Society of the Query conference: 13 – 14 November, Trouw Amsterdam in Amsterdam

With the Society of the Query conference -stop searching, start questioning-, the Institute of Network Cultures aims to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture. What does the dependency on the engine to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet mean? What alternatives exist? How can the increasingly centralized web be regulated? What is the future of interface design? By bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, the conference will examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design.

Introduction to the Society of the Query conference:
Search is the way we now live. At present, the reality of the information society is one in which we are increasingly confined to the use of information retrieval tools to create order and value in the vast amount of online data. Web search has taken over from (directory based) browsing and surfing as the dominant activity on the web. With this development, the search engine has become the main point of reference, one whose emphasis on efficiency and service tends to cloud the nature of both the underlying technology and (corporate) ideologies.

In what might be dubbed the ‘society of the query’, this conference asks what this dependency on tools to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet means for our culture. As the idea of a semantic web unfolds, the human versus artificial intelligence controversy is regarded with renewed urgency. The increasingly centralized computing grid invites critical questions about power distribution, governance, and diversity and accessibility of web content, while on the other hand promising alternatives to the dominant paradigm arise in P2P and open source initiatives. With large investments in media literacy, what role might politics and education play in establishing an informed and technologically literate user base?

This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. The Institute of Network Cultures aims to do so specifically by bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, creating room for speculation and open questions, as well as concrete projects and research.

The questions this conference raises are:

* How does the idea of machine understanding influence the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval?
* How is the legal framework surrounding search engines changing shape?
* Is Google’s increased ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of art and cultural practice?
* What influence does the existing hegemony of a few large search engines exert on the traditional flow of knowledge and the diversity and accessibility of web content, and in what way might regulation be possible?
* Considering developments in the fields of art and information architecture, how can we get to more sophisticated ways of interface design and the presentation of search results?
* What alternative ways of search are visible on the software level, the network level and the user level that challenge the engine as the major search paradigm?

Conference themes

* Society of the Query
* Digital Civil Rights and Media Literacy
* Alternative Search (1 and 2)
* Googlization of Everything
* Art and the Engine

Alternative Search 1
In response to a growing interest in alternative methods to search the web, this session will focus on three ‘genres’ of alternatives on the level of the user, the software and the network. The first genre that is attended to will include the upcoming ‘general purpose’-search engine, a search engine designed specifically with large audiences and competition with Google in mind. The second genre will focus on search methods that disregard the ‘engine’ as dominant paradigm. How promising are, for example, peer- to-peer and open source technologies with regards to the current search conditions and which alternatives for commercial and centralizing methods have already emerged? The third and final genre consists of specialized search engines, mostly targeting specific content. What can we learn, for instance, from search methods within certain web spheres, such as the blogosphere, or the flourishing area of mobile search? And, how is the field of visual search developing, looking beyond the tag as systematizing principle?

Moderator: Eric Sieverts
Speakers:

Matthew Fuller (UK)
Dissonance, Double-Accuracy and Parallel Worlds
This presentation will provide a partial survey of tendencies in artists interactions with search engines and in the development of variant conceptions of search.

Cees Snoek (NL)
Concept-Based Video Search
Despite the rise of commercial video search engines like YouTube, Truveo, and Blinkx, searching relevant fragments in video collections is by no means a solved problem. Present day commercial systems are mainly based on textual analysis of speech transcripts or closed captions. Unfortunately this approach is futile when the visual content is not mentioned or unrelated to the words spoken. In this presentation, we discuss a novel means to search in video content using concept detectors. We highlight the academic challenges, problems, and solutions of concept-based video search. We introduce the MediaMill semantic video search engine and discuss its performance in international video retFrieval competitions.

Ingmar Weber (NL/FR)
“It’s Hard to Rank without being Evil”
Google and similar web search engines are known for collecting detailed logs about all incoming requests and for mining this data on a large scale. In this talk I’ll discuss if good ranking is possible without such an approach at all and if peer-to-peer web search engines are not always doomed to present mediocre results. First, I’ll discuss scenarios where ranking is not required at all. Then I’ll give an overview of the sources of information used for ranking by current web search engines. Finally, I’ll try to point out the relative importance of each information source and how easily accessible it is.

Alternative Search 2
Semantic layers are added to the principle architecture of the Web. In this second Alternative Search session, some of the latest technological developments in semantic search functionality, as well as their implementation by W3C and European cultural heritage project Europeana, will be presented and discussed. In addition to being understood as enrichments of existing knowledge structures, these developments need to be critically addressed on both the cultural and the software level. Which ideologies make up the foundations for the concept of ‘ontology’? And what role will human expertise play in the era of ‘machine understanding’?

Moderator: Richard Rogers
Speakers:

Florian Cramer (NL)
Why semantic search is flawed
The “Semantic Web” and “semantic search” are frequently misunderstood concepts because they are described with words like “ontology” whose meanings in computer science diverge from colloquial and humanities understanding. In reality, they simply boil down to structured keyword tagging of information, which for many reasons does not scale beyond very limited collections of information and application scenarios, reveals a sometimes astounding naiveté about issues of culture and ontology in the original sense of the word. Finally, the false hopes for semantic search result from frustrations with design flaws of the World Wide Web that prevent more diverse search methods and technologies.

Antoine Isaac
Semantic Search for Europeana
Europeana is a pan-European initiative to make accessible Europe’s cultural heritage. It aims to aggregate millions of digital items, as provided by museums, libraries, etc. Allowing users to search among such a wide and heterogenous range of cultural resources raises huge challenges; it also brings a unique opportunity to exploit the large body of knowledge that relates to these resources. I will present some of the latest technological developments that are being tested to provide Europeana users with semantic search functionality, using examples from the Europeana Thought Lab (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/thought-lab.html). In particular, I will sketch how re-using and enriching existing knowledge structures provide with new query and exploration possibilities, beyond simple document search.

Steven Pemberton (NL)
Disintermediation through Aggregation: Making your Data your Own
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis postulates a link between thought and language: if you haven’t got a word for a concept, you can’t think about it; if you don’t think about it, you won’t invent a word for it. The term “Web 2.0″ is a case in point: it conceptualizes the idea of Web sites that gain value by their users adding data to them. There are inherent dangers in using Web 2.0: it partitions the Web into a number of topical sub-Webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole. It also puts your data, and its ownership at risk. So does this mean that user contributed content is a Bad Thing? Not at all, it is the method of delivery and storage that is wrong. The future lies in better aggregators.

Project Showcase
This segment of the conference will consist of the exhibition of specific projects addressing the theme of the search engine, and will be divided into two parts. During the conference, a display of computers and screens will be available on which the latest generation of search engines is installed. The Institute of Network Cultures seeks to give visitors the opportunity to discover search engines such as Wolfram Alpha, Quaero, Theseus and Autonomy. This will provide them with hands-on experience of the range of search methods discussed in the conference sessions. Furthermore, the Institute of Network Cultures plans to organize a concluding evening program to do justice to the diversity of artistic and activist projects that examine the role of the search engine in contemporary society. The works presented in the evening program will vary from browser extensions, alternative search engines and net art projects to videos and VJ performances. It is aspired that artists and developers will be present during this showcase to discuss and elaborate on their work with the audience.

Ticket information here:

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