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 Outdated as the device may seem today, the digital assistant seemed able to create graphs by getting data out of its embodied context (such as other people’s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.

How can we make data useful? Schraefel introduces mspace.fm, a multi faceted column based framework for exploring large sets of data. Instead of offering a result set only, the rich context and the mspace UI allow users to see where results have sprung from. The approach also allows for visualizations such as timelines that may lead to new questions and explorations. If we just get what we want, schraefel argues, then how will we make new discoveries?

Moving from public to personal data fluidity is the next topic she addresses. If we can find ways to keep control over our privacy, giving the computer awareness of what we are doing and licensing it to use this contextual data, will allow us to do valuable things with our data. Many of the data streams we create (such as Web trails or Twitter and Facebook data) sit in data centers without being useful. Atomate.me is an example of a program to control your data online and use it to support the work you are doing.

The current research question of the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group is how to enable people to ask questions of the data and finding new information by mining data context. If you don’t like what Google is doing, schraefel argues, change your tool to one that is more command driven, exploratory and serendipitous. Concluding her presentation, she urges the Deep Search audience to take a look at webscience.org and participate to add a much needed humanities perspective to the geek-oriented discussion about knowledge making.

In the Q&A, Yuk Hui asks how mc schraefel sees the relation between context and privacy. Also, he feels that contextual awareness may lead to short-circuiting rather than serendipity. Schraefel comments that she did not mean to imply that serendipity would by default result from contextual exploration. It will however enable people to develop a richer pallet of knowledge, by which the opportunities for serendipity simply go up. As for privacy; she feels that the focus should be not on prohibiting access to information, but on developing policies to persecute people who misuse it.

Another question addresses the general frustration with the linked data already available on the Web; why is nobody using it? It may simply be a case of customer satisfaction – faceted browsing interfaces seem a pain to use most of the time, especially for the less experienced user. Schraefel replies that this is certainly so. Documents are easy, we ‘know’ documents historically, and this capacity still misses for data sources. Reaching a critical mass of data available on the Web, we now face the fact that there are no standards as to representation. It is a brand new literacy. Yes, we need to get the data out there so we can run the experiment, but until we clear up the databases in a few years time we will have to deal with this pain.

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Karl H. Müller: From a Tiny Island of Survey Data to the Ocean of Transactional Data
Karl Müller is director of the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM)
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Müller notes that his talk is in some ways a continuation of the previous one; mc schraefel focused on ‘looking at the data’, while Müller will ask us to ‘be aware of data’, or at the very least infuse some skepticism with the audience. The focus will be less on people vis-à-vis information, and more on the way in which societies gain information about their internal states.

Müller distinguishes a period of flat search (1750-2000) and one of deep search (2000 onwards). Flat searches are observations and measurements taken in different contexts than the ongoing processes or routines, such as surveys. A survey is a social interaction between you and a respondent according to a script. The data gathered however is not about this interaction but about another context such as, perhaps, your working conditions. In deep search however, the observation and measurement processes occur within the settings of processes and events to be measured.

The flat search period came into being in the 18th century with the census state and statistical offices that appeared all over Europe. It inspired a wave of micro data that Müller terms the ‘victory march of survey data’, which lasted until well into the 1990s. In relation to flat search, Müller emphasizes that data is not data; describing the epistemological status of the survey he makes a distinction between over-learned facts (such as your name and other context-independent data) and under-learned facts (context-dependent data). Under-learned facts have an entirely different logic – they are inconsistent and tend to be easily forgotten. “All in all life satisfaction” is a well-known example of a survey question yielding such data.

Another flaw in survey data is often caused by the multiple-choice question; Müller takes the example of questions about the political orientation of citizens, to which the answer could be either right or left wing. In his example, 51% of the respondents checked both options. This, he claims, clearly shows how our cognitive organization has (and should have) inconsistencies. Furthermore, the arrangement of under-learned facts such as work satisfaction across Europe is nearly homogeneous, while working conditions tend to vary widely. We should therefore develop skepticism toward this type of data.

