Warren Sack
University of California, Santa Cruz, Film & Digital Media, Faculty Member
- Computer Science, Cultural Studies, Art, Critical Theory, New Media, Digital Humanities, and 11 moreDigital Media, Programming Languages, Digital Arts, History of Science and Technology, Participatory Media, Sociotechnical Systems, Software Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, and Softwareedit
- Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online pu... moreWarren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Professor of Film Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and digital studies. He has been a visiting professor in France at Sciences Po, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, and Télécom ParisTech. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). His scholarship and research has been supported by the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sunlight Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Warren received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab and was an undergraduate at Yale College.edit
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Previous software design approaches (especially those of artificial intelligence) are closely tied to a commonsense aesthetics, i.e., an aesthetics that presumes a commonsense, a predictably emergent commonsense, or the uncanny,... more
Previous software design approaches (especially those of artificial intelligence) are closely tied to a commonsense aesthetics, i.e., an aesthetics that presumes a commonsense, a predictably emergent commonsense, or the uncanny, interference of the commonsense world. An alternative to these approaches must be found if we are to design for cross-cultural, global networks where a potential, or virtual, commonsense is contingent upon the possible (but not necessarily probably) emergence of a community of people who create their own stable semantic and social structure through continued interaction on the Internet. This new aesthetics, therefore, must be useful for the practices of design for emergent online communities. * Appears in Database Aesthetics, Victoria Vesna, Editor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 1 Parts of this chapter appear in Warren Sack, "Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetics," in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1, editor-in-chie...
The subject of Warren Sack’s talk will be The Software Arts, a book recently published in the MIT Press “Software Studies” series. Sack offers an alternative history of software that traces its roots to the step-by-step descriptions of... more
The subject of Warren Sack’s talk will be The Software Arts, a book recently published in the MIT Press “Software Studies” series. Sack offers an alternative history of software that traces its roots to the step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of eighteenth-century artists and artisans. He illustrates how software was born of a coupling of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts and argues that the arts are at the heart of computing. The Software Arts is an invitation to artists and humanists to see how their ideas are already at the very center of software; and an invitation to computer scientists to envision how they are artists and humanists too.
Research Interests: Computer Science and Art
The Obama Administration has outlined a set of principles and practices to support Open Government in which citizens can collaborate with the government to solve problems. The Administration is using technology, especially web-based... more
The Obama Administration has outlined a set of principles and practices to support Open Government in which citizens can collaborate with the government to solve problems. The Administration is using technology, especially web-based technology, to support Open Government in practice. Many of the government's websites include video. We examine the website built to support the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). We critique it and argue that a number of important design decisions made for ...
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By connecting a set of web-based tools to scientific video in government, we demonstrate the potential for peer reviewers to interact within a highly configurable context of academic literature, citation networks and time-linked... more
By connecting a set of web-based tools to scientific video in government, we demonstrate the potential for peer reviewers to interact within a highly configurable context of academic literature, citation networks and time-linked commentary. A new way of viewing and understanding information rich media in a web context emerges.
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Research Interests: Information Systems, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, and 15 moreMethodology, Open Source Software, Text Mining, Software Development, Network Analysis, Collaborative Design, Open Source, Design process, Project Planning, Information Space, Internet Use, Empirical Study, System-level design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Empirical Studies
Abstract: Research in Artificial Intelligence (AI)--before the so-called 'AI winter'when funding from the military went south--repeatedly engaged with stories: How might one write software to understand and generate narratives?... more
Abstract: Research in Artificial Intelligence (AI)--before the so-called 'AI winter'when funding from the military went south--repeatedly engaged with stories: How might one write software to understand and generate narratives? From the time of this 'winter,'roughly the late-1980s, until the mid-1990s, fun topics, like storytelling, were put to the side. The US military had been open to funding all kinds of open-ended projects that were, in many cases, in close dialog with humanities scholarship--especially literature and philosophy--even if the ' ...
Abstract: We propose one possible set of criteria for evaluating software–specifically search engines–according to their usefulness for deliberative democracy. We then describe a user study of the search capabilities of three, existing,... more
Abstract: We propose one possible set of criteria for evaluating software–specifically search engines–according to their usefulness for deliberative democracy. We then describe a user study of the search capabilities of three, existing, online archives (Google Groups, Omgili, or Technorati) of threaded, conversational data. Our study measures the capabilities of these search engines according to the proposed criteria. We conclude by stating the software design implications of the study.
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Alan Turing's 1950 essay for the journal Mind entitled" Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is considered to be the founding essay of that area of computer science now known as artificial intelligence (AI). My lecture... more
Alan Turing's 1950 essay for the journal Mind entitled" Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is considered to be the founding essay of that area of computer science now known as artificial intelligence (AI). My lecture today is a re-reading of Turing's founding essay preceded by an overview of the first few decades of AI work. The remarkable thing about Turing's essay is that it simultaneously outlines some of the most important goals for artificial intelligence and anticipates some of the biggest shortcomings of such research as ...
On-line language games are those recurrent, usually textually-mediated activities which happen with and through computers and that result in the construction of on-line roles and identities. Some of these games, like those played on MUDs... more
On-line language games are those recurrent, usually textually-mediated activities which happen with and through computers and that result in the construction of on-line roles and identities. Some of these games, like those played on MUDs and MOOs, and 3D chat environments are considered to be more theater and entertainment than work. Others, like those that result in the on-line identities we know as our credit ratings, consumer profiles, and driving records, are considered more work than play. However, at this point in time in ...
Context: Just because the Internet connects people together does not mean that people get along. Putting people in close connection with one another can be a recipe for intimacy, but can also set the stage for violent disagreement.... more
Context: Just because the Internet connects people together does not mean that people get along. Putting people in close connection with one another can be a recipe for intimacy, but can also set the stage for violent disagreement. Witness the fate of those subjected to domestic violence.
Abstract: We propose one possible set of criteria for evaluating software–specifically search engines–according to their usefulness for deliberative democracy. We then describe a user study of the search capabilities of three, existing,... more
Abstract: We propose one possible set of criteria for evaluating software–specifically search engines–according to their usefulness for deliberative democracy. We then describe a user study of the search capabilities of three, existing, online archives (Google Groups, Omgili, or Technorati) of threaded, conversational data. Our study measures the capabilities of these search engines according to the proposed criteria. We conclude by stating the software design implications of the study.
I think the two questions are closely linked. They both are questions about methodology and, implicitly, questions about what counts as a finished piece of work. I will attempt to answer both of them by starting in an autobiographical... more
I think the two questions are closely linked. They both are questions about methodology and, implicitly, questions about what counts as a finished piece of work. I will attempt to answer both of them by starting in an autobiographical mode. My hope is that this autobiographical approach will make my methodology clearer and, also, fit within the theme of this volume, First Person. ... During the last two years of college, and then for three years more after college, I worked as a research assistant at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Cognition and ...
Abstract: Ever since Socrates we've known that posing questions is a good way of educating people and getting them to participate in a conversation. Most educators and advertising agents know the power of questions, but–beyond the... more
Abstract: Ever since Socrates we've known that posing questions is a good way of educating people and getting them to participate in a conversation. Most educators and advertising agents know the power of questions, but–beyond the editorial page–it is rare to see news laced with questions for the reader, viewer, or user. Questions get the reader to think and thinking helps remembering and encourages participation. The questioning news system described in this paper can be used to automatically annotate news stories with open- ...
Bit transmission technologies are not communication technologies! I argue that most socalled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are neither information nor communication technologies. They are, instead, simply bit... more
Bit transmission technologies are not communication technologies! I argue that most socalled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are neither information nor communication technologies. They are, instead, simply bit transmission technologies that need to be critically decompiled and rebuilt if they are ever to have any potential as communication technologies. The so-called" theory of communication" authored by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949 is the root cause of this widespread ...
–Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers w&f diagram of discourse an incomplete model i d'&fl'dlf• winograd's &... more
–Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers w&f diagram of discourse an incomplete model i d'&fl'dlf• winograd's & flores' model of conversation is incomplete co e sat os co p ete• for them (like austin & searle) language is action bthtbt ff ti• but, what about affective conversations of empathy, comfort conversations of empathy, comfort & greeting? hello!
