Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Jim Piccarello
jp...@blackbird-studio.org wrote:
AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other.
Isn't this redundant? Unless of course, the system is defined in
such a way that it places limits on what operations are definable,
which isn't the case with mathematical numbers, nor (theoretically)
digitality. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'd be interested to
hear otherwise.
First, are we talking about a two-state device that never changes
state? In that case isomorphism isn't redundant, it's irrelevant
I think I said this a bit too quickly and unclearly, sorry :-). What
I meant is this: isn't it the case, barring some arbitrary limit
on the number or kind of definable operations, that if there is a
one-to-one correspondence between the objects in each system, then *it
must follow that* the operations defined in each system mirror each
other, i.e. there is a one-to-one relationship between operations in
one system and operations in another? Intuitively, I say yes (provided
both systems are Turing complete), but my mathematical background is
not quite strong enough to say that definitively.
If we decide to limit the size of number to, say, 8 bits then we
could describe this using modular arithmetic. So 1+1 = 2 but 1+ 255
= 0. Then we would be modeling the numbers {0.1,2,...255} So we
would have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mod
256.
Given the widely varying possibilities of the construction of a
machine, the situation is even *more* complicated, but actually less
problematic IMHO with respect to its relationship with algebra (the
natural number system). See this from HAKMEM:
Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language
is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of
powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you
are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period =
1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops
with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a
ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater
than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary -
the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you
are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal
error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce
machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is
machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more
precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...11
(base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...10. Thus, 2X = X - 1,
so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that
is two's-complement.
Apart from the other things in there relevant to this conversation
(probably undermining the side I seem to have fallen on), I want to
point out that this implies that in algebra addition, subtraction,
etc are actually all addition, subtraction, etc modulo infinity.
Therefore, it is the size of the set, not the nature of the operators
that is at issue.
I guess what I was getting at with the difference between the natural
numbers and a digital system is that the cardinality of an arbitrarily
large but finite set is different than that of a countable set, as
one can create a 1:1 mapping from that finite set to the infinite
set, but not the reverse---though one may question how countable
something actually is given the finite material resources involved in
*any* computation. Now I'm thinking that maybe this was not a very
interesting thing to point out, but anyway...
Cheers,
Evan Buswell
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Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Mar 14, 2009, at 10:33 PM, Evan Buswell wrote:
AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other.
Isn't this redundant? Unless of course, the system is defined in
such a way that it places limits on what operations are definable,
which isn't the case with mathematical numbers, nor (theoretically)
digitality. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'd be interested to
hear otherwise.
First, are we talking about a two-state device that never changes
state? In that case isomorphism isn't redundant, it's irrelevant
since the only operation you have is the identify operation. I
thought we were talking about a binary device that could change
state. So, say, a light switch where define 0 as the light being
off for 1 second and 1 as the light being on for one second. Then
we need some convention for specifying when the transmitter begins
sending numbers (The light is off for 60 seconds. Have 60 '0' been
sent or is nothing being sent? Or has the number been sent and I
missed receiving it.) We also need some convention to identify a
single number (8 bits, 16 bits, or every bit transmitted) But all
this gives is the ability to send numerals. Do we also include the
ability to indicate operations to be performed on the numerals sent?
Also: dichotomous (digital) states are not isomorphic with the natural
numbers, they are isomorphic with binary numbers, i.e. the set [0, 1],
not the set [0, 1, 2 ...]. To get the latter, you need to construct a
system of mapping an arbitrary number to a *set* of digital states,
of which many such systems exist and compete---see, e.g., endianness.
To actually be isomorphic with the natural numbers, you would need
an infinitely large set of states, effectively canceling the digital
nature of the supposed device, as each state would be infinitely close
to (in practice, indistinguishable from) another state.
But then, when we actually deal with the natural numbers, as a whole, we
deal more with natural numberness than with each discrete number.
I don't understand what you mean by numberness.
This is something a digital system is perfectly capable of representing.
I guess it's less that (countable) numbers are isomorphic to digital
states than (countable) numberness is isomorphic with digitality.
I'm not sure what you mean by digitality if we decide we cannot
represent all of the natural numbers.
But this is getting into pretty ill-defined territory.
If we decide to limit the size of number to, say, 8 bits then we
could describe this using modular arithmetic. So 1+1 = 2 but 1+ 255 =
0. Then we would be modeling the numbers {0.1,2,...255} So we would
have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mod 256.
