purple motes

Anyone can now make and distribute video world-wide at zero incremental cost.  That's a mind-boggling video communication revolution.

Google's recent heroic effort to count the number of books that have been published around the world shows how scarce video has been.  Google estimates tomes -- symbolically distinguished, printed and bound works -- to number 146 million.  Google also estimates the number of video works in library catalogs to be about 2 million.[*]  Hence the number of video works equals less than 2% of the number of tomes that the world's libraries hold.

Other public library statistics indicate popular interest in video.  U.S. public libraries' video holdings amounted in 2008 to 5.4% of total items held.   These item counts include duplicates of works within a library and across libraries.  The higher video item share compared to the video work share suggests that U.S. libraries include more duplicate video items than duplicate print items from the world population of tomes and videos.  Moreover, U.S. libraries' video circulation accounts for about 30% of total item circulation in 2010.   The higher circulation share compared to item share for videos indicates that videos are borrowed more frequently than other items.

Public library holdings represent institutionally authorized items.  Commercial video rentals, which are about five times as numerous as video borrowing from public libraries, are institutionally authorized through a different process than are public library holdings.   The vast video libraries on YouTube and other video sharing sites typically have little institutional authorization.  Institutions are as much a part of reality as is human nature.   Institutions change much more rapidly than human nature, but much more slowly than human behavior.  Public libraries as institutions almost surely will endure.  But the share of video works distributed through public libraries probably will increase greatly.

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[*] These are rough, imperfect estimates, but they seem to be the best available data-based figures that currently exist.  Complaining about statistics is easy.   Analyzing data and calculating statistics are difficult, but useful.

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More than a third of all Skype calling minutes are in video calls.  The share of Skype video in Skype calling minutes is higher in higher income countries.  One interpretation of these statistics is that as income increases, users move from basic communication to richer, video communication.[1]  Video calling with Skype suggests a bright future for personal video calling.

Skype calls, however, are not representative of general calling patterns.  Skype calls typically involve a large, stationary screen (personal computer screen) rather than a small, hand-held screen (phone display).   Faces, particularly eyes, are important features in communication.  The large, stationary screen is easier to use for face-based video communication.  In addition,  Skype calls are much more likely to be long-distance / international than are calls in general.[2]   Seeing the face of a distant friend or relative might be a motivation for video calling.  But persons who see each other regularly can more easily synthesize within their brains the faces of the family and friends with whom they talk over the phone.  Hence face-oriented video calling may be less attractive among persons who regularly see each other in person.

The iPhone 4's Facetime video communication service seems to be designed for communicating faces.  Even with the iPhone 4's record-breaking sales and Facetime's potential for developing open industry standards for mobile video calling, communicating faces with mobile video calling is no sure bet for a viable business.  Some speculate that Facetime is actually a Trojan Horse VoIP service.

Watch the gestures and hand positions involved in using Facetime.  The gestures and hand positions are remarkably awkward and unnatural.   Switching from the front-facing camera to the rear-facing camera is a completely bizarre visual gesture.   Moreover, it emphasizes the way that the iPhone flattens the visual field.

A better designed show-and-tell communicator would facilitate naturally pointing and moving the visual field.   Gestures and bodily movement add much to communication beyond the showing of faces.

Notes:

[1] Sten Tamkivi, General Manger, Skype Estonia, stated this fact in his presentation at eComm Europe 2009, Amersterdam, Oct. 28-30 (presentation transcript).  In an interview on May 7, 2010, Skype CEO Josh Silverman stated that more than a third of Skype calling minutes are video minutes.  Tamkivi discusses the correlation between Skype video calling and country income.

[2] Telegeography recently reported that Skype accounts for 12% of all international calling minutes.  According to Telegeography, international calling totaled about 400 billion minutes in 2009.   These figures suggest about 50 billion international Skype minutes.  Figures for total Skype minutes in 2009 range from roughly 25 billion to 100 billion (for the later figure, see Tamkivi presentation).   Note that conversation / traffic minutes  are one-half of end-user minutes, while the definition of minutes in reported statistics often isn't specified.   In any case, Skype international calling minutes probably account for considerably more than 50% of all Skype minutes.  In the U.S., wireline international calling minutes account for about 3% of all wireline toll minutes (see Table 14.1 in FCC, Trends 2008).  Toll minutes account for roughly 20% of all calling minutes (see ARMIS data, table 4).   Roaming minutes account for about 6% of all wireless minutes.  Hence international minutes probably account for less than 1% of all minutes for U.S. wireline and wireless phones.

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Long before YouTube, television, and even magic lantern shows, storytellers used sequences of painted images as part of their storytelling performances.  Storytelling as a service that non-elite itinerants hawked on the street probably arose with the concentration of person in cities, occupational differentiation, and the development of a currency.  As the business of storytelling became more competitive, adding painted images to storytelling is a plausible business strategy.  Painted images would be a capital investment for a storyteller.  That investment would enhance and differentiate a storytelling performance, and also increase barriers to entry for others to create a similar performance.

