Journal of Digital Asset Management (2010) 6, and Me...

The good and wise folks at Palgrave now make available the latest issue of the JOURNAL OF DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT.  If you're actively involved in digital asset management, this is the journal to check out.

Blatant Self Promotion Alert!

John Horodyski's editorial nicely sums up my contribution to the latest issue: "Keith DeWeese from Tribune Interactive covers various topics related to the automated indexing of interactive news content including the cultural implications of transitioning from newspapers to online news in his interview. This includes the impact of declining newspaper readership; applying natural language processing techniques to massive, constantly changing content sets; and the challenges of indexing content of widely varying lengths using frequency-based relevancy."

Returning to Marina Warner, or the Taxidermist and the Taxonomist

If you're engaged in taxonomy development work, you've probably been asked, at least once, "What's taxonomy got to do with stuffing dead animals?"  Some folks are irritated by this, but I think it's a great question.  Marina Warner provides some thing of an answer in PHANTASMAGORIA: SPIRIT VISIONS, METAPHORS, AND MEDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY (Oxford, 2006).

When I read P... a few years back, part I, "Wax," chapter 2, "Anatomies and Heroes: Madame Tussauds" really struck home with its tracing of waxworking as an entertainment from the forensic waxworking practiced in Italian medical schools in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Elaborate forensic waxworks were models of the human anatomy used to teach medical students.  Such waxworks didn't horrify like the tales of cadavers provided to Dr. Knox by Burke and Hare, but they did point to the post French Revolution career of Madame Tussaud who took the art of the forensic waxworkers in to popular culture along with a wink and a nod to the resurrectionists of medical schools through her ever popular "Chamber of Horrors," a must for all subsequent and competing waxwork exhibitions.

Forensic waxworks functioning as models attempted to display characteristics of the human body, ideal forms of what "the body" looked like,  complete with cross-sections showing internal wax organs, wax disease, wax anomalies, and whatever else medical students needed to "know" without having to rout around in corpses.  Warner then touches on a cousin of wax working, taxidermy, and the practice of preserving corpses for similar study and, sometimes, popular exhibition.  The sexual organs of the celebrated Hottentot Venus wound up as one of these (controversial) exhibits.  The "Spectacular Bodies" museum exhibits of just a few years ago carry on the tradition; though, thinking of exsanguinated and freeze-dried human bodies as examples of taxidermy probably didn't cross the minds of too many moms and pops, kids in tow for "educational purposes," with stuffed dears' heads and marlins hanging in the family den.  Or maybe it did cross their minds.

But what does preserving once living entities mean beyond providing focus and shudders at carnival exhibitions and interior decoration and conversation pieces for some homes?  Going back to the forensic waxworks, it's the knowledge model functionality of the waxwork that's key.  Knowledge, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, comparison and contrasting one thing to another, to a model or control, to draw conclusions or know something about the subject at hand, was the goal.  Compare a blue-black leg to the ivory leg of the wax model, or compare the mottled, decaying pancreas of a recently dead man to the wax pancreas standard, and perhaps arrive at the notion that the blue-black leg or the mottled pancreas caused death.

A knowledge model is exactly what a taxonomy is but conveyed in words, codes, and associative relationships setting a standard for a knowledge domain rather than as a wax representation providing an ideal for another.  A taxonomy implies that some output of knowledge, say, a document set, will be compared to it in order to know which documents of the set meet its standard and which do not, which belong and which might need to be measured against another taxonomy.  For die-hards, the Z39.19-2005 standard covering the creation of monolingual controlled vocabularies contains information on how to validate vocabularies and taxonomies, which is sort of comparing and contrasting the standard in development to another standard, all of which makes the process of developing knowledge models a bit like playing the game variant, "Which Came First? The Chicken or the Structure Containing the Chicken?"  Beware of taking it too far!  Even forensic wax workers had to know when to stop, which probably accounts, in great part, for considering their surviving representations as art objects today.

I don't necessarily recommend to everyone decorating the den by hanging a taxonomy over the fireplace;  but, compared to a desiccated marlin, I'll take a mounted taxonomy any day.

Of Intelligent Agents and Believing in Santa Claus...

Earlier this year, I mentioned Virginia O'Hanlon in an article that I wrote for SEMANTIC UNIVERSE.   As it's that Christmas time of year, here's an excerpt from that piece:

'All of which reminds me of the famous story of little Virginia O'Hanlon who, in 1897, wrote her famous letter to Francis P. Church, editor of the New York Sun, asking, "Is there a Santa Claus?" to which Church replied, "Yes, Virginia, there is..." For a couple of generations, that answer sufficed and helped establish the Santa figure with a certain innocent veracity.

There is just no need to debate or drive that point home. But, today, it's just that sort of "declaration" working within the systematic documentation, discovery, surfacing, and online, interactive presentation of the "news" that makes an editorial response, or whatever the content is, that much more thought provoking. Today, particularly in the sphere of semantic technology, we're not just trying to convince children that "Santa Claus" exists as much as we're working to convince a whole host of intelligent agents and their algorithms that he exists, too.'

