randomosity

The folks at Many Eyes recently intro­duced their new com­par­ison cloud tool. Basic­ally, it lets you visu­al­ise two frag­ments of text dis­play­ing word fre­quency for each in the same cloud. It’s an inter­est­ing addi­tion to the more famil­iar word cloud. Using a stand­ard word cloud you get a mat­rix of words with rel­at­ive size, weight or col­our high­light­ing fre­quency in a selec­ted text. This quickly allows you to visu­ally per­ceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a par­tic­u­lar theme or style of writ­ing or speak­ing. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abut­ted. You can now visu­ally com­pare two texts from the same author for sim­ilar empah­sis or quickly determ­ine a dif­fer­ence between texts. In the example presen­ted at Many Eyes, they com­pare the US pres­id­en­tial State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less fre­quent men­tion of Afgh­anistan and the increase in men­tion of Sad­dam. Whether this allows one to con­clude a change in policy or not, it does demon­strate the use of the tool for pro­vok­ing ques­tions for fur­ther exploration.

On Sat­urday, the Ontario gov­ern­ment offi­cially announced how much fund­ing each uni­ver­sity in Ontario is to receive for main­ten­ance and renewal of facil­it­ies. I just happened to see announce­ments from a few insti­tu­tions appear sim­ul­tan­eously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather dif­fer­ent ways in which they presen­ted this news.

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Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMas­ter Lib­rary gave a lively and fast-paced talk explor­ing the nature of majesty to the Medi­eval and Early Mod­ern Research Group. Her paper,“Manufacturing Majesty: Eliza­beth of Hun­gary, Diana of Eng­land and the Con­struc­tion of Royal Saints, 1207–2007,” reflec­ted on the rather strik­ing sim­il­ar­it­ies between St. Eliza­beth of Hun­gary and Lady Diana Spen­cer. Par­tic­u­larly:

• Lin­eage
• Texts
• Mar­ital Love
• In-Laws
• Beauty
• Moth­er­hood
• The Third Person
• Char­ity
• Agency
• Funeral Rites
• Leg­acy

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Naru Shi­ode from the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo gave a spell­bind­ing present­a­tion on spatial-temporal ana­lysis at the Centre for Spa­tial Ana­lysis (CSpA) on Fri­day. Shi­ode is trained as archi­tect and urban plan­ner and finds him­self in the Geo­graphy depart­ment at Buf­falo. He has been asso­ci­ated with pro­jects such as Digital Egypt and the Vir­tual Ryoanji pro­jects explor­ing ancient his­tor­ical recon­struc­tion as well as time-based recre­morph­ing. His cur­rent pro­ject is the 3D Buf­falo pro­ject which allows a user to inter­act via a chro­no­slider that trig­gers time points for each build­ing within a multi-block area sur­round­ing down­town Buf­falo. This pro­ject is only in its early stages, but the poten­tial for his­tor­ical ana­lysis is tre­mend­ously prom­ising.

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Geof­frey Reaume from York and Uni­ver­sity of Toronto gave a fas­cin­at­ing talk in the His­tory of Health and Medi­cine Lunch­time Sem­inar Series today. “From Act­iv­ists to Arch­iv­ists: Doc­u­ment­ing Mad People’s His­tory Since the 1970s,” explored both the form­a­tion of psy­chi­at­ric sur­viv­ors organ­iz­a­tions from the 1970s as well as the col­lec­tion of arti­facts allow­ing for study of these move­ments.
His talk reminded us of Allen Mark­man in NY, Ken­neth Don­ald­son in Port­land then more dir­ectly of local per­son­al­it­ies such as Mel Stark­man and Don Weitz. Reaume’s talk provided me with a won­der­ful expos­ure to the more human side of the men­tal health world and also put it into the con­text of other groups within soci­ety that battle with nam­ing con­ven­tions. Very poignantly, Reaume also exposed the tre­mend­ously con­ten­tious area of attempt­ing to remem­ber the past when treat­ment has often been under­taken to elim­in­ate such remem­brances.
Reaume is cur­rently engaged in two ongo­ing attempts to ensure that those that have been par­ti­cipants (will­ingly or unwill­ingly) in Toronto asylums past are not for­got­ten. The walls of the old Queen Street Asylum have been the site of local devel­op­ment over the past dec­ade.
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When is a tool, not a tool? Appar­ently when it is a quasi-tool or a proto-tool. A tool provides func­tion­less func­tion­al­ity.
These were a couple of the epi­gra­mat­ics Barry Allen shared dur­ing a talk on tech­no­logy, cul­ture and civil­iz­a­tion.¹
I could not pos­sibly do justice to philo­soph­ical reflec­tions on the nature of a tool, so I stop there on the philo­soph­ical and refer you to my foot­note, but as an eco­nom­ist I was par­tic­u­larly drawn into his dis­cus­sion of the pro­gres­sion from first to second order machines. First order being ‘devices that extend human capa­cit­ies by exploit­ing a mech­an­ical advant­age’ and second-order fea­tur­ing ‘an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to pro­duce a mul­tiply­ing effect.’ This form of organ­iz­a­tion seemed to dove­tail with a sim­ilar dis­cus­sion that Allen raised about our abil­ity to effect­ively fix prices, but our seem­ing imab­il­ity to determ­ine the true cost of a tool.
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1. Quasi-tools as I under­stand are objects used by beings without con­scious or intel­li­gent aware­ness that the object provides any par­tic­u­lar func­tion. Innate use of a pebble by a wasp to block the entrance to a birth cham­ber for example. In con­trast, a proto-tool, is con­sciously chosen for use, but has not be fash­ioned to per­form that func­tion, lack­ing delib­er­ate design to enable that func­tion. A ‘tool’ per se shares two descript­ive aspects: that its func­tion is man­i­fold and not lim­ited by pur­pose, instead exten­ded by tech­nique to form cul­tural tech­no­logy. Secondly, the tool is an arti­fact that lacks defin­i­tion without hav­ing a place within an eco­nomy — that is, it has been pre­vi­ously linked to oth­ers in an eco­nomy of socially com­pli­ment­ary action (design, man­u­fac­ture, sale, license, etc.) when we engage with it. [↩]

