Archive fever, vol. V

The New York Times ran a great special section on Museums on Wednesday. Some highlights:

How do you preserve digital art and other variable media (performance art, interactive displays, pieces made of hardware that has or will soon become obsolete)? Several art institutions have joined together to propose models for creative preservation, but the article doesn't address smaller galleries that may be the first or only venues for some variable media art. Here's a link to Rhizome, a group for digital artists that's working with some museums on possibilities for digital archives. The director of digital media at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, Richard Rinehart, is quoted in the article:

"Digital art, like all art, may be at the forefornt of a larger question. ... What is rapidly developing is this black hole. In the future, people may look back and be able to see what was happening in the 18th century, the 19th century, and then will come a period in which we cannot tell what artists were working on. But this is not limited to the art world. This problem about retaining thigs will be for our collective social memory, and it will be of concern to everyone in every walk of life. Government documents, for example."

Still, he added, the heart of computer-generated art "separates the logical from the physical."

"We have worried about preserving the physical," he said. "Perhaps we should be worreid more about preserving the logical." Mr. Rinehart has written academic proposals for creating documentation that is more akin to a music score--with work recognizable even if some of the period instruments at the time of creation are changed.

Edward Rothstein, who's quickly becoming one of my favorite Times critics for his Connections series, wrote an article about repatriation of collections of Native American artifacts and skeletons in museums:

In the Kennewick case, scientists sued the government and ultimately won the right to examine the bones, something that is now taking place. (DNA testing has not demonstrated any genetic connection between the skeleton and contemporary peoples.) But museums have taken a different course: they are transforming themselves under the law's pressures.

According to federal statistics, by 2005, remains of more than 30,000 individuals had been "deacquisitioned," along with more than 500,000 funerary and sacred objects. The effects have been profound, not because of the loss of the objects from museums, but because the law enforced a way of thinking about them. In the protection act's version of "cultural patrimony," it is not just ownership of an individual object that can be called into question, but the possession of all objects from an Indian culture. The "repatriation" has also led to consultations in which tribal leaders become involved even in the treatment of objects that are not repatriated, able to help mold their interpretation, to guide research about their pasts and to influence how they are displayed.

Rothstein discusses David Hurst Thomas's Skull Wars at length. It's a fascinating subject.

Here's a cool piece about the Exploratorium web site. The Exploratorium is one of my favorite museums. I haven't been there in years, but I'm positive I would have just as much fun as I did when I was a kid. This page has a photo of San Francisco rendered in Jell-O.

I want to read more of these interviews with popular art historians about their dream exhibitions. Here's Francine Prose on the color black as an organizing principle:

Black has been very much on the mind of Ms. Prose, whose "Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles" was published last fall. While writing the book, she said, "I thought how revolutionary, how nervy, how extraordinary his use of black was."

Then, in the spring of 2003, Ms. Prose visited the Metropolitan Museum to see "Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting," which she reviewed favorably for The Wall Street Journal. There, she said, "I kept thinking — the thing that no one is talking about, what carries over, is the black." It's almost as if Caravaggio, who no doubt influenced Velázquez, should have had a little anteroom at the Met exhibition all his own.

Caravaggio's work would inaugurate Ms. Prose's exhibition — the first work would be his "Flagellation of Christ," which is now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy. Next would come a Velázquez, either "The Jester Pablo de Valladolid" or "The Adoration of the Magi," both owned by the Prado. John Singer Sargent's "Madame X," from the Met's collection, would be there, as would Manet's "Dead Toreador" from the National Gallery of Art. Taking the show into contemporary times, Ms. Prose said she would pick something by Ad Reinhart — perhaps his "Abstract Painting," 1960-66, from the Whitney Museum of American Art or perhaps "Abstract Painting No. 4," from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Wackypedias

In response to Alice's mention of the Britannica-Nature-Wikipedia bickering--

It's pretty satisfying to find out that Britannica has as many errors per article as Wikipedia. What's amazing though is the existence of great articles in on subjects too insignificant to merit inclusion in EB... look up chess-playing software, or failed aerodynamic theories, or the East Village, and you get info that EB just doesn't have... at least not the 15th edition from circa 1980, which my father obtained in the process of divorcing his first wife (you get the car, I get the Britannica).