Over the past millennium, pictorial storytelling seems to have been practiced in Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, across central and south Asia, Mesopotamia, Northern Africa, and through to Western Europe.   The Hamzanama is a lavish artifact of pictorial storytelling from the 16'th-century Mughal Empire under Akbar.  However, pictorial storytelling was typically a low-status, popular practice.   Hence one should expect it to be relatively poorly documented in the (elite) historical record.  Japanese picture storytelling called kamishibai achieved huge popularity in mid-twentieth-century Japan.  Kamishibai was technologically possible across Asia three thousand years earlier.  Large scrolls or sheets containing multiple images arranged across a single surface provide a cheaper means for displaying multiple images.  A variety of evidence exists for the use of such technology in pictorial storytelling. [1]

Manuscripts found in Dunhuang (northwestern China) indicate that a vibrant trade in pictorial storytelling existed in China about 1200 years ago.  Among the 40,000 manuscripts found at Dunhuang are a small number of non-canonical, non-classical, non-documentary texts.  These manuscripts, which are called bian-wen, are vernacular Chinese narratives with Buddhist themes.  Relatively unskilled lay scribes wrote the bian-wen.  They typically have alternating prose and verse, and they are linked to secular, professional pictorial storytelling.[2]  References to pictures seem to be coded with the conventional phrase "this is the place" (ch'u):

Look at the place where Maudgalyāyana sits meditating deep in the mountains -- how is it?

This is the place where he goes forward and asks the reasons for this situation [3]

A similar coding occurs in Indian pictorial storytelling, which probably was an important source for bian-wen.  Moreover, the same phrase ch'u appears in cartouches in Dunhuang wall paintings showing scenes in stories.[4]

A similar implicit deictic in Jewish and Christian sacred texts suggests an earlier practice of pictorial storytelling.  In Hebrew scripture, in both narrative and in prophetic passages, the Hebrew word hen/hinnē (variously translated into English as "behold," "look," and "see") marks passages:

And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth...." (Gen 1:29)

Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14) [5]

A similar marker occurs in Christian scripture, both in quotations of Hebrew scripture and in new text.[6]  Scholars do not understand clearly the textual function of this marker. Perhaps it is a legacy of early pictorial storytelling.[7]  In any case, in subsequent Christian devotional art, scenes marked in this way -- the Annunciation ("Behold the handmaid of the Lord") and the presentation of the scourged Christ ("Behold the man") -- became highly popular.

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Notes:

[1] See Mair (1988), which describes pictorial storytelling historically across Asia and Europe.  Sequential image art (narrative art) has been attested in an early Mesopotamian city about 5000 years ago.  Hellenistic epigrams artfully manipulated the narrative framework of Greek sculpture and paintings.  While pictorial storytelling is related to these forms, pictorial storytelling involves using oral narrative and pictures to perform stories for a popular audience.  By popular audience, I mean low-status persons attracted to the performance by its personal appeal to them.

[2] Mair (1988), esp. Ch. 4, describes Dunhuang bian-wen.  Mair transliterates bian-wen as pien-wen and Dunhuang as Tun-Huang. Mair also calls bian-wen / pien-wen "transformation texts."

[3] From Dunhuang, Transformation Text on Mahamaudgalyayana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld (S2614), trans. Mair (1983) pp. 90, 92.

[4] Mair (1989) pp. 73-4.  Mair (1995) pp. 33-4 notes that shih ("the time when...") is more common on Dunhuang wall paintings.  He observes:

Genres which use shih as their narrative marker would appear to have a closer affinity to textual and doctrinal sources, whereas those which use ch'u as their narrataive marker seem to be based more on illustrations and the oral tales that accompanied them.  .. in general, the shih ("time when...") type belonged to the religieux and their patrons, while the ch'u ("place where...") type belonged to the folk.

[5] Trans. King James Version (KJV).  Isaksson (2000) p. 388 reports 1,157 occurrences of hen/hinnē in Hebrew scripture.  KJV regularly translates these words as "behold," which occurs 1,104 times in the KJV of Hebrew scripture.

[6] The Hebrew hen/hinnē is translated into Greek as idou/ide, and into Latin as ecce.  In English translations, it becomes "behold," "look," see."  Modern English translations tend to smooth over the supra-textual, implicitly deitic aspect of this marker.  Isaksson (2000), p. 389, notes:

The effect of the particle hinnē is that the chain of events in the main narrative thread is interrupted, a dissociation is introduced, and the following text is marked as an impression of some kind, not necessarily visual. ... We could say that hinnē as a macro-syntactic marker tells the reader or listener, "Be watchful now, the narrative chain is being interrupted by an impression, but only temporarily, it will soon be continued!"

This marker occurs 222 times in Christian New Testament scripture.   It occurs mainly in the Gospels and in Revelation (170 occurrences in total).  That it is not common in the genre of letters suggests its performative associations.

[7] That each instance of hen/hinnē and idou/ide in Jewish and Christian scripture was associated with an image that a storyteller displayed seems highly unlikely.  It is much more plausible that the source of this textual convention was pictorial storytelling in the highly competitive verbal markets of the Hellenistic world.

References:

Isaksson, Bo. 2000. "Expression of evidentiality in two Semitic languages -- Hebrew and Arabic."  In Johanson, Lars, and Bo Utas. 2000. Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and neighbouring languages. Empirical approaches to language typology, 24. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyterj, pp. 383-400.

Mair, Victor H. 1983. Tun-huang popular narratives. Cambridge studies in Chinese history, literature, and institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mair, Victor H. 1988. Painting and performance: Chinese picture recitation and its Indian genesis. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Mair, Victor H. 1989. T'ang transformation texts: a study of the Buddhist contribution to the rise of vernacular fiction and drama in China. Cambridge, Mass: Council of East Asian studies, Harvard University by the Harvard University Press.

Mair, Victor H. 1995.  "Sariputra Defeats the Six Heterodox Masters: Oral-Visual Aspects of an Illustrated Transformation Scroll (P4524)."  Asia Major v. 8, n. 2, pp. 1-55.

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Dale Purves' Lab provides profound and accessible teaching on the function of biological sensory systems.   The point of biological sensory systems is not to perceive accurately the real world, but to respond successfully in the circumstances in which the organism has evolved and lives.  Phylogenetic and ontogenetic experiences determine perception-action cycles, which are empirical sensory responses.   The common knowledge necessary for inter-subjective communication comes from the one real world and the shared phylogenetic and ontogenetic experiences of organism in that one common world.

But don't merely ponder my representation of Dale Purves' research.   Play around with his online demonstrations and see for yourself.

Additional note:  Purves appends to the bottom of his resources list a note and some additional references under the title "Opinions about this approach to vision."  The note states in part:

It seems only fair to warn those interested in the merits of the general approach to vision outlined here that opinion has been divided about this work. In fact, the majority opinion, to judge from numerous anonymous and a number of signed reviews, has been quite negative. ...  Of course, people should make up their own minds, but it would be misleading to present the material, ideas, and demonstrations here without calling attention to their controversial nature.

There can be no more convincing testimony to the greatness of a scientist's work.

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Real-time personal visual communication devices have not been commercially successful.  3G mobile video calling seems to have been a flop.  Real-time visual communication isn't a feature understood in marketing mobile communication devices.  Is real-time personal visual communication a dead-end in the communications industry?

Recent research highlights the value of conveying movement in personal communication.  Researchers Douglas Cunningham and Christian Wallraven compared faces represented as vertices, connected vertices, and surface-modeled, connected vertices.  Reducing the number of vertices tended to degrade recognition of facial expressions in static representations of all three model types.  But if expressive movement was incorporated in the models, reducing the number of vertices more than a hundred-fold (from 15,726 to 127) had little effect on expression recognition.  Moreover, with movement represented, models with vertices-only performed about as well as surface-modeled, connected vertices.  In addition, reducing the screen size of the representations from 512x384 pixels to 128x96 had little effect on expression recognition.[1]   Simple, small, point-light displays that represent movement are efficient means for conveying facial expressions and emotions more generally.

Additional research shows that movement conveys information not present in static images.  Actors performed realistic expressions of nine conversational emotions: agree, disagree, happy, sad, clueless (don't know the answer), thinking, confused (don't understand question), disgust, and pleasantly surprised.  Cunningham and Wallraven tested persons' ability to recognize (in a 10-alternative, non-forced-choice task) recordings of these expressions: a video sequence running from neutral expression to peak expression, and a static image at peak expression.  The over-all accuracy of recognition was significantly higher for the video sequence  than for the static image (78% versus 52% correct identification). [2]

A variety of additional experiments further identified the value of movement.  Cunningham and Wallraven reduced the video sequence to the last 16 frames and expanded the static presentation to those sixteen frames temporally sequenced in an over-all image grid.  Participants significantly more accurately recognized facial expressions in the dynamic 16-frame presentation than in the static 16-frame grid (roughly 75% to 60%).  Scrambling the order of the frames in video presentations roughly eliminated the advantage of video.  Playing the video backwards significantly lessened the accuracy of expression recognition.  At least 100 milliseconds of temporarly integrated, forward-sequenced images seems necessary to capture the value of movement information for recognizing facial expressions.[3]

Video news channels illustrate the communicative power of facial movement.  Try watching a major, anchor-based news broadcast with the sound turned off.  The facial expressions of news anchors are quite extraordinary.  They intently focus their eyes straight out at the viewer, exaggerate head movements and facial gestures, sharply punctuate their facial gestures with pauses and rapid dynamics, and expressively communicate concern and urgency as they report a father discovering a man hiding in the bushes and looking into his daughter's bedroom.   The news anchors' facial expressions powerfully attract viewers' attention and shape viewers' emotional responses.

