Jorn Barger
Encyclopedia
Jorn Barger is an American
blog
ger, best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web
" as he surfed. He has also written extensively on James Joyce
and artificial intelligence
, among other subjects; his writing is almost entirely self-published
.
, Ohio
, as the second child of Rex Barger and Criss Barger Stange, Jorn Barger spent his childhood in his hometown. At age 11 he got to use an early programmable digital computer, the Minivac 601
. His family moved to Bemus Point
, New York
, in 1966.
In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Sigmund Freud
, James Joyce
, and Jiddu Krishnamurti
. He graduated a year early, as valedictorian
from Maple Grove Jr.-Sr. High School in Bemus Point, then attended Jamestown Community College
, Antioch College
, New College of Florida
and University at Buffalo
without taking a degree. In 1973 he decided against a career in computing and "worked on self-discovery" instead for the next six years. During this period, in 1978, he lived for six months at The Farm
, Stephen Gaskin
's intentional community
in Tennessee
.
During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II
, the Commodore 64
, and the Atari 800. From 1989 to the end of 1992, Barger worked as a research programmer at Northwestern University
's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the artificial intelligence
researcher Roger Schank
. He is not known to have held regular employment since and supports himself with "odd bits of contract work."
Previously a longtime resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago
, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico
as of late 2003.
participant since 1989, with "nearly ten thousand postings" to his credit. He wrote early FAQ
s on ASCII art
, Kate Bush
, Thomas Pynchon
, and James Joyce
. In 1994 he formulated the "Inverse Law of Usenet
Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa." As an "unstoppable Usenet poster who could carry on simultaneous debates about Ibsen, Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and Kate Bush," he became an "online legend" who would also get cited in the national press as an expert on usenet.
, AI
, history
, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages.
On December 17, 1997, inspired by Dave Winer
's Scripting News and running on Winer's Frontier publishing software, Barger began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog in the hope of finding "an audience who might see the connections between [his] many interests." These postings featured "a list of links each day shaped by his own interests in the arts and technology," thus offering a "day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits" and coining the term "weblog" as as a novel form of web publishing. The term was shortened to "blog" by Peter Merholz in 1999.
Barger has also described his intentions in terms of exploration and discovery: to elucidate "what treasures were there" and to "make the web as a whole more transparent," a weblog needed to provide a constantly updated and well-described stream of the "best web links." Robot Wisdom's Net.literate portal, which started in July 1998, was a human-edited web directory
that served as a complement to Barger's weblog and aimed to provide the best links on a wide range of topics arranged in ten categories.
Robot Wisdom Weblog acquired a large and enthusiastic following: after a computing newsletter had celebrated the weblog as "offbeat," Village Voice described it as "one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web," The Guardian
called Barger "a highly observant and thoughtful surfer at work" and named his site "one of the most popular weblogs." InfoWorld
counted it among the very few weblogs that were "worth a visit," Brill's Content
claimed that it presented "news the way web pioneers envisioned it—hypertextual, wide-reaching, and exhaustive," Fast Company
called it "one of the best Web logs on the Net," Feed
wrote that the site was "frequented by thousands of the Net's most knowledgeable," Wired
hailed it as "one of the oldest and most popular weblogs," and The New Yorker
commended Barger's "healthy appetite for everything from literature to science," whereas The Register
found that "there's no better reader on the Internet than Jorn Barger." The contents of Robot Wisdom Weblog in its heyday have been recalled as a "mesmerizing sequence of arcana" and a "cornucopia of offbeat delights."
Barger has also been recognized for his contribution to the emergence of the blogosphere
. He was nominated among the "visionaries who changed the face of the Web in 1998" in CNET
's Web Innovator Awards for having "inspired the Web Log community." Barger's work has been judged "seminal," and he reportedly "set the tone for a million blogs to come." An ACM
paper discusses Barger and Chris Gulker
, along with other early bloggers such as Raphael Carter
, as the originators of blog
ging as a networked
practice.
In September 1999, Barger posted one of the first in-depth examinations of weblogs, the "Weblog FAQ," and he led a weblog forum between August 1999 and April 2000.
In December 1999, Barger linked to a passage by anti-zionist
critic Israel Shahak
, which drew a concerned response from a fellow blogger and led to allegations of anti-Semitism. Subsequently, criticism of Israel
and Judaism
became a staple of Robot Wisdom Weblog and the site came to carry slogans in the header banner, such as "judaism [sic] is racism is incompatible with democracy," that many readers and fellow bloggers found "objectionable." Along with a reduced posting schedule and intermittent cessation of updates after 2000, Barger's unexpected anti-Israel turn has been cited as a main contributing factor to a "slow fade-out" of the site's popularity and reputation.
