Notes IMG Seminar	
								Xin Wei Xin Wei
								18, 25 January 1996
Jan 18, Representations of digital media

		 Preliminaries on digital media structures:
			Î   Characteristics of writing
				Î   Citability, iterability, separability (Derrida, Signature Event Context)
				Î   Sign, Interpretant, Object, which requires consciousness
					 (eg. Peirce's entry for sign in Baldwin's dictionary of Phil. and Psych.
					Peirce On Signs, ed. James Hooper, p239-240)

			Î   Characteristics of documents
				Î   Fixity vs fluidity; extensibility (David Levy)

			Î   Digital media encoding, examples:
				Î   TIFF: Tagged Image File Format
				Î   AIFF; MIDI: (music device scripts); SCORE files
				Î   RTF: Rich Text Format
				Î   SGML: Structured General Markup Language: separates raw data, structure and rendering.
					example,structure encoding: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~xinwei/pub/img/media/hamlet_sgml.gif
					and rendered in NetScape: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~xinwei/pub/img/media/hamlet_netscape.gif
				Î   HTML: bastard of SGML, with hyperlinks
				Î   VRML: Virtual Reality Modeling Language
				Î   Mathematica: Graphics objects

			Î   Levels of description:
				Î   What is multimedia? http://www-asd.stanford.edu/Media2/pix/www/whatismultimedia.gif
				Î   I mention document to point out the ambiguity of defining what is a unit of  a writing system.   Word processors (based on character-runs) or graphics editors (based on objects) (ca 1995).   But multimedia databases and networked hyperdocuments use much larger structures: respectively BLOB's, and SGML-like encodings.

			Î   Expression, ----> to complexity, efficiency
				Î   http://www-asd.stanford.edu/Media2/texts/Innovation/perform06.html
				Î   Expressivity: how easily author can achieve an effect
				Î   What is the relation between complexity, efficiency, and expressivity?
				Î   Example: word processing, using menus vs. writing code
				Î   Example: making clothes from thread, dye and needle to express self, vs buy readymade

Jan 25 - Representations of digital media

		 Levels of description, revisited
		 Encoding vs language:  In the write-up for the Jan 1996 workshop on Description in the Age of Reason, it's asked, "are these machine instructions and design  parameters descriptions [sic], or merely mechanical filters?)  To my mind, filters would be more interesting than mere descriptions.
		What is "multimedia"?   Look at the chart of different writing systems, ordered by expressivity, efficiency:

		Blur boundaries between:
			object, intentional subject
			object, transformation upon object
			data structure, algorithm 
			
		 Performable writing?  See http://www-asd.stanford.edu/Media2/texts/Innovation/PerformableWriting.html

		Larry: this chart confuses, or doesn't acknowledge the difference between a description and a script (prescription for action).

		Michael: maybe better not to get sidetracked on expressivity or performance,  Maybe what's more interesting is to ask what can we do (that's different) in this digital represenations?   Maybe useful to think of "executable" wrtiing that 

		Xin Wei:  Exactly,  by "performable" I mean performable-by-computer, so it's synonymous with executable.  But I also had in mind enactive theories of consciousness, and the cyborg, so I use performable also for its connotative senses to provoke some move toward scripts as prescriptions for action, and leave open whether humans or computers are acting.

		Patience: How about accounting for recognition of style?   You can't get multiple interpretations out of a machine interpretation, or at best only a fixed number of interpretations that are pre-determined by the programmer.

	Larry: said something about deterministic and randomized preformance of scripts -- what about randomness?

	Xin Wei:  There's confusion between interpretation and enactment.   In fact, even now, a script -- program --  can be written that runs on a very large number of computer architectures, yet whose results are not predictable.   This is the inevitable result of sufficiently complicated dynamical systems.   (Deterministic systems may be unpredictable!)   In fact this does NOT rely on "randomness" .   We don't need to appeal to randomizers for this.  In fact, any algorithmic random number generator producees what careful people call pseudo-random numbers.   The closest we get to randomness is to appeal to quantum mechanics or people.

	But this is a different question from interpretation,-- how meaning or value is associated with a writing by the reader.   Interpretation brings in the issue of audience, reader, observer.

	Mark:  Wait, there are programs whose effect is fully predictable.

		Diane: And what of literary tradition?  We (interpretants)  recognize writings relative to tradition.

	Xin Wei:  I do believe the interpretant role (if not a classical unitary reader-subject) is absolutely crucial, and missing from my discussion.   But I want to understand more precisely what people mean by context, or interpretation, or  (literary)tradition.   For example, by saying a human can "see" ("recognize") a style of a painting by comparing it with some others by an artist, or that a musician "interprets" a score by, say , using rubato upon encountering a passage in the score (where another musician may play it straight through), could actually be eidetically simulated by, in the first case DSP & pattern recognizition, and in the second by rule-based systems.   It just seems to me that there must be more, and I;d like to understand what there is.   These example you give do not suffice.

(Hence my interest in Penrose's appeal to quantum mechanics, embodied theories of cognition...Johnson, Lakoff, Maturana's autopoeisis -- based on neural models.)

	Larry?:  Aren't you bracketing out the context, the reader?  And maybe you mean (as  Ben suggested) an information-theoretic interpretation of language, like information-preserving transofrmation...

	Xin Wei:  In fact,  I'm very well aware of the bracketing problem.    This is why I show such a chart to computer scientists, with the SRL (Survival Research Labs)  as a token for "multimedia" performance, going off the edge of the chart.   The very focussing on "representations of digital media" itself throws into relief this problem of  what's left out -- the interpretation.  And that's what I'd like to move to next in our thematic agenda. 

	Ben:   What's the context here?   Objected to an insidious dualism in my thinking.  Refer to Quine's chracterization of artifical languages (his comment on Carnap's project): two-dimensional space of languages:  inverse relation between complexity of space of transformational rules vs. complexity of encoding .   One could grant, a la Metz, a conventionalized sign system, and still question their meaning and value.  (I -XW- don't understand Ben's point completely...will have to talk more about this....)

	Xin Wei:  I am interested in how writing systems conventionalize sign systems.  In fact, I propose to look for ways to provisionally generate sign-systems, schema or models out of the vague fuzzy mess of some forms of human expression.   (The metaphor I have in mind is locally compact topological spaces, and theorems about when an abstract topological space is metrizable, or finite dimensional.)  And there's nothing transcendentally different between software  standards for media encoding that conventionalize meaning-sign, and older writing technologies, like say...typewriters.   Even typewriters converntionalized the way that individual letters were formed and spaced

	Michael:	This conventionalizing goes much farther Frank Weisman(?)  Film of students being scholled in proper typing.  (XW: This Latourian observation of how social norms become reified as technology  and adaptations totechnology reminds me of Quintillian's careful prescriptions on the proper training in rhetoric.   Also later, the rise of "official" orthography, calligraphic schooling in 19th (?) c Europe & America.   Sit up straight, breathe right...)