What fonts to use for the name of the game, and in it?
I *love* this Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ typeface, Archer. Look at that ‘C’!
What a lovely game name/heading Archer Book would make: gorgeously classic-yet-futuristic. With Verlag Condensed as a complementary contrast for in-game body text.
Sembl works for lots of different sized groups. We reckon that playing in a team of two to four is ideal. Any fewer and the ideas might not flow freely; any more and you might have too little time with your hands on the device :)
Below you can see board designs for three, four, five and six teams. (So a single Sembl game can involve 6 to 24 players – and we can host multiple games simultaneously.) Each team starts with seed content occupying a coloured spot. In most boards, you have your own seed node to work from, but with the board for younger players – the last one, below – you share with another team. Numbers indicate which round of play that node becomes available.
In all of these designs, I’ve attempted to make the game enjoyably resolvable in an hour of play. Round 1 is always a warm-up. You’re not competing for the place on the board, you just need to find one thing that resembles your seed node, and explain how.
In Round 2, each node in contention is linked to two of the Round 1 nodes. With the simple board for four teams, that pattern continues into the final round. With the other boards, Round 3 requires you to find fewer nodes with more connections.
In Round 3 of a six-team game, you compete for two nodes, each of which is linked to three prior nodes. With the other boards, the aim of Round 3 is to occupy a single node, which is linked to either three, four or five others in accordance with the number of teams playing.
I’m fascinated by how the dynamic of the play shifts according to the number of nodes in contention (relative to the number of teams playing), and the number of prior nodes these nodes link to. The board for five teams is probably the most challenging. Not only are you competing with four other teams for a single node, your node must link to five prior nodes. It might push the limits of what’s achievable within the hour – or perhaps the peculiar pressure of such a game will inspire wondrous thinking!
One thing connects with another — one thing resembles another, or is distinctly different from it, or overlaps with it, leads to it, contains it.
There are many ways one thing and another can be connected, and people have been playing Sembl-like games, making connections on “boards” much like the Sembl boards that Cath illustrated in her post earlier today, for centuries. In fact, graphical diagrams of linked concepts have long played a significant role at the intersection of art, thought and science.
The glorious board above is taken from a manuscript of the De Mundi Sphaera of Oronce Finé (French, 1494 – 1555) at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. It shows how the four “elements” of early science interact, fire being the opposite of water, cold and its opposite, heat, both being able to coexist with either dryness or humidity but not both at once, and so forth.
You can see more of Finé’s diagrams here.
The diagram comes from Fludd’s 1619 work Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris, and you can find other diagrams of his in a slideshow at this University of Oklahoma site.
The good abbot’s diagram shows world history unfolding in three epochs, that of the Father (in Old Testament Times) with its multitude of commandments, that of the Son (from the New Testament to his own day) when only two commandments, to love God and one’s neighbor, were needed — and the gloriously anticipated age of the Spirit, to begin in 1260, in which no commandments would be required since the Spirit would speak in the hearts of humankind. Again, you can see more of his diagrams in this auto-downloading powerpoint presentation from the University of Virginia.
Joachim’s views were highly influential in the middle ages, and traces of them can be found more recently in the Third Reich of the Nazi’s and in Lenin’s concept of the Withering Away of the State — but that’s another story…
This post is a provocation, triggered by Mike Bergman‘s clear and interesting talk on the semantic web in use. It follows some earlier, fuzzier thinking of my own on Sembl and linked data. I now understand where Sembl fits in relation to the semantic web. The answer is that it doesn’t, not really, because Sembl triples are quintessentially different to RDF triples. Different and, I contend, better.
Here’s the problem – just reiterating here, for people who are unfamiliar with ‘the semantic web’. We made a beautiful web, huge and full of knowledge, but it’s too big for humans to use well. We need machines to process the bulk data so we can extract the most relevant gems of knowledge. But for machines to understand the whole web of human knowledge, they need the parts to be arranged in a more orderly way. Is this thing the same as that? If not, what’s the relationship between the two? Machines fail to articulate the parts, and humans are never sure we’ve got the best part of the big picture.
