Deep Search conference 2010
Parent project:
Deep Search > World-Information InstituteReferenced content:
Rent and Bias - Contextual Modelling - Panel
Deep Search conference 2010
Search is a cost-intensive business operating in highly commercial environment. Yet, for the public, the services is free to use, financed indirectly through advertisement. Beneath this simple trade-off - free search results for the price of exposure to relatively limited advertisement - lie much more complex economic processes. On the one hand, there is the way in which the free labor of millions (who create the online content and place the links) is transformed into monetary value by the search engine providers (and other aggregators). On the other hand, there he economic bias of the companies themselves creeps into the search results. In this panel, we want to look at the economic models other than advertisement, and their social and political consequences.
The current paradigm of search is keywords and hit lists. While the results are presented as a simple, decontextualized hierarchy, it is produced by complex models that try to determine context. Increasingly, these contexts are made visible to users through clouds, network diagrams and other means breaking with the model of the hit list. In addition, complex, extremely large data-set created by search engines can provide the basis of complex models of social behavior which produce knowledge without any keywords. In this panel we want to look at how contextual knowledge is being used to inform a new paradigm in search, and a new types of social modeling beyond search.
Deep Search conference 2010
Search is a cost-intensive business operating in highly commercial environment. Yet, for the public, the services is free to use, financed indirectly through advertisement. Beneath this simple trade-off - free search results for the price of exposure to relatively limited advertisement - lie much more complex economic processes. On the one hand, there is the way in which the free labor of millions (who create the online content and place the links) is transformed into monetary value by the search engine providers (and other aggregators). On the other hand, there he economic bias of the companies themselves creeps into the search results. In this panel, we want to look at the economic models other than advertisement, and their social and political consequences.
The current paradigm of search is keywords and hit lists. While the results are presented as a simple, decontextualized hierarchy, it is produced by complex models that try to determine context. Increasingly, these contexts are made visible to users through clouds, network diagrams and other means breaking with the model of the hit list. In addition, complex, extremely large data-set created by search engines can provide the basis of complex models of social behavior which produce knowledge without any keywords. In this panel we want to look at how contextual knowledge is being used to inform a new paradigm in search, and a new types of social modeling beyond search.
Google Before Google, or, On the History of Search
Deep Search conference 2010
This talk is a contribution to a history of Google before Google. It recounts but one essential chapter in the story of the recurring human desire to "organize the world’s information" – Google’s stated goal. Eighteenth-century European Enlightenment was less a renunciation of "immaturity" than an organizing system of printed footnotes, indices, indexes, collations and cross-references. Enlightenment was bibliographic. Enlightenment was a series of tools that accelerated search and linking capacities of its central medium: print.
Deep Search conference 2010
This talk is a contribution to a history of Google before Google. It recounts but one essential chapter in the story of the recurring human desire to "organize the world’s information" – Google’s stated goal. Eighteenth-century European Enlightenment was less a renunciation of "immaturity" than an organizing system of printed footnotes, indices, indexes, collations and cross-references. Enlightenment was bibliographic. Enlightenment was a series of tools that accelerated search and linking capacities of its central medium: print.
Introduction to Deep Search II Conference
Deep Search conference 2010
Introduction to Deep Search II Conference
Deep Search conference 2010
Introduction to Deep Search II Conference
Search Engine Bias and the Public Interest
Deep Search conference 2010
Deep Search II Panel 3: Rent and Bias This talk examines the history of the search business, search advertising and optimization and suggests avenues for public engagement with search engine quality.
Deep Search conference 2010
Deep Search II Panel 3: Rent and Bias This talk examines the history of the search business, search advertising and optimization and suggests avenues for public engagement with search engine quality.
From a Tiny Island of Survey Data to the Ocean of Transactional Data Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
Q&A Panel 4: Contextual Modelling
Deep Search conference 2010
Q&A Panel 4: Contextual Modelling
From Sociometry to Social Networks Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
From Sociometry to Social Networks Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
From Sociometry to Social Networks Q&A
Critique of Search and the Problem of Knowledge Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
Critique of Search and the Problem of Knowledge Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
Critique of Search and the Problem of Knowledge Q&A
Organizing the World - Networks and Classification Panel
Deep Search conference 2010
Visions of Organizing the World
Living in a world of the formless chaos of sensations there is a need to impose order and to find extensions of the mind to organize experience. Since the early Enlightenment enormous efforts were invested into the creation of a system of universal classification. The 17th century brought up the idea that manifold memories do not have to be stored through techniques of ars memoria but can be encoded in scientific classification and are deducible through the algorithmic logic of scientific formulas. The 20th century showed that it is logically impossible to construct a single grand "metalogic". At the dawn of the 21century new visions are animating attempts to organize the worlds information.
