Okay. Good morning. Thank you very much.
Thank you for that introduction. I am heartened to
see so many of you here since I know that
I'm coming at the tail end of about 150 presentations
that you've had in the course of, uh,
the last semester or so. So, So So
thank you very much for turning out for for one
more. Um, let's see. So the work
I want to talk about today, uh, you
know, Barbara said I've got to look under my
belt. The project I want to talk about today
is actually, um, the next book, I
think, uh, and that I was writing it
. It's this This is a talk from a paper
that I wrote last year with my colleague Melissa and
as many and at u C. Irvine. Um
, And as we were writing the paper, there's
a point where I sort of looked up and I
looked at her and I said, Oh, my
God, This is a book proposal, isn't it
? And she looked at me. It's like,
uh uh, like you only just realised. So
, um so So this is that so it means
that this is kind of preliminary, and so this
is It's really nice to be able to come and
, uh, and engage with you about it and
try to get some some feedback and see what your
responses are to the ideas that were, um,
that were trying to trying to put together um and
so it's a very It's a youthful moments for me
to get feedback so that I will I will leave
plenty of time for questions and then I'll appropriate all
your ideas and write them down and take them back
to California with, um, and and the and
the fundamental topic. Uh, as you see,
the title is is what we're calling the materiality of
information, attempting in some ways to recover the fact
that all these informational objects or all that you know
, we talk about information. We talked about it
as a relatively abstract thing, and yet we encounter
it only ever in material forms. In the fundamental
insight here is that actually, those material forms matter
, despite the fact that, uh, that information
science has been founded for many decades on the idea
that the that the actual material, um, doesn't
matter. It's only configurations that matter. We're getting
to investigate how and why those materials might actually matter
. Um, and this is work that began.
Nice to say we were sort of writing a top
last summer, but for me, it has a
longer history. And so if you will indulge me
, which you have no option to do because I
got the microphone and standing in front of the room
, Um, if you didn't tell me, I
want to tell you a couple of stories that,
um that caused me to get interested in this stuff
in the first place. And so a couple of
the stories come from come from my own prehistory and
my my first, my first job, actually,
while I was an undergrad. I was also a
UNIX system administrator for, uh, for a research
group at the University of Edinburgh. And then one
day, people started coming to my office complaining that
their email to the U. S. Was not
getting through or was going very slowly, and responses
were coming very slowly, and I had to explain
to them that at least at that point, there
were three points of connection between Janet, which is
the British academic network and what was then called the
Ark Annette? Um, one was a satellite connection
and there were two undersea cables. Transatlantic cables.
Um, and at that 20.1 of the, uh
, one of the transatlantic cables had come loose and
was flapping around somewhere in the North Atlantic with a
ship out, trying to find it and plug it
back in. Um, and this U S satellite
base station for the satellite connection had been struck by
lightning and was not operating, uh, which meant
that all the traffic from these three connections was now
sort of, uh, channel down into into the
single transatlantic connection. Uh, and what was remarkable
about this was how dissatisfied people were with that answer
, Um, it was what was going on.
And it was why the network performance was not what
they what they would have wanted. But people found
it in some ways disconcerting to discover that their email
was actually flowing across cable or satellite connections as opposed
to being carried to the recipient by email fairies or
whatever it was. They imagine the idea that there
actually might be a cable flapping around loose in the
North Atlantic was a deeply disconcerting kind of notion.
Um, this photograph, by the way, I
found in some book, and this is of,
um of trans trans Atlantic fibers emerging out of the
out of the ocean. Um and so it's a
situation of people being confronted with the with the material
conditions of the information systems that they use in a
way that they found, um, found somewhat disconcerting
and off putting. And it turned out again bizarrely
that, uh, that this this job I didn't
realize at the time. Sometimes you sort of look
back and things are things take on a certain kind
of significant many years later that you didn't realize.
And I'm discovering this job provided me with all this
evidence and experiences that, uh, that shape my
current work in ways that I would never have anticipated
. And another one took the form of this thing
. Um, for mostly, this is called a
tape. Uh, we used to listen to music
on things like this. We also used to used
to used to exchange data and things like this.
Um, my research group was at one point eagerly
awaiting the arrival of a large um uh, corpus
of economic data from Penn University of Pennsylvania. I
think, uh, and one day that the package
arrives in my office and it's a it's a spool
of tape like this one. Um, and I
go off to to try to mount it, um
, on the tape, drive in our backs,
Um and, uh, and my tape drive just
wouldn't read it. So I took it to the
tape drive of the machine on the other side of
the machine room, and it wouldn't read it either
. And then I tried the sun and that wouldn't
read it, and I was getting a little annoyed
. And so I took it down the road to
the computing center, is a couple of miles down
the road, um, in Edinburgh and started running
it on all sorts of different kind of tapes and
nothing tape drives and nothing would read it. And
after a while, somebody's and we're pretty frustrated at
this point. It's been a couple of weeks we've
been waiting for this thing and the idea that now
we just can't read it seems, you know,
uh, cruel and unusual. So, um,
I'm expressing my frustration to one of the guys in
the machine room and they say, Oh, you
should take it to Harry and let him eyeball it
like eyeball it. And this is, you know
, ferric oxide or a little bit very outside on
a on A on a plastic plastic substrate like What's
he gonna do? Like eyeballing the tape. But
sure enough, we take it to this guy,
Harry, and never met before. But he's got
an office upstairs, and he reaches into his unspools
like a couple of feet of tape onto his desk
on top of a piece of paper. He reaches
into his drawer and pulled out of the drawer.
A little metal ring, Uh, which has,
uh, it has something something great, and it
turns out to be like too thin plates of glass
and iron filings in suspension in between, in some
liquid in between the glass. He lays it down
on the tape and taps it, and the armed
filings begin to line up with the magnetized portions of
the tape, and he, like, moves it
up and down until he finds a little gap,
makes a mark with a pencil and a piece of
paper looks fun, finds another gap, makes a
mark who's a ruler out of his desk, measures
the distance between them and goes, Okay, this
is your problem. It's a 400 d p.
