jill/txt

How to hack gender stereotyping and let girls and boys just be kids

Children are constantly exposed to gender stereotypes, but as a parent, I would like to minimize that influence and allow them to stay as open as possible about what sort of person they would like to be. There are ways to make things better. One way is to complain when you see it happening. Another is to change what we can, at home.

Complaining can be very effective. One major area children are taught that they should fit into neat categories of pink and blue are toy shops. But this can change. Hamley’s toy shop in London stopped segregating toys – and kids – into separate floors for girls and boys after protests. This year, after massive complaints from parents, Swedish toy catalogues from Toys R Us and (the sister company of Norwegian BR leker) are more gender neutral than their counterparts in other countries. After reading an article about this that a friend shared on Facebook I checked out the Norwegian Toys R Us catalogue with the Swedish Toys R Us catalogue, and sure enough, there are some very significant differences. Guess which side is the Swedish one?

Toys R Us in Norway thinks only girls play with dolls and only boys with nerf guns. Toys R Us in Sweden has listened to parent protests and changed their photos.

Bizarrely enough, the commenters on the article I read, which is Danish, were almost all shocked at the Swedes. How wrong, the commenters said, to force children into roles that aren’t natural for them. How wrong, I think, to make children think that boys don’t like dolls and girls mightn’t like, uh, nerf guns.

OK, I don’t like nerf guns. I’ll be happy if none of my kids ever want nerf guns. But I’d rather they assumed that nerf guns weren’t a specifically male territory.

Another way we can make our kids’ lives a little less pink vs blue is by simply hacking their toys and media. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who sometimes adjusts the words in a book when reading aloud to my kids. OK, often the adjustment is simply to shorten the book drastically when it’s bedtime, but I also always try to change the bits that assume boys and girls would have fundamentally different interests. For instance, I love Doctor Seuss (and even the corporation that makes board books and popup books loosely based on his rhymes) but I simply do not see why he (they) couldn’t simply have written

All kids who like to brush and comb
Should have a pet like this at home

It rhymes just as well! Why assume boys wouldn’t want to brush and comb a beautiful, soft pet? Just to make sure that other readers will also know how the book is supposed to go, I’ve amended the text:

It’s pretty easy to change the words of a book when you read it for kids who can’t yet read for themselves. But why were the words so limiting in the first place?

This dad did things a bit more elegantly, though, when he hacked Zelda to make Link a girl. Because why on earth shouldn’t his daughter be able to imagine herself as Link?

Flip the pronouns.

The dad does explain how to do this, but it’s a little more complicated than crossing out “girls” and writing in “kids”, although the basic idea is the same.

We need to hack this system more. Sometimes we can simply show our kids more of the variety in life. When our four-year-old insisted that men always only wear boring clothes and that they have to wear boring clothes I showed her and her little brother pictures of ancient kings and gentlemen in their furs and velvets and lace and frills and fancy hairdos. She was impressed, and has changed her mind. Other times we can change the language ourselves, whether in a book or a game. When we cannot, perhaps we can at least show them variety. After realising how horrible the 50s Disney version of Peter Pan is I made an effort to show my then six-year-old older daughter other versions, and to read the original, and to talk about how and why the 50s version is so horribly sexist.

And perhaps most importantly we can kick up a fuss and complain en masse, and maybe get toy shops – even in Norway – to change their catalogues so boys can play with dolls and girls with the toy tools.

Even better, maybe we could just get back to toys being toys. Not pink and blue.

1981 ad for Lego.

25. November 2012 by Jill
Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Do we WANT to be able to predict an election result?

So what does it do to democracy if we can predict the results of an election with 100% accuracy? Nate Silver’s predictions at the NY Times’ Fivethirtyeight.com election poll blog correctly called the results of 50 out of 50 states in this year’s US elections. In 2008, Mashable writes, he only got 49 out of 50 states (Obama won Indiana by 0.1%). Here’s the side by side comparison Mashable showed us, in this tweet from interaction designer Michael Cosentino:

The ability to accurately predict the results of an election, even a relatively simple two party election as in the US, is quite new. As recently as this summer a blogger for The Economist by the name of “M.D.” wrote that forecasts in general are not very accurate, although “the 2008 election happened to be a good year for the forecast industry, with all 15 forecast models with which I am familiar, save one, predicting Barack Obama’s victory.”