Sociometry, Networks and Classification
The power of combining aggregate behavioral data for social data mining in collecting massive amounts of information and to analyze this in the context of longtime records allows to identify aggregate human behavior and uncover trends in society. Electronic networks can be instrumentalized and orchestrated to exploit the individual and to panoptic diagrams of reality mining in societies of control. At the same time social networking technologies can provide a powerful instrument for democratic participation and empowerment.
Deep Search conference 2010
Visions of Organizing the World
Living in a world of the formless chaos of sensations there is a need to impose order and to find extensions of the mind to organize experience. Since the early Enlightenment enormous efforts were invested into the creation of a system of universal classification. The 17th century brought up the idea that manifold memories do not have to be stored through techniques of ars memoria but can be encoded in scientific classification and are deducible through the algorithmic logic of scientific formulas. The 20th century showed that it is logically impossible to construct a single grand "metalogic". At the dawn of the 21century new visions are animating attempts to organize the worlds information.
Sociometry, Networks and Classification
The power of combining aggregate behavioral data for social data mining in collecting massive amounts of information and to analyze this in the context of longtime records allows to identify aggregate human behavior and uncover trends in society. Electronic networks can be instrumentalized and orchestrated to exploit the individual and to panoptic diagrams of reality mining in societies of control. At the same time social networking technologies can provide a powerful instrument for democratic participation and empowerment.
Critique of Search and the Problem of Knowledge
Deep Search conference 2010
Search engines must be understood from the perspective of their relation to knowledge and understanding. The term does not merely refer to Google or Yahoo!, but to the 'extended mind' that challenges our very understanding of knowledge and is made possible by the convergence of different disciplines across computer science, such as semantic web, AI, or ubicomp. The ubiquitous availability of information seems to ease the access and accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge conditioning access itself is becoming universal and absolute: what matters now is probably not the problem of access, but rather the conception of knowledge and understanding through the extended mind. First, Kant's opposition between rational knowledge and historical knowledge, and the positioning of algorithmatic knowledge in such an opposition must be re-assessed. Second, we must re-access Durkheim's "social categories" that are now becoming synchronized in favor of a unified, transcendental knowledge in its becoming, especially today when web ontology becomes the key to information retrieval. These two reassessments attempt to reinterpret our understanding of knowledge, with respect to cognition and sociality in the critique of search.
Deep Search conference 2010
Search engines must be understood from the perspective of their relation to knowledge and understanding. The term does not merely refer to Google or Yahoo!, but to the 'extended mind' that challenges our very understanding of knowledge and is made possible by the convergence of different disciplines across computer science, such as semantic web, AI, or ubicomp. The ubiquitous availability of information seems to ease the access and accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge conditioning access itself is becoming universal and absolute: what matters now is probably not the problem of access, but rather the conception of knowledge and understanding through the extended mind. First, Kant's opposition between rational knowledge and historical knowledge, and the positioning of algorithmatic knowledge in such an opposition must be re-assessed. Second, we must re-access Durkheim's "social categories" that are now becoming synchronized in favor of a unified, transcendental knowledge in its becoming, especially today when web ontology becomes the key to information retrieval. These two reassessments attempt to reinterpret our understanding of knowledge, with respect to cognition and sociality in the critique of search.
Search Engine Bias and the Public Interest Q&A
Deep Search conference 2010
Is it the job of private companies to ensure that we as citizens have fair access to the content of the Internet? Will technological development or market pressures ensure high quality search results in the future? Are "relevance" and "customer satisfaction" (the two most important quality metrics for search engine engineers) enough?
Deep Search conference 2010
Is it the job of private companies to ensure that we as citizens have fair access to the content of the Internet? Will technological development or market pressures ensure high quality search results in the future? Are "relevance" and "customer satisfaction" (the two most important quality metrics for search engine engineers) enough?
