Ghosts + Break-Ups: Your Final Projects

We’ve wrapped up our fourth semester of my Archives, Libraries + Databases class. And once again, it proved to be the highlight of my fall. We visited the Municipal Archives, the Reanimation Library, the Interference Archive, and the Morgan Library. Kate Eichhorn came to visit to talk about archival theory and feminist archives. Radhika Subramaniam… Read More »

A-B-C-D-Eskimos

Perec’s paper on classification brings up some interesting ideas and concepts that examine they way we perceive informational hierarchies. Perec uses some (slightly hilarious) examples to illustrate how classification tends not to consider the depth of a topic prior to classification, such as his distinction that Utopia’s are inherent’s depressing due the taxonomical nature of… Read More »

Aesthetics, so labor

As Christian Paul points out, “the tension between the mostly linear and hierarchical structure of databases and instructions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the seemingly infinite possibilities for reproducing and reconfiguring the information contained within these structures,” very much characterizes digital art. Aesthetics can necessitate certain structural shifts and these are more… Read More »

The job of a data analyst is just like a painter

This week’s topic reminds me a lot of stuffs in my previous work. At that time, I was a data analyst in a research company. Everyday’s job is to deal with bunches of data,data,data… Yet the research data in our clients eyes are totally different from our perspectives. In client’s perspective, the data are orderly… Read More »

Digital Archeology and Preservation

This week’s reading was very interesting to me because I felt I was reading about hard core archeologists and archivists even though what they dealt with was digital files. What they do has its own beauty and excitement and recognize the importance of their work. The video on discovering Warhol’s lost digital arts on Amiga… Read More »

A "virtual" bite of Chinese traditional food (a case of audio-video combination)

http://youtu.be/ZYjc0ziF3cw?list=PLodP2yDwGRJHDoEGcR4P3iSwow4YGaur_ Hi guys! Attached is the documentary I mentioned in class, called “A Bite of China”. In this series of documentary the audio-video elements are perfectly mixed and inspire some feelings like taste or fragrance that could not be objectively expressed in a video clips. So amazing and so enlightening to my project idea. The… Read More »

data power.

How we keep track of things – how we remember and store our ideas, arguments, facts, and questions always comes down to some sort of record. Sometimes that record is only our mind, a mental record – the simplest, yet most convoluting method possible. Our minds may think we remember purely, but with all the… Read More »

The attitude towards big data

For this week’s reading, I found the “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge” of Chaim Zins is quite inspirational. In this article Zins argues identifies the concepts and concretes of “data”, “information” and “knowledge” with a semantic method. With Zins’ concept, the data are existing symbols, the knowledge is embodiments and the information… Read More »

Information Machine

In the film Information Machine, the narrator describes people store information “in active memory bank” and use the information to “sort out and relate to the problem”. The narrator calls people “artists”. Human brains are described as if they are machines when information is being processed and stored but when information is taken out of… Read More »