Michael Piotrowski @true_mxp@qoto.org

My new #blog post traces the #history of #Hamburg over the last 150 years using 8 of its most beautiful #staircases as starting points.

https://blog.dominikgehl.com/destinations-hamburg-staircases

#architecture #photography #spiralstaircase

"Les automobilistes râlent contre les cyclistes qui font des erreurs (ça arrive), mais les automobilistes ne meurent jamais à cause des erreurs des cyclistes. Ou bien?" https://www.24heures.ch/et-puis-un-jour-tu-pars-sur-la-route-pour-mourir-856068851841 #velo #cyclo #cyclopoouet #hommage #violenceroutiere

What you think | What
Mac OS was | macOS was
20 years ago | 20 years ago

Elsevier bought SSRN and SpringerNature buys RSC
https://librarytechnology.org/pr/28173/springer-nature-completes-acquisition-of-research-square-company
Notice something?
#OpenScience

@aramsinn But yes, folks in rhetoric & composition & writing studies have been arguing for years against the Generic Essay Assignment, against the "weekly 1 pager," against the one-off writing assignment that fails to require the real work of writing: revision. Any assignment that is given as a standalone (as opposed to sequenced) doc is doomed in an AI world. Nothing can really be learned about writing anyway when you're making a first draft your last draft.

@aramsinn Jsyk, and to make others aware: there is a whole academic field of research in the humanities whose task is to study writing & use that research to inform the teaching of writing. They are traditionally undervalued in the academy because humanities. But rest assured, they are there and studying this as we type.

#researchers with a #mastodon account and a known field of work (as known by #wikidata) https://w.wiki/649f

Most represented fields of work:
1 #SemanticWeb
2 #ComputerScience
3 #MachineLearning
Good illustration of the bias in the data ^^

📌#IPrA2023 panel about #corpuslinguistic approaches to #epistemic and #evidential marking in #talkininteraction organized by @jeromejacquin and myself.
Panel contributions:
- Elena Battaglia & Paola Pietrandrea, Incremental and interactive evidential constructions in spoken Italian;
- Jan Fliessbach & Johanna Rockstroh, The placement of wh-objects in French partial interrogatives as a stance-taking device – a challenge for sociolinguistics;
- Mercedes González Vázquez, Interactional uses of evidential markers in Galician;
- Gerda Hassler, French markers of evidentiality in interaction;
- Henrike Helmer & Silke Reineke, Uncertainty vs. dispreference of German "ich weiß nicht": A mixed-methods workflow of a corpus-based interactional linguistic study;
- Ana Keck & Jérôme Jacquin, Expressing a low degree of certainty in interaction: the French epistemic adverb "peut-être" ‘perhaps’ in a corpus of political debates and work meetings;
- Costanza Lucchini & Andrea Rocci, Managing knowledge in financial dialogues: corpus annotation of epistemic modality and evidentiality in earnings conference calls;
- Johanna Miecznikowski, Elena Battaglia & Christian Geddo, An utterance-centered corpus-pragmatic approach to the categorization of information source in spoken Italian;
- Ozan Mustafa & Gustav Kaltenböck, Evidential "last I checked" expressions;
- Flavio Pisciotta, Distribution and function(s) of parenthetical "mi sembra/mi pare" in spoken Italian;
- Clotilde Robin & Jérôme Jacquin, Reportive evidentiality in French-in-interaction: distribution and pragmatic functions of reportive evidentials;
- Stefan Schneider, "J'imagine" as deverbal discourse marker in spoken French. Position in turns and interactions;
- Tanja Trebucchi & Serena Coschignano, Discourse functions of "look" and "see" as evidential and epistemic markers in Italian political discourse: a corpus based study.
Meet you all in Brussels next year 🎉 https://pragmatics.international/page/Brussels2023
@corpuslinguistics

Thinking of the things that we've lost in the dustbin of history, and tools for keyboard-to-keyboard communication come to mind.

Unix has had a `write` command pretty much forever (`man 1 write` on my Mac says since 1st Edition, though my Linux machine says since 6th Ed): this was pretty simple; open a user's terminal device and write text to it. The command was kind enough to send a little preamble: "Message from cross@chandra on ttys019 at 08:26 ..." so you knew someone was writing to you. On the sending side, it relied on the terminal driver to accumulate a line of text before sending it to the destination terminal. Of course, this is strictly one-way and implicitly half-duplex: people developed conventions for bidirectional "write" sessions by doing things like typing a little bit and then sending an, "o" by itself (to mean "over", as on a radio) or a double blank line or something. Of course, it was restricted to running only on the local machine, and you had to have write permission to the receiver's terminal device, but it worked well enough on timeshared computers. Moreover, it hasn't been "lost" in any real sense; many systems still ship `write` with the base system image. TOPS-20 had a similar mechanism, as did Multics and, I presume, most similar timesharing systems.

Once networks started getting popular, and people moved out of crowded timesharing machines and into the suburbs of networked workstations, this didn't work as well (since users would have to be logged into the same machine). So networked alternatives appeared... Unix had `talk`, which allowed user-to-user communication over a network, and had a split-screen interface so users could type simultaneously without intermingling text.