The rapid take-up of iPhones demonstrates that good device design can transform a broad product space.  Smart phones, e-readers, and various other electronic devices are proliferating.  At least one informed industry participant sees a bright future for see-what-I-see communications devices.   Developing a real-time visual communications device will require considerable innovation in device design.  But with a good biological and ecological design, such a device could have a major impact on the communications industry.

Notes:

[1] See Cunningham, Douglas W. and Christian Wallraven.   The interaction between motion and form in expression recognition. Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV 2009), 41-44. (Eds.) Mania, K., B. E. Riecke, S. N. Spencer, B. Bodenheimer, C. O‘Sullivan, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA (2009).  These findings don't imply that video quality matters little.   Rather, they point to the importance of a biologically and ecologically informed analysis of video quality.  A point-light display provides a high-fidelity representation of a small number of points of motion.

[2] See Cunningham, D. W. & Wallraven, C. (2009). Dynamic information for the recognition of conversational expressions. Journal of Vision, 9(13):7, 1-17, http://journalofvision.org/9/13/7/, doi:10.1167/9.13.7.  The advantage of video depends significantly on the specific conversational expression.  Video is hugely advantageous for communicating agree and disagree.  That's probably because slight head movements vertically and horizontally, respectively, tend to characterize these expressions.  Happiness, in contrast, was the only expression correctly identified significantly more accurately with a static presentation than with a video presentation.  Compared to a static expression of happiness, a video expression of happiness may be more extensively interpreted, e.g. as actually indicating deception or manipulation.   The experimental determination of correct interpretation doesn't control for different levels of interpretation.

[3] Id.

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Jacob of Serugh recounted a story about some youths from Ephesus in a homily early in the sixth century.  That story spread widely by early in the seventh century.  Themes of the story are shunning false gods, faithfulness despite persecution and hardships, God's care for believers, resurrection of the dead, and the future godly world.  Controversy arose over story details: the number of youths, the youths' names, the number of years that they slept, their dog's name, and their dog's color.   Endless arguments over pointless issues seems to be a deep characteristic of mass communication.

Written works and visual works offer different possibilities in factual disputes.  Regarding the number of youths, the Qur'an (18:22) states:

(Some) say they were three, the dog being the fourth among them; (others) say they were five, the dog being the sixth,- doubtfully guessing at the unknown; (yet others) say they were seven, the dog being the eighth. Say thou: "My Lord knoweth best their number; It is but few that know their (real case)." Enter not, therefore, into controversies concerning them, except on a matter that is clear

Paintings of the companions of the cave became popular among Christians and Muslims.  Unlike verbal accounts, such a painting necessarily takes a position on the number of companions in the cave.  Both the Christian and Islamic story traditions converged on seven sleepers in the cave.[1]  Visual images easily remained blank about the names of the sleepers and how long they slept.  These details continued to be verbally disputed.[2]

The dog's color and name remained disputed details in different senses.  Jacob of Serugh's homily didn't mention a dog.  However, his homily stated that God cared for the youths in the cave:

The Lord saw the faith of the beloved lambs,
and He came to give a good wage for their recompense.
He took their spirits and brought them up to heaven,
and He left a watcher to be the guardian of their limbs.[3]

The figure of the watcher wasn't specified.  The Qur'an, however, describes "their dog stretching forth his two fore-legs on the threshold" (18:18).  Islamic tradition records controversy over the dog's color and the dog's name :

"...Muhammad, my beloved one, told me ['Ali] that the dog was piebald with black, and his name was Qitmir."

The Master said that scholars have differed about the color of the dog of the People of the Cave.  Ibn 'Abbas said that it was spotted; Muqatil said that it was yellow; Muhammad b. Ka'b that because of its deep redness and yellowness it shaded into red; al-Kalbi said that its color was like snow. Some said, the color of a cat; others, the color of heaven. They also differed about its name. It has been related from 'Ali that its name was Rayyan, but Ibn 'Abbas said it was Qitmir, and this is one of the tales of from 'Ali.  Shu'ayb al-Juba'i said that its name was Hamra, and al-Awza'i that it was Natwa. Ibn Fathawayh has informed us, on the authority of Abu Hanifa, that the name of their dog was Qitmur, others say Qitfir.  Abu 'Ali al-Zuhri told me, transmitting it from Ibn 'Abbas regarding His word, "It is few that know," (18.22) ... the dog's name was Qitmir, a spotted dog, bigger than a Qalati, and smaller than a Karaki.[4]

While a painting can easily have no position on the dog's name, a color-painted image, unlike a verbal account, necessarily has a particular color for the dog.  Yet the history of colored images shows that the colors used often were not significant.   That seems to have been the case in the Islamic tradition of the "Companions of the Cave". From sixteenth and seventeenth century Iran and Turkey, "Campanion of the Cave" images show a brown dog, a white dog with light golden spots, an all-white dog, and a dog with a darker color value than the painting's white.[5]  The dog's color seems to have remained a disputed detail.