In 2000 Barger felt he had exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began to explore the timeline
format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource.
Robot Wisdom has stopped updating or gone offline repeatedly for protracted periods of time. By December 2001, Barger was experiencing financial difficulties that he announced would cause an interruption in keeping Robot Wisdom online. The site then went offline for a couple of months. Barger allowed his domain registration to lapse in early 2005, but managed to bring the site back online a few weeks later. Robot Wisdom went offline again in late January 2007. On 10 February, Barger placed a note on his Robot Wisdom Auxiliary weblog soliciting $10 (US) donations, payable to his web host, to help "save robotwisdom.com". By 12 February, Robotwisdom.com was online again.
Barger has experimented with Robot Wisdom as a revenue
-generator, soliciting advertisements in 2000, and, in 2005, donations via PayPal, yet never made "any money from his Web log."
Since October 2006, Barger has maintained the Robot Wisdom Auxiliary "to supplement the Robot Wisdom link blog." Barger also started a weblog called Canon 2.0 on Blogger
. The datestamps on both these blogs seem to end in October 2008, though it is possible that Barger is setting his posts to this date. Barger now maintains a Twitter
account as @robotwisdom.
of human emotions." In the late 1970s, Barger devised a theoretical methodology that demanded hypotheses be expressed as computer simulations, and that the simulations be refined by analyzing literary descriptions of human behavior. He called this method "Robot Wisdom".
and the masterworks of James Joyce
," whom he refers to as a master of descriptive psychology. He has studied Joyce's notebooks and manuscripts for Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake
, which in 1994 made him "the only critic who has seriously studied the material aspects of [Joyce's] notebooks." He has also prepared an online "shorter" annotated version of Finnegans Wake. Barger's website has been cited for "extensive research into the Ulysses and Finnegans Wake manuscripts," yet very little of this work has passed academic peer review. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is agreed upon by Joyce scholars and what is Barger's conjecture. Barger seemed to acknowledge this when he published his list of "50+ Joycean Conjectures".
Barger has contributed one book chapter on Finnegans Wake
and a book review in the James Joyce Quarterly.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger, best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
" as he surfed. He has also written extensively on James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
, among other subjects; his writing is almost entirely self-published
Self-publishing
Self-publishing is the publication of any book or other media by the author of the work, without the involvement of an established third-party publisher. The author is responsible and in control of entire process including design , formats, price, distribution, marketing & PR...
.
Life
Born 1953 in Yellow SpringsYellow Springs, Ohio
Yellow Springs is a village in Greene County, Ohio, United States, and is the location of Antioch College and Antioch University Midwest. The population was 3,487 at the 2010 census...
, Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
, as the second child of Rex Barger and Criss Barger Stange, Jorn Barger spent his childhood in his hometown. At age 11 he got to use an early programmable digital computer, the Minivac 601
Minivac 601
Minivac 601 Digital Computer Kit was an electromechanical digital computer product created by Claude Shannon and sold by Scientific Development Corporation as early as 1961 as an educational kit for digital circuits. It used electrical relays as logic switches and for storage...
. His family moved to Bemus Point
Bemus Point, New York
Bemus Point is a village in Chautauqua County, New York, United States. The village is within the Town of Ellery and located along the eastern shore of Chautauqua Lake. The population was 340 at the 2000 census...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, in 1966.
In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, and Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti or J. Krishnamurti or , was a renowned writer and speaker on philosophical and spiritual subjects. His subject matter included: psychological revolution, the nature of the mind, meditation, human relationships, and bringing about positive change in society...
. He graduated a year early, as valedictorian
Valedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
from Maple Grove Jr.-Sr. High School in Bemus Point, then attended Jamestown Community College
Jamestown Community College
Jamestown Community College is a two-year college in the SUNY system. JCC has two campuses in Chautauqua County, New York, located in Dunkirk and Jamestown. A third campus serves Cattaraugus County in Olean. A fourth site is located in Warren, Pennsylvania...
, Antioch College
Antioch College
Antioch College is a private, independent liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, United States. It was the founder and the flagship institution of the six-campus Antioch University system. Founded in 1852 by the Christian Connection, the college began operating in 1853 with politician and...
