Digitizing my cassettes of international folk dancing music

The previous post was about options to use ontologies and semantic web technologies for indigenous knowledge management system/digital preservation of cultural heritage/traditional knowledge systems. There is already some data available for such systems, but still a lot is to be collected, digitized, structured, and so on. Here’s my very modest attempt of “going with my hands in the mud” on the digitization part, both because it’s long overdue and so as to get a first-hand idea what data collectors may face, of which one thing was that, despite searching online quite a bit, there was remarkably little available, and even that was hard to find.

Once upon a time… I spent 1.5-4 hours a week dancing on folk music from many different countries (see below), for 13 years in a row, of which two years also in the Dutch dances demonstration group—the purpose of the latter group was to show off, of the former to have a good time. This was all principally with the Maroesjka folk dancing club in Heeze, the Netherlands. Besides good memories, I have two full cassette tapes of folkdance music covering most of the dances we learned during (school years) 86/87 and 88/89, and a few pictures. The cassettes were originally compiled by Riekje van Hofweegen, our tireless dance teacher, mostly by copying songs from other tapes and LPs. I have digitized the cassette tapes with a cassette-to-mp4 converter, amounting to about 250MB for 49 songs and, as I don’t have a colour scanner readily at hand, I digitised a few pictures of us in action by taking a picture of them with a digital camera. (so, you’re warned about the quality.)

The two cassettes include folkdance music from—using the originally mentioned countries/regions—Bulgaria, Catalonia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, USA, Wales, and Yugoslavia, which, in other years, included dances from other countries, such as Poland and Russia, as well. To give a random example of the music of a dance from each of these countries/regions: Bulgaria with Kopanitsa, Catalonia with ball de pastors del pirineo, Czechoslovakia with ceresnicka, Denmark with gamble gammel nr 12, England with St. Nick’s Jack, Greece with choros mais, Hungary with fercelö, Israel with  mocher prachim, Mexico with la capsula, Netherlands with bravade, Portugal with malhao malhao, Romania with hora femeilor, Spain with el candil, Turkey with kendime, USA with steppin out, Wales with a name unknown, and Yugoslavia Macedonia with kales more dimco, and one of the Russian dances was the troika (which I have only as sheet music). The only ones of which I have not deciphered their origin yet are the vlaski tanz (my guess: one of the new countries from former Yugoslavia) and one with the quasi-readable handwritten name halleluja lufall (or similar), and there are four dances without a name (two from Wales, and two from Portugal). update: Marija Slavkovik, from Macedonia and with whom I shared an office for some time when studying at FUB, refined the “Yugoslavian” ones as follows: the poskos and çaçak are Serbian, kales more dimco is Macedonian, and the Vlaski tanz Serbian, Macedonian or Bulgarian. As an aside, the first folk dance I learned when I was 6 years old was the mayim, and the first one I participated in with a demonstration was the French dance the ‘river the Rhone’ (I’ve only sheet music of them, which I may scan and/or play on the recorder flute another time).

The dances in the directory on my home page are still in the sequence as they were on the tape instead of neatly annotated and sorted by country, genre and so on. Besides, I’m neither a musicologist nor a folk dance expert: aside from the country/region inserted in the mp4’s file name, I can go as far as the basics, like ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ or both (e.g., virgin blanca, Spain), and annotating a song ‘with singing’ (e.g., kendime, Turkey) or ‘instrumental’ (e.g., the kukunesko choro, Bulgaria), or, zooming in on the actual dances, ‘this has some mayim/polka/…-steps’ or ‘arm-waiving’ (e.g., eretz eretz, Israel, malhao malhao, Portugal) in the dance, and a basic configuration of line or string (iirc, the poskos series, Yugoslavia Serbia), circle (many, e.g., rusi kosi, Bulgaria) or square (e.g., St. Nick’s Jack, England), and/or pair dancing, or both square + pair (e.g., bravade, Netherlands), or circle + arm-waiving + moving from circle-to-centre-and-back (nad-ilan, Israel), and so on. One or more ontologies, or at least some basic structured controlled vocabulary, to annotate this could come in useful here, with knowledge represented about choreography, types of steps, dance styles, and so on. The usefulness of that? Among others, subsequent querying of the music files once there are many (e.g., “list the square-dances from country x”, “what are the first 10 opening steps dance y?”), help categorizing dances for which only partial information is available, easily compare dance styles across cultures, mutual influences, analyse the rhythms, variety in steps, difficulty of the dance, etc.

In case you wonder: yes, I did try dancing on the songs again, and I even remembered some steps from most dances, and some of them completely, including the hora he, the okselfris oh yossel yossel, and the bravade. No, I am not going to capture that with the webcam; for one, because it looks silly to dance alone, and, second, some of the dances are quite fast, like the çaçak (Yugoslavia Serbia), Kopanitsa (Bulgaria) or mãnãstîreanca (Romania). To give you an idea nevertheless, here’s a photo where we’re dancing the ball de pastors del pirineo (dance of the herders of the Pyrenees) from Catalonia, when Maroesjka was celebrating its first 10 years (I’m second from left):

Picture of dancing the Ball de pastors del pirineo

This is indeed in full costume, which was, at least when I was in the adult dance groups, always the case when we did dance demonstrations. (Not that I was really an adult at that time—basically, in secondary school—but the only ones left in our age group were Lilian and me; we were too old and experienced for the kids, so the members in the adult group decided they were willing to tolerate us in their group.) One could participate in demonstrations at least once a year, for those who were interested in it, and most notably during the Brabanste Dag when the village turns medieval for a week. The costume in the photo below is one for a set of Jewish dances we performed during one of Brabanste Dag festivals (going by my haircut, I guess it was in August 1988, and the photo certainly was taken in the garden of the building where we danced weekly).

Group photo made before the folkdance demonstration during the Brabanste Dag in 1988

Most of the costumes were hand-made by the female dance groups members, and while they look nice indeed, I still would say that their sewing and needlework expertise showed itself off most with the Dutch costumes. One of the more recent dance instructors of Maroesjka has some ‘old’ (1989) pictures on her website with Maroesjka members and traditional clothes from different Dutch regions and cities (and more pictures). To feed the stereotype, here’s a group photo of our Dutch dances demonstration group when we participated in an international folk dance festival in Antwerp (in 1991?); I’m third from left, with my real hair.

