Wwwwh: who, what, where, why, how fdm 20c introduction to digital media lecture 10.04.2003

2. last time specific questions who is douglas engelbart? who is ted nelson? is hypertext a form of thought? of reading? of writing? general questions what is the stated motivation of the research? what problem does this research address? who funded this research? what is the economics of the work (i.e., who will buy it?, sell it?, use it?) what is the stated genealogy of the technology? who are the �dramatis personae� of the article? what narrative strategies are employed in the article? othering: who are �we�? who are �they�? what�s a �what� and who is a �who�? what is �thinking�? what is �reading�? what is �writing�?

3. general questions (continued) where was this published? who is the intended audience? what texts are cited in this text? prior to their appearance in this text, who spoke or wrote which statements to whom? where? under what conditions?

4. a general approach to reading technical texts from bruno latour, science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (1987) ...picture the following comic strip: we start with a technical sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership; we then put it in quotation marks, add to this speaking character another character to whom it is speaking; then we place all of them in a specific situation, somewhere in time and space, surrounded by equipment, machines colleagues; then when the controversy heats up a bit we look at where the disputing people go and what sort of new elements they fetch, recruit or seduce in order to convince their colleagues; then, we see how the people being convinced stop discussing with one another; situations, localizations, even people start being slowly erased; on the last picture we see a new sentence, without any quotation marks, written in a text book [or technical manual; or piece of software] similar to the one we started with in the first picture.

5. positive and negative modalities (from latour) (1) New Soviet missiles aimed against Minutemen silos are accurate to 100 meters. (2) Since [new Soviet missiles are accurate within 100 meters] this means that Minutemen are not safe any more, and this is the main reason why the MX weapon system is necessary. this is a positive modality of (1) (3) Advocates of the MX in the Pentagon cleverly leak information contending that [new Soviet missiles are accurate within 100 meters] this is a negative modality of (1)

6. positive and negative modalities (from latour) positive modalities: We will call positive modalities those sentences that lead a statement away from its conditions of production, making it solid enough to render some other consequences necessary. negative modalities: We will call negative modalities those sentences that lead a statement in the other direction towards its conditions of production and that explain why it is solid or weak instead of using it to render some other consequences more necessary. from bruno latour, science in action, p. 23.

7. outline who is tim berners-lee? an abbreviated reading of �the world-wide web� by berners-lee, et al. what are URIs, universal resource identifiers? what is HTML, the hypertext markup language? what is HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol? visualizing the web as a heterogeneous network of people and machines

8. berners-lee: cv education b.a., physics, queen�s college, oxford university employment senior research scientist, laboratory for computer science (lcs), mit; and, 3com founders chair, lcs, mit; and, director of the world-wide web consortium software engineer, cern, the european particle physics laboratory in geneva, switzerland fellowship at cern software engineer, image computer systems ltd. consultant at cern software engineer, d.j. nash ltd., dorsett, uk software engineer, plessey telecommunications ltd., poole/dorsett, uk

9. questions: the world-wide web what is the stated motivation of the research? �The WWW was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.� what problem does this research address? Originally the work was to provide a graphical interface to a set of distributed files used in physics project management at CERN. who funded this research? Currently and/or previously supported by CERN, DARPA, the European Commission, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus), ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), MIT and the WWW Consortium. what is the economics of the work? == the economics of standards what is the stated genealogy of the technology? (bush�s memex; nelson�s writings on hypertext; berners-lee�s early implementations)

10. questions (continued) who is the intended audience? Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) who are the �dramatis personae� of the article? humans, physicists, engineers what narrative strategies are employed in the article? origin story, technical reference, how-to manual othering: who are �we�? who are �they�? consider the competing standards (e.g., wais, gopher, ftp) and the existing utopic writings (e.g., xanadu) what is �thinking�/ �reading� / �writing� ? see nelson and engelbart where was this published? Communications of the ACM; see www.acm.org what texts are cited? definitions of various standards who made which statements to whom, where, when, why, and how?

