For videos and reports of the conference see below
Friday, 13 November 2009
SESSION#1 > Society of the Query
Due to the difficulty of managing the vast amount of dynamic content available on the Web, it often lacks editorial review, and finding meaningful content has become increasingly dependent on technological resources. The traditional role of the expert-editor has gradually been replaced by the algorithm, introducing a specific logic and privileging mechanism for organizing Web content. In recent years, the growing dominance of a few main search engines has trigged many people to critically look at the way by which search engines rank and serve their results. This conference session will focus on ‘searching’ on the level of the software and will discuss the notion of the organization of knowledge within the theoretical framework of both humanities and computer science. Can we trace the history of knowledge organization, and what is the impact of the back-end algorithm, which is increasingly becoming the dominant means by which users acquire and make sense of information online?
- Geert Lovink – Introduction
Video - Yann Moulier Boutang – Inescapable Google? Organization of knowledge, economic value in cognitive capitalism, and collective intelligence
Video – Report - Matteo Pasquinelli – Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect
Video – Report - Teresa Numerico – Cybernetics, Search Engines, and Resistance
Presentation – Report - David Gugerli – The Culture of the Search Society: Data Management as a Signifying Practice
Presentation – Report
Book Presentation
As a follow-up to the Deep Search symposium, held in Vienna, Austria on November 8, 2008, the World Information Institute has now issued the book Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google and will be officially launched at the Society of the Query conference. The volume, edited by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, is a collection of 13 texts that investigate the social and political dimensions of Web search and addresses urgent issues of culture, context and classification in information systems. Article authors are Konrad Becker, Robert Darnton, Paul Duguid, Joris van Hoboken, Claire Lobet-Maris, Geert Lovink, Lev Manovich, Katja Mayer, Metahaven, Matteo Pasquinelli, Bernhard Rieder,Theo Röhle, Richard Rogers, and Felix Stalder & Christine Mayer.
See report
SESSION #2 > Digital Service Rights
In 2005, John Batelle characterized Google as a ‘database of intents’; a valuable archive of individual and collective wishes. As the number of services offered by search engines is expanding, large amounts of personal information are gathered, stored and used for commercial purposes.The current technological climate seems to be one in which the user is virtually unaware of whom or what is behind theWeb applications they use on a daily basis. How, for instance, does the intermediary function of the search engine threaten digital civil rights such as the right to privacy and freedom of expression? What role can politics play in protecting these rights? How can the way search engines are designed aid in protecting our autonomy, and how will the legal framework concerning search engines be shaped?
- Caroline Nevejan (moderator)
Video - Joris van Hoboken – Search engines and user privacy: the need for legislative reform
Video – Report - Ingmar Weber – It’s Hard to Rank Without Being Evil
Video – Report
SESSION #3 > Alternative Search 1
In response to a growing interest in alternative methods to search the Web, this session will focus on alternatives that highlight vulnerabilities and shortcomings within the currently dominant search engines. Looking beyond the tag as systematizing principle, how is, for instance, the field of visual search developing? What can we learn from search methods within different spheres on the Web? Additionally, search methods will be looked that disregard the ‘engine’ as dominant paradigm. How promising are, for example, peer- to-peer and open source technologies with regards to the current search conditions and which alternatives for commercial and centralizing methods have already emerged?
- Eric Sieverts (moderator)
Video - Matthew Fuller – Dissonance, Double-Accuracy and Parallel Worlds
Video – Report - Cees Snoek – Concept-Based Video Search
Video – Report - Ippolita Collective
Video – Report
Saturday, 14 November 2009
SESSION #4 > Art and the Engine
Even during its early stages, artists used theWeb as a platform to produce and distribute an extensive diversity of media such as animation, programming, video, audio and games. While in the last decennium we have witnessed a shift from the directory towards the algorithm, it is the art database that has been refining the directory model for years. What influence does Google’s omnipresence have over the production and distribution of Web based art? How does art criticism manifest itself in the era of Google, and how can online artistic experience be preserved and ensure it can be found easily? This session will discuss the latest developments within the field of graphic design, art and the architecture of information, presents potential outcomes of search result design and investigates how the interface may stimulate new and progressive ways for the user to search, find and analyze data.
- Sabine Niederer (moderator)
- Lev Manovich – Learning from Google: a search engine as a method for cultural analysis
Video – Report - Christophe Bruno – From Dada to Google
Video – Report - Alessandro Ludovico – The Google paradigm: From the funny dictator it’s never enough
Video – Report - Daniel van der Velden – Peripheral Forces: On the Relevance of Marginality in Networks
Video – Report
Flarf Performance
Ton van het Hof (NL) Flarf poetry is sometimes referred to as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Flarf poets harvest their material on the Internet by typing in combinations of search terms in aWeb search engine. Whether coming across Shakespear’s Sonnets, Heideggers Sein und Zeit or gross stories about animal sex, Flarf poets take today’s society as it presents itself, and give it back to us; abstracted, enlarged and ridiculed.
See video or report
SESSION #5 > Googlization
For most users worldwide, Google is the primary entry point to the Web. The current dominance of Google search might be best understood within a larger epistemological shift moving away from an expert driven ordering of information towards a growing emphasis on the algorithm. The algorithmic privileging of sources based on popularity however has important consequences for the type of content reflected in the search results. Issues to be discussed in this session are the influence of the Google hegemony on the flow of information on theWeb and the way this may affect the way we think, act and interact with online information. Speakers will address the particular way Google ranks and serves its results, the diversity of the results, the accessibility of niche or local content and the role of the user in acquiring relevant sources.
- Andrew Keen – Introduction (moderator)
Video – Report - Siva Vaidhyanathan – The Googlization of the Global Street
Video – Report - Martin Feuz – Google Personal Search – What are we to make of it?
Video – Report - Esther Weltevrede – Google as a Globalizing Machine
Video – Report
SESSON #6 > Alternative Search 2
In this second Alternative Search session, some of the latest technological developments in semantic search functionality, as well as their implementation by W3C and European cultural heritage project Europeana, will be presented and discussed. In addition to being understood as enrichments of existing knowledge structures, these developments need to be critically addressed on both the cultural and the software level.Which ideologies make up the foundations for the concept of ‘ontology’? And what role will human expertise play in the era of ‘machine understanding’?
- Richard Rogers (moderator)
Biography - Steven Pemberton – Disintermediation through Aggregation: Making your Data your Own
Video – Report - Antone Isaac – Semantic Search for Europeana
Video – Report - Florian Cramer – Why semantic search is flawed
Video – Report
Evening program
See report