Mace Ojala
Studying Information Studies and Interactive Media at University of Tampere (Finland), currently working at IT University of Copenhagen.
Location Copenhagen
Activity
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Also definitely hoping to be involved with Twente somehow – if this is the sort of stuff you are doing and I know you are, what a fantastic place.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Waaaah there is so much to read!! Happy and sad at the same time ;) I will definitely need to get back to these (post)phenomenology texts.
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Mace Ojala replied to R H
They have the cool ring too, don't they? I love it!
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Exactly, good point. I have a bunch that something weirder and less obvious is going on when people argue against speed cameras.
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I agree completely, and think that the question which gets begged is what that questioning then looks like. Some shapes I can see which that questioning can take place include to form beliefs in our heads ("I don't like that"), and maybe discuss those beliefs with other people. We can boycott either individually or collectively. There are standards (e.g....
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There is this view on democracy than rather it being a historical fact now ("to protect our democracy"), in the past ("democracy has been lost") or in the future ("to achieve democracy"), it is an ideal towards which we must strive for. This is maybe a simple proposition, but similarly to discussions about e.g. peace or justoce, it undermines the defeatist...
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I am of the inclination that nothing in the sphere of human life is "neutral", and we would do ourselves a favor by forgetting this word. Rather we should celebrate, and make the best of the fact that there is no innocence.
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I considered this to be a pun.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
I recognize this isn't maybe so much of a philosophical perspective but rather maybe a sociological one, but since Foucault was already mentioned I think the questions of relations of production are worthwhile (the obvious reference is of course Marx). One thing I've thought about is how the designer and user are alienated from one another. Making relations...
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All design is redesign :)
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I would like to design a washing machines whose grey water is used to the of a WC water tank. This isn't such a behavior change design though, and could easily be done it with a simple hose. Also I would like to redesign refrigerator for single-person household since it is quite a common situation for many people and a full-size fridge is just weird. Maybe it...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Latour's Where Are The Missing Masses? is one of my favourite texts :) I assign it to students to read whenever given an opportunity.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
I really respect the diversity of examples on this course! Not just always the tired examples of social media or shopping algorithms, but the examples here are always much wider, more challenging and much more interesting. Very cool!
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Actually reading glossy, fancy architecture magazines in public libraries was how I first encountered Actor-Network Theory and all these philosophical questions concerning material world, and really tickled my curiosity. 20 years later I entered academia and now study, research and teach these sorts of things. And I like to hang out at the architecture school...
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@SallyMcGrath I've seen that one by Bridle and it is very weird indeed :D Check out James Bridle's work, he is a great artist and deals with a lot of good topics relating to the digital in an interesting and powerful way.
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@EllemijkeDonner isn't it! Always fruitful, always controversial, and also always inspirational. Like a good manifesto!
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Thank you for week 2, really nice perspective and I enjoyed the extension of Ihde's work and of course the commitment to phenomenology.
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Mace Ojala replied to Scott Hawley
Thank you! I copy-pasted the original language page content from https://www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/deze-pandemie-is-een-ijkpunt-in-onze-geschiedenis~b109419c/ to Google Translate in chucks.
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Quoting from a research communication news piece from University of Twente https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/2016/4/497772/robot-spencer-accompanies-first-passengers-at-schiphol-airport#thespencer-project:
"...KLM, the end user."
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Nice, I agree with this analysis for sure.
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The "who is the user" questions are always interesting have been made quite salient by the contemporary state of the internet ("if you are not paying for it, you are the product"). Maybe the airport or carrier staff are the 'real' users, and their task is to get people on the plane in time.
I think the concept of the user is sometimes a bit misleading as...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Following along Latour – if the passengers miss their flights, who is it who missed the flight? Is the robot to blame? Or the people designing the robot? Or the airplane who maybe didn't communicate with the robot and wait for them? Or the safety standard committee who didn't allow the robot to move faster in a crowd? Or the passengers who didn't leave home...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
There is something interesting going on here in the sense that people /already/ manage to get to their flights, for most people for most of the time.
