I expected to come up with some great results harvesting links from guifi.net and other related sites. However, to my surprise, the first crawler did not reveal itself as useful as I thought. guifi.net site did not even appear as a “node” (my fault for not understanding nor coming up with a great config for the crawler settings; As I already knew some of the actors that were engaged in free wifi issues I should have set iteration value to 1 instead of 2; that might have caused to discard some actors that had weak ties on-line but strong ones in the back office…). Anyway, after documenting myself a little bit on the site, things turned out to be a little bit more comprehensive and I could harvester a little more (still, a snowball analysis tentative was left somewhere between /dev/null and the never never land). For anyone who does not grasp what I am talking about, I deeply encourage them to visit issuecrawler.net. It just takes a couple of minutes to see what is about and it is worth the detour.

After playing with issue crawler, I felt that, perhaps, many researchers on the web are searching for graphical tools to visualize a vast array of data or just be able to set / label the links between significant clusters of actors. Touchgraph, for instance, using google “similar pages” may be a more suitable and fastest tool for such purpose. Although it does not enables you to label linking lines (which is always annoying).

With issue crawler you can export your crawler map as a .svg or .pdf or .png file and have that edited later, but still, it would be really great if you could have an app that will allow users to label linking lines or maybe it has and I missed it. However, Issue crawler, as a tool to help exploring or positioning some actors involved in a given issue (be it the BP unstoppable fuel drain in the gulf coast or the demand to open the EM spectrum) that has been traced over the net, is quite useful when complemented with other flows of data or when asking experts three or four websites to start harvesting.

In any case, I could not left unmentioned that guifi.net website is sort of anomalous site in that is not a “typical” site (fortunately). It has links to other sites, yes, but not in a way a blog might have linked his friends or neighbourghs. Nor in a way a big media site or a city council will do it…that left me thinking that there are sites more “suitably” designed to be harvested by issue crawler. And the less suitable sites included, the more experts  needed to help you identify both where an issue is located / based and where it is happening (sometimes you can not rely on the news; as the issue is not “noticiable”). Well…just thinking out loud. guifi.net site is both a site where people get info about but mostly “do things in it”

Another thing which surprised me is that crawls do change their shape when I consult them again. So, I guess the shape of a crawl is less informative than I first thought. Although clusters remain clusters. Again, I had not tested all the options, just played so I might and probably has missed a lot of things. I am not and I do not consider myself an expert using issue crwaler. But it is also useful to have these first impressions posted

Here’s a pict of my second tricky crawl;

from my harvested crawls

PS: I know pict resolution sucks, but I can not put anything larger than 495 px on my blog without deforming the post column and I can not resize the crawl .png without losing even more resolution either…Damn it!

RAX!

from mitpress.mit.edu

Last year a friend of mine asked me about what would be a proper translation into Spanish for a Latour quote appearing in http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/084.html. As well as what did I understand from it. The quote:

“We are digging for the origin of an absolute –not a relative– distinction between truth and falsity, between a pure world, absolutely emptied of human-made intermediaries and a disgusting world composed of impure but fascinating human-made mediators. What is iconoclash? Or ¿ there is a world beyond the image wars?” (Latour, 2001)

Well, the translation is not important anyway, but still, the idea behind the iconoclash exhibit might be useful as another example of “not postulating two different ontological realms and then build bridges between them”. Which is something ANT has ever since tried to avoid (although I am not sure if ANT has stressed this point so much, but still, it is a crucial one and should be noticed more often, IMHO).

Here follows my answer. Spanish written at the time and spanish written now (see  warnings at the end of about section for any harmful interference language switching may cause…)

–

Te diré que se trata de mostrar como, a pesar de la existencia de una línea divisoria que quisiera dirimir las imágenes como siendo “verdaderas” o “falsas”, en realidad, todas (“falsas” y “verdaderas”) necesitan de mediaciones para lograr re-presentar aquello que re-presentan. Es decir, no hay acceso a la naturaleza, la religión o el arte sin “mediaciones”. Sin imágenes (en este caso) que procuran “plasmar” la cosa-en-si pero al hacerlo, cabe considerar que esa misma imágen añade algo a lo que supone re-presentar.

Iconoclash se refiere, en parte, a la imposibilidad o paradoja que, al “destruir” una imágen, no puedes evitar crear otra. Es decir, si los nazis tachan la estrella de David, tachan la estrella de david pero hacen surgir esa imagen de la estrella tachada a su vez. No se si me explico.

