####[The Gothic] aimed to produce emotionally vertiginous shocks and thrills;
sensations of any kind, in fact, so long as they put the viewing subject - the 'Self' - at the centre of the experience.
than its believers believe,
because it is ghostly,
silhouette-like,
deprived of human sentience
#### -> Arnold Weinstein
But probably not you, personally.
Note:
Kurzweil, obviously. painting: Martin Myrone encourages us to think of artistic engagement with, and deployment of, the sublime as primarily market driven, thus categorising it as a somewhat knowing and cynical enterprise. ‘The reality of commercial spectacle and sensation,’ he states, "was accommodated to a revised notion of ideal art through the eighteenth century notion of the sublime, the aesthetic celebration of grandeur and horror for its stimulation effects ... By the late eighteenth century the term had become commonplace with improvised, informal and often half-baked writing that then passed as art criticism, where it typically functioned as a ‘buzzword’ that had a certain currency without being fully theorized." He concludes that the sublime can ‘probably best be described as a certain kind of effect which had more to do with manipulating public and critical response than with attending to some pre-ordained theoretical prescription.’ http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/christine-riding-shipwreck-self-preservation-and-the-sublime-r1133015
- sublimates the human
- revels in the glory of the [data] landscape
- exults in the terror of it all
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more
complicated than that, they means they're getting worried
that they won't like the truth. People as things,
that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
Big data, like the Gothic, lacks context.
Context forces us to not think of humans as things
the humanities are about context.
(project lead: Damien Huffer)
Note:
Big data from culling the posts gives me some insight, esp when I represent as vector models, some of the explicit language behind this trade, and ways that people signal that something is for sale. But it also misses the visual signals in the composition of the images itself. For that, I have to go in and read these hidden cues - rather like a kind of steganography that is explicitly meant to conceal the trade from algorithmic monitoring. This kind of reaction is also present on Facebook or Twitter as people 'template' themselves for particular audiences. The danger is that these templated selves could become algorithmic prisons: our performances in reaction to alogorithms that make assumptions about how the world work cease to become performances and instead become real. This is big data gothic.
### Thick Data and the Fall of the House of Nokia
"They put a higher value on quantitative data, they didn't know how to handle data that wasn't easily measurable, and that didn't show up in existing reports. What could've been their competitive intelligence ended up being their eventual downfall." - Tricia Wang
"People are getting caught up on the quantity side of the equation rather than the quality of the [...] insights that analytics can unearth". - Steve Maxwell
The word behind the elipses is 'business'. Insert your own field.
Hire a digital humanist.
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