Maps as Audiovisual Representations of Data (Part 1)...

I've been asked by Professor Frank Dufour to start pondering the nature of maps as a means of representing data. This data need not represent actual physical space, and, indeed, the very exercise of 'mapping' something has long since evolved from the abstract representation of spacial placement and distances to include everything from work flows to social networks to vin diagrams. The one thing all maps have in common, however, is our need to take data, no matter how abstract or unrelated to spatial location, and place it in a logical, consistent physical order that we can navigate as easily as a person navigates a city using a traditional geographical map.

This is a potentially huge topic and one that will not be answered simply or completely on a blog. The goal is to gather material for a series of lectures for my class and basically see where it takes us.

The first thing I'd like to do is explore map types and try to establish a common frame of reference for discussing them. After that, I'm just going to let the Train of Thought roll along at a leisurely pace, occasionally changing tracks as new ideas present themselves (either from my own rumination or your comments) until the whole thing is derailed by the Cow of Disruptive Thought.

From a top down perspective, there are three general data types, which leads to the following map types...

SPATIAL MAPS
The oldest and most basic type of map, a spatial map translates physical location data into a visual reference to allow you to physically go from point A to point B. The most interesting point about spatial maps is the fact that they do not have to be pin-point accurate to get you where you want to go. The first maps were rough approximations, at best, and even some modern maps (like a map of a carnival or fairground) are less interested in spatial distances than they are spatial relationships. A map of the Six Flags Amusement Park, for instance is not drawn to actual scale, but it clearly lays out that the Superman ride is after the Shockwave ride and before the Titan. And all of these rides are laid out on the map as huge drawings on a tiny area that, if they actually existed in that ratio, could be seen over the curve of the horizon.
 
TEMPORAL MAPS

A temporal map defines not physical space, but temporal progression, in that if event A happens, you can expect event B to happen. A sheet of music, for example, shows the progression over time as does a storyboard or workflow. Events A and B can take place anywhere, and need not have any spatial relationship to each other. Shot 1 on a storyboard might be followed by Shot 2 in a film, but they might have been recorded half a world apart, for instance.

RELATIONAL MAPS
In a relational map, we are looking for abstract ties between data points, how they relate to each other. Data Point A and Data Point B may not exist in the same physical relationship, in other words, you can't find B just by knowing the location of A. They may not even exist in the same temporal location. Data Point A might only apply in the 1800's while Data Point B applies to today. They simply have a variety of non-causal similarities that allow them to be mapped relative to each other. For example, Human Male 1 in Texas has never met Human Male 2 in China, but they can be mapped together because they are both Human Males. Vin diagrams are excellent examples of relational maps.

MIXED MAPS
The combination of the three types above can lead to a wide variety of mapped data representation. In gaming, for instance, we adventure maps that not only represent a spatial layout of a dungeon, castle, spaceship, etc., but also have a meta-function as temporal maps, arranging hallways and rooms in a manner that ensures the players will complete the dungeon in a way that builds up the excitement slowly and keeps the challenge level steady even as it allows them room to explore. You never fight the big boss monster in the first room, for example, but only after traversing the whole dungeon and facing a succession of increasingly more challenging monsters.

Another example would be the board game 'Black Death' which represents an abstract spatial map of the lines of disease communicability in medieval Europe, but also a relational map, where certain squares (marked with a + or - and a number) are more or less likely to spread the disease based upon the virtue of their being slums or hard to traverse terrain. It is also a temporal map, as the movement of disease using its virility rating doesn't represent the disease literally walking across Europe, but slowly being passed, over time, from person to person in one area and then breaking out in another, nearby area. The loss of a disease chit from the board through its Lethality also reflects the temporal nature of the disease running its course and killing off the population.

Yet a third example would be a farmer in a rural area giving directions by using not only spatial references ('turn left at the farmhouse') but also relational ('that was completely flattened by a meteor') and temporal ('in 2001').

THAT'S A START...
Now that we have a set of definitions, I think there are a few questions that raise their heads, the first and most important being, why do humans feel a need to spatially map abstract data? I'll look into those and anything else that comes down the tracks as the series continues...

BoL Gameslate Design Dairy 1...

