Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

We have lots of women excelling in technology here at the OU and it seems so ordinary that it hardly needs comment (but in the context of this event I could mention Clem Herman because she works on projects explicitly aimed at bringing women into science, engineering and technology).

Many years ago I went to a talk by Dale Spender. The particular thing that stuck in my memory was the story that women were initially well-represented on computing courses and in university computing departments, until men realised that computing was a 'serious' subject rather than glorified typing, at which point they muscled in...

The semiotic square

Continuing my study of semiotics using Chandler's book, I was pondering the concept of markedness and also the idea of Greimas's semiotic square.


At the time reading a review of The EGO Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger in the New Scientist, and had just read the words "... the forgettable concept of the ego tunnel...". I first read it as "...unforgettable.." and this led to some musings:

• Perhaps unforgettable is an unmarked term and forgettable the marked term? And that was why I 'naturally' read unforgettable? I don't know. Things are probably forgettable by default, making forgettable unmarked?
• What about 'memorable'? Can I put memorable, forgettable and unforgettable on a square:

Actually I'm not convinced. I don't see why 'unforgettable' could be described as 'non-assertion'. I think 'unforgettable' and 'memorable' are synonyms. or maybe I've got 'memorable' and 'unforgettable' the wrong way around. 'Unforgettable' is stronger than 'memorable'.

Or, have I completely misunderstood these concepts...

The dynamic complexity of experience

From Chandler:

...the binary opposition which we employ in our cultural practices help to generate order out of the dynamic complexity of experience

(My emphasis.) All the time we are trying to generate order out of the dynamic complexity of experience. Well, that's what I think the job of an academic is, but also surely a natural human impulse¹. What do we mean by 'order'? Models, maps, stories... When we study we learn new stories to tell, new maps to use, new models. But 'the map is not the territory' and a new map provides us with new understanding of the territory. It is better to have more maps than seeking ever more detail on the one map². Better to have Beck's topological tube map in addition to a street plan, rather than a map that includes both. And hence the pleasure I'm getting from my reading of semiotics - a new map for me.

1 Of course that statement is itself a story, so this all gets very circular.

2 Which is not to denigrate the work of producing better maps. Just the need to recognise that however good your map, it is only one of many. The physicist's 'theory of everything', even if it were a perfect map in physics - the complete topology of the London Underground - would only be one possible map.