Old Email Archive

digest 1997-02-19 #001



11:28 PM 2/18/97 -0800
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
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Date: 18 Feb 1997 16:04:40 -0800
From: "Wayne Miller" 
Subject: a couple of interesting announcements...
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Electronic College of Theory 
Subject: ECOT -- announcemnt, CFP
Electronic College of Theory For 17 February 1997
++++++++++++++++++++
Contents of this issue:
1. Qwerty on the www
2. Computational Semiotics -- CFP
++++++++++++++++++++
1. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
QWERTY, an arts-magazine (ISSN 1203-8768) produced by graduate students
at
the University of New Brunswick, is pleased to announce (and
shamelessly
promote) our latest digital dive.  Check out
http://www.unb.ca/web/QWERTY/qweee.htm   =20
for our call for submissions of electronic art of all kinds.
Please tell two friends.
All good things,
Darryl Whetter
h. (506) 455-7767
w. (506) 453-4686
also available at:  qwerty@unb.ca
2. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
1st INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL SEMIOTICS
26th - 27th May, 1997
P=F4le Universitaire L=E9onard de Vinci PARIS - LA DEFENSE - FRANCE
TOPICS
SEMIOTICS OF TEXT  : Suzanne Bertrand-Gastaldy, University of Montreal
Computers are increasingly used to assist text analysis for cognitive,
literary, anthropological, sociological, documentary, etc. research.
The
workshop will focus on actual realisations, on the possibilities and
limits
of methodologies and existing tools to take into account the complex
and
multidimensional nature of texts, allowing multiple points of views for
a
variety of user needs. Issues such as desirable features of text
analysis
software, robustness and conviviality of implantations, interaction
between
corpora and users, constraints that actual tools put upon kinds of
analyses and coding choices, the ability to elaborate models of
electronic
analytical tools suited to different semiotic theories, semiotical
foundations of markup languages are examples of possible debates.
SEMIOMETHODOLOGY : Claude Vogel, L=E9onard de Vinci University
Several genres are currently under investigation for semiotic studies :
electronic mail, news, corporate information, Web publishing. The flood
of
full text is overflowing semantic analysis, and this major paradigm
break
leads us to reconsider our approach of text processing. The size of
these
new corpora, the lack of consistency of information, the physical
scattering
of the basic units of texts, make the classical documentary solutions
very uncomfortable. Instead, the semiotic based analysis seems to be a
highly compelling perspective. It is focused on chronology; it provides
a=
way
to build transitive narratives throughout large amounts of data, and it
does
not require the understanding of the details of each local grammatical
sentence in order for a global plot to be elaborated. This promising
trend
may give a second wind to ethnomethodology. For this reason, it is more
appropriate to use the term "semiomethodology" when evoking
this attempt to
rationalize the computational approach of the symbolic dynamics which
underlie collaborative production.
ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS : Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University
Organizational semiotics is the semiotics of organizations and
organizational dimensions of textual semiotics. The objective of this
workshop is to
define the boundaries of this new specialty. Specifically, we will
address
the issue of : "How can semiotic analysis of interpersonal and
corporate
exchanges be used to reveal, evaluate, and contrast the underlying
organizational logics and changes in these logics over time ?"
Recent
advances in
textual analysis are facilitating this endeavor and creating new
opportunities for understanding organizational behavior. Critical issues
in
the area
of organizational semiotics include : 1) how to quickly and reliably
analyze
large quantities of texts, 2) how to reduce textual data to an
empirical
form that can be combined with other types of data and analyzed
statistically, 3) how to identify corporate texts (those representing
the
"view" of
the organization as an entity) and address issues of authorship, and 4)
how
to identify institutional constraints on the production and maintenance
of corporate texts. New and innovative computational methods for
empirically
analyzing texts are being developed to address these and related
concerns. These techniques have the potential to move textual analysis
beyond counting words or locating a few themes or concepts. This
section=
will
focus on the issues involved in performing organizational semiotics
with
particular attention to the new computationally based techniques for
facilitating organizational analysis that increase the ease, speed or
reliability of coding texts and generate information that can be
analyzed
statistically.
BIOSEMIOTICS : Jean-Claude Heudin, L=E9onard de Vinci University
Recently, algorithms and architectures based on models derived from
biological systems have been receiving an increasing amount of
interest.=
This
section will explore how such new approaches and techniques could be
used
for managing large amount of information exchanges on Internet or
Intranet.
Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to,
applications
of agent-based systems, autonomous and evolving agents, genetic
algorithms and programming, neural networks, cellular automata etc. to
text
stream analysis and in the more general framework of semiotics
analysis.