Entonces, la exposicón de iconoclash vendria a ser la búsqueda (la arqueología) de cuando surge esa distinción, cuando surge esa división que hace pensar que seria posible tener, de un lado, las imágenes inmaculadas y de otro las impuras o falseadas. Para Latour, como digo, ambas son hechas por la mano del hombre; manufacturadas, fabricadas. De ahí el interés por saber como y porqué se introduce esta distinción o se atorga un status a una u otra imágen.

“Is it manipulated or is real?” be heard. It is as if, again, the work of the hands, the careful manipulation, the human made mediation had to be put in one column, and truth, exactitude, mimesis, faithful representation into another. As if everything that was added to the credit in one column had to be deducted from the other. Strange accounting! – that would make politics as well as religion, science, and art, utterly impossible”

Haraway, por ejemplo, habla de este tipo de semiotico-materialidad de la imágen creo, con las representaciones que hacen los científicos del Virus o del ADN.

ahora, si te refieres a la traducción, yo diría que es algo así:

“Estamos escavando para conocer el orígen de una distinción absoluta -no relativa- entre verdad y falsedad, entre un mundo puro, absolutamente vaciado de intermediarios hechos por los humanos y un mundo asqueroso compuesto de impuros pero fascinantes mediadores hechos por los humanos. ¿Qué es iconoclash? o ¿Hay un mundo más allá dela guerra de las imágenes?”

RAX!

Richard Box art installation from www.richardbox.com

Though it is not new, Richard Box work on Electro Magnetic Fields (EMF) is quite astonishing for we who are concerned with WiFi. Having not taken too seriously the issue of “electrosensibles”, I think this is really a great visual “proof” of how “influent” may EMF radiations be. I mean, they are able to light up a fluorescent tube out of the radiations (and energy) generated by power pylons!!!

Richard Box work consists in presenting a set or array of fluo tubes. These are literally rooted in the ground which, given the negative / positive charges present in the “air” surrounding power pylons, will cause tubes to light up. In deed, Physicists from the University of Bristol have been engaged and trying to analyze the phenomena which, btw, is a great example of “open-air research” following Michel Callon distinction between closed (confinée) research and open-air research. There are no power pylons in labs, are they? Richard commented on a great moment during the installation where kids played with the tubes pulling them out of the ground and planting them in as they jumped. Smiling at the syncro between the jump, and the lighting up when “landed”.

RAX!

I.Stengers Cosmopolitiques from www.cnap.fr

Reading Isabell Stengers Cosmopolitiques, there are many references to the work of Deleuze. One of them, extracted from Deleuze “Qu’est-ce que la philososphie?” says:

“Diagnostiquer les devenirs dans chaque présent qui passe, c’est ce que Nietzsche assignait au philosophe comme médecin, ‘médecin de la civilisation’ ou inventeur de nouveaux modes d’existence immanents” (Deleuze, 1991)

RAX!

/Post Script 28-04-2009/ actually, the final version (which is a spanish translation of the original) is to be found as;

Baig, R. & Bona, Y.(2009). El derecho a un canal de comunicación simétrico de acceso y alcance universales. In Vinyamata, E. (Coord.) Derechos Humanos, Nuevas Realidades. Ediciones del Campus per la Pau, EdiUOC: Barcelona. pp.159-172. ISBN: 978-84-9788-805-9.

/End of PS/

There is always a strange period of mutual adjustment to the style and arguments of others. This has been a great opportunity to balance some arguments form social sciences and those coming from computer sciences. It is not always that easy to find common notions or agreements upon what has to be stated, what has to be left aside. Indeed, it is not easy even alone

But It is worth it for it opens some space of reflexion and affects the way we went over writings without an apparent problematisation of terms, concepts, figures we are so used to write down in our respective fields. Somehow, as Michel Serres notes, people will be grateful if you respect their own vocabulary and do not supplant their terminology with yours. Even if it is a rather specialised field, in some cases, it is preferable to make some people get a dictionary and find out what a word means rather than neglect a whole set of common vocabulary coming from a specific, and sometimes, ignored field. Serres, in so saying – and as far as I understand, is arguing for a sort of “respect” for those who we write about manifested, literally, in our writing. Which is a good point.