Tag clouds with shaft of light: Playing tag with the Fraser Institute

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Tag clouds with shaft of light: Playing tag with the Fraser Institute.”.You may copy and use this image and text by following the Creative Commons License 2.5 BY-NC-SA guidelines.
Tag clouds with shaft of light over the Canadian topography, or playing tag with the Fraser Institute.

This tag cloud was merged with a Google Earth view from West Coast mountains towards Ottawa and Washington in the East. The beam of light in the background is the Enron tower.

In the Adobe Photoshop toolbar under Filter > Liquify > I maximized the brush to create powerful wind patterns effects in the clouds hovering over the Canadian topology.

I studied the Fraser Institute’s on-line annual reports and web pages to piece together the following categories, tags or folksonomies to introduce mass media users to one of the most highly cited think tanks which emerged in 1974 at the height of Thatcherism. These are the tags in the cloud:

Economic Freedom, Milton Freeman, Education, Environment and Risk, Privatizing Correctional Services (1998), Alan Greenspan, Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg, Fiscal Policy, Sally Pipes, T. Patrick Boyle, MacMillan Bloedel, Governance, Csaba Hajd, Ralph Klein, Private vs. Public Health, Can the Market Save Our Schools? (2000), Law and Markets, Caring For Profit: Economic Dimensions of Canada’s Health Care Industry (1987), Non-profit Studies, Adam Smith, Atlas Foundation, Sir Antony Fisher, Regulatory, Pharmaceutical Policy, The Illusion of Wage and Price Controls, Preston Manning, Entrepreneurship and Markets, Michael Walker, IEA, Alan Campney, Social Affairs, School Report Cards, Thatcher, economic conscience, Bill Emmott, George Shultz, John Raybould, Trade and Globalization, Schumpeter, The Economist, Cato Institute- Washington, Rent Control: A Popular Paradox

See also Think Tanks: Corporate Director Board Interlocks: Fraser Institute

A photojournalist’s haunting report on his journey to Yugoslavia in 1991

Echoes of Geurnica: Vukovar (1991)

I created this Adobe Photoshop image in 1994 in response to the words and images of the women refugees of Vukovar. Women make up the largest percentage of refugees worldwide. Urban ethnographer and documentary videographer Ph.D. Cynthia Porter Gehrie, Ph.D. (Northwestern University) worked with the NONA Center for Multi Media, Zagreb, Croatia cgehrie@videodocument.org to produce a site where the story of these women could reach the world. (Currently under construction)

“I spent three months in the basement, and I had no idea of the extent of the destruction in the city. When they were taking us from the Hospital, where we all gathered, to the general warehouse, from the truck I saw what the city looked like. We drove through the main street all the way to Mitnica. The houses in ruins seemed to weep and moan as if in pain, and only the chimneys stood defiantly. I can still see a house devoured by flames and next to it a cow, which came from who knows where, dazed by the horror and destruction around it. When I close my eyes, I can see the ruins, the ghastly dead streets and, tormented by insomnia as I am, I can feel the eerie silence falling over the city of ghosts (Kumpf 1994)”

While looking for images in 1994 to complete this digitage, I came upon photojournalist, Ron Haviv’s site: “Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal.” (Which is now available through Amazon.com) This is the url of his powerful photo of a Geurnica-like cow which so perfectly resonated with the eloquent, haunting words of a owman who knew what it was to be a refugee. She wrote about “a house devoured by flames and next to it a cow, which came from who knows where, dazed by the horror and destruction around it (Kumpf1994).”

read more about Ron Haviv | digg story

Folksonomy: Clouds, Reflections, Ripples

I have been attempting to insert my del.icio.us tag clouds here. In the meantime I have uploaded a small chunk of my Adobe Photoshop tag clouds image as a banner.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.5 License Reference: Flynn-Burhoe, (2006) Folksonomy: Clouds, Reflections, Ripples https://oceanflynn.wordpress.com Accessed: (yy/mm/dd)

I have been maintaining, updating, reading, Digging and swicking my customized Google homepage. As I move back and forth between these navigational tools and engines, I am aware of potentialities and strengths in each of them. For example these are the only options for categories available through Digg.com: Technology > Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux/Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software, Tech Deals; World & Business > Business & Finance, Political News, Political Opinion, World News, Offbeat News; Videos > Animation, Comedy, Educational, Gaming, Music, People, Sports; Sports > Baseball, Basketball, Extreme, Football – US/Canada, Golf, Hockey, Motorsport, Soccer, Tennis, Other Sports; Science > Space, Environment, Health, General Sciences; Entertainment > Celebrity, Movies, Music, Television; Gaming > Gaming News, Playable Web Games.

Where do I locate the concepts “memory work”, postnational, or individuals like Inuit artist Jessie Oonark, RCA, OC, or news articles about inadequate structural facilities on First Nations’ communities, homelessness in the Far North, neuroscience, philosophy? When I look at my tag clouds I find it a challenge to fit any of them into the default categories provided. Without intentions of being exclusive Digg.com could prevent these issues from being indexed in the communal archives. So they are now located under Political opinions, health, environment, etc. Of course, Digg.com may indeed be seeking only a demographics that wants to follow stories in their categories. If you want something more in-depth you can register elsewhere. But I like digg.com. I like the GUI. I like the connectivity. So I want to use it too. I will continue to explore where I can contact them to suggest additions to their categories, their personal folksonomies. In the meantime I will investigate what categories would be stretchy enough to allow for these entries and focused enough to be useful.

del.icio.us | swicki | Technorati Profile | wordpress | Flickr | blogspot | photoblog | gather | thinkfree | Picasaweb | Carleton homepage

My contributions to Wikipedia: Memory work

See also Memory work resource pages @ oceanflynn.wordpress.com

citationography
My Dashboard
papergirls.wordpress.com > my .rss feed news @ Digg

Memory Work: Legitimate Evidence

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I really need to get outside and dig deep into my garden with my bare hands, pulling out weeds that are uprooted so easily in the good black earth. It is oddly calming for me.

I have learned too much technology this morning and I need to relax in the real physical world. There is nothing quite as physical as black earth under your finger nails. When I come back I want to consider the catalysts that led to my ongoing inquiries into the positive presence of absence, memory work, social exclusions, museology . . . Perhaps my inquiry is instantiated in the embodied Sarah Ekoomiak. I need to share what I have already gathered on her contributions but I cannot do this legitimately in the social sciences. So this will perhaps be in the form of a Flicktion. I will examine why in regards to these key words:

tarmac ethnology Sarah Ekoomiak Google News customized brain imagery Away Iqaluit airport Adobe Photoshop anthropology sociology cyberdelirium del.icio.us ethical topography of self everyday life Flicktion forgetting folksonomy taxonomy communal memory reconciliation RCAP geotagging Road to Nowhere hospitality qualia reflexivity methodology social sciences wikipedia

Aquarium Gaze

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This layered Adobe Photoshop image was inspired by a paragraph in Michael Ignatieff’s book entitled Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. This was the book preferred by the adult students in the Human Rights course I taught at Nunavut Arctic College, Iqaluit, NU in 2002-3.

“Here was a scientist, trained in the traditions of European rational inquiry, turning a meeting between two human beings into an encounter between different species. Progress may be a contested concept, but we make progress to the degree that we act upon the moral intuition that Dr. Pannwitz was wrong: our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it is entitled to equal moral consideration. Human rights is the language that systematically embodies this intuition, and to the degree that this intuition gains influence over the conduct of individuals and states, we can say that are making moral progress.[…] Human rights was a response to Dr. Pannwitz, to the discovery of the abomination that could occur when the Westphalian state was accorded unlimited sovereignity, when citizens of that state lacked normative grounds to disobey legal but immoral orders. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented a return by the European tradition to its natural law heritage, a return intended to restore agency, to give individuals the civic courage to stand up when the state ordered them to do wrong.”(Ignatieff 2001)

My emerging folksonomy:

This linear page entitled Memory Work will be a site of collecting and sharing focused research on the urgently needed on the concept of memory work. This concept was developed by Ricoeur, Derrida, Cixous, Nora. It is urgently need in a postnational, post-WW II, post-apartheid, post-RCAP world where citizens move closer to reconciliation, towards forgiveness or apologies, while revisiting distorted histories with an attitude of mutual respect for Self and the Other-I.

Memory Work I: Freudian Slip

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The catalyst for this layered image was Freud’s influential paper (1901 [1914]) entitled Forgetting of Proper Names in Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I remembered the image a couple of days ago when I submitted my first article Memory work for Wikipedia as a fully register contributor. The words memory and history are not interchangeable. Memory work has an ethical as well as an historical dimension. This image raises some ethical questions about how our stored memories can become entangled.

In it Freud examined the psychological process of forgetting the name of the artist who painted the Orvieto ceiling when his conscious thinking process was abruptly interrupted by memories of the recent suicide of one of his patients who had an incurable sexual disorder. He forget Signorelli’s proper name during this conversation with a stranger while traveling in Herzegovina. They had been discussing the Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina when Freud’s thoughts turned to contemporary [racist] beliefs surrounding the sexual moeurs of Turks who allegedly valued sexual pleasure over life itself. From there Freud thought of Death and Sexuality. As one theme interrupted and replaced the other, he associated the series Signorelli. Botticelli, Boltraffio, Trafoi and could not recollect the proper name.

This is significant to me as it reveals unchallenged western prejudices about the East at the turn of the century.

Layers include a .jpg of Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli’s (1445 – 1523) masterpiece, the massive frescoes of the Last Judgment (1499-1503) in Orvieto Cathedral. The copyright on his work has expired since he passed away more than 70 years ago.