What we need is an authority file for What Each Entity Is and How It Relates to Other Entities; an agreed way to inform machines of the complex variations and dynamics of human knowledge.
Semantic web proponents have succeeded in creating an agreed process for defining and agreeing on What Each Entity Is. Mike Bergman describes the use of URIs to identify data as the semantic web’s ‘crowning achievement’. But the second part of the challenge – How Each Entity Relates to Others – is critical, and tricky. And the current approach – build and/or mash up and apply ontologies, vocabularies, thesauruses, schemas and taxonomies – feels labour-intensive and ineffective.
The web is about as non-linear and dynamic a system of knowledge as you can get, yet we try to describe it in terms of the sum of its components.
What if we’re going the wrong way in our mission to understand things in relation to other things? What if the basic building block of the semantic web structure, the triple, is sub-optimal? At the very least, it is insufficient. Consider:
This entity
[subject]
↓
has this relationship to
[predicate]
↓
that entity
[object].
Let’s face it: triples are reductive and authoritarian. Always starting with the subject and ending with the object, they seek out and cultivate otherness. Whatever the part in the middle is, the subject gets to co-opt the object into a relationship that is always already from the subject’s perspective. Sometimes the subject’s defined relationship to the object is consensual. And sometimes it’s inappropriate. The thing is, even if you carefully pass all your triples through the complex regulatory system they necessitate, you can never be sure you’ve got the relationships right. And if they are validated at one point in time, they may later need updating.
In short: triples are intended to impose order, but they tend to create conflict.
Triples are not evil. Often the predicate is unifying, a form of equivalence, something along the lines of ‘is the same as’. Too often, according to Mike, who lamented the ‘SameAs’ relationship’s overuse. He also showed us a list of various terms for defining the near-identity of different entities – my personal favourite is ‘somewhatSameAs’:
Different ways to describe near-identity
Evidently there is a reconciliatory bent among the seekers of the semantic web, a force resisting the oppositional stretch of the triple :)
And… therein lies an answer to the problem of imposing order without generating disagreement.
Instead of trying to map the complete tangle of relationships, we could focus on crafting resemblance. We could ditch the one-way triple in favour of a mutual one:
This thing
[subject]
↓
shares this resemblance with
[predicate]
↑
This thing
[subject].
Resemblance is by nature imprecise, but because its perspective is mutual, it is never wrong. The spectrum of resemblance runs from fairly uninteresting (eg a glass and a bowl both have a round rim) to the startling, insightful, poetic. And whether humans like the resemblances or not, every single one will help the machines to understand – whether they are written in ‘proper English’, vernacular, or any other language.
Resemblance is a very human approach to structuring knowledge. It is generative rather than reductive, and it is intrinsically attractive – both conceptually, in the sense of drawing two entities closer together, and emotionally, in the sense that it feels better to seek similarity than to define difference. We are naturally dialled-in to similarities and patterns. And this capacity is extremely useful for seeing how the parts relate to the whole. Which is, I recall, the mission of the semantic web.
Obviously, there will still be difference. In fact, it turns out that to identify sameness is to explore difference. As soon as you find a resemblance between two things, a difference pops up. Intriguingly, difference seems to make more sense, and be more palatable, in the context of resemblance. It’s kind of beautiful.
To create an online version of the Sembl game – a Sembl Web – we will need to use stable URIs or to create them if they don’t exist. By default, I’d like to link Sembl entities to Wikimedia. But can we hack the RDF triple and forget the vocabularies and ontologies?
Freed from having to define and structure all the possible relationships in advance, we could invest energy in exploring the territory of relatedness at our leisure, and begin to work out a pattern language for them. We’d be building a knowledge system based on consensus instead of authority.
Wikipedia changed how we create and access shared knowledge. Sembl could change how we create and access shared knowledge of how it all fits together.
