Fwd: [humanmarkup-comment] Out of the blue...

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

Evidently Jorn sent this message to me 10 days ago, but it didn't get 
to me, so he sent it again today, and it did. So I am posting it now. 
As far as I know, this is the only message that I didn't receive 
correctly in the last two weeks, but if you suspect that i didn't 
receive your message please send it along.

Ciao,
Rex

>To: rexb@starbourne.com
>Subject: Fwd: [humanmarkup-comment] Out of the blue...
>From: jorn@enteract.com (Jorn Barger)
>Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 17:24:25 -0600
>X-Rcpt-To: <rexb@starbourne.com>
>X-DPOP: DPOP Version 2.4a
>Status: U
>
>
>------- Begin Forwarded Message -------
>
>Subject:     [humanmarkup-comment] Out of the blue...
>From:        Jorn Barger <jorn@enteract.com>
>To:          <rbrooks@humanmarkup.org>
>Date:        Sat, 29 Jun 2002 08:22:14 -0600
>
>I'm severely 'allergic' to mailinglists so I'm posting this indirectly,
>but I was invited to join (by Ranjeeth, I think) back on Day One, and
>I'm impressed you're still fighting the good fight...
>
>I spent most of the 1970s sifting thru vocabulary-lists of emotion-
>words (etc) trying to come up with anything like a solid set of
>primitives.  I believe I _did_ eventually make some progress there, but
>the final direction was so unexpected and counter-intuitive that before
>I sketch out my primitives, I want to briefly describe what I'm doing
>now, which really doesn't rely on the primitives at all.
>
>Ranjeeth saw my comp.ai.* postings a year ago, about my 'Internet
>Timelines Project' which starts from the assumption that the most
>'primitive' psychological categories must be the very same ones you find
>you need first, if you happen to be trying to sketch out human history
>on the largest possible scale. (I used the example of HG Wells'
>one-volume world history, but boiled down much further via hypertext, so
>that the top webpage will give the most abstract possible
>short-outline.)
>
>So (eg) the growth and migration of human populations, and the conquest
>of one population by another, must be among the 'deepest' primitives
>according to this principle.  And those same primitives that apply for
>human populations can be 'downsized' for human individuals as (eg)
>person-A-bears-child-B (population growth), or person-B-moves-to-place-B
>(migration), or person-A-submits-to-person-B (conquest).
>
>So in the medium-long term, I'm working now at filling in the gaps in my
>own historical knowledge, so as to be able to sketch this largescale
>human history. (Insofar as I'm managing to proceed chronologically at
>all, I'm up to ancient Athens after a year of work.)
>
>
>But where I think I'm already consistently managing to add real value to
>the Web on a daily basis, _without_ requiring the startingplace of
>pre-defined primitives, is in building webpages that inventory and
>organise big chunks of the Web, for many different topics (mainly
>historical timelines).
>
>And my main point, in this posting, is that there's a whole different
>set of categories required here, based on ***the psychology of
>web-research***, that I think might be a very useful addition to HML's
>arsenal.
>
>The simplest example is a categorisation of information-types that
>webpages may offer: etext, timeline, FAQ, biography, map, review, essay,
>photo, links-list, encyclopedia-article, dictionary-definition,
>online-purchase-offer, Internet-Movie-Database entry, mailinglist
>homepage, bbs, archive, etc.
>
>I can't emphasize strongly enough that these specific types *emerged* by
>daily experiment, as _useful_ in the actual pages I was building.  The
>ontologically-inclined will immediately want to subsume the list as a
>branch of their pre-existing ontologies, and fill in 'gaps' based on
>theoretical principles... but this is precisely what I want to warn
>*against*.
>
>Sure, maps and photos are both 'images', and reviews and essays (etc)
>are all etexts, but those abstractions just _dilute_ the typology's
>value.  And the only way you'll appreciate the danger of such 'dilution'
>is if you put a ton of effort into building useful webpages.  But that's
>what semantic markup is supposed to be about, isn't it?
>
>(An example of the dangers of dilution: I've come to believe that
>link-lists are doomed to extinction as an independent category, because
>they're much more useful when they're woven intimately into the fabric
>of any and every other page-type category.  But this design-idea could
>never occur to someone who's looking thru the 'glasses' of an ontology
>that reifies link-lists as an independent category.)
>
>So as a generalisation, I'm suggesting that _every link_ on the web is
>necessarily claiming to offer some category or categories of human
>value, and that the HML project might reduce its infinite-regress
>problem, for psychological-ontologies, by focusing on these specific,
>_web-pragmatic_ values.
>
>
>What's more, categories like 'etext' and 'timeline' imply content-
>structures of their own, that can be implemented with varying degrees of
>success.  Etexts have authors, so an etext-page may (or may not) choose
>to link to an author bio, and/or to a link-list of other etexts by the
