selected writing (6)

This study examines how a social network profile's lists of interests--music, books, movies, television shows, etc.--can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. By composing interest tokens around a theme, profile users craft their "taste statements." First, socioeconomic and aesthetic influences on taste are considered, and the expressivity of interest tokens is analyzed using a semiotic framework. Then, a grounded theory approach is taken to identify four types of taste statements--those that convey prestige, differentiation, authenticity, and theatrical persona. The semantics of taste and taste statements are further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from the MySpace social network site between November 2006 and January 2007. The major findings of the analysis include statistical evidence for prestige and differentiation taste statements and an interpretation of the taste semantics underlying the MySpace community--its motifs, paradigms, and demographic structures.

Beyond being moral and intellectual, we believe in our heart of hearts that true happiness endures and surpasses all tests of time--a criterion that sometimes proves too challenging for those who stake happiness on but a handful of epic life events. Felicitously, robustness is the strong suit of the small when the small is practiced as a wise ecosystem. Finally, true happiness becomes substantial when it not only endures, but in fact, creates and flourishes. True love ripens like a fine wine, and children make their parents prouder by each year. Yet so too can small happiness flourish and multiply if one believes in the unlimited creative potential of aesthetic multiplicities. With the wisdom of a well-trained imagination, each passing day we will even recognize new beauties in that which is already before us. [English version]

My view of aesthetics is much closer to Freud"s. His insight was that the experience of art and beauty arises when everyday situations cause the unconscious mind to erupt with emotion. Using that revolutionary idea, Freud was able to interpret dreams and laughter--two central problems of aesthetics. Freud"s explanation emboldens computational inquiry into aesthetics because it implies that art and beauty"s sublime are psychological rather than divine; art and beauty are not inferior to the rational, but rather, are circumstances more contextually sophisticated than rationality. In Computational Aesthetics, we have applied many AI techniques to "implement" Freudian psychoanalysis in computer programs and machines. This affords new lines of inquiry into a great variety of aesthetic questions--for example, happiness, taste, imagination, humor, frustration, suffering, irony, myth, intimacy, memories, and morality.

The human-grown semantic web has already proven its great potential. By researching semantic technologies to exploit real-world system usage, to cope with subjectivity, and to enhance interpretation using cultural context, we can create smarter systems to harness and enhance humans" intrinsic semantic productivity.

In this paper, we tried to gain insights into how men and women perceive day-by-day events, and what they most value in their daily experiences, by looking at a very large number of diary entries extracted from the blogosphere. Our analysis of gender distinctions revealed that women's and men's sensibilities exhibited a particularity-generality dichotomy that swept all dimensions of gender space. Women focused on immediate time, nuanced colors, close-knit relationships, objects describable by size, the flavors of food, and were disposed to happiness and sadness. Men focused on months and years, primary colors, social hierarchies, abstract ideas, food as a tool for sating hunger, and were disposed to anger and arousal. These findings are in general agreement with previous research in gender psychology, but do articulate more specific preferences for factors directly relating to user interface design such as time, color, socialness, sizeability and concreteness, affect, and food (if one is designing a recipe interface, for example).

But where is this in-between and how can a bricoleur find this space? Bhabha gives away the secret--it is located in "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences." The bricoleur is accustomed to undermining one culture"s teachings with the teachings of another, but if he were to focus on the difference between the two teachings and let that space of difference fill his imagination, a continuum of a thousands possible teachings would appear. Thus, to be in-between the space of difference affords even greater freedom than rebellion. [English version]