Today (amazingly the 410th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare) I’ve finished reading the classic Don Quixote Parts I and II. What an unforgettable journey, and what an eye-opener!

A four hundred year old book (Parts I and II were published in 1605 and 1615) that in many ways paints a character — two characters, in fact — every bit as lifelike and nuanced as anything by novelists who would come hundreds of years later. Insights into the human psyche that presage our modern understanding of the mind. Historical perspectives on Europe, Spain, and even North Africa in the century after the expulsion of the Moors from Europe. And storytelling techniques that seem nearly postmodern. MORE…

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In a previous post, I mentioned the “Technologies of Writing” show I saw during SXSW at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. Since then, I’ve had several occasions to think about the exhibit again. So I thought I’d go a little more into some of the highlights from the show and share some of the related thoughts that have come up since then.

Before Writing

The first thing I learned when I entered the exhibition was this: Before there was any form of language-based writing at all, some early Mesopotamians used clay objects of different shapes to represent recorded word-based information. One would collect a small bundle of these objects and somehow, taken together, the group of objects would form a message.

Presumably the messages contained in these clay trinkets were somewhat prone to inaccuracy. For example, if you switch the order in which you read them, a message such as “Marduk owes Ishtar thirty shekels” could easily become “Ishtar owes Marduk thirty shekels.”

To correct for this, they started making little incisions in the clay. Soon (and by ’soon’ we’re talking many hundreds of years) these incisions evolved into a whole new writing system. The world’s first writing system, in fact: cuneiform. MORE…

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Gotta clear out some final SXSW loose ends so I can go on with my life!

At least they wont ever change this one, I guess.

• Virginia Murdoch suggested the creation of a Society for the Preservation of Paul Rand Logos. I could not agree more. I have a message for companies currently sporting a Paul Rand Logo: You Do Not Need A Redesign. If you do it, it will suck. I still can’t beleive that any design firm would have the audacity to actually accept such an assignment.
• We went to see a show at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center entitled “Technologies of Writing“… It was a fantastic show, with comprehensive examples of writing tools and technologies from around the world and through all of history, including: mysterious Mesopotamian pre-cuneiform objects, Linear-B decryption documents, a Gutenberg Bible, Gertrude Stein’s exquisite stationary, a sample page of Charlotte Bronte’s insanely tiny handwritten manuscript, a vitrine dedicated to the history and techniques for the manufacture of pencils, an early dictaphone, and so much more. It’s a tour de force, really, and anyone interested in information, communication, and even just writing, should pay this show a visit. Many kudos to the curators: I hope it goes on tour.
• I had the great pleasure of meeting most of the members of the crew from Pixelworthy, a talented web firm from my birthplace and hometown, Philadelphia.
• I thought that the SXSW Web Awards show was a little boring, but perhaps that’s only because Behavior didn’t win either of the awards we were nominated for! Still, there was one highlight: After one winner thanked God for his professional success, the very next winner solemnly thanked… the Giant Spaghetti Monster! The audience roared with approval. Bravo!

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Log in! (photo from the Computer History Museum)

In usability testing with consumers (i.e., non-computer experts), I have noticed that a huge number of people use the expression “log on” to simply mean “go to a web site”. They’ll say that they’ve “logged into Google”, suggesting that they’ve entered a user name and password, when they really mean “I typed ‘www.google.com’ into the browser and hit enter”. Importantly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone under the age of 45 say this.

I also notice a large number of people in this age group use the expression “punch” to mean “type”. As in “I punched in my email address and password”.
Whenever I hear this, I can’t help but imagine (to my horror) that inside of their heads they are thinking that every time they type a key on a computer keyboard, there is a hole being punched into a paper card in a mainframe somewhere!

It’s an interesting phenomenon that we tend to continue to use the conventions we learned the first time we learned to use a computer, even if those conventions are obsolete. For example, a huge number of people double-click links in web browsers, which I suspect is a kind of legacy from their experience double-clicking icons when they first learned how to use GUI-based computers. They associate major changes of what is visible on the screen (such as launching an app or going to a new web site) with double-clicks.

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There is a great new series on PBS called African American Lives, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviews nine high-profile African Americans (including Oprah Winfrey, Chris Tucker, and Quincy Jones) about their family histories. I’m enjoying both the historical aspects of it and the technological inspirations I get from it.

Documents and photographs have to be dug up from filing cabinets and flat files, and painstakingly analyzed by researchers.

What’s especially fascinating about the series is the research that Gates and his team did to transform these family histories from simple memories and oral histories into rich, deeply documented epic stories. For each of the nine subjects, they did extensive interviews with living relatives, conducted research into geneologies and historical records, and even did genetic testing and analysis to help fill in the gaps.

It’s a marvel that, even among these families — who all emerged from slavery and extreme poverty — there are such extensive and detailed records in existence at all. What’s more, these records can, through careful research, be cross-referenced with each other, enabling modern scholars to fit the information together like a puzzle to form a pretty detailed picture of the past.

For example, when Chris Tucker was shown the photo on the left, which he hadn’t seen before, and his great grandfather was pointed out to be the gentleman in the middle, he was shocked. I was too! How in the world did the researchers find this photo and know who the person in the middle was? I marvelled at the amount of research that might have been done to make just this one particular cross-reference.

It also occurred to me that this type of research will, in the not-so-far-off future, be a hell of a lot easier to do. To be sure, it’s easier now than ever before due to the help of computers: physical records are increasingly being scanned and indexed into computer systems, enabling scholars to find photos and documents by browsing on a screen or even by conducting keyword searches. And of course, there are countless geneology databases on the Internet (most significantly by the Mormons who have a theological interest in cataloging the ancestry of pretty much everyone).

But what makes this especially exciting to me is the way the Internet and other new technologies will accellerate and empower this research so that, within the next decade or so, just about anybody will be able to view their own family histories as complete, thorough narratives, and even read documents about and view photographs of their distant ancestors, all at the click of a mouse.

Eigenfaces.

Imagine this: Face recognition technology, which is by the way rapidly reaching commercial maturity, unleashed on a massive database of scanned photographs, indexing those images based on who the people depicted are (if the names are known) or indexing them by their general facial “signature” (if the names are unknown).

I could use such a database to, say, find a photo of my great grandmother by simply entering her name. Or, even better, I could take a photo of my great-grandfather, scan it, submit its “signature” as a kind of “search term”, and then find a photo of him I may never have seen before. If this photo contains other people, I could do more searches and research into who they are, and perhaps learn about a long-forgotten grand-uncle who was a notorious bank robber.

This is something just about anyone would want and could benefit from. Like the celebrities in the PBS series, we could all use the Internet to easily (and cheaply) learn volumes about where we came from and who we are. Apparently there’s already at least one company making the connection between face recognition software and geneology.

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