Thinking about Latour and the programs of action, it is not so that there is no *scription already going on at a place like an airport – it is a heavily scripted landscape; signage, color coding, terminals...
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@EllemijkeDonner Also Burri's "Re-conceptualizing the Global Digital Divide" (2011) and Kate Crawford's "The New Digital Divide" (2011) which is an op-ed kind of piece in New York Times.
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I support this sentiment, though I am not totally convinced a field of academic research can guarantee clarity or hold back beliefs. Research is a niche activity compared to the already existing huge amount everyday sense-making of already a very weird world.
I consider it is an achievement, a miracle almost, and a testament to human capaticity that life...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." (Haraway 1985 IIRC)
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Also if we trace backwards from the gun, we arrive eventually at the intent of the manufacturer, or even designer of the gun, and of course their funders and the factor workers and all the background conditions that are necessary for this widget to exist in this world. Practically, for answering questions like this, network is too large (the map /is/ the...
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That is the perfect student attitude!! :D
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One thing that comes to mind from this is that if the gun was to blame, so what? We cannot punish the gun, since it has no moral nor psychological capacity to suffer or for remorse, like the person does.
What I am saying is that it matters why this question is posed – why does it matter at a particular situation. Do we want to punish someone for the act,...
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An extension of the (questionable) folk-wisdom "to a person with a hammer the world is a nail" would be that "to a person with a gun the world is a target". From this, it seems that the presence of the gun makes a (potential) murderer, like a person who picks up a hammer becomes a (potential) carpenter. Of course a lot hinges on the potentiality actualizing.
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Yeah exactly I think this is important. In another example of terrifying human interactions, there is the repulsive idea that women in skirts getting raped should really blame themselves. I am not convinced of it's symmetrics (and don't want to argue that they are), but if women putting on a skirt are blameworthy for possible rapes (either a priori or a...
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I think this is good insight. "Improvised" weapons are not to blame, but for instance a gun or the extreme case, the nuclear bomb, can hardly to be argued to exists for some other purpose such as for cutting bread like a knife, and then being adapted for destruction of human life.
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A Latourian answer would be that a person-gun=gun-person shot someone. We might rephrase it as "an armed person", and at the same time "a wielded gun". A social constructivist might argue that the unfortunate background conditions of the shooter caused a longer causal chain of events which lead to event.
In Finland there has been this tragic tradition of...
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Carl Sagan said beautifully and convincingly, looking at that image that everyone who is alive or has ever lived has been on that "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam".
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There is an interesting lineage/tradition/praxis in some design to keep the ready-at-hand (Zuhandenheit) technologies also present-to-hand (Vorhandenheit). You can find it if you look for "seamful design", and it is a sort of an antithesis, and a provocation against user friendliness, and task oriented design.
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One way I think about all these Zooms and Facebook and Skypes in these corona-times is not so much that they change things, but rather they /repair/ what the virus is changing. That repair is of course not complete or even sufficient, but I think they are in a way "conservative" technologies in the sense that we try to keep doing what we were doing before the...
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Really interesting, and highly specific and quite peculiar example thank you!
I ride the bicycle quite a bit, and in the more ambitious, more serious bike world there is this trend about "going aero", ie. aerodynamical. Aero is definitely a legitimate experience of how the bike rides and cuts air ... but ... it is quite controversial whether it is a good...
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One distinction to draw between "old" and "new" technology is mass-production. There is of course a lot of room for romanticism, which itself can be valuable (I'm looking at you, artisanally and locally brewed small-batch IPA beers ;) . I am not saying that that is the most relevant or novel, or indeed most interesting distinction between old and new...
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I think it is not innocent what the developers of these technologies call "friendship". I am of the opinion that encroaching on that rich and deeply loaded term is a bit of a dirty move, a "dark pattern" of design. Anyway, interesting and almost funny example from Christiane (thanks for sharing), and maybe the kids see through these tricks without any issue.
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I think we live in a deeply "mediated" world, and I also think we (the totalizing "we", the humans) have always done so. One thing that is maybe characteristic of what mediation looks like and entails in everyday life for many of us is that the technologies and artefacts around us are not made by ourselves or anyone we know. Another characteristic is a level...
