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Title: More-than-computational reflections (in the form of a report) Date: 2022-06-12 Category: article Tags: scripts, reading, writing, methods Slug: more-than-computational-reflections lang: en status: draft featured_image:/images/more-than-computational.png
summary: In 2021, Ania Molenda and Andrea Prins contacted us about a project they are doing called Beyond The Essay, where they are researching forms of online reading and writing with a specific focus on the essay in the field of architecture critique. In Varia's practice of collective infrastructure making, we often consider the sociality that is inherent within tool making and tool using. Open ended systems and extensible structures allow us to weave processes with each other and with others by adapting, extending, and transforming them. Within the Beyond the Essay meetings, we proposed three methods to engage with text in collective situations that respond to existing computational artefacts, namely tags (__MAGICWORDS__), indexing formats (x-dexing) and word2vec (word2complex).
Context
In 2021, Ania Molenda and Andrea Prins contacted us about a project they are doing called Beyond The Essay, where they are researching forms of online reading and writing with a specific focus on the essay in the field of architecture critique. After they conducted a range of interviews with publishers in the field, such as Valiz, Archis, Archinet, Torque, BPR Barcelona, Institute of Network Cultures and Framer Framed, we started a conversation on publishing tools and methods. Within our meetings we narrowed the scope down to the research question: how can publishing tools and methods be a support system for critical reflection and engagement?
Introduction
In Varia's practice of collective infrastructure making, we often consider the sociality that is inherent within tool making and tool using. Open ended systems and extensible structures allow us to weave processes with each other and with others by adapting, extending, and transforming them. Within the Beyond the Essay meetings, we proposed three methods to engage with text in collective situations that respond to existing computational artefacts, namely tags (__MAGICWORDS__), indexing formats (x-dexing) and word2vec (word2complex). All of which end up structuring the circulation and writing and reading experience of readers, writers and publishers alike. How do we process essays differently from these perspectives? How can other forms of computing make space for a reconsideration of textual engagements?
Methods
MAGICWORDS
__MAGICWORDS__ is an open ended system for collective annotation of a text, using small instructions that can be activated during a collective reading experience. In the field of software, and specifically in the MediaWiki software, magic words appear as words with special programmatic functions, connecting a specific cue to a programmatic action, such as adding the current time on a page. Within the context of Varia's research, the __MAGICWORDS__ are used to manually perform programmatic gestures with the text.
Magic words operate as prompts, inviting other readers to interact with the text in a specific way, ranging from __SAYITOUTLOUD__, __REPEATTHIS__ or __CANWEDISCUSS__. A set of magic words is collected in a spellbook, which stays open for new additions that may come up while reading.
Magic words emerged from a curiosity to see what kind of social incantations can be evoked through making custom prompts for each other, and how such prompts affect a moment of being together. As such they become a tool to describe relations between text & reader, reader & reader, place & text, place & text & reader. The __MAGICWORDS__ become furthermore an annotation system in which the intention of the comment is formulated by the name of the tag. As such, it changes the relation of the comment with the text by inviting participants to imagine all sorts of different ways to speak back to that what is written.
__MAGICWORDS__ have started being used in this way by amy pickles and Cristina Cochior during a Read & Repair session on Digital Solidarity Networks.
x-dexing
x-dexing is a cross-reading practice that through chance operations guides the reader in going over a body of texts. Contrary to an index, the x-dex invites to perform a non-linear distribution of attention across textures, semantics and aesthetics of the texts at hand.
While x-dexing, we read a collection (materials) from a particular perspective (handles) across forms (text, color, curves, absences). At the beginning of the x-dex exercise, you go through a few steps that prompt you to choose how you will close read based on handles, forms and traces. X-dexing can happen in a concentrated manner, engaging with materials, given scores or invented ones, using these forms or others. But it can also be operated slowly, along time, in an ongoing manner.
If “indexing” would be about gaining access through the illusion of completeness, the x-dex is about situated unfoldings, about letting go of fixitude and about handing over for a little longer; a form of generative relationality that is not providing with control nor indication, but a sort of playfulness and imaginative re-entanglement. Perspectives, feelings, aesthetics or uneasiness are not only brought to the table by the agents that share materials, but by the emergent x-dexer as well. Together they contribute to an explicit toolset for handling difference patterns, operate with worldly absences, and score open questions.
x-dexing was made by Jara Rocha and Manetta Berends to navigate and cross the book Iterations.
word2complex
word2complex is taking the algorithm word2vec as starting point for a discussion around how users can read alongside algorithms and how algorithms construct machinic readings of text. As a reading exercise, word2complex investigates how algorithms order our experience and understanding of relationality between different words, by calculating semantic distances and context similarities. By staying close to the logics of word2vec, word2complex aims to rethink such ways of calculating and proposes to form semantic distances between contexts in more-than-computational ways.
Word2vec derives meaning not from semantics but from structure, relation and repetition, which it then turns to vectors in a multi-dimensional space. In word2complex, participants respond to such a method through a form of slow processing. In the first step, they count the amount of times a word appears in the text. In the second step, they rebuild the context of the word in the different sentences they encouter where the word is being used and in the third step, they relate the words with each other.
Language analysis algorithms are pervasive in an online realm that is heavily text-based. Particularly word2vec is often used to cluster, make suggestions of related items, to translate to other languages, or to bring up results in search engines. By following the particular logic of the algorithm but leaving space for interpretation and co-production of meaning with those present, word2complex attempts to keep the complexity in operations of language processing through situated readings.
word2complex is a continuation by Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior on the collective unfolding of word2vec in Algolit.
Reflection
Forms of collective annotation, close reading and cross-linking, as proposed by the three methods above, invite for forming a social environment in and around text. They create space to engage with the ideas within a single text, to find connections between multiple texts, or to relate the text to a specific context or situation. Their instruction based format invites for versioning, variability and transformation, making them adaptable to different groups and moments. As such, they have been adapted to different contexts, such as workshops or events, by different constellations of people, including Varia members and peers. They have been important scripts for us in shaping our collective practices, which include both the design and publishing work we do, but also in the organisation of public events, such as the monthly Read and Repair sessions in Varia.
Next to an interest in collective work and forms of togetherness, the methods also feed a curiosity around more-than-computational practices*. __MAGICWORDS__, x-dexing, and word2complex are all grounded in forms of computing, structuring, and processing and refer to specific computational artefacts: MediaWiki's magic words, the index as structuring device, and the word2vec algorithm. The methods stretch these artefacts as a way to challenge their authority. Versioning them, making space to form interpretations, creating a possibility for comparison along the way; things can be done differently! These acts of re-situating computational artefacts have turned into a technological artistic research practice, positioned between the fields of art & design and software studies.
*This is not really a proposal for a term, but a play on the phrase "more-than-human"; we are still trying to find words to refer to the research based practices around algorithms, tool-making and language that we have been close to in the recent years.