Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto

[Marianne van den Boomen]

Thanks Florian, for your precise criticism of this indeed rather sloppy 
manifesto.

Regarding your definition of what is 'digital' as opposed to analog, I 
have the impression that there are two definitions of 'the digital' 
circulating: one equals digital to 'build up by discrete entities' - 
then indeed also celluloid film frames are digital, just as numbers, 
typewriting, printed letters and even speech (as set of phonemes). The 
other definition is to conceive the digital stricty as computable 
numbers (after all, digits means 'numbers', besides 'fingers'). And 
computable here means 'computable only by a computer', that is a 
hardware machine running software by which these numbers can be 
processed, modified, calculated, translated etc.
I prefer the last definition, it enables us to talk about celluloid film 
frames and printed letters as non-digital as long they are not 
translated into computable and computed numbers which make sense in a 
specific program running. Not any number my kid brings home from school 
is digital, and not any discrete entity is digital. The documents coming 
from my printer are analog representations of digital material.
I would even claim that such a definition of the digital would have the 
same political significance as you are aiming at. It foregrounds the 
concrete materiality of the digital, and prevents the kind of digital 
mysticism ('digital equals immaterial, disembodied, metaphysical, 
virtual etc') still present in new media studies. Such a definition 
would  also foreclose the easy dichotomy of the digital vs the analog as 
immaterial vs material - both types of information are profoundly 
material inscriptions (Though of course the materiality of computable 
numbers differs from the materiality of iron, energy, or human bodies, 
but no more or no less than that iron differs from the human body.)

Why do you think it is fruitfull to define digital as any discrete 
entity? I agree that anything build up by discrete entities can be 
translated into digital matarial by assigning numbers to to these 
entities, but countable in itself does not make something computable (by 
computers).

Marianne


#  distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission
#  nettime  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org

Re: nettime Critique of the Semantic Web

[Marianne van den Boomen]

Alan Liu wrote:

 I have followed this debate between Florian Cramer and Reto Bachmann-Gm=FCr
 with much interest.  Both viewpoints seem understandable at different
 levels. Florian assesses formal ontology at a fairly high cultural-critical
 level (informed by the imperializing history of universal knowledge/language
 projects).  Reto assesses the same ontology from a lower level closer to the 
 actual standards and source-code (where, true to the general zeitgeist of 
 today's metadata, universal fuzzes out into extensible in the way that 
 XML is not a universal markup language but an extensible markup language with 
 different vocabularies/schemas).

That is very clarifying, I think you are right, Florian and Reto are 
talking different 'levels'. But still, what is at stake is: can coded 
syntactics be extended (or leveled up) to semantics by means of an 
interconnecting web system? Florian says no, Reto says yes, but 
modestly, on the level of formal code.
I seems to me, either the claim is modest but then it is not semantic 
but syntactic, or the claim is bigger, aiming at semantics  and beyond, 
i.e. importing ontological claims on top of the epistemological claims.

 discourse and culture.  By analogy: a language may have a particular
 vocabulary and grammar.  But the language may be used to say both _The
 Elizabethan World Picture_ (E.M. Tillyard's classic book about the faith
 of the Renaissance in a universe ordered according to a single chain of
 being from God at the top to the lowest creature or rock at the bottom)
 and _A Thousand Plateaus_.

Interesting analogy, but doesn't the semantic web pretend more than just 
such a 'syntactic web' of grammar and vocabulary? It aims at providing 
rules and entities as a framework for (the search for) meaning. That's 
another level, I suppose. It aims at universally identifiable and 
extensible semantics. In fact, it aims to overcome the babylonian 
confusion of tongues between for example the two books mentioned above. 
These books can be seen as emblematic instantiations of two kinds of 
ontology: an ontology of being and an ontology of becoming. The semantic 
web aims in that sense at a meta-ontology in which these books not just 
get a classified location in a taxonomic system (indicating their 
relative location on the shelves in a physical library) but in which 
they also become virtually locatable, i.e. addressable, understandable 
and harnessable on the web, even when they function in completely 
different semantic or knowledge domains or are culturally incompatible. 
In fact, hyperbolically reformulated, the aim is to let these books 
'talk to one another', and understand/interprete each other. Seamlessly.
Berners-Lee (see http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0718-aaai-tbl/#(17) ) 
denies that the Semantic Web is about making one big ontology Instead 
he claims: The semantic web is about a fractal mess of  interconnected 
ontologies This may be true, but then we have this already - it's 
called culture. Even Web 1.0 and 2.0 are part of it. Only it is not 
formalized in a meta-ontology interconnecting and extending all these 
micro-ontologies. That will remain a megalomanic dream.


Marianne


#  distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission
#  nettime  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]