Gallimaufry of Whits

A friend bought me a book to read on my short but bland train journies, a compilation of the literary competitions in the New Statesman magazine from 1968 to 1978. I flipped it open at a section entitled View By Appointment Only, which turned out to be the results of a competition to describe Xanadu, from Kubla Khan, like an estate agent. This friend knows just the kind of stuff I like to read, apparently. So I was reading it, and one of the submissions, by Sebastian Carter, was so good that I have to reproduce it here:

“For sale by Auction at an early date, by Decree of a Gentleman of Substance, the stately architect-designed Residence known as ‘The Pleasure-Dome, Xanadu’, set in hilly country near the seaside. Comprising: amongst many luxury reception and bedrooms, the extremely sunny Dome Room; also Furnishings, including ancestral military Portraits, Service flatlet, with Damsel (musical; terms subject to negotiation). Also interestingly landscaped walled Grounds of about 5,400 acres, with extensive but irregular River Frontage, well-matured trees, some odoriferous, beehives and cowshed for one cow (‘Paradise’, for sale by separate Treaty). Sole agents: Persons, Porlock.”

It took me about 2 or 3 seconds to understand the bit about the cow, Paradise, and when I did I absolutely busted up laughing. People just don't laugh on the train, usually, but I couldn't help it; and of course the more I tried to do a quaint English stifle, the more I chuckled.

An old acquintance, someone I don't really know all that well, emailed me the following questions this morning: “what do you see really affects change? What do you see that enables people to live better, safer, or more productive lives? / I'm looking for just that- to make a difference. I know you've thought about this. Send me an email, drop me a line. Help me figure out where to look.”

I'm not sure how many people he sent this to, whether it was just a generic question that he's pumping out at everybody he knows or whether he specifically did single me out, but it is definitely something upon which I like to witter, and so I answered him as follows:

* * *

I do have some observations. I don't know how much help they'll be!

The first point is that if you're looking, then you're at least looking in the right direction. Dr. Richard Hamming, one of the Los Alamos guys during the war, has a good piece about this called You and Your Research which you ought to read if you haven't already.

Second, you don't have to do one big thing. You can do lots of little things. In fact, I'm starting to regard that it's a more sensible approach to work on lots of little things, because the people who did the big things may just be statistical freaks. See my recent essay, Chasing Supernovæ; and Alfred Wainwright and Simon Rodia are a couple of exemplars for you to read about.

Tacking on to this is that our contemporary ethics are starting to develop such that the old framing of who is “famous” for being devoted to good causes isn't really sufficient, something that Steven Pinker very clearly illustrated in the New York Times, of all places, just a few weeks ago in an article entitled The Moral Instinct.

One of the key principles that I've been developing, as a philosophy of creativity, is that the rate of change is much more important than the result. In other words, college students get taught calculus quite easily, for example, but could they have discovered calculus? We teach people things, but we don't teach them how things were discovered, or how to discover new things. This is mainly from a science perspective, but the humanities and the arts may be more fallow and fertile (again see “Chasing Supernovæ” above).

So I study people who made big changes, or times that were particularly bustling. Some examples [a slightly more concise list than the one I actually sent in the email; see if you can guess which examples I left out, and others that I could have included]:

• Geoffrey Chaucer, Dafydd ap Gwilym
• The Elizajacobean playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Nashe, Marlowe, Peele, et al.
• John Milton
• The Civil War, and the English dissenters, especially the early Quakers, i.e. before 1680
• Newton
• William Blake
• Dr. Johnson, Boswell
• The Shakespearean biographers: Malone, Halliwell-Phillipps, EKC, Fripp, SS, et al.
• Coleridge
• Emily Dickinson
• Darwin
• The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Pissaro, et al.
• G.K. Chesterton
• Emily Wilding Davison and the suffrage movement
• Charles Fort
• Robert Johnson

I'm especially into Coleridge at the moment.

What are the commonalities between all these people and periods? Note however that these are generally people who made really big contributions, and as such come under the [possible] statistical freak category. Exceptions include the Shakspearean biographers (Malone especially makes a good study), Coleridge (most of whose best works aren't well publically known!), and Charles Fort (who is as often misunderstood as a scholar can be).

If you're looking towards lots of little things to work on, make sure that they are atomic: in other words, that when you work on something small, it will last the ages and be a valuable contribution. You want to be piling up teaspoonfuls of sand, not teaspoonfuls of water.

