Panel 4: Contextual Modeling

An unstorable and unmanageable amount of data is coming at us, bringing with it a host of new strategies for grasping and analyzing the huge amount of bits and bites, such as visualization models.

mc schraefel: Beyond Keyword Search
Dr schraefel is reader in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton, UK
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Schraefel first emphasizes that in contrast to what people may assume from a visualization expert, she is not ‘in love with graphs’ and actually most of the time, big fat graphs suck. The research she will present here deals with the circumstances of serendipity. Following the idea that ‘fate favors the prepared mind’, she argues that discoveries never happen by chance and an important challenge lies in designing tools that support serendipitous discovery.

She then presents the audience with a 1987 video by Apple computers, which introduces the ‘Knowledge Navigator’; a tablet-like personal device with a natural language interface, a virtual ‘digital assistant’ and access to a global network of information. Outdated as the device may seem today, the digital assistant seemed able to create graphs by getting data out of its embodied context (such as other people’s documents), and be mined and combined to answer a variety of questions. In 1987, schraefel comments, this was a vision of exploration, heterogeneous sources, representation and integration that still inspires research into knowledge building today.

Schraefel notes how Google is the current search paradigm – “what else do you need?”. Drawing a parallel, she notes how Newton’s model of Mathematica set the tone for seeing the world for ages until it turned out that in some spaces, the model was flawed. It is much the same with Google’s document-centric, single source search without interrelations – the model frames the questions that may be asked. In order to enable knowledge gathering, we need a different one.

In a 2005 Scientific American article, Tim Berners-Lee, Ora Lassiler and Jim Hendler introduced machine readable mark-up and the Semantic Web as a new paradigm that moved away from keyword search and toward structured data and ontologies. Ontologies in this sense are subject-predicate-object joints, such as a composer-is a–person, or a person-has a-name etcetera. By giving data a rich (and often multiple) metadata context and using some logic, one may infer properties to objects that are not explicitly labeled, and enable knowledge gathering from heterogeneous sources.

Does this imply a reprise of Victorian taxonomies? Nope, quoting schraefel: “it is more pomo than that”, objects are described from multiple contexts. There is no über-ontology and we are slowly learning to be ‘ok’ with the fact that we don’t know everything controllably, and be messy. Following Berners-Lee, she emphasized the importance of liberating our data; placing sources freely on the web so that we may ask questions other than the document kind, and create information rather than merely retrieve it.

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During my research internship at the Institute of Network Cultures in 2008/2009, I was given the opportunity to explore the broad field of Web search using the Institute’s elaborate network and the extensive knowledge of its staff, and to deliver an editorial outline for the Society of the Query conference. This research also culminated in an MA thesis in December 2009 that has recently become available for downloading at the Igitur Library of Utrecht University. Please find an abstract below, and a download link here.

Abstract: In 2000, Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum argued that search engines raise not just technical, but distinctly ethical and political questions that seem to work against the basic architecture of the Web, and the values that allowed for its growth. Their article was the starting point of a critical Web search debate that is still gaining foothold today. When we consider the semantic metaphor that has been inspiring a refashioning of the Web architecture since 2001, we can see the exact same values of inclusivity, fairness and decentralization reappear that fueled the development of the original WWW. This thesis will explore the ‘promise’ of the Semantic Web in light of the current debate about the politics of Web search. I will argue that a balanced debate about Semantic Web developments is non-existent and that this is problematic for several reasons. Concluding the thesis, I will consider the dubious position of the W3C in enforcing the implementation of new standards and the power of protocol to be an ‘engine of change’.

Panel 3: Rent and Bias

After dwelling in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century in the morning panels, Felix Stalder comments that the program’s strict chronological order will now lead us into the twenty-first century. Keeping the metaphor of the map and the mapmaker alive, the next two speakers will talk about the politics and interests involved in processes of ranking, mapping and creating order in search results. Two such politics are ‘bias’ – why does a certain ranking exist – and ‘rent’ – how are all these practices transformed into a business.

Elizabeth von Couvering: Economic Bias in Search Results
Elizabeth von Couvering is a recent PhD graduate at London School of Economics
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Contrary to the earlier presentations, Von Couvering’s talk shifts from what a search engine should be to what they are today. Her major concern is in the responsibilities information vehicles have to the public interest. Bias gets embedded in search results in a number of ways; first of all, search engines do not index the whole Web. Secondly, they do not index reliably. Furthermore, some engines systematically favor certain sites and the local advertising market has also proven to play a major role in the quality of the indexing process and subsequent size of the index: If you don’t have enough to offer, you will get a reduced quality of service. Search engines are a matter of public interest since they help people find things they don’t know about, and people are unsophisticated in their queries; they tend not to look beyond first page of results and tend to trust the rankings. Bias, then, has major implications.