This will be the first in a series of design diaries highlighting the march of progress of a Gameslate from concept to finished app (for those who have no idea what this is, you can check out the first stirrings of the prototype project here). I'm doing this partially to record my thought process for future reference but also to show the usefulness of standards based design in the creation of system agnostic apps and, finally, to show how the table top RPG can take advantage of the digital age beyond very basic dice rollers and PDFs.

Barbarians of Lemuria will be my first system agnostic Gameslate project and I am currently in the process of working out the visual design and UI elements. To get an idea of the look and feel I'm going for, here is a pic of the visual design in progress...

Now some of you might be looking at this pic and thinking 'what screen is that thing formatted for?' and the answer is 'none of them and all of them.' What you're looking at is a theoretical layout on which I will place the UI elements and try to get a coherent look and feel.

To make a truly system agnostic layout, I am using a number of elements. The first is a background image that is built to fit a screen up to 10.5" long at 300dpi (Retina Level, i.e. as detailed as a human can pick out). That bit of bloody parchment is it. There will be no need for tiling, it is one size fits all for pretty much any screen coming out in the near future.

The next bit are the midground design elements. They will be layed out in the typical HTML5/CSS manner, but with relative, rather than absolute positioning. So the title will always float about 3% from the left and the top while the snake knots will float at around -1% or 101% (depending on their corner) from the left and 100% and 0% from the top (these numbers are all just estimates right now, but you get the idea). This allows the page to work in both landscape and format depending on tablet orientation.

Finally, the yet to be added foreground UI elements will be layed out in a manner similar to the midground design elements. Again, this allows the character sheet to flow naturally if you tilt the tablet. It will take some tweaking to make sure the priority of flow is maintained, but it shouldn't be too difficult and will hopefully negate the need for a mess of alternate layouts and the code to implement them.

I'll probably tweak the title a bit to make it stand out more, but I'm fairly happy with it. On to the UI elements...

Back in the Saddle...

I haven't felt a need to blog since the class I started it for ended a year ago, but now seems like a good time to start again. This time, however, I'll be more liberal with my subject material, covering my school work, politics and gaming much more freely than I would on Facebook.


For my next post: a discussion of 'Listening' a book on audio perceptual theory. And maybe a bit on the problems of designing RPGs for mobile devices...

Protecting The Net From Itself...

The internet is its own worst enemy, according to Jonathan Zittrain (see what I just did there), and I tend to agree with him for the most part. The openness and anonymity of interaction on the net does lead to a great deal of innovation, but at the same time, it also allows for a wide variety of collectivist thought (endless repeated memes and 'remixing'), anti-social behavior (griefing, trolling, flaming, vandalism, spamming) and outright crime (malware, spyware, botnets, etc.).

As a result, many are turning towards 'Tethered Appliances,' technology that is easy to use, all but impossible to tinker with and directly controlled by an external vendor, for their digital content. The appeal is obvious: all the consumer has to do is press and click and they leave all the technical problems to the licensing company to figure out. The downside is not as obvious: the inability of users to modify or enhance the content leads to innovative stagnation.

In Zittrain's estimation, the internet and all its potential for disruptive innovation is doomed to becoming largely irrelevant in the face of tethered appliances in the near future unless something is done to make users feel more secure in their online experiences. He does not see overt regulation as the answer to this, but he does believe that a few systematic changes might help to curb the tide of 'bad code' without overly restricting the generative nature of the net. Those ideas that strongly resonated with my own, in particular where my upcoming research paper was concerned, are detailed below.

ISPs AS GATEKEEPERS

One of the main problems he identifies is the end-to-end nature of content dissemination and the difficulty of monitoring and filtering it. As ISPs act more like super-highways rather than gateways, any information, good or bad, can get to any source and the onus for filtering out bad material is left to the end user, who is usually ill-prepared to do so. A temporary solution for Zittrain, until more effective end-to end solutions can be found, is to get the ISPs to actively filter out malicious content. To act as 'Gatekeepers.' This, of course, makes total sense as the ISP only real consistent choke point in the whole system. If an algorithm could be designed to detect malicious code or the activity of zombies and bot-nets, the internet would become a great deal more secure.