I tape is finally inter record markers figured out What
the what? The block sizes. It's like that's
a 400 g p I tape the the only tape
drive in the building is going to read that.
Is that the I C l? And sure enough
, I take it off and it works. Um
, so you know, my managing to read my
data because somebody could actually physically see the bits.
Um, so I never thought about these things in
terms of the materiality of information, but, uh
, but, you know, these are sort of
ways that ways that these topics are becoming, um
, are becoming relevant to me now. And of
course, this is perhaps an odd time to talk
about the materiality of information, given that so much
of our discourse at the moment is founded on ideas
of materiality. Uh, and the IRR Asia,
uh, eraser, perhaps, or at least distancing
of the of the material, uh, configurations of
computer of computational devices through which are digital and information
services are deployed, right? So all the language
of cloud computing is language of immaterial, itty as
if clouds. Somehow we're actually immaterial themselves. And
I do want to tell us a cloud computing story
, but in a rather different form. This story
comes from, uh, book, uh, that
Paul Edwards from University of Michigan published a couple of
years ago where he in which he is looking at
the history of climate modelling. And he reports in
passing this nice little story about a point in the
late 19 fifties where one of the offices of the
U. S. National Weather Bureau was having a
data storage problem. We've all had data storage problems
. Their data storage problem was slightly different. Um
, their data storage problem was that all the records
they had of, um of previous weather patterns and
climate data were stored on punched cards, and they
weren't terribly sure they're building could physically support. Um
, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation
when I encountered this in the book by my math
, which nobody should ever trust. Uh, one
gigabyte of data and punched cards weighs approximately 35 tons
. So next time you pull 16 gigabytes of data
out of your pocket, um, you might want
to consider what it would be if that were,
um if that were actually, you know, on
punched cards, right? So this is beginning to
get to one of the one of the points.
I want an important point that that that's sort of
a starting point here. In some ways, it's
not, particularly even though we talk about information in
terms of the abstractions and the mathematical abstractions that underlie
the history of computer science. And we can recognize
nonetheless that obviously digital systems in the ways in which
I've just been describing take on material forms. And
so when I talk about the materiality of information,
I want to speak not simply to what I sometimes
called brute materiality, not simply to this issue that
there are material configurations that underlie our information systems,
that wires actually have to go places. That data
has to be stored in objects that actually way things
. Um, it's not simply that it is material
. It's the specific material Properties of informational configurations matter
, the particular material properties of punched cards. In
comparison, to a flash drive matter and the matter
not only for the fact that I can carry 16
gigabytes around right now as opposed to a building that
would barely hold 16, 16 gigabytes or a gigabyte
once upon a time, but also that because of
those material properties, the kinds of things that I
think information can do for me and the kinds of
things that I think I can do with information radically
change. Uh, John Yates of M. I
. T. Has a marvelous group called Control Through
Communication, which he studies the rise of system of
systematic management, sort of organizational and management science in
the U. S. And and attributes a great
deal of what goes on there to the invention of
vertical filing filing cabinets. The idea is that we
had paper records before we had filing cabinets, and
businesses could organize and store lots of data in,
um in in stacks and piles in in coffee books
and so forth, but only with vertical filings.
We get the notion of random access and the idea
that I can go and extract particular piece of paper
easily and put it back, and only once I
have random access. Does it make sense to start
asking questions like, How many umbrellas did we sell
in Baltimore last year? In February? Right?
And if you can't ask those questions about the past
, you can't make predictive expectations Group had said predictions
about the future. Um, and you can't have
the idea of organizing your business around the ability to
process information and the ability to be able to to
analyze and analyze and predict So the specific material forms
in this case, just the idea that my pieces
of paper might be able to be stored vertically rather
than horizontally radically changes what the information can do for
me. And that's sort of the idea that I
want to get at in here as well. When
I speak about material properties, I want to speak
to the specific kinds of materiality is that information can
have things. Thinking of materiality is, rather than
materiality and thinking about properties like durability, flexibility,
uh, visibility. These are all particular kinds of
material properties, such that the change and transformation of
those materiality changes. What I expect information can be
what I can do with it, how I approach
it and how I do it and and so forth
. I'm gonna skip this slide. So So what
I want to do is take you through briefly a
number of things that the materiality of information can be
coming from this sort of perspective of thinking about materiality
and and in particular, um, there's been a
great deal of interest in the social sciences over the
last 10 to 15 years in materiality, and I
want to sort of speak, show how some of
that work can have impact on what we do in
computer science and information science. Um, and and
now it's the case. I would say that actually
, in a great deal of social science, there's
a lot of confusion about what materiality is, what
materiality can be. And that's one reason that I
want to sort of step through a series of different
things, different potential material. It ease of information
as intellectual projects, different kinds of projects within within
that broad area. And, um, and I'm
doing this partly to clear the ground so that I
can focus in particular on one of them on the
last one here, which is sort of thinking about
the materiality of informational representations. But in order to
get to that, I want to sort of step
through some of these others. And hopefully, by
stepping through them, I'll give you a better picture
of what, as an intellectual project an investigation of
the materiality of information might be. So the first
of these is to think about the materiality of in
front of digital goods and think about the material it
ease of urban infrastructures to think. Oh, I
can't remember if I still do these in the same
order, but to think about the material conditions of
information system production to think about the material consequences of
informational metaphors and then But I'm just going to about
those super quickly. Those are not really my primary
topic here today. My primary topic is this last
one digital materiality with materiality digital representations. But let's
start off with digital goods. Um, and again
, this is partly is part of the sort of
this idea of trying to set out what a study
of the materiality of information might be. And one
thing that it might be is a study of the
sort of material culture of digital information, so in
in social sciences, particularly in anthropology. Uh,
there has been a great deal of interest in recent
years in the area of material culture. The fundamental
idea behind material culture is to say that anthropology is
fundamentally being concerned with the sort of symbolic value of
the symbolic, the symbolism of social life and the
kinds of symbolic value that social practices have. Um
, and has generally been much more focused on how
we interact on the on sort of myths on symbol
systems and on the symbology of everyday life, and
has largely ignored the physical objects that populate our life
. If we if anthropology has been largely concerned with
people, it has largely ignored stuff. And material
culture is an attempt to recover an interest in stuff
, um, to study, for instance, the
ways in which our homes are organized so as to
display certain aspects of identity, um, of ethnicity
, uh, social standing and so forth that we
invest a great deal of value in our cars,
our stereo systems, um, and and all the
other sort of cut treatments of everyday of every of
everyday life that they carry symbolic value. To that
, we may want to understand the symbolism of of
social interaction in a way that includes, um,
of the objects of everyday life as part of that
and so one of the kinds of things than that
we might focus our attention on Accord. Interested in
the materiality of information is the materiality of digital goods
or what I sometimes described as why iPods are cool
and zones or not. Um, with apologies to
anybody in the room with the Zune, like,
I'm guessing none of you have the Zune logo,
um, attitude and multiple colors. And on your
heart, I'm guessing that's a pretty unusual kind of
thing. I really want to when this picture was
taken at the other part of it, too.
Um, so it's certainly the case that we can
all recognize that the kinds of digital objects that we
carry around with us, and indeed the commitment to
a digital life itself is something that carries certain kinds
of symbolic value. You think about the ways in
which information plays a role in manifesting who it is
that we are and how it is. We're going
to interact with each other. The very idea of
doing things online is not simply something that carries certain
kinds of organizational efficiencies with it, but also demonstrates
a certain kind of forward looking this right? Um
, my friend, uh, collaborator Genevieve Bell talks
about being in Indonesia once and witnessing parade, um
, in a small in a small village, something
that they did every year in sort of celebration of
their history. And people were walking through carrying on
sticks the various kinds of emblems of different kinds of
periods of the history of the village in terms of
sort of religious affiliations, uh, wars that have
been fought and the rest of it. And the
man at the back of the parade has a stick
with a great big cell phone on it. Right
, Because that's the future. It's a symbol of
the future. It marks where we are now and
where we are and where we're going. We are
marching into the future behind the man with the big
cellphone mistake, right? And so the digital objects
that we carry and the fact that we use those
digital objects as part of our everyday life carries carries
certain kinds of symbolic value. So that's where we
begin to see an intersection, recognizing that the digital
goods themselves there are material forms and there and there
are very present in our lives is already something that
we need to be able to pay attention to,
not simply the the information that goes around but the
objects through which it gets encoded. However, as
I said, that's not actually my topic here today
. That's just one that I want to start to
talk about. The second thing that we could have
in mind when we think about the materiality of information
is the consequence for our everyday lives, from,
um, of the ways that digital networks and everyday
so everyday spaces gets reorganized by the presence or absence
of different kinds of digital networks. Um, this
is actually there's another photograph from from Genevieve's work that
she took somewhere in South Australia. I can't tell
if this sign is informational or warning. Um,
one could imagine it both ways. If you look
closely, it also seems to have caused someone to
swear violently across the road. But it's just like
like some. Sometimes you really need to get that
cell phone signal, right? Um, but there's
an argument to be made that proximity to digital to
high capacity digital network is as important in the beginning
of the 21st century as your proximity to the rail
network was at the beginning of the 20th, right
? If where the where the trains went, structured
industrial production structured, uh, patterns of human migration
and structured patterns of habitation and therefore, how families
get organized in the rest of it. We can
think about many of those same things as being affected
now by the presence and absence of digital networks and
digital infrastructures and variety of places. The messages that
I can send because I can't get a cell phone
signal as I stand here, um, the presence
or absence of high speed fiber. There's some really
nice work coming out of, uh, done by
a person who just graduated from UC Santa Barbara,
who has been studying the which calls the cultural geography
of undersea cables the kind of competition going on amongst
South among South Pacific nations to have the trans Pacific
fibers run near their islands because of because of the
other kinds of economic benefits that it brings that if
the cable comes here and then we become a reasonable
site for for all sorts of data network for all
sorts of, you know, data stories and the
and the rest of it that people will come with
the cables. Right? So the ways in which
our urban infrastructures I had rural infrastructures indeed get reconfigured
around the presence or absence of different kinds of networks
speaks to the material consequences of these flows of these
flows of information. The idea that that, as
as bits are flowing around the wires as bit flow
through some again sort of abstracted non material in force
fear they also radically reconfigure the physical infrastructure around on
the physical space around them. The material consequences play
out on that sort of on that sort of urban
level. This is also not what I want to
talk about the next one that we could talk about
. That I think is really important to include in
here. Um, it started, like the material
conditions of production of information technology. Uh, by
which I mean the fact that when I want to
deploy information services when I want to deploy digital services
, it's great. You know, it's great that
I can I can have this idea. I can
build software. I can, you know, put
it out there. But where is out there,
exactly? The presence of out there, um really
means having access to the kinds of resources that it
takes to be able to put a large number of
computers in a particular place, supply them with energy
, supply them with electricity, have somebody managed them
, have somebody look after them, move very hot
air rapidly from one part of the building to another
or one part of the world to another, and
that there's certain kinds of economic power, Um,
that are fundamental to the deployment of those kinds of
things. Yeah. And more broadly, we might
think about what kind of material resources need to be
deployed alongside these otherwise notionally immaterial, um, information
services. We're all familiar with the kinds of rags
to riches stories told about, um, commercial operations
to begin in Silicon Valley garages and Harvard dorm rooms
. And, you know, and the odd thing
here is that rags to riches notion since, um
, garages cost a lot of money in Silicon Valley
and Harvard, education is don't come cheap either.