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Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
The isomorphism discussion is interesting: it seems to be more about homology than isomorphism properly speaking. But if it is about homology, anmd perhaps about the kind of structural homology intimated by Lucien Goldman way back in Le Dieu Cach?, and very important to the first generation of Birmingham Cultural Studies, then it raises a couple of interesting further reflections for a possible Digital Humanities One is about what is likely to be homologous, and at what scales. For instance, the math being talked through here is largely logic, and a logic extrapolated from some key moments at the end of the 19th century concerning the derivations of number from zero and the distinction between orders of infinity. Boolean algebra has a close relation with the emergent set theory of the early 20th century.These are products of a specific period in history.If the thesis of homology holds good, then there should be a structural diagram held in common by the political and economic shape of the era and its emergent universal articulation in enumerable units. To anyone raised on Marx, this looks indubitably like the general equivalence of commodities and their potential to be exchanged for a universal equivalent, money. As money is floated free of material (the gold standard) to become entirely mathematical in nature, the unit nature of calculation becomes universal logic. QED. The other concerns the hardwiring of such homologies, and suggests that we should be extending discussion from machine code and software studies into hardware ? after all, that case was made in Kittler?s ?There is no Software? some years ago now.Here however we hit some interesting problems. It is true that, for example, both CMOS and CCD chips operate on a unit grid.But the way they do so differs quite dramatically, in particular the integration of amplifying functions in CMOS. Chip design would be one more field where we stand in need of a development of understanding ? if it is the case that homologies inform the deep structure of the digital regime which we inhabit. So for example both chips average the light over the area of each pixel over the duration of exposure and record that as voltage which is subsequently digitised as a whole number. The averaging function suggests, alongside the clock function required to ?drain? the array of charge from the chip in row order, that where not only equivalence but averaging are in play, the discussion can?t be restricted to the commodity form but requires an address to the ?management of populations? which the tradition out of Foucault sees as vital. To leap to a conclusion: if there is a characteristic structural diagram for our epoch ??let?s call it ?the database economy? ? and there is a structural homology between it and its key expressions (?a satellite represents a colossal accumulation of the very forms of industrial, military and scientific capital and power and knowledge? Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit, p.7) then the places to look for such symptomatic structures ought to include the fine points of hardware design, which should never be taken as given or universal. That is the point. Must fly Sean # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other. Isn't this redundant? Unless of course, the system is defined in such a way that it places limits on what operations are definable, which isn't the case with mathematical numbers, nor (theoretically) digitality. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'd be interested to hear otherwise. Also: dichotomous (digital) states are not isomorphic with the natural numbers, they are isomorphic with binary numbers, i.e. the set [0, 1], not the set [0, 1, 2 ...]. To get the latter, you need to construct a system of mapping an arbitrary number to a *set* of digital states, of which many such systems exist and compete---see, e.g., endianness. To actually be isomorphic with the natural numbers, you would need an infinitely large set of states, effectively canceling the digital nature of the supposed device, as each state would be infinitely close to (in practice, indistinguishable from) another state. But then, when we actually deal with the natural numbers, as a whole, we deal more with natural numberness than with each discrete number. This is something a digital system is perfectly capable of representing. I guess it's less that (countable) numbers are isomorphic to digital states than (countable) numberness is isomorphic with digitality. But this is getting into pretty ill-defined territory. Evan Buswell # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Jim wrote: What exactly do we mean by isomorphism? For me, the interesting thing about the digital world, as opposed to the analogue one, is that digital objects are all amenable to easy manipulation transmission with the same bag of tools. The point is not that they are isomorphic to integers or lightswitches. The point is that they are expressible as great long streams of bytes. We all have powerful tools for working with those streams, and when we need to express some new kind of thing in that form we can easily and cheaply build and distribute new tools. Subject, of course, to the limitations of the conventional hardware - screens keyboards speakers so on. I'm sorry if this is all painfully obvious. It just puzzles me to see a discussion about what counts as digital that does not settle down to 'the stuff we can work on with computers'. Richard # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