Group photo of the Dutch demonstration group of Maroesjka, during the international dance festival in Antwerp in about 1991.

The clothes may look a bit dull, but it takes about 1.5-2 hours to dress, one needs help with sticking in the pins, and it is hot in there. What seems like a blue striped skirt is actually just an apron. Underneath is a long black, thick, skirt, and underneath that an under-skirt. The colourful top is stiffened and held together with all those pins in different places. Then there’s that cap on our heads, which requires you to muffle away long hair, roll up the ‘fringe’ evenly, and then fasten the cap with as many hairpins as needed to make it unmovable. The men were ready in less than 10 minutes (trousers, blouse, hat).  We skipped the clogs because it is too heavy to dance with, except for one short dance that only the men did during the demonstrations.

Our Dutch folkdance repertoire included, among others, the bravade, mazurka, hakke toone, and the vleegerd. (I only have sheet music for the latter two, and may record it some time later, since I haven’t played the recorder [flute] since a while and was never good at it anyway—btw, there is also a Dutch song database with sheet music). I can’t remember the name of the dance we were dancing in the photo below, but the figure we’re making is that of a windmill, with each couple representing a sail of the windmill that is held together firmly at the centre (hand-to-wrist cf. just holding hands), so that some real dancing speed could be achieved whilst going round.

A few Maroesjka members went on to set up the Platform Nederlandse Floklore, but also that site does not have much information, and is structured about as good or as bad as this post. They have posted a few videos of Dutch folkdances on youtube.

Finally, I am aware the above information is not really readily available in an easy computer-processable format from a knowledge management viewpoint. Nevertheless, perhaps it was an interesting read. Overall, it already took a lot more time to digitise and ‘annotate’ it (well, write this blog post) than I thought it would take even for those two cassettes: one evening digitizing, 1-2 hours online search trying to find related relevant material, two evenings writing this post, and another hour to upload and layout it all. To collect and computerize all of South Africa’s indigenous knowledge in the “national recordal system” NIKMAS (driven by the NIKSO office) surely is going to take a very long time by very many people.

A couple of OWL requirements for using ontologies in Indigenous Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge about, say, long established agricultural practices, culinary customs and typical dishes (and its ingredient evolution over the centuries), medicinal plants and so on falls under the term indigenous knowledge in South Africa, cultural heritage in Europe (that I wrote about earlier), and traditional knowledge in other countries. Whichever term you prefer, it’s that kind of knowledge that is on the way of being lost due to changes in society. There is consensus to preserve it somehow (and possibly make some money from it along the way). Given that there’s lots of it—hence, lots of data, information, and knowledge, that has to be managed—computing and IT enter the picture.

For South Africa, this is managed through the large-scale project from the Department of Science & Technology’s NIKSO office that aims at building a “national recordal system” and an IT infrastructure (IKMS) to both store and access the indigenous knowledge. Setting up such a system consists of some typical software development themes (following consultation with stakeholders), such as the need for handling varied data formats (documents, images, audio), integration of the existing disparate databases and other IT resources in SA into the IKMS, availability of the information in all 11 official languages, the need for a citizen portal, and so on.

Some of the requirements smelled very much like a possible nice use case for Semantic Web Technologies so as to implement a really state of the art infrastructure with enhanced capabilities compared to standard applications. Ronell Alberts, Thomas Fogwill and I assessed that when I was visiting CSIR-Meraka in August and September 2010 as one of the secondments from the EU FP7 Net2 Project. The assessment of possibilities of using semantic web technologies, including the assessment of maturity for off-the-shelf usage, was accepted at IST-Africa recently [1]. We focused on enhanced querying, semantic browsing, questions answering, multilingual information access, knowledge generation, classification of information, formalisation of scientific knowledge & discovery, and knowledge-based data integration.

This we took a step further by zooming in on the ontologies-part of semantic web technologies for four of the usage scenarios, the selection of which was based on their potential for impact and maturity and inclusion into the IKMS. These are: ontology based querying and browsing; a natural language independent ontology for multilingual data access; support for collaborative knowledge generation; and the formalisation of IK for scientific discovery. More precisely, we investigated the requirements for ontology languages to meet the IKMS needs and how well they are met, if at all. A paper describing the details was just accepted for OWLED’12 [2].

In short: some of the required OWL features include representation of vagueness, mereotopology, modularisation, and extended support for internationalization (i.e., multilingualism) and annotation for collaborative ontology development. Thus, the first three put new requirements on the expressiveness of the OWL language itself, and the latter two formulate requirements akin to ‘usability’ extension for OWL. To motivate it all, we first describe each topic, provide real examples, and a few references to current research and tools, which is then followed by the OWL requirements taking into account the examples and generalizing from them; details can be found in the paper.

Hopefully there will an extensive and useful response at OWLED’12, like the feedback we received at OWLED’07 and DL’07 on the requirements on automated reasoning for bio-ontologies [3]. Obviously, if you have a solution to one or more of the gaps that we had overlooked, please leave a comment or send me an email.

References

[1] Fogwill, T., Alberts, R., Keet, C.M. The potential for use of semantic web technologies in IK management systems. IST-Africa Conference 2012. May 9-11, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

[2] Alberts, R., Fogwill, T., Keet, C.M. Several Required OWL Features for Indigenous Knowledge Management Systems. 7th Workshop on OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED 2012). 27-28 May, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. CEUR-WS Vol-xxx. 12p.

[3] Keet, C.M., Roos, M., Marshall, M.S. A survey of requirements for automated reasoning services for bio-ontologies in OWL. Third international Workshop OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED 2007), 6-7 June 2007, Innsbruck, Austria. CEUR-WS Vol-258. 10p. This was described informally in an earlier post.

Some reflections on learning isiZulu

It didn’t go as fast as I hoped and planned for, and certainly slower than all the other languages I learned over the years. While it is true that learning one indo-European language after another is ‘easier’ because some words and grammar rules are quite similar within each branch, and there aren’t many words in common with isiZulu (in the Nguni language group), that is not the reason why it’s going slower.

