Design for very large-scale conversations

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-200).On the Internet there are now very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people exchange messages across international borders in daily, many-to-many communications. It is my thesis that VLSC is an emergent communication medium that engenders new social and linguistic connections between people. VLSC poses fundamental challenges to the analytic tools and descriptive methodologies of linguistics and sociology previously developed to understand conversations of a much smaller scale. Consequently, the challenge for software design is this: How can the tools of social science be appropriated and improved upon to create better interfaces for participants and interested observers to understand and critically reflect upon conversation? This dissertation accomplishes two pieces of work. Firstly, the design, implementation, and demonstration of a proof-of-concept, VLSC interface is presented. The Conversation Map system provides a means to explore and question the social and linguistic structure of very large-scale conversations (e.g., Usenet newsgroups). Secondly, the thinking that went into the design of the Conversation Map system is generalized and articulated as an aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology of design for VLSC. The goal of the second, theoretical portion of the thesis is to provide a means to describe the emergent phenomenon of VLSC and a vocabulary for critiquing software designed for VLSC and computer-mediated conversation in general.Warren Sack.Ph.D

Arkose: A Prototype Mechanism and Tool for Collaborative Information Generation and Distillation.

The goals of this thesis have been to gain a better understanding of collaborative knowledge sharing and distilling and to build a prototype collaborative system that supports flexible knowledge generation and distillation. To reach these goals, I have conducted two user studies and built two systems. The first system, Arkose 1.0, is a prototype collaborative distillation system for a discussion space, which provides a set of augmentative tools to facilitate the filtering, structuring, and organizing of discussion information. Arkose 1.0 supports editors to distill a discussion space incrementally and collaboratively, and allows a gradual increase in the order and reusability of the information space. The study of an online question-answering community, Naver Knowledge-iN, investigates users’ knowledge sharing behaviors in a large online question-answering community. Through the analyses of a large quantity of question/answer pairs and 26 user interviews, the study analyzes the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior and gains insights into their motivations, roles, usage and expertise. It reveals that the limiting nature of the reply interfaces of Knowledge-iN leads to the accumulation of simple and easy questions and answers. This tendency is encouraged by the point system that rewards users who answer many questions quickly. Arkose2 is designed and implemented based on the lessons and insights gained in building Arkose 1.0 and examining Naver Knowledge-iN. Arkose2 provides a host of additional interaction mechanisms and supportive tools over Arkose 1.0 that assists users to flexibly generate knowledge and distill and organize it better. Finally, the evaluation of Arkose2 reveals a number of insights, issues, and lessons about users’ distillation activities of discussion spaces and features of Arkose2. These together provide valuable lessons and insights for the architecture and features of the next generation collective intelligent system.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78880/1/ksnam_1.pd

Three modern Japanese dissenters: Minobe Tatsukichi, Sakai Toshihiko and Saitô Takao

This inquiry into the thought of three political thinkers in pre-war Japan is motivated by a concern of our own time: the absence of credible opposition in the present-day political system. The widely accepted view is that Japanese society is "conformist", and the pressure for conformity comes from traditions and cultural norms. My general position in this dissertation is that very often conformity is not only a matter of inherent cultural norms but is a political and social force appropriated, strengthened and enforced by those in power: the weak tradition of public debate has historical foundations.However, mainstream historiography (Marxism and the school of modernisation theory), rarely pays attention to one of the most significant motors of dissent, the tension between authority and the individual, especially as it was exacerbated by the Meiji Restoration. I therefore hope to engage with previous accounts in the following ways. The first concerns definitions of modernisation, and the other, methodological, is concerned with the relations between individual and society. To highlight the role of the general populace in the emergence of political modernisation, I borrow from Jiirgen Habermas his concept of a civil society and his investigation of the transformation of the "public" sphere. I also employ methodological perspectives based on the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, with his emphasis on the material dynamics of social change.To examine the mechanics of opposition in pre-war Japan based on this combination of definition and methodology, I focus on the careers of three prominent "dissidents": Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948), a constitutional scholar, Sakai Toshihiko (1870-1933), a socialist reformer, and Saito Takao (1870-1949), an opposition member of Parliament. All three were outspoken critics of discretionary power, and realised that the Meiji Restoration by no means ensured a civil society. Nevertheless post-Restoration Japan witnessed drastic changes in the forms of authority and in the people's engagement with them. Hence all three were articulate critics of government, and witnessed, recorded, and participated in those changes through their writings and political activities. The dissertation traces the contributions of each to the emergence of a Japanese civil society, and examines the viability of liberal positions within a period of highly "engineered" social change

Twilight Reflections of Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848): An Annotated Translation of "Chosakudo Kyusaku ryaku jihyo tekiyo".

