{"id":4009,"date":"2009-08-22T11:28:29","date_gmt":"2009-08-22T11:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/08\/22\/whats-missing-from-this-art-pr\/"},"modified":"2009-08-22T11:28:29","modified_gmt":"2009-08-22T11:28:29","slug":"whats-missing-from-this-art-pr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/08\/22\/whats-missing-from-this-art-pr\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Missing From This Art Project?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Bora on FriendFeed<\/a>, a cute little art project from MIT<\/a> that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here’s what you get if you put my name in:<\/p>\n

\"i-ef22156de5f5dbb7c72ab49cde2c2f32-sm_me.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It’s nice, and all, but there’s something a little bit funny about it. Something… missing. Let’s see if we can’t illuminate the problem by putting in a few more names:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"i-1cb972a0898b593dd27363bd27f799f3-sm_bohr.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"i-13bb9330190162266ef1962290a29936-sm_einstein.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"i-a2ecf0c4e4eed2dfb0a202b42379d7e5-sm_feynman.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Again, click for larger versions.)<\/p>\n

What’s missing is that there’s no category for science, or anything science-related. Which leads to absurdities like a large-ish bar corresponding to “Sports” for Richard Feynman, or “Fashion” for Niels Bohr. You can watch it processing the results, and it completely skips most scientific or science-related terms (like “electron” or “atom” or “physicist”), while assigning others to categories in an essentially random manner (“physics” gets coded as “Education” or sometimes “Medicine”; Feynman’s “Sports” bar is largely due to phrases like “winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics”).<\/p>\n

If you want a graphical illustration of the Two Cultures problem, it’s right here. Even though this is a technological art project, from MIT no less, it doesn’t occur to the artist that science or science-related subjects ought to included in the range of subject categories for human activities. Science isn’t something that normal people do, so there’s no need to code for it.<\/p>\n

And this is why I rant about the lack of respect for science<\/a> in the rest of the academy.<\/p>\n

(Now, to be fair, the project slights a lot of humanities disciplines as well– “Jean-Paul Sartre” also merits a substantial “Sports” bar, as does Friedrich Nietzsche, both of which I find faintly hilarious. But there are at least some halfway sensible categories into which humanities-related content can be put– “books” and “art,” for example. The total absence of science-related categories is deeply annoying, though.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here’s what you get if you put my name in: You can click on it for a bigger image, that… Continue reading What’s Missing From This Art Project?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,73,37,11,56,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-art","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-technology","category-two_cultures","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}