Getting Off the Bus

November 4th, 2009 Rafael Alvarado

“We must jump off Lévi-Strauss’s bus one stop before he does.“
Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spi­der, p. 149.

It is hard to over­es­ti­mate the infli­uence of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French philoso­pher turned anthro­pol­o­gist who liked to be known as a crafts­man, on the dis­course of the human­i­ties and social sci­ences in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Oper­at­ing among a sur­plus of great thinkers (espe­cially in France) dur­ing a period of the deval­u­a­tion of the role of intel­lec­tual, his name nev­er­the­less stands out not sim­ply for hav­ing founded one of the most impor­tant intel­lec­tual move­ments of the cen­tury — struc­tural­ism — but for hav­ing defined the agenda, along with Wittgen­stein, for a host of major thinkers up to the present time. With­out Levi-Strauss, there is no Fou­cault, no Der­rida, no Bour­dieu, no Lyotard to both absorb and react to the idea of struc­ture and the great anthro­po­log­i­cal tra­di­tion which served to flesh out the idea. For with­out Levi-Strauss, the vast store­house of descrip­tive ethnog­ra­phy that he dis­cov­ered and fully absorbed in Amer­ica, in the New York Pub­lic Library, while in exile dur­ing the war, would never have reached Paris. The sig­nif­i­cance of these mate­ri­als — many of them dry cat­a­logs of cul­tural traits inter­spersed with ten­ta­tive obser­va­tions about the nature of cul­ture — would never have caught the atten­tion of the Euro­pean eye. And with­out his role as cul­tural vec­tor between Amer­i­can empir­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy and French philo­soph­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy, the deep well of ethnog­ra­phy in gen­eral might never have informed the imag­i­na­tion of decon­struc­tion, post­struc­tural­ism, and post­mod­ernism. Evi­dence for the influ­ence of this source can be found every­where, both implic­itly, as in Foucault’s appro­pri­a­tion of the idea of mana to the­o­rize power, and explic­itly, as in Lyotard’s strong ref­er­ence to Lévi-Strauss and the ethno­graphic exam­ple of the Cashinahua in the Post­mod­ern Con­di­tion. Sur­prised by his fame and noto­ri­ously absent from the activism of the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss was the unmoved mover for an entire sys­tem of thinkers whose lights shone the brighter for their prox­im­ity to him.

Today the bus has stopped. For those of us who have fol­lowed Doniger’s advice — and you have to — per­haps now we may con­sider get­ting back on for a few more stops.

Posted in Athropology | No Comments »

RDF Schema Definition Language">Toward a Structuralist RDF Schema Definition Language

June 7th, 2009 Rafael Alvarado RDF Schema Definition Language&rft.source=The Transducer&rft.date=2009-06-07&rft.identifier=http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=534&rft.language=English&rft.aulast=Alvarado&rft.aufirst=Rafael&rft.subject=Comparative Ontology">

When I get the time, I’m going to write a vocab­u­lary cre­ation lan­guage to sup­port struc­tural­ist text inter­pre­ta­tion. It will con­sist of two specs: one to han­dle the mark­ing up the sur­face fea­tures of text, such as rhetor­i­cal fig­ures and tropes. This will be based on my work with the Prince­ton Char­rette Project and it will likely incor­po­rate some ideas from Steven Bird’s work on anno­ta­tion graphs. The sec­ond will be either an exten­sion of or a vari­ant of SKOS and|or OWL designed to rep­re­sent extracted sym­bolic struc­tures. It will incor­po­rate pred­i­cates to han­dle rela­tions of sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, such as has_part, has_analogy, and has_metonym, between the ele­ments rep­re­sented in the first lan­guage. At a larger level, I want to rep­re­sent holis­tic dimen­sions such as con­text and level, as well as nar­ra­to­log­i­cal things like encom­pass­ment, trans­for­ma­tion, inver­sion, and liminality.