Political theorists, at least since John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty (1859), have asserted that exposure to conflicting viewpoints is beneficial for democracy. Through exposure to political viewpoints contrary to their own,... more
Political theorists, at least since John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty (1859), have asserted that exposure to conflicting viewpoints is beneficial for democracy. Through exposure to political viewpoints contrary to their own, citizens are said to gain political tolerance and an understanding of opposing rationales. Recent empirical work has confirmed these assertions (Fishkin 1992; Mutz 2002). However, there is no clear means by which a citizen can find opposing opinions. Factors such as the consolidation of media ownership ( ...
We propose a means to visualize design-related, online discussions based on an analysis of the quotations shared between messages. We present an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community. The... more
We propose a means to visualize design-related, online discussions based on an analysis of the quotations shared between messages. We present an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community. The objective of this research in cognitive ergonomics is to understand and to model the dynamics of social interactions that take place in OSS design mailing lists. We hope this research also informs the architecture of new tools for supporting organisational memory archives and the ...
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§ Ideology is one of the main indices that has been used to categorize news products. For example, it is one of the crucial distinctions which differentiates the stories published in a liberal periodical from those published in a... more
§ Ideology is one of the main indices that has been used to categorize news products. For example, it is one of the crucial distinctions which differentiates the stories published in a liberal periodical from those published in a conservative periodical. A computational model of ideology and point of view is proposed and its use and implementation in a prototype system, SpinDoctor (Sack, 1994a), is described. It is argued that any future multimedia indexing technology will need to include at least some of the ...
Abstract: Ever since Socrates we've known that posing questions is a good way of educating people and getting them to participate in a conversation. Most educators and advertising agents know the power of questions, but-beyond the... more
Abstract: Ever since Socrates we've known that posing questions is a good way of educating people and getting them to participate in a conversation. Most educators and advertising agents know the power of questions, but-beyond the editorial page-it is rare to see news laced with questions for the reader, viewer, or user. Questions get the reader to think and thinking helps remembering and encourages participation. The questioning news system described in this paper can be used to automatically annotate the news with open-ended, ...
Abstract: Contrary to Negroponte (1995), we posit the development of a software technology to facilitate the construction of a “Daily Not Me,” ie, a semi-automated clipping service that, when given a topic (eg, abortion), will return a... more
Abstract: Contrary to Negroponte (1995), we posit the development of a software technology to facilitate the construction of a “Daily Not Me,” ie, a semi-automated clipping service that, when given a topic (eg, abortion), will return a range of diverse opinions about the topic (eg, pro-choice and pro-life) that contradict one's personal views. In this paper we present some preliminary results towards this long-term goal. Our work bootstraps recent, prior work in which one of the co-authors (Kelly, 2004) used qualitative content analysis to characterize ...
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Right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are a great number of artists working on, what could be called, projects of information visualization.“Information visualization,” as a named area of research and development,... more
Right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are a great number of artists working on, what could be called, projects of information visualization.“Information visualization,” as a named area of research and development, was originally an outgrowth of the pragmatics of contemporary science and engineering. Faced with huge volumes of data, scientists and engineers write computer programs to render data as images, making it possible to visually search for and scrutinize patterns in the data. Generally speaking, as ...
A representation of ideological point of view is articulated and a method for detecting the point(s) of view expressed in a news story is described. A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program,... more
A representation of ideological point of view is articulated and a method for detecting the point(s) of view expressed in a news story is described. A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program, SpinDoetor, which can automatically detect the point(s) of view represented in some news stories. SpinDoctor is a computer program designed to detect ideological point of viewlin news stories. To detect point of view, SpinDoctor implements a critical reading strategy called actor-role analysis (Sack, 1994a; Sack, 1994b). Actor-role analysis was developed around the following observation: one means of detecting point of view is to examine how certain people, who appear again and again in the news (i.e., news actors), are described or portrayed (i.e., are assigned roles). Thus, for example, if one is given a news story which mentions Oliver North -- (in)famous for his role in the Iran-Contra affair and recent senatorial campaign -- and the story assigns North ...
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A computational, social network-based approach to story understanding is proposed and implemented in the Conversation Map system. Analyses of audiences’ online discussions following the airing of two episodes of a wellknown television... more
A computational, social network-based approach to story understanding is proposed and implemented in the Conversation Map system. Analyses of audiences’ online discussions following the airing of two episodes of a wellknown television show are presented.
