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THE EMERGENCE OF THE GEOSPATIAL WEB (Introduction to the Second Inclusiva-net Meeting ?Digital networks and physical space? 2008) Juan Martín Prada In contrast to the widely held supposition that telecommunications networks make no territorial distinctions, political power systems today are responding worldwide by strengthening geographical ties to their decisions, through new divisionary tactics, territorial separations, and barriers to prevent people from moving. Migration is becoming increasingly difficult, almost always subject to illegality and suspicion. Tactics continue to focus on localization and using borders for political ends. ?To inhabit? still means to inhabit a specific place in the economic and political hierarchy. In the last few years it has become evident that the Internet is not a system that truly transcends borders. Instead, territorial limits have a strong influence on it. Clearly, equal access to the Internet is not available in all parts of the world. In addition to radical...

Thanks, Kim, for informing the list about this. - It's always difficult when online discussions branch into different threads on different sites. But it seems as if there are enough significant differences between the "digital humanities" discourse on the UCLA site and the discourse on Nettime to post critical remarks here rather than on the original site. There are, to put it diplomatically, issues with this manifesto, both in its precision of terminology and critical thinking. First of all, the term "digital humanities" is fuzzy. Does it mean the cultural study of digital information systems, or simply the use of these systems in humanities research and education? If the latter is meant, why differentiate between humanities and other fields of study and not talk about "digital technology-based research and education" in general? Paragraph 1 of the manifesto states that... | Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent | practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer t...

http://www.myspace.com/onemannation] [www.syrphe.com] /// [www.adnoiseam.net] /// [www.ant-zen.com] [13 Feb 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Medialab/Sound Track ] / [ Enschede,NL ] [27 Feb 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Hörbar ] / [ Hamburg, DE ] [28 Feb 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Kuhturm ] / [ Leipzig, DE ] [01 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Die Remise ] / [ Berlin, DE ] [02 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Madame Claude ] / [ Berlin, DE ] [06 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz]/[ Dresden, DE ] [07 Mar 2009] / [OMN+ELE] / [ Chateau Rouge ] / [ Prague, CZ ] [08 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Gödör Klub ] / [ Budapest,HU ] [11 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ FLUC/Klub Moozak ] / [ Vienna, AT ] [12 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ TBA ] / [Ottensheim,AT] [13 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Wagon Offenbach ] / [Offenbach,DE ] [14 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Kolbhalle ] / [ Cologne, DE ] [20 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ De Piek ] / [Vlissingen,NL] [21 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ Extrapool ] / [ Nijmegen,NL ] [22 Mar 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ WORM ] / [ Rotterdam,NL] [29 Jul 2009] / [ OMN ] / [ ...

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First, really enjoying the discussion, so thanks Florian and Michael. Michael, I have my own thoughts about it, but could you say more about what or which you mean by "bogus folk histories"? I am working on a history myself and have not been very impressed with the largely anecdotal and narrow accounts that I see then being universalized, and the term new media has all kinds of problems. --Florian can sum those up much better than I though. ;-) I will say though that I think the digital distinction has some historical importance as well because of the way it changes reproduction and distribution, and because of the way it makes audio, video, text, and sill images in a sense equivalent, which has allowed new artistic/musical/literary practices to develop. I'd like to know what you and others think would make a better history, or what has been left out? best, Kim On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Michael Wojcik wrote: > Florian Cramer wrote: > > > This is a straightforward paraphrase of McL...

Indymedia UK: Police Seize UK Indymedia Server (Again), 23.01.2009 00:09 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/419838.html On 22 January 2009 an Indymedia server was seized by the Police in Manchester. This was probably related to postings about the recent Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) trial. Kent Police had e-mailed imc-uk-contact in the morning requesting that personal information about the judge in the SHAC trial be removed from the site. However this information had already been quickly removed in line with IMC UK policy. The e-mail also requested information relating to the poster be retained. Indymedia as an open posting news service does not log such information about its sources. The machine was handed to the Police by the management of UK Grid, a Manchester based colocation facility, without a warrant being shown. It is believed that a warrant for this one server may exist and have been issued by a Chief Inspector. As the server was a mirror of the site, it can be concluded that the validity...