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We could also think, along perhaps ancient traditions, that all things have their "own" nature. The nature of a stone is to fall to the earth, the nature of a dove is to fly around and nest, the nature of artwork is to evoke the sense of awe etc. With this idea of "nature of x", robots which do not seem to follow their own nature are uncanny; c.f. if a stone...
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I think it is always useful to be a little wary of the totalizing "we". I think it is a little limited, and untrue view that "we" are creating social robots to take care of our elders. Rather I think it is good to remind ourselves that very very few people in very particular places with very particular arrangements and resources are developing them. Most of...
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I really like that example Hesam. Any "soldier robot" which does not try to de-escalate the situation and create conditions for peace and human flourishing. In general I think war is rather... hmm inappropriate activity to put it mildly, and I would like to hope that we are moving toward a future without it.
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I think seeking for first-hand experience with social robots (or what might be called such) is valuable, thanks for sharing it. These sorts of experiential things are sometimes a little hard to make deep sense of through language only, through text and speech and stories (imagine only talking about musical instruments). I visited a robots lab in Berlin last...
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There is an absolutely gorgeous, and refreshingly weird sound-art version of "The Medium is the Massage" which McLuhan created with John Simon in the 1960s. You can find it here, and I think it is also on Spotify http://www.openculture.com/2016/10/hear-marshall-mcluhans-the-medium-is-the-massage-1967.html
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Mace Ojala replied to R H
Due to my recent purchase of a new synthesizer which I am anxiously waiting to arrive from an online shop (I am not a musical person at all, but am nevertheless developing that part of my human experience), I am deep in the "synthesizer YouTube" right now.
Following along your thoughts R H, I wonder what is the role of the Corona+YouTube recommender...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
I have purchased a music synthesizer¹ late last week, and am anxiously waiting for it to ship from an online shop. While not checking my email for shipping confirmation, I am watching the short and inspirational DIY Instagram videos of other people play music with the the particular synth.
In this present moment I can feel all the topics of this course...
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For me the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and everything that follows is the most comprehensive description of what is (one possible story of) the impact of technology in our lives. Or rather, on /their/ lives, on the lives of the non-humans, pre technological creatures. I had seen the movie a number of times, but one time it really...
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I need to read more of Floridi, and this concept of "online" seems to be exactly correct. What on Earth would it mean to disentangle ourselves¹ from technology. I find the suggestion not only entirely inconceivable, but also violent as it would rip us from our real and meaniful history and worldy engagement.
¹ a totalizing "us" in there, I admit,...
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Engeström has a nice paper from 1991 IIRC which you might enjoy based on what you wrote above, titled "When is a tool?".
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@RoosdeJong Thinking of different kinds of technologies is absolutely crucial I believe, and some sort of totalizing concept of Technology is almost counterproductive. So splicing it up in different ways, or qualifying can surely help make sense of it... or rather them :)
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Mace Ojala made a comment
I'm loving it, thank you everyone for such good discussions!! See you next week and stay safe.
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It is not necessarily the drivers needs that are addressed by driving, but for instance the needs of the employer or the industrial complex to construct and exploit a flexible and interchangeable labourforce.
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Hehe I cannot believe autonomous cars are still a topic of interest in 2020 (just teasing; but I do hope they will be left on the pages of history as a grotesque hallucination that captivated some people for some time during 20th and early 21st century).
Anyway:
Thinking about Heidegger, autonomous cars are exactly that sort of a trying to escape from...
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Yes the authentic experience of the world was interrupted when The Car was forced into existence, but I think also authentic relationships to other humans became interrupted; our fellow humans became metal/plastic boxes, obstacles, perpetrators, trespassers and hazards with no internal world at all and no intersubjectivity.
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Thanks I really appreciate the text above discussing Heidegger's writing, and especially reminding us of the developing, and chaning aspects of what Being in an era. I take issue with the totalizations, but whatever :) I've read "The question concerning technology" a couple of times over the years, and a framing always helps. I am definitely having fun on this...
