CiteULike: hamlet's library [14 articles]

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

Marshall Mcluhan — 2006-06-22T03:33:16-00:00

(01 October 2002)

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Herbert Mcluhan — 2005-05-11T20:59:07-00:00

(01 June 1962)

Nearly every decade has its own claim to a revolution that is the biggest since the invention of the printing press. Well, what was that original revolution, still the defending champion of cultural upheavals, actually like? In The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto theorist Marshall McLuhan described the shift from an oral to a print culture and in the process set off a bit of a revolution of his own. The Gutenberg Galaxy, the first of McLuhan's major books, is also the most accessible, but, as you would expect from the man who told us that "the medium is the message," it's innovative in style as well as content, structured as a mosaic of short essays, quotes, and aphorisms, one of which introduced the idea of the "global village" to a world that would soon fulfill McLuhan's prophecy. Movable type, as much if not more than any meaningful arrangement of that type, transformed Renaissance consciousness--just as electronic circuitry is transforming us now. That is the basic premise of Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. New technologies create new human environments, and "technological environments are not merely passive containers … but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." McLuhan's second book, The Gutenberg Galaxy was published in 1962, won the Canadian Governor General's Medal that same year, and pushed McLuhan toward international prominence. Like most of McLuhans's other work--Understanding Media or The Global Village, for example--The Gutenberg Galaxy is a rich, dense text that draws freely, almost frantically, from works of philosophy, economics, political theory, history, and especially literature. There are liberal doses of Shakespeare--text and commentary--sprinkled throughout, as well as trenchant appropriations from Rabelais, Cervantes, Leibnitz, Blake, Joyce, and many others. Attempting to match his medium to his metaphors, McLuhan structures his book using what he calls "a mosaic or field approach" and ends up producing more than 100 short sections separated by pithy glosses in large bold type, such as "Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy," or " Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society." Today's reader might find the "mosaic of perpetually interacting forms" into which the author organizes his data and quotations distinctly Web-like. Indeed, one could say of McLuhan and his complex rhetorical circuitry what McLuhan himself says about Shakespeare: "His insights appear so richly in his lines that it is very difficult to select among them." --Russell Prather

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Janet Murray — 2005-07-26T02:06:24-00:00

(27 August 1998)

Technology changes storytelling--movies don't tell stories in the same manner as wandering bards. Janet H. Murray, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is fascinated with the changes emerging technologies may bring. Interactive tales, more versatile structures, stories as games, and games as stories are among the topics she explores in her very personable and entertaining style. And what about fears that interactive escapism could be the coming addiction? She makes an unblinking examination of this question with insight into both the technological possibilities and the strengths of the human psyche. Strongly recommended for anyone who loves the art of storytelling in any medium. "[A] brilliant look at the future of storytelling." -- James Coates, Chicago Tribune "Hamlet on the Holodeck reaches beyond the scope of interactive narrative and encompasses the global possibilities of emerging technologies." -- Stan Diehl, BYTE Stories define how we think, play, and understand our lives. In this comprehensive and readable book--already a classic statement of the aesthetics of digital media, acclaimed by practitioners and theorists alike--Janet Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by. Murray discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the dramatic satisfaction of participatory stories and considers what would be necessary to move interactive fiction from the formats of childish games and confusing labyrinths into a mature and compelling art form. Through a blend of imagination and techno-wizardry, Murray provides both readers and writers with a guide to the storytelling of the future. (cloth published by Free Press, 1997) More on Hamlet on the Holodeck

Hamlet and the Psychology of Rational Choice Under Uncertainty

JOHN Orbell — 2008-04-07T19:01:28-00:00

Rationality and Society, Vol. 5, No. 1. (1 January 1993), pp. 127-140.

Shakespeare's Hamlet is the classic case of an individual who cannot make a decision, and classic explanations are in terms of "deep psychology"--a paradigm that searches for causes of behavior deep within the individual's psyche. This article shows, however, that the play can be coherently and simply understood in terms of "shallow psychology"--a paradigm that turns attention to the difficulties attendant on rational decision making, emphasizing, most importantly, constraints on information that is necessary for good decision making. Hamlet is shown to be a case of decision making under uncertainty, where the consequences of error are unthinkable and where a decision cannot be avoided. Far from showing us a personality constitutionally unable (for whatever deep reason) to decide, the play shows us the difficulties attendant on this class of decision problems--a demonstration highlighted by the fact that those difficulties must be faced by an individual better equipped than most for decisive action. The play also shows us the only satisfactory way for resolving such a problem. A de-emphasis on personality and a turning of critical attention to the structure of situations that normal people confront might contribute not only to an understanding of this particular play and of dramatic tragedy but also to our understanding of decision making in general. 10.1177/1043463193005001010

Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks

Antonis Sidiropoulos — 2006-09-16T10:33:02-00:00

(13 Jul 2006)

What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking? How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a journal or conference has long attracted significant interest, due to the benefits from obtaining an unbiased and fair criterion. Although it appears to be simple, defining a quality metric is not an easy task. To overcome the disadvantages of the present metrics used for ranking scientists and journals, J.E. Hirsch proposed a pioneering metric, the now famous h-index. In this article, we demonstrate several inefficiencies of this index and develop a pair of generalizations and effective variants of it to deal with scientist ranking and with publication forum ranking. The new citation indices are able to disclose trendsetters in scientific research, as well as researchers that constantly shape their field with their influential work, no matter how old they are. We exhibit the effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices to unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results obtained from DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.