The sixteenth-century Persian dispersed Falnama demonstrates vigorous assertion of disputed details.  A Falnama pairs an image with an augury text.  The dispersed Falnama's "Companions of the Cave" image shows seven sleepers and a dog.  The dog is white with light golden spots.  The associated augury text declares:

O augury user, know that the cavern of the People of the Cave and the sign of the sheepdog that accompanied them (according to the theologians and historians, the name of that dog is recorded as Qitmir) and the pursuit by the king of the age Daqyanus [Decianus, a Latin form for Decius] and their abiding in secure and tranquil protection and being rescued from the wickedness of the enemy have appeared in your augury.[6]

Even apart from the parenthetical specification of the dog's name, the description of the image is longer than usual in augury texts.  The parenthetical text doesn't mention that number of sleepers, which was a disputed issue among the Qur'an's first audience.  It doesn't mention the color of the dog, a point of disagreement in sixteenth-century Iran and a point directly relevant to the painting.   Asserting the name of the dog in the augury seems like petty, scholarly point-scoring.  But it's also an enduring practice of mass communication.

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For some related discussion, see my review of the Sacker Gallery's exhibition, Falnama: Book of Omens.

Notes:

[1] Tabarī , a pioneering early-tenth-century Islamic historian, recorded nine sleepers.  See Brinner (2002) p. 696, n. 4.    However, Milstein (1998) p. 152, notes that among a collection of twenty-one illustrated, sixteenth-century "Stories of the Prophets" (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓) manuscripts, all depict seven young men.  The sixteenth-century, Persian dispersed Falnama, the sixteenth-century Topkapı Persian Falnama, and sixteenth-century Safavid-Ottoman Dresden Falnama all depict seven companions in the cave.  In the Christian tradition, the story became known as the "Seven Sleepers of Ephesus."  Hence the disputed number of sleepers was transformed into an identifying description.

[2] Tabarī and al-Thaʻlabī, an eleventh-century Islamic scholar, have different names.  See Brinner (2002) pp. 694, 696, inc. n. 4., 712.   Id., p. 696 n. 4, also lists different names in the Christian story tradition.  For an additional set of different names in the thirteenth century, see the Seven Sleepers in Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend.  Voragine reports claims that they sleep 362 years and asserts instead that they slept 208 years.  On the sixth-century dispute over years slept, see Griffith (2006) p. 129.  Recognizing the disputes over years in the cave, the Qur'an declares, "(Allah) knows best how long they stayed" (18:26).

[3] From Jacob of Serugh's homily, "Youths of Ephesus."  Excerpt trans. in Griffith (2006) p. 123.  Jacob is also written as James, and Serugh as Saruq or Sarug.

[4] al-Thaʻlabī, trans. in Brinner (2002) p. 696.

[5] Brown dog: Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, pers. 54, dated 989 AH (1581 GC), color print in Milstein (1998) Plate XX.  White, golden-spotted dog: dispersed Falnama, color print in Farhad and Bağcı (2009) p. 160.  All-white dog: Topkapı Persian Falnama, TSM H.1702, color print in Farhad and Bağcı (2009) p. 32.  Darker-than-white dog: Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓ , at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, ms. Diez A Fol. 3, dated 984 AH (1577 GC), monochrome reproduction in Milstein (1998) Fig. 7.   The Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi B. 249 shows a white-toned dog in the monochrome reproduction in Milstein (1998) Fig. 31.

[6] Trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston, in Farhad and Bağcı (2009), Appendix A.1,  p. 260.

References:

Brinner, William, trans. 2002. ʻArāʻis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā, or, Lives of the prophets as recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʻlabī. Leiden: Brill.

Farhad, Massumeh with Serpil Bağcı. 2009. Falnama: the Book of Omens Washinton, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Griffith, Sydney. 2007. "Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur'an: The 'Companions of the Cave' in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition," in Gabriel Said Reynolds, ed., The Qur'an in its Historical Context. New York: Routledge, pp. 109-40.

Milstein, Rachel, Karin Rührdanz, and Barbara Schmitz. 1998. Stories of the prophets: illustrated manuscripts of Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓. Costa Mesa, Calif: Mazda Publishers.

Image credit: detail, "People of the Cave," from the dispersed Falnama;  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1935, ELS2009.5.16.