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Ooh, I want to read this Ode to Common Things! Thank you for mentioning it.
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Absolutely. Consider for instance your bicycle. It is an entirely anonymous piece of atoms, efficiently made for an anonymous buyer, manufactured for the purpose of accumulating profit. It is supposedly inseparable from all the other bicycles from the same process of production. However, isn't this bicycle unique and "aromatic" to you? I love mine and wouldn't...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
I don't think the questions of agency start with the so-called "autonomous" car, and it is pretty unclear to me who drives even the "normal" car. Ok one person is called "the driver", but the engineers, bureaucrats, standards, and bicyclists, children, pedestrians and animals also contribute by accepting a appropriately fearful attitude towards the ongoing...
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I guess the meta-point of ticking all the boxes being the correct answer is that the only correct answer to a straightforward question is that "it depends" ;)
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At this point the trolley problem is a symbol of itself :D
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Oh yes!
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In design "appropriation" is a good concept to follow. Users do a lot of things, a lot of weird things with technology. The link from drawing board to practices is long, winding and interesting :)
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Unintended consequences of cars are illuminating: the cities we have are not the cities we intended. Part of if has to simply do with scale. Somehow ideal "The Car", or a few cars didn't cause the cities to be shaped like they are, but rather the masses and masses of cars over a long time.
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Thinking from hmm philosophy or theory of design, as well as from cultural theorist Hall's ideas of encoding/decoding, it seems like a bit of a failure to entirely disregard the role the user/consumer/receiver. "The user completes the design". Isn't it quite a limited view to think that your IKEA furniture is the same as mine, or that we play the same...
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I wonder what is the source of this "authenticity". Why are we somehow "authentic", and is a sequence of choices and possibilities of making choices during our lifetimes sufficient for it? Authenticity is a classic topic in philosophy isn't it, so the jury is still out I guess. But the existentialists seem have some pretty good answers I think.
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Causation also seems to work in funny ways; which formations actualize from given conditions is contingent, and chance also has a role to play. So studying the conditions and what could have actualized is always fun, and does not only apply to the future, but also to "alternative histories". An STS mantra is "it could be otherwise". I need to study more of...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Interesting, I am not familiar with Jasper's work but seems like rich engagement and some really good points above. I am always particularly interested when someone changes their mind.
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I'm onboard this attitude!
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Did we ever keep up? I don't think we ever did – how would we possible have?
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Hi, there is another intro thread elsewhere on this course, but the reason I joined this online course was to simply enrich my perspectives on philosophy and technology, and expose myself to other styles of doing it than what I encounter at my work at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU).
My academic environment is very sociologically oriented, and...
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Mace Ojala replied to Rob Farrow
Luckily there is more to language than lists of dictionary definitions :)
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Mace Ojala replied to Sasa Horvat
Trancendentalism finally makes sense, thank you. There is a lot of nuance and the term appears throughout wide literature (as Sasa suggested), holding on to the definition above in the glossary and and this explanation a is useful. Thank you. I always find intrigued by exactly that, the conditions of factuality as well as conditions of possibility, and this...
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Mace Ojala replied to Peter Giles
Considering the real biographies of authors always brings richness to literature! I too often skip those parts and focus on what is on the pages.
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Mace Ojala replied to Sandra Paola Vargas Jiménez
Hi Sandra, may I recommend Latour's 1994 piece "On Technical Mediation – Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy" published in Common Knowledge volume 3, number 2.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Thanks to Tony, all the facilitators on the forum and other staff, and the people on the videos for in-depth chats around each of the topics. Those really enhanced the learning, and also the experience of "being there" and feeling welcome at the corpus linguistic community. And a big cheer to everyone in the comments sections, a lot of really high quality...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
The tasks on this course to critically evaluate other's essays, and then see other, experienced people's analysis is very valuable. I wish we would have this at "real" university too.
By the way Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan is one of my favourite books, written about the time of the Glencain Uprising. Check it out, if you haven't. Beautiful literature.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Really interesting language politics, thanks.