, New College of Florida
New College of Florida
New College of Florida is a public liberal arts college located in Sarasota, Florida. It was founded originally as a private institution and is now an autonomous honors college of the State University System of Florida.-History:...
and University at Buffalo
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...
without taking a degree. In 1973 he decided against a career in computing and "worked on self-discovery" instead for the next six years. During this period, in 1978, he lived for six months at The Farm
The Farm (Tennessee)
The Farm is an intentional community in Lewis County, Tennessee, near the town of Summertown, Tennessee, based on principles of nonviolence and respect for the Earth. It was founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and 320 San Francisco hippies; The Farm is well known amongst hippies and other members of...
, Stephen Gaskin
Stephen Gaskin
Stephen Gaskin is a counterculture hippie icon best known for his presence in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s and for co-founding "The Farm", a famous spiritual intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee...
's intentional community
Intentional community
An intentional community is a planned residential community designed to have a much higher degree of teamwork than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They...
in Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
.
During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
, the Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
, and the Atari 800. From 1989 to the end of 1992, Barger worked as a research programmer at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
researcher Roger Schank
Roger Schank
Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.-Academic career:...
. He is not known to have held regular employment since and supports himself with "odd bits of contract work."
Previously a longtime resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico
Socorro, New Mexico
Socorro is a city in Socorro County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It stands in the Rio Grande Valley at an elevation of . The population was 9,051 at the 2010 census...
as of late 2003.
Usenet
Barger has been an active UsenetUsenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
participant since 1989, with "nearly ten thousand postings" to his credit. He wrote early FAQ
FAQ
Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...
s on ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
, Kate Bush
Kate Bush
Kate Bush is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush topped the UK Singles Chart...
, Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, and James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
. In 1994 he formulated the "Inverse Law of Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa." As an "unstoppable Usenet poster who could carry on simultaneous debates about Ibsen, Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and Kate Bush," he became an "online legend" who would also get cited in the national press as an expert on usenet.
Weblog
Barger started his Robot Wisdom site in February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James JoyceJames Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, AI
Ai
AI, A.I., Ai, or ai may refer to:- Computers :* Artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science* Ad impression, in online advertising* .ai, the ISO Internet 2-letter country code for Anguilla...
, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages.
On December 17, 1997, inspired by Dave Winer
Dave Winer
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting...
's Scripting News and running on Winer's Frontier publishing software, Barger began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog in the hope of finding "an audience who might see the connections between [his] many interests." These postings featured "a list of links each day shaped by his own interests in the arts and technology," thus offering a "day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits" and coining the term "weblog" as as a novel form of web publishing. The term was shortened to "blog" by Peter Merholz in 1999.
Barger has also described his intentions in terms of exploration and discovery: to elucidate "what treasures were there" and to "make the web as a whole more transparent," a weblog needed to provide a constantly updated and well-described stream of the "best web links." Robot Wisdom's Net.literate portal, which started in July 1998, was a human-edited web directory
Web directory
A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links....
that served as a complement to Barger's weblog and aimed to provide the best links on a wide range of topics arranged in ten categories.
Robot Wisdom Weblog acquired a large and enthusiastic following: after a computing newsletter had celebrated the weblog as "offbeat," Village Voice described it as "one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web," The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
called Barger "a highly observant and thoughtful surfer at work" and named his site "one of the most popular weblogs." InfoWorld
InfoWorld
InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG...
counted it among the very few weblogs that were "worth a visit," Brill's Content
Steven Brill (law writer)
Steven Brill is the founder of CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine. He also founded the failed Verified Identity Pass, Inc., the New York-based company that operated the Clear airport security fast-pass. The service abruptly shut down June 23, 2009, without any notice to the company's 260,000...
claimed that it presented "news the way web pioneers envisioned it—hypertextual, wide-reaching, and exhaustive," Fast Company
Fast Company (magazine)
Fast Company is a full-color business magazine that releases 10 issues per year and reports on topics including innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design, and social responsibility...
called it "one of the best Web logs on the Net," Feed
Feed Magazine
Feed or feedmag.com was one of the earliest e-zines that relied entirely on its original online content. Feed was founded by Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson in 1995, and soon found a devoted online following. The zine had daily content, and focused on media, pop culture, technology, science and...
wrote that the site was "frequented by thousands of the Net's most knowledgeable," Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
hailed it as "one of the oldest and most popular weblogs," and The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
commended Barger's "healthy appetite for everything from literature to science," whereas The Register
The Register
The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...
found that "there's no better reader on the Internet than Jorn Barger." The contents of Robot Wisdom Weblog in its heyday have been recalled as a "mesmerizing sequence of arcana" and a "cornucopia of offbeat delights."