To achieve this, you need to look at how to stop being temporally provincial. The list above can help with this too: you just ask the question, what did these people work on that lasted? What did they expect to last, and is that different from what actually lasted? And then you have to apply it to the modern day.

One of the big problems that we face is that we're currently in a big technological period of change, what with the rise of the computer, the internet, and the digital revolution in general. There's a lot more data than there ever has been before, and a lot more people connected to the greatest library of all time, the internet. The challenges that historians, especially, will face in the future are presumably going to be phenomenal.

It's certainly possible to contribute to this revolution, by contributing to Wikipedia and writing websites and coding and things like that, but I am suspicious of its temporal provincialism. I've noticed that much of the code that I've written, most of the computer science contributions that I've made, have not been things which last because computer science is moving so swiftly. Everything is obsoleted so quickly that it's just teaspoons of water all the time. In part this is just because I'm probably not a very good computer scientist, but I also suspect that it is in some measure endemic.

As I point out in Chasing Supernovæ, which is really my best summary of these issues so far, the direction I'm taking is certainly different: “I've found out so many things about Shakespeare, who is generally considered to be an overstudied subject, that I'm preparing a large work of these findings. That even Shakespeare is not, in fact, overstudied shows just how much great work there is especially to be done in literary history.”

Yet it's interesting that of all the Whits essays that I've written on these kinds of subjects, the only ones that have been bookmarked at del.icio.us are those which pertain to the Semantic Web; to computer science. Computer science is the current hot topic. It's got a good community, so it's easy to get sucked in to it. But it's a Will-o'-the-wisp that I think one ought to be very wary of in the common sense.

In the extended sense, it almost certainly has a rôle to play. I move now here into the realm of half-considered thoughts about Natural Philosophy. One of the most exciting periods, that I didn't really fully enumerate in the list above, is the 17th century scientists, moving from Bacon's Novum Organum in which he outlines a new kind of scientific method, to the very first Royal Society period, past John Aubrey and Sir Thomas Browne and Newton. The transitioning that this period went through fractioned and factioned science making interdisciplinary study very hard. The concept of Natural Philosophy is perhaps one that ought to be revived for the modern age.

I think that the zeitgeist of mutheism, natural philosophy, metatropes, relativism, cognitive science, mini-models, ars discovery, developments in ethics, temporal provincialism, vectorism, and things like that themselves form a natural advance and a useful thing to humanity, but since many of these findings are my own and those of my friends I am of course apt to be biased on the matter!

That's probably enough for you to be thinking about for now.

Joseph Addison, in the halcyon days of literary criticism (how come you can say “halcyon days” but not “kingfisher days”?), remarked that a true critic “ought to dwell rather upon Excellencies than Imperfections, to discover the concealed Beauties of a Writer, and communicate to the World such things as are worth their Observation”. Though we also seek beauty in imperfection now, the point about things that are worth observation is still pertinent.

I've barely scratched the surface of Emily Dickinson research, so I may be doing the field an injustice, but it seems a good example of being beset with criticism that is, from this perspective, marred. The problem is its emphasis on studying Dickinson qua a quiet provincial homebody rather than qua one of the world's most celebrated poets. Whilst obviously her background had a tremendous effect on her psyche and thus her poetry, as it does with every poet, surely the basis of investigation in the ancient Addisonian sense is that she was able to transcend expectations and become a philosophe?

Dickinson's poems are about so many things—from identity to religion, from nature to companionship, all woven in a sometimes paradoxically complex mesh with her mastery of metre and connotation and cadence—that it's an imbalance to merely concentrate on her domestic circumstance and its place in the whole Dickinsonian scheme. Compare studies of male poets: we might, especially in the liberalisation of the 20th century, concentrate on their sexual orientation and their sexual drive and its place in their poetry, but for all good poets and good criticism about them that only holds a minor place; as do their domestic arrangements. Domesticity is just one characteristic of many myriad components that make up the poet's roving mind. Whilst Dickinson was more locked into her domestic arrangements, that just makes her accomplishment all the brigher; that she not only reached lofty rarified heights, but that she also had further to go to get there.

Obviously I'm thinking of many pieces of work that display this bias, but here's a single example concerning Dickinson's non-standard use of dashes in her work, by way of illustration. It's from Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles, by Sharon Cameron, p.3: ‘In Harman's discussion, the hyphen becomes emblematic. “Perhaps because it both joins and divides, [it is like] a hymen. … That hyphen-hymen persephonates Emily.”’ Apart from the bias, it also has another weakness in its awful classical allusion. Compare it to the following example that a friend subsequently provided me, an accusation levelled by Dr. Erwin Chargaff at genetic research: “The hybridization of Prometheus with Herostratus is bound to give evil results”; the implication being, as my friend put it, “that the scientists were doing something audacious (like stealing fire from the gods), simply for the sake of becoming famous”.

