What can the French avant-garde teach us about search?

Alfred Jarry cycling. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

“What can the French avant-garde teach us about search?”. I spent the winter of 2015 through 2016 investigating this very question. From England to Virginia, in the halls of academia a small group of researchers have been diligently working away. Applying ideas from the French Playwright Alfred Jarry’s (Wikipedia,Jarry, 2017) canon of literature, they hope to find new, interesting ways of transforming the world of search.

Thus what could the results of a search engine such as http://pata.physics.wtf/ possibly mean for how we think about finding information on the web?

Why would searching for the word bicycle via this engine return images of a water bottle, key or tortilla chip jammed into somebody’s arm (give it a try and see what images come back)?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Since the early days of Google and Yahoo, our ability to search for data to answer questions or hone in on a topic in the wilds of the web has become ever more refined. But some, such as Professor Andrew Hugill (Wikipedia, Hugill, 2017), argue this has taken away from the explorative nature of early search engines.

How then have search engines like pata.physics.wtf challenged this world?

Enter ‘pataphysics.

‘Pataphysics: a science of imaginary solutions

The French playwright Alfred Jarry became infamous amongst the theatre goers of Belle poque Paris at the end of the 19th century. His plays were raucous affairs with the 1896 opening of the controversial Ubu Roi descending into riot as the final curtain went down.

Over the years, Jarry’s works, such as Dr Faustroll Pataphysician, would go onto explore a pseudo-philosophy he called ‘pataphysics.

‘Pataphysics (yes the ‘ belongs there) is often defined as:

“… the science of that which is super induced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. … ‘Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. ‘Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one. ” (Jarry 1996)

In essence, ‘pataphysics is a philosophy that looks at the exception, rather than the rule. Jarry and other followers of this ‘imaginary science’ constructed a number of categories of phenomena that help us to explain these exceptions. These can be summed up as:

Clinamen

The essence of a clinamen is a slight swerve from the norm. Canadian experimental poet Christian Bok defined the clinamen as: “the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest possible difference”. (Bok 2002).

For those familiar with Jarry’s work, his most notorious clinamen they are likely to have read is “merdre” a mutation of the French word merde (we leave it to you the reader to Google that term).

The addition of the ‘r’ has changed the original word to something that makes the original vulgar term sound even harsher in its native French. In the world of computing the clinamen has been realized in code form through the application the Damerau-Levenshtein distance, where changing 1 letter in a word reveals a different word with often considerable difference in meaning.

Syzygy

The syzygy has its root in the realm of astronomy. The term refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies such as the Sun and Earth being in conjunction with the Moon.

Outside of the field of astronomy the concept has been adopted by both poets and philosophers.

It is therefore not surprising that it has found its way from philosophy into ‘pataphysics where it is used in the context of a pun resulting in something unexpected.

An example of such a pun in the world of search is looking for the term “weed” and being presented with the word “band”. The user may have intended the initial search to mean an uncultivated plant growing in a flower patch. However by returning the word “band” the initial search term is thrown it into a different context. Now we have the initial word taking on the meaning drugs, and the result being either a reference to a rock band and associated drug use or a secondary meaning the prohibition of drugs.

Antinomy

Most readers will be familiar with the term antinomy as it is used to define the mutually exclusive. The term thus sums up symmetry and incompatibility. Examples include good and evil and plus and minus.

Synonym

Synonyms are of course two words that in essence mean the same thing. We might use the words ‘ground’ and ‘land’ in a synonymous fashion for example.

The beauty of synonyms is in their wordplay however. Two words can reference the same concept, but in fact have a difference in meaning. In our example ground and land can whilst being synonyms also be unrelated, where ground can mean to grind something up.

Anomaly

Jarry said ‘pataphysics is “the law that governs exceptions” and an anomaly is the disrupter of order, the exception that proves the rule.

If ‘pataphysics sees the world (a rule in itself) as a stream of unique events then surely an anomaly is an oxymoron? However it is here we find that the anomaly exists through contradicting itself. A anomaly therefore is a pataphysical exception within the rule that renders the rule no longer a rule.

It was from these categories that Hughill constructed the idea of patadata. This would be a ontological/taxonomic format for representing the association between a search term and a search result, with the results being one of the categories above.

Thus, rather than take an input term and find more relevant results, using a patadata structure we hope to return more explorative terms. Based upon Hugill’s paper ‘pataphysics and computing we can see an example of what such a result may look like:

Query = “Good” Patadata = [Fine(synonym), Evil(antinomy), Carrot(anomaly), Moral(syzygy), Hood(clinamen)]

This set can then be further used by a search engine to return links to a user based upon the five pataphysical categories. The result is a search experience quite different to that of a traditional search engine such as Google.

Early work has been done in implementing the ideas expressed by Andrew Hugill, Fania Raczinski, James Hendler and Johanna Drucker.

Zhang, Zou, Jing and Yang of Bath Spa University at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering presented an approach to incorporating pataphysical concepts with the semantic web. Their paper discussed the application of a pataphysical ontology in OWL format, with an MVC architecture as part of a General Framework of Creative Computing. (Zhang et al. 2016) This proposed structure would be built upon a Java and Apache Jena based stack, with a JSP, javascript, HTML and CSS front end.

For those interested in experimenting with these ideas at home however a simpler python approach is available.

Patalib a Python library for exploring ‘pataphysics

The Patalib Python package was a byproduct of the winter of research I conducted. It functions around the idea of using an English word list such as that found in linux and the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Each search class generates a JSON object in a format similar to Hugill’s patadata structure.

The libraries home page can be found hosted on GitHub at the following URL:

https://andydennis.github.io/patalib/

A packaged version of the library can also be installed via pip from pypi: