Week Two Interface, Database, Bush, Englebart
**I will be out of town this week Thursday until class time Wednesday, so this is posted a week early.
Summaries:
In his chapter on "The Interface," Manovich discusses the idea of cultural interfaces in three different forms: print, cinema, and HCI. In detail he discusses metaphors of print such as the page and the folder, and ways in which cinema acts as a cultural interface privileging movement, perspective, and visual narrative. He refers to cinema as a "toolbox of the computer user" in that "Cinematic means of perception, of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking, and emotion have become a way of life for millions in the computer age"(86). However, beyond the description of forms, Manovich also talks about the physical presence of a screen and the idea of imprisonment or technological tethering. He outlines the history of the screen as the classical picture frame (available in concept still as horizontal view is referred to as landscape and vertical as portrait) as well as the dynamic screen of moving pictures. Though, it is when he details the movement to a real time screen and the issues of VR that Manovich also brings up the idea of fixedness involved in using a screen as an interface and that although VR incorporates a lack of screen, or an unbounded screen "VR imprisons the body to an unprecedented extent"(109). Therefore, the paradox is that in removing the borders of a screen and seemingly the limits of perspective involved in the classic or dynamic screen, VR has thus far involved an apparatus that is fixed even as the user is required to move, "thus making the user a captive of the machine in a physical sense" (Friedberg as qtd. in Manovich 110).
Contrary to the issues of physical/technological relationships introduced in "The Interface," Manovich deals primarily with the categorization, spatializing, and conceptualizing of data and data storage in his chapter, "The Forms" on the database. He sets forth the tension in new media and data organization between the idea of the database and the narrative. He questions whether the database represents the opposite of the narrative in form and outlines examples of databases that deal with the competing goals of information access and psychological engagement or immersion. Next, Manovich discusses instances where a new media user relies on syntagmatic, sequential structures as well as paradigmatic or database-like constructs. Along the way, he cautions that although one might be said to pick a trajectory through a database, this cannot be considered a narrative unless there is a perception of connections or connected events. In other words, "a database can support a narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation. It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest territory, of the new media landscape"(228). Finally, Manovich presents Greenaway and Vertov as two cinema figures who in working with the traditionally narrative structure of film attempt to subvert that mode in an attempt to capture a cinematic representation of a database. This is important as Manovich claims that the skill to merge the two forms is something that all new media designers and artists have yet to learn (243).
In keeping with a look at databases and information storage and retrieval, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think" presents a surprisingly modern and insightful look at how information might be stored and accessed while maintaining a series of associations referred to as "trails." Bush marvels at how "[t]he world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it"(38). He outlines several possible devices for the aid of human thought and creative development, the most detailed of which is called the "Memex" where one might store thousands of records in a micro/compressed system. However, Bush states that the issues with this system would involve difficulty in retrieving records "largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing"(44). Instead he proposes associative links that would form trails. These trails could be recorded as such, recalled at a future time, and even shared and incorporated into a colleague's Memex. What Bush is ultimately calling for in the storage of data is "selection by association, rather than indexing"(44).
This idea of associative data storage and construction is further taken up by Englebart, having read Bush's article. In "Augmenting the Human Intellect" Englebart goes into more detail in terms of man's limitations of memory and abstract conceptualization and proposes a system for not only storing and recalling information, but also for working through complex problems of argument statements. In the example of an architect using simulation, mathematical modeling, and functional analysis, Englebart states: "In such a future working relationship between human problem-solver and computer 'clerk,' the capability of the computer for executing mathematical processes would be used whenever it was needed"(98). An extended example of the computer's capacity for visual organization of information is the hypothetical description of a "computer-based augmentation system." Here Englebart outlines a computer-based system that could in essence diagram parts of an argument or statement providing links to antecedents and nodes. He finds this associative/visual structure so effective in providing shortcuts to reformulating a complex statement that in the end of the article he laments ever having to return to a more sequential, serial approach.
My Thoughts:
Regarding Manovich's statement about the screen and the body in VR, I was interested in the paradox of movement and fixedness. I'm interested in how the interface offers a tension between experienced movement in the VR session and the physical technological tethering in reality. Also, because I am recently interested in looking at audio culture and the experience of auditory composition as being temporally controlled, I'm wondering how the screen interface argument works for sound, especially with the mobility of ipods, "reality soundtracking" and if there is an ability to translate this concept to that mode. (I have finally found a more concrete research interest, so I have been trying to read this section with that in mind.) Additionally, the section "The Interface" seemed to connect to media as a filter and the idea of new media as "repurposing." When Manovich talks about computer gaming involving cinematics and shifts in perspectives and defined narratives/narrative development despite algorithms there was a clear connection to cinema as a cultural interface for new media.
In terms of the section on "The Forms" and the database, the question of the form or the possible merger of the database and the narrative is something that I believe the last three readings were all taking up together. Manovich is outlining the tension between narrative and database while also positing some creative approaches in new media to merging the forms. Also, the availability of new media to be numerically represented and digital seems to allow for a greater complexity in creating an archival system that allows for multiple categorizations and associations. However, what Manovich is addressing is the ability of new media to address such a merger of forms.
However, Bush and Englebart are primarily concerned, not with the cultural interface that will present a merging of forms, but an archival system for personal research and problem solving. In their discussion of associative trails and recording, indexing and representing the recall of data, however, they are implicitly dealing with the tension of creating a database that not only allows for, but also facilitates the archival of research and problem-solving narratives. Bush envisions the Memex device as one that can in essence: scan, use keyword (coded) searches for access, and has the potential for collaborative sharing of "files" or "file transfer" in allowing a whole trail to be printed and given to a colleague to be included in his or her Memex as part of a greater or slightly different trail.
Englebart, on the other hand, is not only interested in research archival systems but also the representation of concepts and computer-based augmentation of problem solving. What he seems to be describing in some ways not only involves creating a visual narrative through a brainstorm of ideas or statements but also an interface which would allow the individual to visually grasp relationships (logical narratives) through nodes and antecedent links displayed non-sequentially on a screen. Therefore, while both Bush and Englebart seem to be calling for what today would entail a more complex system of tagging records, Englebart's proposition appears to be more closely linked to not only the issues of database and narrative, but also tying in the issues of HCI and providing an effective GUI interface such that human intellect truly would be assisted not only in terms of memory and retrieval but also in respect to construction of knowledge and composition. Thus, it is in Englebart's article that both the database, the narrative, and the interface are being addressed.