The main reason is the lack of (adult) education opportunities and the learning material. There was one course offered, which I attended, but it was cancelled after 6 weeks due to a dwindling number of participants (from 6 down to 2), and despite checking the classifieds regularly, there are no ‘isiZulu tutoring’ offers (there are for maths and other subjects) and I’m told there is a shortage of isiZulu teachers even on primary and secondary schools. So this left me the options of self-study and the get-a-boyfriend one.

A consequence of the “English is the language of business” agreement for post-Apartheid South Africa is that now most South Africans learn and can speak English (yeah, what the Afrikaners couldn’t achieve by some awful law back in 1976 [that Afrikaans be the medium of instruction at all schools and everyone thus learns to speak Afrikaans], the English language mother/native tongue/home language speakers achieved by other means). So the get-a-boyfriend option doesn’t really work for learning the language, at least not to the same extent as in other countries.

I will focus on the self-study and learning material in the remainder of this post. Now, I am fairly disciplined in study habits, but as my fellow researchers can attest, being an academic is more than a 9-5 job, and conference paper deadlines, attending conferences, and additional teaching duties get in the way of keeping up with it. Perhaps some consider this a lame excuse, but the following one holds generally: one easily can get the pronunciation wrong if not corrected by a mother tongue speaker (some accent is always better than a distorted pronunciation), the lack of practice in conversation, the absence of inside knowledge to which of the newspapers to buy to decipher (i.e., which one has simplistic sentences vs. high-brow complicated sentences and larger vocabulary), and so on.

And then, the textbooks! I had bought one on the internet while still in Italy, as preparation before moving to South Africa: Teach yourself Zulu, which I wasn’t quite happy with, and, in hindsight, perhaps I could have guessed that, because I didn’t like the ‘Italian for English speakers’ either when I bought that one when I first went to Italy in 2004. Trying two others from here, it just got worse. I think the main problem is the lack of structure, as they are all terribly disorganized when it comes to grammar. I’m probably experiencing the same emotions as Carsten Graebler (a German exchange student who developed an online dictionary and a grammar cheat sheet because there was none and he needed one in his attempts to learn isiZulu).

Let me give an example. When personal pronouns come into play, it gives a list of examples in the ‘order’ of I, he, they, you, she, or as I, we, you, you, that have so-called “concords” with the verb. Anywhere else, the latter is called with its proper linguistic term conjugation, and in the order of I, you[singular], he/she/it, we, you[plural], they, with a corresponding list how to conjugate the verb. In roman languages, they are at the end of the stem, in isiZulu, at the start, so we have ngi-, u-, u-, si-, ni-, ba-; e.g.: ngithanda = I like, sifunda = we study and so on. They are just lists one has to memorize for the pronouns and nouns. Then, like in the roman languages, because the verb in the sentence already indicates who or what it is about, one can drop the subject (personal pronoun/thing) in the sentence. With a language that doesn’t have such heavy conjugations, you have to include it. (As an aside: the conjugation maps to the subject, not subject+pronoun, so, teachers, don’t include the latter nonsense in the textbooks and don’t teach Zulus a ‘translating the isiZulu’ in the ‘sort of English but the wrong way’ (and then spit on them for using it the wrong way)! I cannot recollect any of the Italians or Spanish make the same mistake when they speak in English, so that’s really due to bad teaching here.)

And, please, make an index of the grammar rules. Now, when I want to check how again, e.g., future tense is, I have to browse through the book, where the grammar is presented piecemeal in a fairly random come-along way that suits the mini-conversations of the chapter’s topic rather than a whole rule together in one place.

There are two related hypotheses about the lack of structure, like I’ve seen also in the English ‘teach yourself Italian’ textbook. One: it is due to the relatively simple grammar of English compared to the complex grammar of multiple other languages, so if one knows only English, it is harder to handle structure, glean from others ways how to structure things, or even think about looking for structure in another natural language. Two, with a grammatically simpler language, the onus is on the receiver of the message to decode the message in a way that is hopefully what the sender intended, whereas with grammatically richer languages, the onus is on the sender to encode correctly what s/he wants to say so that the receiver can understand precisely what the sender really meant. Like having more and less expressive ontology languages (e.g., using OWL 2 DL and SKOS, respectively), where the former allows the modeler to be more precise and the latter retains lots of ambiguity that easily can be misinterpreted by another modeler or software application. I don’t know whether anyone investigated this for natural languages, and to what extent that has an effect on conducting a conversation and learning and teaching a language.

Then there are the topics. In one isiZulu textbook, the topic of the first chapter is greetings, the second is on giving short commands (wait, listen, come here, do it, fill up, make tea!). Or a course structured so as to “teach you isiZulu so that you can instruct your domestic and gardener what to do”: no, I want to use it in everyday life and work (I don’t have a domestic, and not even a garden), like congratulating someone on his birthday, understand when they ask me where the registration office is and answer it, ask for the AV key to use the data projector in the lecture hall, and even better would be to be able to explain some computer science in isiZulu and give a compliment for a test well done. The Teach yourself Zulu textbook is at least somewhat better in this regard, as it handles early on also topics like celebrations, going to the supermarket and buying food, going for a drink, and asking someone for something instead of instructing the worker.

Last, I want to learn isiZulu, the language, not be indoctrinated in racist crap that “isiZulu is a new language; it only became one in 1905, when the colonists an missionaries started to write it down…before that, there were only many mutually incomprehensible dialects but no language…really, Afrikaans was a language before isiZulu” and that “yes, that’s what they [the Zulus] have, short little stories; they don’t have comprehensive histories like we have in the West”, to quote but two. And not to have illustrated the use of iyi- only with indoda iyisela (the man is a thief), whereas it just as well could have been illustrated with, if I understand the unexplained rule correctly, indoda iyinono (the man is a careful/tidy person).

So, overall, I haven’t managed to go beyond the very basics. Each university I’ve been before UKZN had a language centre, where students and employees could sign up for evening courses in multiple languages. It would help to have that here, too. Or the civic centre or community school/college could organize such courses. True, there’s a shortage of teachers, but there’s also a 29% unemployment rate in the country—surely some of them are capable of becoming isiZulu teachers. And teachers and teaching material could upgrade themselves with the latest tools (like the isiZulu spell checker, online dictionaries and conjugator), update the textbooks material to make it suitable for the 21^st century, and add some decent grammar compendium. In the meantime, I probably have to contend myself with flicking through the material trying to remember it all and with entertaining myself with some curiosities in the dictionaries.