Given Nate Silver’s results this year, I’m guessing that 2008 didn’t just “happen to be” a good year. What’s happening is that we’re getting very, very good at analysing big data. Also, more and more applicable data is available in a format that we can analyse – we’re using Twitter as well as traditional polls.

Interestingly a quick search on Google Scholar found plenty of articles discussing how to make more accurate election forecasts, but I didn’t find anything about whether perfectly accurate election forecasts are something we really want. Nate Silver’s prediction victory is reported in many news outlets (including Norwegian Dagbladet) but the only criticism of the model that I’ve seen is to question its accuracy – please tell me there are people considering what it means for democracy?

What is the point of voting, if we have 99.999% accurate predictions? Is voting an anachronism when we can simply analyse the population as a whole using astounding amounts of data? If predictions match election results perfectly, are they now unbiased? If we know that predictions are extremely accurate, does it change the way we vote, or the kinds of people who turn out to actually vote? Perhaps using prediction software that included the whole population could be more democratic than the current system of actually going to a physical place to vote, which has all kinds of built in exclusion of some kinds of voices.

But it is also easy to imagine a world where presidents are chosen by algorithms analysing the people’s sentiments and opinions. We’ve stopped using old-fashioned voting, because the software is so much more fair. But what happens when the algorithm is tweaked in favour of one of the candidates. So easy to do. Such profound consequences.

07. November 2012 by Jill
Categories: Networked Politics | Leave a comment

Visual histories of genre

Jesper Juul has become interested in visualisations of genre histories, and in a blog post yesterday he both showed the above visualisation of the history of film genres, based on 2000 US films, and linked to his own article on the history of matching tile games, where one of his methods in mapping the history of the genre was creating a visual family tree of influences, partly based on Alfred J. Barr’s diagram of “Cubism and Abstract Art” from 1936, which, as Jesper writes, is also criticised by Tufte. Here is Jesper’s family tree of matching tile games:

Jesper and commentors to his post discuss briefly whether visual genre histories could be automatically generated, and I wonder, too, whether we could create something like this for genres of electronic literature from the data in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base of Electronic Literature. We would need to have an even more complete data set, and to make sure that everything was carefully tagged by genre, but once that was done, it would certainly be possible to generate a visualisation like the film genre visualisation above.

Another strategy is using Google trends and book search to track the use of different genre terms as I did for my Dichtung Digital paper, and wrote about in the blog as well.

03. November 2012 by Jill
Categories: Electronic literature | Tags: history, visualisation | Leave a comment

Roberto Simanowski on the Facebook timeline as a “diary”

Roberto Simanowski is giving the second keynote at Remediating the Social. It is titled The Compelling Charm of Numbers: Writing for and Thru the Network of Data, and you can read the full paper in the PDF of the proceedings or watch the video at Bambuser.

Facebook’s timeline is the first time Facebook breaks its positivity, with “like” buttons and no “unlike” buttons, “friends” and no “enemies”. In Timeline, death is always implicit, even as you fill in your birthdate, as you can see in the video that launched the feature:

The detail is the enemy of perspective and reality, Simaowski says.  What Baudrillard said about the photograph may apply to Facebook as well: “The eccentricity of the detail blogs out hte view of hte world”. Photographs only documents the appearance of objects, not their inner truth. If an algorithm selects content and we look at raw data, we lose their inner truth. Of course, you can control your Timeline on Facebook, for instance by adding life events with narratives, photos and so on. The sublist of kinds of life events are reminiscent to Vladimir Propp’s morphology of folk tales, but seems more arbitrary – for instance, why can you enter weight loss but not weight gain, or quit a habit but not gained a habit? With Propp, the arrvial of a hero is followed by certain events, whereas Facebook’s database does not allow you to link events. Simanowski correctly says that Facebook wants your data more than your narrative. But then he says that the main feature of the shift from narrative to data is about making sure that people know less about themselves. I would certainly disagree with that.