>same author.  Any timeline will usually mention people and places that
>can be similarly linked to secondary/offsite pages.
>
>But this theory of web-pragmatics can't be nailed down just by standing
>on the sidelines and analysing-- you have to keep building pages and
>listening to visitors' feedback and looking for ways to optimise their
>value.
>
>To start with some examples close-to-home, I dropped in today via a
>circuitous route that started with a Google-search for the phrase 'xml
>websites'.  That search indirectly led to OASIS and I noticed
>HumanMarkup prominently linked from the OASIS homepage, and then clicked
>on the archive-link from the 'committee' page, and browsed the latest
>month of postings...
>
>'Mailing-list posting' is definitely a useful web-pragmatic category.
>There are lots of possible ways to structure a mailinglist archive, and
>it's not immediately obvious which are the most useful.  Eg, Google
>Groups lets you click on a person's name and see a reverse-chronological
>index of all their postings, which I often find useful.
>
>The eList software is apparently configured to supply an up-link to
>'Elist Home' but this is the archives page, and there's no obvious
>up-link back to the committee-page. (I used the sidebar, but only
>because I happened to have arrived that way-- someone arriving via a
>Google search would have trouble spotting it.)
>
>The committee-page mentions the mailinglists and tells how to subscribe,
>but doesn't spell out whether you have to subscribe to post (I'm
>assuming you do).  These are all _pragmatic_ categories that could be
>usefully spelled out in detail, and eventually embedded in the design of
>generalised software apps.
>
>I looked on the committee-page for the startdate of the project, and
>didn't find it-- there are several short 'timelines' on that page that
>could be merged, I think.  When you do this, you start to notice the
>gaps (like starting-date) and you start to fill in historical
>connections (eg mover arrives, or shaker departs).
>
>To connect this back to the HML ontology of emotions, one bit of
>web-pragmatics I often miss is the concept of 'critique'-- I can go to
>Yahoo and find a hundred pages about XML, but suppose I want just pages
>that are skeptical about XML?  That 'critical attitude' is by no means a
>_complex_ emotion, but it would be an incredibly useful one if people
>could cite it somehow in semantic markup. (Eg, mailinglist archives
>could tag which postings are critical of what topic-areas.)
>
>Or more broadly, if someone left the mailinglist in a huff, can your
>committee-timeline accurately annotate that emotion? ('Accurate' here
>becomes a very delicate question, and I've been arguing forever that the
>utility of an emotions-ontology can only be demonstrated by the
>'literary-historical' quality of the psychological narratives it can
>represent.)
>
>
>Which brings me back (sort of) to the question of emotional primitives.
>
>Back in the 70s, I gradually came to the conclusion that lists of
>emotion-words really weren't adequate, because each word by itself was
>just an ambiguous fragment of the psychological reality.
>
>So my counter-proposal is that when you list an emotion-word like
>'critical' you recognise that it's associated with what I call the
>"usual 'criticism' story".  Different cultures may have very different
>ideas of what's usual, but one likely prototypical 'criticism' story in
>US culture is a boss (or spouse, or parent) who denigrates something you
>do. So the usual-critical-story might be:
>
>   person A tries to perform X
>   person B insults person A's performance as inadequate
>   person A feels bad
>   person A looks for ways to improve performance
>   etc
>
>Any bare emotion-word can be usefully fleshed out with a story-skeleton
>like this.  But when you start to do this, you begin to realise why the
>simple words by themselves never composed themselves into a coherent
>ontology-- they overlap and branch in far too many ways.
>
>So my simplification-approach leverages off the most-simplified internal
>composition of the stories themselves-- how many persons must be
>involved, at minimum?  how many places?  how many things?  what basic
>relationships exist between these elements?  how do those relationships
>change in the course of the story?
>
>I've proposed a data-structure for classifying these that requires
>self-similar hierarchies within hierarchies... but my Timelines project
>simplifies it considerably by reducing (eg) 'migrates' to:
>
>   date1=  person1=  place1=  place2=  relationship=moves
>
>
>I should end with a batch of urls, I guess:
>
>timeline project: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/biography.html
>recent examples: http://www.robotwisdom.com/science/classical/
>ontology-theory: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/
>web-design theory: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/
>
>--
>Robot Wisdom Weblog:  http://www.robotwisdom.com/ "If you worry that
>reading the news online will rob you of the serendipity factor you get
>with the newspaper, Jorn Barger solves the problem." --Dan Gillmor


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