Many early engines have merged over time. From 1996 on, media companies bought up search engines as they proved to attract large audiences. The ‘integrated portals’ that emerged were selling an audience to advertisers; the classic media model of production, packaging and distribution. Many search engines died under this audience-based model, as the engine itself was often not developed anymore. Currently we have moved toward paid performance advertising, pay-per-click, a traffic-based value chain. Google is no longer looking at an audience but at the movement of users from one site to another. Search engines have become online media giants with an incredible market share and ‘gaming the system’ has become a profitable professional activity.

What has been done to address the problem of bias? Von Couvering points towards search engine efforts to improve search quality by focusing on relevance and customer satisfaction. What constitutes a relevant result is based on a customer’s frame of mind. In terms of the technology, relevance is an objective indicator of search engine retrieval quality. Relevance – not fairness, diversity, objectivity or formative value for instance. Defining quality as relevance is problematic. You can’t succeed in working toward a less biased search engine, unless you get beyond the idea of relevance, and introduce an alternative mode of framing search results.

Von Couvering argues that there is the need for a discussion of professional codes of ethics for information scientists. Engineering goals are primarily described in terms of efficiency, or sometimes ‘elegance’. She feels that there is room for standards such as they exist in library science for instance, which is access for everybody, or perhaps in journalism where seeing both sides of a story is a central element for professional development. There is a need for public debate on an Internet that is other than a market place or a retail store, which she found was a recurring theme in her research. She concludes: “This is not information retrieval, this is sales.”.

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The website searchengineland.com featured a live blog coverage of the interview with Dylan Casey, Search Product Manager at Google from the TWTRCON – a one-day conference focusing entirely on the business use of Twitter, held on 14 June 2010.

In brief, Google launched the Real Time search last December, a feature that shows results based on whether there is a real time component to the queries made on a particular topic. This can be done by clicking on the Latest tab on the search results page. Results displayed include twitter tweets, Google news, blog search, Facebook Fan page updates, etc. Since April 2010, another feature was the inclusion of top links on the result page: a section that displayed the more ‘authoritative and popular stories’ on the query. More links to background readings are present in the article itself.

Questions to Dylan were mostly to do with the developments of Google’s real time search function and the way it was reacting to the integration of News results and Facebook  results, and more so, the ramifications of real time results on the way ‘ searching’ was going to develop.

While he discussed some features of the real time search that Google will focus on: namely frequency and quality (for example: retweets in the case of twitter posts), and that there will be no connection between paid and unpaid searches (paid results will remain unchanged in natural search irrespective of surge in real time search results), the most interesting remarks from Dylan were that the opening up of the web is better for everyone and that instantaneous updates made content more relevant for its consumers.Two of the most interesting comments were on the way content publishing and the notion of privacy in content was to change with ‘real time search’:

One of the benefits is not only people will think they can come to Google and get the right answer if they hear an explosion or see a rally but also it will change the way that people will publish. That if I’m making this [real time] content available, it will be useful.”

The more open the web is the better, not just for Google but for everyone. Flip side is that the content previously thought of as private needs to be increasingly careful on how we manage it.

These comments very much highlight the dissonance between public and private nature of information that recent concerns over  Google Buzz has also generated. The question rather, is that should user published content be made searchable and catalogued on a large Search engine platform.

Whilst concluding with a response to an audience query on the physiology of the real time search, Dylan added that there was still a long way to go with real time search, and that it  was progressing in the direction of  “work to innovate.” He adds, ” It’s just like search. We haven’t solved it yet.”

Panel 2: Sociometry, Networks and Classification

In a brief introduction, Konrad Becker mentions that the first speaker of this panel, Greg Elmer, is unable to make it to the conference. He is happy to welcome Sebastian Giessmann, as his focus on networking as a ‘technique of the social’ works well within the context of the historical vision of organizing the world’s information; not only things but also people. We can see this development in the rise of mass society when the need to classify social relations emerged. Interestingly, the roots of these social classification systems are often murky and obscure – criminology for instance, has a background in rather non-scientific and occultist themes. Sociometry finds its origin in a slightly more progressive idea.

Sebastian Giessmann: From Sociometry to Social Networks. Networking as Technique of the Social. Sebastian Giessmann is a research fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in the cross-sectional group “Cultural Theory and its Genealogies” of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

As a cultural historian, Giesmann is professionally passionate for the occult. He specializes in the history of networks and networking, and intends to recount here the story of the ‘wild love affair’ between sociology and the visual form of the network diagram. His argument will frame both the history of knowledge and what William Mitchell has called ‘diagramatology’.

