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Part 1 Precontext to Technology

In this sectionwhich explores several influential works related to information technology and knowledge management. By examining these texts, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of how our relationship with information has evolved over time, and how we might continue to improve our ability to manage and share knowledge in the future.

Sources

@bushvannevarAsWeMayThink1945

@caulfieldmikeTheGardenandtheStream2015

@makbonnieHowThePageMatters2011

[[@wiegandwayneTheAmherstMethod1998]]

@kumarshiveFromClayTabletstotheWeb2013

January 9th History of the Internet

January 11th Archeology

First fire - [Archeology]: Explore what it means to be human through its traces - [Digital] pertains to digits; descrete numbers and computation as opposed to [Analog] systems, where the values is continuous. - [Memory storage] of the past - Jacquard cards - Mount Street Mills - AGC Rope - Different [thing]s and [places] of this history - Different [archeological theories] - Different [historical theories] - What are the questions? - [Space Economy Theory] - refers to the way invements in infrastructure contract the experience of space between places - [Complicated vs Complex Theory] - The things we study are often emergent from lower level elements - We've got [complicated] individuals enmeshed in systems that collapse time and space - [Complex]systems are useful for considering what happens when you've got many different kinds of things interating in non-linear ways. - [Assemblage Theory] - how does a thing gather unto itself? - assemblage composed of human and non-human - how actions are distributed across a network - you can't divide the world into physical objects/properties and human agency - it's the interactions that matters - Material Engagement Theory - The pot that emerges is driven by an idea in their mind. - the pot reacts to the reality of the clay, wheel, water, and past clays made, ambition for future pots. (SAME AS CODING) - [Perspectivism] - How something is recorded matters - many ways to make the decisions - these new categories of ideas emerge from engaging with the material - Like the pot & clay, if you don't see the relationship with clay, you don't even look to see it - Dr. Graham: a [network] is present whenever there is a relationship between two entities along which information flows. (Definition of information) - Networks form a substrate for social life, humans aren't the only things that have a social life - networks leave physical traces - more complex phenomena can emerge from interactions in certain network shapes - networks provide mechnisms which computation can happen - computation is inherent in the shape of the network - the components of a networked history are not just the technical objects, but also the assemblage - Questions to ask: - What are the [social]/[political]/[economic] contexts of the [people], [places], [things]? - What are the [assemblage]s that make the people, places, things up? - How do those assemblages extend in [time] or [space]?

People

January 16th Messages

  • physicality of messages/books has impacts in the world
  • physicality has changed over time / thus impacts in the world have changed
  • when new classifications shift, theres a shift in power too
    • every phase of the 'internet' that we see involves this shift
  • With digitization, messages/content had potential to be 'aware' of their relationship to other messages/content - key insight of the memex
  • 'hypertext' becomes an attempt at realizing that potential

[Messages and Mediums] - The Medium is the Message - Medium is something that carries something else [Cave Painting] [Clay Tablet] [Classification and the Catalogue] [Writing Evolution] - cuneiform in Mesopotamia - scripts in Crete - hieroglyphics in Egypt - Glyph systems in Indus valley - Rongorongo of Rapanui (Easter Island) - Varies Glyphs and Physical Systems (Knots / Puiqu / Wampum) in Central and South America - Character based symbols in China - notation systems for counting date even earlier [How did ancient people store and transmit information] - Clay Tablets - Papyrus - Stone - Wax Tablets - Engraved in Metals [Libraries] - Emerged before alphabetic scripts - Mari - Settlement founded at start of 3rd millenium - Owned more than 3000 letters from 1800-1750 (Starts of 2nd millenium) - The ability to own, control, have these things created power, status - Rooms of scrolls in little pigeon holes; in the roman world [bibliothecae] - Reflect the world back on itself - Melvil Dewey - Dewey Decible system - [[Memex]] - associative indexing, Vannevar Bush - [[Hypertext]] - capture what a computer might know? - [[Ted Nelson]] - Coined term Hypertext in 1965 -

January 23rd Secret Codes

  • When no one can read writing becomes a secret code
  • When a certain number of people can read or your enemies can, another layer of intensity has to be added
  • Why do we keep [[Secrets]]
  • Story of spy embedded within revolutionaries in 1775 Boston [[Dooley]]
    • cracked secret cyphers
  • Using [[metadata]] to find Paul Revere
  • Clytemnestra learning in Argos that the war had been won at Troy
  • Ploybuis using torches to perfect communications in war time
  • Scytale used by spartains, a transposition cypher
  • Al-Kindi - one ofo the great philosophers
    • 9th century worked in baghdad. one of the fathers of cryptoanalysis
  • Roger Bacon - 13th century - Europe - Describes various systems of secret writing known to him
  • Early Modern Europe (16th to 18th century)
    • intro of a new information technology in Europe (moveable type)
    • faster circulation of ideas
    • new ideas about god, relationship with people, nature of government
    • coinciding with the European age of discovery
  • Francis Bacon and the Bi-Lateral Cipher
    • De Augmentis Scientasium of 1623 lays out his system
      • Linkage to typerwriter
    • steganography
  • typesetting conevetions
  • nomenclators
    • popular in diplomatic circles in 1400 to about 1800
    • Marry Queen of Scotts - nomenclator broken thwarted her attempt to sieze power
  • Black chambers, break the nomenclators
    • Blaise de Vigenere, french diplomat mid 16th century, spends time in rome and becomes interested in encipher messages
  • Media for all of this was Paper
  • many solutions to a common problem emerged at the same time
    • semaphore or flag/torches
      • became mechanized in 18th century
  • Claude Chapper - French Revolution used flages at different angles to so send messages
  • Samuel Morse sends a message through electric telegraphy from Washington to Baltimore via wire in 1844
  • Questions to ask
    • Where are the gaps
    • Where are the women in this story
    • Who/What is left out
    • What otherthings had to have happened to support all this
    • Brecht Poem

