So the blog thing is new to me and I feel I should be writing an essay rather than a “post.”  I’ll back-off my hangups and get in here with some ideas about the Bhutan Hour or Two.

A few of us met to consider how we would use the locale of Gainesville in Alachua County as a model for applying holistic consultancy or electrate activisism, or is it inventing holistic consultancy and electrate activisism.

The “Bhutan” thing (pardon the quotes, parens, italics and other semi-illiterate tricks, but I feel myself being drawn into the blogosphere as I type) is a reference to the constitution of Bhutan, which apparently sets as a purpose of their government, the maximization of gross national happiness.  Sounds like a good idea.

Americans are not a happy bunch.  In national opinion polls we now have 80% or more of us saying that we are going in the wrong direction.  We certainly have our challenges — make your own list. We like to argue about which problems are the most serious and which we should address first.  We treat our academy similarly, breaking it into disciplines and arguing over which is the most worthy.  And we treat our communities similiarly, breaking ourselves into groups of all kinds and competeing against each other for recognition, resources, power.

Probably not the road to happiness.  So can we think differently?  Can we bring holistic thinking to bear?  Can we invent/discover/unleash a holistic consultancy of people sharing ideas and actions leading to a gain in our gross city/county happiness?  Some people talk and practice systems thinking.  I think we will move beyond that — we are considering something beyond an engineering approach.  Holistic in perspective — economic, political, religious and social.  Holistic in approach — humanistic, scientific, artistic and engineering.  Holistic in engagement — university, community and business.  Holistic in scope – opportunity, quality of life. Holistic in consequence — equity, justice, sustainability and, of course, happiness and whatever I left out of any of these lists — lists are segmented and reductionist.  Holistic thinking would move beyond the linear boundaries of text.

And our thoughts turned to activism — probably not the traditional local “activist” model but something that would be a bit more …. holistic.  How to engage/involve people not normally involved.  How to bring holistic thinking to the entire community — not divided by any of our categories.  How to invent/discover/unleash a new kind of activism, leading to a new kind of holistic happiness — I almost wrote “holistic problem solving” — but that’s an old trap and perhaps an oxymoron.  Our current modes of problem solving are predicated on reductionist thinking.  Not holistic thinking.  Its hard to write about things/ideas I don’t have words for.  That’s why we have a blog — to work ideas out.

I’m optimistic about our ability to create these things.  I am optimistic about our ability to improve gross domestic happiness in our community.  If I had worked harder or longer on this post, it might have been an essay, but that’s probably not what I wanted at this point.  A blog post is fine.

The founding motivation of E is to use digital media to create an interface capable of mapping the dispersed and fragmented specialized disciplines of the university onto the holistic tangle of problems in the lifeworld (as noted on our website).  We illustrated the incommensurability of these two conditions (the academy / lifeworld problems, such as “water”) with the images of (respectively), the “silos” of an organizational chart, and a Jackson Pollack painting.

It is important to note a further difficulty faced by our interface project, which is that these two images represent two different metaphysics, distinguishing Western and Asian worldviews.  In his study Art and Time, Philip Rawson described the difference between West and East using similar images to those we used to distinguish academic knowledge and the ecology of problems (the West as grid; the East as tangle).  In his context Rawson characterizes the two orders in terms of synchronic segmentation (sequence and change) versus diachronic flow (duration and continuity).

The relevant point for us is made clear in Rawson’s further specification of the Asian metaphysics by means of the image of water.  His entanglement diagram “illustrates the duration of happening through time as a function for the continuous linear flow of energy.  This appears similar to branching and joining streams, resembling the channels in a huge river delta.  They connect what we conventionally  think of as chains of separate forms linked by complex cause and effect.  We can call this the water image of time.  Certain peoples have built their cultures around this water image, and it has profoundly affected their artistic expression:  the Chinese in particular.”  The West, in contrast, analyses time (universal flows of every sort) “according to static and abstract grids of pigeonholes.”

Rawson’s observation helps clarify the larger challenge of our project.  The obstacle preventing the holistic organization of academic knowledge is not “just” bureaucratic or institutional, but metaphysical.   Part of our project, then, must include the invention of a syncretic consultancy, hybridizing the virtues of Western and Eastern apparati.   It is not enough to know water (the Western manner); we must become water.

What is water within the disciplinary discourse of media studies? It is a figure. A figure appropriates for its signifier or vocabulary some first-order information (word, image, sound, scene) and operates it rhetorically, to say something else. A figure relies upon AS the way concepts rely upon IS. For example, the water works by Roni Horn.