She's Speaking: My Chat with Angela Carter

Recently, a friend read to me some of his favorite passages from FLESH AND THE MIRROR: ESSAYS ON THE ART OF ANGELA CARTER. As I listened, a time and place of the past, around 1987/88, came back to me in a rush: an office in an old house, me on the phone, and the familiar, back-of-the-Penguin Carter face coming in to focus and hovering over the scene. I was remembering a telephone conversation I had, many years ago now, with Angela Carter. I don't know how I could have mislaid that conversation over the years, but I had. I'd changed. When I spoke with Carter, I wanted to write and publish like her, but then I changed.

My many and too elaborate word fantasies about hairy automatons, sacred fruit dropped from translation to Heaven, jewels that bullied and ate children, and Victorian maids hanging, for uncanny love, in moldy gardens were just not catching on with anyone, anywhere. The funny thing was that when I started writing about such things, I had no idea who Angela Carter was. I was just writing in my own way. But every now and then, some one would read and appreciate my tales, and so I was urged to read Carter's BLACK VENUS. It was a bit like catching sight, for the first time, of some one thought to be "the one." Not long after, I made the connection that Carter had co-written the screenplay for what was promoted in the States as a dreadful werewolf film but turned out to be THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, any thing but awful and, still, one of my favorite fantasy films. So now I was reading Carter along with others in somewhat similar universes, and I kept watching and writing and writing hoping it would mean some thing, knowing it was a long shot.

Then I wrote a letter which, like Fenby to Delius, took me to New York and a circle of internationally-renowned, avant-garde musicians and composers in orbit around a concert pianist with whom I had a mildly torturing, intimate relationship. Not being an internationally-renowned, avant-garde musician, I mostly prepared dinners and served those who were; turned pages for him; catalogued compositions by Morton Feldman and Arvo Part; and tried to put order to the personal phone book exploding with the contact information of Anthony Burgess, Diamanda Galas, Edward Gorey, Virgil Thompson, et al.

Taking a break from the glamor of it all, and with Village Voice opened before me, I read that Angela Carter was going to read from her novel LOVE, recently reissued, in a Greenwich Village bookstore on Tuesday. The problem: it was Tuesday, I was in Toronto, and she was reading just as I was reading about her reading. The added salt in the wound was noting that Carter was ending a residency at SUNY Somewhere. So much for meeting her, studying under her, plumbing her imagination, sharing laughs with her about about Sade and Bataille and marzipan Neuschwantstein's over cognacs, perhaps, cigars--I'd have smoked a cigar for Angela Carter.

That just wasn't how it played out. Now I'm mildly surprised that I even managed to figure out how to track down her phone number and call her. Her contact information didn't follow John Cage's in the prized personal phone book; but the Village book store gave it to me, and I was contacting SUNY, and, heart in throat, I was calling Angela Carter after find a florist who sold tuberose in case, should my fantasy of how things would play out become real, I'd be invited 'round for cognac. Not that the tuberose was her flower of choice, but in my purple-prose colored world, tuberoses just seemed so right for Angela Carter. I just needed to have the lovely little chat, set a lovely date, and be on my lovely way.

...

(from memory, so a bit more or less than the conversation really was)

The phone is ringing, it's answered, and a voice asks, "Hello?"

"Hello! May I speak with Angela Carter?"

"She's speaking."

"Where?"

"Here, on the phone, to you [moron]."

"Uh, um, er, um...hello, thank you for answering."

"You're welcome. And who is this?"

"This is Keith DeWeese."

"What can I do for you?"

"Well, Ms. Carter, I was just very upset that I missed your reading in the Village, and, well, I know I'm being a silly 'fan,' but I just wanted to talk to you. Your work inspires me, and I just wanted to say hello and thank you."

"Oh, that's delightful. So what inspires you?"

"Well, your choice of words, your subject matter--fairy tales, legends, folklore, Louise Brooks, Japan!"

"You like Louise Brooks, do you?"

"Yes, she's incredible."

"Who else do you like?"

"Well, I'm really in to Musidora these days. Irma Vep."

"Oh yes! Musidora. She's been on my mind, too, lately. She pops up in unique places, doesn't she?"

I'm laughing now, relaxed, "Yes, she does! I'm so glad she's on your mind. Do you think you'll write about her?"

"She's on my mind. I'm trying to see THE VAMPIRES, but I keep missing it. Have you seen it?"

"No! I keep trying, too, but it's just so hard to find."

"And I don't know if I could really follow it for so many hours. I've seen parts of it though, enough to tantalize me."

The rest of the conversation was more of the "Have you read...?" "Did you know...?" "Oh no! He didn't say that!" variety. At the end, she took my address, and, true to her word, within a few days, I received a note from her with a signed copy of LOVE. Her engagement at SUNY complete, she left for England the following week. So the delivery of tuberoses didn't work out as hoped, though I'd asked if she liked them, and she said, "Oh, yes, but over-powering in a closed room," which I think was said to humor me. As for LOVE, I read it until I came to love it.

Caustic as she could be, Angela Carter was warm, gracious, far kinder than I deserved. Under the circumstances--you know, absolute dolt calling Angela Carter out of the blue and burbling on about Erzebet Bathory and Louis Feuillade--it all smacks of a stalker tale now, but it wasn't; after all, she sent me LOVE.

A few years after that, the 'mildly torturing, intimate relationship' with the pianist ended badly in Norway and with a John Cage opera's interdeterminancy ricocheting all around us. By 1993, the pianist, Angela Carter, and John Cage were dead.