Annotated list of books on (South) Africa I read last year

I mentioned in the New Year’s post that I’ve been reading up on (South) Africa to obtain some more background information than provided in the online and printed newspapers and monthlies (such as The Africa Report, with, e.g., its article on Google in Africa). The remainder of this post is an annotated list of fiction and non-fiction books, collections, and pamphlets on Africa I read in 2011, which to quite an extent had to do with availability in the nearby bookshops. Yes, I’m talking about hardcopies. Looking them up online for this post, some are out of print, and less than half are available as eBook, Kindle edition, etc. The links are to the Kalahari.com online bookstore, when available, but several are available also internationally through booksellers such as Amazon.

Suggestions for “must reads” that can help me to understand this complex country and continent are welcome!

Non-Fiction

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994, Abacus). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime. It easily readable, and makes a man out of the myth. It is a personal account, and not so much an exposé of ideas (cf., e.g., Fidel’s “my life” or “la historia me absolverá”).

Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention by Carolyn Hamilton (1998, Harvard University Press). After the first chapter of academese, the remaining chapters provide a highly readable and fascinating picture of the life of King Shaka as well as the agendas of the multiple narrators of those times, somewhat alike a two-layered ‘soap opera’. 

The Racist’s Guide to the People in South Africa by Simon Kilpatrick (2010, Two Dogs). Illustrates well the new term I learned here, “equal opportunity offender”, although he does it in a satirical, witty, way. For the record, I can confirm Kilpatrick’s description of the Dutch [described in the same paragraph as the Germans]: yes, I do commit the cardinal sin of wearing socks in sandals, eat liquorice and lots of cheese, don’t leave a tip if the service or food is crappy, and as a child I went many times on summer holidays in France bringing most of our food from the Netherlands (indeed, that was cheaper). But, to some extent, I still wonder how accurate and/or exaggerated some of the descriptions of the other groups are. 

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2005, Penguin Books). Appeared to be written for people who politically lean to the right to convince them to move toward a centrist position, for Sachs’ ego as do-good-er within a capitalist framework, and serves as an appeal to the baby boomers to let go of the generational egoism so as to come off less bad (or a bit better) in history. 

Persons in Community: African Ethics in Global Culture, edited by Ronald Nicholson (2008, UKZN Press). Various essays of varying quality. Positive: Ubuntu from different perspectives and in different contexts. One can safely skip the annoying writings with Christian religious stuff, which has done more harm than good, notwithstanding the attempts at revisionary history writing.

African Renaissance (read in part), edited by Malegapuru William Makgoba (1999, Mafube Publishing). A collection of essays written in 1999 on problems and looking forward on what to do to realise a better future for South Africa and the continent. I think this will become a useful document for assessing if, and if yes how, the hopes and ideas have been realized over time. As an aside, it introduced me to the term “potted plants in green houses” that refers to certain academics in South Africa (note: they can be found in other countries as well, albeit due to different reasons).

Currently reading: Africa’s Peacemaker? Lessons from South African Conflict Mediation (currently reading), edited by Kurt Shillinger (2009, Fanele). The collection contains analyses of several conflicts in Africa, and lessons learnt of South African efforts in conflict mediation. From the parts I have read, this would have been useful to read for one of the courses of the MA in Peace & development I did a while ago.

Lined up to read: Chabal’s Africa: the Politics of Suffering and Smiling (2009, Zed Books).

Pamphlets

The following three pamphlets are from New Frank Talk, and give plenty of food for thought—not just to me, but if you do a search on it, you’ll see various sources, including news articles, discussing the topics.

Black Colonialists: the root of the trouble with Africa by Chinweizu. On post-colonial time, loathing Blacks in government who behave like their former colonialist masters.

Blacks can’t be racist by Andile Mngxitama. The thesis is that if you are not in a position of power, you cannot be racist, as one cannot act upon one’s prejudices about certain identified groups of people (if one has them); hence: ‘race’-based prejudice + power + acting upon it = racist. (Most) Blacks are not in a position of power, hence, cannot be racist, or so goes the argument in a nutshell. 

The white revolutionary as a missionary? Contemporary travels and researches in Caffraria by Heinrich Böhmke. On the ‘well-meaning left’ going to Africa to ‘help the poor and do good’ as a modern-day version of the colonialist-missionary with its negative influences.

Fiction

The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal (2010, Jacana Media). One of those books you just have to finish reading quickly to see how events unfold with the characters. It describes the experiences of three South African interns in a remote hospital in South Africa and how they come to grips with that new situation and their heritage with the different situations and mores they each grew up with.

The Master’s Ruse by Patricia Schonstein (2008, African Sun Press). The author has been so friendly to me, but it was not easy finishing reading the book. Perhaps it is a good book, attested by the freedom of the reader to read in it what fits the reader (and that wasn’t pretty). 

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda (2009, Penguin Books). Criticism of recent developments in South Africa is woven into the storyline. It also claims to insert all sorts of clichés, which is harder for me to assess. Disappointing is the portrayal of most of the female story characters who all happen to have all sorts of negative character traits and behaviours, with the male lead—having fought in the struggle, but not getting his share of the money and fame to become a ‘Black Diamond’—the good guy. It reads as if it were a Bouquet-book but then for a male readership.

Can he be the one? By Lauri Kubuitsile (2010, Sapphire press). Now this is a real Bouquet-book (called Sapphire here), but then with a cast of successful Black South Africans.

Earlier

Regarding possible suggestions, I have read several fiction and non-fiction books over the years, so possible glaring omissions from the aforementioned list may have been covered already—or: if you consider reading something about (South) Africa and none of the above piqued your interest, then maybe one or more of these ones do. Some of those books are, in alphabetical order by surname of author:

I write what I like by Steve Biko (1987, Heinemann). A must read. Writings from the ‘70s, on the Black Consciousness Movement. Introduced me to the term “Whitey” and (problems with) the “White liberal left”.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee (2004, Vintage).

Lettera ad un consumatore del nord by centro nuovo modello di svilluppo.

Concerning violence by Frantz Fanon (part of Wretched of the earth, which, when you search a bit, is available in whole as a free pdf download). Highly recommendable.