Pondering our collaboration, and wanting to open a second front, while Howard tinkers with his tool. (Howard, anything to report?)
Reading Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). The term was coined in the 19th c., to name the continuing Enlightenment ideal (dating back as well to the first philosopher, Thales of Miletus, in Ionia), of a unification of all knowledge. Wilson notes the same fragmentation in the academy that is our own point of departure, and acknowledges the loss of the Enlightenment belief in progress in knowledge (and in society). He asserts the need to recover this lost momentum and trajectory, and proposes that as hybridizing of disciplines develops, all learning will devolve into two (interdependent) modes: natural sciences and creative arts.
A point of dialogue, to be tested in our electrate context, is a difference or distinction between Wilson and E (the difference made by taking into account the apparatus shift into electracy). Here is Wilson’s summation of the origins and meaning of the term.

“William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis __The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences__, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory, across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “the consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs” (Wilson, 8).

The theory informing our experiment (since I am the theorist!) relocates the site of correlation. The shift does not contradict the spirit of consilience as a term, which, as Wilson notes, is an extension or stronger, more precise sense of “coherence.” Electracy adds to the cycle of inference (abduction deduction induction) a fourth mode — conduction– to describe the kind of coherence found in the arts: a holistic interdependent aesthetic internal organization of a complex heterogeneous collection of materials. “Vortex” is Ezra Pound’s name for this mode of order (anticipating the effect of self-organization in dynamical systems). In the imaging technologies of electracy, the vortex becomes a better candidate for supporting consilience than is similarity or analogy of inductions.
This claim remains to be made precise and tested in our collaboration. To appropriate and revise the original definition of consilience:
“the consilience of Conductions takes place when a signifier, obtained from one disciplinary discourse, coincides with a signifier, obtained from another different disciplinary discourse. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs”
A preliminary convergence to scan for coincidental signifiers that may jump together:
WATER as…
figure (media theory)
site (architecture)
number (mathematics, statistics)
code (computer programming)
resource (agriculture engineering)

E
glue
(aka the little red hen)

As a brief history, I have been involved in building database driven information systems since the mid 1980’s, have done much work on semantic networks and knowledge representation, participating in research on early systems like KL-ONE and Candide.  Merging with database technology, these systems then became semantic data models, and have now matured to the current day ontology languages such as OWL.  We were looking for a better way to represent complex information in a way that the meaning can be processed by a computer, in contrast to the traditional relational databases which are very weak on semantics.  I have always been trying to use these to create information collections for various departments and colleges here at UF, and have built numerous systems which are currently on-line.  Applications I am involved with include digital libraries, ontology-based simulation, natural language processing, eLearning, and 3D/VR.

The goal in every case is to represent knowledge in the domain within an underlying ontology database, or what I call an ontology management system, which is a database built on ontology concepts (the data are modeled using a formal ontology language).  I have built the Lyra OMS as my current platform for this work.  Knowledge objects in the OMS can automatically transform to presentation environments, so we generate our eLearning modules automatically for a student presentation by mapping the content in the OMS to a display based on desired styles of presentation.

In 3D/Virtual Reality applications, I only began working in this area about 2 years, we have successfully demonstrated how the OMS can store the objects in the VR scene. We built a prototype using the Java Xj3D environment that couples our OMS to a VR rendering engine.  There is much potential here, because in this environment the scene geometries can be directly integrated with other  knowledge, so we no only have the shape of an object (which is what you normally find in a VRML file), but also the meaning of the object, vast taxonomies of object categories, dynamic behavior (through integration with our ontology-based simulation environment), any other associated knowledge, and the ability to name objects using multilingual, natural language expressions.

So since we can project objects from the OMS to a presentation, I figured we’d have no problem exporting our VR scene from the OMS into Second Life, but we now know this is impossible using today’s SL technology.  And I’m dreading trying to implement our dynamic simulation models in LSL (the scripting language used in SL).  I am about to begin exploring alternative platforms that might make my life easier.  Anyone know of any?

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu   (our ancient agricultural extension publication database)

http://ees-diglib.ad.ufl.edu/WCC (our more recent digital library work)

http://cbc.at.ufl.edu  (our new eLearning site for a national training course in crop protection)

http://orb2.at.ufl.edu/Aymara  (Aymara on the Internet, our language training program)

http://orb.at.ufl.edu/ObjectEditor (my general purpose site listing my projects)

What were the other two places besides Xanadu and Alachua,  that Coleridge based Kubla Khan on, Greg?

Hello Group E, I have registered http://groupeblog.wordpress.com for us to blog important research material and discussion. The flickr and de.licio.us tags are groupeblog.