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Today, even on the Internet, horoscopes consists of a few brief sentences.  That's a form auspicious for the economics of print newspapers, which are now dying.  For horoscopes in new media, the future offers much broader sensory possibilities.

"Take an augury.  See what your desire is.  See the shape of your beginning and end." So states the introduction to a Falnama, a book of omens, created as a gift for the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I about 1615.  In the largely scribal cultures of Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, large, expensive books used for divination focused on images.  The Sackler Gallery's ongoing exhibition, Falnama: Book of Omens, along with the scholarly, beautiful exhibition catalog, presents these fortune-showing books.[1]

The construction of the books prioritizes seeing.  Like the Hamzanama of Akbar, these monumental Falnamas have large images framed to form complete pages.  The books open to an image on the right page and text on the left page.  Since reading in Persian and Turkish progresses from right to left, the image is read before the text.  Visually, the images are colorful and ornate.  The texts on the facing pages are also highly decorative.   At least with these books, taking an augury was an impressive sight.

Consider, for example, the above image of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise.  It is from the Topkapı Persian Falnama, attributed to the last quarter of the sixteenth century and to a Shi'i artistic center outside of the Safavid royal court.[2]  The figures of Adam and Eve contrast expressively.  Adam is in confident motion; Eve is stationary and concerned.  Eve has the same flesh-tone as the angel in the doorway on the upper right of the image, and she gazes dejectedly downward.  Adam, in contrast, has a darker, more earthly tone, and he gazes confidently out on the world. Adam's smoothly curving hand clasps Eve's rigid, outstretched hand.  With her other hand, Eve holds sheaves of wheat with a fist that also conveys fear and tension.   In addition, notice Eve's slightly angled left foot and raised big toe.  Far away in time and space from Hollywood caricatures, that's a poignant gesture of shyness and hesitancy.

Three out of the four Falnamas represented in the exhibition include an image entitled "People of the Cave".  A Falnama known as the dispersed Falnama, probably created for the Persian Shah Tahmasb about 1560, includes a "People of the Cave" image.  The composition is balanced and circular.  At the visual center, a white dog is curled up sleeping against the black cave background.  In a crescent above the dog, the companions (people) sleep peacefully with intertwined bodies and arms.  The colorful cave, anchored with three equally spaced green trees, circles around them.  Dispersed around the cave are active men with different types of dress, arms, and standards, and different complexions and facial characteristics, especially noses.  The cave appears as a place of tranquility separated from the world's turmoil.

Textual sources other than the Falnama provide insight into the image.  In sura 18, Al-Kahf, the Qur'an provides guidance about the associated story.  It indicates (18:9) that the story was already well know among the Qur'an's first audience.  Syriac Christians of that time referred to the story as the Youths of Ephesus.  The earliest surviving reference occurs  in one of Jacob of Serugh's homilies from early in the sixth century.  In the story, youths from Ephesus hide in a cave to escape  Roman Emperor Decius' order to do homage to his gods Zeus, Apollo, and Artemis.  Decius condemns the youths by sealing the opening of the cave.   Many years later in the reign of the (Christian) Eastern Roman Emperor Theodorus II, God awakens the youths from their death-sleep.  One youth returns to Ephesus to get food.  The youth is astonished that Christianity reigns in Ephesus, while the Ephesians cannot understand why the youth attempts to pay for the food with ancient coinage.  The youths and the Ephesians eventually realize that the youths have been resurrected from a long death-sleep in the cave.[3]

The "People of the Cave" image comes from a story of an astonishing future, unrecognizable from the past and the present.  If the "People of the Cave" image were understood to present that theme, it would undermine analogical interpretation of historical-traditional figures and events depicted in the Falnamas.  As guidance concerning the cave story, the Qur'an warns, "Nor say of anything, 'I shall be sure to do so and so tomorrow' Without adding, 'So please Allah'" (18:23-24) .  The dispersed Falnama and the Topkapı Persian Falnama, both of which include a "People of the Cave" image, typically add to the end of the auguries conditioning on God's wishes or will.  The Falnama of Ahmed I, which does not include a "People of the Cave" image, does not explicitly include such conditioning in its augury texts.  Moreover, Ahmed's Falnama explicitly urges in its introduction analogical interpretation of the images.  Its compiler apparently had good reason to exclude a "People of the Cave" image.