Barger has also been recognized for his contribution to the emergence of the blogosphere
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
. He was nominated among the "visionaries who changed the face of the Web in 1998" in CNET
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
's Web Innovator Awards for having "inspired the Web Log community." Barger's work has been judged "seminal," and he reportedly "set the tone for a million blogs to come." An ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
paper discusses Barger and Chris Gulker
Chris Gulker
Christian Frederick Gulker was an American photographer, programmer, writer, and pioneer in electronic publishing....
, along with other early bloggers such as Raphael Carter
Raphael Carter
Raphael Carter is an American science fiction author whose work, while sparse, has met with considerable acclaim.-Work:Carter's first novel, the postcyberpunk The Fortunate Fall was well received...
, as the originators of blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging as a networked
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
practice.
In September 1999, Barger posted one of the first in-depth examinations of weblogs, the "Weblog FAQ," and he led a weblog forum between August 1999 and April 2000.
In December 1999, Barger linked to a passage by anti-zionist
Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionistic views or opposition to the state of Israel. The term is used to describe various religious, moral and political points of view in opposition to these, but their diversity of motivation and expression is sufficiently different that "anti-Zionism" cannot be...
critic Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak was a Polish-born Israeli professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known especially as a radical political thinker, author, and civil rights activist. Between 1970-1990, he was president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and was an outspoken critic...
, which drew a concerned response from a fellow blogger and led to allegations of anti-Semitism. Subsequently, criticism of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
became a staple of Robot Wisdom Weblog and the site came to carry slogans in the header banner, such as "judaism [sic] is racism is incompatible with democracy," that many readers and fellow bloggers found "objectionable." Along with a reduced posting schedule and intermittent cessation of updates after 2000, Barger's unexpected anti-Israel turn has been cited as a main contributing factor to a "slow fade-out" of the site's popularity and reputation.
In 2000 Barger felt he had exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began to explore the timeline
Chronology
Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...
format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource.
Robot Wisdom has stopped updating or gone offline repeatedly for protracted periods of time. By December 2001, Barger was experiencing financial difficulties that he announced would cause an interruption in keeping Robot Wisdom online. The site then went offline for a couple of months. Barger allowed his domain registration to lapse in early 2005, but managed to bring the site back online a few weeks later. Robot Wisdom went offline again in late January 2007. On 10 February, Barger placed a note on his Robot Wisdom Auxiliary weblog soliciting $10 (US) donations, payable to his web host, to help "save robotwisdom.com". By 12 February, Robotwisdom.com was online again.
Barger has experimented with Robot Wisdom as a revenue
Revenue
In business, revenue is income that a company receives from its normal business activities, usually from the sale of goods and services to customers. In many countries, such as the United Kingdom, revenue is referred to as turnover....
-generator, soliciting advertisements in 2000, and, in 2005, donations via PayPal, yet never made "any money from his Web log."
Since October 2006, Barger has maintained the Robot Wisdom Auxiliary "to supplement the Robot Wisdom link blog." Barger also started a weblog called Canon 2.0 on Blogger
Blogger (service)
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
. The datestamps on both these blogs seem to end in October 2008, though it is possible that Barger is setting his posts to this date. Barger now maintains a Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
account as @robotwisdom.
Artificial Intelligence
Barger attempts to "map out a programmable taxonomyTaxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
of human emotions." In the late 1970s, Barger devised a theoretical methodology that demanded hypotheses be expressed as computer simulations, and that the simulations be refined by analyzing literary descriptions of human behavior. He called this method "Robot Wisdom".
On James Joyce
Barger seeks to establish a "connection between artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and the masterworks of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
," whom he refers to as a master of descriptive psychology. He has studied Joyce's notebooks and manuscripts for Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
and Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
, which in 1994 made him "the only critic who has seriously studied the material aspects of [Joyce's] notebooks." He has also prepared an online "shorter" annotated version of Finnegans Wake. Barger's website has been cited for "extensive research into the Ulysses and Finnegans Wake manuscripts," yet very little of this work has passed academic peer review. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is agreed upon by Joyce scholars and what is Barger's conjecture. Barger seemed to acknowledge this when he published his list of "50+ Joycean Conjectures".
Barger has contributed one book chapter on Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
and a book review in the James Joyce Quarterly.
Autobiographical postings
Over the years, Barger has posted a number of autobiographical accounts. These include the following works:-
External links
- @robotwisdom Jorn Barger's Twitter feed
- Shared Items , Jorn Barger's Google reader feed (August 2009 - today)
- Robot Wisdom auxiliary, Jorn Barger's weblog (October 2006 - October 2008)
- Robot Wisdom, Jorn Barger's personal website (February 1995 - October 2006)