What exactly do we mean by isomorphism? There is the mathematical definition of isomorphism where two systems are isomorphic if and only if there is one-to-one correspondence between the objects in each system AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other. The natural numbers are not just the sequence denoted by the decimal numerals 0,1,2,3,4, They are that plus the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division along with the relationships of less than, greater than, and equals. Just because a collection of things can be numbered doesn't make that collection isomorphic to numbers in the strict mathematical sense. Furthermore although we may speak of binary and decimal numbers there are, strictly speaking, just numbers which have binary or decimal representations and these representations are strings of characters. So there are, strictly speaking, binary numerals but not binary numbers. When we learned our arithmetic in grade school we learned algorithms for operating on strings of decimal digits. Am I misunderstanding something? Flick Harrison wrote: I think the main problem I have in this discussion is that I can't say that a lightswitch is isomorphic with numbers. Nor is a telegraph button. On Mar 10, 2009, at 3:05 PM, inimino wrote: Isomorphism is not equality. # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
jeremy hunsinger wrote: There is no positive difference between discrete values or objects and some subset (possibly the entire set) of any countable infinite set, including the set of natural numbers. really? so there is no difference between an orange. and an orange section, each discrete and equal to one? Oh, good god. There's no positive difference between discrete values and numbers, and in the context of the actual discussion I was responding to (digital things are ... discrete values or objects), there's no positive difference between discrete objects and numbers. Not, at any rate, if we understand discrete objects here as digital discrete objects (as the context of the discussion and your own sentence imply), specifically in the sense of digital media (which is what we were discussing). Of course there is still the question of semantics, as Evan pointed out; or to put it another way, of the use-value of numbers under various regimes of interpretation. Though this problem doesn't arise with digital media; that the same integer may be a telephone number, the combination to a safe, and a random value obviously does not mean those three uses are identical. But the specific point I was responding to - Flick's objection (as I understood it) to the reduction of digital to numbers - lay outside the domain of interpretation and use. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric Writing, Michigan State University # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Michael Wojcik wrote: Of course there is still the question of semantics, as Evan pointed out; or to put it another way, of the use-value of numbers under various regimes of interpretation. To expand on this a bit: a digital work has no intrinsic meaning; it's only an index into the spaces opened up by various realms of interpretation. An mp3 file doesn't have songness; that characteristic is produced (if it's produced at all) by a listener experiencing the event located at the coordinate labeled by the mp3 data in the interpretive space described by the MPEG-2 Level-3 Audio specification. Note there are two acts of interpretation here: one mechanical and one subjective. Matt Skala's theory of bit color nicely describes this distinction, and his initial example - an mp3 of silence - also shows how the subjective stage depends on cultural and historical factors, etc, sometimes in profound ways (there's no way to tell from the data which silence the recording represents). Thus the question of whether the digital is reducible to numbers is one of scope: do we mean that term to include the regime of its interpretation, and if so, are we including both parts (mechanical and subjective) of that regime, or only the former? -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric Writing, Michigan State University # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Oh, good god. There's no positive difference between discrete values and numbers, and in the context of the actual discussion I was responding to (digital things are ... discrete values or objects), there's no positive difference between discrete objects and numbers. there are other kinds of values than numerical ones. there are all kinds of systems of valuation. so yes there is a difference between 'discrete values' and numbers, unless you are taking a purely western mathematical construction of 'discrete values' Thinking outside of the box, as well as within it, isn't a bad thing here, because it opens up some possibilities for thought. Not, at any rate, if we understand discrete objects here as digital discrete objects (as the context of the discussion and your own sentence imply), specifically in the sense of digital media (which is what we were discussing). digital just means... discrete objects. you seem to want to define digital as meaning 'numerically representable discrete objects' but... that is different i think you likely want to mean binary representable discrete objects. which then your argument makes perfect sense because you are saying numbers=numbers, which is tautology. the problem is that, some things in the world that have the property of being digital, and thus are discrete but do not have the property of being capable of being isomorphic with numerical representation.I agree completely with your perspective insofar as we agree the framework is purely mathematical computability, but the world of digital media is more than that, though people usually collapse it. The point is to say, we don't have to collapse it, there can be more and if so, how can we do things differently? Of course there is still the question of semantics, as Evan pointed out; or to put it another way, of the use-value of numbers under various regimes of interpretation. Though this problem doesn't arise with digital media; that the same integer may be a telephone number, the combination to a safe, and a random value obviously does not mean those three uses are identical. But the specific point I was responding to - Flick's objection (as I understood it) to the reduction of digital