Forgetting 2.0

Memory Work I: Freudian Slip

It isn’t the willful forgetting that interests me, as much as the unconscious forgetting of those names, things, places, dates, events, reasons and consequences that are dissonate with a certain way of seeing and existing in the world. The act of choosing to forget is a form of remembering . . . a gesture of forgiveness, healing, detachment, withdrawal, cowardice or mere convenience.

Memory work entails an ethical act of revisiting the past to avoid repeating errors in the future, to illuminate unchallenged assumptions that contributed to distorted histories. 

The Great Flood of the virtual archives has innodated users with a tsunami of words. I am attempting to use emerging technical tools of the semantic web to make it easier for other users at all levels to hyperlink names, things, places, dates, events, reasons and consequences to reliable and/or frequently cited sources in subject areas where I have been an active teacher, learner and researcher.

These compilations are found in one of the main search engines along with other posts and articles proposing an argument from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.  

Notes

1. Layers in this Flickr image include a .jpg of Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli’s (1445 – 1523) masterpiece, the massive frescoes of the Last Judgment (1499-1503) in Orvieto Cathedral. The copyright on his work has expired since he passed away more than 70 years ago. There is a topographical map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small iinsert of Freud’s museum which is itself th subject of controversy as rrevealed in Derrida’s book Archives Fever (1996). The uppermost layer is the diagram from the Freud’s article explaining how he made a Freudian slip. The catalyst for this layered image was Freud’s influential paper (1901 [1914]) entitled “Forgetting of Proper Names in Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” In it Freud examined the psychological process of forgetting the name of the artist who painted the Orvieto ceiling when his conscious thinking process was abruptly interrupted by memories of the recent suicide of one of his patients who had an incurable sexual disorder. He forget Signorelli’s proper name during this conversation with a stranger while traveling in Herzegovina. They had been discussing the Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina when Freud’s thoughts turned to contemporary [racist] beliefs surrounding the sexual moeurs of Turks who allegedly valued sexual pleasure over life itself. From there Freud thought of Death and Sexuality. As one theme interrupted and replaced the other, he associated the series Signorelli. Botticelli, Boltraffio, Trafoi and could not recollect the proper name. This is significant to me as it reveals unchallenged western prejudices about the East at the turn of the century.

2. Speechless’ blog stats page revealed that one of the referrers to the December 12, 2007 post entitled “Inuit Communities as the new DEW line: Camels in the Arctic” was also found under a search for categories under “forgetting” as part of the parent category TeachingLearningResearch. (http://oceanflynn.wordpress.com/category/teaching-learning-and-research/conceptsideas/forgetting/) It is also placed under categories of Memory Work, Risk Society, Social History Timeline, Social Justice, child poverty, climate change, ethics, forgetting, human agency, risk management, timelines, wealth disparities will intensify with tags: Arctic Adventures, benign colonialism, endangered, ethical topography of self and the Other, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Hudson’s Bay Company, Iqaluit, Jennifer Naglingniq, modernity, nasiq, Nunavut, Places on the Margins, self and identity, social exclusion, vulnerability to social exclusion.

This post was a comment submitted to Walrus Magazine article.

Metatags and WordPress.com

WordPress.com’s semantic tools such as categories, tags, urls for individual posts, author’s name generated automatically to each post, dates per post, seem to mimic the function of metatags and are Search Engine friendly. As well, when my delicious tags and wordpress.com’s tags and categories are syncronized,  I think this performs a similar role of structuring as metatagging. To make it even more elegant, del.icio.us offers suggestions for popular tags used by other del.icio.us users on posts and sites that have already been entered into their database. For example, del.cio.us suggests these tags for Alex Iskold’s useful post on structuring the Internet through metatagging: Blog, blogging, code, CSS, Design, development, findability, folksonomy, howto, HTML, marketing, metadata, readwriteweb, semantic, semantic_web, semantics, semanticweb, tag, tags, tips, trends, visualization, web, web3.0, webdesign, XHTML, markup, Internet, microformats.  

After reviewing the ReadWriteWeb article on structuring the Internet, I looked up the New York Times metatags offered as a best practice model by ReadWriteWeb and attempted to adapt them to my own Speechless blog. WordPress quickly eliminated my outlaw codes leaving no trace.

WordPress did not support my adaptation of the New York Times metatags: when written under ‘Code’ . They are deleted. Under ‘Visual’ this is what they looked like before deletion: more.

Aside: While noting the New York Times metatags, I was also drawn to a comparison of New York Times’ Categories 2008-02:

World, U.S., N.Y. / Region, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, Opinion, Arts, Style, Travel, Jobs, Real Estate, Automobile.

I would like to compare these to the default categories offered by Digg and other major actors in Web 2.0 blogosphere.

to be continued . . .

Webliography

Iskold, Alex. 2008. “How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured.” >> ReadWriteWeb. Uploaded. January 30, 2008 10:48 PM. Accessed February 2008.

Connectivity between Del.icio.us and WordPress.com

I am experimenting with connectivity between del.icio.us and my free wordpress.com blog.