The semantic web is big, in theory. There are over 7 billion RDF triples already, though according to Mike ‘very few’ are put to use. Sembl Web doesn’t yet exist, but when it does, it will constitute a humane generator of mutual triples – triples that:
Sembl is poised to create complex, chaotic flow among disparate parts of the web. And that flow is the point. That’s what converts knowledge into understanding.
…..
Disclaimer: I’m no expert on the semantic web. If I have overlooked something critical in the above, I’d appreciate you letting me know. On the other hand, if you see value in this approach, please let me know where and how. Ie, comments appreciated!
Consider the rhyme of
womb
with
tomb
It has the delicious property that these two words describe, if you will, the two chambers from which we enter this life and through which we leave it. Not only do the two words rhyme on the ear, in other words, they can also be said to rhyme in meaning.
Meditation: if you were wearing headphones, and these two words were spoken, what would the stereophony of their meanings be?
The essence of Sembl thinking is that you see resemblances — similarities, analogies, symmetries, echoes, metaphors, connections, kinships, links — between things, between ideas, between people.
And you play them as moves in the game — you notate them, you score them.
That’s the basis of the iPad or web-based Sembl game, it’s the basis of the HipBone family of games that preceded Sembl and were its jumping-off point – and it’s the basis for the whole style of thinking we call Sembl thinking.
…..
So the simplest move you can play in a Sembl game with yourself would be one in which you juxtapose two objects or ideas that resemble one another in interesting ways. For my own pleasure, I’ve been playing mini-games of this sort for years now, and recently I’ve been using what I call the HipBone SPECS format to do it:
The idea here is to drop two quotes, or images, or whatever, into the two spaces, to see what their kinships and differences are. And the more interesting the initial two items you use are, and the greater the conceptual or imaginative distance between them, the more interesting the result will be.
Here are some examples, which will give you an idea (a) of what Sembl thinking is like, and (b) of how to use the SPECS format for games of your own. You’ll see that in each case I have a sort of mini-graphic joining the two images or texts. This will usually be the picture of a pair of eyes or something of the sort – as a little decorative device to show that the two items are to be seen with, so to speak, “binocular vision”.
This first example finds an interesting similarity between the mechanics of flow in liquids, as studied by the great physicist Von Karman…
and Vincent Van Gogh’s visionary sense of the night sky…
There’s really no limit on the resemblances you can explore and find:
This one explores the difference between linear thinking and a dilemma – and if you’ve ever had a train of thought, you’ve probably come across both situations…
Are you a science buff?
The upper image here represents the winds over much of the United States, while the lower one records ocean currents in the Atlantic…
Is current affairs your interest?
I was already playing two-quote games when the Iraq war started, and there’s a pair of quotes from back then is still a favorite of mine:
In March 1917, the incoming British General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude told the inhabitants of Baghdad:
Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.
And almost a hundred years later, in April 2003, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld addressed US troops, also in Baghdad, telling them:
And unlike many armies in the world, you came not to coquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
I think that “doublequote” pretty neatly illustrates George Santayana’s frequently repeated remark, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it”
…..
To go back in time and see some of the earliest Sembl-style thought diagrams, including one that illustrates where ideas come from and where they mix and match, go to the next post in this series, Medieval and Renaissance Sembl games…
An essay woven of Sembl thinking: Gary Snyder, Han Shan, Dogen, Thoreau, Smokey & MIT…
Gary Snyder is the fellow in the upper panel with the mountains behind him. Han Shan — whose name means Cold Mountain, which was also the name of the place he lived — is the fellow showing a poem to his friend in the lower panel. Dogen Zenji is the fellow who gave us the Mountains and Rivers Sutra. Thoreau is the fellow who retired for a while to Walden Pond. Smokey the Bear you know. And MIT is where Gary Snyder received the Henry David Thoreau Prize last Tuesday.
All are worthy of your attention, but in combo they’re unbeatable.