Right? So you know what it takes to be
in those places at those planes what it takes to
be able to mobilize the resources that you have available
to you in order to produce something that that we
then also consumer is an important part of the whole
picture, right? It's an important part of what
it takes to be able to do this stuff.
So again, behind the scenes of these of these
immaterial digital, uh, services, the whole like
dissolution of the world of atoms into the world of
bits and the kind of rhetoric the Nicholas Negroponte is
best known for, there's a whole bunch of atoms
as well, right? The atoms are still there
and it takes certain kinds of resources of economic resources
power, by which I mean sort of Cody in
power rather than electricity. Um, to actually get
that stuff to get that you know, the double
that stuff has to be aligned as well that the
digital is not the only domain here in which in
which we need to be able to do these things
. So so that's another really important sort of part
of trying to recover the material components of of information
systems development. But again, not what I'm primarily
focused on today. And then the fourth of my
five okay, speaks, um, and speaks to
, uh, the, uh the ever increasing material
reach of information, science and informational metaphors. So
many of you will recognize some of the people on
this on this slide. Uh, Claude Shannon,
uh, Norbert Wiener and others who were associated with
the Macy conferences that ran in the 19 fifties and
early 19 sixties that people like Kathy Hills at U
. C. L. A have written about extensively
that are essentially the origins of the cybernetic movement that's
on the U. S. Cybernetic movement, for
sure. Uh, and and arguably the origins of
information, science and computer science as we currently know
it. And that the and essentially what's going on
at the Macy conferences and in the work associated with
people like Shannon is an ever increasing reach of mathematical
mathematical abstraction. So, as many of you will
know again, right, Shannon published in what year
? 1953. I can't quite remember that. Right
. Publishers publishes the paper, a mathematical theory of
information in which he sort of sets out contemporary information
theory. It gets rapidly re published as a book
where it has lost its indefinite article and acquired Definite
Article Become the Mathematical Theory of Information. And the
book is um, is co edited, is co
written with uh With With Warren Weaver consisted essentially of
two chapters. One chapter is, um, is
Shannon's theory and the mathematics, the mathematics of it
and Weavers Chapter is arguably the more interesting. Well
, it's a different kind of contribution, a really
interesting one in its own right, which is a
contribution in which he tries to metaphorically expand and amplify
what it is that Shannon has talked about. To
be able to say, Look, this theory of
information isn't simply a theory of communicating systems. This
is a theory that describes all patterns of communication at
levels from, you know, from organisms to society
, from cellular communication to culture. We can model
everything in terms of this kind of informational account.
Information becomes this universal solvent, this thing that can
dissolve everything and reform it. And I think we
currently see, um, I know there's a lot
of work in bioinformatics here. There's a lot of
work in my institution as well and bioinformatics we see
within bioinformatics and genomics and interesting kind of, um
, parallelism, whereby the information science and the model
of information becomes also a way to incorporate biological material
, genomic material and human material and new kinds in
new kinds of ways. So the the interesting thing
here about information is that in terms of its sort
of mathematical formulations, it becomes a way to incorporate
all other and describe all other kinds of material configurations
of the world. And that becomes interesting first because
, if not least because if I can persuade you
that your problem is an information problem and it's also
a problem to which you know, Microsoft and IBM
can sell you a solution, this problem to which
I as an information scientists have an answer for you
. Um, so the Metis expanding material reach of
information science, something that we're all sort of pushing
forward ourselves and in computer science goes and I schools
and so forth, um, has had some really
interesting consequences in terms of how it is. We
start to think about information becoming re materialized in different
kinds of places, but that's a that is,
fortunately, the last of the things that I don't
really want to talk about, but I need to
sort of get out the way in order to focus
a little more specifically on one of these concerns and
considerations. Um, which is the materiality of,
um, of digital networks? Uh, sort of
digital representations. Informational representation. Um Mm. And
one of the first places I came across this and
so sort of motivating place is work that was done
by, uh, in in England by, uh
, Thomas Green, Mary Ann Petry and Alan Blackwell
, and relate and colleagues on the, um I'm
just looking at how it is that people learn how
to program. And so there's there's studies were on
learning on early programming. Um, an early learning
. Actually, they did a lot of stuff on
prologue, which, if you're in Edinburgh, made
a lot of sense, but otherwise, it's kind
of bizarre. It's like, you know, it's
not exactly studying conventional programming practice, but nonetheless,
whatever I spent a lot of I spent a lot
of my early years sacrifice prologue. Um, well
, one of the things that they observed one of
the things that they observed, um is they find
it instructive to look not just at the programs that
people wrote, but also the kinds of errors that
they made. And then they started to focus on
the process of correcting those errors. And in the
end, to notice that there are one of the
problems about correcting errors is that frequently our protest of
correction introduces new kinds of errors. Right, We
have these sort of knock on effects. I tried
to pick something and break break something else. Um
, and they noticed a couple of things, right
? So one is that there were corrections that were
conceptually simple, but lexical complicated. That is,
there were corrections that you could make, um,
uh, adding a new parameter to, uh to
a function that actually that we can talk about really
crisply and coherently in terms of the line in terms
of the programming language, Um, and even in
terms of what your program does, but that actually
affects the program in many different places. You can
think about things that change indentation structure in the same
way. Suddenly I got to actually have to change
a huge number of lines to make a change.
This conceptually very simple, adding an extra level of
indirection, which again, is the kind of thing
that we all casually throw out there, uh,
as as as a mechanism for fixing a problem that
actually might have all sorts of changes that enterprise making
to the program. And that means that it's possible
to fail to make it in one place or another
place and so forth. So they're observing the different
kinds of the different kinds of things that people try
to fix, have different kinds of lexical consequences.