The stories associated with Falnama images did not consistently control interpretations of the images.  Falnama images are distinct, specific and highly articulated, e.g. "Imam Riza Saves the Sea People," "Imam Ali Slays Murra ibn Qays," "Khaybar: The Conquering Palm of Ali," "Alexander Builds a Wall against Gog and Magog," and "Moses Challenges Pharaoh's Sorcerers."  The images can easily be identified with well-known stories.  Most of the stories, however, do not have obvious implications for auguries.  In two cases in the four monumental Falnamas' surviving images, the same visual topos is associated with an auspicious augury in one Falnama, and an inauspicious augury in another.[4]

Apart from Qur'anic or image-specific verses at the beginning of the texts, the augury texts themselves are largely as abstract and insipid as modern horoscopes.  A representative excerpt:

you have found freedom from sorrows, and the doors of joy and happiness have been opened to you, and your affairs, as you would wish, will turn out well, and day by day your fortunes are on the rise.  The intent is good with respect to everything, especially travel, buying and selling, contracting marriage, entering a city, and transporting and consigning things.  In short, the auspiciousness of this intent and the goodness of the augury cannot be denied, and every desire that you have in your heart will turn out beautifully.[5]

Across the three Falnamas with original auguries, the auguries emphasize good news: good auguries outnumber bad auguries by a factor of 2.4.  The auguries typically conclude with exhortations to "almsgiving, charity, performing obligatory prayers and good works."  Occasionally the texts make points bearing on intra-Islamic controversies over Islamic authorities.[6]  Overall, the augury texts are characteristic products of bureaucracy.

Recognizing the augury texts to be bureaucratic work suggests that the monumental Falnamas were for elite use, but not for elite reading.  These Falnamas obviously are lavish, expensive works.  Auguries designed for a specific, elite reader probably would have a literary form like that of Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream.  In contrast, the auguries in the Falnamas all begin with the generic address, "O augury user!" or "O augury seeker."  Moreover, the auguries address concerns common to persons of all levels of wealth and status, e.g. "buying or selling anything, or renting or renting out land, a garden, or a house, or forming a partnership, or moving into a new house, or making a request from important people or others." [7]  The Falnamas seem to me to make most sense as a tool for an elite's bureaucracy to provide auguries for ordinary persons who seek them from the elite person.[8]

The pretense that the elite person himself will seek auguries from the Falnama would help to enhance the Falnama's value.  The introduction to the Falnama of Ahmed I declares the book to be "the Book of Auguries of His Majesty the Padishah, Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God."[9]  Ordinary persons might reasonably and urgently seek auguries from a person understood to be "Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God."  On the other hand, the introduction explicitly anticipates that Ahmed will seek auguries for himself from the Falnama.  That anticipation should be interpreted in the context of the introduction's extravagant rhetoric.[10]  It can be interpreted as supporting the Falnama's value, where its value was primarily to serve persons seeking auguries from Ahmed.  An augury based on the Falnama that Ahmed is described to use is an augury associated with Ahmed's authority.

Understanding the Falnamas as elite tools for providing auguries to ordinary persons suggests that images were more important than words for making an impressive, royal augury.  I foresee the future for horoscopes on the Internet to be visual.  For a glimpse of this future's shape, see the Sackler Gallery's magnificent and unique exhibition, Falnama: Book of Omens.

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Falnama: Book of Omens, is at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, through January 24, 2010.  It is the first exhibition devoted to these works.  The Sackler Gallery is the sole venue for the exhibition.

Update: Here's some related discussion of the Companions of the Cave / Seven Sleepers of Ephesus story and images.

Notes:

[1] The exhibition catalog, Farhad and Bağcı (2009), unfortunately lacks the notes to the text translations in Appendix A.   I hope that these notes will be posted on the exhibition website.

[2] Id. pp. 53, 58, 100-1.  "The Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise" image in this Falnama is attributed to the Ottoman painter Hasan Pasha.  On the development of images of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, see Section III.A. Sense of Scripture, in my work, Sense in Communication.

[3] For an analysis of the story and its sources, see Griffith (2007).  The story is celebrated on the Orthodox Christian calendar under the title, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.  Al-Thaʻlabī, a great Islamic scholar who wrote early in the eleventh century GC, provides many details associated with the story.  Farhad and Bağcı (2009) p. 160 describes the youths as living "some time before the birth of Christ."  Milstein (1998) p. 152, summarizing sixteenth-century "Stories of Prophets" (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓) manuscripts, states, "All the authors agree that the personages may have lived before the time of 'Isa (Jesus)".   The "may" makes this statement difficult to interpret.  Al-Thaʻlabī states, "Exegetes and historians have said that the affair of the People of the Cave took place during the days of the petty kings between Jesus and Muhammad."  Trans. in Brinner (2002) p. 691.

[4] See Farhad and Bağcı (2009) pp. 32, 34, and 310 (n. 29).  The topoi are "Alexander Builds a Wall against Gog and Magog" and "Abraham's Fire Ordeal."

[5] Excerpt from augury for "Uvays-i Qaran and the Camal", dispered Falnama, trans. by Thackston, id. p. 260.

[6] The good/bad ratio is calculated from the augury classifications in id., Appendix B.  The quoted exhortation is from "Uvays-i Qaran and the Camal", dispered Falnama, id.  Id. p. 54 notes that the texts of the Topkapı Persian Falnama persistently invoke Imam Ali and underscore the superiority of Shi'ism.