Simanowski goes on to talk about the Quantified Self movement, poking fun at the obsession with tracking data about seemingly mundane things. He also brings up Lev Manovich and his familiar statement that database and narrative are natural enemies. Although Timeline has “pockets of narrative”, it does not undermine Manovich’s thesis, because Manovich also writes that new media doesn’t radically break with narrative, it just redistributes. In the Timeline, Simanowski says, life events are subordinated to the database element, and the narratives are subordinated to the life events.

Narrative gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as part of the plot, according to Jeremy Bruner in his book Acts of Meaning. Simanowski continues, moving through Ricoeur, Goethe, postmodernism and object oriented ontology. Facebook Timeline a response to postmodernism and the death of God, end of grand narratives? Promises new positivism.

Narrative is disappearing in literature and culture as well, Simanowski says, referring to arguments by people like Nicholas Carr on the “shallows” and ideas of hyper-attention, loss of deep reading and so forth. So we should hack Facebook, Simanowski argues. We should reinstate narrative, write long narrative descriptions of our life events on Facebook!

I think Simanowski is clinging to an idea of narrative that we might not need, or that might be doing just fine on its own despite the Facebook timeline and the Quantified Self movement. Doesn’t narrative change? The epic of Gilgamesh, the old testament, the old Norse sagas: none of these are easily read as narrative for today’s readers. In fact, the aspects of the database are rather heavy in them with their long lists of who begat whom. The Dreamtime stories of the Australian aborigines are also, and perhaps most importantly, maps of the land. Should Facebook be narrative? And might this simply be a change in what narrative is?

Friedrich Block is the respondent. He notes that there are few e-lit works that use Facebook, and there are few or no critical papers about e-lit that discuss Facebook. Art disrupts, timeline conceals.

A question from John Cayley: I agree (John says) that something has to be done about Facebook. But I think that it would take terrorism or attacks, because detournement is, well, it’s too late, that would be like trying to detourner architecture. The problem is that the timeline isn’t meant to be a service for users, it’s supposed to gather data. But is it possible to have good databases, or are databases always wrong?

On Twitter, Tim Hutchings pointed to a brand new article by Manovich arguing that the database no longer dominates the web. Manovich writes:

I want to suggest that in social media, as it developed until now (2004-2012), database no longer rules. Instead, social media brings forward a new form: a data stream. Instead of browsing or searching a collection of objects, a user experiences the continuous flow of events.

Definitely more to think about here.

02. November 2012 by Jill
Categories: ELMCIP, social media, Visualise me | Leave a comment

Programming for fun, together! Nick Montfort’s keynote at Remediating the Social

[VIdeo of the conference is also available at bambuser.com/v/3110251]

Remediation of the Social is the international conference that is the highlight of the ELMCIP project, and we’re excited to be here! We not only brought the whole Electronic Literature Research Group from UiB, we also brought eleven of our e-lit students. Look at everyone arrived at the airport:

Actually I didn’t arrive with the team, I showed up this morning, still in time for the start of the conference though. The auditorium at the Edinburgh College of Art has stuccoed ceilings and many familiar faces from the e-lit and new media conferences I’ve attended in the last fifteen years, and many new faces I don’t yet know.

Simon Biggs welcomes us to the first day of the final conference of the ELMCIP project, Remediating the Social.

Nick Montfort gives the keynote (documentation, and soon, the video, are available on the ELMCIP Knowledge Base), and his theme (as I read it) is about fun, and about how programming and creating programmable art and literature can and should be fun and accessible. He shows us an early television commercial for the Vic-20 computer, emphasising that it was “not just for games” – it had “a real computer keyboard”. Next, an Australian commercial for the Commodore 64 that I’ve shown students as well. This ad is pretty funny, but notice particularly the wonderful juxtapositions: look at these fun things we could do! We could go to a waterpark – or we could program! Back then, programming was seen (and marketed) as fun, easy and an obvious thing you’d want to do with your computer. The demoscene is another example of this, a wonderful subculture of  young people who challenge each other to make their computers generate cool graphics and “demos”. “The Popular Demo” is an example of how the demoscene is about fun, and very different from the apocalyptic aesthetics of most computer games (I’d say there are plenty of exceptions to this – and I’m sure Nick would agree.)

Next, Nick fires up a C64 emulator and proceeds to teach us enough BASIC programming to write the 10 print program that he and a pile of other scholars have just written a book dissecting. I am definitely showing students this bit of the lecture for my next run of my BASIC class. Happily all this is being videotaped. All this will lead, in a moment, to the program that is also the title of the book Nick and nine co-authors are releasing in a couple of weeks from MIT Press: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.

Scott Rettberg steps in for Rita Raley (who is stuck in lower Manhattan without power or internet or access to the flight she had tickets on) as respondent, and uses the example of collaborative writing as a counter example to Nick’s programming examples. E-lit authors also collaborate and have fun, for instance as Nick and Scott did in Implementation, or more programmatically, as Scott and then many, many other authors rewrote and recoded Nick’s generative poem Taroko Gorge.

Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg discussing the Taroko Gorge remixes, and Nick’s keynote on programming as fun.

01. November 2012 by Jill
Categories: Electronic literature, ELMCIP | 3 comments

Workshop on Curating and Exhibiting Electronic Literature

Today we’ve gathered electronic literature experts with gallerists, artists and curators from Bergen at Hordaland kunstsenter for a workshop on Curating and Exhibiting Electronic Literature, which is a first step in preparing to host the ELO conference here in Bergen in 2015. Our goal is to learn more about how to think when we curate exhibitions for the ELO2015 conference, and specifically, to help formulate a call for works for the coming ELO Conference and Exhibition for works of electronic literature that is suited for the different Bergen venues which highlight the Bergen electronic art and literature scene.

I’m not going to blog every talk and discussion, but will “liveblog” a few interesting links and discoveries.

Nick Montfort talked, among other things, about Games by the Book, a recent exhibition at the Humanities Library at MIT, where books were presented along with games. Lovely idea for a library exhibition.

Kristian Pedersen presenting the process behind “Letters”, a moving, animated poem from Gasspedal animert.

Dene Grigar talked us through some of the nine (so far!) exhibitions of electronic literature she’s curated, and Simon Biggs and Mark Daniels skyped in from the ELMCIP conference in Edinburgh, Remediating the Social, to show us what the exhibition there looks like a couple of days before opening. Simon mentioned the challenges of a juried or peer reviewed selection process when you want to create a coherent, curated exhibition. The hurricane on the East coast of the US is also causing trouble. Some art works have not arrived, others, like John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe’s ”Common Tongues”, are at the gallery but without their artist, and with phone lines down and no way of contacting John, it’s difficult to make sure the work is presented the way it was intended. Dene talked about how she got the electronic literature exhibition going at the MLA conference in 2012: figuring she could coast the digital humanities wave at the 2011 conference, she simply grabbed hold of the MLA leadership and asked if I could do it. She already owned all the computers and drove all the gear down to the conference (three hours from her home) along with students who worked as docents explaining the works to the audience. She borrowed pedestals from local galleries. MLA provided no funding, so she had to write a lot of grant applications.

Kristian Pedersen is an animator who works with poets to create beautiful moving poetry. He showed us the process behind one of his recent pieces, “Bokstavene” (or “Letters”) which plays upon the very analogue human errors in consulting a microfilm archive.

Søren Pold talks about exhibitions he has done in collaboration with the Roskilde library, including one where readers use glued-together leather-bound books like Wii controllers to generate a poem, Tilfældigvis er skærmen blevet blæk (“Coincidentally, the screen has turned to ink”). After your interaction, it prints out the poem on a narrow slip of paper, and posts them to a blog. The installation was even more successful when presented at the Roskilde Festival, where the printouts were particularly useful: people took the printout back to their tents, showed them to friends and their friends came back and tried the installation out for themselves.