One of the reasons that I tend to turn to the literary historians in a field, people like Malone, Coburn, Schoenbaum, Holmes, Sir E. K. Chambers, is that they turn out to be very intelligible and intelligent critics too. So much so that in fact if you want to be a literary historian at my university, you are based in the English department rather than the History department: there's a systematic acceptance of it, which is wonderful. Perhaps one of the best hybrid historian-critics of recent times is James Shapiro, which may betoken some good things to come.

Paul Collins, in Banvard's Folly, has a chapter about Delia Bacon, a critic of Shakespeare who went mad in pursuit of her subject. His summary of the whole situation is marvellous, but two things that he says stand out: “Educated madness retains all the syntax and cadence of rational, educated discussion. It sounds sane. But when strung together, the words make no sense”. And, after reproducing a long tortuous quote from Bacon, that she “is desperately wrestling with an idea here, a coherent idea. But it is like light trying to pass through several panes of cracked glass—bent through layer after layer, until it is refracted and twisted into a wraith of reason.” Paul Collins is perhaps the most outstanding historical miscellanist of our generation; check him out.

The domesticity bias surrounding Dickinson is at a less pernicious level than intellectual nonsense, but I think that things like it can lead to the kind of sloppy thinking that engenders nonsense. In some people a reticence to speak clearly may be because they have nothing to say, or it may be because they do not know how to say it, or it may even be that their peers simply don't expect them to speak clearly. But whichever way, there is never any defence for it.

Thanks to a misreading of Bernard Williams, many modern virtue ethicists say that Socrates posed the question “How should one live?”, but that's not quite true. The question that Williams actually refers to, as contained in my edition of The Republic, 352d, is “whether the just live better and happier lives than the unjust”. Coinage of memes by misinterpretation happens all the time; it's a valid process. And the question of how one should live is a valid one, but it's usually more helpful to break it down into pieces.

Richard Hamming pointed out, in You and Your Research, that if you want to be a great scientist, you have to work on great problems. This has been a big influence to me, but the bigger question that it only partially tries to answer is: what is the best way to contribute to the general lore of mankind? Are you more likely to contribute good things in the arts, the humanities, or the sciences? What about being interdisciplinary? Should you try to do all things and then choose whatever you turn out to be best at? Or is it worth cultivating skills in a particular area?

The Hamming approach is focussed only on the sciences. In Magic, Science, and Civilization, Jacob Bronowski mentions that one of the discoverers of DNA, one of the Nobel Prizewinners, wrote a book about how they specifically set to work on the most challenging problem of the time, so as to maximise the reward; that they literally focussed on winning the Nobel Prize. Another Nobel Prizewinner, Feynman, writes memorably that he wanted to reject his Nobel Prize because it was just nothing to do with the work. The work was its own reward. Presumably Crick et al. felt the same thing (I haven't read that book), but the two mindsets on how you focus yourself are interesting.

The interplay of value and recognition is very tricky. Newton worked on developing calculus before Leibniz did, but Leibniz was the first to publish, and now after some controversy as to who was first, they're jointly credited. But the integral sign, the dy/dx notation, and even the name “calculus” are all from Leibniz, even though Newton got there first. If nobody reads your work, it is functionally useless to humanity; but that doesn't prevent you from historically being seen as having the greater insight. And you might not be read not just because you refuse to publish, but because nobody listens to you when you do publish.

Only a handful of scientists make the really big discoveries. Are the great scientists really great, or just statistical freaks? Can amateurs contribute usefully to science? These are two questions, quite challenging to the Hamming ethos, that I've been asking myself a lot. It's not so easy to be a productive amateur in science, I think, though there are some people who do very well. The Rev. Robert Evans, for example, holds the record for the visual discovery of supernovæ, having found forty since he started in 1955. Bill Bryson wrote about him in A Short History of Nearly Everything, but for some reason when I found the Supernova Search Manual online a few weeks ago, I didn't connect immediately that it was written by the same guy.

But in general, how is an amateur to contribute usefully to science? As well as chasing supernovæ, you can do wildlife surveys for ornithology and botany, and perhaps discover a period 19 oscillator in Conway's Life if you work at it hard enough—things like that. But the humanities beckon strongly as being much richer grounds to mine for discoveries and general contributions, especially to the amateur.