The Wilson Centre in Cana­dian His­tory offi­cially launched an awe­some new learn­ing tool destined for the classrooms of local schools last night. The People and the the Bay is an his­tor­ical envir­on­mental doc­u­ment­ary cre­ated by Nancy Bouch­ier, Ken Cruikshank and the wiz­ards from Pixel Dust Stu­dios This stun­ning pro­duc­tion brings a viva­city, zest, and prob­ing depth to explore the unique rela­tion­ship between the Hamilton har­bour and the lives of people in the area and the city itself. The occa­sion was cel­eb­rated at the Canada Mar­ine Dis­cov­ery Centre, a uniquely appro­pri­ate site for present­ing this pro­duc­tion. The centre sits on the har­bour and is an inter­pret­at­ive museum ded­ic­ated to Canada’s rich aquatic her­it­age.
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The His­tory of Health and Medi­cine Sem­inar series con­tin­ued today with a rather pro­voc­at­ive paper by Dr. Ann Her­ring and Sta­cey Lock­er­bie. “The Com­ing Plague: Global panic, local reper­cus­sions and avian influ­enza,” con­tends that glob­al­iz­a­tion and spread of inform­a­tion has pre­ceded the poten­tial epi­demic with out­comes that alarm poten­tially unduly and have enorm­ous local eco­nomic and social impact.
Her­ring is well known for her work on the his­tory of infec­tious dis­ease and very spe­cific­ally on its impact on nat­ive pop­u­la­tions. Lock­er­bie work involves the trans­ition of aquacul­ture in cent­ral Viet­nam from local to a global com­mod­ity. Their work coin­cides as a res­ult of Lockerbie’s first-hand exper­i­ence in Viet­nam with the impact of poultry culls and the move­ment towards lar­ger state-controlled fact­ory oper­a­tions as the gov­ern­ment (over)reacted to the bird flu.
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To a stand­ing room only audi­ence, Dr. Stephen Heathorn kicked off the Fall Thursday Sem­inar series in the Depart­ment of His­tory with a talk entitled ‘Long Before Oliver Stone…Conspiracy The­ory and the ’Kit­chener Films’ 1921–26.’ Heathorn’s talk centred on the back­story to a half-decade struggle to bring the movie ‘How Kit­chener Was Betrayed’ to Brit­ish screens dur­ing the early 20s. He used this epis­ode to demon­strate how offi­cial policy per­petu­ated the Kit­chener myth and avoided ques­tions of pro­fes­sional com­pet­ence. This paper comes from a lar­ger explor­a­tion of how memory and repu­ta­tion of mar­tial lead­ers is manip­u­lated over the space of the 20thC.
In 1916, Kit­chener drowned on a mis­sion to Rus­sia when the ship he was aboard struck a mine off the Orkneys. Pub­lic grief was intense over the loss of the man who sym­bol­ized the fight­ing spirit of the nation and led many to ques­tion the culp­ab­il­ity of mil­it­ary and politi­cians in the tragedy.
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The His­tory of Health and Medi­cine Sem­inar series wel­comed Luz Maria Hernández-Sáenz today, who presen­ted the lively story of Dona Maria Tiburcia Reyn­antes. Her paper “Between Medi­cine and Magic: the Story of an 18th cen­tury Mex­ican healer,” explored the rather fas­cin­at­ing case of a trav­el­ling healer in eight­eenth cen­tury Mex­ico who com­bined magic and medi­cine with reli­giously ordained heal­ing prac­tice. In the case of Tiburcia, Dr. Hernández-Sáenz, util­ized Inquis­i­tion records to explore the tale of a women who claimed to be able to cure ill­ness, reunite the divorced and to even resus­cit­ate the dead.
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I atten­ded a SRO lec­ture by Alan Taylor last week. He delivered a won­der­ful nar­rat­ive on the life of Joseph Brant couched in the cur­rently con­ten­tious dis­cus­sion over nat­ive land rights in the Grand River basin. Taylor is the author of a vari­ety of books, the most per­tin­ent being The Divided Ground: Indi­ans, Set­tlers, and the North­ern Bor­der­land of the Amer­ican Revolu­tion. Fol­low­ing a con­cise, if rather softly spoken, brief on the vari­ous parties play­ing in the story, he moved to the meat of the mat­ter. The key ele­ment that Taylor seemed to want the audi­ence to appre­ci­ate was that the Six Nations them­selves were by no means homo­gen­eous. Addi­tion­ally, the area into which they moved was by no means dom­in­ated by one party or another and was a pop­u­lated by a col­lec­tion of diverse groups already: pre-existing nat­ives such as the Mis­sissauga, recent set­tlers from either the US or from the Brit­ish Isles and sig­ni­fic­antly, a small, but vocal cadre of Brit­ish mil­it­ary forces. The res­ult is an inter­mixed cul­tur­ally diverse people in this area.
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