Missiverna #52

Hejsan!

52 veckor av missiverande borde betyda att jag firar ett år som brevskrivare. Hurra mej! Har du hängt med från början (sedan 29 juli 2013) bör du ha minst 520 länkar att klicka på, i och med det här numret.  

Så här såg den gångna veckan ut för mig:

1. Yale-universitetet har en av världens främst samlingar musikinstrument, och på en ny sajt kan man utforska dem!
    
2. Design fiction* är ett spännande ämne och TBD Catalog är en katalog över fiktiva produker (Tack Peter för tips!):
   
   [It] is today's exuberance about a fantastic near future translated into its inevitably fraught, low-battery, poor reception, broken firmware, normal, ordinary, everyday sensibilities. It is neither boom, nor bust. It is just the near future now. It is the near future we'll wind up with for our sins. 
   
   * En definition: "Design Fiction uses narrative elements to envision and explain possible futures for design."
    
3. "unBox the Chomsky Archive is a project that will make Chomsky’s personal papers accessible to the world. With your help, we can expedite the process of sharing Chomsky’s remarkable collection of notes, drafts, photographs, and other unpublished materials."
   
   - Los Angeles Review of Books skriver om det arkiv över Susan Sontags digitala liv som finns tillgängligt på UCLA sedan i somras:
   
   Scholars and curious Sontagolytes can now check out a laptop that reproduces the basic folder structure of Sontag’s computers (a Power Mac G4, an iBook) from the 1990s and early 2000s. That laptop makes visible all of her digital files and presents the entirety of her email correspondence, thus making extraordinarily open and available the digital life of this most private of American public intellectuals.
    
4. Fint app-koncept:
   
   "Shhhh is a mobile application that turns off all notifications and alarms automatically to stay tuned with friends and family when spending time together"
    
5. Computational Culture är en akademisk tidskrift om mjukvarustudier. Här är utdrag ur två abstracts, det ena om NoSQL-databser och det andra om Facebook Open Graph:
   
   As part of a broader inquiry into the materialities of information, this paper examines the specific materialities of database technologies, at a moment when those materialities are in flux.
   
   och...
   
   We argue that, if Facebook is to be conceptualized as a mass medium, the Open Graph is where media and masses mutually (re-)configure one another. In order to disentangle these relationships, we investigate backend and frontend practices from three different angles – descriptive, analytical and historical – and investigate how seemingly incompatible media promises converge.
    
6. MIT Technology Review om Google Genome:
   
   Also speeding the move of DNA data to the cloud has been a yearlong price war between Google and Amazon. Google says it now charges about $25 a year to store a genome, and more to do computations on it. Scientific raw data representing a single person’s genome is about 100 gigabytes in size, although a polished version of a person’s genetic code is far smaller, less than a gigabyte. That would cost only $0.25 cents a year.
    
7. Under november äger inte bara NaNoWriMo rum, utan också NaNoGenMo, eller National Novel Generation Month: "Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words." Ett av de mer ambitiösa bidragen är ett som har regenererat Voynich-manuskriptet (nämnt förra veckan).
   
   - Relaterat: video från Bot Summit 2014, "an event where botmakers from around the world get together, both in person and online, to discuss the art and craft of making software bots."
    
8. Draftback är ett Chrome-tillägg som kan spela tillbaka vartenda jävla tangenttryck i Google-dokument som du och/eller andra skrivit! Mind blown. James Somers berättar hur han gjorde det. (Tack Mariana för tips!)
    
9. "By using an audio interface to communicate data feeds rather than a visual one, Phantom Terrains explores hearing as a platform for augmented reality that can immerse us in continuous, dynamic streams of data." 
   
   Frank Swain, som är hörselskadad, berättar om hur han omvandlar elektromagnetisk strålning från WiFi-nätverk till ljus som sedan sänds i hans hörselapparat.  
    
10. Surfa, drunkna, dyka: Rex Sorgatz analys av mediainnovationer de senaste 25 åren är inte så dum. Här avslutningen, om var vi (kanske) är nu:
    
    "Today’s innovators have abandoned the archives. Innovations in recent years have shifted away from an obsession with capturing everything to a fascination [at] exploring something. We now inhabit a world populated with strange new media creatures: deep subreddits and long episodic podcasts, premium binge-watching and topical data visualization.
    
    We are now in the era of the deep dive.
    
    Consider the media buzzwords of this moment: think piece, longform, recap, and binge watch. All of these terms suggest a break from the era of big data into the epoch of deep exploration."

Dyk djupare,
---
Erik Stattin
erik.stattin@gmail.com 
@mymarkup
@missiverna