One of the big prob­lems I see in this project is an appar­ent lim­i­ta­tion in RDF to sup­port triples about triples. For exam­ple, an anal­ogy is a rela­tion between struc­tures, not terms. The asser­tion A : B :: C : D is, at minu­mum, an asser­ta­tion about the rela­tion­ship between two asser­ta­tions, A : B and C : D. (The pred­i­cate of the asser­tions them­selves is usu­ally X has_part Y.) An anol­ogy looks some­thing like this then:

[A has_part B] just_as [C has_part D]

The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this task would be to pro­vide URIs for each RDF triple. I haven’t seen a gen­eral solu­tion to this prob­lem. I know I can cre­ate local URIs within a spe­cific triple store, and use these in triples. But I need to define an RDF triple as a datatype first. And I antic­i­pate prob­lems fur­ther down­stream; I won­der if the cur­rent RDF toolset is designed to han­dle index­ing and infer­enc­ing of these kinds of triples.

If any­one has sug­ges­tions about how to han­dle this issue, I’d be glad to hear them.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

After writ­ing this, it strikes me that to say that two triples are anal­o­gous is just to say that they share a predicate–so long as that pred­i­cate is suf­fi­ciently spec­i­fied. To assert an anal­ogy, then, is to assert that such an iden­tity is impor­tant or rel­e­vant in a cer­tain context.

Posted in Comparative Ontology | 7 Comments »

Rituals, Texts and Databases

May 12th, 2009 Rafael Alvarado

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy asserts that humans already have ontolo­gies, and that machine ontolo­gies are both pro­jec­tions of human ontolo­gies (those of the numerati) and mate­r­ial agents that inter­vene in the ongo­ing repro­duc­tion of ontolo­gies (every­one else’s). Devel­op­ers of ontolo­gies for the web of linked data would do well to under­stand the nature of human ontolo­gies, as well as they way machine ontolo­gies inter­vene in the ongo­ing con­struc­tion of social life.

Human ontolo­gies are not like ROM pro­grams, hard-wired into our brains and exe­cuted with­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion; they are designed to be repro­grammed through engage­ment with the world. They are one of our most effec­tive adap­tive traits.

Ontolo­gies are adaptive

Anthro­pol­o­gists have stud­ied ontolo­gies in the wild for a long time, under the var­i­ous cat­e­gories of “struc­ture,” “sym­bol­ism,” “cul­ture” and “col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions.” One of the most impor­tant con­trib­u­tors to the study of ontol­ogy is the Amer­i­can cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist Mar­shall Sahlins.

Sahlins’ prin­ci­pal the­o­ret­i­cal con­ti­bu­tion to cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy has been to retrieve the con­cept of cul­tural struc­ture from the ahis­tor­i­cal, for­mal­ist, and mech­a­nis­tic con­cep­tion devel­oped by Lévi-Strauss, whose own work on mythol­ogy belies his more the­o­ret­i­cal pro­nounce­ments. Rather than sep­a­rat­ing struc­ture from event (and his­tory), and locat­ing the for­mer deeply within a uni­ver­sal mind–like a camshaft respon­si­ble for the jig­saw puz­zle of culture–Sahlins focuses on what he calls the “struc­ture of the con­junc­ture” of struc­ture and event. His­tory emerges as a cul­tur­ally dis­tinc­tive second-order struc­ture that results from the ongo­ing work of cat­e­gories in praxis. So cat­e­gories have a struc­ture, but that struc­ture under­goes reeval­u­a­tion and change as it is applied to the world.

In Islands of His­tory Sahlins describes the process of cul­tural (onto­log­i­cal) change in terms of the “risk of ref­er­ence”: as cul­tures clas­sify things in the world–as they deploy ontologies–they also put these ontolo­gies at risk. For things in the world do not always behave as clas­si­fied, or planned. Even the sun has an occa­sional eclipse. Although the keep­ers of culture–from priests to grandmothers–try to enforce adher­ence to the cat­e­gories, the behav­ior of things will inevitably con­tra­dict the cat­e­gories and call for their revi­sion. Sahlins reads the Hawai’ian’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Cap­tain Cook as Lono as just such a world chang­ing event.

