In her article “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Johanna Drucker discusses the importance of representing data produced by humanists as nuanced, constructed, and situated, while also recognizing the performative nature of interpretation.  Since visualization tools are traditionally used by the natural and social sciences, they carry with them the somewhat erroneous assumption that such data being represented is produced empirically and independently of the observer – i.e. that the data is an accurate representation of reality.  This assumes that the observation of a certain phenomena is the same as the phenomena itself.  Drucker thus makes a distinction between “capta” and “data,” arguing that the former is a much more accurate word to describe the production and representation of knowledge in the humanities, and elsewhere.  The word “data” comes from Latin to mean “given,” whereas the word “capta” is derived from the Latin word for “taken.”  Thus, she writes, “Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed.”  The idea of “capta” then better represents the humanistic method of knowledge production as situated, partial, and constituitive.  She notes that this does not mean that the use of “data” in the sciences and “capta” in the humanities juxtaposes the two disciplines in an intellectual opposition, but rather that humanists are perhaps more aware of the fact that “intellectual disciplines create the objects of their inquiry.”

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Source: http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/f2011dh/2011/10/31/capta-and-data-visualization-the-humanistic-method-and-representing-knowledge/

ayjay:

“The problem with Google’s vision is that it doesn’t acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience. Back in 1970, cultural critic Richard Sennett wrote a wonderful little book—The Users of Disorder—that all Google engineers should read. In it, Sennett made a strong case for “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities,” where strangers from very different socio-economic backgrounds still rub shoulders. Sennett’s ideal city is not just an agglomeration of ghettos and gated communities whose residents never talk to one another; rather, it’s the mutual entanglement between the two—and the occasionally mess that such entanglements introduce into our daily life—that makes it an interesting place to live in and allows its inhabitants to turn into mature and complex human beings. Google’s urbanism, on the other hand, is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to. Since no one formally reviews public space or mentions it in their emails, it might as well disappear from Google’s highly personalized maps. And if the promotional videos for Google Glass are anything to judge by, we might not even notice it’s gone: For all we know, we might be walking through an urban desert, but Google Glass will still make it look exciting, masking the blighted reality.”

— Evgeny Morozov

Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact that the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured, enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces; the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one to another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all symmetrical, sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different movements. We must therefore envision a certain number of models, which would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between them.

—-

via chapter 14, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, University of Minnesota Press.

Communication is the sharing of meaning through the exchange of information. The process of communication is defined by the technology of communication, the characteristics of the senders and receivers of information, their cultural codes of reference and protocols of communication, and the scope of the communication process. Meaning can only be understood in the context of the social relationships in which information and communication are processed (Schiller, 2007: 18). I shall elaborate on the elements of this definition in the context of the global network society.

Beginning with the scope of the process itself, interpersonal communication must be differentiated from societal communication. In the former, the designated sender(s) and receiver(s) are the subjects of communication. In the latter, the content of communication has the potential to be diffused to society at large: this is what is usually called mass communication. Interpersonal communication is interactive (the message is sent from one to one with feedback loops), while mass communication can be interactive or one directional. Traditional mass communication is one-directional (the message is sent from one to many, as with books, newspapers, films, radio, and television). To be sure, some forms of interactivity can be accommodated in mass communication via other means of communication. For example, viewers can comment on talk radio or television programs by calling in, writing letters, and sending e-mails. Yet, mass communication used to be predominantly one directional. However, with the diffusion of the Internet, a new form of interactive communication has emerged, characterized by the capacity of sending messages from many to many, in real time or chosen time, and with the possibility of using point-to-point communication, narrowcasting or broadcasting, depending on the purpose and characteristics of the intended communication practice.

 I call this historically new form of communication mass self-communication. It is mass communication because it can potentially reach a global audience, as in the posting of a video on YouTube, a blog with RSS links to a number of web sources, or a message to a massive e-mail list. At the same time, it is self-communication because the production of the message is self generated, the definition of the potential receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific messages or content from the World Wide Web and electronic communication networks is self-selected. The three forms of communication (interpersonal, mass communication, and mass self-communication) coexist, interact, and complement each other rather than substituting for one another. What is historically novel, with considerable consequences for social organization and cultural change, is the articulation of all forms of communication into a composite, interactive, digital hypertext that includes, mixes, and recombines in their diversity the whole range of cultural expressions conveyed by human interaction. Indeed, the most important dimension of communication convergence, as Jenkins writes, “occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interaction with others” (2006: 3).

(intro of Chapter 2 of Communication Power - Manuel Castells) - triggered by this post from Esko Kilpi on “private broadcasting”

What are new architecture titles you’re most excited about, particularly ones that may be dealing with shifts in publishing?

Bleak Houses, by Timothy Brittain-Catlin,  which will be published in Spring 2014; The Architecture of Error, by Francesca  Hughes, which will be published in Fall 2014. These titles bring to light views that are repressed and issues that remain uninterrogated, unscrutinzed, and unspoken in most architectural texts and professional exchanges—and yet these issues have everything to do with constituting architecture’s cultural identities and social complexes. I am referring to such issues as error, regret, failure, and disappointment—which both of these books address in different ways. Despite the pervasiveness of these conditions, they rarely surface in public discussions or formal writing about architecture, where the heroic fictions of success, merit, and value dominate.

fragment from a conversation with  Roger Conover, Executive Editor, MIT Press from A Short Survey of Architectural Publishing.