Interactive Archiving

Hi all. Sorry for the lax updating, it's been busy. My biggest side project is starting to get into gear for the season and various other creative pursuits have been keeping me busy. (But sadly, not SxSW…deploying things today!)

The Times posted a nifty piece on digital archiving, which is delighting both my technically and curatorially geeky halves.

Writing down ideas is kind of weird. Kind of like money, when you put stuff on paper, it's not really the idea being put down, but something like a symbol for the idea. And the symbols can have varying layers of complexity. One of my favorite pieces of digital and interactive art lets you play with this idea abstractly. Digitally storing information is like adding another degree of complexity to the symbols. Not only are the funny squiggles there, we've encoded them into ones and zeroes and committed the symbols of symbols to a very finicky storage medium.

What delights me about the rising field of digital curatorship is how these curators are pioneering new ways of interpreting those symbols. As in the case of the Emory curators, they're trying to allow collection visitors/patrons to interact with an approximation of Mr. Rushdie's subjective experience of writing. (With emphasis on approximation.) Here visitors are getting so much more than the content of the documents, they're having an interactive experience with the information.

But like a lot of cool art, it's necessarily ephemeral as a result of the media it's stored on and the technology used to interpret the symbols. (Or rather than art itself, the archive installation is a symbol of the art itself, perhaps? More like an imprint of the act of creation for the final work of art, Rushdie's novels.) While it's sad to think we'd lose the records, that almost makes it that much more interesting an experience. Like a bottle of fine wine, there's some beauty in experiencing something wonderful yet fleeting, and it's an idea you see in other areas of art. One of Eva Hesse's favorite sculptural media was latex; she would specifically treat it so that the material would degrade faster. When she died she instructed one of her assistants to destroy several pieces of her work. A resistance to permanence is also a big part of performance art (hence some controversy over the Marina Abramović show, which features the reperformance of some of her pieces.)

While this makes digital art that much more interesting for me, it's also incidentally why I refuse to pay for mp3s or other digital content without a physical disc. Data is fragile. (I love when people get all nostalgic about CDs. Yes, I still maintain a CD/DVD collection.) As Ms. Cohen points out, it depends on the storage media, and the current data storage technology is far from indestructible. But that makes computing machinery that much more interesting as an artistic medium.

“Fully safe”

Real quick: German government advises against using Internet Explorer

It's fairly droll that the "increased security setting" wouldn't make IE "fully safe." Well yes, there's no such thing as guaranteed safety online. Obviously the attack on Google was advanced or else they wouldn't be talking about throwing away a solid toehold in a serious market that they would have a hard time recovering. I think it's a safe assumption that this sort of attack isn't going to happen to the average user.

Anyway, in the interest of honesty I don't use IE because it indirectly caused me to require a new harddrive when I upgraded to IE8. But I have the great misfortune of running Vista…

Victims of success?

I love the adage that "Stats don't lie," because it's so accurate in one manner of speaking, and so totally absurd in another. Data is data: it's how we interpret the data that's often the source of debate.

In the case of last week's Pew study the data has sparked a debate that this blogeuse is loving. I first read about it from The New York Times, whose article was (fascinatingly, I think) less about the findings and more about the interpersonal element – how are we subjectively experiencing the demographic shift?

Initially when reading about some interpretations of this data along the lines of this NY Times blog piece seemed irksome. Really, why terms like "Alpha" with the confrontational connotations in analyzing the situation? Obviously something a male-dominated media might do. Likewise, seeing expressions like "wearing the pants in a relationship" make me cringe, not only for the implication that any one person in a couple needs to be dominant, but that it's no longer true in a literal sense. Everybody wear pants anymore, people.

But the reality is that money = power. It's not a particularly nice truth, but there it is. And I do like that the Pew study has started a debate that acknowledges that there is an unintentional power dynamic in a committed relationship between cohabiting couples. (I hesitate to say "marriage" because there are many common law, civil unions and other "nontraditional marriages" which would have the same qualities I'm writing about.) No matter how much two people strive to make all decisions together, when one member of the couple has the better job, there's going to be a little more influence to make life decisions like moving in favor of supporting that member's job. It's not always a question of regarding both people's wishes and coming to a decision together as much as, we need to eat. We're going to go where we can eat.

So back to the Times piece. The upshot of the piece that Mr. Roberts seems to want us to gather is that women are becoming "victims" of a male backlash from this shift. I won't disagree that there are men floating around who don't like the idea of smart women, women in power and with resources. And I've certainly experienced for myself how much it sucks to be condescended to by men who were making themselves feel better.

But that's their problem, not ours. We're clearly doing well, and other peoples' insecurity is not our fault. How does that make us "victims?"