11. what is the www? answer 1: a collaboratively authored hypertext and/or a collaborative authored technology

12. organizations and standards writing standards is a process of collaborative writing the practical politics of classifying and standardizing: There are two aspects of these politics: arriving at categories and standards, and, in the process, deciding what will be visible within the system (and of course what will thus then be invisible). The negotiated nature of standards and classifications follows from indeterminacy and multiplicity that whatever appears as universal or, indeed, standard, is the result of negotiations or conflict. How do these negotiations take place? Who determines the final outcome in preparing a formal classification? Visibility issues arise as one decides where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting. Because there are always advantages and disadvantages to being visible, this becomes crucial in the workability of the schema. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, �How things (actor-net)work: Classification, magic and the ubiquity of standards,� http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html

13. who wrote/influenced the www standards? what is the international standards organization (iso)? what is the internet engineering task force (ietf)? what is a request for comments (rfc)? who belongs to the world-wide web consortium?

14. iso: international standards organization ISO is a network of national standards institutes from 145 countries working in partnership with international organizations, governments, industry, business and consumer representatives. It acts as a bridge between public and private sector. It has created over 12,000 standards. ISO standards are developed according to the following principles: Consensus: The views of all interests are taken into account: manufacturers, vendors and users, consumer groups, testing laboratories, governments, engineering professions and research organizations. Industry-wide: Global solutions to satisfy industries and customers worldwide. Voluntary: International standardization is market-driven and therefore based on voluntary involvement of all interests in the market-place. [from the ISO website www.iso.ch]

15. ietf: internet engineering task force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport, security, etc.). Much of the work is handled via mailing lists. The IETF holds meetings three times per year.

16. rfc: request for comments Each distinct version of an Internet standards-related specification is published as part of the "Request for Comments" (RFC) document series. This archival series is the official publication channel for Internet standards documents and Internet community. RFCs can be obtained from a number of Internet hosts using anonymous FTP, gopher, World Wide Web, and other Internet document-retrieval systems [e.g., www.ietf.org/rfc]. The RFC series of documents on networking began in 1969 as part of the original ARPA wide-area networking (ARPANET) project. Some RFCs document Internet Standards. These RFCs form the 'STD� subseries of the RFC series. When a specification has been adopted as an Internet Standard, it is given the additional label "STDxxx", but it keeps its RFC number and its place in the RFC series. Some RFCs standardize the results of community deliberations about statements of principle or conclusions about what is the best way to perform some operations or IETF process function. These RFCs form the specification has been adopted as a BCP, it is given the additional label "BCPxxx", but it keeps its RFC number and its place in the RFC series. Not all specifications of protocols or services for the Internet should or will become Internet Standards or BCPs. Such non-standards track specifications are not subject to the rules for Internet standardization. Non-standards track specifications may be published directly as "Experimental" or "Informational" RFCs at the discretion of the RFC Editor

17. w3c: world-wide web consortium 414 current members: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List want to join? full membership: $57,500/year affiliate membership: $5,750/year

18. uri: universal resource identifier examples: http://artstream.ucsc.edu/film20c mailto:professor_fdm20c@yahoo.com ftp://artstream.ucsc.edu

19. html: hypertext markup language try [view] --> [source] in your web browser html is derived from sgml sgml was created by charles goldfarb and others originally as an ibm project on integrated law office information systems. sgml is intended to be a means to make explicit the content and structure of a document. compare this approach to the visual means of graphic design.

20. http: hypertext transfer protocol http is an internet protocol designed for transfering information for hypertext documents. what is a network protocol? a set of rules used when computers send information across the network compare this to ftp, smtp, nntp, etc. for more on protocols and how they work see http://artstream.ucsc.edu/film170a/Winter2003/notes-for-12-feb-03.html

21. http: experiments to try on your computer the simpliest web browser: from os x or your cats unix account, try fetching the front page of Google using telnet with the following sequence of commands: telnet www.google.com 80 get / http/1.0 a trace of what the web server sees: examine the access_log of your apache web server: /private/var/logs/httpd/access_log watching the traffic between the browser and he server: if you have mac os x, try running tcpflow or tcpdump: % sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -i en1 -c port 80

22. what is the www? answer 2: the www is a vast, heterogeneous network of people and machines how big is the web? http://www.searchenginewatch.com how fast is the web? http://www.internetweather.com/ what is the history of the web? http://www.archive.org/ what does the web look like en large? http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html

23. what is the www? answer 3: the www is a collaboratively authored hypertext, a collaboratively authored technology, and a vast, heterogeneous network of people and machines mapping the space: using ideas from bruno latour and the graphical conventions of networks, we can envision the www as all of these things at the same time

24. next time: rhizomes and networks bruno latour gilles deleuze felix guattari