Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Fears of the mouth: Mark Dery

Mark Dery has a fun post about various fears of the human mouth, starting from dental horror. It's grand Dery, an energetic romp across fields and topics with a canny sense of humor and the surreal.

This post's image, drawn from Dery's post, is for one of Poe's oddest tales. "Berenice" (1835) concerns yet another  dead woman returning from the grave, but via... her teeth.

They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!...
The teeth! --the teeth! --they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.

Folksonomies and taxonomies: synthesis

For the future of metadata, maybe it won't be a struggle between taxonomies and folksonomies:

it's exciting to consider how these two approaches might fit together and function as a whole. Neither works especially well on its own: controlled vocabularies often miss out on input from content authors and become rigid, stale, and distant from the vernacular of users; folksonomies will begin to break down for the reasons mentioned above. Treating them as major parts of a single metadata ecology might expose a useful symbiosis: encourage authors and users to generate folksonomies, and use those terms as candidates for inclusion in richer, more current controlled vocabularies that can evolve to best support findability.

I hope to post more about this soon, time permitting.

Mix your Radiophonatron

The BBC offers the Radiophonatron, a browser-based electronic music mixer, based on elements from the famous Doctor Who theme song.  Play on, and dream of Daleks:

(thanks to Sara)

Hacks drift through shared Sims world

According to this story, hacks are surreptitiously altering a multi-player Sims universe:

Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -- every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.

To whatever extent these interventions alter a Sims story in a way construed as narrative, these are new stories written onto the preexisting ones.  It's related to alternate reality games, as they obtrude without a formal wrapping into other digital objects.  Yet the lack of organized framework and collaborative play suggests a different form.
(thanks to Paonia)

New Infocult category stocked up and ready for your blogging pleasure

After receiving requests and advice, I've started a new category: Gaming and Narrative.  It's a bit more focused than Cyberculture, which I've been using before.  Gaming and narrative includes various aspects of textuality and games, from storytelling to unusual interpretive communities, new forms of fiction to simply cool games.

Indian Ocean: blogs check newspapers

More on new media upon the old: one blog arraigns newspaper headlines on the Indian Ocean disaster.  Notice how unremarkable the stark differences are.  Any better than, say, blog subject lines?

Is relief "pouring" in? "Trickling" in? Bound up in "red tape"? Is it a "tidal wave" of assistance? Is it "building"? Do survivors "fight for aid amid corpses"? Do "delays hinder relief"? Is this aid "ramping up"? Is it arriving "slowly"? "Expanding"? "Moving ahead"?

(via BoingBoing)