Adventures in Curation

machado

Using Harpers Magazine as a Tool for Filtering: Curation Rules/Filters/Nets/Skeins

I have been thinking and working out loud lately on the subject of curating. I have been scraping links off of newsletter pages or, as in the case below, from Harpers Magazine’s Weekly Review for October 4,2016. Matthew Sherrill “curates” the week’s Browsings .  Harper’s has a long history for me with this kind of intellectual sifting with its “Index”, a collection of interesting numbers from lots of different sources.  Of course, the issue for me is how I can develop a humane curation algorithm that doesn’t involve hours upon hours on a browser.  Suffice to say I am not there yet and the notes below are just that–notes toward an iconoclastic algorithm.

The algorithm is far from the more humane system I am looking for, but there have been some interesting discoveries as I work through the internet-as-tsunami issues.  Creation is a form of filter.  These links inspired a lot of creativity.  Curation is a way to force yourself to make sense personally of the wide morass of news that bubbles up each week. Observing is a perfectly acceptable way of curation.  I guess what I mean by that is that ‘thick’ summary can be great curation.

One positive side effect of this work has been the creation of lots of material to be shared.  I only intended to curate for my own understanding and exploration, but now I see how sharing is a natural consequence. That should have been obvious, right.  To curate means to curate for someone else, for an audience outside of yourself.  In the end I find it useful for my own reflection and understanding. If someone else digs the voice here, I guess that’s gravy.

Notes Toward a Humane Curatorial Algorithm

 First, get rid of non-content links (navigation, repetitive links, social media connections).

 Second, segment the content into the original newsletter divisions or divisions of your own.

 Third, “renegotiate the links”: reading through the remaining links without the integument of the original post. Choice here: random within the larger context areas or in the same order as presented? Hmmm.  This is a choice between the trail blazed and a new one considered.  I think that I will stick to the blazed trail and renegotiate the meaning on that road as I walk it. “Wanderer. There is no road, the road is made by walking.”~Machado

 Fourth, create filters.

 Ask a question, “What are the most important links and why?”

 Ask a question, “What might my readers be most interested in and why?”

 Observe and make sense of links ad hoc as I am doing in the Discoveries section below.

Create/respond/translate/derive/transmogrify/borrow/mashup/remix

 Fifth, note discoveries based upon filters both conscious (from questions) and otherwise (from some deep ‘interestingness’ unrelated to overt question—a gut feeling.  See the Chris Offut article below

The Original Stories

Filtering by Discovery and Thick Observation

Washington Post uses the public annotation tool Genius to allow reporters to have “featured” annotations.  Note that someone else, @kamsash, using Hypothes.is has also publicly annotated the debate transcript. 
Pure political chicanery
Texas is worried about Syrian immigrants killing Texas citizens.  Chickenshit Texans.  Is that redundant? Yep.
Adding guns to any mix raises the temperature of reality in ways that are totally unpredictable.  
“I saw a woman pinned under concrete,” Shah told NBC New York. “A lot of people were bleeding; one guy was crying.”
 Two Syrias?

Filtering by Creating

So…if you are black and you are holding any object (or not), then…Created this flow chart to note the horror of this story and the multi-score and more since …forever.
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“I saw a woman pinned under concrete,” Shah told NBC New York. “A lot of people were bleeding; one guy was crying.”
I created a screencast about ‘people bleeding’ 
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Allepo Is Burning
I am in the process of creating a multimedia object called a zeega that is my way of coming to terms with the horrible contradiction of the Syrian Civil War.  
Also been thinking about Mosul and its terrible story.  Using an inhuman voice to tell an inhuman story.  Just connected these two in my mind Allepo&Mosul.
Somebody hacked a public billboard.  Any connected thing is capable of being hacked.  The Internet of Things is a growing universe of things to be hacked.  What happens when the most routine aspects of our day can grow out of control.  How do you grab control of a billboard? Signage and video everywhere has the potential to be a public embarrassment/a public statement.  What will our response be: the terrorist response and the application of overwhelming force including more burdensome laws and regulations or censorship of public signage or ever more draconian security measures or what?

