Internet commentary

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2002), "Internet commentary", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2002.06731cag.001

Internet commentary

Keywords: Cyberculture, London-AI, Cyrillic alphabet, Homophonic keyboard

AbstractTwo metasites that give access to previously-neglected cyberculture topics are reviewed. Changes in the arrangements for the valuable free London-AI events calendar are reported. The use of a homophonic keyboard layout to produce Cyrillic text in e-mails and other documents is discussed with recommendation of a particular package.

Cyberculture

Facets of the Internet that come under the general heading of cyberculture have received relatively little attention in these Commentaries. The topics have an intangible character that makes them difficult to summarise, though their importance is undeniable and is acknowledged in the name "cyberspace-and- society" of a useful list on the UK Mailbase. (Messages to the owner of the list, not for distribution, should be addressed to: cyberspace-and-society-request@jiscmail.ac.uk and to subscribe to this or other Mailbase lists the address is: jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk .)

In view of the difficulty of dealing with these topics, a Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) is very welcome, at: http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs . A particularly welcome feature is its undertaking to review relevant books and to make the reviews accessible on its website. The Director of the Center is David Silver and its physical location is the University of Washington in Seattle. An early announcement was made on the cyberspace- and-society list in June 2001 (at which time the Center was located in the University of Maryland) by Jeremy Hunsinger (see below) and at that time the number of books that had been reviewed was over 85 and were said to cover "a range of topics, from online culture, communities, and identities to hypertext, digital literacy, and online pedagogy to Internet policy, the digital divide, and online privacy."

A visit to the RCCS site in October 2001 revealed a wealth of sources of information, including, under the heading: "Book of the Month" a list of one, two or three books for every month since July 1997, with the possibility of clicking on any title to see a comprehensive review. In addition there is an annotated bibliography, under the four headings of Cyberculture in Context (8 entries), Virtual Communities (9 entries), Community Networks (3 entries) and Virtual Identities (5 entries). The introductory note under the last heading refers to a cartoon in the New Yorker with the caption: "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog" and claims that a challenging problem is to examine the effect of online interaction on the notion of selfhood.

Of the entries under the heading of Cyberculture in Context, two are by authors from the MIT Media Lab, one of them its director. As this headings introductory note says, the participation of the Media Lab is probably the best possible guarantee that the predictions will become reality. As might be expected the entries are generally enthusiastic, though one is said to display a trace of neo-Luddism. Some of the discussion is about the best way to foster a communal atmosphere in Internet use. The authors tend to deprecate the unsociable situation where most users are focused on a particular short-term objective, or communication only with established contacts. There is of course mention of MOOs and MUDs, types of virtual-reality multi-user domain in which the participants appear as avatars, so that true physical characteristics and even gender are hidden. There seems to be a view that Virtual Reality will play an increasing part in Internet exchanges, though just how it will operate is not clear.

The site has a wealth of links to other sources of information, including a Directory of Electronic Theses and Dissertations in the Humanities, and the opportunity to subscribe to a listserv facility called cyberculture-announce, which will distribute notices of relevant events and publications.

Another site dealing with similar interests is the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. This is the affiliation of Jeremy Hunsinger, mentioned earlier. The address is: http://www.cddc.vt.edu . There is a listserv facility, to which subscribers are invited. The site also provides a hub for a Cyber Studies resources WebRing. This was begun in January 1998 and when visited in October 2001 it had links to a total of 48 sites spread over various countries, many of them referring to subdivisions of the general area as cybersociology and cyberanthropology.

One site is devoted to the topics of Gender, Sex and the Web, and a number of others make some reference to gender. A concern with gender is also apparent in many messages to the cyberspace-and-society listserv, and is somewhat surprising since Internet communications are on the whole irrespective of gender. The site with the heading of Gender, Sex and the Web has the address: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/so/gender.htm and has links to a very large number of other sites dealing with variations on the theme.

London-AI

This very useful facility, managed by Sunny Bains and operating as a list within the UK Mailbase, is undergoing changes. It obviously demands time and effort, and financial help to pay for assistance has been provided by The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). This was an unfair burden on members of AISB, since many subscribers to the list were not AISB members, and the arrangement has been discontinued. Attempts were made to find a way of continuing, but list subscribers did not rush to join the AISB, or even to send messages of support, when it was put to them that such action might save the London-AI list.

The demise of the London-AI list in its familiar form was announced by Sunny Bains in a message distributed to the list on 23rd October 2001. Fortunately there is an offer from Tom Smith of the University of Sussex to continue the facility using a WEB-based scheme that will operate with less manual effort. Details will be announced shortly. As Sunny Bains says: "It may take a while beforewe get a calendar as rich or diverse as it has been using the current method, but this seems the only possible compromise to shutting it down completely." She is to be thanked and congratulated for her efforts in establishing this valuable facility.

Cyrillic keyboard

Several of the main fonts provided with Windows have variants allowing for languages other than English, and alphabets other than the familiar Latin one. Windows can be set up to operate in any specified combination of languages, and the one in effect at any time is indicated in a corner of the screen and can be changed using the mouse pointer. The most-used printing fonts, including Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman, are provided in alternative versions, so that, besides for example the basic Arial there are variants Arial Cyrillic, Arial Turkish, Arial CE (for Central European) and so on.

Every font, including these variants, includes the English (Latin) alphabet as well as the necessary additional characters. In the case of a font with the appendage of Cyrillic, these include the complete Cyrillic alphabet. When the computer is set to work in Russian, one such font comes into use and the keyboard is made to refer to the Cyrillic characters. Both alphabets can be accessed from the keyboard, because the language setting can be freely switched between Russian and English. Characters can also be selected on- screen using the mouse pointer and the character map, but this is an extremely tedious way to input more than a few words.

Messages to be sent by e-mail can be made to use a Cyrillic font by entering the "Format" pull-down menu of Outlook Express, and then "Encoding" within it, and then "Cyrillic (Windows)", when the message is set up. (If the "reply" facility is used, and the incoming message was in a Cyrillic font, the new message automatically uses it also.)

A difficulty, however, is that the standard distribution of the Cyrillic letters over the keys has no relation to the familiar QWERTY keyboard. This is inconvenient for a user familiar only with the QWERTY layout, even if a keyboard is obtained that is labelled with both alphabets. An alternative is to alter the assignment of the Cyrillic letters to keys so that they are mapped, as far as possible, onto the letter of the English alphabet that sound most similar. A complete mapping is not possible since the Cyrillic alphabet has more letters than the English one, and some have to spill over onto non-alphabetic characters. Nevertheless, it is enormously easier to transfer from QWERTY to a homophonic or anglophonic keyboard than to the standard Cyrillic one.

Keyboard drivers that allow homophonic Cyrillic keyboards can be downloaded free of charge from: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/fonts/wincyrillic.html . A variety of options is offered and one that is certainly effective and convenient is a package called WinKey due to Gavin Helf. With this installed, double-clicking on its WinKey icon activates it (apparently remaining so until the computer is restarted). While WinKey is active and the system is set to operate in Russian the user has the choice of two keyboard layouts and can toggle between them by pressing the "scroll lock" key. One layout is homophonic Cyrillic and the other is the familiar QWERTY for the English alphabet, so that documents or messages that mix the alphabets are readily produced, slightly more conveniently than by switching the computer between languages, and with the advantage in some contexts that everything is done without leaving the "Cyrillic" font variant.

Alex M. Andrew