And also then, this sort of problem with no
co and errors, the kind of way that might
make a change and that produces new kinds of errors
itself is also tied to the particular kind of lexical
form of the programming language. And the different programming
languages have different features this way. That certain kind
of programming languages make it easier to make certain kinds
of conceptual changes or that localized changes in particular kinds
of ways. Again, here, you can think
about perhaps that those of you who are familiar prologue
programming and know that it's a pattern based language,
Uh, you know, like like Haskell or ML
or some of those right? You're familiar with how
it is. You can introduce new cases into into
those languages that are that are pattern based without necessarily
making a whole bunch of other changes a big pile
of conditional lifts or something. So they became really
interested in what they call the cognitive dimensions of notations
and the cognitive dimensions of programming languages. They were
focused on how it is that people make changes and
different ways that different languages would reflect or make easier
, different kinds of changes or make it easier to
introduce different kinds of errors. And this is kind
of an interesting take, I think, on the
on the on the material. And it's one that
points our attention towards materiality and a new kind of
way because after all, much of the work of
programming is work done in something like this. It's
text work. It's think work. Obviously it's conceptual
work. It's mathematical work, its graphical work.
We sketch things, we draw them with pieces of
paper, but it's also text work, and the
the text work that we do is, uh,
is related to, but not directly driven by the
sort of conceptual work we do. That is,
I think that's a change that's easy to make.
Conceptually might be difficult, lexical and and vice versa
. And so it draws, are they draw our
attention towards the importance of trying to think about programming
not only as a conceptual practice but as a material
practice, one that involves, you know, engaging
with the stuff of programs. The stuff of programs
is this, like long, complicated sequence of characters
into which different kinds of potential errors errors can be
introduced. The idea is, I guess, in
some ways is that we need to pay attention to
the particular kinds of representations at work. The two
representations that are identical in terms of their consequences.
That is, a program written than two different programming
languages that does the same thing might nonetheless be radically
different in terms of the actual material engagement, which
we as programmers we have with them. They allow
us to do different kinds of things. They allow
us to think in different kinds of ways. Mhm
. Now there's an interesting sort of tradition that I'd
like to try to link this to, which is
the work in a broader work that's going on in
studying the sort of knowledge practices that our marriage around
different kinds of representations. We can take this back
to studies of, um, of oral and literate
cultures, uh, back to sort of Walter Ong's
, uh, work on morality of literacy or Jack
goodies work that will actually speak more to at the
moment. So if you suppose we think about that
sort of question of oral and literate cultures, right
, that's sort of the standard picture we have of
oral cultures, at least in the in the Western
mode is I don't know the bardic tradition and Celtic
Britain or something. Maybe it's just me. I
naturally always go to Celtic Celtic origins of things right
? But it's like, you know, you think
, How did somebody managed to turn up, You
know, at work a whole night after night and
give the recite Bill Wolf in exactly the same way
, right? How do you manage to to to
reproduce? That's always like we think about oral cultures
. We think about these massive memory feats that people
would be able to do explain, you know,
telling stories, reciting poems in the absence of a
written description. What an amazing feat that it's,
um How did people manage to do that? And
the answer, of course, is they didn't was
the first answer. And the second part is and
it didn't matter. Um, you don't necessarily reproduce
it the same way. Uh, and as long
as you produce the experience, that's okay, and
and one of the reasons it doesn't matter is that
in an oral culture, no one's got a written
version to check. Whether you got it wrong or
not, nobody is able to sit there looking at
me going. You miss that word you missed,
You missed that entire stands up. That's like just
disappear. No one is in a position to do
that. In fact, the very idea of verisimilitude
, the very idea of exactly production, is the
kind of idea that we can only have after we've
invented a written language. Only in the presence of
a written record does the idea of the of the
conformance of an oral performance to a written record makes
sense. So songs argument in contention is not simply
that is not just let's see. You don't simply
want to argue that a little literary form that written
for written language is simply a different representation of of
things that could otherwise be represented orally that could be
spoken. But rather it's a fundamentally different kind of
knowledge. Practice the ideas of what it means to
know something. What we might do with that knowledge
is completely changed by the introduction of a written introduction
of the written record. Jack Goody in his work
, um, explores this in more detail. So
he's right. He's interested not just in in the
shift from oral to literate cultures, but argues,
too, that actually you can observe the evolution within
, represent the co evolution of representational forms in written
and written language and the knowledge practices associated with those
. So, for instance, once you have written
language, while we can write things in different kinds
of ways, so one of the things one of
the first things we can do is we can make
lists. Um, and in fact, you know
what These arguments that the written language often begins with
listening and once you have lists lists seem like a
really useful way to understand the world list seem like
a really useful way to keep track of what's going
on in the world and to understand your relationship to
it. If you look at medieval encyclopedias, they
are largely collections of lists. What are the birds
you will encounter if you go to Northern Africa?
What kinds of diseases do people die of in the
in the north of Scotland? Right. These are
the kinds of things that medieval encyclopedias record enormous lists
of things. And then what goody traces through the
through the historical written record is the emergence of alternative
forms of written representation and of the knowledge practices associated
with them. So one of the things that you
get after lists his trees. I go from the
list of the tree. Now I can represent hierarchies
. And once I have a hierarchy, once I
have the ability to represent things as trees. Suddenly
everything looks like a taxonomic structure. Suddenly, everything
looks like a hierarchy, something that many ways we
still have to shake ourselves loose brawl right that once
I can represent something in this way. Then suddenly
I have this whole panoply of representational practices that come
into play. I can now understand relationships. I
can now begin to model the world in terms of
a series of sort of hierarchical things that gives me
notions of abstraction, gives me notions of sort of
pair wise relationships that all that that, um,
that bound up with my ability to represent things in
written form. So so, you know, goodies
notion here is that these two things are tied together
. Understanding the world in terms of hierarchies and hierarchical
relationships is bound up with the representation of particular kinds
of data on a page, Um, and that
you can see the two emerging alongside each other and
the next one after less mhm the next one after
trees is table. So I moved from a hierarchical
organizations of data to relational organizations of data that arise
when I can start to represent tables and yeah,
and again, he traces this through the through the
record not just the emergence of the table as a
physical form as a written form, but also the
emergence of relational thinking as how it is that that
that that form, um, moves around in the
world. So there's a conformance between how we think
and how we represent things. Um, yeah.
Having some common having conversations with Stephen Deborah last night
, about about sort of computational thinking and so that
which I know that lots of people here are interested
in. And the relevance here should be hopefully,
relatively should be should be fairly clear that if there
is a link between the kinds of representational practices at
work and the ways we have of understanding the world
, if they are mutually influential, then digital representations
, um, have a role to play here.
And if, as we go back to, um
, to Thomas Green and those guys doing the cognitive
notation stuff, then different kinds of representations, different
kinds of notations have different kinds of material properties.
Then again, we're sort of building up this this
this more complex with more complex whole we. So
we certainly the sort of the issue that we,
the Melissa and I are trying to investigate at the
moment, then, is one that tries to understand
what the consequences are. The particular kinds of representational
forms that are encoded into information systems and through which
are information systems operate, Um, because they are
, especially when we're especially interested in cases where those
representational systems live at the at the intersection of sort
of the digital and the human or the digital and
digital and the social. There's some really nice examples
of this that come up in the work of,
uh, one of my colleagues at U C.
L. A. Michael Curry is a cultural geographer
. Michael has done a lot of work on geographical
information systems. Uh, and one of the things
that Michael argues is that you know what he does
. That sort of an interesting study of the history
of the zip code system, right? His own
improvement plan, Uh, which is originally introduced by
the post office in order to improve the delivery of
mail. Um, but then marketers begin to recognize
that it suddenly gives them a way of describing every
street address in the U. S. And if
you have this notion that you are where you live
, people cluster around similar kinds of demographic characteristics.
Then this becomes a way to identify from someone's address
what kind of demographic characteristics they might have. And
so you can build these geo demographic databases that describe
people according to where they according to where they live
and therefore market things to them deferentially, I can
send my you know, uh, ads from my
BMW dealership to the sorts of places where people are
likely to buy BMW. Uh, the weird thing
, of course, here is that as you begin
to use the ZIP code system in order to deploy
differential and marketing information and things like that, it
also becomes a means by which, uh, different
kinds of spaces can be, uh, can be
can they begin to take on the characteristics that these
representational systems give them? Right? Uh, if
if services are deployed to people in different kinds of
places differentially according to things like the ZIP codes,
then people will then tend to move to the places
where they can get the services that they want.
So so it becomes something of a self fulfilling prophecy
. Um, once upon a time, the Geo
demographics described the spaces. And after a while,
the Geo demographics are actually creating. Creating the space
is, um, this picture that you can't possibly
read is the list of all the zip codes in
Los Angeles area government. So these kinds of representational
forms become ways of understanding the world around us,
and they become consequential for how it is that we
operate in that we operate in that world, they
become indeed sort of broader cultural metaphors and, uh
, and left Manevitz. UCSD has argued in a
book called The Language of New Media that the database
form is the sort of dominant is going to be
the dominant cultural form of the 21st century, playing
the kind of role of the novel, Um,
did in the 19 and that filmed it in the
20th, that the database form abandons a narrative structure
in order to focus primarily on relation Haliti and that
that's the underlying form of hyper text. It's the
underlying form of uh, uh, much digital,
much digital media underlying form of computer games that don't
necessarily have a fixed path but allow you to go
and explore and where things have relationships to your actions
, to other kinds of objects in the world and
so forth. And so he's arguing essentially that you
see, in the history of media this history of
shift between different kinds of ways, again of narrating
our own experience and telling stories about the world that
here is to be represented by, um, represented
by the database so that database forms database representations suddenly
become this primary structuring element. If I want to
have an element, if I want to be able
to digitally encode things, then I have to be
able to fit them into database forms and the kinds
of database forms I have to fit them into.
Our are traditionally for our normally now you know,
relation all databases. So that fits with that relational
form that was associated with tables. But again,
as many people here will know, relational databases,
although they may be the current the currently operative,
um, database form are not the only one that
we've ever explored. And we've looked at network databases
and we've looked at the hierarchical databases and so forth
, and so we can and we can see again
here the idea that different kinds of data can be
represented more or less effectively with different kinds of database
forums and therefore that the kinds of notations that are
encoded in our systems materially um, um um,
configured into those systems are ones that shape what it
is that we can know and tell about the world
around us. So there's a really interesting is a
really interesting moment in some ways to look at some
of those questions. Um, because what we see
is if the rise of cloud computing, um,
and with the kinds of massive parallelism parallelism associated with
cloud computing, the emergence of alternative kind of database
forms or replacement of or a displaced certainly kind of
displacement of relational forms with with sort of like a
bag of objects, kinds of models with fluid databases
with attribute value stores and the rest of it that
provide an alternative kind of encoding of information in the
world because of the alternative material configuration of the systems
on which they reside. Alright, that these kinds
of systems that attribute based based data stores fit more
naturally to the kind of, uh of system of
systems on which cloud services get deployed. So again
, we're sort of tracing this sort of path of
connections, and it becomes a circular one eventually.