In the next few decades, big changes lie ahead in the way societies gain knowledge about their internal states, Muller says. Surveys change; new ‘deliberative online surveys’ are surfacing which offer the user information support and open time horizons in order to stimulate informed decision-making. Furthermore, from tiny islands of survey data, we will move toward an ocean of transactional data. Previously trivial assessment models will become more complex with a strong potential for visual analysis. Moving toward a map for deep search methods and designs.

Concluding his presentation, which is now running out of time, Müller briefly presents what he terms the evolution of information and societies in terms of code systems, in four stages:

Stage 1: Darwin-Societies (4 bio. years – 500 mio. years): Genetic Code,
Stage 2: Polanyi-Societies (500 mio years – 1 mio. year): Implicit Practices, Communication, Neural Code,
Stage 3: Piaget-Societies: (1940/1950 – 1 mio. year): The Age of Languages, Scriptures, Symbolic Codes,
Stage 4: Turing Societies (from 1940/50 onwards): Turing Creatures (app. 100 bio.), Machine-Code-Based, Man-Turing Creature-Interactions, and Societal Deep Search.

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Closing Discussion (some excerpts)

Felix Stalder notes that one of the recurring themes at Deep Search ll is seeing metadata as a way of dealing with exponential growth and unstructuredness, as well as the notion of ‘rent’ as the commercial exploitation of extracted metadata. But also: How do we create knowledge about knowledge, and what are the politics of metadata without imposing value systems? Elisabeth van Couvering feels that the Web has been quite successful precisely because there is no such hierarchy or local agreements. Many metadata schemes have come and gone, but we are still facing the fact that we cannot trust metadata in terms of who assigns what, except by looking at the source. Felix Stalder then clarifies that he sees Pagerank as a giant metadata system – it produces data about documents that is becoming proprietary. Isn’t there a way around this?

Matteo Pasquinelli comments that we are now entering a new phase of theory or activism; do we want more clarity or more obscurity? He is curious as to the political orientation of this discussion, which he feels has not developed much in the past few years. mc Schaefer emphasizes that the document isn’t the smallest measurement for action, it is the data. Right now, in the way it is delivered to us it takes a lot of care to make data useable at all. Even on a non-political level we haven’t figured out how to best work with it. What seems clear is that we should move away from corporatization and towards these new potential spaces of data data, as opposed to data from documents.

Sebastian Giesmann asks the presenters; if we want to regain the search technologies that are out there, should we privatize them or make them public? Is having access to an RSS feed enough, as mc schraefel mentioned? Private actors seem better able to set up the technology side of it. Should we have a European Search Engine, more recommendations in social networking sites – where do you see this going? mc schraefel replies that as long as there is capitalism, there will be innovation. If search engines could be seen as a utility, as Elisabeth mentioned before, we should take a look at how public utilities are doing. Selling off the backbone of the Internet to private Telco’s by the Clinton administration got the business and investments going. Google really is a metaphor for the state of society, it is not about search so much. The Web is so woven into our life model, the question is what party runs it best? Should it be run by the government as a public utility? After all, she argues, governments are selling off their public utilities.

Felix notes that it is a very depressing choice between Google and the State, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Matteo mentioned open source and free culture – in between the state and market category, that is the space to think about. Some layers of regulation are necessary, but the state is the least one to have any influence on. Matteo notes that also for distributed computing, we need computing power – it is the same discussion for the governance of the net. What are the options for counter-governance? mc schraefel the mentions the post-earthquake Haiti mapping activities. They were not ordered by the government or Google, but arose because people had tools and were able do that. Enabling spontaneous goodness – there is a counter layer, or a mid-layer. Chad Wellmon comments that we also have other institutional models that engage Google or the state. For instance there is Google books, an institutional collaboration between Google and several universities that, while not too democratic, is an alterior model too.

In the final question round, an audience member wonders how search will move beyond factual knowledge. Elisabeth van Couvering notes that prior to her research on search engines, she never considered the web to be a place of information and facts but one of friends, entertainment, learning, reading etcetera. The Web isn’t all about information, and search isn’t either. mc schraefel adds that in terms of metadata and privacy, the best things come of love and lust online. Matching criteria in dating sites, privacy algorithms and cryptography in the porn industry.

