emotion incubator group
recent:
resources:
february 6, 2008
right now this is going to be jumble of thoughts...
yesterday i discovered that the world wide web consortium (w3c - a group of professionals who work to develop web standards) has started the emotion incubator group (emoxg) with the mission of creating a general-purpose emotion markup language.
this is incredible news to me personally. i have long been fascinated with my own much more laymen attempts, skewed by my own use of creative writing, to encapsulate subjective emotions within the much more objective field of math. last march, i wrote a story entitled "the mathematician of emotions." i struggled a year prior to that in writing that story as my character was attempting to write and proof the emotional math (which resulted in my purchasing of used algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, chemistry, and physics textbooks) and it wasn't until i re-started the story from the other side (ie, advance the character ten years and in the world of the character the math is already proven and accepted as truth) could i actually write it. so while interested in the "emotional math" and apparently dedicated by all the books obtained, my real concern was in telling a story with calculable emotions in it and i never really did try to prove anything. in a way, trying to find the emotional equations was getting in the way of telling the emotional story.
but i'm still fascinated by it. i subscribe to scientific american mind magazine (though my diligence in reading it is not consistent), just recently acquired a book called the emotion machine, have read koestler, pinker and others, and have an enthusiast's interest in the field of usability.
usability, up until yesterday and i readily admit to not doing more research on the any possibly related subjects, was my best example of the scientific practice of emotions. you sit someone down at an interface and have them narrate to you what their doing, why their doing it, and how they feel about it. you take those results, quantify them, and if need be, redesign your interface. so it makes one feel "bewildered" or "confused" then you go back and aim for clarity and flow in your presentation. but that's emotion after that fact, as externally affecting the process.
and here's the w3c emotion incubator group attempting to encapsulate emotion within the syntax itself, to be added internally, both intially and on-the-fly. that's goddamn amazing. they claim in the foreword their endeavor is not an attempt to "standardise emotions." and i suppose i believe that they believe this. no official markup language has been released (at least not to my knowledge) but there is a comparison in their document of existing languages and how the eml might use aspects of them. but no matter how you look at it, out of necessity, there's going to something like this, or semantically equivalent:
<ecstatic>dominic</ecstatic>
<boring>these words</boring>
and somewhere, stored in 1s and 0s, a computer is going to have to interpret those keywords according to a pre-programmed definition. the emoxg makes allowances for fuller quantifiers, intensities, gestures, etc that could be combined with such a keyword to get a more "nuanced" emotion, but again, no matter how granular, there's still a definition at each step. so i wish they were more honest about that. that really it's an attempt to make the subjective into something (more) objective. and there's nothing wrong with that. at some point we've all wanted emotions, feelings, the disappointments and confusions that stem from misinterpretations to be made simpler, easier, something as simple as typing:
<sad action="cry">someone</sad>
<soothe words="it's okay">you</soothe>
yesterday i discovered that the world wide web consortium (w3c - a group of professionals who work to develop web standards) has started the emotion incubator group (emoxg) with the mission of creating a general-purpose emotion markup language.
this is incredible news to me personally. i have long been fascinated with my own much more laymen attempts, skewed by my own use of creative writing, to encapsulate subjective emotions within the much more objective field of math. last march, i wrote a story entitled "the mathematician of emotions." i struggled a year prior to that in writing that story as my character was attempting to write and proof the emotional math (which resulted in my purchasing of used algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, chemistry, and physics textbooks) and it wasn't until i re-started the story from the other side (ie, advance the character ten years and in the world of the character the math is already proven and accepted as truth) could i actually write it. so while interested in the "emotional math" and apparently dedicated by all the books obtained, my real concern was in telling a story with calculable emotions in it and i never really did try to prove anything. in a way, trying to find the emotional equations was getting in the way of telling the emotional story.
but i'm still fascinated by it. i subscribe to scientific american mind magazine (though my diligence in reading it is not consistent), just recently acquired a book called the emotion machine, have read koestler, pinker and others, and have an enthusiast's interest in the field of usability.
usability, up until yesterday and i readily admit to not doing more research on the any possibly related subjects, was my best example of the scientific practice of emotions. you sit someone down at an interface and have them narrate to you what their doing, why their doing it, and how they feel about it. you take those results, quantify them, and if need be, redesign your interface. so it makes one feel "bewildered" or "confused" then you go back and aim for clarity and flow in your presentation. but that's emotion after that fact, as externally affecting the process.
and here's the w3c emotion incubator group attempting to encapsulate emotion within the syntax itself, to be added internally, both intially and on-the-fly. that's goddamn amazing. they claim in the foreword their endeavor is not an attempt to "standardise emotions." and i suppose i believe that they believe this. no official markup language has been released (at least not to my knowledge) but there is a comparison in their document of existing languages and how the eml might use aspects of them. but no matter how you look at it, out of necessity, there's going to something like this, or semantically equivalent:
<ecstatic>dominic</ecstatic>
<boring>these words</boring>
and somewhere, stored in 1s and 0s, a computer is going to have to interpret those keywords according to a pre-programmed definition. the emoxg makes allowances for fuller quantifiers, intensities, gestures, etc that could be combined with such a keyword to get a more "nuanced" emotion, but again, no matter how granular, there's still a definition at each step. so i wish they were more honest about that. that really it's an attempt to make the subjective into something (more) objective. and there's nothing wrong with that. at some point we've all wanted emotions, feelings, the disappointments and confusions that stem from misinterpretations to be made simpler, easier, something as simple as typing:
<sad action="cry">someone</sad>
<soothe words="it's okay">you</soothe>