Author Archives: Nicolas Malevé
Computational linguistics as seen by Stanislaw Lem
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions […]
Anarchive, Wolfgang Ernst
“The term archive has been the dominant metaphor for all kinds of memory.” Listen online An interview made by SON[I]A.
Francis Galton’s Composite Portraiture meets Wittgenstein’s camera
Galton also devised a technique called “composite portraiture” (produced by superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals’ faces registered on their eyes) to create an average face. In the 1990s, a hundred years after his discovery, much psychological research has examined the attractiveness of these faces, an aspect that Galton had remarked on in his original […]
250 000 labels
This document, edited by Antonio Torralba, contains the notes written by Adela Barriuso describing her experience while using the LabelMe annotation tool. Mrs Barriuso has no training in computer vision. In 2007 she started to use LabelMe to systematically annotate the SUN database. The goal was to build a large database of images with all […]
Capta
Etymologically the word data is derived from the Latin dare, meaning ‘to give’. In this sense, data are raw elements that can be abstracted from (given by) phenomena – measured and recorded in various ways. However, in general use, data refer to those elements that are taken; extracted through observations, computations, experiments, and record keeping […]
The index at work
Erasmus censored The censorship of books by the Catholic Church has been a complex process. The list of books to be banned is first compiled in an Index, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Then the books are physically altered. Various censored specimens have been kept and give us the chance to see the index at work.
in the case of templates the writing itself becomes peripheral to the processing
Excerpts from Matthew Fuller’s It looks like you’re writing a letter The Templates, sample documents that the user can edit to make their own, with their repertoire of ‘elegant fax’, ‘contemporary fax’ to ‘formal letter’ or ‘memo’, acknowledge that forgery is the basic form of document produced in the modern office. The purest manifestation of […]
Tabou
Words banned by proclamation and restored through expiatory ceremonials. The Abipones as declassifiers? Dans la langue des Abipones du Paraguay, on introduit des mots nouveaux chaque année, car on supprime par proclamation tous les mots qui ressemblent aux noms des morts et on les remplace par d’autres. On comprend que de tels procédés liquident la […]
Templates after the fact
The edits of the declassifiers do not merely hide some content to preserve secrecy or privacy. They also underline the repetitive nature of the requests and controls that are taking place in the administration. The words that are “redacted” become like variables in a template.
The declassifiers
A declassified document is a document that ceases to be classified as secret. The process of declassification is not a simple publication of a once secret document. It leaves its traces on the document. When the document is released for public scrutiny, parts of it may still be removed. The classification of the paragraphs is […]