As a final remark in response to my own question as to how we may move on with search research, perhaps on a European level, after the current conference, Felix comments that Deep search ll, except from being a sequel to the first Deep Search, is also the fourth conference within a broader network of research that has aimed to develop a certain cultural awareness on search engines over the last three or four years. We are in the process of thinking about creating a relatively loose network that may produce some density within the discursive field between these episodic events and gatherings.

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The Society of the Query collaborative research blog is a first attempt to gather dispersed research on this topic and perhaps discover emerging themes. Comments and ideas as to the future of these collaborations and cultural search research in general are very welcome; please send an email to Srividya Balasubramanian: srividya (at) networkcultures (dot) org.

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’.

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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Matteo Pasquinelli: Surplus and the immaterial: political notes on the “industrial revolution of data”
Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher who works at the intersection of French philosophy, media culture and Italian post-operaismo at Queen Mary University of London.

Pasquinelli  starts his talk with a February 2010 article from The Economist, Data, data everywhere, which mentions the excessive dimension of networks and contemporary capitalism in terms of immaterial production. The authors introduce a paradigm shift they call ‘the industrial revolution of data’. For Pasquinelli this is a crucial topic as in radical thought and network activism, networks are often thought of in a binary, symmetrical way. Notions such as free culture and creative commons in his eyes bypass the idea of a growing network and surplus in terms of excessive cultural production. The Economist addresses the question of how to deal with this exuberance and proposes a paradigm shift in political strategy as well. The data generated may well serve us to analyze things like government spendings, something  Pasquinelli feels is a relief from thinking in old paradigms like the panopticon, control society etcetera. This is a society of metadata, no longer of control. In activist circles, Pasquinelli states, metadata is often not a known subject.

The article also states that the data currently created exceeds the available storage abilities and computing power, causing much information to get lost. Pasquinelli notes that this friction between the ‘global mind’ and the ‘global body’ is interesting in respect to Moore’s law, and suggests that we deal with an  ‘attention deficit syndrome of the globe’. Still, rather than storing all data it is important to keep track of trends, which is exactly what the society of metadata is about.

The notion that networks reach critical mass and transform into something else, is a paradigm Pasquinelli feels is missing from the current debate. In our flat cartography of networks, we fail to describe the forces of energy that cross them, such as economic value. He asks; what would be the form of the network singularity? In political economy, we could say that capitalism is indeed a form of singularity, a transformation of money to currency following critical mass. In both political and media theory, finding people that work on the notion of excess is hard. One example is Antonio Negri who argues that today, value is no longer related to the time we put in our work but to the production of social relations and links.

Pasquinelli suggests that the form of the network singularity may one of a vortex, a modern dimensional space. But to understand this we should return to the main topic of today: The diagram of Pagerank, a model of semantic relations that is increasingly becoming an economic diagram. Nicholas Carr has previously noted how feeding intelligence into Google’s system makes the machine smarter and Brin and Page richer, a model that political economists describe as cognitive capitalism.

When The Economist article describes the data overload, it refers to a friction between different layers of the network – people and machines. In the current debate, Pasquinelli argues, it is important to distinguish three distinct network layers; a hardware layer (memory), a layer of data or content production (immaterial) and a layer of metadata. The layer of content production is producing so much that the hardware layer can’t keep up. Google and other technologies of governance transform data to metadata. When we talk of free data or new political strategies we seem to focus on content production only, Pasquinelli argues, unaware of the hardware layer below and governance of metadata above us. He then describes ‘rent’ as the new business model that develops within the friction between these layers. As an example, he mentions Google and Apple whose products happily profit from free culture and illegal file sharing. New parasitic economies are developing in relation to the overflow of data.

In the feudal system, the rentier was one who hired out land that was cultivated by others, currently it is the one who hires out new spaces of production that are cultivated by others. Today, there is a widespread activism against intellectual property which Pasquinelli supports, but at the same time he concludes that we are unaware of the form of businesses related to spaces where intellectual property is no longer a necessity.

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The metaphor of the rentier is picked up in the discussion following Pasquinelli’s talk by Elisabeth von Couvering, who wonders whether it may be of help in explaining the form of content media companies such as search engines produce, as it seems to exist only in the form of ‘packaging’; indexing or a navigational system. Pasquinelli answers that to describe cultural economy, we need to distinguish between the paradigms of intellectual property – selling your copyrighted product – and providing a seemingly free space that produces an attention economy around it. In the economy of the Internet there is only space for monopoly, one hegemonic social network follows the other, and although they may belong to the regime of free culture, there is a clear business model behind them.