Unfortunately, the ISP providers do not want to engage in this sort of activity for ethical and commercial reasons. It is expensive and time consuming to try and filter out good information from bad, and would require the providers to interact directly with the millions of net users on a regular basis to correct cases of misidentified content. Governments can take control of ISPs, but this leads to a less desirable environment for generative purposes, especially in authoritarian environments, like China, where information is heavily filtered and monitored to protect the government, encouraging users to bypass those particular ISPs in any way possible, taking their business off-road, so to speak, defeating the purpose of the ISP as Gatekeeper.

THE DUAL-BRAINED COMPUTER

Now, this idea had occured to me early on as I read Zittrain's book The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came upon his version of it in the solutions section of the book.

Basically, you split your computer into two parts: the frontal lobe that takes in information and is easily 'reset' and the rest of it, which stores your important information and permanent programs. Most knowledgeable users  already do something similar to this through the act of partitioning drives or storing permanent data in external sources. The difference in this case is that your whole computer is separated from its 'desktop' by a tightly controlled gatekeeper. A sort of 'personal ISP' that controls throughput.

You can think of your PC as the castle, with a gate and a moat, and the desktop as the village outside the castle which provides sustenance for the castle's inhabitants. All sorts of things can happen in the village. A spy can enter the village via a trade caravan, for instance, but as long as the gatekeepers check all the goods coming into the castle, he'll never know what goes on behind those walls. The spy can even foment rebellion and get the villagers to turn on you, but as long as you have all your systems of governance inside the walls, you can fight off the rebellion and then sally out to 'reset' the village by clearing out the rabble-rousers (or in the PCs case, the whole village) and starting again.

This whole concept does tend to move internet usage towards the 'tethered appliance' concept, with the internet being a separate appliance from the main computer, but the difference is that the user is the one that decides what is and isn't permissible content and when to reset. The main advantage is that the arduous process of reloading settings and programs becomes a thing of the past as only ephemeral data related to web browsing has to be reset.

The only problem is, again, the technical ability of the user to reinforce their gate properly so that the gatekeeper to distinguish between good and bad code. And then there is still end-to-end contact with every other user on the net, and the most malicious of these may well send an 'army' of bad packets to 'besiege' your gate and overwhelm it. In other words, your castle walls are only so strong as the force defending them.

THE ROTATING SUB-NETWORK PROTOCOL

Ok, this is my own idea, based on the concepts illustrated in Zittrain's book, as well as a few other readings from earlier in the semester concerning network.

The problem with most networks, as pointed out above, is that they are too damned big, diverse and distributed. The only active bottleneck in the system occurs when you build a gate at your end-point, but that gate is often easily overrun or fooled into letting in malicious code.

The solution for these problems comes in two parts. The first is to institute Zittrain's 'Gated Community Network' concept, in which a smaller net of concentrated interest is created (like 'Trekkie-net' or 'Puritan-net.'). Each member of this exclusive community actively participates in it, access outside of the community is not end-to-end, but only allowed through a special ISP like 'gatekeeper.'

The second part is this gatekeeper, but not just a single gatekeeper, but a trio (or more) of gatekeepers who act to validate each other. Basically, one of these nodes acts as out dual-brained computer desktop mentioned above. After any activity is completed within that node, the information filters through a second node to assess long term harm, and eventually into permanent storage. In case of corruption,  the third node can 'reset' the affected node(s) using its base code.

These sub-networks are not mandatory, but are a way for like-minded individuals to gather together and use the principle of motivated self-interest to keep the environment stable, in much the same way the users of Wikipedia 'overwhelm' bad edits. This 'Social' reinforcement is complemented by 'Code' reinforcement in the form of the Gatekeepers, which can be set to heavily reinforce protocol (like 'don't allow pornography' on Puritan-net or 'No Next Generation Content' on Old School Trekkie-net).

I'll be thinking more about this concept and trying to develop it for my research paper, but at first glance, this might be a good method of creating protocol first networks that are resistant to external corruption...

The Wild, Wild Net...

Lessig's Code 2.0 provides a very insightful look into the difficulties of regulating the internet, and in particular, on the rule of law as it pertains to online copyright. Some would say that copyright cannot exist on the internet, while others would say that the very forces that are forcing copyright out of existence (pirates, hackers, amateur cultures, whatever) are creating the commercial motivation for the development of technologies that will cement it ever more firmly, but this time without any means to enforce the freedoms of 'fair use' that existed previously.