Rit­ual is one mech­a­nism humans use to syn­chro­nize the world with world view. As peo­ple grow, for exam­ple, and change sta­tuses, rites of pas­sage are used to medi­ate this “con­tra­dic­tion” and reclas­sify peo­ple so that they can fit into the sys­tem. Another mech­a­nism is prophecy, where the reverse is true–world views are aligned with a world that has changed. Mil­lenar­ian move­ments are the clas­sic exam­ple of this: a prophet emerges who can make sense of the new in terms of the old, but changes the old in the process.

Rit­u­als and prophetic move­ments are the orig­i­nal forms of change management.

This is the ongo­ing work of cul­ture. Cul­tural repro­duc­tion is never mechan­i­cal. That is one rea­son we humans have his­tory. There is always a dis­pro­por­tion between words and things, plans and situations.

Data­bases (and the point of this post)

Now, a data model, such as a set of tables and fields in a rela­tional data­base, an XML schema of ele­ments and attrib­utes, or an RDF vocab­u­lary of classes and prop­er­ties, is a plan, a schema of clas­si­fi­ca­tion. And data­base appli­ca­tions, like rit­u­als and texts, have their own forms of ref­er­en­tial risk to con­tend with. They clas­sify the world and, in the process, both effect the world they clas­sify and open them­selves up for revi­sion by that world as it changes.

For exam­ple, the cat­e­gories pro­duced by a require­ments elic­i­ta­tion process for an appli­ca­tion designed to improve some work­flow, and encoded in a data­base that sits at the bot­tom of an appli­ca­tion stack, may not accu­rately rep­re­sent the work­flow as it is actu­ally prac­ticed, and as it will inevitably change as new devel­op­ments take place–changing per­son­nel, clients, strate­gic plans, etc. The data­base, then, is put into a situation–the sit­u­a­tion of the conjuncture–into which its cat­e­gories are at risk.

In this sit­u­a­tion, data­bases are like texts–they are built on the arma­ture of a hard-coded ontol­ogy, and they can move beyond their orig­i­nal domain of applicatibility.

But unlike most texts, and very much like sacred texts, data­base appli­ca­tions (and their admin­is­tra­tors) are usu­ally given a cen­tral posi­tion within an orga­ni­za­tion. They are often deployed as key ele­ments of an enter­prise archi­tec­ture that calls the insti­tu­tional shots. Thus they can insu­late them­selves from ref­er­en­tial risk. They can force con­for­mity to their logic–as Michael Wesch’s New Guinea vil­lagers redesigned their set­tle­ment pat­tern to con­form to the gov­ern­ment census–or they can pro­duce a black mar­ket of behav­iors in an orga­ni­za­tion that bypasses the data­base gov­erned work­flow. This is what fac­ulty do who are forced to use an LMS but would rather use Google Docs.

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy can help here. If we view ontolo­gies as always sit­u­ated, then we should (1) design sys­tems for max­i­mum flex­i­bil­ity and adapt­abilty, and (2) learn a les­son from the rit­ual life of peo­ples around the world and through­out his­tory: engage our ontolo­gies in con­stant reeval­u­a­tion and mod­i­fi­ca­tion, mak­ing the world (of our orga­ni­za­tions) fit where appro­pri­ate, and also refin­ing the cat­e­gories to fit the world.

To meet the first chal­lenge, we shouldn’t cre­ate over­wrought ontolo­gies, but rather focus on just enough clas­si­fi­ca­tion to achieve the effects we need. Usu­ally, the effects we are most con­cerned with are con­nect­ing peo­ple to peo­ple, peo­ple to infor­ma­tion, and infor­ma­tion to infor­ma­tion, in as few links as possible.

To meet the sec­ond chal­lenge, we may want to refine what we mean by “social oper­at­ing system”–for that is pre­cisely what a rit­ual sys­tem is. Maybe it’s time to fol­low McLuhan’s advice and exploit the rit­ual effects of the elec­tric, in order to mit­i­gate and shape the more dan­ger­ous effects of the elec­tronic. When we build ontolo­gies, maybe we should also be think­ing of the phys­i­cal and vir­tual spaces in which they will be deployed, and the mate­r­ial and dig­i­tal arti­facts that will be their vehi­cles of expression.