Abstract: “Twilight Reflections” is an annotated translation of Kyokutei Bakin’s (1767-1848) manuscript “Chosakudō kyūsaku ryaku jihyō tekiyō” (1844) and is accompanied by essays that place this manuscript into context. “Jihyō tekiyō” is an evaluation by Bakin of his earliest yomihon works, which he composed in the final years of his life. Those entries are written with an intended audience that is familiar with Bakin’s work and many of the entries require annotation for understanding. The preface generally introduces the discovery of the “Jihyō tekiyō” manuscript, and includes information on Kyokutei Bakin and academic questions posed by “Jihyō tekiyō”. The first chapter explores the nature of Bakin’s literary circle in the creation of “Jihyō tekiyō,” showing that the manuscript had an intended audience and bears many similarities to other manuscripts written by Bakin. The participation of that literary circle extended beyond being readers of the manuscript, they helped Bakin acquire copies of some of the books he evaluated. The third chapter shows that “Jihyō tekiyō” is a response, in part, to the literary activities of one of Bakin’s rivals, Tamenaga Shunsui. The third chapter of this dissertation shows that many of the methods Bakin used to evaluate literature in the 1810s and 20s remained with him throughout the years. “Jihyō tekiyō” shows, however, that aspects of these methods have changed over time.PHDAsian Languages & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135803/1/kmulholl_1.pd

Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japan

This dissertation examines the discourses surrounding women and writing in the rapidly commercialized publishing industry and media in early 20th-century Japan. While Japan has a rich history of women's writing from the 10th century onwards, it was in the 1910s that the journalistic category of "women's literature" (joryû bungaku) emerged within the dominant literary mode of Naturalism, as the field of literature itself achieved a respectable cultural status after the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Through a close textual analysis of fictional works, literary journals, and newspapers from the turn of the century to the 1930s, I explore how various women embraced, subverted, and negotiated the gendered identity of the "woman writer" (joryû sakka) while creating their own spheres of literary production through women's literary journals. Central to this investigation are issues of media, translation, canonization, and the creation of literary histories as Japanese literature became institutionalized within the new cosmopolitan notion of world literature. The first chapter explores how the image of the woman writer formed around the key figure of Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) within the interrelated discourses of Naturalism, the New Woman, and decadence in the 1910s. As the New Woman became a social phenomenon alongside ongoing debates about women's issues, feminist women inaugurated the journal Seitô (Bluestocking, 1911-16) as a venue for women's literature. While this category renders their writings marginal to mainstream literature, it was a progressive, political position that marked their place within the literary world. I examine Toshiko's ambivalent position within this feminist project, and the instability of the media image of the New Woman that was always on the verge of slipping into the decadent figure of femme fatale. The second chapter examines the canonization of the late 19th-century prominent writer Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-96) at the turn of the century as a model woman writer and an embodiment of Japan's past tradition, which cast a threatening shadow on the women of Seitô. Tamura Toshiko's rejection of the New Woman identity and increasing association with aesthetic decadence also came to be at odds with their feminist mission. Seitô women's rejection of both Ichiyô and Toshiko was thus a necessary act in self-proclaiming the birth of the New Woman. As the number of women writers gradually increased in the late 1910s, various types of literary expression emerged beyond gendered expectations, paving the way for the mass expansion of women's writing in the 1920s. As the notion of world literature formed alongside various national literatures during the vast expansion of the publishing industry and translation culture in the 1920s, women began to envision their own alternative genealogy alongside dominant literary histories. The third chapter explores the envisioning of women's literary history by the Seitô writer Ikuta Hanayo (1888-1970) and the British modernist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose feminist imaginations came together through the canonization of the English translation of The Tale of Genji, originally an 11th-century work written by a woman. As the growth of translations created a sense of global simultaneity, I further examine how the rhetoric of gender was central to Japanese literary modernism through the reception of two major British modernists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in Japan

Topic Search for Intelligent Network News Reader HISHO

We have developed an experimental system for retrieving information from network news. It is called the "Intelligent Network News Reader HISHO" and HISHO not only stands for Helpful Information Selection by Hunting On-line but also means "secretary" in Japanese. This system can extract network news articles of interest to a user without requiring the use of keyword-like queries. In contrast to ordinary information-retrieval and abstractgeneration systems, this system uses an "information context " to select articles from news groups on the Internet, and it displays the context visually. This function is called "Topic Search" and helps users grasp the thread of discussions. A salient feature of the HISHO is that it retrieves articles dynamically by adapting itself to the user's interests rather than by classifying them beforehand. Since this system utilizes cross-posted information and conventional expressions, it can refer to information in multiple news groups. We completed a protot..