There is a topographical map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small iinsert of Freud’s museum which is itself th subject of controversy as rrevealed in Derrida’s book Archives Fever (1996). The uppermost layer is the diagram from the Freud’s article explaining how he made a Freudian slip.

del.icio.us | swicki | Technorati Profile | wordpress | Flickr | blogspot | photoblog | digg | gather | thinkfree | Picasaweb | Carleton homepage

Uploaded by ocean.flynn on 2 Nov ’06, 4.23pm MST.
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Technorati spider release

In my attempt to understand how Frimr reached its scores I found sites called blogjuice? which led me again to Technorati. I had visited their site before so this time I decided to register. I now have a Technorati Profile. I am now trying to use Technorati to refine searches for key concepts such as memory work, answerability, post-national, ethical topography of self.

I continue to find so many free, useful and fun internet services. Flickr is by far the most entertaining. For keeping track of bookmarks, which I call my webliographies, del.icio.us and swicki offer much more than I could ever have imagined. Swicki even does it with image collages of your individualized tag clouds. I have been learning how to interconnect my Flickr with WordPress and Blogspot. That is also amazing.

I have decided to no longer keep an account with Frimr, a fictional site that offers to track how famous you are becoming on the Internet. I just could not figure out how to fill in their on-line form. Apparently my score jumped from 0 to 9999 and back down to 0 in a few weeks because of the way I entered my ‘feeds.’ I didn’t even know what a feed was until I tried being a frimeuse. (This term in French for boastful: ‘Link me, I’m famous’ ) Since I am in this for the pure pleasure as well as the teaching, learning and research I prefer not to work too hard to keep track of my score.

del.icio.us | swicki | Technorati Profile | wordpress | Flickr | blogspot | photoblog | digg | gather | thinkfree | Picasaweb | Carleton homepage

Folksonomy II

Using Adobe Photoshop I layered Friedrich’s (1818) Voyageur au-dessus de la mer de nuages (1818), a Google Earth generated image of Garibaldi Mountain region, British Columbia (49.51.20.64N – 122.57.18.09W elev 6026′ eye alt 13964) and my del.icio.us tag cloud as it emerges from the fog of my thinking. Tags are user-generated so the author chooses how to categorize each .url. Eventually a pattern emerges from this exercise in taxonomy from the ground up. As I visit other peoples’ blogs and del.icio.us webliographies, I learn better ways to categorize certain theories and/or theorists. Gradually I changes these tags, folksonomies or ethnoclassifications so that I can better connect with others making similar journeys.

del.icio.us | swicki | wordpress | Flickr | blogspot | photoblog | digg | gather | thinkfree | |Picasaweb | Carleton homepage

Creative Commons: Light Flickring on Water

Creative Commons from my online Flickr album is composed of multiple layers. They include a .jpg of the Google Earth generated globe which is inverted, stretched and manipulated in 3 other layers, ripples from an M. C. Escher print and a stunning photo by a Professor Andrew Davidhazy from Rochester, NY. described on a few of the 80, 000+ references to him on Google as modest, talented, a great teacher and a ghost expert for photography. I have just licensed my work on line with the Creative Commons. Their icon lets people know that they can use your work for non-commercial reasons if they attribute it to you; they can make derivatives but they have to share-alike. Of course the challenge with Goggle Images is some of the most stellar images available are difficult to track down in terms of authorship because there are already so many derivatives. This was the case with this drop of water by this well-known professor who continues to do astounding work. I left a comment on his web blog but I re-entered it three times before I realized he had wisely included an administrator’s block for unedited entries. It may take him ages to even check his comments. When he does he will find to his annoyance in his busy life, that I’ve inadvertently left three. More than that I just emailed him instead of Flckr’s team re: emailing our Flickr photos to WordPress. He is going to put me on his ‘block permanently list.’

An Inuit friend reminded me that many Inuit of Canada view the world from a circumpolar point of view. In honour of my Inuit friends and students from time to time I view the earth through their lens. I positioned then froze the globe from a circumpolar point of view using a Google save screen option. So I have geotagged this to the north east of Baffin Island, perhaps somewhere near Pond Inlet. Hello to the family of Julia and Ernie! Their family photo in their traditional clothing taken when they visited you in Pond Inlet in 2005, is framed and hanging in our home on Vancouver Island.

Swicki Eurekster

This is the latest of my free internet tools
ocean.flynn
swicki at
eurekster.com

I have also just placed a 30″ x 36″ canvas and partially prepared my space for embodied painting. So I will add to this later, perhaps much later.

Thoughts I had wanted to develop in case I forget:

• 100’s of ways one can say/write the word love in pure arabic
  why my score on Frimr plummeted from over 8000 to 3 when I added 3 missing digits to a my feed .url
• How ugly are the sounds of the lexicon of the internet. Do they sound better in another language. There is no room for poetry in what is growing. I don’t think it would sound very good in ‘spoken word poetry’ or rap. Maybe I am wrong.
• Whether I want to use the concept moral ‘topology of self’ as developed by Charles Taylor or to use ‘ethical topography of self’ that I prefer. Why?
• Do I want to start my own blog, an organic, fluid, stretchy glossary of terms that are evolving as I navigate back and forth between disciplines, technologies, blog subcultures, etc.?