And that's the point, which is, you know
, that the database that the that the implementation platform
structures something of the kind of effective systems we can
build upon it. Those systems have been quoted into
the particular kinds of representations of the world. The
world gets structured according to those and it's sort of
all loops back around again. I'm gonna skip this
slide all together, and what I want to do
is give you a couple of, um, of
, of, of examples more broadly of where this
, um where where? This, uh, where
these questions of materiality perhaps play out That will give
a little more structure to what I'm saying. Um
and then I will sort of, uh, I'll
wind up my part and take questions or or steal
all your ideas. Vegetarian. Um and the first
of these comes from some work that a colleague of
mine, Becky Grant er, who's at Georgia Tech
these days, Um did many years ago. And
I'm when she moved to Chicago and she was working
for, uh, working for for Lucent. Bell
last, um, and Becky is an amateur photographer
. And so when she got to Chicago, she
, uh connected with various local photography groups and people
to hang out with and take photographs with the rest
of it and one of the things. And there
was an interesting moment in some ways because sort of
prosumer digital photography was just hitting, so the camera
clubs were beginning to try to take seriously what was
happening with digital photography as part of their practice.
Um, it had previously the professional ends. Digital
equipment had been out of reach for them. Um
, and the low end digital equipment had not been
interesting enough to do anything to do. They're they're
kind of artistic photographic practice with. But now,
suddenly, it was something that they had to contend
with. Um, and and it threw up all
sorts of very complicated problems for them. So,
for example, they spent a lot of time running
competitions. And those competitions have all sorts of rules
that govern the different kinds of categories into which photographs
should. Beach photographs should be placed. Um,
so for example, at least for the camera clubs
that she was dealing with, you could take nature
of photographs. That's one category, right? And
one of the things about a photograph for a photograph
to be a nature photograph. It had to have
no sign of human involvement in any way. A
footprint was a problem. It suggested that a human
footprint is a problem. I think animal footprints were
okay. Sorry. Uh, but, you know
, it's it showed the sign of human activity.
A fence post would also rule a photograph out as
being a nature photograph. It might otherwise have trees
and grass and bushes the rest of it. But
if there was a fence post in the middle of
it, however picturesque, and whether it was,
um, it ruled something out of court as a
as a as a nature of photographs, a drooping
telephone cable. Uh, so what became a worry
for them was that people might be using Photoshop and
similar tools to eliminate the signs of human activity that
would render a photograph, um, ineligible for the
for the category and to put it back in.
And, of course, I mean Photoshop Now,
I think, has specialized tools for drooping telephone cable
. I mean, that's like one of the one
of the standard things, but you know that even
even even back at the back of the time,
when they didn't do that, it obviously was capable
of being used to be to make those kinds of
changes. And the idea that the photograph might be
post process in order to make it eligible for categories
was deeply problematic for the camera club. But at
the same time they couldn't ban post processing. And
the reason they couldn't ban post processing is they recognize
that a great deal of the creativity of artistic practice
happened. Photographic artistic happens in the dark room.
They're very committed to the idea that the artistry of
photography is not simply what happens behind the viewfinder,
but it's going to happen in terms of how you
develop your photograph. So post processing can't be evil
because post processing is part of what they do.
But there's no new forms of post processing that become
available in the digital realm that are not the sort
of post processing that we like to do. You
might be actually okay to apply color washes digitally to
your images. It might be okay to rebalance certain
things that reproduce aspects of what's going on here.
Um, so it's not that, but but it
becomes under, but not to make the sort of
the very, very highly local changes the Photoshop is
also introducing. So this is not a question of
where that it's an interesting question with respect to from
materiality, right. What they were engaged in was
already a deeply material process. The material transformation as
we move into the new kind of area is one
that, um that is amenable to a new kinds
of new kinds of practices. The material form and
the practices are mutually, uh, mutually bound together
here. Um, and the material form indeed is
pointing out the specificity, the material specificity of their
previous practices that they haven't thought of as being unique
to, uh to a particular demand, a particular
kind of photography. And it throws up. It
throws up a whole series of sort of questions,
and it causes them to have to radically reconfigure the
social and organisational institutional processes of digital of photography in
order to allow this new kind of material into the
into the picture. There's another interesting one that they
had to deal with. That sort of comes out
of this and you can start again to receive here
because they're committed to the idea of dark room artistry
. Uh, they also require that people make their
own prints, right? And of course, if
you're a photographer and you're working in film photography,
then that would be sort of natural to you that
you would want to be able to do this.
But what does it mean to make your own prince
in a digital world? Doesn't require, for instance
, that you own the printer. Um, does
it mean that you have to be the person to
hit the print button? If you use somebody else's
printer, you go to a commercial service. What
does it mean to make your own prince? The
prince has radically has sort of become divorced from the
digital material in a different in a different kind of
way. So this pairing of social practice with material
practice, um, it's sort of what we want
to sort of get out here and point out through
this example of the way that the that the simple
that's the changes in the in the in the materials
here have all sorts of manifest consequences for the organization
, and this is again not a brute materiality question
. It's not that one thing is material, and
the other one wasn't it's not. The digital form
is immaterial, whereas the whereas the film won with
material that's absolutely no what's going on, but the
different. But they have different kinds of material,
properties and the and the question is, how are
the social practices type of those different material properties.
The other example. This is the one that keeps
me awake nights. The more I read about another
book I brought in my on this trip with me
is going to scare me when I go home.
Uh, this comes from work by an anthropologist called
Hugh Gustafson, who has spent many years studying nuclear
weapons. Um uh, designers, Um, actually
, the really interesting one of the really interesting things
. Just as a quick, ethnographic moment. He's
an ethnographer. He did all this. His original
dissertation work at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Um, but
he's also Canadian, which means he's not allowed to
go into Lawrence Livermore Lab. So the interesting one
of the interesting things that come in the book is
how you manage to do an ethnographic study of a
field site that you can't actually enter. He spent
a lot of time hanging out to the gates,
and he could use to go to the visitor center
in the cafeteria, which, it turns out,
was enough for him to do some really interesting work
. So the situation with nuclear weapons testing is essentially
this. We haven't blown up a nuclear weapon for
a long time, right? We haven't been able
to, That's what what what all the sort of
test ban treaties are, You know, they require
mean that we haven't been able to blow up nuclear
weapons for a long time, and yet we have
continued to develop them. We have developed new ones
. We have entirely new multiple generations of nuclear weapons
that we have never blown up. How do we
do that? We do it through computer simulation.