Investing in Girl Geekitude

Last night's dinner was entirely worth the late trip back to Brooklyn from Microsoft HQ. I was pleasantly surprised with the good advice offered by Ms. Bonnie Halper of StartUpOneStop.com and pleased (though not surprised) with how engaging Ms. Sarah Chipps of girldeveloper.com was. The attendees were interesting and conversation was delightful (hooray for finding fellow runners!)

Something that struck me even before signing up for the dinner though, which was then reinforced at the event, was how Microsoft and .NET heavy the speakers were. Which of course makes sense – the event was sponsored in part by Microsoft and the event was hosted at their offices. That's quite smart of Microsoft. They're investing in a segment of the development market that might not necessarily be as exposed to the up-and-coming technology in development that they would look for in their hiring practices, and then pushing their own products. As I can attest, it is intimidating going to tech events that you know are going to be an all-boys club. Case in point, the Microsoft Evangelist who gave a talk on Silverlight, Mr. Peter Laudati, commented right off the bat that though accustomed to speaking before large groups, they were generally always men with a few women. Last night it was the opposite: all women with a handful of men.

From a strictly business standpoint, Microsoft is getting the one up on competitors who aren't investing in the development of the female half of the talent pool. They helped facilitate a great set of panelists and created some good networking opportunities. By doing that, they had the opportunity to seriously push their own technology. And boy, did they. Laudati's title couldn't have been more apt, (I'll admit, I was impressed with his Bing maps demo, and I am a fiend for Google) and Chipps' background is straight up .NET (she hilariously Photoshopped "C++ for Baby Geniuses" over a book being read by her in a childhood photograph).

What amused me about Laudati's talk was how he seemed slightly nervous about the fact that he was speaking for an all-women group. He spent a good two minutes I would estimate commenting on how problematic it is that there are so few women in the room at most of his talks. I was thinking to myself, "Well, duh. You're preaching to the choir on that. But what about the cool stuff I can develop with your product?" It brings to mind a similar point Chipps made in her blog not long ago that talk is essentially cheap. People aren't going to respect you as a developer unless you're doing cool things. So stop talking and go do cool things.

I wished I could have made this point to Mr. Laudati (whose talk ran 15 minutes overtime. I felt terrible for the speaker from hakia.com) so I might have had more time to hear about Silverlight, which I knew a bit about but was very intrigued to hear more. At one point near the beginning he commented that "this is all very technical" and I thought to myself, "Yeah! Because we're all techies! We like technical!" I wanted to hear about exciting new development technology, and felt a bit gypped that time was wasted wibbling about a problem everyone in the room was aware of. The problem is why we were in the room in the first place.

So to add something to Ms. Chipps' comment, "shut up and build something." But if you're going to talk, make it worthwhile!

Life without QA...

…and you get this. The MSN startup window when I signed in last night. [twitch]

Which (because of its Microsoft sponsorship) reminds me, the next New York Girl Geek Dinner is next week. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Girl Developer. This will be my first GGDNYC event; I’ve been impressed with the diverse selection of speakers that past events have boasted. Definitely looking forward to it.

Finding projects on Facebook?

On Wednesday The New York Times health blog mentioned a University of Texas study on the accuracy of people's Facebook personas to real life. I love that a serious study is being conducted regarding Facebook usage, and think it sometimes gets short shrift when people talk about online networking.

The U of Texas study suggests that, perhaps surprisingly, people's genuine personality traits can be accurately deduced from the persona they present via their Facebook profile. I would suspect though that a natural effect of finding participants who have sufficient Facebook activity to give a personality assessment is that the sample would skew toward extroverts. But, assuming the study's conclusions are accurate, it also has implications from a networking perspective.

Interesting career and collaborative opportunities can come from some of the most unexpected places, and Facebook is helpful in keeping tabs on interesting people. I tend to use mine as a sort of über Rolodex tool in that I can keep the contact information for people I meet in one place. If one can count the profile information as a good indicator of personality, it would be possible to get a feel for how they might fit in to the culture of a potential new workplace or how they might mesh with a development team for a project you may potentially collaborate on.

If used right, one might be able to reconsider the use of a Facebook page as another tool for networking. Perhaps this is part of a larger Gen Y trend to be comfortable mixing the personal and the professional, but I like the idea that people are taking a personal online social network seriously to study its effects, and can hope that that information will encourage people to rethink how they use them.

More on patterns in swarms

Shortly after my last post I wound up chatting with my good buddy Nick about swarm behavior. Radiolab did a fun ep on swarm intelligence their last season, totally worth checking out if you're interested in more info (or if you're more of an aural learner).