So, I've decided to accomplish these two aims first) by looking at my changing word use of the course of writing and second) by looking at some research in the journals and the news this week.
1) My words
To chart my themes in this blog I've just looked at all 12,946 words of it. It shows some unexpected results.
To start with I've counted up how many times I used each word and ranked them. Aside from the common pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions ( I've written the word 'the' 751 times) the top words are:
Data ~ 105
Technology ~ 58
Information ~ 49
Environment, Environmental ~47
System(s) ~45
Internet ~40
Example ~34
Things ~34
Post ~ 28
Time ~26
Computational ~ 24
All these words would be expected right? I don't think these results show anything particularly surprising. But as all these words appear many, many more times than once per entry, I thought it would be interesting to look at how their use changed over time as a means to chart the progression of the blog. These results are interesting.
The graph of their use looks like this:
So to start with its kind of interesting to see that the while the themes of 'data' and 'technology' both follow the same trend, i.e. they both come and go every 2 posts or so rising every time they peak, they are exactly out of phase with each other the whole way through. Why would this be? Well, it certainly means that I have confronted these two topics separately. They are definitely separate topics but they are connected. So this lends me to thinking that my approach could have been better. These data reflect one of my main conclusions reached in this blog: data is more important that the technology used to collect it. What I mean by that is data comes first, or least it should do. Before implementing any system, for example active control of natural or environmental systems or passive observation, what you're going to get out of it needs to be considered. It then it needs to be considered again during technological development and again after implementation. More on this below.
Another observation is that its surprising the internet is not mentioned more, as at the outset of writing this blog I would have imagined that this would be a really central theme. Of course, this could be down to my negligence but I think that its reflecting something else entirely. From doing this project, it has become increasing clear to me that using computational technology does not, in fact should not, go hand in hand with connecting all these systems up. I think these systems need to remain to a certain degree geographically specific.
This data also reflects my belief that I have somewhat neglected the environmental connection more than I should have. If I had sketched out what I would hope these lines would look like at the start of the project in October I would have put 'Environment' up there level with 'Technology'. Both of these words I would have expected to appear higher than 'Data', which is somewhat of a surprise winner. Appearing almost double the amount of times of the second most common word, it is clear that knowledge (inclusive of both the words 'Data' and 'Information') is far and away the most important point that to emerge here. I suggest that this is for two reasons. Firstly, as much as the ability to put in the systems I've been talking about here is important, the ability to USE them properly and responsibly is far more important. This is derived from data. I think this conclusion too belongs to the growing conversation that people are having that we shouldn't just do things because we can, particularly with respect to technology. Possibilities and effects, adverse and beneficial, need to be discussed. Secondly, I believe it reflects the possible uses of these technologies as well. Just as these computation systems are useful for active control over Nature, for example flows of rivers etc, they are equally as useful for observing Nature (and our interactions with it). This is perhaps something that is overlooked in often flippant pieces discussing civilisation's magnificent ability 'to do engineering'.
Finally, I'm really happy to notice that I have been able to consistently fill my posts with examples to illustrate my explorations and discussions. At the same time, I'm somewhat embarrassed that the word 'post' appeared so consistently throughout. Its making me think that I have been overly self-aware of the whole blog writing experience, and that this might have held be back somewhat.
Having looked at what I've been writing about, I want to end by looking at what people are writting about right now and whether what I've been exploring has any relevance all at. Happily it turns out it does! Simply looking at published pieces in Nature this week confirms this.
2) The Thoughts of Others
The first piece listed is an Editorial entitled 'Data Sharing will pay dividends'. In discussing data sharing in the pharmaceutical industry it highlights one of the major issues - access, availability and ownership. This complements one of the conclusions of this blog in that it states: the more data the better and furthermore the more people who have access to the more data the better. Ultimately this is one part of the much broader debate into how the internet actually exists and interacts with global capitalism and nation states. Another part of the same debate would be the current privacy debates. The sharing of information is shaping the current intellectual and political landscape.
The second thing to catch the eye is a new piece on using massive amounts of data to recognize photos and speech, deep-learning computers are taking a big step towards true artificial intelligence. What better follow up to the aforementioned conclusion could one ask for? One need not say more!
Also reported is that a swarm of satellites set to deliver close to real-time imagery of swaths of the planet. This signals a huge change in satellite technology, this is the first civilian project to do anything of this sort. This shows that computational technology of the sort that isn't just 'personal technology' like iphones etc. is coming to the civilian world and this will change things again. A second coming of the technological revolution.
3) My final word
So, these two analyses are cause for celebration. I've been talking about things that really matter and can only increase being so. I've even managed to come to some of the same conclusions as people who have been thinking about this for decades!
I've really enjoyed this project, its given me a great opportunity of look at research and writing in a huge number of different areas and link them all together. I've had fun toying with bits of code to supplement my reading. The final thing I want to saying is this.......
As I mentioned last time after tackling this topic for four months I discovered a journal called Environmental Technology only last week. I been reading some of its papers. Clearly 'Computational Technology' is a tiny subset of 'Technology'. The title of the first paper to catch my eye is 'The effect of heterotrophic growth on autotrophic nitrogen removal in a granular sludge reactor', a somewhat different topic than that which we've been dealing with here.
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The code I used to do the word counting etc. is up here ~ http://herculescyborgcode.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/word-frequencies_3837.html. To repeat the same thing just save all posts into separate .txt files named in numerical order in a directory with this code saved as frequencies.py - go to this directory and type 'python frequencies.py' at the command line. Of course, you would want to change your key words though to suit your subject matter.
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