Rui Torres, who works on the Po-ex archive of Portuguese experimental poetry, talks about creating a database, and how the rigidity of the database and its metadata is necessary so we can be creative with the database. The interface is a kind of remix, you remix the content of your database through the interfaces, and sometimes the interface might be an exhibition.

Talan Memmott presents the ELMCIP Anthology of Electronic Literature, which is being launched this week at the Remediating the Social conference in Edinburgh. Eighteen works from across Europe – it looks beautifully clean and inviting. The physical edition is on a cute little flash drive and it will also be released online soon.

Talan Memmott shows off the ELMCIP European Electronic Literature Anthology on its cute little memory stick.

[Lunch at Pascal. Yum.]

Sissel Lillebostad teaches curators at KHiB. When you work with commissions in public space, you deal with a very present audience. The space is already occupied: by people, their needs, visions, routines, habits, expectations, information. When introducing art into this kind of space, you have to do it by violence. You have to actually conquer the space for art. Time is also important. KORO expects publicly funded public art to last for at least twenty years. The curator’s space is a wish, a vision. It is redefined and created by three unstable structures: the art, its reception and the space itself. All are unforeseeable. A case study: Adsonore by Natasha Barrett, which is a sound installation in the stairwell of a building at the hospital - I blogged about it when it was first installed in 2003. Adsonore has turned out to be a complete failure, Sissel says (and I remember reading that it frightens the people who use the building), but, she asks, why? It was well-conceptualised, there were so many good things. But the people who work in the building hated it so much that it has been turned off. People responded in two ways. Some said well, it was exciting, kind of lively, but a bit frightening at night when I heard voices at the bottom but couldn’t see anything. But 80% became very hostile to the work in the first few months after it was installed. The space was too much for the work. So Natasha Barrett changed the system to only run during office hours. That didn’t help. The sounds it creates are too intense – every little movement reverberates through the space. Slamming doors, echos, fragments of conversations from last year, yesterday, ten minutes ago. It’s a text, and it forces anyone who walks through that  You want to be able to focus completely on art. But in public space you also need to be able to ignore art. You cannot constantly be confronted by art. In a white cube, you can install art that is very demanding. But you can’t do that in a public space.

A panel presents some local organizations and art spaces: Anne Marte Dyvi presents BEK, Bergen elektroniske kunstsenter, Malin Barth presents Foundation 3,14, and Elisabeth Nesheim presents the Piksel festival, subbing for Gisle Frøysland.

How does one plan exhibitions of electronic literature? Maya Økland from KNIPSU commented that while elit in the library seems like a great idea, for an art exhibition in a gallery you would be more interested in the quality of the content and context, the artistic quality, than in the platform or programming language. Anne Marthe Dyvi from BEK suggested commissioning site specific art where an artist/author spent an extended time in a specific place to create something particular to that site. She also suggested putting out a call for collaborations between artists and authors. Workshops and hackathons were suggested, much as the Piksel festival organises. What about residencies, Rod Coover asks? Conveniently, Vilde Andrea Brun from the Bergen Municipality (Bergen kommune) snuck in during this session, and as she works with funding for visual and literary arts is able to answer: the city funds residencies for international artists, some through USF, and also Hordaland fylke funds some too. So there are definitely opportunities for this.

At this point I had to rush to the preschool to pick up kids, but I’m looking forwards to the evening program:

20:30-23:00 Readings, Screenings and Performances at Gallery 3.14
“An Evening of Digital Narratives and Poetry”
Michelle Teran, Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Talan Memmott, Kristian Pedersen, Rui Torres

30. October 2012 by Jill
Categories: Electronic literature | 4 comments

What should all graduates know about computers and the information society?

I helped organise a seminar today on what kinds of digital competencies universities should aim to teach students (and lecturers) and I’m meeting so many interesting people across the university. I already knew Knut Melvær from Twitter and his blog, and he’s already blogged about the seminar. I enjoyed hearing Knut Martin Tande, who is vice dean for education at the Faculty of Law, talk enthusiastically about how he’s encouraged many of his colleagues to video record their lectures, and how he uses blogs in his teachin