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Send four copies of an abstract (approximately 500 words) in english or
email it to :
Ir=E8ne Ludman - IWCS'97
P=F4le Universitaire L=E9onard de Vinci
92916 PARIS-LA DEFENSE-CEDEX, FRANCE=20
Phone: (33) 01 41 16 73 05=20
Fax : (33) 01 41 16 73 35
Email : irene.ludmann@devinci.fr
DEADLINES
Submission of abstracts by 1st April 1997
Acceptance notification to authors by 15th April 1997
Submission of full papers by 12th May 1997
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Claude Vogel (chairman), Suzanne Bertrand-Gastaldy, Kathleen Carley,
Jean-Claude Heudin
PROGRAM COMMITTE
Pierre Boudon (canada), Guillaume Deffuant (France), Evelyne Lutton
(France), Joe Porac (USA), Carl Roberts (USA), J. Sebeok (Canada),
Peter
Stockinger (France), Bill Turner (France)
For more information please visit the following Web page :
http://www.devinci.fr/home/actua.htm
=3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D 
=3D  =
=3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D  =3D
Information for Subscribers
The Electronic College of Theory is an e-mail conference devoted to
literary
theory and related topics.  It is sponsored by the Society for
Critical=
Exchange
and the English Department of Case Western Reserve University.   The
English=
=20
Department of the University of Iowa has generously provided an email
home.
ECOTs electronic mail address is: sce-ecot@uiowa.edu.
Please send all contributions, requests to join or suspend or leave
the=20
conference, or other administrative matters to this address.
Participation in the conference is limited to members of the Society
for=20
Critical Exchange, but we'll gladly let you sit in for a while before=
badgering
you (gently) to join.  For more information on the SCE and its many=20
activities, point your web browser to:
http://www.cwru.edu/orgs/sce/sce.html
Or contact the moderator of this list, Max Thomas, at
max-thomas@uiowa.edu.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 18 Feb 1997 19:33:25 -0800
From: Andrew Russ 
Subject: Re: The Golem
Some of you may be interested in a practicing physicist's
review of _the Golem_ by Collins and Pinch.  The reviewer was
N. David Mermin (among other things coauthor of my condensed
matter physics text).  It appears in the March and April 1996
issues of Physics Today, as the "Reference Frame" column (p.
11
both months).  Letters in response, including one by Collins nd
Pinch, appear in the July 1996 issue of Physics Today (p. 11 again).
(And while we're at it, there's an opinion piece on the Alan Sokal
- -- Social Text incident on p. 60 of the July 1997 issue).  Physics
Today is the American Physical Society member magazine, and your
library probably has it.
>
>I recently gave one of my sharper students a couple of chapters
from
>_The Golem_ by Collins & Pinch. My student is a math whiz and
still
>young enough to want science to be a search for rational truth.
While he
>was able to credit the argument that science is a human institution
and
>often proceeds by other than purely objective and rational means,
he
>would like to think that in the end the nature of reality is laid
clear.
Who doesn't want science to be a search for rational truth?
(It just doesn't work out that way for various reasons that most
of you know some of (does any body know all of them)).
"The end" wherein the nature of reality is laid clear may be
a
long time in coming, so a lot of the confusion comes from viewing
science in progress as finished science results.  Then again, maybe
no fact in science is completely finished (or final).  I think i
better stop here, though.
>So he had a question about the chapter on the reception of
relativity.
>Specifically, he asked why, if physicists were so all-fired hot to
>accept the radical theory of an obscure paten clerk (as Collins and
>Pinch seem to argue)--why was Einstein only given the Nobel in 1923,
and
>then for the photo-electric effect?
>
>My tentative answer was that the politics and sociology of the
Nobel
>committee may have played a role. And I suggested that we'd need to
look
>at Eddington's biography for evidence of his motives, and to see
whether
>he was typical of his fellow-physicists.
Well, i think the occurence of "instant" Nobels is only a
very recent pehnomenon (e.g. the W Boson discovery experiment in
1983 awarded in 1985), and still not common.  I'm sure this is
written about in several places, as it's an obvious question.
(not unlike the question of why James Joyce never received a
Nobel in literature).
>I also suggested that the
>various attempts to reproduce the Michelson-Morley results were
more
>telling, since the narrative of 20th century science presents the
M-M
>experiments as conclusive proof of relativity when in fact the
results
>were open to considerable interpretation.
>
The narrative of 20th Century Science, as presented
in undergraduate textbooks, is designed more around the desire to
create a certain understanding of the theory or phenomena being
studied, rather than a desire to produce historical accuracy.
Thus the way things happened gets simplified and rearranged
for rhetorical reasons (and probably because this was how the
textbook author learned this material him/her-self).
Also, this account is generated with considerable hindsight.
For example, the concept of the vector is typically introduced
in the first or second chapter of elementary physics, before or
during the study of Newton's mechanics.  But historically vector
notation was proposed by J. W. Gibbs and O. Heaviside in the 1890s,
two centuries after Newton's mechanics.
andrew russ