Posted in Comparative Ontology | No Comments »

“Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities">“Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities

April 10th, 2009 Rafael Alvarado “Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities&rft.source=The Transducer&rft.date=2009-04-10&rft.identifier=http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=250&rft.language=English&rft.aulast=Alvarado&rft.aufirst=Rafael&rft.subject=Digital Humanities">

Recently, Matt Kirschen­baum, Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor at Mary­land, Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the Mary­land Inis­ti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in the Human­i­ties, and author of Mech­a­nisms, tweeted a request for “absolutely foun­da­tional” arti­cles or chap­ters for “an intro­duc­tion to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.” The fol­low­ing is my list, in chrono­log­i­cal order.

1. Van­nevar Bush, 1945, “As We May Think.”
2. Claude Shan­non, 1948, “A Math­e­mat­i­cal The­ory of Communication.”
3. Nor­bert Wiener, 1954, “Orga­ni­za­tion is the Message.”
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, “The Struc­tural Study of Myth.”
5. Ben­jamin Colby, 1966, “Cul­ture Pat­terns in Narrative.”
6. Gre­gory Bate­son, 1967, “Style, Grace, and Infor­ma­tion in Prim­i­tive Art.”
7. Rod­ney Need­ham, 1975, “Poly­thetic Classification.” *
8. Jean-François Lyotard, 1979, The Post­mdern Condition.
9. Ted Nel­son, 1980, Lit­er­ary Machines.
10. Wal­ter Ong, 1982, Oral­ity and Lit­er­acy.
11. Lucy Such­man, 1988, “Rep­re­sent­ing Prac­tice in Cog­ni­tive Science.” *
12. Dou­glas Adams, 1990. Hyper­land. *
13. Diana Forsythe, 1993, “The Con­struc­tion of Work in Arti­fi­cial Intelligence.” *
14. Steven Bird and Mark Liber­man, 1999, “Anno­ta­tion graphs as a frame­work for mul­ti­di­men­sional lin­guis­tic data analysis.”
15. Lev Manovich, 2001, “Data­base as Sym­bolic Form.”
16. John Unsworth, 2001, “Knowl­edge Rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Human­i­ties Computing.”
17. Stephen Ram­sey, 2005, “In Praise of Pattern.”
18. Tim Berners-Lee, 2006, “Linked Data–Design Issues.”

* These were added after the orig­i­nal post. I reserve the write to amend and anno­tate this list at any time …

Here are a few qualifiers.

Num­ber one, I don’t think there are, strictly speak­ing, any foun­da­tional texts in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. Not in the way that physics can claim Newton’s Prin­cipia or biol­ogy Darwin’s Ori­gin. I am not sure if this sit­u­a­tion is due to the (peren­nial) infancy of the field–if, indeed, it is a field. (I think of it more as a cross-displinary method­ol­ogy.) More­over, my say­ing so cer­tainly isn’t due to any dis­taste on my part for the con­cept of a canon. Instead, there are, roughly cor­re­spond­ing to the pre– and post-war era of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury, a num­ber of loosely related essays that adum­brate a set of ideas which sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of peo­ple who call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists have been unpack­ing. The lat­ter have pro­duced a num­ber of essays which the majori­toy of dig­i­tal human­ists will have read, and these may be called foun­da­tional, in the sense of a shared dis­course. Fair enough. But none of these texts can claim the sta­tus of hav­ing defined a method or a domain that we can, in ret­ro­spect, claim as dis­tinctly con­cern­ing the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. Also–and here I will be controversial–I believe that this par­tic­u­lar cor­pus has had the effect of pro­duc­ing, though the hyer­co­her­ence that can affect small “thought col­lec­tives” (Fleck), a rather nar­row set of con­cerns which have put the field into a groove from which it would do well to extri­cate itself.

Num­ber two, since I con­sider the dig­i­tal human­i­ties to be at once crit­i­cal and prac­ti­cal, these texts come from both angles, one set con­cerned with method, the other with his­tor­i­cal context.