Net diagrams are systemic pictures, constantly reaching the boundaries of inscription spaces. They become network diagrams only if their nodes represent heterogeneous entities. Once a net consists of hybrid agents, interconnectivity and heterarchy become the standard, instead of ‘mere’ connectivity. But it is near impossible to draw the extendibility, aggregation and disillusion of networks in an iconic form – the classic conflict between time and space and media theory, and the reason why social images often resort to the dynamics of animation and simulation techniques. Grappling with the (im)possibilities of the topological, relational, visual form that has come to represent the network society is something Giesmann feels we must address critically and historically. Network diagrams offer only a measurement of sociality; out of the micro dimension of groups emerges the macro dimension of the network society.

Giessmann moves on to talk about the classics of sociology. Comte, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel rarely used graphics, but the 1930s introduced new methods with Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychological geography and Otto Neurath’s visual statistics, both as a way to deal with huge numerical datasets and to appeal to a wider audience. Moreno’s graphics imported the image practices of chemistry, making the ‘social atom’ the basic element for sociological visual augmentation.

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The second edition of the World Information Institute’s Deep Search conference series took place in Vienna on May 28. Where the first Deep Search symposium, held in November 2008 (find a review here) dealt with the history of information retrieval, the automatic classification of data, civil liberties, digital human rights, the power embedded in search systems and the visibility of online content, this second edition promised to look more deeply into both the history and future of classifying information, and large datasets.

Panel 1: Visions of Organizing the World

Introducing the first panel, Felix Stalder notes how the ‘grand title’ of the panel emphasizes an important issue; the urge to organize the world’s information is as old as human culture. Themes reemerge – organization cannot exist without an operating model and an array of judgments as to what constitutes information and knowledge. An historical perspective is important in this respect, as seemingly new issues are seldom unprecedented.

Chad Wellmon: Google Before Google, or, On the History of Search.
First speaker Chad Wellmon is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Virginia
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Wellmon starts off by quoting a New York Times article in which a Media Studies professor claims that Facebook’s unwillingness to let Google crawl part of its content threatens the open and democratic arrangement of information on the Web. To such advocates the hyperlink is no more than a ballot, an embodiment of freedom. To the individual user however the Web in its fullness does not exist. Active linking confers a structural integrity to one document, and not to another. The hyperlink method of organization may be said to be less hierarchical than categorization, but to say that the Web is democratic in nature is to ignore the means by which we access it. Search technology and linking make the Web seem smaller and more manageable than it is, and highlight its fundamentally contingent nature.

In order to gain a historical perspective on all this, Wellmon traces the history of search technology, “a story of constraint and expansion”, back to what he feels is the prototype of the Web’s hyperlink: the eighteenth century footnote. The enlightenment project is a complex of footnotes and citations, one pointing to the next. Reflexivity is in the footnote. Books ‘talked to each other’ in a constant citing process in which the relevance of one text was decided by footnotes which point toward other texts. Reading enlightenment as a series of technologies to manage the intense proliferation of information however invites the question; what kind of knowledge is deduced from this citational logic?

Using a recent computer visualization of the citation process within an eighteen century encyclopedia, Wellmon shows the emergence of multiple subsystems within the encyclopedia, exposing the double character of search technology: Citing leads to inner circling, it establishes an inside and an outside, inclusion by means of exclusion. This double logic, Wellman suggests, may well produce the distinction between information and knowledge.

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Since Google shut down its mainland Chinese-language portal Google.cn on March 23 and has started rerouting searches through its acclaimed uncensored Hong Kong site, reports on the move have varied in tone from appraisal (Google defying the censorship and bullying of the Chinese government) to a fair amount of skepticism (Google relocating to Hong Kong is above all a business move).

German weekly Spiegel Online termed Google’s move to Hong Kong ‘A Face-Saving Capitulation’, a sentiment Spiegel claims is shared by the better part of Germany’s leading newspapers as it quotes Die Tageszeitung, Financial Times Deutschland, Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Google’s move was a far cry from abandoning the Chinese market altogether, but still allowed the company to fulfill its promise of ending self-censorship in China. But Chinese authorities have reacted angrily. The government on Tuesday issued a statement calling the move “totally wrong.” And a commentary in the overseas edition of the leading Chinese Communist Party newspaper ratcheted up the rancor even more on Wednesday. It accused Google of “cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies” and being part of the “United States’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war,” according to Reuters. The front-page commentary went on to say that:
“For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god.”
It is a sentiment with which many in Germany would agree. Indeed, in Wednesday’s newspapers, German commentators weren’t very interested in Google’s spin on the move. Instead, they attributed it to business logic rather than principle, saw it as merely a “face-saving capitulation,” warned people away from seeing the fight as a David-vs-Goliath-like match-up and even imagined it as the welcome dawning of the post-Google world.

Furthermore, Spiegel mentions that the shutdown of Google.cn may be a loss to some users in China (e.g. Gmail accounts were less prone to snooping than were state providers), but that it is hardly a tragedy. China’s tech-savvy netizens have long been used to censorship and have already found their ways around the barriers. A March 23 blogpost on the digital activism blog digiactive.org raises some interesting points as to the importance of Google’s move to Mainland Chinese netizens. In the post, entitled ‘Google’s Stand on Uncensored Search: Irrelevant to China’s Internet Experience’, the author (and resident of Mainland China) gives four reasons why he feels the recent fuss over uncensored search results is irrelevant:

1. Censorship isn’t News: Anyone in China scouring the internet for politically sensitive content that might have been snuffed out by Google.cn’s filters already has no illusions about how manipulative, hypocritical, and controlling China’s internet authorities are–not to mention China’s entire government. In other words, they aren’t anywhere near getting duped into believing China’s official “Harmonious Society” tag line just because several items are missing from their Google search.
2. Circumvention Options Already Exist: Anyone in China who is genuinely serious about uncovered all of their missing content and actually being able to access it once they find it on their search engine of choice has options. For anywhere from USD $8-15 per month, VPN (virtual private network) software is available for subscription, which instantly unblocks all search results and real content in China.
3. There are Already Pockets of Free Speech on the Chinese Web: I don’t think Google.com or Google.cn were ever confused as a platform for political change in China. While I do applaud Google’s ethos of free information for everyone, people in China have many other places to go if they actually want to exchange politically sensitive ideas. Just take a look at Kaixin001.com! Here is an unblocked, easily accessible website on which hundreds or thousands or articles, videos, and photos are exchanged daily across China. Some articles are amusing distractions or mindless celebrity gossip, but many others are full of highly “controversial” content that blisteringly excoriates China’s government policies and the gaping holes in the face of its “Harmonious Society.”
4. Google.cn Wasn’t an Effective Block: To Google: For all of those politically active Chinese-only speakers whom you thought desperately need your Google.cn service in order to exchange information freely, don’t worry, there are plenty of other channels that were always much more popular anyway. Does Google really believe that Chinese people with the motivation to seek out a free version of the internet and access uncensored ideas will be deterred because Google.cn had some missing results to content that they wouldn’t have been able to view anyway?

Read the full articles on digiactive.org and Spiegel Online.

The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China, recently published on The China Beat blog, is based on the script of a talk that Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. In her talk, Zhu focused on Google’s precarious relationship with China, but also on the reception of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ in Chinese theaters in order to investigate the concept of China’s emerging “critical masses” as constitutive of a quasi-public sphere invested with people power. Announcing Zhu’s talk in early February, the China Beat states:

No longer isolated, nameless masses, today’s Chinese audiences and social media users are critical masses: “critical” to the tenure of a one-party state that is no longer in a position to easily put down a popular rebellion; “critical” in the sense that they identify problems and demand, and indeed shape, state action; and “critical” in the sense that they constitute ready networks of audience members and information consumers with the potential to be moved to collective action by a catalyzing event or issue that transforms passive association into active participation in a critical mass of like-minded citizens expressing their passion in forums ranging from online debates to street-level demonstrations or even extended political or cultural campaigns. Zhu argues that media-centered critical masses are a central dynamic of China’s changing state-society relationship. Additionally, she suggests that this emerging dynamic is not limited to China, and identifies points of convergence between China and the West in politics and political participation. She proposes that the electoral politics of established democracies and the regime-sustaining politics of authoritarian states alike are trending toward a quasi-democratic “politics with globalized characteristics,” with important prospects and problems in common.

In addition to Zhu’s talk at Google, the follow-up essay features added sections by Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson meant to tease out the issues that were left without further elaboration due to time constraints.

Suchen, Spielen, Lernen (to search, play and learn) is a recent essay by by Konrad Becker, director of World-Information.org and co-editor of the upcoming Deep Search ll symposium in Vienna as well as the upcoming volume Critical Strategies in Art and Media (Autonomedia, 2010). The essay is available (in German) at the Berliner Gazette: http://berlinergazette.de/suchen-spielen-lernen/.