Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Archives for September 2006

9/11, Breughel and Auden

by

Thomas Hoepker's 9/11 photo The photo shows five people on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11. Two crouch, facing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan; three others stretch out on the embankment, facing away from the unfolding tragedy.

The photographer, Thomas Hoepker, waited four years to publish the image. He told David Friend, the author of the 9/11 book “Watching the World Change,” that his subjects were “totally relaxed like any normal afternoon.” Frank Rich wrote about the photo in his column last Sunday, saying it represented how the 9/11 trauma “would recede quickly for many.”

Now there’s a bit of a controversy, fanned by David Plotz in Slate, who argues that Rich was wrong on the face of it: “They’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.”
Ed Cone agrees.

Surely the photographer who was there understands the moment best? But wait — now one of the people in the photo has written in to Slate to say, no, the photographer got it all wrong, he never even talked to the people he was photographing, and of course they were talking about the attack on the World Trade Center and not just going about their daily business.

Breughel's IcarusWho knows? I wouldn’t jump to blame-throwing in any direction. Rather, I’d note that the power and the appeal of the image lies in the archetype it evokes, one that goes back to an extremely famous Breughel painting: Breughel’s Icarus. You’ve probably seen it — it’s the one with the closeup of the ploughman in the foreground and the mythic tragedy unfolding so far in the distance it barely registers. W.H. Auden explicated the painting in his “Musee des Beaux Arts”; it’s about relative perspective, life going on while great events unfold in the background, and the way the ripples of tragedy and heroism pass over the surface of deep waters leaving nothing behind.

If Hoepker got his explanation of his image wrong, it’s important to know; and bless the Internet for making it easy for people to correct the record. Still, the image is potent on its own because it plugs into this tradition of thought. The people in Hoepker’s photo may have been fully engaged with the events of 9/11 at the instant the image was captured, but the image itself tells a different story, one of people at a safe remove from tragedy, unaffected visibly by it.

As Auden said: Suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Towers fall, yet “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” That’s the truth, and I think that’s ultimately what Rich was writing about.
[tags]9/11, photography, w.h. auden, breughel[/tags]

Machine-readable data and human-memorable stories

by

I spent much of the last few years immersing myself in the lore and culture of computer programmers, but not until today did I encounter the Lojban phenomenon. Lojban is an invented language (in the tradition of Esperanto, which I actually studied for a couple of months in seventh grade, thanks to Mr. Glidden). One Lojban enthusiast was profiled on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal; the article was mostly about a German programmer who has led a campaign against software patents in Europe. But it mentioned in passing his interest in Lojban, “an artificial language…intended to eliminate ambiguity and promoted by some programmers.”

Eliminate ambiguity? No wonder programmers are leading the bandwagon.

The Journal’s shorthand description may not do full justice to Lojban, which turns out, according to Wikipedia, to be an evolution out of Loglan, a “logical language” intended to “test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” (the idea that the structure and nature of language shapes human thought). There is much more here at Lojban.org and also here — including the idea that Lojban is structured to be more machine-readable (i.e., intelligible by computers) than naturally occurring human languages, making it well suited for “human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence research.”

I got to thinking about Lojban and the desire to smooth out all the fuzziness and overlap of our naturally evolving languages while reading Adrian Holovaty’s fascinating recent posting about the future of newspapers. Holovaty is a pioneering figure at the crossroads of the newspaper and technology industries; he started out working for newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas, where he and a group of Python developers created the content-management framework now known as Django; now he’s with the Washington Post.

Holovaty’s post argues that the “story” paradigm of newspaper journalism is a straitjacket the profession needs to shed if it expects to make full use of computers in its future. Stories are just “big blobs of text”; they’re not structured in ways that allow their data to be reused creatively. Newspapers are producing vast volumes of information each day, but because they don’t store the information in ways that allow it to be computer-readable in meaningful ways, they are failing to take real advantage of what technology can do with it all.

I think Holovaty is basically right, particularly when he points in the direction of information like weather data, sports scores, crime stats and the like — “news” that is essential metric, information that arrives from day to day in a relatively predictable format and ought to be stored in ways that let you compare it and reuse it. And he’s smart enough to understand that the structured-data model he is advocating wouldn’t and shouldn’t replace real old-fashioned stories: “News articles are great for telling stories…The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.” Amen.