Towards a Semantic Wiki Experience - Desktop Integration and Interactivity in WikSAR

David Aumueller — 2006-09-02T18:35:32-00:00

Common Wiki systems such as MediaWiki lack semantic annotations. WikSAR (Semantic Authoring and Retrieval within a Wiki), a prototype of a semantic Wiki, offers effortless semantic authoring. Instant gratification of users is achieved by context aware means of navigation, interactive graph visualisation of the emerging ontology, as well as semantic retrieval possibilities. Embedding queries into Wiki pages creates views (as dependant collections) on the information space. Desktop integration...

Semantic authoring and retrieval within a Wiki

David Aumueller — 2006-08-17T02:43:35-00:00

(2005)

Structuring information on the Web can be a tedious task but is needed for effective retrieval of specific content. A prototype web application -- the SHAWN Wiki -- helps the user in this task by facilitating semantically structured content creation in an effortless and usable manner. Semantic authoring merely is a matter of entering field value pairs among prose text within a single input field. Annotating the content that way the user instantaneously gets gratified by context aware means of navigation and semantic query possibilities on an emergent ontology. Queries can be persistently embedded on Wiki pages to maintain constantly up-to-date lists of results. Thus, the information authored on the Wiki remains highly accessible.

SHAWN: Structure Helps a Wiki Navigate

David Aumueller — 2005-02-25T15:52:46-00:00

BTW Workshop WebDB Meets IR (01 March 2005)

Common wiki applications lack possibilities to structure the relationships between wiki pages. This paper presents a semantic wiki prototype named SHAWN that allows modelling concepts and their relationships within a wiki environment. One goal of this prototype is to keep concept creation very simple. Yet, entering relationship data instantly gratifies the user with enhanced navigational means on the wiki. The engine supports simple semantic queries upon the emergent model. A challenge is to accommodate a self-explaining query interface for these ontologies.

Semantic email: theory and applications

Luke Mcdowell — 2005-02-15T15:44:58-00:00

Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Vol. 2, No. 2. (15 December 2004), pp. 153-183.

This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can be carried over to the realm of email. We introduce a general notion of semantic email, in which an email message consists of a structured query or update coupled with corresponding explanatory text. Semantic email opens the door to a wide range of automated, email-mediated applications with formally guaranteed properties. In particular, this paper introduces a broad class of semantic email processes. For example, consider the process of sending an email to a program committee, asking who will attend the PC dinner, automatically collecting the responses, and tallying them up. We define both logical and decision-theoretic models where an email process is modeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe a set of inference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular, we show that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set of constraints in polynomial time, and for the decision-theoretic model it is possible to compute the optimal message-handling policy in polynomial time. In addition, we show how to automatically generate explanations for a process's actions, and identify cases where such explanations can be generated in polynomial time. Finally, we discuss our publicly available implementation of semantic email and outline research challenges in this realm.1

Bibster--a semantics-based bibliographic Peer-to-Peer system

Peter Haase — 2004-12-12T16:06:23-00:00

Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Vol. 2, No. 1. (01 December 2004), pp. 99-103.

This paper describes Bibster, a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic metadata among researchers. We show how Bibster exploits ontologies in data-representation, query formulation, query routing, and query result presentation. The Bibster system is freely available and is used by researchers across multiple organizations.

The Semantic Web: The Roles of XML and RDF

Stefan Decker — 2005-01-11T08:43:40-00:00

IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 4, No. 5. (2000), pp. 63-74.

this article, we explain the role of ontologies in the architecture of the Semantic Web. We then briefly summarize key elements of XML and RDF, showing why using XML as a tool for semantic interoperability will be ineffective in the long run. We argue that a further representation and inference layer is needed on top of the Web's current layers, and to establish such a layer, we propose a general method for encoding ontology representation languages into RDF/RDF schema. We illustrate the...

Semantic integration: a survey of ontology-based approaches

Natalya Noy — 2005-01-31T15:52:37-00:00

SIGMOD Rec., Vol. 33, No. 4. (December 2004), pp. 65-70.

A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching

Erhard Rahm — 2005-02-03T13:57:44-00:00

The VLDB Journal, Vol. 10, No. 4. (December 2001), pp. 334-350.

A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching

Erhard Rahm — 2004-11-25T06:48:55-00:00

VLDB Journal: Very Large Data Bases, Vol. 10, No. 4. (???? 2001), pp. 334-350.

Schema matching is a basic problem in many database application domains, such as data integration, E-business, data warehousing, and semantic query processing. In current implementations, schema matching is typically performed manually, which has significant limitations. On the other hand, previous research papers have proposed many techniques to achieve a partial automation of the match operation for specific application domains. We present a taxonomy that covers many of these existing...