to numbers - lay outside the domain of interpretation and use. I think there are plenty of digital things that are not necessarily isomorphic with numbers, though as I said, plenty of things are. ... # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Friday, February 20 2009, 15:55 (-0500), Michael Wojcik wrote: Flick Harrison wrote: I can understand the temptation to reduce digital to numbers. There may be such a temptation, but at the end of the day, digital and certain fields of numbers (namely discrete ones), as technical terms, are isomorphic. There's no reduction going on. It should be added that other languages have only one word for both. The French word for digital is numérique. It has the same broad semantics as digital in English (including the notion of a culture numérique). Florian -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Flick Harrison wrote: I can understand the temptation to reduce digital to numbers. There may be such a temptation, but at the end of the day, digital and certain fields of numbers (namely discrete ones), as technical terms, are isomorphic. There's no reduction going on. But I think it borders on tautology to define digital as computable numbers... computable only by a computer. Who proffered such a definition? (The conversation you're referring to was a while ago...) That last part is redundant, if not nonsensical. As a filmmaker, I like to draw the line between analogue vs digital at the binary code. And binary code is only numbers if you choose to call it that. Any sufficiently reasonable and useful definition of numbers would include any binary code. This isn't simply a matter of nomenclature; the concept of countable numbers covers binary encoding. (Maybe I'm missing some basic computer tech - are there non-binary computers?) There are non-binary digital computers, and there are non-digital (analog) computers. There are computers of metal and computers of flesh and bone and computers of the mind. Digital is the smooth information curve converted to binary code. That's digitization. There are entities which are discrete ab initio, hence digital but never digitized. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric Writing, Michigan State University # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Flick Harrison wrote: I can understand the temptation to reduce digital to numbers. But I think it borders on tautology to define digital as computable numbers... computable only by a computer. Defining a computer as a hardware machine running software by which these numbers can be processed etc seems to confirm this. The definition of digital I'd give, at least for the purposes of this discussion, is comprised of a linear sequence of tokens or symbols drawn from a finite set. This would include things like the text of Moby Dick encoded in US-ASCII, or the encoding of a video clip as a sequence of bytes in some particular video format, as well as things that might not be quite so obviously digital, like the human genome. This definition does indeed have powerful connections to computability (and, I would argue, to human cognition) but it's not just about numbers. I think you conflate digital with binary, which may be common enough in everyday usage, but is technically incorrect, and this leads you to exclude all sorts of things that in fact are digital, simply because they don't happen to be binary. As a filmmaker, I like to draw the line between analogue vs digital at the binary code. And binary code is only numbers if you choose to call it that. A 1/0 switch is also an on/off switch. You could also call it an a/b switch. (Maybe I'm missing some basic computer tech - are there non-binary computers?) An abacus would be an early example. What we call a Turing machine, as Alan Turing defined it, is another. The Turing machine is in no way required to use a binary code, but it is required to use symbols drawn from a finite set. The reason the digital system works is the yes/no nature of its basic information method. It's not about units or numbers; it's about on/off. A ternary computer based on three distinguishable states (-5V, 0V, 5V, say; or perhaps, red light/blue light/no light) would be no less digital, so it's not about on/off (two states), it's about states that can be distinguished from one another. The reason the digital system works, the essential characteristic that allows deterministic computation, is that there are a finite, enumerable set of distinguishable states. In contrast, an analog system would be one in which, for example, the exact voltage, or the exact wavelength of the light, was relevant. Likewise with written text. Yes, you can rearrange the letters in the bible to write War and Peace. You can also rearrange the bricks in the White House to create the Sistine Chapel. Is the White House, therefore, digital? The White House and the Sistine Chapel are defined by context, location, and provenance, not merely by the arrangement of bricks. The Bible, though, doesn't exist in the same way the White House exists. Individual bibles exist, but if the Bible means anything it all, it must mean something closer to a sequence of symbols than to a physical object. There's some sense in which the Bible is /essentially/ digital, while the White House is not. What Florian Cramer pointed out is that this can be true for texts to a greater or lesser degree, and the degree of digital-ness of a text ‒ the amount of information lost when the text is reduced to nothing more than the linear sequence of symbols ‒ varies between texts, for reasons that can be interesting in their own right. Binary code written on paper is not digital, even though it can be reproduced 1:1, because it's simply a picture of binary code, not actual binary activity. Can you define precisely what actual binary activity is? A binary code written on paper is no more and no less fundamentally digital than encoded on a hard disk drive platter as adjacent areas which are magnetized differently. This is not a pipe, eh? A lightswitch, on the other hand (to borrow McLuhan), is a digital system - the binary switch gives light if it's yes, or darkness if it's no. The on/ off is as much a state as a number. As is the state of ink on paper forming a numeral 1 or 0 or letter from the Latin alphabet. Any physical manifestation or transmission of digital information always has this characteristic: we or our tools can distinguish it as being in one particular state from some finite set. The only thing digital about the ink on paper or about the light switch is the interpretation given to it. We partition the immeasurably vast number of states such a system can be in, and only then can we talk about the light being either on or off, the ink as representing this character or that. -- http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/ # 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:
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
Howdy everyone, I'm enjoying this list! I just joined it a few weeks ago, and lurk-time is over. I've been reading my Emily Postnews and I think I'm ready to contribute. I can understand the temptation to reduce digital to numbers. But I think it borders on tautology to define digital as computable numbers... computable only by a computer. Defining a computer as a hardware machine running software by which these numbers can be processed etc seems to confirm this. As a filmmaker, I like to draw the line between analogue vs digital at the binary code. And binary code is only numbers if you choose to call it that. A 1/0 switch is also an on/off switch. You could also call it an a/b switch. (Maybe I'm missing some basic computer tech - are there non-binary computers?) Digital is the smooth information curve converted to binary code. I agree that film frames are not digital for all the reasons mentioned. The reason the digital system works is the yes/no nature of its basic information method. It's not about units or numbers; it's about on/off. George Lucas' editdroid system, for instance, used non-linear edit methods back in the 1980's, but the information remained analogue (waveform-based) videotape. There was a digital element in the sequencing / referencing of bits of analogue tape, but the video remained analogue. We could call this an analogue / digital system. Likewise with written text. Yes, you can rearrange the letters in the bible to write War and Peace. You can also rearrange the bricks in the White House to create the Sistine Chapel. Is the White House, therefore, digital? That's nonsense. Maybe there's a good word that connects digital to discrete-unit systems, but digital shouldn't include both. Binary code written on paper is not digital, even though it can be reproduced 1:1, because it's simply a picture of binary code, not actual binary activity. This is not a pipe, eh? A lightswitch, on the other hand (to borrow McLuhan), is a digital system - the binary switch gives light if it's yes, or darkness if it's no. The on/ off is as much a state as a number. The original loom-punch-code systems ARE binary, therefore digital, because they read yes-or-no information in the form of punched holes, and their behaviour is governed by it in a mechanical way. And a telegraph could be digital, since it is on-off, and the variations of length in on-off activity could really be counted as sequences of on- off (i.e. a long beep is really 2 short beeps with no gaps; a long pause between words is really three short silences without beeps in between, whereas a shorter gap between letters is two short silences. In the context of morse code, these beeps and silences can be read grammatically as multiple types of discrete signals but they are in fact a simple on-off code). Radio and telephony, which came later, actually DOWNGRADED (ha ha) to analog from the binary telegraph, when they turned the beeps and silences into waveforms, thus introducing gradual interference (as opposed to the all-or-nothing interference of digital systems with their error-checking protocols). -Flick Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com * FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553 * MYSPACE: http://myspace.com/flickharrison # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
In definitions, we always must ask: why? We use the words usefully already, why (politically) make the definition include or exclude something? I certainly don't have a clear answer to this question, which makes me hesitant to contribute; nevertheless, I feel I have a few things that might build on the discussion. For me, digital means linguistic or grammatical or any other of the problematic and non-neutral words that try to encapsulate language. Digitization is a system that functions through absolute difference (or differance, if you prefer), the ability to separate the phenomena of 1 from that of 0 (or any other symbols, e.g. a from b from c). As someone has mentioned, the size of the symbol set must be finite. It is precisely through making the infinite finite that we create absolute difference. This has nothing to do with numbers. Rather, numbers have to do with it, numbers are representable with digital content and entangled with the idea of digitality somehow. The convention of turning A into 0x41 or 0011 is just a convention. We could just as well interpret the series of voltages in a byte as representing a letter. Then to represent numbers, we could assign a number to each symbol, thus reversing the primacy of one symbol set versus another. Text is a digital medium. Speech is not, film is not---as has been said, there is here both an absolute distinction and a continuum in which distinctions cannot be made. However, I'm generally uncomfortable with describing a medium as digital, at least in these conversations where we're trying to be as precise as possible. All media have both digital and analog characteristics; even with a painting there is some amount of communication that takes place through the absolute separation of the framed object from its