Hacia el reino del silencio by Miguel Díaz Nápoles (2008, Pablo de la Torriente, Editorial). On Cuban doctors in Ghana.

The challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai (2010, Arrow Books). Highly recommendable. Interesting analyses of problems, ideas and successes for self-empowerment. If you have any difficulty choosing between this and Sachs’ book, take this one.

I am an African by Ngila Michael Muendane (2006, Soultalk CC). About decolonization of the mind. A must read.

How man can die better: the life of Robert Sobukwe by Benjamin Pogrund (version of 2006, Jonathan Ball Publishers). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime; Sobukwe was with the PAC.

Inside rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence by Jeremy M. Weinstein (2007, Cambridge University Press). Highly recommendable, if you’re into this topic.

As mentioned, if you have any good suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me off-line, lest I keep on picking books fairly randomly and hoping it is worthwhile the price and reading time.  But maybe I should venture more often into the real world, instead of ‘reading this one more book to be better prepared for it’.

An analysis of culinary evolution

With summertime being what it is (called komkommertijd—literally: ‘cucumber time’—in Dutch), I stumbled again upon the paper The nonequilibrium nature of culinary evolution [1].

Food is essential, and due to location with its climate and available resources, as well as culture, each region has its own cuisine. There is much talk of homogenization of food dishes in popular press, or at least the threat thereof. One colleague here called “food from the North”, north of the Alps, that is, “barbarian”. But how much diversity in recipes across geographical locations is there? How, if at all, does it vary over time? What is the ingredient replacement pattern and do the replaced ingredients really disappear from the local menu?

Kinouchi and colleagues [1] tried to answer such questions through assessment of the statistics of the recipes’ ingredients, which were taken from 3 complete Brazilian cookbooks (Dona Benta 1946, 1969, and 2004), 40% of the large contemporary French cookbook Larousse (2004), the complete British Penguin Cookery Book (2001), and the Medieval Pleyn Delit.

For instance, the average recipe size of the Dona Benta (1946) as measured by ingredients, is lowest at 6.7, that of the Pleyn Delit an impressive 9.7, and of Larousse the highest with 10.8. However, one has to note that for the Pleyn, there are just 380 recipes with a mere 219 ingredients, whereas the numbers for Larousse are 1200 and 1005, and for the Dona they are 1786 and 491, respectively. When one makes a graph the frequency of appearances of ingredients in the recipes in the cookbooks, then all six cookbooks show very similar rank-frequency plots (power-law behaviour; see Fig. 1 in the paper); that is, for that dimension, there is a cultural invariance, as well as a temporal invariance for the Brazilian cookbook.

However, the more interesting results are obtained by the statistical and complex network analysis to obtain an idea about culinary evolution. The authors propose a copy-mutate algorithm to model cuisine growth, going from a small set of initial recipes to more diverse ones and using the idea of “cultural replicators” and branching. To make the line fit the data, they need 5 parameters: number of generations (T), number of ingredients per recipe (K), number of ingredients in each recipe to be mutated (L), the number of initial recipes (R₀), and the ratio between the sizes of the pool of ingredients and the pool of recipes (M). Models without a fitness parameter did not work, so one is generated randomly and assumed to stand for the “intrinsic ingredient properties”, such as nutritional value and availability. At each generation, one “mother” recipe was randomly chosen, copied, and one or more of its ingredients replaced with other random ingredient (implementing the mutation rate L) to generate a “daughter” recipe. And so onward. Searching the parameter space, the authors do indeed find values close to the actual ones observed in the cook books.

Then, on the fitness of the recipes (replaced by hamburgers, pizza, etc.?), Kinouchi and colleagues use the fitness of the kth recipe, defined as , and a corresponding total time dependent cuisine fitness, . The results are depicted in Fig4 in the paper and, in short: “this kind of historical dynamics has a glassy character, where memory of the initial conditions is preserved, suggesting that the idiosyncratic nature of each cuisine will never disappear due to invasion by alien ingredients”. In addition, the copy-mutation model with the selection mechanism is scale-free, so that it is an out-of-equilibrium process, which practically means that “the invasion of new high fitness ingredients and the elimination of initial low fitness ingredients never end”, i.e., some ingredients are very difficult to being replaced, as if they were “frozen “cultural” accidents”. The latter has some similarity with the ‘founder-effect’ phenomenon in biology.

De aardappeleters (potato eaters) by Van Gogh

That much for the maths and experimental data of the paper. Before I turn to some research suggestions on this topic, I will first make an unscientific informal assessment. Van Gogh painted the painting de aardappeleters (‘the potato eaters’) in Nuenen—a village about 15km from where I grew up—back in 1885, to which Thieu Sijbers added a poem to describe such a poor man’s meal. I could not find the full original, but Van Oirschot ([2], p17) has the main parts of it, which I reproduce here first in the original old Brabants dialect and then a translation in English.

En hoekig nao ‘t bidde

‘t krous en dan wordt

aon de sobere maoltijd begonne

recht van ‘t vuur

op de bonkige toffel gezet

worre d’èrpel naw schieluk

mi rappe verkèt

van de hijt fèl nog dampend

de pan outgepikt

nao de monde gebrocht

en gulzig geslikt.

Ze ète, ze schranze

nao ‘n lutske de pan

toe ‘t zwart van de bojum

zo lig as ‘t mer kan

…

Mi’n mörke vol koffie

van waot’rige sort

zette d’èters nao d’èrpel

de maoltijd dan vort

…

Ze ète, jao net

mer dan is ‘t ok gezeed

want al wè ze pruuve

is èrremoei en leed.

My translation into English:

And edgy after praying

to the cross, and then

they start with the sober meal,

straight from the fire,

put on the chunky table,

now the potatoes are suddenly

cursed swiftly,

still steaming from the heat,

picked from the pan,

brought to the mouth,

and swallowed greedily.

They eat, they gorge,

and shortly after there is the black

of the bottom of the pan,

as empty as it can be.

…

With a mug full of coffee,

of the watery type,

do the eaters continue

with the meal after the potatoes.

…

They eat, yes just about,

but with that, all is said,

because all they taste

is poverty and distress.