MIT:
MIT’s an interesting place to crop up in an account of Snyder — a poet, a Californian living high and away in the Sierras, and one of the first westerners to sit Zen and study in a monastery in Japan… And yet it’s curiously appropriate. Snyder is not here to banish science with poetry, but to enhance poetry with science, science with poetry, and both with his keen eye for context and honest detail.
He’s interested in weather. Understanding weather is in all our interests, but Snyder is actively interested. He’s interested in mountains and rivers, which comes to much the same thing — and he would surely have been interested in this exhibit that opened at MIT on Friday, just three days after his award ceremony there:
I dropped this image in here because it shows mountains and glaciers — but not without end. The loss of glaciation would concern Snyder — we know he’s interested in such things both immediately and in the long term, not only from his ecological writings in prose, but also because there’s a section of his epic Mountains and Rivers Without End that opens with these words:
“The 15 billion cubic kilometers of water on the earth are split by photosynthesis and reconstituted by respiration once every two million years or so.”
Even on that time-scale, Snyder’s interest in such things is personal: that section is titled We Wash Our Bowls in This Water.
So that’s the MIT part of the package.
Han Shan:
The terrific tale [link includes poems, too] of how a Chinese official learned that Han Shan and Shih-te, his laughing companion pictured above, were in fact great bodhisattvas though they looked like vagabonds could have come straight out of Jack Kerouac‘s Dharma Bums days. The official describes Han Shan:
He looked like a tramp. His body and face were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply. Everything he said had a feeling of Tao in it, profound and arcane secrets. His hat was made of birch bark, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Thus men who have made it hide their tracks: unifying categories and interpenetrating things.
And here he describes how he arranged for the publication of Han Shan’s poetry:
I ordered Tao-ch’iao and the other monks to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs – and also to collect those written on the walls of people’s houses. There were more than three hundred. On the wall of the Earth-shrine Shih-te had written some gatha (Buddhist verse or song). It was all brought together and made into a book.
Gary Snyder it was, by the way, who turned Kerouac and the Beats onto Buddhism, and who features as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Gary Snyder:
Here’s Snyder again:
The first question that arises for me when I see photos of Gary Snyder like the ones above, I’ll admit, is whether it’s somehow axiomatic that his face should be as creased and rugged as the mountains he loves.
That’s a question for the intuition, really — but it may be worth noting that Emily Bronte saw a similar yet somewhat different correspondence between face and land and mentioned it in Wuthering Heights:
Catherine’s face was just like the landscape – shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient; and her poor little heart reproached itself for even that passing forgetfulness of its cares.
People, and their eventual likeness to the places they live?
Let’s take this a little deeper. With respect to mountains, rivers and sages specifically, the great zen master Dogen teaches us in his Mountains and Rivers Sutra:
From time immemorial the mountains have been the dwelling place of the great sages; wise ones and sages have made the mountains their own chambers, their own body and mind. And through these wise ones and sages the mountains have been actualized. However many great sages and wise ones we suppose have assembled in the mountains, ever since they entered the mountains no one has met a single one of them. There is only the actualization of the life of the mountains; not a single trace of their having entered remains.
Dogen Zenji:
Dogen composed the Mountains and Rivers Sutra, which as far as I can tell is not available in book form except as a section of his longer work, the Shobogenzo. Snyder worked from 1956 to 1996 on his long poem series, Mountains and Rivers without End. The Cleveland Art Museum houses a scroll painting from the Northern Sung dynasty, Streams and Mountains Without End:
Translation — hey, second cousin to reincarnation?
An ancient Han Shan poem that’s also an early Snyder poem, Snyder here translating Han Shan:
I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don’t get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone under head
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
Of both men you might say: the dwelling place is where the mind dwells.
Smokey the Bear:
Snyder has his own sutra. It is called the Smokey the Bear Sutra, and it’s both fierce and hilarious: I have a beautiful copy in storage somewhere, in the beautiful Fudo Trilogy edition, that Snyder kindly inscribed for me, “Well met”.
It contains the following gloss on mountains and rivers:
My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain.