surroundings (or this is being actively fought and subverted...). It is our interpretation of the content, not the medium, which is digital or otherwise. Part of the theme of this thread has been to try and emphasize the materiality of digital information. I think there's something to be preserved here; however, it is precisely what is non-material that separates the digital from the analog. Clay is no more a digital medium than anything else. When you pick letters into it, digital content is created. But the minute an anthropologist wants to find out what kind of wood your stylus used, the information ceases to be digital (until they answer their question, that is...). Similarly, if I wanted to model a computer, I have a choice between analog and digital representations (i.e. emulation on another machine or reproduction of a voltage model of its circuits). The machine itself has nothing to do with analog and digital, our interpretation of 3.5 volts as 1 and 0 volts as 0 is what makes computers digital. Of course, this is complicated because computers are not a representation of anything other than computing. That is, the digital representation is a representation of digitization itself, and only accidentally is applied to analog-converted objects (you'll notice all the mathematicians hate it when this happens). Hence the prevalence of the textual/symbolic in every aspect of computing---but let's not go there right now. Regarding one more theme which has come up: computability. So far as has been understood, there is nothing necessarily computable about a digital representation. A digital representation can always be represented in computation, but that does not necessarily mean that this computation will finish, or even know where to begin. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chompsky_hierarchy for more on this. (And note it is not an accident that this work was done first in linguistics). To take this a little out of the rabbit hole, I think it's important to emphasize that digital material can never be divorced from the actual, material representation: that the abstraction is itself not a reality, dependent on a material reality of power plants, technicians, asphalt saws, and fiber optics for its existence. But at the same time we need to be careful not to imagine *actual* 1s and 0s floating around in our machines. That is our interpretation; there are none until each time we put them there. Evan Buswell On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: On Thursday, 29. January 2009, Lloyd Dunn wrote: I must correct a technical error that has crept into these discussions at least twice. Analog film frames are not digital. The case in point is simply this: you can take the letters of the Bible and re-arrange them to produce, for example, War and Peace. But you cannot take the frames of, for example, The Birth of a Nation and use them to produce, say, Psycho. The point is that a text is assembled from a finite set of fixed, conventional, symbols called letters. The number of texts that can be created from the same finite set of letters is infinite Absolutely. This also fits
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
For me, digital is a woody kind of word. Similar to shruberries. # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
I must correct a technical error that has crept into these discussions at least twice. Analog film frames are not digital. The case in point is simply this: you can take the letters of the Bible and re-arrange them to produce, for example, War and Peace. But you _cannot_ take the frames of, for example, The Birth of a Nation and use them to produce, say, Psycho. The point is that a text is assembled from a finite set of fixed, conventional, symbols called letters. The number of texts that can be created from the same finite set of letters is infinite. Each and every frame of film is unique, each an analog work in itself (the same as a photograph), and is infinite in variety. You can probably re-arrange the shots (each a collection of frames that interdepend to produce the illusion of movement) in a given film to produce an infinite nubmer of new films (assuming you allow repetition of shots) but, it seems certain to me that the collection of films so produced will not exibit the same level diversity (most of them would be difficult to distinguish one from the other) that any random collection of books from any library would. Lloyd Dunn l...@detritus.net PhotoStatic pwp.detritus.net The Tape-beatles psrf.detritus.net # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Thursday, 29. January 2009, Lloyd Dunn wrote: I must correct a technical error that has crept into these discussions at least twice. Analog film frames are not digital. The case in point is simply this: you can take the letters of the Bible and re-arrange them to produce, for example, War and Peace. But you cannot take the frames of, for example, The Birth of a Nation and use them to produce, say, Psycho. The point is that a text is assembled from a finite set of fixed, conventional, symbols called letters. The number of texts that can be created from the same finite set of letters is infinite Absolutely. This also fits with standard definitions of the term. The Free Online Dictionary of Computing, for example, defines digital as: A description of data which is stored or transmitted as a sequence of discrete symbols from a finite set, most commonly this means binary data represented using electronic or electromagnetic signals. http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?digital There are many 'pre-electronic' symbolic systems that are digital (Wikipedia lists about 10 of them), but printed text, as Florian points out, is a particularly interesting example, because many of the features we normally associate with digital information in computers are already present in printed text. E.g. the ease and perfection with which it can be duplicated; the ease and fidelity with which the information can be separated from its physical carrier (after all, how different is the practice of quoting from that of copying / pasting?); or the ease and reversibility at which it can be transformed, either through strictly algorithmic means (e.g. cryptography) or more less strict means (e.g. translation). Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