Filtering by Making Sense

What happens when we have multiple social annotation platforms addressing in different channels a public response to public record speeches.  Is there a public policy need to have an accepted channel for public discussion.  And what about techquity issues for those who are unaware of or unable to join in?  Why is the Washington Post allowed to feature/privilege its reporter’s posts uber alles using Genius?  Since the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos are we beginning to see the possible “forking” of annotation platforms that are centrally owned by private hands like Amazon?
This is a link that takes you to another annotation tool, NowComment: https://nowcomment.com/documents/63620/
It doesn’t quite capture all the multimedia in the original webpage but it does gather together the text and images from the original from the article.  Shows how close (and far) we are from being able to do transmedia translations online.  Even text-t0-speech on Kindle is pretty hard to do although Pocket has solved the problem. (I would love to be able to record this internal text-to-speech as an audio file. Anybody know how?)
So…Congress passes a bill that allows U.S. citizens to sue the Kingdom of Saud (and any other foreign government) for 9/11 (or any other tortious action).  Totally political.  Our politicians sponsor this bill before the election. Nobody can vote against 9/11 victims before an election! So they pass the bill in the full knowledge that it is fraught with reverse consequences.  Does this mean that Yemeni citizens killed by drone strikes can sue the USof A? And if they win would that mean that international laws would allow US accounts be frozen until damages are paid? Suffice to say, the morons in the Congress passed it anyway and given the chance to back down because of the Obama veto, they overrode it anyway.  It is now the law of the land, but these scumbags in Congress are now making noises like they are going to ‘correct’ the bill.  This would likely allow them to re-vote during the lame duck session, thus having their 9/11 cake coming and going.  This is disingenuous to the max. 
Two corollaries here: (1) Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and (2) don’t be surprised that this happens in an authoritarian police state culture that values force over principle. In other words, if you give police power every single one will have his or her ‘fiddle’.  Of course, the same is true for anyone given any power.  As Madison once wrote so wisely, “If men were angels, no governments would be necessary.”
There are so many channels of communication now that didn’t exist even five years ago.  Many of them are not even text. Emojis, emoticons, memes, gifs with text, snapchat/instagram, etcetcetc. And it is breathtaking the speed with which this symbolic language can morph. Exhibit One is pepe the frog.  Here is a very listenable podcast by the inimitable PJ VOGT and ALEX GOLDMAN from “Reply All” doing some fancy ‘splainin’. If you are over 30, you can file this under “shit I don’t know and never would have know without a translation from a millenial.”  
This led me to the idea of “fear of no knowing”–FONK and that led me to NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture especially this post on FONK.  The post addresses not only FONK but also FONK-E, the ‘fear of not knowing ever’. We are bumping up on the theoretical limits of shit we can and cannot know—evah.
    • We can’t know what’s beyond our cosmic horizon, the bubble of information defined by the distance light has traveled since the Big Bang, around 46 billion light-years.
    • We can’t explain in deterministic fashion the essential randomness that takes over at the quantum level, having to accept that the possible outcomes of a measure are probabilistic.
    • We can’t construct a self-referential logical system that is closed, in the sense that every statement within that system can be proved, as the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel showed with his incompleteness theorems. �
    • A computer cannot include itself in a simulation; it is thus impossible in principle to simulate the universe as a whole, since the simulation would by necessity include itself. �
    • Humans may be cognitively impaired in understanding their own consciousness, a problem known in the cognitive neurosciences and related philosophical discussions as the “hard problem of consciousness.”
Here is a screencast of my curation of this new story that explores the notion of what is and is not newsworthy.
The Dutch government has determined that it was a Russian Buk missile that destroyed the MH17 Malaysia plane crash that killed nearly 300 innocent passengers over Ukrainian airspace almost two years ago. Institutional imperatives on the Russian side are heavily invested in denial yet Russian manufacturers know exactly what happened and are cashing in on nationalist fervor by creating a child’s bed that models the Buk missile launcher. A…child’s…bed.  
The dangers of monolithic, either or thinking.  The videos from Assad’s government are designed to make Syria appear safe for all while the ‘truth’ of eastern Syria is far from it.
Brexit and now the FARC vote.  Has the world gone mad?  What next a Trump November surprise?
I think Duterte is a Philippine premonition of what could happen if Trump wins.  Bad hair, fascist policy, and a general air of doom.  Would make a valid political cartoon.
Reading about the equation of war crimes with antiquity destruction, I am reminded about why I feel so ‘mxed’ about it—concept creep.  Is there anything that can not eventually become a war crime?  Read this article and let me know: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/04/09/the-most-dangerous-creep/
  • French citizens could soon be allowed to smile in passport photos
And why is this news?
  • The country is regularly ranked the most pessimistic nation on Earth,
And how can a ‘nation’ be anthropomorphized? aggregated what?
  • person must have a neutral expression and a closed mouth for a passport photo
And why must we be neutral?
  • “undertaker’s smile”,
And what are we undertaking with a neutral smile?  a lie?
  • A spokesman for France’s Interior Ministry hit back, maintaining the civil servant “doesn’t have a neutral expression because he’s unquestionably smiling”.
And this would make a grand MontyPython sketch. No it wouldn’t. Yes it would.
  • Mr Boulet thinks the verdict could change how people around the world think about France. “If we win, the French will give their country a pleasant face,” he said.
And the Ouroboros of absurdity rounds on its own tail, chomping away.
No wonder the kids attacked the church. On aesthetic grounds alone it is worthy of a stoning.
 Or maybe they thought they were re-enacting the story of the three little pigs.
 
