I was just reading the Wikipedia entry for "deconstruction", the post-modern theory of Derrida's, and I started thinking about my view that all representations are 'text' on a computer because they are all represented as data. I had mentioned that at an art demonstration and I started thinking that images expressed as printed data are not usually readable by human beings. But then I thought that if a color image is expressed as a black and white image (and presented in an appropriate field pattern for images) it would be. This is a form of compression so it is a kind of abstraction that needs to be produced by an algorithm. I then thought that all sorts of characteristics of an image, like texture, could also be produced by other similar algorithms to make them understandable to human beings. (Texture defined as variations occurring within certain sized areas is an example. My understanding is that a general algorithm to detect any kind of texture would be much more complicated.) (By the way, It is interesting, in the context of this message, that the word 'texture' starts with the word 'text'.) None of this may be radically new or even interesting but I think the recognition of a few of these concepts might be useful. This does not involve the idea of presenting data to be human-readable, but thinking of how abstraction might be used to produce recognition. First of all, a useful abstraction might rely on an algorithm not only to get it out of a data (or a 'text') but the data or some characteristic of the data might need to be put through a transformation by the algorithm. Although this is not radically different it is a new way of looking at 'abstraction.' Secondly, different kinds of transformative abstractions of data-text might be needed to build a configuration of abstractions that could then be used in recognition and subsequent analyses. I think that is a new and interesting way of looking at the concept of abstraction. Jim Bromer
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