A Framework for Web Science (2006)

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Authors: Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner
Publisher Now Publishers Inc, 2006
Foundations and Trends in Web Science. Vol. 1, No 1 (2006) pp. 1–130
ISBN 1933019336, 9781933019338
Length 134 pages

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Steven Shaviro: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales (2010)

Steven Shaviro: “The new issue (14.1) of the open-access journal Film-Philosophy is now online.

Featured in this issue as an ‘extended article’ (it comes out to 100 pages!) is my latest: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.

The article is freely available for download; it comprises about two thirds of my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Affect, appearing sometime later this year from Zero Books. (The book version will include two additional chapters: one on Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer, and a general conclusion).” (from author’s blog)

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Warren Neidich: Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2002)

In Blow-Up, Warren Neidich proposes a different and wholly original paradigm for thinking through cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject. Across the theoretical landscape that Neidich describes, even familiar monuments from the history of art, architecture, philosophy and aesthetics appear strange and disorienting, because the starting point of the primary and secondary repertoires (the nervous system and the pathways of connection built up through interaction between the brain and the outside world) is so totally unexpected. Crucial to Neidich’s narrative is the idea that, in modernity, the technologies that have evolved in the sphere of visual communication have come to operate on the subject with particular vehemence, not only in the realm of meaning but in their determining influence on the primary habits and dispositions of experience. Photography, cinema, television, the internet–as the forces of spectacle gain ever-wider currency in a rapidly globalizing world, those cultural forms that emerge as dominant in the competition for structuring the pathways of consciousness will annex and colonize more and more of the subject’s interior life, worldwide. But Neidich suggests that the subject of culture has the ability to remap itself, rewire itself, and assume forms so creative and protean that it will always outrun the forces that seek to limit its plasticity–even trauma and amputation cannot irreversibly damage the neural body.

Published in Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #2 (2000-02): Cinema and the Brain
Later published within the book “Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain” (DAP/UCR/California Museum of Photography, 2003).

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