January 30th Punch Cards

  • the point of as we may think article is the assemblage of contemporary technologies giving something of their background and fused imaginateively into the potential future
  • Given a certain kind of configurations of power and connections, similar ideas emerge at similar times
  • Weaving of threads
    • Middle Kingdom, 1897-1878 BCE MET
  • Amasis Painter, ca 550-530 BCE MET

  • Mediums of Weaving?

    • Flax - 4500 BCE
    • Wool
    • Silk - 3500 - 2700 years ago Archeology suggests
      • Made in India by 3rd Millenium BC
      • Required work to make silk made them luxury items
      • Threads so small that you cant see the weaving if done right
    • Created the silk roads (a linking of a variety of local trade networks into large one from China to Europe)
    • Drawloom invented in 2nd century BCE
    • procopius, 6th centruy chronicling, tells of some industrial espionage conducted to find where silk came from
      • Byzantium was a center for processing silk in 4th century
    • Lyons 15th century established Silk Industry in Lyon
    • Jacques de Vaucansons - 1709 - 1782
    • Joseph-Marie Jacquard - Napoleon
      • Uses punch cards to control lifting of warp threads and increase speed to make silk items
      • An approach that applied threaded together punch cards to the automatic control of the loom.
      • Assemblage of ideas
        • someone elsem ightve come up with the same idea also
        • Cards matter, not the Loom
    • Lovelace figured out how to program the loom
      • people design and build things with no idea how to make the things actually achieve results, and frequently the people who figure out the programming were women.
    • Punch card
    • Adam Schuster
      • Work on US census in 1880, took 7 years to count everything
      • 1890 census feared of not counting fast enough
      • realized he could combine punch cards with electric circuit
      • 1890 census took 2 years to process 62 million people
      • Coupled punch cards with electro-mechanical counting sets
    • What are the threads that had to come together
    • What are the assemblages that enabled these developments
    • What is left out
    • What other questions does this story raise

  • 24 x speed increase! (ie 2 feet per day)

  • replicable patterns, complex patterns, multiple machines producing identical swathes of silk

February 1st Electricity

  • Electricity
  • Animals create Electricity
  • Luigi Galvani
    • 1737 - 1798 Found electricity moved animal limbs
  • George Forster
    • law in early 19th c england let murders corpse be used for scientific purposes
    • Giovani Aldini, nephew of Galvani figured the dead could be reanimated
      • Frankenstein??? Mary Shelley
  • Thales of Miletus - 600 BC believed that all things had a soul
    • interested how if you rub amber with wool it attracted stuff
  • Word of Electricity varies over centuries
    • Gets more used in 16th / 17th century
    • William Gilbert in 16th Century observed how electricity attracted a needle/lodestone
    • always had a connections between electricity and life, even when we didn't know that there was one
  • Can we store Electricity?
  • Pieter van Musschenbroek invents the Leuden jar - tried capturing static electricity
    • known as first capacitor
  • How fast does electictiy go
    • Jean Antoine Nollet arranged 200 monks and found they all got shocked instantly
  • Ben Franklin notices that an iron point can conduct electricty away from a charged iron sphere
    • Develops lightening rods to protect buildings and ships
  • Alessandro Volta, 1745-1827 becomes aware of Galvani and disagreed
    • argues electric current was a functions of moisture note animal forces.
    • Battery 1800
      • Helps kick start systematic experiemnets and research into electricity
  • Electricity and Magnets
  • Hans Christian Orsted worked out that current in elecrtic wire creates a circular magnetic field
  • Michael Faraday - Works out how to go the other way, use magnets to make electricity
  • Joseph Henry - inventor of many elecrical devices, including the relay
  • All these things were discovered by multiple people at the same time
  • Telegraph
    • Once henry and others invented how circuits can make juice flow with insulations, messages at distance now feasable
    • 1830s saw this and steam powered railways
      • if you wired up enough batteries to a magnet, you could pump enough electricty to do work at a distance
  • We can
    • Store electricty
    • induce electricity to travel
    • induce changes in some device at point B by altering the electricity at point A
    • know how magnetic fields and electricity areconnected
  • Things wouldn't of happened without the industrial revolution, without professionalization of what it meants to experiement, to communicate scientific, industrial, engineering knowledge
  • For these works to exist, what else had to exist

obsidian-memex/docs/index