But I’d also like to pause and reflect for a moment on the enduring value of the “story” as a tool for human memory compression.

Unstructured information, Holovaty complains, is information with a short shelf-life: “The information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.” That’s not quite true: It has no chance of being repurposed by machine. But the process whereby a writer distills a volume of data and detail into a coherent narrative that sticks in the memory, if done with lively care and skill, is one that very much promotes “repurposing” by other people. The story sticks in the mind. You repeat it to your friend at work or your spouse over dinner. They get interested and repeat it. In exceptional cases the story becomes a part of the collective memory.

The kind of “repurposing” that machines do with structured data isn’t often going to result in that kind of experience. It’s closer to the stuff that has always been looked down on in newsrooms as “service journalism” or “news you can use.” That condescension is regrettable, but it’s in part inspired by journalists’ awareness that this sort of work really can be done pretty well by machine.

The “repurposing” of structured information that Holovaty describes — say, the ability of someone looking at a Little League schedule to call up the weather forecast for that day and location — is highly useful. So far, as he points out, the newspaper industry has failed to offer such services, or even see them as part of its mission. And so Yahoo and similar online “portal” businesses have moved into the vacuum and turned them into businesses that newspapers now eye jealously.

But Holovaty’s post suggests a way that newspapers — and, really, any journalistic enterprise — can get back into the game. If newsrooms begin to build up storehouses of structured data, someone’s going to need to look through them for patterns and insights. Why are state corporate tax returns dropping in a booming economy? If twice as many restaurants opened this year as last year, why were there only half as many health citations? Are sunspots governing the fortunes of the local high school football team? (OK, so there’s also room for fun and nonsense.) This is the kind of work newsrooms remain uniquely well-situated to perform.

In other words, there’s still plenty of room for the old-fashioned journalistic roles of fact-finder, truth-teller, story-creator. The quest to make more information more useful to machines isn’t an end in itself; it’s a way-station along the way to telling new kinds of stories — lovingly mined out of machine-organized data and then composed in “big blobs of text” for human consumption.

I’ll be glad to read those blobs in a language that still leave plenty of room for double meanings and for poetry. Lojban looks fascinating, but I’ll keep my ambiguity, thank you. Wordplay and nuance and music don’t fit easily into a database schema — but they’re how we encode data so it sticks with us long-term. They delight us, and that delight carves new pathways in our brains. Story is repurposed into memory. It’s our ancestral algorithm. Computers don’t really get it. But who says we have to change for them?
[tags]journalism, newspapers, structured data, storytelling[/tags]

The war without end, at one and five years

by

Today’s 9/11 anniversary hoopla left me cold. May the dead rest in peace, may the living go in peace, and may the U.S. never again live through such a day. And may we never again be governed by such a gang of incompetent, self-serving, short-sighted fools.

I have little to add to the words Frank Rich offered this past weekend, lamenting the disappearance of the all-too-brief moment of national unity after the al-Qaeda attacks, squandered by an administration determined to drive wedges rather than build alliances and to start new wars rather than finish current ones. My colleague Walter Shapiro offers an astute analysis of Bush’s speech tonight, with its hyperbolic rhetoric of war without end; I couldn’t bear to watch it.

Instead, in thinking back to the immediate post-9/11 era, I looked back at a brief piece I wrote on the one-year anniversary of those attacks. At that time, Bush and his team were rolling out their autumn offensive (the appropriate time to unveil a new product, as his spokespeople had reminded us earlier that summer) to persuade the electorate and the world that their war on terror demanded an invasion of Iraq. Long ago, I’d been a student of military history, and I basically said, hold on a minute: before we go start another war, how are we doing on the one we’re already fighting?

Then and now, the Bush administration has so successfully defined the war on terror as a vague global struggle, generations long and apocalyptic in scope, that it resists the application of any conventional yardstick of performance. There are metrics you can apply to normal wars — casualty rates, dollars spent, enemy capabilities impaired; but when you’re fighting “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” as Bush called it tonight, you can get away with pretty much anything.

In September 2002, I said that since the president wouldn’t ever tell us how the war was going, we’d better start asking questions ourselves.

