shirley niemans

Society of the Query conference: 13 - 14 November, Trouw Amsterdam in Amsterdam
With the Society of the Query conference -stop searching, start questioning-, the Institute of Network Cultures aims to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture. What does the dependency on the engine to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet mean? What alternatives exist? How can the increasingly centralized web be regulated? What is the future of interface design? By bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, the conference will examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design.

Introduction
Search is the way we now live. At present, the reality of the information society is one in which we are increasingly confined to the use of information retrieval tools to create order and value in the vast amount of online data. Web search has taken over from (directory based) browsing and surfing as the dominant activity on the web. With this development, the search engine has become the main point of reference, one whose emphasis on efficiency and service tends to cloud the nature of both the underlying technology and (corporate) ideologies.

In what might be dubbed the ‘society of the query’, this conference asks what this dependency on tools to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet means for our culture. As the idea of a semantic web unfolds, the human versus artificial intelligence controversy is regarded with renewed urgency. The increasingly centralized computing grid invites critical questions about power distribution, governance, and diversity and accessibility of web content, while on the other hand promising alternatives to the dominant paradigm arise in P2P and open source initiatives. With large investments in media literacy, what role might politics and education play in establishing an informed and technologically literate user base?

This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. The Institute of Network Cultures aims to do so specifically by bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, creating room for speculation and open questions, as well as concrete projects and research. Continue reading…

Last week, Govcom.org, the Amsterdam-based creator of info-political tools such as the IssueCrawler, celebrated its ten year anniversary. As part of the jubilee, a series of lectures called the ‘Amsterdam New Media Summer Talks: Networked Content’ was organized on August 11. The program, hosted by Richard Rogers, included talks by Warren Sack, Alexander Galloway, Greg Elmer and Anat Ben-David. As the theme suggests, the Summer Talks focused on the way Web-based content is organized, be it not from a user perspective, but by analyzing the way Web devices, such as crawlers and scrapers, actively affect content delivery. Co-organizer of the Summer Talks and the week-long workshop that followed, is the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. DMI aims to develop and display tools and methods for researching the ‘natively digital’, examples of which would be hyperlinks, threads and tags. The workshop was divided into four sub-themes; Studying Software, Cyberlands, Alternative Algorithms and Networked Content.

I took part in the Studying Software group (lead by Warren Sack) where we narrowed our focus to a device-centric study of news aggregators and alternative editorial processes. We worked towards defining a system that determined the geographic location of news sources surrounding a specific issue on Google News. Our aim was to explore whether geographical distance distinguishes significant differences of opinion. For instance, when discussing the issue of the Iraq War, is there a significant difference between French opinions and American opinions? Or, given the issue of “whaling” does the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Norway, Japan) have a significantly different way of describing the issue than does the Southern Hemisphere?

The protocol we presented at the end of the week describes a process where the input is a query (of one or more search terms in Google News) and the output is a set of colored, geographical maps. The maps show the geographical locations where one query term, for instance “North Korea”, co-occurs with a certain secondary keyword, such as “reunification”, “human rights” or “nuclear”. For instance, if the query is “North Korea” the process might determine that “North Korea” frequently co-occurs with the noun “reunification” in the news sources of North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and China; co-occurs infrequently in Brazil; and, co-occurs not at all in the rest of the world. Then, the colored map might show most of Asia tinted orange with 100% opacity; Brazil tinted orange with 20% opacity; and the rest of the world left blank. The actual scripting and testing of the proposed tool may lead to further refinements and related uses, such as the possibility to zoom in on the world map in order to get to the local sources, or to follow the development of an issue over a period of time.

Other research projects and tools realized during the Jubilee Workshop:

Nomadic Citizenship: Palestinian Cyberland goes Web 2.0
IP Browser
The Vigilance of Wikipedians