Cory Doctorow’s 2008 novel Little Brother traces the fight between hacker teens and an overactive surveillance state emboldened by a terrorist attack in San Francisco. The novel details in great depth the digital tools of the hackers, especially the asymmetry of contemporary cryptography. Simply put, today’s encryption is based on mathematical functions that are really easy in one direction—multiplying two prime numbers to get a large number—and really hard in the opposite direction—figuring out the two prime numbers that were multiplied together to get that large number.
Doctorow’s speculative future also contains asymmetries that are more familiar to us. Terrorist attacks are, alas, all too easy to perpetrate and hard to prevent. On the internet, it is easy to be loud and to troll and to disseminate hate, and hard to counteract those forces and to more quietly forge bonds.
The mathematics of cryptography are immutable. There will always be an asymmetry between that which is easy and that which is hard. It is how we address the addressable asymmetries of our age, how we rebalance the unbalanced, that will determine what our future actually looks like.
Would you like to raise awareness among the Texas digital humanities community about a new program or grant, recent hire, upcoming event, open opportunity or other news item? Contribute your news to the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium’s upcoming newsletter. We plan to distribute the newsletter online and via email to members of the TxDHC’s website in early August. (And if you’re not a member of the TxDHC website, please sign up–ideally using your professional email address.) Please submit your news item(s) by August 1, 2017 at https://goo.gl/forms/t56S5SROS7OFSgZr2.
While the audience for the TxDHC Newsletter is Texas digital humanists, folks from outside Texas are welcome to contribute items of interest to this group. Note that the newsletter editor retains discretion over what will be published.
We look forward to learning about what’s new!
(Cross-posted from TxDHC website.)
I firmly believe the case for the humanities is best made on its own terms. Rather than bending pretzel-like to explain how the humanities contribute to the prevailing values of techo-industrial capitalism, we should argue first and foremost for the humanities as good in their own right. We should be strong in our conviction that the social and moral goods produced by the humanities are of equal value to the economic goods produced by science, technology, and business. That said, it is sometimes pragmatic to show that even when measured by the standards of science, technology, and business, the humanities are extremely valuable. When arguing our case to decision makers who are themselves members of the STEM fields (e.g. your Dean or Provost) or who have become convinced of the central importance of STEM in the 21st century economy (e.g. legislators or members of your board of visitors), it is often more persuasive to do so on their preferred turf.
One way to do this is to argue from primary data that show the direct economic benefits of arts and humanities in our communities. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project is a good place to look for this kind of evidence. Another way is to refer decision makers to the frequent statements of prominent members of the tech community who have spoken out in support of the humanities education and humanities skills as useful in the tech economy. Good examples of this kind of secondary evidence are Mark Cuban’s recent statements warning students off finance and computing in favor of liberal arts; David Kalt’s assertion that “individuals with liberal arts degrees are by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders”; and the example of Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s crediting of his philosophy degree for his success. I’m sure you’ve seen more examples of this type, which I’d love to collect in the comments section below.
Quoting STEM and business types back to themselves is sometimes the most effective way to argue our worth. It’s one thing to say your work is important, it’s another to show that the people your audience respects most say your work is important. It may not be the case we want to make, but sometimes it’s the case we have to make.
When the New York Times let it be known that their election-night meter—that dial displaying the real-time odds of a Democratic or Republican win—would return for Georgia’s 6th congressional district runoff after its notorious November 2016 debut, you could almost hear a million stiff drinks being poured. Enabled by the live streaming of precinct-by-precinct election data, the dial twitches left and right, pauses, and then spasms into another movement. It’s a jittery addition to our news landscape and the source of countless nightmares, at least for Democrats.
We want to look away, and yet we stare at the meter for hours, hoping, praying. So much so that, perhaps late at night, we might even believe that our intensity and our increasingly firm grip on our iPhones might affect the outcome, ever so slightly.
Which is silly, right?
* * *
Thirty years ago I opened a bluish-gray metal door and entered a strange laboratory that no longer exists. Inside was a tattered fabric couch, which faced what can only be described as the biggest pachinko machine you’ve ever seen, as large as a giant flat-screen TV. Behind a transparent Plexiglas front was an array of wooden pegs. At the top were hundreds of black rubber balls, held back by a central gate. At the bottom were vertical slots.
