I haven't read everything above but just want to throw this in there... data is a human-organized thing but it's machine-influenced. It represents humans trying to organize information as machine. If you've every had to construct a relational database you'll understand. You have to pretend to be a machine. You have to ask yourself questions like, "How would I associate this information with that information without understanding the information?" If you do it really well, none of the human-readable information will matter at all. It's just fluff.
We're just fluff. On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Rob Myers <[email protected]> wrote: > On 09/02/14 03:15 PM, Michael Szpakowski wrote: > > This seems a measured and fair response. I wasn't having a pop - rather > > rehearsing my perplexities out loud.. > > Yes that's how I took it. > > > I *do* think there are some further issues, especially in the case of > > historical collections, about what is *available* for the data to be > > extracted from - > > Certainly this is a visualisation of "the world as seen from the Tate > collection". > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png > > And the Tate Collection contains...the art collected by the Tate over > the years under changing curatorial fashion and competence (contrast > post-Impressionism in French collections and Action Painting in American > collections with the examples of each in the Tate and it's not even funny). > > I'm not claiming more in these posts. But I didn't start by positively > articulated my assumptions about the nature and limits of what I am > doing. I should have done that. > > Moving beyond the Tate, one of my next projects is to recreate then > build on some similar visualisations of Wikipedia's articles about > artists and movements. Which I can then contrast with the Tate data. > > There are a couple of reasonable questions here. Why contrast existing > privileged institutions in order to (apparently) police historical > consensus, why not try to build something new? And why take the > pre-existing units of those institutions' art histories as the basis of > investigation? > > Firstly this is provisional work with a political motivation. I'm > learning how to do this (everyone is), and I want art open data to be a > success. So for these reasons I'm visualising a high-profile data > release with a well understood technical and ideological structure. > > Secondly I'm working on techniques to discover commonalities and > groupings of artists and artworks that do not rely on pre-existent > imposed categories. The first part of that is going to be in the next post. > > > and this suggests the danger of circularity here: > > "I've found no great surprises in the Tate collection data, which I take > > as a confirmation of how well existing models have done". > > That conclusion disappointed me, though, because I was looking for clear > surprises as they would be a means of validating this approach. I > earlier described what work differences in qualitative or quantitative > data from prior models would give art historians to do. By "models" here > I mean art historical narratives rather than other data. So this is more > "despite my best efforts different approaches appear to agree" than "A > because B because A". > > "Tate categorized this data with these labels, and examining the data I > found them" would be trivial. But when the labels are pre-decided, their > relation and frequency can still be interesting. And if those labels are > systematically mis-applied (as judged according to some external > criteria), that is also interesting. > > I'm not trying to play fast and loose with a kind of quantum > insititutional critique / historical insight that is the one if it fails > to be the other. It's possible for this to fail in both modes. ;-) > > - Rob. > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > -- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://pallthayer.dyndns.org *****************************
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