To take myself as an example, my amateur contributions include having: independently found a link between Hamlet and Jabberwocky; contributed dozens of antedatings of words to the OED, including words like “meteorite” during the course of my essay on the discovery of what meteorites are; found a possible Goidelic and Brythonic hybridisation in Cumbric; and underlined the connection between pillow mounds and toponymy. Moreover, I've found out so many things about Shakespeare, who is generally considered to be an overstudied subject, that I'm preparing a large work of these findings. That even Shakespeare is not, in fact, overstudied shows just how much great work there is especially to be done in literary history.

An interesting side-effect of being a literary historian is that you get to study how great figures—from Dafydd ap Gwilym to Thomas Nashe through Sir Thomas Browne and Newton and Coleridge to G.K. Chesterton—came to be regarded as great, and to form your own opinions about how great they were. And, of course, to perceive whether there is anything to be learned from them in answering the question of how best to contribute to the pile of humanity's lore.

One of the greatest principles that is springing up again and again in my own studies is the reinforcement of the idea that big advances are indeed just statistical freaks, and that it's best to instead pursue what I call the Wainwright approach of making small atomic contributions in great number. The burden of trying to find one big insight leads to a kind of intellectual anxiety, and even if you're fortunate enough to have an insight, you can end up then trying to replicate it in the same area rather than continuing to make other good advances (the Semantic Web may be a good contemporary example of this syndrome).

With Coleridge especially, though he's widely regarded for his mystery poems of Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, and Christabel, I think that the power of Coleridge is in almost everything he did, from the grandest schemes to the most petty minutiæ. Part of what it means to be a good Coleridge scholar is sorting out all the stuff worth propagating from his tremendous output, and synthesising the whole in terms of the original notions, received notions, and augmented notions of further comment. We need, in my opinion, more people coming to read and understand his Letters and Notebooks, his great prose works; that is my vote as an historian (cf. “The Very Consideration” in Five Essays).

As well as science and the humanities, there's also art to consider. The value ethics of art are particularly complicated, and I don't want to get too much into art philosophy here. But I certainly think it's worth trying to cultivate artistic tendencies alongside other things, because as individuals one of the most interesting things that we have to add to the pile of lore is the unique aspects and perspectives that we have, of which art is a more positive expression than what we can contribute through the humanities and science.

I've spent a couple of days translating a poem, On a Misty Walk / Ar Niwl Maith, from Mediæval Welsh into English. It's by the 14th century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, about whom not much is known except for what we can glean from his poetry. And his poetry is immense: he's widely regarded as the best Welsh poet of all time, but he's not very much known outside of Welsh circles because decent translations of his material in English are hard to come by. There is a Works of Dafydd ap Gwilym website by Swansea University, but I noticed that they didn't have Ar Niwl Maith, a poem which I really like, which is why I figured I'd translate it.

So, why is Gwilym so good? It's mainly because he eschewed the formal structures of the time and started to write about anything. The girls of the local parish that wouldn't sleep with him, for example, or even one poem about his penis. But as well as flexing the rules, he could also bang out some really powerful expressions, coin words, and do all the other things that we expect of the best lyric poets. Unfortunately, since I'm not well versed in Mediæval Welsh literature, there's an awful lot about his poetry that I still don't understand, but I think it's well worth getting into.

My inexperience also didn't put me off translating Ar Niwl Maith. This poem is about a date that he made with a beautiful girl, and then tries to keep but runs into this otherworldly mist that sprouts from the night. Most of the poem is in the dyfalu mode, which basically means a piling up of comparisons, done as poetically as possible. So he compares the otherworldly mist to all kinds of things for most of the poem, then talks about getting waylaid towards the end, and ends it with a punchline that I wasn't able to translate all that naturally.

One thing that I sadly couldn't replicate in trying to stick to the semantics of the original so closely is the metre. The original uses rhymed couplets and a basically octosyllabic metrical scheme with probably some stress pattern that I'd be able to pick up if, again, I knew more about Mediæval Welsh. If there are any Welsh scholars out there who know about this stuff and want to enlighten me, please feel free to contact me.

I wonder how many other great poets are out there inaccessible across cultures because of language barriers? If Shakespeare had spoken Manx or something instead of English, how well known would he be?

