Polythemus

=Polythemus= This is a thread currently under development by John Lindsay a.k.a. //Amphitaxis//.

‘I went to a big bookshop, and found nothing on any of this at all, so have started []’

Adding to this, there is the **[|RSA]**, which has a different sort of membership from the BCS so I've added RSA to Poythemes, and now also placed on **OpenRSA** so if anyone here is MBCS and FRSA, and perhaps also CITP, for that has a different identity?

One of the matters under investigation is the continuation of the matter of wiki, blog, and others, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, Wetpained, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Scribd, add up to about twenty or thirty just to test memory.

Now are these all the same thing, or are they all different things?

Are they basically part of corporate, consumer, capitalism chasing market share of channels; are they a domain of social activism, whereby those who in the past have not made history may now so do, or whatever?

Then there is an issue on the main page for this wiki to which I need to return, about organisations and communities, which was part of the matter of the July meeting, to which all this refers: the consequence of organisation and community is that it has already happened. The making of genre, subject, is the matter of the institutionalisation of KIDMM concepts and the autonomy of their institution, which is the same sort of matter as convention.

If you have a professional obligation, or several of them, how do you organise a hierarchy of obligations and priorities? As a MBCS, FRSA, and educator, is the social activism the top level of the hierarchy, or are there more than one?

This I raised a long time ago, but within the KIDMM universe, at a meeting appropriately enough at Elephant & Castle, where Nick Holt helped me build a slide.

And at that point my attempt to add a picture is defeated. We will need to return.



Good, done that now, from a dos machine. Worked OK on bigmac, but not on middlemac.

Does it speak for itself, or does it need explanation?

Within wikispaces KIDMM there is a discussion of genre, which is the same sort of matter as wikiblog, and there is or isn't a discussion of glossary, all of which are about methods for determination.

Maybe Polythemus needs a glossary? (JL adds 13 August that he is experimenting with the dicussion forum as it might be called.)

(JL adds, 13 Aug, that he left out a paragraph on method for engineering social change, that the point of history is not only to make it, but to change it. This is a Polythemus matter. For a knoew one, he is using openRSA on ning, but hasn't given it a name yet. JSTOR however will be a tag.)

!. Subject : genre
How do communities, organisations, decide what subjects are?

Often in conversation the matter will be raised, it depends what you mean by that? That depends on the circumstances!

What happens when communities in practice deal with matters of Polythemus in amphitaxis? The most obvious is perhaps sustainable development, which we have been at for a long time. On wordpress there is now a developing history section within bcs within infopolecon to jot down these things and not clutter wikispaces kidmm with stuff that predates its existence.

A more simple case is the matter of Section 106 agreements (as they are called, which is a developing case to which we will return.

{now I have a matter of method: do I use this place here to put subject case, or do I move to a lower level with the danger of repetition?}

The model in the illustration above shows what is at stake. There is a circular argument which as with circles, has neither beginning not end.

**[1.C Clash**
I'm going to insert a knew case immediately. (JL adds, 17.8.10) That is going to cause trouble. But the connection with Polytehmus and Pastoral, both of these grep search and this case should probably go after pastoral, but perhaps we need a case here, as e-very-thing too abstract loses people? But cases lose people too. There is an exhibition at Ladbroke Grove on Clash {those might make a hashtag} #ladbrokeclash. Shall I develop the case here, or elsewhere? **]**

2. Reception, or #threth
I have found a knewthing. This makes a tool for considering the matter of Polythemus. On the internet, in a manner which doesn't concern us here, I found something called martindale and reception which I then found was self plagiarised in a book called #useclassics (it isn't of course but that is my twittering tweet). In that he has an introduction, thinking through reception which is just about the article from the internet. Elsewhere, reception theory is referred to, so that struck me that thinking through reception theory has just about as many ways of working on it, with brackets and commas, as we could need. He has another book, on taste, but none of them are here at KU or in the local Borders.

That means we have a trail.

Is reception theory a genre? A subject?

It is dealing with the classics, that is Greek and Latin, as literature.

Safe there.

As those have been dealt with in the time since, including now.

Not safe.

