Semantic Web Company

A conference at Freie Universität Berlin in the end of June was dedicated to “NOW AND THEN. Temporal Experience in Film, Literature and Philosophy” (Jetzt und dann. Zeiterfahrung in Film, Literatur und Philosophie) . This led me to thinking about time as such – especially concerning media and maybe blogs like this one.

What is news? What impact does news have on people? What about time? One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times, scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? What is its structure?

„In many respects aesthetic experience is bound to time: the time of reading, the rhythm of a filmic montage, the temporal construction of a story. Without such temporal markers as these, aesthetic experience would neither be comprehensible nor would it even be possible. Poetological and philosophical reflection on the temporal basis of aesthetic experience give shape to… questions as… addressing the subjectivity of temporal experience through aesthetic form… how temporality and causality leave their mark in experience… how to treat „actuality“ as an aesthetically significant topos of Modernity“ and more. [Source]

It was not astonishing to me that I found a book called Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society). (more…)

An interview with Herbert Hrachovec, conducted by SWC’s own Marion Fugléwicz-Bren, drew my attention to an article by Hrachovec in which he explored what he calls the “irreconcilable similarities” between man and semantic machines:

Treating certain systems (computers, brains) as mechanisms working towards potentially meaningful results by purely formal procedures has proved to be a fruitful research program. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. The shape of its pieces contains no information about the content of the representation that has to be retrieved. Finding out how the pieces fit together is a syntactic activity that can be performed according to formal principles. All those pieces just fit together in the end; but, remarkably enough, a picture of something has been assembled by this process. Evidently it is possible, by appropriate construction, to integrate formal procedures and the more complex relationships between signs and their interpretation. A puzzle illustrates semantic machines insofar as it leads to representation of reality in the absence of any prior semantic information.

When do you think this article whas published? (more…)