Num­ber three, parts of this list are, as you’ll quickly see, pretty spe­cific to me, and my back­ground as an Amer­i­can cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist with strong Eng­lish and French influ­ences. These are texts that have been foun­da­tional to my con­cep­tion of the dig­i­tal human­i­ties, and which have made a dif­fer­ence to my way of think­ing about tex­tu­al­ity, dig­i­tal tex­tu­al­ity, and what hap­pens to text when it becomes dig­i­tal. But it is not entirely idio­syn­cratic. In its defense, I would argue that the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is more closely tied with the struc­tural­ism of the 1950s and 60s than is usu­ally recognized–and indeed, more than struc­tural­ists are pre­pared to admit. (There is an impor­tant chap­ter of intel­lec­tual his­tory that needs to be writ­ten here, con­cern­ing the close but rel­a­tively hid­den rela­tion­ship between struc­tural­ism and the “cyber­netic moment.”) More­over, the anthro­po­log­i­cal angle is always worth push­ing, inso­far as the dis­ci­pline, before its reflex­ive self-implosion in the 1980s and 90s, bequeathed the cul­ture con­cept on which the realign­ment of the human­i­ties and itner­pre­tive social sci­ences has been con­structed. From an anthropologist’s view, the wild suc­cess of cul­tural stud­ies and cul­tural his­tory has the sad sweet­ness, the tristes tropiques, that attends the simul­ta­ne­ous death and birth of cultures.

* * *

Posted in Digital Humanities | 8 Comments »

A Chiasmus Model of Syllabus Design

February 5th, 2009 Rafael Alvarado

One of the things I like to do when design­ing a course is to view the syl­labus as a kind of plot or out­line of a story. The story may end up as the basis of a book, but mainly it pro­vides struc­ture to the expe­ri­ence of the stu­dents tak­ing the course. Struc­ture at this level is impor­tant because it pro­vides a cog­ni­tive scaf­fold­ing for stu­dents when they are try­ing to ingest the con­tent of the course as a whole.

Now, in gen­eral, there are two cog­ni­tive mod­els one may use to present mate­r­ial to stu­dents in a way that max­i­mizes the abil­ity of the stu­dents to retain the infor­ma­tion: the his­tor­i­cal and the log­i­cal (or per­haps “struc­tural”). The sci­ences, of course, tend to be log­i­cal, for obvi­ous rea­sons — ideas build on them­selves in a way that requires going from the sim­ple to the com­plex. (Some­times this order matches his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment, but not nec­es­sar­ily; often the work of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion occurs late in the stage of the devel­op­ment of a the­ory.) The human­i­ties, on the other hand, tend to be his­tor­i­cal, or some vari­ant thereof (such as reverse chrono­log­i­cal order.) The human sci­ences tend to be some­where in the mid­dle, which raises the point of this blog entry.

In a course I am design­ing now — the Anthro­pol­ogy of the Infor­ma­tion Soci­ety — I found myself being unable to decide between the two. An his­tor­i­cal approach would be easy, and in fact I have used it in the past. But I think it is a bit plod­ding: begin with the Cyber­netic moment, in both the com­mer­cial and aca­d­e­mic spheres, and march one’s way through to the cur­rent posthu­man­ist era of the web and com­mer­cial­ized cyber­space. Addi­tion­ally, one eas­ily falls into the traps of tele­ol­ogy and the ever-dreaded meta­nar­ra­tive (the fear of which is itself part of what we are study­ing). On the other hand, a purely struc­tural approach — say, along the lines of a tra­di­tional ethnog­ra­phy, where var­i­ous insti­tu­tions are stud­ied in suc­ces­sion (reli­gion, pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, kin­ship and the fam­ily, etc.) has it’s prob­lems too: such divi­sions, although not as arti­fi­cial as some may argue, nonethe­less they pre­vent an organic under­stand­ing of their rela­tions — in anthro­pol­ogy espe­cially, one wants to talk about reli­gion, pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics at the same time.