He also had an ancient, fraying 14th edition, as well as one of those ultra-compact, 4-pages-to-1, 2-volume monsters that comes with a magnifying glass, which they should revive because it makes doing research feel really cool.

Whenever I hear about class and race differences in the degree to which a student's home environment supports his or her education, I think about that Britannica set. I consulted it for school scores of times. I could have used my schools' crappy World Books, I guess, but you can't beat last-minute, same-school-day cribbing from the Britannica.

Incidentally, I searched britannica.com to find the edition numbers my dad has, but all I found was a fawnine and low-substance summary of the encyclopedia's history. Wikipedia found a full version history of the Britannica right away.

By the way, if the Britannica want to quash the notion that novelty is fast becoming the primary function of their printed volumes, they might want to reconsider their pricing. On their website, the standard print edition is $1000, but the Limited Edition Britannica Renaissance Suite--which "makes a statement on any bookshelf"--is $2500. I'm afraid that "such renowned individuals as Carl Sagan, Milton Friedman, and many Nobel Laureates" doesn't beat Wikipedia anymore. I don't trust Sagan or Friedman more than a random stranger, and I wonder how many Nobel Laureates have edited Wikipedia? Not more than Britannica, but that won't be true forever.

Massive multiplayer fact-checking

Julian Sanchez of Reason Magazine writes about the Washington Post's Ben Domenech, hired as a conservative blogger and then forced to resign days later after bloggers noticed he plagiarized parts of several articles earlier in his career. Bloggers did what the Post's HR staff did not, or, as Sanchez argues, could not. The task is just too large for a few people, but not too large for thousands of energetic dorks avoiding their bosses' gaze:

Maybe someone saw a phrase they thought looked familiar and started Googling. Once the first instance of apparent plagiarism was spotted and blogged, thousands more began looking through that same body of writing, perhaps with each individual only checking a few pieces, a few phrases at a time. The same task would have taken a committed body of researchers days, but because the task was what Net theorist Yochai Benkler would call highly modular and granular—capable of being broken up into highly fine-grained microtasks—a distributed swarm of bloggers was able to accomplish it incredibly quickly, turning up many more instances in a matter of hours.

Sanchez notes, however, that this advantage does not make blogs better than newspapers, just different:

The blogosphere's virtues on this front are not necessarily the Post's defects, any more than it's a problem with the blogosphere per se that it's less well suited to producing intensive, sustained investigative reporting on stories that aren't similarly modular and granular. They're different kinds of information systems with different comparative advantages.

This comes at the same time as news that the US government is using the distributed skills of internet users to translate a huge trove of once-classified internal documents of Saddam Hussein's goverment:

The documents' value is uncertain--intelligence officials say that they are giving each one a quick review to remove anything sensitive. Skeptics of the war, suspicious of the Bush administration, believe that means the postings are either useless or cherry-picked to bolster arguments for the war.
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There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time--so far, about 600--on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.
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"The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important," said Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger at Instapundit.com ...

This trend owes a lot to Distributed Proofreading, an offshoot of public domain e-book library Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreading scans books that have fallen into the public domain, then uses optical character recognition software to generate best-guess text files from the scanned images. On their website, anyone can proofread the books, one page at a time.

From their front page:

When a proofreader elects to proofread a page of a particular book, the text and image file are displayed on a single web page. This allows the page text to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the page text. The edited text is then submitted back to the site via the same web page that it was edited on. A second proofreader is then presented with the work of the first proofreader and the page image. Once they have verified the work of the first proofreader and corrected any additional errors the page text is again submitted back to the site. The book then progresses through two formatting rounds using the same web interface.

Once all pages for a particular book have been processed, a post-processor joins the pieces, properly formats them into a Project Gutenberg e-book and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.

It's going well: they just celebrated their 8,000th digitized book, W.E.B. DuBois's The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States.