When I was about nine I was dragged off to a jumble sale. It was boring as usual, but I browsed stoically to see if there was any treasure I could buy for one of those huge old 50p pieces. Surprisingly, I found a View-Master, which is a stereoscopic viewer for looking at three-dimensional slide scenes on paper discs—I had no idea at the time that such a thing existed. It was a red, cheap looking thing, but it was very cool, and it came with one disc, a set of scenes from Peter Rabbit books. It's been a while, so I couldn't even remember what the contraption was called. I asked two friends about my age, Joe Geldart and Paul Mutton, and they had both had one (Joe's was even red like mine) but couldn't remember the name of it either. Searching for “stereoscopic viewers” and the like uncovered it eventually.

These things were like gold dust in a small provincial town, so I don't think I ever found another disc. I didn't even have the Peter Rabbit books, so I just had these odd scenes of a clothed rabbit rooting around by a potting shed, and a farmer looking for him. The scenes imparted what I now call a metatrope, which is my term for a kind of specific poetic ambience. Metatropes don't get more frequent with age... if anything, I suspect that I had them more often and more strongly when I was younger.

A couple of months ago I had a routine dental checkup, and I was sitting in the waiting area looking at the magazines there. They're always the same: Country Life, National Geographic, things like that. Usually more of the kind of things that women read than men. There were some photography mags there too, and one of them outlined a simple method of composition based on thirds that I've been using with my ultra-compact Canon with some nice results. Country Life is pretty good too; that's a staple. Once I was reading that in a hospital, waiting for an appointment with my regular very trendy young nurse, and she comes out and calls me in, and she's absolutely gobsmacked by the fact that I'm reading Country Life. She just figured due to my rugged good looks that I'm a party animal, I guess.

Once I was reading Country Life in yet another hospital, and this one had such a great article in it that I had to scribble down a whole page's worth of notes from it. And then another time (we're getting to the point now), in yet another medical setting probably, I was reading some gardening magazine that they had. It featured an interesting garden design that was made up of lots of different parts: it had a very formal garden right next to the house, like one of those Elizabethan knot gardens and a series of herb patches; then a more regular lawn and borders a bit further away from the house; and then it gradually got more and more natural as it went out, with meadow sections and so on, until it eventually blended with the natural landscape.

I've been reading about Coleridge a lot lately, and when his pantisocracy scheme, a kind of utopia that he was going to set up on the banks of the Susquehanna with Robert Southey, collapsed, he instead turned to trying to make smaller versions of it in England. He lived in Somerset and the Lake District especially where he tried to re-create some semblance of this earlier idealistic scheme. Coleridge wrote about the strange juxtaposition of his writing room at Greta Hall with its splendid view of the mountains and lakes. Wallace Stevens had considered gardens as being the last remnants of nature to the city-dwelling moderner:

“I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings.”

One of the primary forms of poetry that I've been trying to cultivate for several years now is an admixture of these and other related thoughts. It's hard to pin down exactly what I do in terms of craft to acheive it, but it has something to do with long euphonous words used in strange situations, a kind of careful intertwining of meanings, and the instinctive choice of natural imagery. The overall effect is like the sort of poem you'd expect someone to write in a potting shed. It's always got a little bit of that metatrope to it.

I'm starting to think that the question of metatrope solipsism, or rather, of metatrope individuality, can be solved in terms of a spectrum. In other words, the question is whether two people can have the same metatrope, and the answer is that they probably can, but not necessarily so. The best art, from my perspective, may be defined in terms of that which most universally encodes a metatrope. La Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, for example, is superb on that front. Kubla Khan. A Midsummer Night's Dream. All of these have a poetic ambience that is so clear to me, and has been so often described by others, that I can't help but feel it must be universal, or at least roughly universal.

Ursa Major, depicted in La Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, is La Grande Ourse in French, incidentally. I find this quite funny, and it also reminds me of reckoning the hour celestially in 1 Henry IV, II.i: “Heigh-ho! an it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged: Charles' wain is over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed. What, ostler!”

I was asked recently about the relationship between metatropes and meaning, for example whether metatropes have anything to do with classificational cognitive dissonance and the integration of new information. I don't think that they do. The metatrope I got recently from crocuses peeping through a lawn, for example; I've seen crocuses peep through lawns before, just not in the particular way on that particular day that made it seem poetic in hard-to-describe metatropic way. The conjunction of elements, which I've noted before, does seem important though. In the crocuses case, the fact that I was singing Folie à Amphion by Django Reinhardt helped to solidify it.

There are five things I've been meaning to write about, but rather than pick one at random I'm going to give summaries of them all. If anyone wants to see any of these realised as a full essay, they are to email me or ping me on IRC with their preference.