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Mace Ojala replied to Hideo Watanabe
More generally and extending beyond academia, the influence of software is an issue. "Software Studies" as its known, and that is my field I am heading to. A lot of inspiration comes from STS (Science and Technology Studies), and also philosophy of science, philosophy of computing, social sciences, critical cultural theory etc.
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Mace Ojala replied to Hideo Watanabe
There is stuff on this in the field of Digital Humanities. Also on Twitter check out #toolcrit and there was a tool criticism workshop in Amsterdam some time ago by the fine people at UvA, which will provide some more references. Here is a link to a report from that workshop https://repository.cwi.nl/noauth/search/fullrecord.php?publnr=23500
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Mace Ojala made a comment
One that shouldn't be missed (and that we are almost obliged to look at): WikiLeaks.
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
This was a actually the assignment text I had for a university course about language processing, in English
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Mace Ojala replied to Sharon McCulloch
I think a couple of checks about proper titles, not thinking circularly, not drawing tautologies etc are always in place when we are in the business of academia. The domain related checks such as how were were wider conclusions from data made are they, though.
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
Yeah I tried the web form versions of CLAWS and USAS too, they seemed to work quite well though I didn't evaluate them for accuracy, recall, precision, F1 of other such measures. I like that they express ambiguity, by providing multiple tags when they feel like it.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Aaaah I wish I got such detailed and helpful feedback on my University assignments... Feedback and critique is such a great way to learn, even if it isn't on your own work. Thanks :)
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Nice, always educating to see other people's research!
The first one is not referencing any sources, but in the other hand has a captivating motivation to invite the reader into the narrative. The second one is including explorative wordlists which prove to be uninformative, but catches up later. The third one is great, manipulating the data and making "u."...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
One would assume mapping from one tagset to another is something one might want to do occasionally. For a language processing assignment earlier this week I was just using tagger from NLTK Python toolkit, and used the Penn Treebank tagset (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/Penn_treebank_pos.html).
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Mace Ojala made a comment
University of Tampere represent! I'm doing a degree of Information Sciences and Interactive Media there. Currently at University of Copenhagen, though :)
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
I've studied at University of Tampere and University of Copenhagen, and Python is popular at both. There is a Python library called NLTK, with an accompanying O'Reilly book (also freely online), that helps with this kinds of things. The class nltk.text is a good starting point, and the nltk.corpus subpackage, aside from the book which indeed is very good.
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
Sure, worlds most popular write-only notation ;)
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
Thanks for the references Tony.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Boo PDF, they're such a drag and harmful for human life. I wish the researchers had access to the word processing documents which were used before the PDF was created.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
It would be interesting to see over time how different immigrant groups are talked in the press. Also, nowadays other, non-massmedia corpora are available, for iinstance web forums, blogs etc. Given a set of this texts, we could predict which kind of source it comes from if we had learned a model for various sources.
Other than that, I've been wondering...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Nice. It would be nice to be able to collapse the tags to groups (all nouns together f.ex.) for some exploratory tasks, it would be easier to read and focus on particular POS of interest. Earlier I was thinking about the possibility to disregard the proper from analysis of linguistic style across the two flavours of English, and POS tags makes it...
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That's definitely right. The whole issue of distant and close reading opens a whole lot of ground where we must trod carefully (but make enough mistakes to learn).
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Well, asking a person for definitions is basically a random sample from the population, or language community. Asking individual people about meanings doesn't tell anything about the meaning of the words in language, but by either aggregating samples, or starting to limit the Independence of the samples we can start to infer about the language itself, which...
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Mace Ojala made a comment
In attending Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis MOOC via Coursera, so I'm happy to see network stuff enter our corpus linguistics course too. Networks of course look pretty (well, I think they do), but there is so much more analysis to be done and insight to be gained through mathematics.
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Mace Ojala made a comment
Keyword lists don't explain much about the differences, but invite for further analysis. One can start close reading and start human interpretation, or more distant analysis. The reason is that the content varies across LOB and Brown, not only the language , and this of course is one one hand interesting, on one hand a hindrance if one would prefer to look at...
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Mace Ojala replied to Mace Ojala
Looking forward to it :)