This could be politics, as his aesthetic turn seems to be, it could be history, indeed can't not be, it seems to me; it could be philosophy and the methods must be? And it could be the organisation of knowledge, indeed must be, so it is phKO.

It might also be called deception studies, or redemption studies? There is a matter of modern ethics here, a PRADSA.

3. Reading matters
What do we know about Reading was the title of a seminar a long time ago, now in the entrails. Had I Sribd then, I might have put up the slides. Then there was as there is now, how to attach text with slides. The role of slides in writing is a knewish matter, I certainly didn't use them for many of the first years.

What about reading them? With linear text, and without linear text?

Is that an introduction to reading matters?

It was about 1974, lying on the carpet in Bethnal Green, that I sketched out the diagram which was to become the central chapter of my PhD. I wrote that I write. Above it, I read. Leave out what comes between. What happens to I write? In some sense it is published. Wikispaces is simply a continuation of this. What then happens? That was my original contribution. A copy is bought and goes into a library, on a shelf, with a card in a catalogue.

In 1975 I did my first online search of a remote database, ERIC, to see what was known about the political ideas behind the formation of policies for stock selection and cataloguing and classification of materials in libraries.

Now I'm not doing a whole historic story of that, all I want is to put down the marker that I had to separate upon, for that was knew, and took me away from the line I had sketched earlier.

For another reader then read what I had written and in turn written something else, including me. That was published and went into a library with a classmark and a record. Then I realised as I drew, and the piece of paper got longer, that it should be rolled up like a cigarette paper, that it became a cyllander, a cycle, a cyclical process. It had been going on since the beginning of speech, so to speak, to the beginning of writing, to the beginning of libraries and collections. Book, liber, were meanings well deep in time.

So within this process, what words mean, how they are joined into sentences, what constitutes a sentence, a paragraph, what happens next, is all the consequence of conventions, and you need to understand those conventions as much as the meanings of the words. Writing and reading poetry wasn't the same as a scientific paper.

Between poetry and science, between 8 and 5, was 6,7; 9,3; 0,1, and 4. These were in some sense subjects, in another, genre. They were some how or other constituted of convention.

At that time I had been working with Basil Bernstein on what he called restricted and extended codes. He hadn't thought of libraries and access to libraries as part of the process of code formation and elaboration. I was working as a school librarian in a secondary school in East London, and trying to work out what sort of things should be stocked, what sort of cataloguing should be done, how pupils should be introduced to reading. And writing. The whole of ILEA was wired, there was on line access to television, there were computers, with, if I remember right, card access once a week. Those are stories for a different place.

Here I want simply to track the matter of the conventions of genre and subject.

This is a wiki though, so I expect others to contribute to the formation of this story.

3.1 unRead
Itr is then obvious that while one is reading something, one is not reading everything else. Reading is a matter of selection, and so is writing. Part of the matter is then deciding what is shaping these choices.

We might start by suggesting that actions have to have purposes. To be unpurposed is still to have a purpose.

=__4. System matters__=

This is a matter to which I know at this stage neither the name nor the method.

It involves the question of whether there is a human condition through learning that means that understanding the system properties gives one an engineering social change position different from understanding facts? Facts have to fit into KIDMM. Engineering social change fits into wikispaces and KIDMM.

If I engineer a system and put it into the world, that is PRADSA. If the world rejets it, I can't tell whether it is my understanding, or something else?

Less this is too general, immediately a case, which will take us to transport. If I ask for a transport map, more than ten years after the 1997 Integrated Transport white paper, no one understands what I am asking for. If I ask for a bus map, even though it has railways on it, they will either give me one, or say that they don't exist any more, or they don't have any. They will then say, "Where do you want to go?" And I will reply, "I don't know, until I know where I can get to." Otherwise I could simply list places, that I can't get to, until I run out of places, or find one I can get to.

Traveline has made a difference now, and to that we will turn in detail, but it is clearly designed for [comput*], and an information systems designer would approach it in another manner.

Leave that case to return to the general.

Two additional pages have been created as adjuncts to this project:
 * CHArt — Computers and the History of Art
 * Technology and Social Action