Now. It's one of the primary ways that we
can manage manage to assess new kinds of weapons designers
. And so we're at a becomes this really interesting
thing where you can argue that the single major driver
of nuclear weapons development is not material science or nuclear
physics, but computer architecture that the development of new
kinds of simulation technologies, new kinds of simulation,
the mathematics of simulation or new kinds of computer architectures
that lend themselves to particular forms of simulation is what
drives the development of new kinds of weapons. Because
each new form of simulation each new compact simulation capacity
that you can put in the hands of development of
weapons designers creates the opportunity to design a new class
of weapons. I can now design weapons that I
couldn't have designed before because I can now simulate the
kinds of explosions in the kinds of physical behaviors that
I couldn't have done couldn't have done before. Um
, so the materiality of of of the of the
simulation in terms of the very kind of specifics of
what it can do, what and how quickly you
can do it for whom you can do it and
with what kinds of, um, resolution and so
forth drive, uh, drive a different kind of
material process, which is weapons design. That itself
was once founded on an alternative materiality, the materiality
of actual nuclear fissile, fissile nuclear materials. Actually
, if you read this stuff, the other really
scary thing about the fact that we haven't blown up
any weapons for a long time is that nobody has
any really good ideas about how plutonium pits degrades.
So actually, no one's gonna be a good idea
about what would happen if we blew up any of
the weapons that we used to blow up. But
we haven't blown up for a long time. Um
, and of course, And then this is the
other interesting part of it that the people who last
blew up weapons are all retiring. Uh, if
they haven't already retired by this by this point.
And so now you have a You have an entire
, um, community of people who were designing things
they've never blown up. And hopefully none of this
bolivar matter, that's, you know, just have
said. But this is an interest in this case
is interesting because again, I think that's important material
displacement. But the materiality of simulation technologies displaces the
materiality of, uh, of nuclear physics. And
I don't think I want to say simulation displaces physical
experimentation. But I want specifically to point to the
materiality is here specifically to point to the kinds of
things that we can develop with the kinds of architecture
is that we have. You think about this in
terms of their distribution that parallel architectures, um,
the different kinds of computer systems that we develop,
the emergence of Buell clusters as the primary sort of
compute platform here rather than large scale veteran machines.
All that sort of stuff, I think, has
really important consequences, which I realized as I say
this stuff that other people in this room know much
more about these. I should shut up. Um
, but let me sort of trying to sort of
wind this up by pointing to a couple of sort
of, uh of areas. So there are aspects
of what I'm saying here that should be deeply familiar
to people that are, of course, deeply familiar
to computer scientists. Uh, you know, we
spend a lot of time teaching our undergraduates about you
know, the consequences of putting things in lists,
putting things in the race, putting things in hash
tables and what it means for, uh, for
for the performance of their programs. Although there's been
some really interesting work lately that suggests that almost everything
we know about that is wrong, because we haven't
been checking lately with respect to what's been happening in
cashing architecture and the rest of it. But I
believe that to one side, fascinating though it is
, um, that already speaks in some ways to
a connection between software practice between our practice community practices
as software developers and the materiality of both the representations
in the digital systems that that that that underlie then
But that link is one that we generally haven't taken
very seriously. It hasn't been a strong topic of
of, um of investigation, either from a sort
of cognitive perspective from a socio cultural perspective or whatever
. We haven't sort of focused very much on that
entwining of, um of technological representation and practice.
And I think there's a really important work to be
done there. The other place where this where this
stuff does have some import is in an emergency emerging
area of software studies that some of you may have
some familiar with familiarity with. And I pointed to
left Banovic earlier, and he's a big person in
this area. And Aleve and others have argued that
the kinds if we start to understand digital technologies as
important cultural forms, then we should be able to
bring to the realm of the digital the kinds of
critical practices that those in humanities have developed over many
years, uh, and engage in software studies,
studies that take software seriously in terms of using the
same kind of tools that we've used in literature studies
, cultural studies, media studies and so forth.
My problem with a lot of the software study stuff
is it takes the digital or computer or software very
much as a metaphor, um, launching off point
for a sort of metaphorical examination of what? What
it means for us all to be dealing with the
digital right, And I sort of this this relationship
between the virtual and the real one counterpoint to that
has been working platform studies. So Ian Bogus Montford
, especially known for arguing that know what software studies
needs to do, is it needs to focus in
intimate detail on the particular configurations of different kinds of
machines. And the first, the first book in
this area, is their study book, Raising the
Beam, which is a study of the Atari VCs
. A study that, it has to be said
, is a more detailed technical description of the Atari
VCs than anything Atari ever actually produced. Um,
it reminded me of years ago when I used to
really enjoy that stuff, as I read, the
book is like I'm dealing with again the timing of
how long it's going to take the C R T
beams like swipe back so that I can like,
you know, prepared the next line of my next
line of my sprites to be to be painted,
Um, and they're sort of go through the details
of how it is that the actual kinds of games
that we can get produced and are very ideas of
what Atari eight bit games look like are intimately tied
to the configuration of the machine. I want to
try and argue, and you, as you may
be able to tell from the kinds of examples I've
been focusing on, that it's important, I think
, for us to find a middle ground, a
point in between the kind of super detailed. This
is the particular configuration of our 1.5 megahertz 65 oh
two. Driving this kind of motherboard in, um
in in Nick and Ian's platform studies. And yet
further down and more connected to the actual physical and
my actual detailed, um, professional practice of software
development. Um, than the than this sort of
the more metaphorical motion of software studies, um,
and say instead that actually the at that middle there
, where we focus on the question of representation and
we focus on the kinds of things that representations do
for us and do out in the world. In
consequence of what we as computer scientists do, there
might be some, um, some important things for
us to pay attention to. Okay, and with
that I will stop and take questions.