Weibel Lines

Irony... yeah, I know what that is...

Evelyne Viegas, a student in the MSIM program here at UW, is doing an independent study with me this summer on the semantic Web and collaborative software, and as part of that, she and I have established a semantic web discussion group that meets at the Third Place Bookstore (and cafe and pub) every couple of weeks.  This is the academy we always dreamed about: books, beer, coffee, and camaraderie.  And people come! 

First of all, how cool is it that bookstores here provide social space for community events?  Not just a place to buy coffee, but a space for events.  Third Place alludes to the place other than home and work, where people congregate for sustenance and community. Is it accident or irony that Amazon, the slayer of independent bookstores, sits high on a hill overlooking Seattle, home of a vibrant ecology of independent bookstores?

But i digress.  Half a dozen to a dozen would-be and actual semioticians gather every other week to explore the manifestations of meaning on the Web, and how to encourage and capitalize on it.   Last night's topics ranged across:

• the slippery boundary between authoring and metadata creation
• SLATES as organizing principles for Web 2.0 (see my earlier post)
• Ranganathan's categories (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time)
• THERE.COM
• virtual economies
• derived ontologies and electronic warrant
• RDF as the love child of Platonic logic
• ORKUT.COM (you need an invitation... sniff)
• PREFOUND.COM
• TRIBE.NET
• Dogear, social bookmarking in the enterprise from IBM
• Michael Braley and Geoff Froh's enterprise tagging MSIM capstone project
• The Strength of Weak Ties (or, why people should share bookmarks on needle point , knitting, and USB 2.0 devices).
• EUREKSTER.COM
• microformats
• and more....

Most troubling question of the evening (Michael Braley):

Is Myspace the leading manifestation of semantics on the Web?

It is certainly among the most popular... in fact, this past week, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that US visits to MySpace led all other sites for the first time.  Yikes!

Finally, the award in the category of If-you-can't-define-it-you-don't-really-know, goes to Kevin O'Halloran, graduate of the the iSchool and currently at Microsoft, who offers the following definition of irony:

a measure of the distance between text and subtext

OK... i think I got it.  Finally.

Now... what would MySpace for grownups look like?

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image: Seattle's skyline at night, taken from a pier on Alaska Way on a crisp evening in July

Book Review: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

My first encounter with Umberto Eco was through Foucault's Pendulum, which I found a difficult if compelling read.  You might think of FP as the book Dan Brown might have written had he been better-read and less interested in…well… readers.  It is a thinking person’s DaVinci Code… a very well-read and patient thinking person. 

I struggled to keep my head above water, and mostly failed. Eco is vivid and brilliant.  He also, in my view, sometimes edges toward the pedantic, unable to suppress the semiotic detail that cascades through what must be tightly integrated academic and novelistic lives (Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, though, that is probably an understatement equivalent to saying that Bill Clinton is a politician from Arkansas).

The word semiotics is, as far as I understand it, is the philosophy of communication.  In FP,  the historiography, symbolism, and dramatic narrative were so serpentine as to overtax my sparse understanding of the two millennia of the history of Christianity. I couldn't find traction in the story, though certainly it was a memorable confusion.   His latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, is far more accessible to this casual reader, perhaps because the semiotics is distinctly 20^th century, and in general more familiar.

The book is built around a middle aged man, Yambo, who has lost his personal memory to a stroke, but retains the public, shared experience of literature and daily living (I can't say whether this is a common mode of amnesia, but the device is integral to the book).  The narrative describes his search for his own past, and his rediscovery of his family's history in fascist Italy of the 1930’s and 40’s.

Much of the book involves the protagonist's reconstruction of self in the long-closed-up house of his upbringing, where he recovers parts of his identity, including his intellectual, sexual, and moral coming of age.

Loana uses graphic devices uncommon in books outside the so-called 'graphic novel' genre. There are hundreds of color images interspersed in the text. These pictures remind us why the cover-art of online book catalogs are so important, evoking as they do our history with content we’ve known, or acting as visual trigger to suggest expectations in content we don’t.  It is a surprisingly engaging device.

Eco has given us a novel of a high intellectual order that explores the origins of self and morality, and illustrates the importance of personal and cultural memory, and how bereft of identity we are without both.  It is also a good story, well told; I wanted to find out what happens.

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Image: The elevator ride to the Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Center) in New York City.  April, 2006, by the author