One of the more interesting concepts in all of this is that while the internet presents the possibility of a 'world' without government influence, any civil society, be it real or virtual, must agree to a set of protocols which defines how they interact with each other. Without some method of enforcing that protocol, however, all you're really doing is just shaking someone's hand and hoping that they're not crossing their fingers behind their back at the same time. You cannot have law without someone to enforce it and removing the enforcement removes the compulsion to follow the law. So you need some governing body in much the same way as small western towns needed a Sheriff to uphold the law.

In the example of IP, there is no penalty for stealing it on an unregulated net, but then again, there is also no penalty for so restricting its use that doing so won't have consequences. But it doesn't stop there, as any behavior that the producer finds offensive, from content you produce to criticisms you voice, may well see you banned from access to the software, anything else the producer wishes to restrict access to, and anything else produced by other producers who are aligned with that producer. It's kind of like dating, in that way: treat a woman wrong, and you can be certain that your eligible dating pool will be significantly reduced when she starts talking to her friends, who talk to their friends, etc.

While things haven't gotten quite that extreme (yet), there is a move by Microsoft towards shifting all their software online and restricting access to it to yearly license payers. While this might not have  been a brilliant move a few years ago as the delays caused by working from remote software would have been intolerable, real-time online applications have improved dramatically since then and the idea of even running something as complex as Photoshop or even Maya is not outside of the realm of possibility today. It would take an incredible amount of time and money to set up, but the advantage to Microsoft or Adobe would be immense. No more 'First Sale' legal battles. No more 'cracked software.' The question is, will they charge the consumer a reasonable yearly fee or will they, in their position as ultimate gatekeeper, keep the same exorbitant prices? And who would stop them if they chose the latter? I'm reminded of the Cattle Barons of the old west here.

In the end, Lessig's research assistant, Harold Reeves has a point beyond even that given in Code 2.0, in that it is not only Microsoft's responsibility to build a fence and lock its doors to protect its material, but also to ensure that in the process of securing their IP that they don't end up cutting themselves off from the vast majority of their consumers like the crazy old cat lady who lives in the large house down the road, but is so paranoid that she hasn't left the house or talked to anyone in 20 years. Real World Law may have little meaning in the non-geographically distributed boundaries of the internet, but social law and the ostracism of those who refuse to 'play nice' still does as does commercial law and the fact that competition will inevitably produce a cheaper and more friendly product to compete with. So in the end, the big companies will shy away from over-control if for no other reason than cyberspace is just too large to compete with, so you don't really need some legal authority telling everyone what to do.

On the other hand, the whole point of this book is that we cannot reliably predict what the future holds for us technologically or socially. Even though Reeves might be right today, tomorrow might require an entirely different way of viewing the same problem. A bunch of extremely smart man in the 1700's couldn't possibly foresee anything even as wondrous as a telegraph line and how this would affect their new government 200 years down the road, no-one could have forseen the changes brought about by the internet 20 years ago and who would have guessed even 10 years ago that we'd all be carrying that same internet around in handheld phones more powerful than the entire Apollo space program. No one knows what technology is coming down the pike, how it will empower corporations or individuals, and how it will change the network structures and protocols of the future.

So I think Lessig is right. Even if most of our reality becomes virtual, even if our societal structure centers more around our virtual selves than our physical address, there will still need to be some form of regulatory entity to reinforce protocols and protect the ability of culture to spread without undo restriction. The question is: whose going to be the Sheriff, what authority will he wield and how is he going to enforce it? It might take an entirely new form of government to find out...

If You Can't Beat Them, Use Them....

Amongst the dry, academic pages of Information Feudalism by Drahos and Braithwaite, there are a few very interesting factiods. For instance, I doubt that very many people know that the first illegal electronic download occurred in the late 1800's when the entire contents of a book written by then Queen Victoria were telegraphed across the Atlantic over 24 hours and then printed and published within 12 hours of the completion of that transmission. And all without so much as a 'please,' much less licensing fees (see Tom Standage's Book, The Victorian Internet for many more similarities between Victorian era  tech and the modern internet).