M.C. Schraefel asks whether Pasquinelli has considered the more positive aspects of open data for the renter – such as the production of API’s by these rentiers that allow users to use data in whatever way they want, or Amazon’s server farms that rent out space for people who can’t afford or manage the hardware, to do interesting things with their data. Pasquinelli answers that rent refers to monopolistic exploitation on all the three layers of hardware, content production and metadata, in relation to collective processes. It is about the economic business models that we never discuss in depth. In answer to a later question, he notes that contrary to the feudal description, today’s rent is more dynamic, the economy of knowledge is liquid, immaterial and monopolies such as Google’s may collapse and be followed by others.

Rent, another audience member argues, is strongly related to database marketing in which user data is the capital involved. Von Couvering feels that there are two stores of value in search today, first of which is the data archive; profiles and linkage info that is mined, and secondly; traffic, monetizing clicks as they happen. Facebook for instance takes travel in itself and monetizes it by restricting and charging search engines to their traffic. Perhaps the question should be what the trade-off will be between these sources of value.

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.”

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.

Moreno’s work proved significant for the future of social networks. As head of a reeducation camp for young girls in Hudson, NY, he used the social relations between the girls and their different houses in much of his socio-geographical work. Giessmann presents a case study in which Moreno tries to grasp why so many girls run away from the camp. He concludes that the 14 runaways are part of a ‘hidden network’. Without the mapping, there was no network information to be found, network graphs work as a performative social matrix.

Networks represent the oldest forms of human communication. Participants are unaware of the networks they inhabit and cannot move out of these networks since they preexists them. Moreno’s surveillance regime was dubious, but his sociometrics precisely measured social exclusion and proved scalable; he later projected this method onto the entire New York population in order to measure isolation.

Social network analysis today is done by digital means. Relations are coded with 0 or 1, either there is a connection or there isn’t. The semantics of social network analysis changed a lot between the 19^th and 20^th century, shifting toward the micro-sociological approach. Moreno’s work is an early example of the new sociometric style in the making, the old rules proved increasingly insufficient to graph complex constellations of relational information. Looking for dynamic ways to visualize relations, 3D calculus models appeared in the 1950s and the first real time computer visualization, again based on the symbolic and iconic practices of chemists, appeared around 1980.

With the rise of software programs and java applets, graphs today easy to manipulate and the iconic form has become arbitrary. The diagram is a moving image, it represents while it computes, and vice versa. Giessmann quotes Benjamin who states that “we cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught”. On the contrary, the diagrammatic net strives for constant growth, which is one of the key features of networks.

In Web 2.0 social networking sites and their practices, the dispositions of sociometry and search in relational databases merge. Where do we stand, Giessmann asks. At the brink of even more advanced tools and global market research, like Facebook? A new social Web of recommendation, or utopian emotional transmission?

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In the brief discussion after Giessmann’s talk, Elisabeth van Couvering raised a point as to the connection between mapping and search engines. A central aspect of search technology is the conceptualizing of the whole Internet as a graph of this type, with links representing connections in a particular direction. The way that search engines work in terms of understanding what’s likely to be relevant, and how you can even come up with an answer to that question is built exactly on this mapping technology. So, she says, let’s think of how this can be useful, perhaps not as a visualization, but certainly in the context of search and what we are talking about today.

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Panel Discussion (first round)
Chad Wellmon, Yuk Hui, Sebastian Giessmann, Konrad Becker (moderator)

Some interesting points emerging from the first plenary discussion of the day:
Kicking things off, Konrad Becker refers to the connection made in the first presentations between Google and enlightenment. The well-established notion of Google being ‘evil’ makes him wonder: Is enlightenment evil? Chad Wellmon responses by quoting Diderot, who argued that even if we had the perfect, infinite encyclopedia, one just like God’s mind, it would still be useless for us today. Despite its perfection and absoluteness, we are still a finite mind. This he feels is also true for Google; the Web in its entirety does not exist – and even if it did, we still have finite minds. So whether Google can read my mind or not, from a more phenomenological point of view, the question is irrelevant.

