Exploring Erkki Kurenniemi's Archive

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Linux includes a command called time, which rather than reporting the current time (that’s “date”), is a kind of meta command that can be used to measure the resource usage of the execution of another command.

Running the hash index function I’ve been working on today took all of 244 minutes (in “real” time) — not yet sure what “user” vs “system” time exactly means but imagine it has to do with the way my computer divides it’s resources among the various processes going on in parallel to the timed task.

Not surprisingly, by the time the original command finished, I had already discovered and fixed a bug in the script so it’s time to run the script again 😉

http://ss64.com/bash/time.html

An archive is an organic whole

In de vorige paragraaf is uiteengezet hoe een archief ontstaat ten gevolge van de werkzaamheden van een college of een ambtenaar, hoe het archief altijd de neerslag is der functiën van dat college of dien ambtenaar. Een archief wordt dus niet willekeurig gemaakt, gelijk men de eene of andere verzameling historische handschriften samenstelt, al wordt zulk eene verzameling wel eens een archief genoemd. … Integendeel, een archief is een organisch geheel, een levend organisme, dat volgens vaste regelen groeit, zich vormt en vervormt. Veranderen de functiën van het college, de aard van het archief verandert mede. De regels, die de samenstelling, de inrichting, de vorming van een archief beheerschen, kan dus de archivaris niet van te voren vaststellen; hij kan alleen het organisme bestudeeren en constateeren, welke de regels zijn, waarnaar het zich heeft gevormd. Elk archief heeft dus als het ware zijne eigene persoonlijkheid, zijne individualiteit, die de archivaris moet leeren kennen.

Handleiding voor het Ordenen en beschrijven van archieven, Muller, Feith, Fruin, p. 5, 1920 Second Printing

The preceding section explained how an archive is created due to the work of a college or any officer, how the archive is always the reflection of the functions of that body (organisation) or that official. An archive is not random, as in the collection of this or that historical manuscript, despite the fact that such a collection is sometimes called an archive. On the contrary, an archive is an organic whole, a living organism that grows consistently, forming and deforming. Changing the functions of the college, changes the nature of the archive as well. The rules, which govern the composition, establishment, and formation of an archive, can not be previously identifies by the archivist, it is only through studying and noting the organism, that the rules, to which it has formed can be observed. Each archive has as it were its own personality, individuality, to which the archivist must become acquainted.

Fast translation via Google with hand corrections

No matter how good the scheme, its scope is limited by the fact that data entry is never an easy task, and there are never enough resources or trained personnel to make it happen. Not only will there inevitably be mistakes with respect to the internal structure of whatever classification one is representing, there will also inevitably be cultural variations with respect to how it is interpreted as well as culturally biased omissions.

Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star, p. 107

The Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer (aka baobab) tool provides a means of graphically representing the contents and relative sizes of files on a hard drive. In this case the visualisation is a Treemap.

Quotes from an article written for Framework: The Finnish Art Review.  From leaving the body to leaving the earth (first sentence and last paragraph of the article).

Man is a machine. A machine produced by evolution. I find it impossible to think that for mere nostalgic reasons, such a slime-based system would be preserved.

[…]

Having been mostly apolitical, except for slow drift from mild zen-marxism to still milder liberal anarchism, I now have a cause. The ideology of sustainable development is too slippery, because it does not specify absolute limits to change. I want to sharpen sustainable development into the Museum Planet Earth idea.
Briefly, this says that in step with the transhumanist fall into the singularity, in less than a 100 years, we should make the planet Earth into a museum. This means asymptotically stopped change in resident human population, biodiversity, biosphere, environmental chemistry, climate, and so on.
But, everything will be allowed: economic expansion, population explosion through stopping of ageing, genetic manipulation, genetic and nanotechnologies of unimaginable powers, warfare and worse, in space. A deal?
To make this utopian future more acceptable, I briefly describe its econopolitics. In 2100, for example, print 10 billion “ Earth licences”and distribute them to all then living humans. No more licences will ever be printed. Licences can be sold. This way, the people that want long life and long-lived children can have them, but only through migrating to space. This will be cheap because there will be people wanting to stay down here, purchasing Earth licences to a price that will plentily cover the price of the lift to orbit for the seller.

With privacy law, copyright, one can only look at an archive blindfolded. Before tedious negotiations take place, images, sounds, videos of the archive cannot be published. They still can remain in the archive though.
Can we therefore access the archive blindfolded?

Being blindfolded implies the suppression of sight, but also implies a concentration on other senses. Or implies a remapping of sight. Our eyes are delegated to our hands, nose, to the epiderm and all these informations combined produce a global image, a mental image.

Using computer vision algorithms, we are seeing without eyes, computer visions hides and reveals, hides and concentrates. A Braille for the legal blind spots.

Following the definition found in this page, an average image is

an image that gives equal weight to each of the component images, combining them to make a whole.

Given a folder of the Kurenniemi’s archive, all its images would be aggregated into one.
First snapshots …

du -h
(disk usage, with “human” option) is a very basic and common tool for interrogation of the data stored on a hard drive. It simply dumps a list of the names of files and folders, with the amount of disk space each uses. The process recurses into each subfolder meaning that the disk space usages overlap.