A young guy—like me, a college student—sat on the couch in a sweatshirt and jeans. He was staring intently at the machine. So intently that I just froze, not wanting to get in the way of his staring contest with the giant pinball machine.
He leaned in. Then the balls started releasing from the top at a measured pace and they chaotically bounced around and down the wall, hitting peg after peg until they dropped into one of the columns at the bottom. A few minutes later, those hundreds of rubber balls had formed a perfectly symmetrical bell curve in the columns.
The guy punched the couch and looked dispirited.
I unfroze and asked him the only phrase I could summon: “Uh, what’s going on?”
“I was trying to get the balls to shift to the left.”
“With what?”
“With my mind.”
* * *
This was my first encounter with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, or PEAR. PEAR’s stated mission was to pursue an “experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes,” but that prosaic academic verbiage cloaked a far cooler description: PEAR was on the hunt for the Force.
This was clearly bananas, and also totally enthralling for a nerdy kid who grew up on Star Wars. I needed to know more. Fortunately that opportunity presented itself through a new course at the university: “Human-Computer Interaction.” I’m not sure I fully understood what it was about before I signed up for it.
The course was team-taught by prominent faculty in computer science, psychology, and engineering. One of the professors was George Miller, a founder of cognitive psychology, who was the first to note that the human mind was only capable of storing seven-digit numbers (plus or minus two digits). And it included engineering professor Robert Jahn, who had founded PEAR and had rather different notions of our mental capacity.
* * *
One of the perks of being a student in Human-Computer Interaction was that you were not only welcome to stop by the PEAR lab, but you could also engage in the experiments yourself. You would just sign up for a slot and head to the basement of the engineering quad, where you would eventually find the bluish-gray door.
By the late 1980s, PEAR had naturally started to focus on whether our minds could alter the behavior of a specific, increasingly ubiquitous machine in our lives: the computer. Jahn and PEAR’s co-founder, Brenda Dunne, set up several rooms with computers and shoebox-sized machines with computer chips in them that generated random numbers on old-school red LED screens. Out of the box snaked a cord with a button at the end.
You would book your room, take a seat, turn on the random-number generator, and flip on the PC sitting next to it. Once the PC booted up, you would type in a code—as part of the study, no proper names were used—to log each experiment. Then the shoebox would start showing numbers ranging from 0.00 to 2.00 so quickly that the red LED became a blur. You would click on the button to stop the digits, and then that number was recorded by the computer.
The goal was to try to stop the rapidly rotating numbers on a number over 1.00, to push the average up as far as possible. Over dozens of turns the computer’s monitor showed how far that average diverged from 1.00.
That’s a clinical description of the experiment. In practice, it was a half-hour of tense facial expressions and sweating, a strange feeling of brow-beating a shoebox with an LED, and some cursing when you got several sub-1.00 numbers in a row. It was human-computer interaction at its most emotional.
Jahn and Dunne kept the master log of the codes and the graphs. There were rumors that some of the codes—some of the people those codes represented—had discernable, repeatable effects on the random numbers. Over many experiments, they were able to make the average rise, ever so slightly but enough to be statistically significant.
In other words, there were Jedis in our midst.
Unfortunately, over several experiments—and a sore thumb from clicking on the button with increasing pressure and frustration—I had no luck affecting the random numbers. I stared at the graph without blinking, hoping to shift the trend line upwards with each additional stop. But I ended up right in the middle, as if I had flipped a coin a thousand times and gotten 500 heads and 500 tails. Average.
* * *
Jahn and Dunne unsurprisingly faced sustained criticism and even some heckling, on campus and beyond. When PEAR closed in 2007, all the post-mortems dutifully mentioned the editor of a journal who said he could accept a paper from the lab “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.” It’s a good line, and it’s tempting to make even more fun of PEAR these many years later.
The same year that PEAR closed its doors, the iPhone was released, and with it a new way of holding and touching and communicating with a computer. We now stare intently at these devices for hours a day, and much of that interaction is—let’s admit it—not entirely rational.