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
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Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
The Insatiable Abstraction Engine: A Digital Humanities Manifesto http://bbrace.net/R/Rabbit-Raffle.html -- ../R/Rusty-Sprockets.html /:b # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
KMV wrote: Michael, I have my own thoughts about it, but could you say more about what or which you mean by bogus folk histories? I am working on a history myself and have not been very impressed with the largely anecdotal and narrow accounts that I see then being universalized, and the term new media has all kinds of problems. --Florian can sum those up much better than I though. ;-) Pretty much that. I've heard a number of people recently present historical accounts in this area that are more or less just anecdote or personal impression. Rhetoric, which it the academic field I'm currently mostly in, tends to fetishize history (the fascination with Classical rhetoric, lots of publication on the history of rhetoric, etc), but not all that many rhetoricians actually do real historical research. A good number do, of course, and more are careful to avoid making historical claims, but there's a lot of the here's how hypertext happened sort of argument being made. Sometimes these are interesting narratives, but they're often presented as incontestable fact, or at least as general hypotheses well-grounded in the available evidence. I don't want to go into specifics, particularly since I don't have texts at hand to cite (I thinking primarily of conference presentations at the moment). It's just a general trend that I've observed and discussed with a handful of folks - mostly historians. I will say though that I think the digital distinction has some historical importance as well because of the way it changes reproduction and distribution, and because of the way it makes audio, video, text, and sill images in a sense equivalent, which has allowed new artistic/musical/literary practices to develop. OK. I'd have to think about that, but it seems like those are a couple of places where the digital/analog distinction still carries some weight. Another might be questions of uniqueness and the metaphysics of aesthetics: it'd be interesting to consider what Matt Skala's concept of bit color does to Walter Benjamin's concept of aura, for example. I'd like to know what you and others think would make a better history, or what has been left out? I'm really not sure, mostly because I know I'm not a historian, and I haven't really thought about what might go into such a history. That's what bothers me - if I can think of counterexamples and omissions when I hear one of these narratives, what would some serious digging turn up? -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric Writing, Michigan State University # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Michael Wojcik wrote: Florian Cramer wrote: [...] technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus computable] units. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), generally with a sampling rate around 60 samples/second. But the analog frames of the projected film are not amenable to lossless copying, and they are the meat of the film. The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Outside of human culture, digital information transmission and storage is nothing new, as Richard Dawkins would remind us. The genetic material we all carry, what he called the digital river, predates any other information storage and replication system we know of. # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
The problem at hand is a basic literacy. 'Digital' is used as a completely unsuitable substitute for 'discrete'. Film is discrete, even images on the computer monitor are discrete, but their internal representations can be digital or not. The two are not related. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Friday, January 23 2009, 18:57 (-0700), inimino wrote: The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Quick answer: We cannot extend it to all written language because for some texts, those analog details - the calligraphy or typography - are essential. This is true, above all, for visual poetry since the antiquity and across languages and cultures. In philology, there have been controversies about the hand-written manuscripts of authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka, and to which extent their strike-through corrections and doodling should be preserved in text editions. (A hardcore respective stance is been taken, since the 1980s, by the French critique génétique.) A technically literate digital humanities could greatly benefit from such differentiations since it could reconstruct how for example for most epics, religious works, academic treatises and later for pamphlets, novels and journalism the analog text information was nonessential, and that they were digital precisely to facilitate their own reproduction. So, in this example, techno-terminological precision and a historical reflection beyond anecdotal first and second waves of digital media go hand in hand. Florian -- http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