 
Everything made legible and under control. An urban space means no roosters. Let’s confine the noise and chaos of domesticated critters to the rurals just like we do with the confined animal feeding operations (CAFO).  All the noise and stink and death away from me by God. Not in my backyard—literally. Let’s confine the rurals to the rurals, too.  
Read this incredible post at zero hedge (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/how-half-america-lost-its-fking-mind?page=2) and then consider the graphic below. If you live in a city we are out of sight and out of our minds and we are likely coming to an urban area near you—soon—uninvited.
A horrific story of cows eating themselves to death.  It doesn’t do anything to capture that horror. Stupid cows it almost says.  One badly clasped link leaves a gate open and the cattle follow the scent of food since all other instincts have been bred out of the sad beggars.  Just doing what comes unnaturally to them. Twenty two of them die.  Do you know what even one dead cow looks and feels and smells like? I didn’t think so.  Most folks don’t.  They are toxic meat bags to be dealt with, that’s what they are.  They are lost friends sometimes, animals you have likely raised from cradle to fucking untimely grave.  Multiply that by 22 and note that your entirely livelihood from milk is now gone.  Would I consider suicide? I can’t say I wouldn’t.  
Lost at the end of the story is this throwaway line (because we know the most important stuff is early in the story and the least newsworthy is at the end).  
  • “Mr Vaillant hopes to rebuild his herd through donations and help from his neighbours.”
And consider how this might work.  Consider how this rural community is struggling already and it now has another burden. My county used to be the third biggest milk producer in the state, now it’s not even in the top twenty.  I don’t think anyone here could have been relied upon to help Mr Vaillant even if they wanted to do so.  I remember when my father-in-law’s milking parlor burned down and he was able to borrow his neighbor’s until he rebuilt his own.  That is not happening anymore around me except in Amish communities. Wake up, cities.  No civilization has ever survived without a vibrant agri-culture.
Consider all the threads of human fate weaving together from all of their pasts, all of the people who had to survive to share their DNA with these two thieves, all of the circumstances that would leave the victim’s house empty—and this is what we get with this story—burglars having sex on their victim’s couch
Mike Judge addresses this in the hilarious opening to his movie, “Idiocracy”:
Did I miss the memo?  When did “Negro” become a term of racial opprobrium?  
Perhaps we are seeing another example of concept creep here.  To acknowledge race has crept from being acceptable to being racist.  The value we are promoting is raceblindness.  Admittedly, Bill Grandstaff was an African American cowboy who was remarkable historically to have lived successfully in a place not noted for its racial diversity.  So should we now ignore this historical fact in favor of a more nuanced version of history that would prefer to not know this in his name.  Inquiring minds want to know.  Concept creep. Cool term. Get to know it.  
Interesting that  Jeanetta Williams, “president of the Salt Lake chapter of the NAACP, also opposed the effort to change the name. She said the name wasn’t offensive and was a point of pride because it makes clear the canyon is named for a black historical figure.”
What maketh a story newsworthy?  Is there an objective rubric that tells us what to weigh and by how much?  In this case how much value is there in knowing the savage irony that a man’s son may have caught the Zika virus from his father’s tears, a heretofor unknown vector for transmission?  What are supposed to feel?  I suspect AP doesn’t give a fuck what we feel so long as we click on the story and feel a lot of it.  They don’t care if it bemused WTF-itude or depressed-and-here’s-another-reason-to-think-that-if-there-is-a-god-she-sure-ain’t-nice.  Or let’s put it this way, there is nothing in the article to indicate that there were any fucks given about the reader’s feelings.
And now for story to cleanse your emotional palate of zika tears, pedophiles, incest, and paranormal abuse.  Iceland turns out the street lights so as to turn up the effect of the borealis.
Catch a roundtrip flight on Delta tomorrow for $777. I am sure I have seen way cheaper.  
I don’t know why you got to the end, but if you did showers of good luck to you.
be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder beck tench rumi

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