Sample the Web

This post over at Boing Boing by Cory might prove useful for a class discussion, focused around how we write in a technological age. Here’s Cory’s bits:

Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that store his notes and works in unstructured databases, and tease out and suggest subtly connected ideas, so that as he writes, his computer jams with him, suggesting neat tangents to his subjects. It’s a great example of good computer-human interaction, where computers are used to programatically count and compare quantifiable elements (word and phrase frequencies) and human beings are used to pass judgement on the output of the computers. People are good at understanding and crap at counting; computers are just the reverse.

Cory then links to the New York Times Essay by Steven, which includes this interesting section touching upon the “next step” of computer and human collaborative writing:

The other day I ran a search that included the word ‘’sewage” several times. Because the software knows the word ”waste” is often used alongside ‘’sewage” it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.

That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems — whether cities or bodies — find productive uses for the waste they create. . . .

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn’t conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I’m not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

I wonder how this whole equation would change if you took it off the desktop and reoriented it towards the blog. How many bloggers use their sites as a sort of notebook of bits and pieces they find interesting and think they may use at a latter time? I know I use this blog in that fashion, often riffing in the rough on ideas I will write in a more polished manner for AppleMatters, an article, or perhaps my dissertation. Not only that, but I also actively use this website as a note-taking database. This very post is an example of me riffing on some ideas that I’ve read that I am considering repurposing and presenting to my class. I also probably search my own website more than anyone else who reads it. I remember some half thought that I may have blogged about and I run a quick search to find either a specific post, or a series of inter-related posts on the same topic.

I also have been a long-time user of DEVONthink PE, which is mentioned by Steven in his Times essay, and I have a good percentage of the research and notes for my dissertation plugged into that database for exactly the same sort of functionality that Steven and Cory are talking about. Nevertheless, I think blogging is changing the way I write more than any of these other forms of human computer interaction, simply because whatever I bounce around here has the potential of being bounced around the entire blogosphere. This means, I’m not only working with computers, but with other people with their other computers, and then we get into the very interesting field of writing as a social act. If you’re interested in exactly how interesting such a process can be, I recommend that you read Invention as a Social Act by Karen Burke LeFevre, which happens to be one of the few books on rhetoric from my studies at Illinois State University to which I continually find myself returning (in fact, I think it is the only one of those books which I still possess). This all, in turn, ties in nicely with Bakhtinian ideas of discourse. There are more voices in each word I use than my own, so that the computer’s response with a loose connection that I had not previously seen is actually a reverberation of the discourse of others within my own words.

Okay, that’s enough ranting about this. My head cold is seriously impeding my ability to think coherently on this any longer.