The coffee is probably not real coffee but made from roasted sweet chestnuts [2]. The potatoes are an example of the “alien ingredients” mentioned in [1]: before potatoes were introduced in Europe (16^th century), the Dutch recipes, at least, used tubers such as pastinaak (parsnip, which are white, and longer and thicker than carrot) in the place of potatoes; this is known primarily from the documentation about the Siege of Leiden in 1573-1574 during the 80-years war. Parsnip has not entirely vanished (parsnip beignets are really tasty), but now takes up a minimal place in ‘standard’ Dutch cuisine, so that it may be an example of one of those “frozen “cultural” accidents difficult to be overcome in the out-of equilibrium regime” ([1], p7). A standard Dutch dish is the aardappelen-groente-vlees combination, or: boiled potatoes, boiled vegetables, and a piece of meat baked in butter or fat, or the potatoes and vegetables are cooked together and mashed together into a hutspot (= potato+carrot+onion) or boerenkoolstamp (= potato+curly kale). Over the years, pasta entered the menu as well, and primarily a combination of Chinese and Indonesian, but to some extent also Surinamese, food has become regular dishes. Thus, pasta and rice took some space previously occupied by potatoes, but potatoes are in no way being marginalised. My guess is that that is because tubers and grains belong to different food groups and are therefore not easily swappable compared to tuber-tuber replacement, such as parsnip → potato [note 1], or grain-grain replacement, e.g., maize[flower] → wheat[flower]. Simply put: if you grow up on rice or pasta, then you do not easily switch to potatoes, or vice versa.

Perhaps Kinouchi’s copy-mutate algorithm can be rerun taking into account types of ingredients and then see what comes out of it; and use some variations like (1) swap within same food group, (2) different food group swap, pick random ingredient; and (3) keep the swap within subgroups, such as tuber-carbohydrate-source-staplefood#1 → tuber-carbohydrate-source-staplefood#2 (vs. the more generic ‘carbohydrate source’) and herb#3 → herb#4 (vs. the subsumer ‘condiment’).

Further, in addition to ingredient substitution-by-import, one also observes recipe import, which faces the task of having to make do with the local ingredients. Chinese excel in this skill: dishes in Chinese restaurants taste different in each country but roughly similar—in Italy, they even split up the meals into primo and secondo piatti. But when substituting original ingredients with the local ingredients that are only approximations of the original ones, how much remains of the recipe so that one still can talk of instantiations of the dishes described by the original recipe and when is it really a new one? What effect do those imported recipes have on local cuisine? Is there experimental data to say that, statistically, one recipe is better “export material” than others are? Are people [from/who visited] some geographic region better at transporting the local recipes and/or their ingredients elsewhere?

It remains to test whether those mutated recipes are still edible. Forced by ‘necessity’, I did ingredient substitution due to recipe import several times (the Italian shops do not have baked beans, no brown sugar, no condensed milk, no ontbijtkoek, no real butter, no pecan nuts, only a few apple varieties, etc…), and for some recipes the substitute was at least as good as the original, but then the substitute approximated the original. I certainly have not dared mashing together cooked pasta+carrot+onion to make an “Italian-style hutspot”, let alone random ingredient substitutions. In case someone has done the latter and it is not only edible but also recommendable, feel free to drop me a line or add the recipe in the comments.

References and notes

1. Kinouchi, O., Diez-Garcia, R.W., Holanda, A.J., Zambianchi, P., and Roque, A.C. The nonequilibrium nature of culinary evolution. ArXiv 0802.4393v1, 29 Feb 2008. Also published in New J. Phys. 10, 073020 (8pp) doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/7/073020

2. van Oirschot, A. (ed.). Van water tot wijn, van korsten to pastijen. Stichting Brabanste Dag, 1979. 124p.

[note 1] There is a difference between root-tubers (such as parsnip) and stem-tubers (such as potato), but functionally they are quite alike, so that for the remainder of the post I will gloss over this minor point. Some basic information can be glanced from the Wikipedia entry tuber, more if you search on Pastinaca sativa (parsnip) and Solanum tuberosum (potato) who are not member of the same family, and you may be interested to check other common vegetables and their names in different languages to explore this further.

A new plant family: the Simulacraceae

May I recommend for the Friday afternoon/weekend reading: an article by Bletter, Reynertson, and Velazquez Runk in the journal Ethnobotany Research & Applications (vol. 5, 2007) on “The taxonomy, ecology, and ethnobotany of the Simulacraceae”, which has about 80 species divided in 17 genera, such as Plasticus, Textileria, and Papyroidia. Moreover,

This family is more than a botanical curiosity. It is a scientific conundrum, as the taxa:

1. lack genetic material,
2. appear virtually immortal and
3. have the ability to form intergeneric crosses with ease, despite the lack of any evident mechanism for cross-fertilization.

In this study, conducted over approximately six years, we elucidate the first full description and review of this fascinating taxon, heretofore named Simulacraceae.

To summarize, also in the words of the authors,

The eco­nomics, distribution, ecology, taxonomy, paleoethnobot­any, and phakochemistry of this widespread family are herein presented. We have recently made great strides in circumscribing this group, and collections indicate this cosmopolitan family has a varied ecology. … Despite being genomically challenged plants, an initial phylogeny is pro­posed. In an early attempt to determine the ecological re­lations of this family, a twenty-meter transect has been in­ventoried from a Plasticus rain forest in Nyack, New York, yielding 49 new species and the first species-area curve for this family.

The Simulacraceae collections—based on the principal method of “opportunistic sampling”—are deposited in the herbarium of the Foundation for Artificial Knowledge Education. Some of the open problems yet to investigate include simulacrapaleoethnobotany and simulacrapolitical ecology, and from an engineering perspective, the design of a Traditional Simulacraceae Knowledge/Teleological Simulation Knowledge base (dubbed acronym “TSK,TSK”, which would compete well with the yearly naming game for the NAR January database issue).

A short html version of the article is available online in the Jan/Feb issue of AIR, but also the full pdf file (about 6MB) in the Uni of Hawaii database with more information and colourful photos (openly accessible, of course). Enjoy!

more on AI and (contemporary) cultural heritage: poeme electronique, RAI, and robocup

In the comment on the previous post on AI & cultural heritage, my brother wondered if something concrete would come from using the variety of (AI) techniques. Apart from the ones mentioned in that post that are being implemented in Italy and Haifa, there’s also one – working! – closer to home: the Poeme Electronique (virtual reality), and others, such as TV genre classification (neural networks) and Robocup (game theory).

Following up on the previously mentioned VR & cultural heritage, a VR version to regain lost art, and a documentary about the making-of, is available online for free, but you need a lot of bandwidth. It has been developed in the Virtual Poeme Electronique project led by Vincenzo Lombardo. The Electronic Poem was developed for & by Philips Eindhoven for the 1958 international exposition in Brussels to demonstrate its technology for society (as opposed to use technology for war) and thereby the first multimedia project of the electronic era. Unfortunately, it was broken down 2 months after the exhibition hosted 2 million visitors, and lost – other than various bits and pieces to build it, such as the sketches of Le Corbusier, music scores by Edgar Varese, the hyperbolic paraboloids drawings by Xenakis (the plan resembles a stomach, as metaphor that expo visitors would be ‘digested’ by the multimedia presentation in the building), and an old Philips video; see the materials section. The VR reconstruction is interesting from, a.o, a technological viewpoint: “the unity of this installation, that conveys images and sound paths of a great complexity in a common digital space, requires challenging solutions in the integration of the various media (design of the digital space, display of the visual show, organization of the sound paths) and in the interaction between the spectator and the installation” (copied from the project website); see also a summary on the fascinating cultural historical & artistic aspects. In the upcoming years, the expo will be rebuilt by Philips at the site of the former headquarters in Eindhoven.

Of course one could argue if TV is, or approximates, contemporary art. Instead of one’s subjective view, one could investigate this in a more structured fashion by analyzing the archives of the various types of programmes. However, e.g. RAI (the Italian public radio and TV organization) already has some 560 000 hours TV archive and 700 000 hours of radio archive. One step in the structuring of the archive to query and analyse it better is TV genre classification. [1] used a feed-forward neural network after the feature extraction process. Features of the video files are, a.o., luminance colour histograms, texture signature, average speech rate, and displaced frame difference. It works for the basics categories, such as news and talk shows, but I wonder about more recent, finer-grained distinctions, such as “infotainment” and “docudrama” that is blurring the lines between information proper and the fantasy-part that are being mixed and which ought to result in rough or fuzzy boundaries of the classes, or at least groups of TV programmes that are difficult, if not impossible, to classify automatically.

The third “contemporary cultural heritage” (???) with AI, or at least close to society, is football/soccer, and the seeming folly of robocup – the football cup for robots – which provides “a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined”. Moreover, “RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries” (copied from the Robocup website). As the invited speaker Manuela Veloso explained with great enthusiasm and conviction, it’s not about soccer but, in her specialisation, modeling and implementing game theoretic team strategies. That is, how to represent team strategies, how to generate a team response to an adversary, and how to make strategic decisions in timed zero-sum games? A first step is to separate out skills (actions) from tactics (sequence of actions) from plays (web of tactics). Another aspect is the notion of winning: the usual game-theoretic maximum reward pay-off versus a threshold-win scenario (see also [2], which has won the Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI’07). One contradictory issue in the presentation, however, was the team-individual (non-)balance. To win Robocup, Veloso et al use (a.o.) team strategies alike the “playbooks” in American football that specify multiple play-plans. During “locker-room agreements”, the coach decides which play plan to execute (which can be changed during the game), and all players stick to these rules; hence, the individual player is subordinate to the team. In contrast to this American football, with football/soccer, one regularly sees games with individuals who not always play as a team. Veloso is passionate about the approach off the team-oriented playbook approach of American football, but at the end of the presentation the take-home message for future research was that the team-approach was wrong and that one should look for player strategies that are based on the individual and who only cooperate when “needed”… which pretty much ends up as the average football/soccer game of which she laments the play strategy. To put it positively, I think she probably meant that it is the balance between individual behaviour of the player/robot and the team of players/robots as a whole; hence, when, how, and why switch between these two fundamentally different strategies.

Manuela Veloso and Daniele Nardi during the invited talk (picture from AI*IA website).

[1] Maurizio Montagnuolo and Alberto Messina. TV Genre Classification Using Multimodal Information and Multilayer Perceptrons. Proc. of AI*IA ’07, Rome, 2007.
[2] Colin McMillen and Manuela Veloso. Thresholded Rewards: Acting Optimally in Timed, Zero-Sum Games. In Proceedings of AAAI’07, Vancouver, Canada, July 2007.

AI and cultural heritage workshop at AI*IA’07

I’m reporting live from the Italian conference on artificial intelligence (AI*IA’07) in Rome (well, Villa Mondrogone in Frascati, with a view on Rome). My own paper on abstractions is rather distant from near-immediate applicability in daily life, so I’ll leave that be and instead write about an entertaining co-located workshop about applying AI technologies for the benefit of cultural heritage that, e.g., improve tourists’ experience and satisfaction when visiting the many historical sites, museums, and buildings that are all over Italy (and abroad).

I can remember well the handheld guide at the Alhambra back in 2001, which had a story by Mr. Irving at each point of interest, but there was only one long story and the same one for every visitor. Current research in AI & cultural heritage looks into solving issues how this can be personalized and be more interactive; several directions are being investigated how this can be done. This ranges from the amount of information provided at each point of interest (e.g., for the art buff, casual American visitor who ‘does’ a city in a day or two, or narratives for children), to location-aware information display (the device will detect which point of interest you are closest to), to cataloguing and structuring the vast amount of archeological information, to the software monitoring Oetzi the Iceman. The remainder of this blog post describes some of the many behind-the-scenes AI technologies that aim to give a tourist the desired amount of relevant information at the right time and right place (see the workshop website for the list of accepted papers). I’ll add more links later; any misunderstandings are mine (the workshop was held in Italian).

First something that relates somewhat to bioinformatics/ecoinformatics: the RoBotanic [1], which is a robot guide for botanical gardens – not intended to replace a human, but as an add-on that appeals in particular to young visitors and get them interested in botany and plant taxonomy. The technology is based on the successful ciceRobot that has been tested in the Archeological Museum Agrigento, but having to operate outside in a botanical garden (in Palermo), new issues have to be resolved, such as tuff powder, irregular surface, lighting, and leaves that interfere with the GPS system (for the robot to stop at plants of most interest). Currently, the RoBotanic provides one-way information, but in the near-future interaction will be built in so that visitors can ask questions as well (ciceRobot is already interactive). Both the RoBotanic and ciceRobot are customized off-the shelf robots.