We see those three gray dots in a speech bubble and deeply yearn for a good response. We open the stocks app and, in the few seconds it takes to update, pray for green rather than red numbers. We go to the New York Times on election eve and see that meter showing live results, and more than anything we want to shift it to the left with our minds.
When asked by what mechanism the mind might be able to affect a computer, Jahn and Dunne hypothesized that perhaps there was something like an invisible Venn diagram, whereby the ghost in the machine and the ghost in ourselves overlapped ever so slightly. A permeability between silicon and carbon. An occult interface through which we could ever so slightly change the processes of the machine itself and what it displays to us seconds later.
A silly hypothesis, perhaps. But we often act like it is all too real.
With the semester having just ended, many of us are settling into new summertime routines and hoping those routines supports both some research productivity and some measure of relaxation. For me, in addition to the transition from semester to summer, I’m also transitioning into a more active period for our Greenhouse Studios initiative: our first projects are entering their intensive build sprints, we’re hiring our first full-time staff, and we’re preparing to move into a new, custom-built space on the first floor of the library.
Times of transition are times when we establish new habits—good ones or bad ones—and I’m trying to keep this passage from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 in mind as I transition to summer and Greenhouse Studios embarks on a new phase in its development:
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair. Wahram was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. That was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when one wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world. They came a bit too often for his taste. Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long before by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror— terror that no new eaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost. Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram’s desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized.
Carpe diem.
The role of mobile applications in the museum field has been a matter of discussion since the debut of the iPhone a decade ago. Since then, many museums have developed mobile apps, explored way finding, and experimented with other uses for these ubiquitous devices. Five years ago, we developed a experimental application called Heist which connected mobile devices to digital collections found on touch tables using a captive portal and HTML5. Ahead of its time, Heist was difficult to scale and implement broadly, but we hung on to the idea, wrote another grant (with our partners) and have since developed a new Heist-like system called The Omeka Everywhere Collections Viewer.
Omeka Everywhere is an IMLS-funded project that has brought together Open Exhibits and Omeka to make collections more accessible to the public in a variety of settings. The Omeka Everywhere project is a collaboration between the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Ideum, and UConn’s Digital Media and Design Department. The software we’ve developed allows museum visitors to pair their mobile devices with a collections viewer application optimized for a multitouch table or a touch wall. Visitors can then favorite collection items and share them on their preferred social media platforms.
As the video demonstrates, we used a mobile app and simple numeric code in the table software to pair devices with stations on the touch table. It is a simple and highly reliable way to connect the applications. The advantage of a full mobile application (as opposed to an HTML5 captive portal page used with Heist) is that the mobile application will travel with visitors after their museum experience ends. The challenge may be getting the museum goers to take the time to download the application in the first place. A possible solution would be to make it easier to download the application at the museum itself, through a captive portal. That may increase adoption. We will soon see how museums use this software and how many visitors opt to participate.
At the moment, there isn’t a simple way to connect to people’s personal devices in museums. Visitors bring their iOS and Android phones with different hardware specs and various OS versions. Sharing between devices in a public setting isn’t seamless. Along with hardware and software fragmentation, general concerns about privacy and security are real, so for the foreseeable future there will be imperfect methods for these types of experiences. Still, for those visitors who do participate, our usability testing strongly suggests that they will have an enhanced experience at the museum and they will take the collection (and their favorites) with them as they leave to share, study, and re-experience on their own terms.
The Omeka Collections Viewer and its mobile application companion will be available later this summer to museums, cultural organizations, and others via Open Exhibits and Omeka. The applications will be free and open. Attendees of this year’s American Library Association Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago will have a chance to see the Omeka Collections Viewer in person at Ideum’s exhibition booth 5237.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [award number MG-30-0037-1].
One of the things I try very hard to do in my DMD 2010 “History of Digital Culture” class is to teach students that their technology choices are not inevitable nor even determined primarily by what’s “best,” but rather that their technology choices are values choices, reflections of their ethical commitments and those of the communities that create and use those technologies.