Distributed projects like this bear more than a passing resemblance to massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like EverQuest, World of Warcraft and Second Life. There's even a page on Wikipedia's ever-fascinating Meta-Wikipedia site that lists reasons why Wikipedia might be considered to be an MMORPG:

• Thousands of articles (magical items)...
• Editors/players who seem addicted, unable to leave the site, who spend all their waking hours on the site, and whose "real" lives and work are suffering as a result...
• The accumulation of experience points (edits) leading to higher levels (higher rankings)...
• People with similar ideas and goals form guilds...
• Player-killing, which is strongly discouraged, but nevertheless happens, taking several forms, among them edit warring, banning and blocking; player-killers may be taken before a magisterial court, the Arbitration Committee...
• Trolls - controversial or unpopular people whose goal is to fight the dominant groupthink. Seen as enemies or bosses to fight.

Solar eclipse in Georgia

My friend John "Pachydon" Mackedon snapped this picture of today's solar eclipse in Georgia:It was only a partial eclipse in Tbilisi--but it was total in western Georgia, and supposedly perfect in separatist Abkhazia, Georgia's westernmost province.

It was a cloudy day, just hazy enough so that during the eclipse you could stare directly at the sun without discomfort. I had a meeting moved into a hallway in the state chancellery so I could watch from the window.

Killer dolphins, orca to enslave humans

Orca whales are not only setting traps--by spitting fish onto the water surface and waiting for a gullible gull to take the bait--they are teaching each other how to do it.

A group of dolphins has learned to protect their noses by lancing a sea sponge and wearing it like a glove on their snouts while digging for worms. This behavior appears to be passed down by demonstration, and only from mothers to daughters. (Seeing grandma doing it clinched the matrilineal hypothesis.)

The only other species that are known to pass on cultural ideas are great apes, who teach each other how to use tools such as hollow reeds to suck ants from anthills. Birds pass on songs, but in isolation they're still programmed to sing, just not the same tunes as each other.

The aquatic mammals seem ever more clever than we previously thought. And they're cross-breeding to perfect their genetic edge, creating the unbeatable 'wholphin'. The inter-species war scenario The Simpsons warned us about in Treehouse of Horror IX: Night of the Dolphin can't be far off.

Is this a bad time to mention that Hurricane Katrina released a group of "armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater" who may be "missing in the Gulf of Mexico"?

P.S. If we are attacked by terminator dolphins, we'll need intrepid scientists like biologist Frank "yeah, I know it's apropos" Fish. Investigating "spinner" dolphins, who twist up to seven times in a single leap into the air, Fish hypothesized that perhaps the dolphins were attempting to shake off ramoras. But don't most large aquatic animals like teaming up with ramoras? To understand why having a ramora might be unpleasant, Fish attached one to his back. Turns out it's pretty painful. Way to take one for the team, Fish!

H for Hack

Speaking of V for Vendetta (and with apologies to reader Marina), what do you do if you're a critic, and you're asked to write about comic books, because they're the new thing, but you don't know Jim Shooter from Jim Lee?

Wired's Jason Silverman:

The Wachowskis adapted the screenplay from Alan Moore's acid, richly layered comic, written in the early 1980s. Controversial long before 9/11, the original Vendetta follows an embittered anarchist-terrorist as he tries to spark a revolution by, in part, dynamiting government buildings.

In related news, Animal Farm is a richly layered meditation on the nature of communism! I, too, got a liberal arts degree without reading the assigned books.

I liked V for Vendetta fine, but it doesn't hold a candle to Moore's Watchmen, Swamp Thing, Tom Strong, Top 10 or Marvelman (aka Miracleman). Compared to these, V is heavy-handed and shallow, and I'd wager that most readers who made their way to comics through Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware would agree.

Silverman:

... Vendetta [the film] is too vague to pack much political punch. Hollywood, with its congenital fear of alienating anyone, manages to dilute the comic book's radical, complex vision.

What's left is a fuzzy, pandering film. What are its lessons? Totalitarianism is bad. People power is good. Unless you aren't quite sure where to stand on the whole Hitler-Nazi-Holocaust thing, Vendetta is unlikely to evolve your worldview.

Yeah, I read The Stranger, professor. It was radical, complex.

The Vendetta book allows for a few moments when the hero's violence to his oppressive government targets seems inhuman. But it'd be hard for the movie to be any more pro-terrorism than the book was. After all, people are saying that the movie plays down Natalie Portman's metamorphosis to inherit the role of revolutionary killer, and isn't she the real protagonist, the audience stand-in?

