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.
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 this so far is 419 Fraud, named after the Nigerian Statute that outlaws it. 419 consists of tens of thousands of letters, apparently coming from government officials, company directors, military officers, approaching Western bank account holders with an incredible offer. The letters claim an insight into some impending calamity or coup and requests that the recipient aid the senders by allowing their bank account to be used to move capital out of Nigeria in return for a generous commission. All that is requested is a simple downpayment. And then another. A couple more. The entire operation is based around faxes and letters, an industrial scale semiotics of fraud: letterheads, confidentiality, intimations of corrupt generals, numbers in government departments and corporate headquarters, calls to aid the world’s poor, stranded bank accounts, readily available cynicism with politics, the ploy of the African simpleton working the racist sucker. The believable template, hooked up to the mailing list database is an economic machine that works all the better, all the more profitably, if it is fuelled on fraud.
Whilst “In mechanised writing all human beings look the same” in the case of templates the writing itself becomes peripheral to the processing. Employment agencies on the net have been found to be advertising non-existent jobs in order to pull in trade and the appearance of market share. Tens of thousands of people respond with their CVs. For jobs knocked up by the batchload on a CGI form come a multitude of self-starting no-dozers with ski-lift productivity profiles as per the thrilling careers of the templated exemplars that come with the program.
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 possibilité d’un récit ou d’une histoire: la langue n’a plus de dépôt du passé, elle se transforme avec le cours réel du temps.
[…] (ces prohibitions) semblent aller de soi., être des impossibilités naturelles, et peuvent être levées ou expiées par certaines cérémonies.
Julia Kristeva, Le langage, cet inconnu, 1981.
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. (more…)
A document declassified by the NSA[/caption]
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 shown in the margins. How protection of state secrecy meets vandalism.
Appearing in the New York Times, a posting by Mark Vanhoenacker about flight.
The world’s airspace is divided. There are various sorts of divisions. To the pilots who cross them every day, their borders form what we may regard as the countries of the sky.
[…] An airplane typically navigates through sky countries along a route composed of a few radio beacons and many waypoints. Waypoints are defined by coordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon, and by a name, which typically takes the form of a five-letter capitalized word — EVUKI, JETSA, SABER — that’s pronounceable and distinct to controllers and pilots regardless of their first language. Waypoint names are the sky’s audible currency of place, atomized and distinct.
Many waypoint names are random, but others are not.
Commenting on Hacker News, therockspush notes how the waypoints around San Francisco reflect underlying Silicon Valley, with waypoints named: UTOOB, NTELL, EBAYE, and CISKO.
Arcane 17 is a text by André Breton written at the end of the war while traveling on the East Cost of Canada. Arcane 17 is a book object that contains text, images and objects.
A report from one of the Cqrrelations working groups:
From the start we were interested in how a Gold Standard is established, a paradoxical situation where human input is both considered a source of truth, and made invisible. Annotation here means the manual work of ‘scoring’ large amounts of data that can than be used for ‘training’ algorithms. This scored data becomes a the reference against which the algorithm is trained and tested. The Annotator is typically a student or Mechanical Turk worker, or sometimes the work has been already done for another reason, such as in the case of the sentiment analysis algorithm, where the Gold Standard for deciding between positive or negative language patterns is based on a large corpus of movie reviews along with explicit rating of the described movie.
In-between the solution-oriented and mystifying descriptions of several algorithms for text-mining that we looked at, the actual conditions, context and work of annotation felt surprisingly undervalued and under-documented. Only in a few cases, and often hidden far away in software sources, we found descriptions of the method of annotation.
It seems that annotation always implies a contextualperspective. Scoring sources is also time consuming and boring; itcan only speed up when the annotator does not doubt her opinions. Through the development of pattern.en.paternalism we wanted to both experience and challenge this practice. Our decision to work with a contested ‘polarity’ such as paternalism, was of course deliberate.
We wanted to:
Understand the work of annotation
Expose the place/role of the annotator
See what place dissent could have in text-mining
[…] which is a quirk of temporal memory – one tends to fill in gaps with data only acquired later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord’s exit through the back of the retina.
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King.
Gödel proved that within any formal system sufficiently powerful to include ordinary arithmetic, there will always be undecidable statements that cannot be proved true, yet cannot be proved false. Turing proved that within any formal (or mechanical) system, not only are there functions that can be given a finite description yet cannot be computed by any finite machine in a finite amount of time, but there is no definite method to distinguish computable from noncomputable functions in advance. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, as Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the noncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance.
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, The origins of the Digital Universe, Vintage, 2011, p50.