When the University of Connecticut’s UITS (University Information Technology Services) made a choice not to renew it’s Adobe Creative Cloud site license, my students correctly judged that this was a values choice about the relative importance the higher administration places on artistic work at the university. The decision not to support software for artists, while at the same time maintaining support for software for, say, engineers, is a statement about how the university values different kinds of work on campus. I was pleased that the students immediately saw that this wasn’t just a choice about the quality of the software or even its cost, but about the intellectual commitments and identity of the university. What the students didn’t so easily grasp, however, was that the controversy over the Adobe suite also reflects on the values choices of the students, on the values choices that digital artists have made over many years to put the Adobe suite and other expensive, proprietary, closed-source software packages at the center of their creative practice, which in turn stems from set of larger choices artists have made vis à vis our prevailing copyright regime.
Artists have largely chosen think about copyright a something that exists to protect them and their work, and they have generally supported our ever-stricter copyright regime. Moving from a humanities and social sciences faculty to a fine arts faculty when I came to UConn from George Mason in 2013, I was struck by how poorly my storm-the-barricades, anti-copyright, open access agenda went over with my colleagues. Not that anyone really cared, but it was apparent from the beginning that I was coming at conversations that touched upon intellectual property (for example, a conversation about making faculty syllabi freely available on the web) from one side of the fence and they were coming at them from the other. Indeed, UConn’s School of Fine Arts offers a course on copyright for artists called Protecting the Creative Spirit: The Law and the Arts, which is taught by two lawyers. You can tell from the title of the course where its sympathies lie.
My DMD 2010 students (most of whom are freshman and sophomores studying in the department of Digital Media & Design which resides within the School of Fine Arts) are no exception. When I teach the unit on copyright, the first question I ask the class is, “What is the purpose of copyright.” Inevitably, students answer with some version of “to keep people from ripping you off.” My next move is to put the copyright clause of the Constitution up on the overhead and explain to them that, in fact, the purpose of copyright is to “Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” and that protecting an author’s exclusive rights for a limited term is simply a means to an end.
What is more, I tell them that the ever-stricter copyright regime we live with today wasn’t really designed to protect artists artists at all, although some may have used and benefited its protections. Instead, it was designed by and for big corporations, and it does a much better job of protecting those corporations than it does of protecting individual artists. It is true that many of these corporations employ artists (several former DMD 2010 students are now working for Disney), but those artists’ works are works for hire. The works may be protected by copyright law, but they are protected to the benefit of the employer, not the employee.
It is telling that the feelings of outrage and abandonment regarding the UITS Adobe announcement weren’t evenly distributed among my students. Digital Media & Design students at UConn choose from six different “concentrations,” electing to focus on either 2D animation/motion graphics; 3D animation; game design and development; web design and development; digital media business strategies; or digital culture, learning, and advocacy. (Students from all concentrations are required to take DMD 2010.) Especially hard hit by the news were the 2D/motion graphics students, for whom Adobe After Effects sits at the heart of their practice and for which there really isn’t a substitute, commercial or open source. Letting the Adobe license lapse was basically going to kill their creative practice, or, at the very least, put them out several hundred dollars.
My web design and development students, on the other hand, felt sympathy for their colleagues, but were pretty blasé about the whole thing. For them, letting the Adobe license lapse wouldn’t really change anything. The Adobe corporation has very little leverage over a web developer. To drive the point home, I challenged these web development students to think of a single piece of software that, if taken away from them, would affect their practice in any significant way. A few came up with TCP/IP, but quickly corrected themselves: TCP/IP is a protocol not a piece of software and is an open standard in any case. Apache was another, but, again, it’s open source, and there are serviceable alternatives. Certainly, they couldn’t name a corporation that exists that could raise its prices and bring their web development work to a halt in the way that Adobe was threatening to stop the work of our motion graphics artists. The difference, of course, is that our web developers rely on an open source technology stack and our motion graphics artists rely on proprietary software protected by a copyright law that was written in part by the very companies that produce it. Our web developers are not captive to copyright. Our motion graphics artists are.
Far from protecting artists, this is the best example I have of how our overly restrictive copyright regime harms artists. Rather than teaching our students how to situate their creative practice within a framework of intellectual property protection and thereby reinforce a copyright regime that wasn’t put in place for them in the first place, we should be encouraging our students to resist this regime. We should be teaching them to advocate for open access and open source software. In the longer term, we should be helping them to develop open source and open access alternatives themselves. This is an especially important message for my digital media and design students who, with their considerable skills, will be in a position to effect the longer term project of building the open source tools that will be necessary to free artists’ creative practice from propriety software. In the long term, maybe the very long term, this is the only way we can keep digital artists from being held hostage to corporations as Adobe held my students hostage this semester.
Fortunately, we’ve sorted out the Adobe license issue for now by cutting a licensing deal (shall we call it a hostage negotiation?) apart from UITS for students enrolled in the School of Fine Arts. For now, our students are safe. But only for now. You can bet I’ll be screaming this example over the fence at my colleagues in the School of Fine Arts the next time we talk about copyright.
Next month, Ideum will be exhibiting, for the first time ever, at the American Library Association (ALA) Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, IL, June 23-26. We’re excited to bring our multitouch hardware and software to the thousands of information science professionals who attend ALA every year. We will be showing Omeka Everywhere, a touch table collection viewer and mobile app that allows collections be viewed and shared between platforms. Omeka Everywhere is a collaboration between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Ideum, and the University of Connecticut’s Digital Media Center. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Please join us at booth number 5237, where Ideum team members will be happy to speak with you and demonstrate our Drafting Table and Duet Coffee Table, both with 49″ 4K Ultra HD displays, and examples of our library and museum collections-focused multitouch, multiuser software. Ideum tables have been purchased by academic, public, and special collections libraries all over the world for youth, student, and maker spaces, information and wayfinding stations, collaborative learning labs, and special exhibitions. Come see what we’re all about!
Next month, Ideum will be at InfoComm in Orlando, Florida from June 14-16. We will have a 43″ Duet Coffee Table in 3M’s booth, number 1467. This fall, Ideum will also be exhibiting at the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Annual Conference in San Jose, CA from October 21-24 in booth number 821.
Ideum’s in-house Industrial Design team did a great job matching form with function with the new Colossus. The fully redesigned Colossus touch table, with a massive 86″ display, starts shipping next month. Like its predecessor, this new version of the Colossus has a 4K Ultra HD display, is hardened for public spaces, and supports up to eight simultaneous users. We’ve updated the touch screen and the powerful integrated computer system in the table base. The overall table form factor is sleeker, as seen in such design touches as the crafting of a slimmer cradle for the top display that sheds inches from the previous design (it is now only 3″ thick).
The original Colossus table can be seen at installations at: The Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The image above shows the final prototype of the new Colossus in raw aluminum. Models shipping next month will have our standard midnight black powder coat, but we can customize the Colossus in virtually any color. The Colossus ships standard with an Intel Quad Core i7 computer system, 32GB of RAM, (2) 1TB hard drives, and a dedicated NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics card.
To learn more about Colossus touch table, see the Colossus product page on the Ideum website or contact our Sales Group.
Version 2 is an extensive update to the GestureWorks authoring framework that makes it simpler than ever to offer multitouch and multi-user applications. GestureWorks Version 2 comes with a newly rebuilt visualizer for touch and gesture tracking. The source code for the visualizer (built in Unity3D) is included with the GestureWorks software package.
GestureWorks allows you to author in C++ and Unity3D, the preferred languages for exhibit and application development. Our comprehensive tutorials show how to use GestureWorks with Qt Quick and Unity 3D. GestureWorks provides standardized development and robust support for multitouch gestures and is streamlined to take advantage of Windows Desktop native touch events.
GestureWorks-built applications run on any multitouch or touch-enabled hardware that supports Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7. The efficiency of Version 2 means your projects will have outstanding performance regardless of the hardware device. A lifetime license for GestureWorks is included with the purchase of Ideum multitouch tables and touch walls; it is available only to current purchasers of Ideum hardware.
Learn more at the newly revamped GestureWorks website featuring the updated logo: www.gestureworks.com
GestureWorks Version 2 Visualizer