O for overreaction

Katrina vanden Heuvel's post about V for Vendetta on the Nation's blog is puzzling in its insistence that movie reviewers aren't responding seriously to the film's Big Ideas about Contemporary Society because they don't believe the Big Ideas are important:

The New York Times' review opened with the line: 'Thumb-suckers of the world unite.' It concluded by wondering how anyone over the age of fourteen could find the movie subversive. David Denby in the New Yorker speculated that the movie would mainly appeal to 'aging kids.'

This infantilizing line of attack is sadly nothing new.

Those of us who objected to the results of the 2000 presidential election were told to, quote, 'get over it.' Those of us who were outraged by the outing of Valerie Plame were condescendingly told that this was 'how the game is played.' Those of us who question the continued occupation of Iraq are accused of being quitters or 'cut-and-runners.'

It never ceases to amaze me how desperate many members of the media are to appear cool, to show they 'get it'--their eye-rolling cynicism masquerading as maturity. Government surveillance, torture, fear-mongering, media manipulation, corporate corruption--this is how the world works, they shrug.

Well, they may be comfortable in such a world. But for those of us who are not, V for Vendetta is a movie to savor.

What if the movie just isn't very good? Isn't that what Manohla Dargis is saying in her Times review that vanden Heuvel cites extremely selectively:

The Wachowskis appear deeply enamored of the great (super) man theory of history, with mysterioso leaders who are intent on delivering the rest of us from false consciousness. Given this, it's no surprise that the geopolitical terrain staked out in this film skews so last century: globalization having been given the jackboot, partly, one imagines, because multinational capitalism, with its total market value and shareholder wealth, doesn't register as cool as all that shiny, shiny leather and crypto-Nazi styling.
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Initially scheduled to be released in November 2005, to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day, the film was delayed in the wake of the July bombing attacks in London. Since then, inevitable questions and objections have been raised about whether V for Vendetta turns a terrorist into a hero, which is precisely what it does do. Predictably, the filmmakers, actors and media savants have floated the familiar formulation that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, as if this actually explained anything about how terror and power (never mind movies) work. [bolded because it's such a great point]

The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

And here's Stuart Klawans' review of the film in the very publication vanden Heuvel edits. He's not infantilizing anyone by pointing out that Big Ideas don't make a great movie:

But if you want simulated knife-throwing, chaotically edited fight scenes, ponderous musical cliches (the 1812 Overture, Beethoven's Fifth), wholesale borrowings from 1984, strained allusions to the Bush Administration and Fox News, lengthy and yet inconsequential protests against the ostracism of gays and lesbians, a muddled girl-in-peril plot and some gee-whiz production design, V for Vendetta is the movie for you. Never mind that the Wachowskis' characteristically logorrheic script defeats at every turn first-time director James McTeigue, who has been asked to make a comic-book movie but can't possibly keep it going. V for Vendetta is about the idea of a comic-book movie, you see, and the idea of liberation.

Don't sleep on Sam

The NY Times' Caryn James looks at Spike Lee's films. Great, but how does she fail to mention the excellent Summer of Sam?

A look back at his career, freed from received opinions and skewed memories, shows that major works like "Do the Right Thing" hold up. And some underappreciated gems emerge, like the nuanced "Jungle Fever" (1991), about an interracial romance, and the audacious "Bamboozled" (2000), his satirical take on a contemporary minstrel show.

Nola Darling, the sexually voracious heroine of "She's Gotta Have It," who unapologetically juggles three men at once, is no longer quite so daring. And the acting is as awkward and rough as it always seemed. But the film's energy still leaps off the screen; the black-and-white photography that turned an inexpensive necessity into sultry atmosphere still works; the characteristic Lee blend of drama and humor is already there. Nola remembers a parade of men offering ludicrous come-on lines, like "You so fine, baby, I'd drink a tub of your bathwater."

Archive fever, vol. IV

The New York Times printed an excerpt from Rick Poynor's essay from Print magazine about found photographs. Poynor argues that the interest in magazines such as Found magazine, sites such as Look at Me, the Horus Archives, and Time Tales are evidence of some cultural gesture toward amateurism and nostalgic unmediation:

It's the emotional implications that make found photographs so fascinating. They look much the same as the snapshots that fill our own family albums. Yet cut loose from their points of origin, they become objects of deep mystery...