From a Tiny Island of Survey Data to the Ocean of Transactional Data
Deep Search conference 2010
Like all major successful technologies, survey research and survey data, despite their obvious success stories over the last decades, will cease to be the predominant mode of data bases for socio-economic research, broadly conceived. Instead, transactional data which result from electronic traces (web-search, electronic sales and purchases, etc.) will become the major data base for socio-economic analyses.
Second, visual methods which rely on pattern generation and pattern recognition by competent observers, will become at least as important as traditional statistical techniques. The lecture will focus on several main design groups for visual methods in the social sciences.
Third, the shift to an ocean of transactional data and to visualization techniques will have a profound effect on two domains: on the one hand, the new data ocean plus visualization techniques will require the construction of new sets of methods, tools, research designs and new classes of theory building for the theory and the methodology of the social sciences. Furthermore, aggregated transactional data and their diffusion through media channels should lead to new feedback-loops and to contagious attractors for everyday routines and practices.
Deep Search conference 2010
Like all major successful technologies, survey research and survey data, despite their obvious success stories over the last decades, will cease to be the predominant mode of data bases for socio-economic research, broadly conceived. Instead, transactional data which result from electronic traces (web-search, electronic sales and purchases, etc.) will become the major data base for socio-economic analyses.
Second, visual methods which rely on pattern generation and pattern recognition by competent observers, will become at least as important as traditional statistical techniques. The lecture will focus on several main design groups for visual methods in the social sciences.
Third, the shift to an ocean of transactional data and to visualization techniques will have a profound effect on two domains: on the one hand, the new data ocean plus visualization techniques will require the construction of new sets of methods, tools, research designs and new classes of theory building for the theory and the methodology of the social sciences. Furthermore, aggregated transactional data and their diffusion through media channels should lead to new feedback-loops and to contagious attractors for everyday routines and practices.
Surplus and the Immaterial: Political Notes on the 'Industrial Revolution of Data'
Deep Search conference 2010
Digital information is growing out of measure, out of the storage and computing capacity of the world, the Economist reports (Feb 2010). As usual the Economist appears optimistic and comfortable about new business opportunities, but some data provided by the report itself point to a structural contradiction. The question is whether the technological limits of the Turing universe will unveil a political limit, i.e. if the excess of social cooperation and communication feeding the mediasphere may turn into something else, into a new social composition. Or will capitalism once again reorganise its governance and the 'industrial revolution of data' will constitute just a further economic regime?
Deep Search conference 2010
Digital information is growing out of measure, out of the storage and computing capacity of the world, the Economist reports (Feb 2010). As usual the Economist appears optimistic and comfortable about new business opportunities, but some data provided by the report itself point to a structural contradiction. The question is whether the technological limits of the Turing universe will unveil a political limit, i.e. if the excess of social cooperation and communication feeding the mediasphere may turn into something else, into a new social composition. Or will capitalism once again reorganise its governance and the 'industrial revolution of data' will constitute just a further economic regime?
From Sociometry to Social Networks. Networking as Technique of the Social
Deep Search conference 2010
"Social Networks" -- the peculiarity of this ubiquitous term rarely ever draws attention. But in the history of networks, the microsocial approach in sociology is a surprisingly late event. Starting with Jacob Levy Moreno's inauguration of sociometry in the 1930s, microlevel actor networks form a crucial part in a twofold genealogy of knowledge. My presentation therefore focuses on the co-evolution of sociological theory, statistics and the rise of the digital computer. What is the relation between network visualization and non-visual logic of matrices and the databases which are now powering the massive social networking sites? How has American Sociology been constructing the scientific facts that today inform the relational approach to our lives? And finally, what power relations are inscribed in all those everyday sociometric appliances and gadgets of the network society?
Deep Search conference 2010
"Social Networks" -- the peculiarity of this ubiquitous term rarely ever draws attention. But in the history of networks, the microsocial approach in sociology is a surprisingly late event. Starting with Jacob Levy Moreno's inauguration of sociometry in the 1930s, microlevel actor networks form a crucial part in a twofold genealogy of knowledge. My presentation therefore focuses on the co-evolution of sociological theory, statistics and the rise of the digital computer. What is the relation between network visualization and non-visual logic of matrices and the databases which are now powering the massive social networking sites? How has American Sociology been constructing the scientific facts that today inform the relational approach to our lives? And finally, what power relations are inscribed in all those everyday sociometric appliances and gadgets of the network society?
Institute for New Culture Technolgies / t0
