Annotation | Chris Aldrich

Read Proposal for Near-Future Blogging Megastructures by Brendan Schlagel (Brendan Schlagel)

Blogging is great, but it sometimes feels like every blog is an island. To have a robust blog society requires connection, community, conversation. Part of the problem is we don’t have many great ways to connect blogs together into larger conversation structures.

I suspect this response (part read post, part annotation post, part reply, and with Webmentions enabled) will be somewhat different in form and function than those in the preceding conversations within the blogchain, but I offer it, rather than the standard blogpost or even reply, as the sort of differently formed response that blogging futures suggests we might experimentally give.

Sure we have hyperlinks, and even some esoteric magic with the likes of webmentions. But I want big, simple, legible ways to link blog discussions together. I want: blogging megastructures!

In practice, building massive infrastructure is not only very difficult, but incredibly hard to maintain (and also thus generally expensive). Who exactly is going to maintain such structures?

I would argue that Webmentions aren’t esoteric, particularly since they’re a W3C recommendation with several dozens of server implementations including support for WordPress, Drupal, and half a dozen other CMSes.

Even if your particular website doesn’t support them yet, you can create an account on webmention.io to receive/save notifications as well as to send them manually.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:14PM

Cabinet: one author or several; posts curated into particular collections or series’, often with thematic groupings, perhaps a “start here” page for new readers, or other pointers to specific reading sequences

Colin Walker has suggested something like this in the past and implemented a “required reading” page on his website.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:18PM

Chain: perhaps the simplest collaborative blogging form; a straightforward back and forth exchange of posts exploring a particular topicMesh: like a chain, but with multiple participants; still a legible structure e.g. alternating / round-robin style, but with more possibilities for multiplicity of perspectives and connections across postsFractal: multiple participants and multi-threaded conversation; more infinite game branching; a possibly ever-evolving and mutating conversation, so could probably use some kind of defined endpoint, maybe time-bound

In the time I’ve been using Webmentions, I’ve seen all of these sorts of structures using them. Of particular interest, I’ve seen some interesting experiments with Fragmentions that allow one to highlight and respond to even the smallest fragments of someone’s website.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:20PM

I tend to think of blogging as “thinking out loud”, a combination of personal essay, journaling, brainstorming and public memo.

Another example in the wild of someone using a version of “thinking out loud” or “thought spaces” to describe blogging.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:25PM

Baroque, brutalist, Borgesian — let’s build some blogging megastructures.

Take a peek at https://indieweb.xyz/ which is a quirky and interesting example of something along the lines of the blogging megastructure you suggest.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:27PM

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👓 Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You | Dan Cohen | Buttondown

Read Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You by

Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)

This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been.

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

This isn’t a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in *[An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise](https://amzn.to/32JWDSn)*. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.
November 13, 2019 at 08:33AM

The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.

Circle back around and read this when it comes out.

Similarly, these other references should be an interesting read as well.
November 13, 2019 at 08:36AM

From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.

And it’s not just happening with text, but it also happens with speech as I’ve written before: Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016 In fact, in this mentioned case, looking at transcripts actually helps to reveal that the emperor had no clothes because there’s so much missing from the speech that the text doesn’t have enough space to fill in the gaps the way the live speech did.
November 13, 2019 at 08:43AM

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Acquired The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version 5th Edition

Acquired The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version 5th Edition by Michael Coogan (Editor), Marc Brettler (Editor), Carol Newsom (Editor), Pheme Perkins (Editor) (Oxford University Press)

For over 50 years students, professors, clergy, and general readers have relied on The New Oxford Annotated Bible as an unparalleled authority in Study Bibles. This fifth edition of the Annotated remains the best way to study and understand the Bible at home or in the classroom. This thoroughly revised and substantially updated edition contains the best scholarship informed by recent discoveries and anchored in the solid Study Bible tradition.

· Introductions and extensive annotations for each book by acknowledged experts in the field provide context and guidance.
· Introductory essays on major groups of biblical writings - Pentateuch, Prophets, Gospels, and other sections - give readers an overview that guides more intensive study.
· General essays on history, translation matters, different canons in use today, and issues of daily life in biblical times inform the reader of important aspects of biblical study.
· Maps and diagrams within the text contextualize where events took place and how to understand them.
· Color maps give readers the geographical orientation they need for understanding historical accounts throughout the Bible.
· Timelines, parallel texts, weights and measures, calendars, and other helpful tables help navigate the biblical world.
· An extensive glossary of technical terms demystifies the language of biblical scholarship.
· An index to the study materials eases the way to the quick location of information.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, with twenty new essays and introductions and others--as well as annotations--fully revised, offers the reader flexibility for any learning style. Beginning with a specific passage or a significant concept, finding information for meditation, sermon preparation, or academic study is straightforward and intuitive.

A volume that users will want to keep for continued reference, The New Oxford Annotated Bible continues the Oxford University Press tradition of providing excellence in scholarship for the general reader. Generations of users attest to its status as the best one-volume Bible reference tool for any home, library, or classroom.

Ordered on Amazon on 6/13/19 for use as reference with Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature (Yale-RLST152) which I’ve been watching recently.

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