Check It!
In an attempt to do the "engaged academic" thing:
So I checked out this new (to me) search engine, KartOO. Instead of the regular list of sites (ala Google, Yahoo, et cetera), your results are displayed through "maps" that show the content connections between sites.
This got me thinking of Benjamin and Ulmer (or at least how I’ve read Benjamin through Ulmer and Sirc). If the mystory is about finding patterns, then kartoo might be the first mystorical search engine–or at least the first to foreground the connections.
But it’s not just that kartoo foregrounds the connections that interests me–it is both the visual representation of connections and the cartographic language used to describe them. Sirc has written about composition as exploration of a virtual urban; kartoo offers a map to available knowledge. . .I’m not sure what the connection does yet, but there’s something here. Maps (traditonally) are visual representations of geophysical sites; here they become visual representations of sociocultural knowledge.
So, if maps are tools for navigation, is kartoo an opportunity to navigate knowledge? If so, it sort of falls between the two aims of Ulmer and Sirc, as I understand them. Ulmer offers an opportunity to let desire drive research, and then suggests that research itself should generate analysis through pattern recognition (other than the other way round). Sirc advocates a composition model that (at least superficially) is less concerned with patterns than Ulmer’s. If we take the box-logic/virtual urban model to its (absurdest/absurdist) extreme, it degenerates into apparent randomness–let’s collect these items/let’s tour this city and write about what we see–with little concern for how they relate to one another. [Which is not what Sirc is advocating, I think, but merely to point out that even "experimental" methods are obliged to have more "traditional" grounding in order to be useful. Maybe.]
On the other, aren’t Sirc’s virtual urban and Ulmer’s mystory both about mood and affect? So there is maybe more connection between the two than I thought. Maybe the difference (and more reading is apt to move me in error, I’m sure) is that Ulmer suggests the research should create the mood–you find the mood in doing research and discovering the mood/image/emblem within your findings, while Sirc starts with the mood/image/emblem and asks for a collection of texts/artifacts that embody the mood (or, conversely, a tour through a virtual urban whose cityscape is the mood?).
That said. . .how does kartoo play into that? I don’t know, but I think it does anyway. Perhaps–drawing on Ulmer–it finds the patterns in your research for you (but, admittedly, maybe on a very superficial level). Or–in Sircian fashion–it maps out your course through the virtual urban?
Which is to ask, further, how does technology shape our research? I know I’m probably a bit late coming to the table with this question, but–it’s new to me. Whether it’s kartoo mapping connections for me, or Google saying that one result is 12% more "relevant" than another, or any other prioritization scheme offered by JStor, FirstSearch, et cetera, the very nature of research can be driven by what "technology" recommends. Of course, as well-trained academics, we know we don’t have to observe the recommendations of the tech.
But isn’t there a danger that the obscure, the unpopular, the unheimlich might be overlooked by a search engine? There is too the question of whether search engines are a good start to research or not. I don’t myself traditionally use the "everyday" search engines for research, but what is the difference between the way Google works and the way FirstSearch works? I know there’s probably a technical difference between databases and search engines, but I don’t know enough about it to say how that difference applies here. On a different approach, to our students I’m not sure if it matters–>Is there a difference to them–even (expecially) a perceived difference– between doing research via Yahoo! or via the MLA bibliography?
Search engines as epistemology perhaps?
