Source: The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature and Science 11. January 1830. 123.

Here is their side-by-side comparison of the trailer they watched (on the left) and the composite generated from the brain signals:

The software selected multiple “matching” clips from the database and created a composite:

Although this technology has been used in the past, this is the first time the images have been dynamic: movies of the mind.

The range of ethical implications are vast, of course: what sort of right-to-privacy issues can we glimpse on these horizons? As it stands, the technology requires images that have already been presented to the subject (and we’re talking specifically visual cortex here; this is not quite “mind reading”… yet), but the potential for one day “decoding” the perceptions of unconscious subjects (dreaming to comatose) is just incredibly cool.

More related links:

• The Quest to Read the Human Mind (PopSci)
• The Gallant Lab, UC Berkeley (source for YouTube videos above)

The National Park Service have a fabulous collection of phonograph recordings, including some of the earliest recorded sound, here, including some of my favourites:

Big Ben, Westminster, striking half-past ten, quarter to eleven, and eleven o’clock, on July 16, 1890:

“The Phonograph’s Salutation” — William Gladstone:

This one is also interesting — one of the earliest known commercial advertisements, recorded by Len Spencer around 1906.  It is another one of the Edison recordings from the NPS, available on Wikimedia.

And you can’t beat Tennyson’s gruff monotone:

The strange but rather wonderful photo caption is what captured my attention:

IT’S A DURHAM CUSTOM – Pedestrian crossing of busy downtown streets without guidance from traffic lights as the group above is doing on Main Street is a common practice which makes Durham unique among big North Carolina cities. The agility of local pedestrians recently caused City Council members to pay informal tribute to their ability to traverse streets with few accidents. As a matter of fact, some contend Jaywalking in the middle of the block is safer than crossing with the light at a corner where automobile drivers customarily ignore pedestrian rights-of-way.

Durhamites, apparently, are agile pedestrians, skilled at maneuvering tactically in urban space, but not quite so willing to follow rules (traffic lights produce misbehavior).  A perfect illustration of de Certeau’s concept of pedestrian speech acts” (97) — see post.

 Some would be useful for teaching the birth of certain “concepts”:

And some are just fun, like this one I saw posted on Facebook:

Admittedly, I’m always a bit wary of using computers to analyse culture.  (Am I the only one who cringed at the term “culturenomics” here?) But in this case, the reasons to be cautious are not just epistemological and methodological. There are technical issues with OCR; Google Books does not always classify the publication dates of books accurately; and then there are problems with spelling, including national and regional differences, differences over time, and — of course — the ever-problematic medial “s” (case in point: you might think the eighteenth-century was a bit potty-mouthed if you do a search for the history of the term “fuck,” but if you look at some of those results you’ll find frequent references like “infants desire to fuck the blood…” etc.)  Here’s a good example: a chart of the term “person” would make you think there was barely such a concept before 1800.  But try adding “perfon” to the search, and you find this:

Despite these cautions about reliability, some of these results are rather fascinating. I’m doing some research into the relationship between the “technologies” of sensation and detective fiction, and if you plug these terms into Google Ngrams you get the following results:

The hype about sensation fiction that lasted throughout the 1860s and 70s is clearly represented on this graph.  But although the detective novel was a popular genre throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century, as a concept it had little impact in comparison with the “sensation novel” until the twentieth century.

On reading:

Reading (an image or a text)… seems to constitute the maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize the consumer, who is conceived as a voyeur… in a ‘show biz society.’

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristis of a silent production: the drift across the page, the matamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eye of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an emphemeral dance.  But since he is incapable of stockpilin g(unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading.  He insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one’s body.  Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an ‘invention” of the memory.  Words become the outlet or product of silent histories.  The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Standhal’s text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news.  The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces.  A different world (the reader’s) slips into the author’s place. (xxi)

And here’s de Certeau, in a similar vein, on the pedestrian’s appropriation of the city:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins.  They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.  These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.  The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.  It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were organized by their blindness.  The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. (93)

(Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.)

Julia Margaret Cameron: “Annie, my first success”
(Annie Wilhelmina Philpot), 1864

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Another beautiful one, Beatrice, from 1866:

- Elspeth Probyn – “Writing Shame”

For me, one of the most exciting parts of this class is the chance to really probe the intersections between science and the humanities.  If we’re asking “what is human?” then surely we have to ask “what are the humanities?” and “how does the definition of the human alter when we shift perspective from science to humanities?  When we combine perspectives?”  Since there seem to be a number of science students signed up for the class, I think discussions should be really interesting.

I’m hoping that the blog will be a productive and exciting collaborative environment.  I’ve been doing quite a bit of research – reading comments on the Hastac discussions and on ProfHacker about integrating technology into the classroom.  My own graduate experience of collaborative blogging has been overwhelmingly positive.  I’ve always had my more productive thoughts when I have had a little time to mull them over; I’d often think of something I wish I’d brought up in classroom discussion after the fact.  A blog is a great place to encourage those who are a little less comfortable with consistent and lively class participation to get their ideas heard.  And I’m hoping that it will be a chance for me to engage with the students, interact with them and get to know what they are interested in/finding challenging.   I want it to be a training platform for my own jump into pedagogy, too, so expect a little metablogging in the weeks/months to come!

So… I’ve mastered hosting and wordpress.org and themes and pluggins, and we’re finally ready to go: