March 18: Doree Duncan Seligmann
"Humanizing The Internet"







Abstract

Technological developments are allowing us to do more and more --- to get more information, make more connections, access more devices, get higher resolutions, use more media. But at the same time, there is no parallel master plan for us humans to start growing more ears or eyes or hands and feet; or a faster brain. So what will we have to do to make these new possibilities and all these capabilities really valuable? One day soon, the equivalent of 300,000 encyclopedias could be delivered electronically to you each second --- but you won't be able to read them --- so what should we be sending to you instead? What aspects of human communication can we introduce back into our modern digital, computer mediated-communication systems? In this talk I'd like to explore the benefits of slowing things down; filtering and processing; massaging and tailoring data streams into something meaningful. In fact, I'll go so far to say that we can benefit from making things slightly inefficient.

Reading List

David A. Kahn [The Codebreakers; The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet ]
Marshall McLuhan [Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man Essential McLuhan]
Tom Standage [The Victorian Internet : The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers]
Edward Tufte [The Visual Display of Quantitative, Visual Explanations : Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative,Envisioning Information]
Fred B. Wrixon [Codes, Ciphers and Other Cryptic and Clandestine Communication: 400 Ways to Send Secret Messages from Hieroglyphs to the Internet]

Biography

Dr. Doree Duncan Seligmann is a researcher in the Communication Software Research Department at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She earned an A.B. in Anthropology at Harvard University, spent several years directing and designing theatrical productions in Paris and then returned to New York to complete a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University. She developed Archways, a system that automatically generates a 3D virtual environment for multimedia communication using knowledge-based graphics and intelligent objects, started the Metaphorium, a web-site to explore visual metaphors and lately has developed new services and configuration tools for the Lucent Softswitch. She is currently teaching a course at Columbia University, Internet Communication Programming and edits a column on art and technology in IEEE Multimedia Magazine. She is also editor of "Life Into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World," published by WW Norton, NY.