Florian Cramer wrote: > This is a straightforward paraphrase of McLuhan's "end of the > Gutenberg Galaxy", with the only catch that McLuhan referred to > analog media - film, radio, television. So it seems as if the authors > thoroughly confuse "electronic" and "paper" with "digital" and > "analog". But, technically seen, the movable type printing press is > not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, > countable [and thus computable] units. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), generally with a sampling rate around 60 samples/second. Individual frames in chemical-photography film may be analog, but the medium is in essence a digital one. And there's nothing necessarily analog about film, radio, or television, all of which have full-digital variants in use today. The digital/analog distinction is useful in some technical realms (eg data communications engineering), and sometimes as a term of convenience, b...

The problem at hand is a basic literacy. 'Digital' is used as a completely unsuitable substitute for 'discrete'. Film is discrete, even images on the computer monitor are discrete, but their internal representations can be digital or not. The two are not related. > By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, > since it's quantized into still images (frames), # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

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On Friday, January 23 2009, 18:57 (-0700), inimino wrote: > The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog > details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for > lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. > > Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- > written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed > texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Quick answer: We cannot extend it to all written language because for some texts, those analog details - the calligraphy or typography - are essential. This is true, above all, for visual poetry since the antiquity and across languages and cultures. In philology, there have been controversies about the hand-written manuscripts of authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka, and to which extent their strike-through corrections and doodling should be preserved in text editions. (A hardcore respective stance is been taken, since the 1980s, by the French ;critique génétique".) A technically liter...

Michael Wojcik wrote: > Florian Cramer wrote: > >> [...] technically seen, the movable type printing press is >> not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, >> countable [and thus computable] units. > > By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, > since it's quantized into still images (frames), generally with a > sampling rate around 60 samples/second. But the analog frames of the projected film are not amenable to lossless copying, and they are the meat of the film. The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Outside of human culture, digital information transmission and storage is nothing new, as Richard Dawkins would remind us. The genetic ma...

KMV wrote: > Michael, I have my own thoughts about it, but could you say more about > what or which you mean by "bogus folk histories"? > > I am working on a history myself and have not been very impressed with > the largely anecdotal and narrow accounts that I see then being > universalized, and the term new media has all kinds of problems. > --Florian can sum those up much better than I though. ;-) Pretty much that. I've heard a number of people recently present "historical" accounts in this area that are more or less just anecdote or personal impression. Rhetoric, which it the academic field I'm currently mostly in, tends to fetishize history (the fascination with "Classical" rhetoric, lots of publication on the history of rhetoric, etc), but not all that many rhetoricians actually do real historical research. A good number do, of course, and more are careful to avoid making historical claims, but there's a lot of the "here's how hypertext happened" sort of argument being made. Sometimes these are interest...

Any analog signal can be sampled and digitized. And any signal, to get to our brain, needs to be reconverted in an analog signal (digits can be seen only by the mind). The basic difference between the old and the new 'digital' media is that it is based on solid-state electronics. Allowing this miniaturization and computation, it makes information easily transferable. The consequences are huge but I believe the base of it all is there. -----Original Message----- From: nettime-l-bounces@kein.org [mailto:nettime-l-bounces@kein.org] On Behalf Of Morlock Elloi Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2009 10:00 AM To: nettime-l@kein.org Subject: Re: Digital Humanities Manifesto The problem at hand is a basic literacy. 'Digital' is used as a completely unsuitable substitute for 'discrete'. Film is discrete, even images on the computer monitor are discrete, but their internal representations can be digital or not. The two are not related. > By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, > since it's...

The Insatiable Abstraction Engine: A Digital Humanities Manifesto http://bbrace.net/R/Rabbit-Raffle.html --> ../R/Rusty-Sprockets.html /:b # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

Some blog posts from info-activism campaigners... Info activism, a crucial part of human rights advocacy -- Kristin Joy Antin http://www.informationactivism.org/node/39 People's video is still the effective tool -- Jola Diones Mamangun (The Philippines) http://www.informationactivism.org/node/38 There's so much of information ... -- Jessica Dheere, Beirut http://www.informationactivism.org/node/37 Wikileaks is the absolute most important project on the globe -- Jacob Appelbaum http://www.informationactivism.org/node/36 Info-activism can help people to make informed judgements -- Elizabeth Eagen http://www.informationactivism.org/node/34 Fighting prejudice against sex-workers -- Chan Man Wai (HK, SAR) http://www.informationactivism.org/node/33 It helps to bring the information across -- Aung Myo Thein (Burma/Myanmar) http://www.informationactivism.org/node/32 Knowing you can help will make people want to help -- Ana Keselashvili, Georgia http://www.informationactivism.org/node/31 We need cheaper mobile communi...

anyone interested? [addresses redacted @ nettime --mod(tb)] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Isbel Keilbach" Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 5:14 PM Subject: US Citizen Grants > What a nice day is today! It is really a nice day, because you are > receiving this email. We are here to help thousands of people to receive > their Government Grants program and improve their ways of living. > > Here, finally, is your opportunity - exactly how to apply for Government > grants and what to say, step-by-step AND SEE IF YOU QUALIFY FOR A PIECE OF > THE MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AWARDED EACH YEAR by private and > Government grant agencies to thousands of regular people just like you. It > doesn't matter if you are a male or a female, rich or poor, married or > single, young or old, black or white, employed or unemployed or whatever. > To make a long story short, virtually anyone can get their hands on money > from the Government. And most of the money is awarded interest-free. So,...

Thanks Florian, for your precise criticism of this indeed rather sloppy manifesto. Regarding your definition of what is 'digital' as opposed to analog, I have the impression that there are two definitions of 'the digital' circulating: one equals digital to 'build up by discrete entities' - then indeed also celluloid film frames are digital, just as numbers, typewriting, printed letters and even speech (as set of phonemes). The other definition is to conceive the digital stricty as computable numbers (after all, digits means 'numbers', besides 'fingers'). And computable here means 'computable only by a computer', that is a hardware machine running software by which these numbers can be processed, modified, calculated, translated etc. I prefer the last definition, it enables us to talk about celluloid film frames and printed letters as non-digital as long they are not translated into computable and computed numbers which make sense in a specific program running. Not any number my kid brings home from school is ...

http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?digital There are many 'pre-electronic' symbolic systems that are digital (Wikipedia lists about 10 of them), but printed text, as Florian points out, is a particularly interesting example, because many of the features we normally associate with digital information in computers are already present in printed text. E.g. the ease and perfection with which it can be duplicated; the ease and fidelity with which the information can be separated from its physical carrier (after all, how different is the practice of quoting from that of copying / pasting?); or the ease and reversibility at which it can be transformed, either through strictly algorithmic means (e.g. cryptography) or more less strict means (e.g. translation). Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futur...

Hello people at Nettime The past one, was a sad and angy week for people living in Milan/Italy. Milan's social and cultural life was stricken hard once again. At 7am on january the 22nd around 100 policemen entered the squatt COX18 (http://www.cox18.noblogs.org), which include in its premises the social center created more than 33 years ago, the Calusca City Light bookstore, founded in 1971, and the Primo Moroni Archive. Looking at the Expo2015 that will take place in Milan, the Municipality ask for legal possession of some buildings in town in order to sell them and earn money. The words of the Vice Mayor De Corato were clear: we want to close all the free social centers and squatts in Milan, after COX18 and Pergola Tribe, will be the turn of Cantiere and Torchiera (other 2 important places of free culture in town). We at Digicult, supporting COX18 and all the squatts and social cultural centers in town, ask to all the people that belive in cultural freedom, in the importance of the existance of places of f...

Hello Marianne: > Why do you think it is fruitfull to define digital as any discrete > entity? I agree that anything build up by discrete entities can be > translated into digital matarial by assigning numbers to to these > entities, but countable in itself does not make something computable (by > computers). Thanks for the good points - but I still have doubts that a differentiation of "countable" and "computable" holds. To my knowledge, it doesn't in computer science. Since Alan Turing wrote "On Computable Numbers" in 1936, computable numbers are actually defined as countable (real) numbers. But I would argue that it's not actually an issue of computer scientific correctness since much computer science terminology such as "interpretation", "operational semantics" and "information ontology" is problematic if not flawed. The crux lies in the definition of "computer". If we colloquially define digital computers as the kind of electronic computing devices that we encounter as PCs, laptops, embedded controllers...