Continuing with the artificial, there were three presentations about virtual reality. VR can be a valuable add-on to visualize lost or severely damaged property, timeline visualizations of rebuilding over old ruins (building a church over a mosque or vice versa was not uncommon), to prepare future restorations, and general reconstruction of the environment, all based on the real archeological information (not Hollywood fantasy and screenwriting). The first presentation [2] explained how the virtual reality tour of the Church of Santo Stefano in Bologna was made, using Creator, Vega, and many digital photos that served for the texture-feel in the VR tour. [3] provided technical details and software customization for VR & cultural heritage. On the other hand, the third presentation [4] was from a scientific point most interesting and too full of information to cover it all here. E. Bonini et al. investigated if, and if yes how, VR can give added-value. Current VR being insufficient for the cultural heritage domain, they look at how one can do an “expansion of reality” to give the user a “sense of space”. MUDing on the via Flaminia Antica in the virtual room in the National Museum in Rome should be possible soon (CNR-ITABC project started). Another issue came up during the concluded Appia Antica project for Roman era landscape VR: behaviour of, e.g., animals are now pre-coded and become boring to the user quickly. So, what these VR developers would like to see (i.e., future work) is to have technologies for autonomous agents integrated with VR software in order to make the ancient landscape & environment more lively: artificial life in the historical era one wishes, based on – and constrained by – scientific facts so as to be both useful for science and educational & entertaining for interested laymen.

A different strand of research is that of querying & reasoning, ontologies, planning and constraints.
Arbitrarily, I’ll start with the SIRENA project in Naples (the Spanish Quarter) [5], which aims to provide automatic generation of maintenance plans for historical residential buildings in order to make the current manual plans more efficient, cost effective, and maintain them just before a collapse. Given the UNI 8290 norms for technical descriptions of parts of buildings, they made an ontology, and used FLORA-2, Prolog, and PostgreSQL to compute the plans. Each element has its own interval for maintenance, but I didn’t see much of the partonomy, and don’t know how they deal with the temporal aspects. Another project [6] also has an ontology, in OWL-DL, but is not used for DL-reasoning reasoning yet. The overall system design, including use of Sesame, Jena, SPARQL can be read here and after server migration, their portal for the archeological e-Library will be back online. Another component is the webGIS for pre- and proto-historical sites in Italy, i.e., spatio-temporal stuff, and the hope is to get interesting inferences – novel information – from that (e.g., discover new connections between epochs). A basic online accessible version of webGIS is already running for the Silk Road.
A third different approach and usage of ontologies was presented in [7]. With the aim of digital archive interoperability in mind, D’Andrea et al. took the CIDOC-CRM common reference model for cultural heritage and enriched it with DOLCE D&S foundational ontology to better describe and subsequently analyse iconographic representations, from, in this particular work, scenes and reliefs from the meroitic time in Egypt.
With In.Tou.Sys for intelligent tourist systems [8] we move to almost-industry-grade tools to enhance visitor experience. They developed software for PDAs one takes around in a city, which then through GPS can provide contextualized information to the tourist, such as the building you’re walking by, or give suggestions for the best places to visit based on your preferences (e.g., only baroque era, or churches, or etc). The latter uses a genetic algorithm to compute the preference list, the former a mix of RDBMS on the server-side, OODBMS on the client (PDA) side, and F-Logic for the knowledge representation. They’re now working on the “admire” system, which has a time component built in to keep track of what the tourist has visited before so that the PDA-guide can provide comparative information. Also for city-wide scale and guiding visitors is the STAR project [9], bit different from the previous, it combines the usual tourist information and services – represented in a taxonomy, partonomy, and a set of constraints – with problem solving and a recommender system to make an individualized agenda for each tourist; so you won’t stand in front of a closed museum, be alerted of a festival etc. A different PDA-guide system was developed in the PEACH project for group visits in a museum. It provides limited personalized information, canned Q & A, and visitors can send messages to their friend and tag points of interest that are of particular interest.

Utterly different from the previous, but probably of interest to the linguistically-oriented reader is philology & digital documents. Or: how to deal with representing multiple versions of a document? Poets and authors write and rewrite, brush up, strike through etc. and it is the philologist task to figure out what constitutes a draft version. Representing the temporality and change of documents (words, order of words, notes about a sentence) is another problem, which [10] attempts to solve by representing it as a PERT/CPM graph structure augmented with labeling of edges, the precise definition of a ‘variant graph’, and a the method of compactly storing it (ultimately stored in XML). The test case as with a poem from Valerio Magrelli.

The proceedings will be put online soon (I presume), is also available on CD (contact the WS organizer Luciana Bordoni), and probably several of the articles are online on the author’s homepages.

[1] A. Chella, I. Macaluso, D. Peri, L. RianoRoBotanic: a Robot Guide for Botanical Gardens. Early Steps.
[2] G.Adorni. 3D Virtual Reality and the Cultural Heritage.
[3] M.C.Baracca, E.Loreti, S.Migliori, S.Pierattini. Customizing Tools for Virtual Reality Applications in the Cultural Heritage Field.
[4] E. Bonini, P. Pierucci, E. Pietroni. Towards Digital Ecosystems for the Transmission and Communication of Cultural Heritage: an Epistemological Approach to Artificial Life.
[5] A.Calabrese, B. Como, B Discepolo, L. Ganguzza , L. Licenziato, F. Mele, M. Nicolella, B. Stangherling, A. Sorgente, R Spizzuoco. Automatic Generation of Maintenance Plans for Historical Residential Buildings.
[6] A.Bonomi, G. Mantegari, G.Vizzari. Semantic Querying for an Archaeological E-library.
[7] A. D’Andrea, G. Ferrandino, A. Gangemi. Shared Iconographical Representations with Ontological Models.
[8] L. Bordoni, A. Gisolfi, A. Trezza. INTOUSYS: a Prototype Personalized Tourism System.
[9] D.Magro. Integrated Promotion of Cultural Heritage Resources.
[10] D. Schmidt, D. Fiormonte. Multi-Version Documents:a Digitisation Solution for Textual Cultural Heritage Artefacts