Metatropes Considered - This morning Joe Geldart asked whether “pretentious, posing, poor estonian places” are a metatrope for me. It's only been a couple or few weeks since I coined the word metatrope, but it already seems to have a greater mindshare than anything else I've contrived on Whits. What is a metatrope? I've considered some of the properties of metatropes further, so as to better define them. Possibly to include a list of my own metatropes, expressed in the kind of shorthand notation that is normal for jotting them down.

Complexity and Diplomacy - Would start with an anecdote about how Sam Ruby composed some of his 2003 essays about the Atom syndication format; his method is very subtle, and full of diplomacy. Then to constrast that with my Ditching the Semantic Web?, which caused a lot of misunderstanding because the broad summary, my boycotting of RDF, was the only thing that really sunk in, and the rationale behind that became a point to which people were oblivious. Ed Summers said he thought there was some dishonesty to it, that there was a hidden part of the story; whereas I considered it one of my most desperately honest of essays. I think it cut close to the mark for a lot of Semantic Web developers, which is why the positive aspects of my post, of alternatives that are good to work on, and the compelling nature of the community, were ignored. Comparisons to Chettle's apology of the Groatsworth of Wit, and of the interplay between the primary participants in Pantisocracy.

Design Patterns vs. Mini-Models - How do design patterns compare to mini-models? Are they the same thing? I've been thinking that it was wrong of me to try to list all of my patterns, as I started to do at the beginning of 2007. They just become a clatter. Instead, to concentrate on weeding out the ones that matter. I think that each of the similar terms—schema, pattern, idea, design, vision, model—have particular aspects to them that justify their desynonymisation.

Faith and Practice - One thing that's been bothering me about religion is the connection between faith and practice. The Quaker “manual”, if you like, is called Quaker Faith and Practice. But modern Quakerism is a lot different from the early days of the movement, before 1680 or so, when it was a very radical thing. As usual, the resultant is concentrated on rather than the vector; what if religions concentrated on that aspect of conduct? The Catholic church have just updated the list of sins with a set of new modern sins. Sins seem to supplement the secular law by providing stringent guidelines of how to conduct yourself.

The Very Consideration - An outline of some of the design patterns and mini-models that I've been working on which comprise my current philosophical meanderings. These include: the very consideration, which is the idea that perceptions and connotations etc. are first class things in themselves, often not seen as such; loudmouth democracy, that “one person, one vote” democracy can be subverted by convincing others, and that a similar process is what happens in history, in that it's whichever historian shouts loudest that can bring attention most to a subject; and transformative chains, an idea that's come on from my simple initial model of Shakespeare's plays and their development as being different stages of one sublime phantasmagorium, rather than ups and downs in a transitive quantifiable scale.

When I showed Outlines of Ambient Information to the Semantic Web Interest Group, it generated many pages of discussion, and I've had multiple requests for further explanation. What has led someone who's worked on the Semantic Web for eight years to “suddenly” ditch it?

The process was kickstarted in September 2007 when I got very interested in doing something useful with RDF. The first thing I did was to write a crawler, and survey nearly twenty million triples in the wild to see what kind of data was out there. I made a list of the top 500 ontologies, but none of them were very compelling, so I decided to concentrate on some things that might interest me, especially weather forecasts. I set up a meteorology ontology, and exported thirty-five weather forecasts from the NOAA forecasts website. The process for exporting the data was very fragile, which was annoying.

Next I decided to work on an RDF API called Trio, so that I could make RDF cool. RDF, I figured, ought to be a lot simpler than it is at the moment; I wanted to make it as easy to use as JSON. Surely then the usecases would follow. Indeed I was thinking about genealogy and all sorts of things, but first I wanted to do what TimBL was doing and work on a generic Semantic Web browser. I started working on that, calling it Arcs, and I managed to create a sublime user interface for it.

But there was no use of it. I wasn't using any of the technologies for anything, except for things related to the technology itself. The Semantic Web is utterly inbred in that respect. The problem is in the model, that we create this metaformat, RDF, and then the use cases will come. But they haven't, and they won't. Even the genealogy use case turned out to be based on a fallacy. The very few use cases that there are, such as Dan Connolly's hAudio export process, don't justify hundreds of eminent computer scientists cranking out specification after specification and API after API.

There are lots of other failings that I could point out about the Semantic Web, but I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to turn into merely a griping and unconstructive commentator, which is what can happen when you only concentrate on the melancholy aspects of something like this. So instead I thought: what kind of Semantic Web style things would I like to work on? What can computer science deliver, in the medium term? Some of those things are what I outlined in my article on Ambient Information. I think that they're things that Semantic Web developers would be interested in working on, except that they don't really require many formats or specifications or even tools in some cases.

When we discussed this on the Semantic Web Interest Group, the conversation kept turning to how the formats could be fixed to make the use cases that I outlined happen. “Yeah, Sean's right, let's fix our languages!” But it's not the languages which are broken, except in as much as they are entirely broken: because it's the mentality of their design which is broken. You can't, it has turned out, make a metalanguage like RDF and then go looking for use cases. We thought you could, but you can't. It's taken eight years to realise.

This isn't to say that advanced computational techniques have no place to play in our future. Things like natural language processing and advances in cognitive science can be nothing but a benefit if the models that they produce are true advances in our knowledge. The years of thinking and argument over RDF will still have happened, but its results must now be abandoned because they serve as a powerful distraction from the things that matter. We all have a vote to cast in terms of the things that we work on. I've considered my vote very carefully, and RDF is the wrong candidate. It's not prudent, perhaps even not moral (if that doesn't sound too melodramatic), to work on RDF, OWL, SPARQL, RIF, the broken ideas of distributed trust, CWM, Tabulator, Dublin Core, FOAF, SIOC, and any of these kinds of things.

The counter-argument that the Semantic Web Interest Group folk gave at first before coming to some level of acceptance was that there are use cases, that I just have to look harder. But that's sorta the point: if you have to look hard, then you're looking too hard. The things that I outlined are not ones that I had to look hard for, because the annoyance of them not being solved is a daily and pervasive thing. Go for the low-hanging fruit first!

Once the aura of self-delusion regarding the Semantic Web is stripped away, you're left with two things. An excellent community, which is one of the Semantic Web's real strengths, and a whole lot of really cool things that computer scientists can be working on. My current goals are to explore those use cases more thoroughly, and somehow integrate them with the community if I can. This'll be hard because the self-delusion is partly institutional, and people have invested such an amount of effort into this as to make it self-perpetuating. But you won't have to just write-off all the work; and indeed you can't. It's just that you can't be an effective computer scientist and a Semantic Web developer, with the current stack of technologies in the Semantic Web layer cake. If I have to do these things without the community, then I will.

If you want to be trendy, perhaps you can call the sorts of things that I want to work on part of the “semantic web”, lowercase, not capitalised. But in as much as this reminds me of the airy nothinghood that the Semantic Web espouses, it's probably best to just start from scratch on the trendy terminology front as well.

I'd really like a keylogger for OS X that archives not only keys pressed but names of the applications they're typed in, exporting to monthly files. I'd like daily automatic HTML dumps of my Firefox browsing history. If there were large amounts of storage available, I'd like some kind of movie (preferably retaining the text as text, when text is rendered, like an SVG movie of sorts) of my entire computing interactions.

I'd like all of the books that are in the public domain to be freely available as images and OCR'd text documents online. Google Books for some reason doesn't automatically place books written before c.1930 into its Full View category, though I believe that legally they could do so. Manuscripts should also be brought into the fray, especially when OCR becomes palæographically competent.

I'd like all photographs on Flickr to be linked together just like Microsoft are doing with their Photosynth technology, but I'd also like to be able to apply this to my own photographs and create interactive 3D models of the landscapes that I take photographs of. It'd be nice if this could be linked into satellite imagery too, as well as the Flickr environment.

I'd like all train and bus and other schedules to be online in a good machine readable format, JSON most likely being the best choice, so that people can compete to produce excellent accessible user interfaces for them. Why should we have to use a single company interface? It's in the interests of these kinds of companies to provide this data to their users, so that their services are used more.

I'd like the government to give subsidies to the Ordnance Survey so that all map data is free. Same for the Oxford English Dictionary: the magic oed.sgml file should be in the public domain. If not tax pounds, then perhaps a donation or a research council fund? It's antithetical to the information age to have all of this exceptional data locked up behind pay barriers.

Google Maps and Flickr Maps are great, but I'd like more integration of the online and offline worlds geographically speaking. It should be possible to annotate the landscape more easily and pick that up whilst you're walking around; William Loughborough calls this “ambient information”. There are three ways in which this might be achieved: more central sites that people can collaborate on à la Wikipedia; more geotagging of content; or more Thought Treasure-like NLP extraction processes.

I'd like computer systems to be more analogue, so that they don't lose the splendour of Dickinson's dashes. In other words, to support more gaiji for example, and to be less reliant on decades old datastructures and techniques. I should be able to embed little SVG sketches in my pages more easily, and they should scale along with the text.

