Jhu presentation-final-2010 jul20

data and its discontents john’s hopkins university July 20, 2010

why globalization works for

but not for

Khalil al-Anani http://international.daralhayat.com/internationalarticle/147817

Mohammad Kayyali http://hyperstage.net/

Eman Abdelrahman http://lastoadri.com/blog/

globilization cheat sheet

winners losers things people brands ideas corporations ecosystems atoms bytes

disclaimer

this guy

@EthanZ, said all this with more elegance, better jokes, and richer data @ TED last week :-P http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html

unfortunately, the news is trending the wrong way Ethan Zuckerman 2010 TEDtalks

key ethanisms

imaginary cosmopolitanism

engineered serindipidy

an aside

Benjamin Franklin image from the portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis Ethan Zuckerman photo by Joi Ito (CC-BY)

1. Ethanz is the Dalai Franklin 2. Birthing diverse, global idea/information networks is the modern equiv of Franklin’s defining modern nation state

July 4, 1776 The Declaration of Independence

July 14, 2010 The Declaration of Interdependence

which gets us to the starting point of this talk

why isn’t the internet working, and how can geeks+translators help?

Meedan’s 2 interests 1. Translation 2. Context

1. Translation the most obvious barrier to global information exchange

http://news.meedan.net

Meedan Translation + translation as dynamic + revisions are collaborative + show translation history + the consumer as editor + MT data feedback loop + community vets translations + translator given attribution

Showing two languages side by side counter to traditional UI/UX best practices +provenance +attribution +version control +visual cues +url translation +lots of human effort

Activity streams on two Meedan translator’s proﬁle pages

Meedan Translation 2011 + Glossary Tools + Translation Memory Tools* + Entity Extraction + Mobile (SMS) + Urdu and Farsi Engines + Translation Marketplace

2. Context (understanding) Increasingly, context is a digital artifact that can be curated

first a bit a theory

understanding in an two- person, monolingual exchange is non-trivial

Creative Commons - Mushon Zer-Aviv

Meaning outbound = speaker’s intention+the rules of my language+referents+use of the grammar+choice of words+sound of voice +movement of face+social grammars+political grammars+time of day+distance from the ice cream truck+temperature+every context in which the speaker has ever used/heard this word+++ Meaning inbound (a guess at the speakers intention) = pretty much all the above processed through my framework, with a nod to all the speaker’s referents of which I have knowledge.

very non-trivial

fortunately, this helps

the meaning of a word is its use in the language Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations

when we ‘use’ a ‘word’* we are also signifying our ‘place’** in the ‘language’ * url, hashtag, tag, phrase, entity ** network, location (geo), location (social), role

bringing it back

I think I can

If meaning is bound in use and use is bound in language, then this barrier is also a great filter. When we go looking outside our language community we will be more likely to find new ‘meanings’- we will have an understanding better able to withstand the harsh semantic climate swings that typify this lovely blue and green planet

nytimes

dar al hayat

lastoadri.blogspot

data data data language, words, phrases, comments, tweets, people mentioned, entities mentioned, entities afﬁliated, locations mentioned, publishing location, publish time, event time(s), last update time, comment/bookmark times, tags, strong tags, links, target language(s), publisher, author(s), people af- ﬁliated (via twitter, face book, any available social graph)

understanding

an example* *controversial example

the war on terror

semantic namespace problem good! bad!

new signifiers ephemeral networks

http://daralhayat.com/ef657 http://nytimes.com/45769

discovery

Meedan Analytics 2011 + Media Database + Bi-lingual Search + Freebase/SwiftRiver Tagging + Maps + Network Tools

we need geeks

to work on

in closing

declaration of interdependence

we might say, “We hold only one truth to be self-evident, namely the truth that truth itself is big, social, complex, global, multilingual, and evolving.

Our life is made richer and our understanding more durable to the extent that we absorb as many of the diverse and distributed truths that surround

any one person, country, corner store, url, folk singer, geo-political event, web application, concept, word, or powerpoint presentation.”

true thanks :) ebice@meedan.net @edbice

Jhu presentation-final-2010 jul20

by Ed Bice

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