Another factoid, and the one I'm focused on for this post, is that claim that early software companies, by pricing their products beyond the reach of the average consumer, had a large role in the formation of software piracy. That is a bit of an oversimplification of a larger problem with modern society, one in which life has become so easy that many feel entitled to own works of intellectual property at no cost and where internet distribution of said ideas has started to really make people question the true value of information and ideas (for a very funny, if highly profane discussion of this subject, see Cracked.com). It is not totally incorrect, however.

As a child of the late seventies and early eighties, I remember the controversy over BETA/VCR home recorders (which was, itself, predated by Cassette Tapes, the Napster of the sixties and seventies). The creators and producers of television and movie programming were very concerned that these devices would be used to record their programs off of TV and, thereby, reduce possible revenues from syndication and re-release ticket sales. I also remember the videotapes they sold back then. A single movie would cost around $75 dollars! And we're talking 1979 dollars, here! That's like asking someone today to pay $230 for Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows on a crappy videocassette tape.

I think it's safe to say that when creating the market for home movies, Hollywood also, by dint of their greed, created the pirate video industry almost simultaneously. I should know, because by the time I saw these movies advertised in TV Guide or in the Sears Catalog, my grandfather had already rigged up a method of copying them. And was trading them at the Saturday Flea Market sale with other like-minded individuals very shortly after that. He also built a satellite receiver out of some spare electronics and a coffee can and had free HBO for years, but I digress.

Is that justification for modern IP piracy, however?

Back! To the Future! And here I am, a self publisher of games, scripts, what-have-you, many of which are in PDF format. One recent release, Barbarians of the Aftermath, a 176 page PDF selling for $15, sold pretty steadily for about a year, but within 3 months of its publishing, my hard work, which I designed, wrote, layed out and did the graphic design for, was being flogged on Torrent sites without so much as a 'please,' much less licensing fees. I never thought I'd have so much in common with some English Queen from the 1800's. If I actually had the sales from those downloads (which far outweigh my actual sold copies), I might actually be able to make a living out of game publishing. As it is, people for whom $15 is really a tiny sum of money, the equivalent of a movie and trip to the concession stand, my work, which gives them years of gaming entertainment value for their $15, is not worth more than the effort it takes to locate and download it over the internet.

A side effect of this pirate economy is the devaluation of perceived worth of physical objects which actually hurts book sales as well. A 176 page full color hardback of Barbarians of the Aftermath costs $44.95. Again, this is not 'greed' pricing, but the realistic cost of publishing and distributing in the modern era. It is an actual tangible product, that you own, and which provides you with more entertainment value than simply reading it would normally provide. The average gaming consumer, however, finds it hard to pay that much for anything book related, when PDFs are so easy to come by.

So what can be done to combat piracy of electronic IP? One idea has been to make the prices so low, that the effort and risks of pirating are no longer worthwhile. Adamant, an RPG and game publisher, recently experimented with 'App Pricing' to stimulate sales and discourage piracy. Basically, every game and supplement was priced like a smartphone app, from 99 cents to $1.99. This experiment failed for various reasons, which the owner of Adamant explains in detail here. I am planning to follow a similar route by actually making the games themselves into apps. With App Pricing and the security offered by the tighter security environment of the smartphone/tablet environment and some sort of software verification scheme, I hope to further discourage piracy. But assuming that piracy is going to happen, and Bittorrents aren't going away how can I make it work for me?

By turning the game into a software product, one that provides something that you can't really recreate with a download and the home printer, the focus of shifts from the game and the rules and even the graphic design as the IP of import. I'm shifting my commercial focus so that the PDF is merely a vehicle for selling the software. The PDF, which is a fully fledged Pen and Paper RPG, can now be sold for 99 cents and if someone goes through the trouble of pirating it, all they are really doing is advertising my game, and in effect, my game software. The Torrents become my marketing tool for the $15 phone/tablet app.

This is all experimental, but I think that history has shown that piracy is here to stay, as long as there is someone who can benefit from it (in much the same way as Elizabeth I benefited from privateers, who were nothing more than 'legalized' pirates). Once you realize that, however, you can redirect your energies to being the one who benefits from it. If you can't beat them... use them.

The Good, The Bad and the Collectivists...