I have my most recent del.icio.us links automatically generated in my WordPress sidebar using a text widgets option in Presentation in my Dashboard.

I would like to have a del.icio.us icon and simple widget for efficiently link my most visited posts to users’ del.icio.us accounts where one click opens the delicious page complete with the post’s url, description and key words automatically generated.

I am playing with a href and urls to find the cleanest most elegant route.
This is another suggestion from blog.delicious.com :

“First, you can link to http://del.icio.us/post with a GET argument of “url” containing the URL-encoded URL, and you can supply a title in the “title” field, similarly URL-encoded. This effectively lets you put something equivalent to del.icio.us’s “copy this” link somewhere offsite. The final URL should thus look like: http://del.icio.us/post?url=THEURL&title=THETITLE

So far I can use this code and this icon to help users link this post to their del.icio.us accounts:

  link this post to del.icio.us

50,157 Total Views: Connectivity between Google Search, WordPress, Flickr: Stats, Referrers, SEO, Clicks, Views, Links

WordPress Blog Stats, even in its bare bones, free application  for wordpress.com blogs, allows authors to trace the findablity, efficiency and relevance of their own published content and the search intentions of visitors to their sites. While it is satisfying that Speechless has received 50,157 total views in c. 15 months, it is deeply encouraging to note the multiple key word searches that have brought viewers to relevant content and the follow-up internal and external links that they have clicked. I have spent less time on http://papergirls.wordpress.com, but it too has received  16,397 views since I uploaded my first post. (I use that blog mainly as a way of tracking stories that I have dugg on Digg). 

Over the past while I have noticed a number of other search engines have mapped content I’ve scattered throughout the blogosphere. I attempt to write using wikified standards of accountability using the most reliable webloiographic sources I can find without resorting too often to the Deep Web, such as scholarly journals that require paid memberships. However, some legitimate knowledge claims are still available only in print. I use my powerful EndNote database compiled from the early 1990s (when I began postgraduate studies) onwards to enhance research, analysis and writing.

Recently I converted WordPress categories to tags and I will be observing how this impacts SEO.

I often read the reviews and heed the advice of the authors of ReadWriteWeb in the use of open source technologies.

I continue to be dazzled by the organic yet explosive emergence of an ontology of the semantic web.  

PicLens, Google Images and Flickr

PicLens offers a visually powerful alternative to viewing digital Flickr and Google images. I’ve just downloaded it and I am playing with its potential with my other open source digital tools in my blogosphere. I learned about this through ReadWriteWeb, a site I have come to rely on for the safest and most exciting innovations for bricoleurs and pros.  

ISR’s January 2008 Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers Claim Wealth Disparties Intensify

According to the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, one of the most widely-cited surveys in the United States conducted by the Institute for Social Research (ISR), one of the oldest social science research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology, wealth disparities continue to intensify. There is a gaping difference in how income groups experience the financial situation. ISR Director Richard Curtin warned that the the “largest proportion of consumers in nearly two decades reported financial distress, especially households with incomes below $75,000. economic” and that, “Households with incomes under $75,000 were twice as likely as higher income groups to report that their finances had worsened due to both higher food and fuel prices as well as smaller income increases. “Over the past decades, whether inflation was much higher or lower, or incomes grew faster or more slowly, there has never been such a wide divergence in the experiences across income groups.”

Curtin, Richard T. 2008. “Consumer Growth Engine: Barely Above Stall Speed.” Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. January 2008. PR200801.pdf

“Although there was a small recent gain in consumer sentiment, confidence remains significantly below last January’s level, declining by one-fifth during the past twelve months. [. . .] Higher food, gas, and heating costs as well as declines in the value of homes and stocks left nearly every consumer feeling more vulnerable. “Consumers have adopted more cautious spending plans, with the expected growth in real personal consumption spending starting at about 1.0% in the 1st quarter of 2008 and then rising slowly in the balance of the year,” according to Curtin. Residential investment will continue to slump until late 2008 and then begin to grow very slowly.

The risk that a recession develops remains uncomfortably high. “The most likely prospect is that the rate of overall economic growth will be about zero in the first half of 2008, with nearly equal probabilities that it will be slightly above zero as slightly below zero,” Curtin said. The surveys have continued to record the largest gap in more than a quarter century in how different groups assessed their financial situation. [. . .] More homeowners reported that their home had lost value than reported it had increased for the first time in the nearly two decades the question has been asked. “The housing market will not benefit as quickly as in the past from cuts in interest rates given the near universal rise in credit standards as well as continued declines in home values making even refinancing more difficult,” Curtin noted. [. . .] The increase in job and income uncertainty has affected vehicle buying plans. Overall, vehicle buying attitudes in January were the least favorable since the 1990-91 recession (Curtin 2008-01).”

CC Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2008. “ISR’s January 2008 Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers Claims Wealth Inequalities Continue to Increase.” >> Google Docs. Uploaded February 15, 2008. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddp3qxmz_519fxqgr5gv

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Faith and Knowledge: New Atheism and Acts of Religion