VMS had the `phone` utility that was similar to `talk`, but supported multiple users and worked over DECnet.

The IBM mainframe was, remarkably, a pioneer here. Running the VM/CMS operating system, each user session was really a virtual machine: you logged into a VM instance that then booted a small, single-user, single-tasking operating system called CMS. The interesting bit here was that CMS (and the underlying "Control Program" in the hypervisor) had a facility for sending short text messages between virtual machines. When augmented with the SNA (System Network Architecture) protocols and RSCS (Remote Spooling Communications Subsystem) you could send messages between machines. The BITNET exploited this to create inter-machine "relays", similar to IRC on the Internet (indeed, BITNET relays were a bit of an inspiration for IRC).

I briefly used VM/ESA on a 3090 in the early 90s, and one could share "minidisks" between virtual machines. CP had an interface for querying who was actively connected to a disk and locally, clever programmers used this to build a simple "chat-room" kind of interface. They wrote an "EXEC" (basically shell script, but in REXX) that queried who was connected to a particular disk, and then made a request to RSCS to send each of those users a message. Users who wished to participate just connected to the relevant disk when they logged in; it was kind of neat to see relay messages appear on your 3270 terminal as folks chatted. Sadly, the mechanism was never extended beyond the local machine.

And of course there was the `finger` command on the Internet, which was useful for querying who was logged into a machine, or get information about a user. Incidentally, the name supposedly derives from the act of running one's finger down the page of a telephone directory to get information about someone. Anyway, users could create a couple of small text files (.project and .plan) that included information about them, what they were up to, etc. Some of these were quite creative. Some folks also extended the `finger` server to provide general information about a network or site (system uptimes, etc).

I don't suspect any of this is regularly used anymore. I miss `finger` and `talk` in particular; they were cool ways to interact with other people.

However, the `talk` protocol was weird (it used a UDP server to "post" a `struct sockaddr_in` on a remote machine; the remote user then connected to their local server and retrieved that and used it to establish a TCP connection somehwere!).

Then there was Zephyr, the Internet Message Send Protocol, SMTP's terminal write, etc....

I suspect approximately none of this is in regular use anymore.

The #pandoc website has an #online converter at https://pandoc.org/try; it offers a wealth of options, including file upload for docx or epub conversions. It's perfect for experiments, short demonstrations, and one-off conversions.

Hello there!😃 Greeting from ACM, the world's largest computing society. We're celebrating our 75th anniversary this year and am thrilled to be embarking on a journey on #Mastodon with you all.

Would love to connect with students, educators, researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs in the fields of #computing. Any recs o accounts to follow and #followback on us would be appreciated!👍 #introduction

#Introduction time! This account represents Digital Humanities Quarterly, an #openaccess, #peerviewed, #digitaljournal covering all aspects of #digitalmedia in the #humanities.

We’re published by @ach and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and indexed in Web of Science.

At DHQ we publish #scholarly #articles, #casestudies, #fieldreports, #editorials, #opinionpieces, #interactivemedia, #bookreviews, and #reviews of #websites, #newmedia #artinstallations, and #digitalhumanities #tools and #systems.

If you’ve moved over from Twitter or are newly part of the #digitalhumanities community here we’re excited to continue connecting with you all and sharing the latest and most cutting-edge work being done in the field of DH.

When you’re a big semi-formal international organisation, running a tri-annual very big inclusive conference aiming at diversity and inclusiveness all over the place (e.g., translating the call-for-papers “into as many languages as possible”; encouraging to work on and report in “all languages”), that’s very nice. And I do like this conference a lot!

But then why have the program and communication with organizers in an app which is available for smartphones only?

And this app (with only one one-stare review) apparently is from the same company that did the submission and registration website–so everybody does have an account there but of course the info message states that no connection to these accounts is possible. Brave new world!

I already paid a rather large fee for online participation and now I have to purchase an iPhone to just look up the slot for my presentation? Really?

What a mess!

Envie d'en savoir + sur #Lausanne, son histoire et ses transports?

➡️ ponts & ascenseurs pour atténuer le relief
➡️ traces des anciens tramways & funiculaires
➡️ rôle du port, de la gare & du Flon
➡️ courses 🚲 par le Petit chêne
➡️ infras nouvelles (métros, vélo) ou abandonnées (serpentine, swissmetro)

Les vidéos du colloque http://infoclio.ch 2022 "Façonner l'avenir ? Prospective et sciences historiques" sont en ligne.
7 talks + 2 tables rondes à voir ou à revoir.
https://infoclio.ch/fr/vid%C3%A9os-du-colloque-infoclioch-2022-prospective-et-sciences-historiques

Voilà une nouvelle intéressante (même si j’apprécie Toot!), Tapbots l’éditeur de l’application #TweetBot travaille à 'Ivory' une application pour #Mastodon. Elle est actuellement en phase beta.

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/tapbots-ivory-mastodon-app/