Had we prevented further terorrist attacks on American soil and citizens? Yes then and yes now.

Had we apprehended the parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Limited success then, minus the big prizes; no further success since.

Had we eliminated state-supported havens for al-Qaeda? Limited success then, and some ground lost since, as the border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan reverts to Taliban control — a prospect that seemed inconceivable four years ago.

Had we successfully rebuilt Afghanistan to win international support for our anti-terror campaign? I rated this “mixed to positive” four years ago; this grade is considerably lower today.

Have we prevented the spread of Islamic radicalism and support for bin Laden? Again, I said the results were mixed in 2002, but since then the disastrous Iraq war and other missteps, including the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, have left us far worse on this score.

Have we protected the U.S. economy as the backbone of our war effort? In 2002 I’d said “mixed to negative” here; today, the economy is somewhat improved in the short term, but long-term we’ve created an economic house of cards, thanks to a president and governing party that tell us we’re fighting the war of the century but won’t levy the taxes to pay for it (or even include its cost in their budgets).

Have we preserved the ideals of our open society in the face of terrorist threats? I over-optimistically judged this “mixed to positive” in 2002; this was before Abu Ghraib, before revelations of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts, before we came to understand that the president was claiming the right to incarcerate anyone anywhere in the world forever without trial. I still think we’ve succeeded in resisting the worst overreactions to terror that nations have made; we don’t live in a police state — but I can’t help thinking the president and vice president wish we did.

Have we kept dangerous weapons and material out of terrorists’ hands? I marked this a blank in 2002; today I’d have to say we’ve lost ground, given the failure of nuclear non-proliferation under the Bush team’s “we don’t talk to people we don’t like” diplomacy. We launched an invasion of a country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction instead of working at containing countries that sought to produce them; we gave those countries a big incentive to hurry up and finish their deterrents before we attack them.

Have we cut American consumption of Mideast oil to reduce our exposure to instability in the area and our dependence on despotic regimes there? This was a failure in 2002 and remains one today. If anything, the rise in oil prices has hurt our economy and helped those of our enemies, real and potential.

Based on this set of yardsticks, I’d say that we’ve made no progress since 2002 and lost significant ground on a variety of fronts. In the current Atlantic, James Fallows offers a different argument, one that says, actually, we’re doing pretty well against al-Qaeda today — we’ve crippled its operational capacity, and the worst thing we have to fear is our own over-reaction to the remaining threat.

Fallows’ argument is persuasive in many ways, but so much of the progress he cites was achieved in the first year after 9/11; the years since, overshadowed by the Iraq adventure, have not helped much. He may be right that we should declare victory in the war on terror and move on. Sadly, we could have done that four years, and untold thousands of deaths, ago.
[tags]war on terror, james fallows[/tags]

Standing behind your words

by

A fascinating thread runs through a pair of this week’s scandals.

First we have two of the top names in Silicon Valley’s old-boy network at odds over some quite possibly illegal boardroom shenanigans at one of its most hallowed companies. In an effort to plug media leaks they were sure emanated from a board member, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman, Patricia Dunn, hired a private consulting firm that apparently hired someone else who obtained private phone records of board members via, not to mince words, fraudulent means.

Those means now bear the delightfully euphemistic label “pretexting,” which sounds like something harmless, out of high school debating. But what we’re really talking about is calling up institutions like phone companies and claiming to be the person whose records you’re trying to obtain. Old-fashioned black-hat hackers used to call this “social engineering.” I’m not a lawyer, and others will determine the precise legality or lack thereof of what went down at H-P; but whatever you call it, it’s deceitful and dishonorable, and that is plainly why Silicon Valley grandee Tom Perkins, whose name bedecks the industry’s most august venture-capital firm, quit the H-P board in a huff. Perkins is now at odds with Valley uber-lawyer Larry Sonsini, who represents H-P’s board and who has been saying that the company did nothing illegal. (Leading technology journalists were also apparently targeted by the H-P-sponsored “pretexting.”)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the New Republic, a little magazine with a venerable history, has suspended one of its critics, Lee Siegel. Siegel was caught posting anonymously on his own blog, under the name “sprezzatura,” singing hosannas to his own genius and lashing out at his critics.