Another point is made by Wellmon in response to the question whether citations and linking are really analogous when looking at the fundamental difference in scale, and the active decision of placing a footnote versus the more emergent nature of linking. Wellmon replies that the ‘triumph of the citational logic’ is cashed out in terms of scale on one hand, but also in terms of absolute searchability. There are books in Google Books where every word becomes searchable. So in a sense – and you could do this with a journal article – every word, every character can become a footnote in the sense that it is linked. Every single element of a text is drawn into this logic.

Yuk Hui notes a great ignorance in the representation of the temporal experience of users. In interface design we often talk about experience, but it is based on the assumption that the user is a robot. In the case of Google, searching is something that actively engages in your thought process. You will get a result, which is something different than when you are looking for something yourself. Tagging is an active experience in which we try to understand objects. Hui feels that it is not the question whether any technology is evil; it is good and bad at the same time. For example; using network visualization to understand human mobility, or Google’s flu statistics, may help to understand something, but on the other hand it is dangerous. Heidegger speaks about the practice of presenting the world as an image so we can control, navigate and understand it. Peter Sloterdijk says ‘dasein is topological’ can we understand topological here as a network image? The answer for Hui is negative as the network image is ignorant of temporal experience.

Wellmon argues that there is a certain level of ‘necessary errancy’ in visualizations – or search engines for that matter – that we can recognize and reflect on. One could take a very practical imperative in that there is the condition of possibility of being able to use something. If a map weren’t scaled to use, that would be a worthless map. Konrad Becker refers to the famous theme of the 1:1 map and Korzybski’s quote ‘the map is not the territory’, or ‘the map portrays the map mapmaker’. More and more people say that the map actually is the territory, the map influences the territory or the map eats the territory. Maps are and have always been power tools – drawing a territory often led to ownership of it, and old maps on ships were embedded with lead so they would sink and its business intelligence would be lost to the enemy.

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.

It is exactly this logic that is key to Brin and Page’s 1998 paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ in which they say that the Web is based on a premise of citation (linking) and annotation (link description). The practice of pointing to one another’s work, to rank and render authority is how Google works. Pagerank is a recursive system; the parameters of the system are defined by the system itself and by the history of its own operations.

But there is one key difference: Pagerank does not only count links, it normalizes them in order to increase the quality of search results. Focusing not only on comprehensiveness but also on the relevance of search results meant a step beyond the Web as envisioned by Berners-Lee – information is no longer freely available to anyone. Learning from Pagerank, Wellmon finds that radical openness is only half the story. The means of obtaining value is recursive in nature – the value of one page is a function of the value ascribed to it through links by other pages, a product of the system itself. What the Web values, is determined by what the Web already, or historically, values.

The proliferation of footnote upon footnote by scholars eventually led to ridicule and mockery. Both Kant and Descartes have noted that historic, or book knowledge is one of mere collection – one is only a repository of books and thinks in terms of them, rather than for himself. This, Wellmon feels, is the historical locus of information versus knowledge, and the reason why throughout enlightenment, encyclopedias, books and footnotes were dismissed in favor of self-originating production and recursivity.

Wellmon notes how the late eighteenth century proliferation of books prompted new systems to evaluate knowledge, and the distinction between information and knowledge became increasingly irrelevant. In a similar way, Google has undone this distinction. Is it even possible to write an algorithm that does not affect that which it retrieves? The logic of enlightenment belies the claim that Google merely retrieves and organizes information. Search is evaluative. Returning to the New York Times article, Wellmon argues that the free and democratic Web is merely an idea. We have access to a limited, contingent Web that is marked by our own searches, a function of technologies that encircle, include and exclude. Concluding his talk Wellmon notes how Brin and Page’s vision of the perfect engine that “understands exactly what I mean and gives me back exactly what I want” would represent the ultimate triumph for the citational logic; ‘what I want’ would be forever defined by ‘what I have always wanted’, or by what my demographic other has always wanted.

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Yuk Hui: Critique of search and the problem of knowledge
Yuk Hui is a PhD researcher of the Metadata Project in the Centre of Cultural Studies and Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London.