My solu­tion has been to adopt a rhetor­i­cal device that seems to com­bine the his­tor­i­cal (that is, the sequen­tial) with the struc­tural into what might be thought of as a tem­po­ral struc­ture: the fig­ure of chi­as­mus. We know this as the famil­iar pat­tern A B B’ A’, as in the following:

“Love is the irre­sistible desire to be desired irresistibly .”

Rhetori­cians and poets have though the ages used this device to struc­ture units of dis­course from sim­ple one or two-liners (like this exam­ple) to entire poems and sto­ries, such as Chre­tien de Troye’s Lancelot. The sub­ti­tle of The Hob­bit expresses this logic: “There and Back Again.”

Chi­as­mus at the larger units of dis­course (such as a course) is use­ful, I think, because it pro­vides a tem­po­ral, his­tor­i­cal frame that is easy to fol­low, but which, by the dou­bling back that defines its char­ac­ter, exposes struc­ture as well. I think this is best pre­sented by example.

In my course, I expect to dis­cuss the role of the com­puter as both a sym­bol and arti­fact that both struc­tures and is struc­tured by the social insti­tu­tions in which it is embed­ded. The major insti­tu­tions in play are the polit­i­cal and the eco­nomic, along with a more dif­fuse and per­va­sive one I call ide­ol­ogy, which includes reli­gious and onto­log­i­cal beliefs of all kinds (fol­low­ing the think­ing of many anthro­pol­o­gists, such as Mary Dou­glas and Louis Dumont). Now to present this, I could, as I men­tion above, pro­ceed his­tor­i­cally or struc­turally. His­tor­i­cally, I could begin with the dif­fu­sion of the com­puter, or com­put­er­i­za­tion, as ide­ol­ogy in the 1950s, where the ideas of infor­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­trol dom­i­nate the human and bio­log­i­cal sci­ences, and even anthro­pol­ogy itself. I could then move onto the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of information-driven economies and eco­nomic orga­ni­za­tions (such as, notably, inter­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions). Finally, I could con­clude with the effects on the polit­i­cal sphere (rights, pri­vacy, com­mu­nity) with the emer­gence of the blo­gos­phere and the rise of yet another model of the sur­veil­lance state.

The prob­lem with this approach, though, is that it doesn’t pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity to show the effects of each phase on the pre­vi­ously dis­cussed lev­els — what hap­pens to the sym­bol­ics of the com­puter as it becomes more overtly enmeshed in the dynam­ics of polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion? Also, the suc­ces­sion of ide­ol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and pol­i­tics, which I had not noticed upon first teach­ing the course, raises the larger ques­tion of how these social dimen­sions are related. I do not want to imply a sim­ple causal hier­ar­chy in which ideas influ­ence infra­struc­ture which in turn con­strains pol­i­tics. At the largest level, there is a struc­tural point to be made about these dimen­sions, which argues for dis­cussing them in iso­la­tion from their his­tor­i­cal sequence.

This is where chi­as­mus comes in: I plan to orga­nize the course in the fol­low­ing manner:

1. Intro­duc­tion
   1. Ide­ol­ogy
      1. Eco­nom­ics
         1. Pol­i­tics
         2. Pol­i­tics
      2. Eco­nom­ics
   2. Ide­ol­ogy
2. Con­clu­sion

WIth this struc­ture, I can march my way through his­tory, and then dou­ble back and make the struc­tural points that are really the point of the course, link­ing eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics and ide­ol­ogy together as a con­flicted yet organic whole. And notice how each dimen­sion is struc­turally priv­i­leged: Ide­ol­ogy encom­passes, whereas the polit­i­cal is at the cen­ter; and eco­nom­ics medi­ates and bridges.

Any­way, the struc­ture has already proved use­ful in orga­niz­ing my thoughts and mate­ri­als, regard­less of the mer­its of my argu­ments for it

[Note: this is a repub­lish­ing of an entry I wrote for Dickinson’s local blog on teach­ing and learn­ing.]

Posted in Teaching and Learning | No Comments »