It’s self-evident that there’s something loathsome about any writer who would don a virtual ski-mask in order to post pompous paeans to his own work along the lines of “Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be” — and then, when confronted by users who suspect the truth, deny it with “I’m not Lee Siegel, you imbecile. If you knew who I was you and your n + 1 buddies would crap in your pants.” Wit! Intelligence! Grace!

But how, asks Slate’s Jack Shafer, is what Siegel did any different from what legions of blog-commenters do every day in posting anonymous comments? Shafer is too locked into Slate’s contrarian-for-contrarianhood’s-sake stance (a journalistic mode pioneered by Slate founder Michael Kinsley when he ran the New Republic years ago) to grasp the simple and obvious difference: As the author of the blog, Siegel writes from a position of privilege. He can defend his own work from the stage mike without concocting a fake claque to cheer himself. By inventing “sprezzatura” he is not only deceiving his readership, he’s casting doubt on anything anyone has ever posted in favor of his work elsewhere on the Web. Now anytime you read anything nice posted on a blog about Siegel’s work, you’re going to be wondering, is this a real comment? Or is this Siegel playing games?

Anonymity is not a simple good — it’s a complex phenomenon that cuts positively or negatively depending on the power equation in play. When anonymity allows an insider to blow a whistle on corruption, or a dissident in a repressive regime to communicate about atrocities, it is plainly good. When anonymity allows people in positions of power to shrug off responsibility for their words, it’s problematic at least, and often harmful.

Siegel’s “sprezzatura” impersonation is a relatively low-stakes matter; with its exposure the only real harm is to the writer’s own reputation and to his publication’s dignity. But the common practice among denizens of the Bush White House of defending their actions and ambushing their opponents via anonymous, disownable statements shares in Siegel’s dishonor. They’re in power. They control the dialogue. There’s no excuse for them not to stand behind their words — and their record of unwillingness to put their names behind their statements has now fully eroded their credibility.

Back at the H-P boardroom, we have a sort of double-deniability maneuver: a primary act of impersonation on the part of investigators seeking to unmask an anonymous boardroom leaker, and then a secondary act of anonymous distancing on the part of the board and its chairman, who claim they didn’t know what their henchmen were up to. Henry II invented this “plausible deniability” gambit 900 years ago when he wanted to off Thomas Becket; it’s no more credible today.

According to CNET, before he quit the H-P board Perkins suggested that the chairman “just ask the board members if they had leaked information, rather than launch a full-blown investigation, and ask for a private apology.” Good plan. Too bad even this statement is attributed to an anonymous source.

To be fair, Perkins and his adversaries are all now tightly bound in legal webs as to what they can and can’t say. Nonetheless, we’re left with the spectacle of a group of rich, powerful people behaving appallingly. When a corporate board reaches a point as far gone as this, it’s time for everyone to resign. And I don’t mind being quoted on that — by name.
[tags]Hewlett-Packard, anonymous sources, lee siegel[/tags]

Proofs

by

Apologies for the week of blog silence here. I was otherwise engaged: the page proofs for Dreaming in Code landed on my doorstep right before the holiday weekend, so that was my Labor Day weekend, and the evenings since.

It is a strange — and, I have to admit, wonderful — feeling to see this project, which I first conceived in the fall of 2002, near completion. From vague notion to typeset pages — in only four years! (The official publication date is Jan. 16, 2007.) Next up: bound galleys… blurbs… then books!

Now my energy turns from the page to the Web, where I will be building out the book’s site, at present mostly a placeholder, with excerpts and more. Here on this blog, I’m also planning to start a new project around the book’s theme — the mysterious difficulties of creating software — that I’ll be announcing soon. I don’t mean to be mysterious; there are just some details to be worked out between me, my blog and Salon.

In the course of seeing my 100,000-or-so words transformed from a Word document (it’s what the publishers want!) to a typeset galley, I’ve learned a bit more about what goes into making the text of a book look good and fit right. (My editor and the Crown designers did a great job with Dreaming in Code.) So when I recently stumbled on this blog by a book designer — addressing the realms of typography, castoffs and such — I took note. Fascinating stuff if the extent of your knowledge of publishing design is, like mine, drawn primarily from the newspaper world and the computer desktop.

[tags]Dreaming in Code, books, publishing[/tags]