Towards a deep ecology of art, technology and being - an ontological investigation with particular reference to the rock-cut edifices of Ellora, India, and Tadao Ando’s water temple

This practice-based thesis is an interrogation of ‘being’, one not centred on the human being. It concerns a being that manifests through dynamic inter-relation between human and other entities and phenomena in the universe. It considers several interrelated questions, interrogating notions of 'relational being','non-anthropocentric being', 'the being of a space', ‘the space of being’. Ultimately, one is considering the implications of relational being for ‘deep ecology’. With regard ‘relational being’, key inter-related Buddhist ideas drive the thinking and practice: ‘relational origination’ (pratityasamutpada), and ‘emptiness’(shunyata). Furthermore at the heart of this particular history of technology is a discussion of the significance of zero. The Sanskrit term shunya, means both ‘zero’ and ‘empty’, and relates to shunyata. There are several principal objectives. Firstly an analysis of perceived relational dynamics in Ellora’s rock-cut architecture, technology, and ontology. Secondly, scrutiny of apparent correspondence between Ellora’s Edifice Twenty-Nine and a contemporary Tantric shrine: the Water Temple, constructed in 1991. Thirdly, an examination of ideas in contemporary science and technology that engender reconsiderations of notions of ‘relational being’. The primary practical outcomes are two films: relationship-place naka-ma and zero = every day? Both approach the question through phenomenological process, paralleling Ando’s conception of ‘architecture’ as an integrated and inter-acting entity of built edifice, wider landscape, and the spectatorship of persons who frequent it. This research engenders ‘new knowledge’ in terms of: offering pluralistic, trans-national and trans-disciplinary insight on current thinking relating to art, architecture, technology, spectatorship, and ontological practice; evolving knowledge with regard interactions between body, humanly constructed entities, wider environments/ecologies; engendering new perspectives on considerations of cyberspace, Ellora, Ando, and the Water Temple; contributing to a counter thesis vis-à-vis the colonial project of objectification and ossification of the other

Negotiating gender equality in daily work: an ethnography of a public women’s organisation in Okinawa, Japan

This doctoral research is a contribution to the understanding of social activism and its socio-cultural formation in postcolonial Okinawa. It is based on eighteen months of fieldwork including participant observation and interviews at a public women’s organisation, Women’s Organisation Okinawa (WOO). This project centres on the lived practices of staff who attempted to produce and encourage gender equality in the public sector under neoliberal governance. I demonstrate through ethnographic analysis how the practice of law and social movements is distinct from the ideals of such movements as well as the particular individuals involved in them. WOO was established in the public sector by local government in alliance with various grassroots groups in Okinawa in the late 1990s. WOO embraced the dreams, hopes and anticipations of various actors - users and workers - who had been involved in the establishment, but in reality, it also contained various contradictions. First, WOO was a new workplace for those who wanted to work in activism and be paid for their work, but also reproduced precarious, low-waged, gendered labour. Second, WOO was a site which put law into practice, but it revealed that law internalised the inconsistency between what people had originally expected of the law and what law enacted as a result of institutionalisation. Third, WOO unexpectedly became a focal point of contact between neoliberal and feminist governance through public services and the requirements of performing accountability for citizens and for feminist activism. Thus frontline practitioners attempted to bridge the gap between ideal, reality, law and practice and to negotiate with neoliberal and feminist governance in the labour process. This thesis demonstrates how the inconsistencies between ideal and reality arose in the daily working practices of staff positioned between citizens, laws and social movements. More precisely, it explores how staff attempted to negotiate, accommodate and struggle with the gap between ideal and reality through their lived experience, rather than fiercely resisting or merely being subject to a form of governance or reality. In doing so, the thesis reveals how unstable and problematic the notion of ‘gender equality’ was as it was deployed at WOO