Science, mountains, weather patterns, rivers…
The poetry in Synder’s Mountains and Rivers has its rapids and still waters, its simple poetry and dazzling prose:
A day on the ragged North Pacific coast get soaked by whipping mist, rainsqualls tumbling, mountain mirror ponds, snowfield slush, rock-wash creeks, earfuls of falls, sworls of ridge-edge snowflakes, swift gravelly rivers, tidewater crumbly glaciers, high hanging glaciers, shore-side mud pools, icebergs, streams looping through the tideflats, spume of brine, distant soft rain drooping from a cloud,
sea lions lazing under the surface of the sea…
HD Thoreau:
Walden Pond is one of the great power centers of America Snyder mentions in the Smokey the Bear Sutra — and Snyder borrowed one of Thoreau’s lines for a poem of his own:
The sun is but a morning-star: each day represents a new opportunity to recover the nobility of life, another chance to turn aside from use to wonder.
Like Han Shan, Thoreau is among the ancestors. And as Thoreau’s own friend Emerson wrote, “The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately.”
And what’s this about the former great men? Snyder goes way back before Emerson and Thoreau, and even Han Shan — he once said:
As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying intuition and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
Now:
Perhaps that’s what keeps him relevant, fresh. Once again in Mountains and Rivers Without End he writes:
Alive in the Sea of Information.
As are we all. How’s that for archaic meets MIT?
I love what Mitchell Whitelaw calls a generous interface. The traditional search box gateway to a collection is reticent, even officious, begrudging you for your lack of familiarity with the goods. By contrast, a generous interface hails the most casual passerby with a taste of the collection or – better still – the whole feast and before you know it, you’re delving in and across and between, following your nose and filling up with wonder.
Mitchell Whitelaw and Sam Hinton, Flickr Commons Explorer
Unlike in the Museum game of Sembl, where players source content from the iPad’s camera, in the web-based game players will draw on the wealth of material already available online.
But finding something to resemble should not be the challenge of the game – that honour is reserved for resembling itself. An empty search box during the game would feel confronting, and counter to Sembl’s spirit of speculative exploration.
Clearly, Sembl Web needs to be hooked into some generous collection interfaces.
Happily, Canberra appears to be a hotbed of exemplar interactive GLAM dataviz work. (Hello Mitchell, Sam, Paul, Ben and Tim. I may be in touch :)
We don’t really know how to think, yet. Or to put that in a more positive light: our characteristic ways of thinking are not yet as subtle and sophisticated as the problems that face us – as a global population, in our communities, in our business lives, our family situations, our own individual tangled and constantly shifting minds and emotions.
We have plenty of people who know how to do black and white, either-or thinking – which turns into highly emotional and often inappropriately judgmental knee-jerk thinking when the going gets tough. There’s a lot of heart in that, but not always a whole lot of clarity.
And we have a fair number of people who can do deliberative thinking, who understand critical thinking, apply some measure of doubt to their own assumptions and certainties, make careful, slow, analyses and do close readings, and in general try to avoid a headlong rush to judgment… There’s a lot of clarity there, as well as heart – but words and logic tend to dominate, and feelings are often relegated to second place.
And we have assorted artists, creative types and eccentric thinkers who see sideways, think laterally, connect dots, listen with care, appreciate silences, hear multiple voices and hold them together in their minds like a symphony… These are the folks who have the best grasp of complex problems, the bridge-builders between parties and factions – and the peace-makers. They live, balancing, at the intersection of love and clarity, with mind clarifying heart and heart giving courage to thought.
Sembl thinking is a whole spectrum of ways of thinking drawn from the best of that third group, brought together under one roof. And Sembl itself is a game and family of games, designed to explore and enjoy these ways of thinking.
The game’s motto is simple, profound, and insanely ambitious:
Tapping human knowledge and imagination, link by link
The Sembl prototype will soon be playable! Here, Cath introduces the concept at the core of the game, as a prelude to an online tutorial for teachers.