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In his famous talk at TED, Hans Rosling [7] used animated and interactive graphics to get his point across. Rosling’s energetic style and interesting message certainly helped, but the means he used were an incredible demonstration on the... more
In his famous talk at TED, Hans Rosling [7] used animated and interactive graphics to get his point across. Rosling’s energetic style and interesting message certainly helped, but the means he used were an incredible demonstration on the power of visual communication. From the perspective of current visualization research, though, the displays used were simple, and one has to wonder if they would have been accepted for publication at the InfoVis conference. This raises the question of whether our criteria for evaluating visualizations are really the right ones, and what other criteria there might be. Information – some argue – wants to be free. Certainly data that was collected with the support of public funds should be freely available, and a lot of it is, at least in principle. But access can mean many things, from easily usable tables of numbers to obscure data formats and querying interfaces to printed tables in locked PDFs. Availability of data does not equate meaningful access...
Previous work in AI story understanding has largely been used to build tools which can summarize stories and categorize them according to the events they describe (e.g., the technologies developed for the Message Understanding... more
Previous work in AI story understanding has largely been used to build tools which can summarize stories and categorize them according to the events they describe (e.g., the technologies developed for the Message Understanding Conferences). These sorts of technologies are built around the assumptions that (1) events reported as facts in news stories should be "understood" as facts; (2) the style of a story, i.e., the way in which a story is told, is not of interest; and, (3) the source of a story should not influence its analysis. These assumptions are obviously unrealistic. Everyone knows that one should not believe everything in the news. But, by making these simplifying assumptions most existing story understanding systems function as gullible "readers." The focus of my current research is to build a less gullible story understander by encoding in it a means to recognize point of view. The techniques that I am developing will be useful, not only for informatio...
We have developed Metavid.org, a site that archives video footage of the U.S. Senate and House floor proceedings. Visitors can search for who said what when and also download, remix, blog, edit, discuss, and annotate transcripts and... more
We have developed Metavid.org, a site that archives video footage of the U.S. Senate and House floor proceedings. Visitors can search for who said what when and also download, remix, blog, edit, discuss, and annotate transcripts and metadata. The site has been built with Open Source Software (OSS) and the video is archived in an OSS codec (Ogg Theora). We highlight two aspects of the Metavid design: (1) open standards; and, (2) Wiki functionality. First, open standards allow Metavid to function both as a platform, on top of which other sites can be built, and as a resource for "mashing" (i.e., semi-automatically assembling custom websites). For example, Voterwatch.org pulls its video from the Metavid archive. Second, Metavid extends the MediaWiki software (which is the foundation of Wikipedia) into the domain of collaborative video authoring. This extension allows closed-captioned text or video sequences to be collectively edited.
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A representation of ideological point of view is articulated and a method for detecting the point(s) of view expressed in a news story is described. A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program,... more
A representation of ideological point of view is articulated and a method for detecting the point(s) of view expressed in a news story is described. A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program, SpinDoetor, which can automatically detect the point(s) of view represented in some news stories. SpinDoctor is a computer program designed to detect ideological point of viewlin news stories. To detect point of view, SpinDoctor implements a critical reading strategy called actor-role analysis (Sack, 1994a; Sack, 1994b). Actor-role analysis was developed around the following observation: one means of detecting point of view is to examine how certain people, who appear again and again in the news (i.e., news actors), are described or portrayed (i.e., are assigned roles). Thus, for example, if one is given a news story which mentions Oliver North -(in)famous for his role in the Iran-Contra affair and recent senatorial campaign -and the story assigns North the ...
[57] ABSTRACT Disclosed is a method and system for administering to a student a problem in computer science for testing, analysis and feedback. The student is provided with an item pool of predetermined test problems to be selected by the... more
[57] ABSTRACT Disclosed is a method and system for administering to a student a problem in computer science for testing, analysis and feedback. The student is provided with an item pool of predetermined test problems to be selected by the student. The student inputs a solution in response to the problem selected, and the solution program is converted, by lexing and parsing, into an abstract syntax tree representation. Predetermined knowledge base patterns are selected from a knowledge base and compared against portions of the ...
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