The title of the talk includes two questions; a critique of search, and the problem of knowledge. Hui aims to show how the two are related, and how they relate to the current discourse on search. Search in his view is a broad term that includes more than just the engine or Google – Facebook is about searching and patterning too, and sensor enabled mobile devices are also used to build coherent databases for further information retrieval.

Recently, Hui starts, we’ve seen the emergence of Web ontologies and the Semantic Web. The term ‘ontology’ originates from Aristotle and means ‘being qua being’. The term was later understood to mean the categorization or classification of things, and currently as the classification of metadata. FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is such an ontology, defining relations between people. Ontologies are used to construct a searchable network of data, and are often understood as ways toward the “organization of knowledge”.

Specifically, Hui asks what is meant by ‘knowledge’ in this respect. Are algorithms and data structures knowledge? They are definitely so to programmers, but are they knowledge to us? It seems that we lack the means to think about them – we simply use them. When we talk about acquiring knowledge through search, should we not also be talking about a knowledge of search? Do we even have room for technological objects within our understanding of knowledge?

Like Wellmon, Hui refers to Kant who distinguishes two types of knowledge; historic knowledge – the empirical kind – and rational knowledge that is obtained through reasoning and the construction of concepts. Technological knowledge (the data structures and the algorithm), he feels, is neither historical nor rational, since we merely have a general idea of what they are, and this idea was not derived through any concept we have available to us. For many philosophers, a technological object is no different than an apple, and philosophy has rendered no useful framework for us to address the technological object. We use them rather than know them.

Hui then explains how cognitive scientists Andy Clark and David Chalmers refer to technological knowledge as the ‘Extended Mind’. As the term itself suggests, the mind is completed through an extension – in Hui’s example, the mind of an Alzheimer patient is extended through a notebook which is used for looking up information on, for instance, the location of a theatre. Clark and Chalmers argue that the relation between the patient and the notebook is comparable to the relation between a healthy person and her memory. Extending this idea, Hui argues that data is in fact Kant’s ‘historical’ or ‘factual’ knowledge, and data structures and algorithms are that what constitutes ‘rational’ knowledge – data is subsumed in categories and processed by algorithms.

The technological or algorithmic knowledge seems to be located between historical and rational knowledge, modifying the transcendental nature of Kant’s faculties. Now, Hui claims, we are moving from categories as pure concepts to social categories. In the work of the sociologists Durkheim and Mauss, the understanding of social categories is not purely cognitive, they call it the “cultural character of categories of understanding”, ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etcetera.

Rather than Kant’s pure reason, this framework of intelligence is social and cultural and determines the scheme of classification, the formation of concepts. Technological knowledge has a role in the creation of social categories by forcing something into cognition. Hui names Facebook invitation objects as an example, as they change the way we understand an event or a friend. Zygmunt Baumann has termed this ‘the turn from social bond to network’.

Hui then turns to the problem of knowledge: A data structure or algorithm is not self-sustainable, it needs to be externalized in order to reach perfection. However, imposing standards are limiting the possibility of changes to the core of the technology. Meanings within data structures have to be sustained, or ‘universal’, for the digital milieu to maintain integrity and compatibility. The paradoxical nature of technological knowledge problemizes the concept of the organization of (historic) knowledge, as it demands a transparent indexing method for classification.

Technological knowledge has two dimensions; the extended mind and the constitution of the social categories. The synchronization of meaning through data and algorithm is not within the scope of the “organization of knowledge” anymore, but asks questions about the constitution of an “I” (extended mind) and a “we” (social categories). If technological knowledge becomes an uncontrollable force pushing us into the process of synchronization – isn’t personalization the opposite force? It is not, as personalization is possible only through the synchronization of technological knowledge.

Many theories and sociological studies have been focusing on understanding search as the items list on the right side of the equation, but there aren’t many inquiries into the items on the left side. Doing this, does not only invite sociological, political and engineering questions such as Facebook privacy, but also existential ones. Hui emphasizes that he is not suggesting we resist new technologies, but rather that we seriously address this problem of knowledge that we have ignored in our focus on data, content or organization of knowledge.

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.

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.