Alan Liu, "The Art of Extraction"

layer hidden off the screen

Alan Liu	The Art of Extraction
		Toward a Cultural History & Aesthetics of XML and Database-Driven Web Sites

This page supplements a talk presented at The Digital Cultures Project and Microcosms conference on "Interfacing Knowledge: New Paradigms for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences," March 8-10, 2002, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara. (Last revised 3/10/02 )

<Preface> Patchwork Quilt Book Cover

The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information (forthcoming, Stanford UP)
Patchworks: New Arts and New Humanities in the Information Age (in progress)

<Demo>
- The Romantic Chronology (Filemaker site co-edited with Laura Mandell)
- UCSB English Dept. Web Site (Access created with Robert Adlington and Eric Feay)
- Voice of the Shuttle (revised as SQL Server site by Robert Adlington and Jeremy Douglass)
- Hypertext Fiction Tracker
</Demo>

</Preface>

<Argument Title="The Blind Spot on the Page">

<Demo>

Code from a simple database-driven Web page that draws content dynamically from an Access

Code from a simple XML document and associated XSLT stylesheet designed to pour XML content dynamically into HTML

</Demo>

<Demo>

Shoutcast Site

My image gallery site

</Demo>

SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM Artists ORDER BY LastName, FirstName, Dates, Nation

XLST (and XPATH) statement:

xsl:value-of select="LEXIA_TITLE"/>

</Argument>

<Argument Title="The Cultural History of Extraction">

Wendell Piez on John Hall's Maine Rifle Works

Frederick Winslow Taylor's Shop Management (1903)

William Henry Leffingwell's Scientific Office Management (1917)

Taylor on "instruction cards":

The "instruction card," as its name indicates, is the chief means employed by the planning department for instructing both the executive bosses and the men in all the details of their work. It tells them briefly the general and detail drawing to refer to, the piece number and the cost order number to charge the work to, the special jigs, fixtures, or tools to use, where to start each cut, the exact depth of each cut, and how many cuts to take, the speed and feed to be used for each cut, and the time within which each operation must be finished. It also informs them as to the piece rate, the differential rate, or the premium to be paid for completing the task within the specified time. . . .

</Argument>

<Argument Title="The Aesthetics of Extraction">

General overview of the problem of aesthetics in new media:

Chart of Contemporary Aesthetics

Specific problem of "data transcendence":

Jennifer Jones, "Virtual Sublime: Romantic Transcendence and the Real," Diss., UCSB (in progress)

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco/New York: HarperCollins, 1997)

J.M.W. Turner:

Regulus (1828)
Vesuvius in Eruption (1817)
Light and Colour: The Morning after the Deluge (1843)
The Sun of Venice Going to Sea (1843)

William Gibson, Neuromancer, pp. 180-81:

"Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen, quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it"

Marcos Novak's "transarchitecture":

examples: 1 | 2 | 3

Jean-François Lyotard, "What is Postmodernism?", in The Postmodern Condition, p. 81:

"The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable"

<Design_Speculations>

Cool things that might be done with data pours:

Make the presentation aware of the content, and vice versa:
- branch the interface into different layouts based on conditional testing of the content
- allow the interface to reject the content until certain conditions are met (e.g., "The database that is responsible for content on this page contains one or more instances of the following business buzzwords ("leverage," "innovate," "right size"). Please ask the responsible parties to remove these words so that this page can be displayed.")
Make the presentation control content:
- pour data into a repeat structure of layers; then script the page so that dragging a layer out of the stack sets the next iteration of the repeat to filter content based on what was dragged out
"Bare the device":
- make the rendered presentation of a data pour react to the formatting of the source code in the background (e.g., white space, line breaks, comments)