These unofficial images answer a persistent need to belive that photographs can still capture some essential, unvarnished truth about the subject. Where, even before the digital era, professional photographers were often show to have manipulated images that might appear to represent actuality, amateur photographers can still be given the benefit of a doubt. Their directness, ineptitude, and lack of artifice become signs of reliability. The taste for these pictures is a measure of our enduring hunger to experience unmediated reality.

I'm not sure that's the only conclusion one could draw from the found photography phenomenon. For one thing, Found takes far more delight in snarkiness than in nostalgia (the Columbia equivalent, perhaps, is the Digitalia feature of the Blue & White). William Gibson took the idea of how people connect to found photographs/footage in a completely different direction in his brilliant novel, Pattern Recognition. Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves is scary take on found materials. It took me two tries to love Gibson's novel and I'm not totally into Danielewski, but they're both ambitious books that move away from the nostalgia trope toward something weirder.

Love truth, pardon error

One of my favorite blogs is Regret the Error, a compendium of newspaper corrections minor and less minor. One of my favorite corrections ever ran last year in the Columbia Daily Spectator: "A column ... incorrectly identified the current president of the Columbia College Conservative Club as an avowed fascist. It is the former president of the Columbia College Conservative Club who is an avowed fascist."

The cathedral vs. the bazaar, revisited

William Taylor, founding editor of FastCompany magazine, has an article in the NY Times about companies soliciting ideas and participation from employees and customers, rather than just handing down perfect ideas fully formed.

He makes reference to similar shifts in software development, which were described most famously in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", a 1996 paper by Eric S. Raymond, a leading evangelist of open-source software.

Taylor:

At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description — called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus — and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.

Mr. Marino, 57, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market, which began in January 2005, has already paid big dividends. One of the earliest stocks (ticker symbol: VIEW) was a proposal to apply three-dimensional visualization technology, akin to video games, to help sailors and domestic-security personnel practice making decisions in emergency situations. Initially, Mr. Marino was unenthusiastic about the idea — "I'm not a joystick jockey" — but support among employees was overwhelming. Today, that product line, called Rite-View, accounts for 30 percent of total sales.

"Would this have happened if it were just up to the guys at the top?" Mr. Marino asked. "Absolutely not. But we could not ignore the fact that so many people were rallying around the idea. This system removes the terrible burden of us always having to be right."

Raymond:

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn't fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.

By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand. Chance handed me a perfect way to test my theory, in the form of an open-source project that I could consciously try to run in the bazaar style. So I did—and it was a significant success.

David Remnick on fact checking

David Remnick in Haaretz (it's not a great interview) goes into some depth about the New Yorker's fact-checking:

"When I go to interview, for example, Sheikh Naif Rajoub, one of the leaders of Hamas, I go with a translator, because I do not speak Arabic. I don't want to record too much, because that is double the work. I write pretty fast, and I know what to omit. But that's okay. Because afterward, at the office, our Arabic fact checker - a very talented Lebanese-American woman - will call Sheikh Rajoub and go over it with him, fact after fact. She will ask, 'You said that you will never recognize Israel - is that true?' And he will confirm or refute. 'Is it true that you were born in 1948?' 'Is it true that you have three children?' Every fact found in my article is checked and confirmed. As editor of the magazine, it is embarrassing to be caught with mistakes, and I hope that there will not be any, but I feel very good when I know there is someone checking up after me."
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The New Yorker's fact-checkers - "about 20 young employees in their twenties, who specialize in a variety of fields and who care" - make the magazine unique as it relates to what has recently become a burning issue in American journalism: over-reliance on unnamed sources, a hot subject in the wake of The New York Time's failure in its coverage of the war in Iraq, due to reliance on unnamed administration sources who claimed that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

"Seymour Hersh writes about intelligence for us," says Remnick, "and he often quotes from sources without attribution. But as editor, I know exactly who each of these sources is. And the fact-checkers will speak with the sources and will ascertain that they stand behind the words. When Hersh speaks with a source, he will ask him if he is willing to speak with the fact-checkers."