Jaron Lanier is an interesting man. In many ways we couldn't be more different (humanist views, faith in newspaper reporting,  belief in man-made global warming, taste in hair, etc.),  but in his article on online collectivism, Digital Maoism, I find that he and I are very much aligned in our experiences and concerns with the push towards online collectivism. The article sums up the main problems of the collective fairly succinctly and with little of the blather that you might expect from the same subject written within the halls of academia. A practical man with decades of experience in technology as an instigator and creator as opposed to one who theorizes or debates endlessly to no real conclusion, Jared not only identifies the main problems with Collectivism as a goal, but also points out the usefulness of it in limited spheres of influence.

The problem and solution of collectivist output, or group-think, can be summed up in the following ideas: A Collective is best when...

... answering questions, not asking them, and outputs simple answers.

As Lanier points out, a collective is very good at guessing the number of jelly-beans in a jar or serving as the basis of Google's search engine algorithm. What it is not so good at is coming up with lasting ideas or products.

This is, at its base, due to the way the collective averages information to come to simple conclusion. This requires a simple question, like 'do you like X' or 'how much do you think X is worth.' Asking 'what is beauty' will get many, varied and often conflicting answers whose sum total is nonsensical at best. In effect, it is better to ask practical, easily definable questions of a collective, like 'on a scale of 1-10' and leave the vagaries of complex philosophical or creative thought to individuals.

A good example of this can be seen in the episode O' Brother, Where Art Thou. Homer's long-lost brother Herb steps down on the design of a new car to allow the 'average man,' Homer, design it instead. The result makes the Tucker Torpedo look like a 2011 Car & Driver Award Winner and destroys Herb's business (ironically, because the collectivist car industry hated it).

... it is tempered by procedure.

Many people in the United States bemoan the 'gridlock' that plagues congress. 'Congress is the opposite of Progress' some proclaim, and to an extent, that is not only true, but intended.

When they set up our system of government, our founding fathers knew that true democracy would lead to mob rule and that this was not a desirable thing. Even back in the 18th century, they understood the destructive properties of group-think, and (although they didn't have a name for it) the vulnerability of social networks to incitement and exploitation. Instead, they chose a representative form of government to establish a multi-layered process to slow down decision making and established rules to make sure that true majorities, not simple ones based on a fraction of a percentage point over 50, would steer the ship of state.

In this way, state autonomy was virtually guaranteed, as any decision made by the Federal government that affected the states as a whole was sure to be bogged down in debate and unlikely to pass. Only those ideas with true worth, those that could be agreed upon by a large majority of the union, would be allowed to change the entire fabric of the United States. The strength of this system was shown in the passing of the 13th amendment, which was legally above board, leaving the South no other recourse than to secede from the Union to avoid it's effects.

In the end, the United States is a very large collective, but by the use of procedure, we slow down the impulsive nature of collectivist thought, the 'Jitters' as Lanier referred to them, to keep the system from devolving into a constantly changing set of priorities based on whatever ideas are in vogue at the moment, allowing for maximum freedom and a clearly defined culture and set of standards.

... it is overseen and corrected by individuals.

The main complaint that Jared has about collectivist thought is that is terrible for creating, or using active discrimination in the selection of, ideas or products of lasting value. He uses the old and well worn cliché of a 'design by committee' as the perfect example of something a collective should never be allowed to do. I have first-hand experience of this.

In my first job out of college (donkey's years ago), I worked as the graphic designer for a small corporate entity named HBS Systems (the HBS stood for High Class Business Systems, leaving out the C and making the systems in HBS Systems redundant, a fine example of committee design all on its own). We had a hall of middle managers (I called it the Gauntlet) that had to have their say on everything that came out of my office. Products would go up on side of the hall and come down the other. Each manager would add notes on what they thought it needed to have changed (and they all commented), I would make the changes and then it would go back and the managers would then go about undoing the changes of other managers after they appeared. A single 8 page brochure was in the works before I started working there and, two years later, it still wasn't done.

The problem with this job was that as the graphic professional, I should have had some say over which ideas to implement or discard. Instead, my professional skills took a backseat to every mid-level executive in the building, including HR and accounting, and none of them could agree on anything. The individuals who should have had final say, the graphic professional and the head of the company, took second place to the collective of 'everymen' whose input could only make the final product 'average' at best.