INTRODUCING DRUID: REAL-TIME ANALYTICS AT A BILLION ROWS PER SECOND
WHY GENERIC MACHINE LEARNING FAILS
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Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
new article by Lev Manovich: "There is Only Software"
Depending on the software I am using, the “properties” of a media object can change dramatically. Exactly the same file with the same contents can take on a varirty of identities depending on the software being used.
What does this finding means in relation to the persisting primacy of the term “digital” in understanding new media? Let me answer this as clear and direct as I can. There is no such thing as “digital media.” There is only software – as applied to media data (or “content”.)
Download full article (1500 words):
There is Only Software (PDF).
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Reference:
Lev Manovich. "There is Only Software." 2011 version. Available at www.softwarestudies.com
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Web 2.0 Summit 2011: The Data Frame
From Summit announcement:
"This year, data has taken center stage in the networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more—data is not only the Web's core resource, it is at once both renewable and infinite. No longer tethered to the PC, each of us bathes in a continuous stream of data, in real time, nearly everywhere we go.
In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer "what’s happening," "what’s on your mind," and "where are you?" Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power."
"This year, data has taken center stage in the networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more—data is not only the Web's core resource, it is at once both renewable and infinite. No longer tethered to the PC, each of us bathes in a continuous stream of data, in real time, nearly everywhere we go.
In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer "what’s happening," "what’s on your mind," and "where are you?" Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power."
Saturday, April 23, 2011
new article by Lev Manovich: "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data"
Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data (PDF).
In this article I address some of the theoretical and practical issues raised by emerging “big data”-driven social science and humanities. My observations are based on my own experience over last three years with big data projects carried out in my lab at UCSD and Calit2 (softwarestudies.com). The issues which we will discuss include the differences between “deep data” about a few and “surface data” about the many; getting access to transactional data; and the new “data analysis divide” between data experts and the rest of us.
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Reference:
Lev Manovich. "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data."
Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. The University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012. PDF available at http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-trending.html.
Friday, April 22, 2011
interactive media visualization by Jonathan Harris
In 2007 well-known digital artist and designer Jonathan Harris created a project which features a number of interactive interfaces to a large photo collection. These interfaces are excellent examples of what I call "media visualizations" (see my article What is Visualization? 2010).
Interactive interface:
http://thewhalehunt.org/whalehunt.html
Explanations of interface modalities:
http://thewhalehunt.org/interface.html
new software studies book: "Programmed Visions: Software and Memory" by Wendy Chun
book description (from Amazon):
"New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things--mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates "programmed visions," which seek to shape and predict--even embody--a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.
Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a "thing" in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. She argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The less we know, the more we are shown. This paradox, Chun argues, does not diminish new media’s power, but rather grounds computing’s appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known--its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware--makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture."
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (April 30, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262015420
ISBN-13: 978-0262015424
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