First, really enjoying the discussion, so thanks Florian and Michael. Michael, I have my own thoughts about it, but could you say more about what or which you mean by bogus folk histories? I am working on a history myself and have not been very impressed with the largely anecdotal and narrow accounts that I see then being universalized, and the term new media has all kinds of problems. --Florian can sum those up much better than I though. ;-) I will say though that I think the digital distinction has some historical importance as well because of the way it changes reproduction and distribution, and because of the way it makes audio, video, text, and sill images in a sense equivalent, which has allowed new artistic/musical/literary practices to develop. I'd like to know what you and others think would make a better history, or what has been left out? best, Kim On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Michael Wojcik mwoj...@newsguy.com wrote: Florian Cramer wrote: This is a straightforward paraphrase of McLuhan's end of the Gutenberg Galaxy, with the only catch that McLuhan referred to analog media - film, radio, television. So it seems as if the authors thoroughly confuse electronic and paper with digital and analog. But, technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus computable] units. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), generally with a sampling rate around 60 samples/second. Individual frames in chemical-photography film may be analog, but the medium is in essence a digital one. ... -- Kim De Vries http://kdevries.net/blog/ # 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 Digital Humanities Manifesto
Thanks, Kim, for informing the list about this. - It's always difficult when online discussions branch into different threads on different sites. But it seems as if there are enough significant differences between the digital humanities discourse on the UCLA site and the discourse on Nettime to post critical remarks here rather than on the original site. There are, to put it diplomatically, issues with this manifesto, both in its precision of terminology and critical thinking. First of all, the term digital humanities is fuzzy. Does it mean the cultural study of digital information systems, or simply the use of these systems in humanities research and education? If the latter is meant, why differentiate between humanities and other fields of study and not talk about digital technology-based research and education in general? Paragraph 1 of the manifesto states that... | Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent | practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the | exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced | and/or disseminated. This is a straightforward paraphrase of McLuhan's end of the Gutenberg Galaxy, with the only catch that McLuhan referred to analog media - film, radio, television. So it seems as if the authors thoroughly confuse electronic and paper with digital and analog. But, technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus computable] units. On top of that, there are very contemporary positions in the so-called 'new media' field that are much more differentiated and a few steps ahead in their reflection of the relation between online and print publishing. In his introductory essay to the first Mag.net reader, Alessandro Ludovico soundly argues that print is becoming the quintessence of the web, a stable long-term medium for which the unstable medium of the Web serves as a production and filtering platform. | Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution | looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print | was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating | search and retrieval. The common assumption that media studies suffer from a lack of mid- and long-term memory is a confirmed by this paragraph. Historically, the opposite is true. In their first wave of the digital revolution, the humanities chiefly associated the new technology with holographic visuality of virtual reality and cyberspace. The humanities needed about ten years to catch up and grasp that computing and the Internet was based on code, and thus on linguistic logic. | Now it must look forwards into an immediate future | in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core. First of all, the digital is not a medium, but a type of information; information made up of discrete units [such as numbers] instead of an analog continuum [such as waves]. The medium - the carrier - itself is, strictly speaking, always analog: electricity, airwaves, magnetic platters, optical rays, paper. To insist on this terminological precision is not just some technological nitpicking, but of political significance. It reminds of the concrete materiality of the Internet and computing that involves the exploitation of energy, natural resources and human labor, as opposed to falsely buying, by the virtue of abstraction, into the immateriality of digital media. | The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous | search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is | qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses | the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of | the Humanities: complexity. As it remains totally vague what this second wave represents - YouTube and social networking as the next evolutionary step after Google Search? [Seriously? How young are the people who wrote this?] -, it is nearly impossible to seriously discuss this argument. It also seems quite futile to argue whether the humanities or sciences have the better grip on complexity - a word which is a systems theoretical null signifier typically serving as a dialectical device for reducing the very thing it means; saying that something is complex is a truism, and thus a simplification. Aside from that, the above argument is seriously flawed in its implicit assumption that there was no, or less, social and cultural complexity involved in what it calls the quantitative formalisms of databases and programming. It's a blatant regression behind the research of critical media scholars [like Matthew Fuller, Wendy Chun, McKenzie Wark and many others] and hacker activists of the past decade; research that has shown again and again how these very formalisms are qualitative, i.e. designed by human groups and shaped by cultural, economical and political interests through and through. |