I'd like to be able to better manage my personal digital library. I probably have around a terabyte or two of data, but because it expands at very close to the rate of available storage, it's strewn across several systems and discs and in lots of different organisational styles and formats. It's exceptionally fractal, and requires not only elbow grease but some techniques to help manage it effectively.

The Semantic Web isn't concerned with any of this, so I'm going to stop working on the Semantic Web. By this, I mean anything to do with RDF, OWL, Dublin Core, FOAF, SIOC, and so on. I will no longer be writing or supporting Trio, my RDF API. I will no longer give answers, help, or advice to people wanting information about Semantic Web technologies. I will, moreover, actively dissuade anyone from working on the Semantic Web where it distracts them from working on the use cases outlined herein.

Another of those little project schemata that I've been pondering is creating short poetic descriptions of pretty girls. Though, in fact, it's not the pretty girls so much as the poetic ones. Some of the most physically attractive girls are actually quite bland in terms of poetic description, whereas girls with style, or with a strange kind of movement, or mannerisms, or speech tones, are very good for poetry. When I say poetry, note, I don't mean anything necessarily concentrating on the metre and rhyme in some formal way; I mean whatever kind of words are most appropriate to the expression, unlimited.

This is a great little idea because, amongst other functions, it exposes one of those societal lacks of good faith. Once I'd thought of the idea, based on a combination of inspiration from Feynman and Coleridge, I figured I'd look at a few girls and scribble down some thoughts and see if there was any value. Immediately I found the first problem was one of craft: you can't just look at girls and write things down about them. At least, you can't do it in an impolite sort of way, so the main basis for observation has to be a really good incidental memory. I had thought about making some more formal study of it, for example posting myself at my library's grand viewpoint and observing and writing there, but that smacks of effort.

It also got me thinking about painting nudes. Feynman talks about painting nudes when he got into his artistic phase. Painting nudes is fine as an art form, but it or any of its equivalents are not what I want to do. If I went into an art class and just asked all the girls if they'd stand up so I could write poems about them (as Feynman noted, “you just ask them?!”), I'd quite likely get a positive response and be able to write some fairly interesting things, but it would be artificial. It'd be people posing for poetry. “Posing”—the word says it all.

It's funny because Feynman actually talks about ogling the girls, and doesn't really say too much in terms of poetic description about it. But if you really analyse your thoughts about people that you see round and about, if you're anything like me you'll find that they have an extremely complex composition bedded in received notions of style and behaviour. One girl today reminded me of a packet of Silk Cut. I don't smoke, and I haven't even seen a box of these things in years, but the packaging is really distinctive. This girl's skin was exceptionally white, and she had dark black hair and a purple dress. It was very Silk Cut. She was, ironically, one of the least attractive of poetically notable girls I saw today; ironic because being compared to a packet of cigarettes would not be regarded as flattering, whereas I like the packaging of Silk Cut and yet I didn't find her attractive.

Another girl, really more into the zone of woman (I've often thought about doing a survey of “a $num year old $girl”, where girl is one of girl, lady, woman, female, etc., to see what the ranges are, descriptively speaking), was one I'd seen before: she had been reading a book about the Iceni queen Boudica, and she looked a bit like the popular vision of Boudica, with her demeanour, choice of dangling earrings, robust age, and that sort of thing. That made the association stick, and so I was able to recognise her again today.

There are many other instances from today that make good examples for poetic awen or muse. A girl with a navy-blue with white-polka-dots top and a flowery flowing skirt (bizarre combination) that was dashing headlong into the toilet; a frightened whilst daydreaming looking short girl who was clutching her books to her bust very tightly whilst wearing an odd low-cut top; a leonine looking girl with dirty blonde hair and slightly Roman features intently reading a book under a tree. Would have been interesting to see what book; if it were something about lions or Romans it would have been a mordant for the image.

It's actually much easier to capture one's personal perspectives in this way when you focus on it. Most of my travels are philosophical in nature (cf. philosophical walks), but generally girls are a very brief tangents to the things that I tend to think about, and I rapidly crystalise very complex interlayered ideas of them and dismiss the whole thing within seconds. Once you just make it more of a primary concern, to write poetry, the power of observation itself actually increases.

One of the main points about this is that it wouldn't be enough to merely photograph people to capture this level of description about them. It's the level of transmogrification that the subjects undergo in the poetic mind that provides the power: it's the conjunction of poetic subject material, poetic reception, and poetic expression that counts.