[7] Id. p. 32, makes this point, but emphasizes the universal appeal of the texts, including to elite readers: "each augury includes several prognostications, at least one of which could apply to the most august seeker."  The quote is from the dispersed Falnama, "Salomon and Bilqis Enthroned," trans. by Thackston, id. p. 257.

[8] Id. 28, 30 provides evidence of extensive popular demand for image-based auguries in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Istanbul and Isfahan.

[9] Trans. by Sergei Tourkin, id. p. 295.

[10] For example, Kalender, the powerful court administrator who wrote the introduction, describes himself as "this humble writer, the least and most insignificant of his [Ahmed's] servants and smallest of the slaves in his retinue."  Trans. Tourkin, id. p. 296.  The description of Ahmed's status is also a matter of extravagant rhetoric.  But the exalted status of the Sultan Ahmed I relative to that of ordinary persons cannot be doubted.

References:

Brinner, William, trans.  2002. ʻArāʻis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā, or, Lives of the prophets as recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʻlabī.  Leiden: Brill.

Farhad, Massumeh with Serpil Bağcı. 2009. Falnama: the Book of Omens Washinton, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Griffith, Sydney. 2007. "Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur'an: The 'Companions of the Cave' in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition," in Gabriel Said Reynolds, ed., The Qur'an in its Historical Context.  New York: Routledge, pp. 109-40.

Milstein, Rachel, Karin Rührdanz, and Barbara Schmitz. 1998.  Stories of the prophets: illustrated manuscripts of Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓. Costa Mesa, Calif: Mazda Publishers.

Images courtesy of the Sackler Gallery.  Image credits:

• Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, from the Ahmed I Falnama; by Nakkas Hasan Pasha; Turkey, Ottoman Period, 1614-16; Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 49 x 36.4 cm; Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, ELS2009.5.37

• People of the Cave, from the dispersed Falnama; Iran, Safavid period, mid 1550s-early 1560s; Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 58.4 x 45.1 cm; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1935, ELS2009.5.16

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A recent controlled study found that women discriminate perceived expressions of fear and disgust about 100 milliseconds faster than men do.  For comparison, in designing its search service, Google is concerned to save users 30 to 40 milliseconds of response time.

The study also found the women and men discriminate fear and disgust expressed by women about 50 and 40 milliseconds faster, respectively, than they do fear and disgust expressed by men.  That both women and men are better attuned to communicating with women is consistent with evidence that, in telephone calls, women and men talk longer on average with women than with men.

Perceiving others' emotions fosters successful social communication.  Cross-species comparative anatomy suggests that females have driven the evolution of social communication.  Significant sex differences in communication are highly plausible.  That the demographics of social media services today are skewed toward women probably isn't an artifact of a particular culture or social-media service design.

The study also documented the value of multisensory stimuli.  Both women and men discriminated fear and disgust in audio-visual stimuli more quickly than they discriminated those emotions in silent video stimuli.   Silent video stimuli, in turn supported faster emotional discrimination than did purely auditory stimuli.  In addition, the study found evidence that cross-modal processing contributed to more rapid emotional discrimination between audio-visual stimuli.  While bit-streams from different sensors are typically highly articulated in digital systems, low-level, cross-modal sensory processing is an important aspect of communication in biological systems.

*  *  *  *  *

The study discussed above is O. Collignon, S. Girard, F. Gosselin, D. Saint-Amour, F. Lepore, M. Lassonde.  Women process multisensory emotion expressions more efficiently than men.  Neuropsychologia (2009), doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.007

Recordings of actors and actresses expressing fear and disgust were presented to 23 women and 23 men participants.  The participants sought to distinguish between the expressions of fear and disgust "as quickly and accurately as possible."   Trade-offs between speed and accuracy are possible.   Women were not significantly less accurate than men in any sensory condition, and in most sensory conditions, women were more accurate than men.  See Supporting Fig. 1.   Hence compensating for differences in accuracy would not decrease the difference in response times between women and men.

I estimated the numbers above based on a graphical figure (Fig. 3) showing response times at the 50'th percentile of the response time distributions.   Because those numbers are my estimates from the printed graph, they are approximate numbers.

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Persons tend to prefer what is familiar.  For example, political candidates heavily advertise themselves with signs and bumper stickers that typically include just the candidate's name and office sought.  While voters find this same information on the ballot when they go to vote, repeated exposure to a candidate's name evidently induces voters to prefer that candidate.  Brand advertising, which has been highly successful across a wide variety of media ecologies, is oriented toward the same effect.

Preferring the familiar favors survival in a wide range of actual human environments.  Because persons recognize dangers over time and avoid them, familiar surroundings are less likely to be dangerous than unfamiliar surroundings.  Persons who eat familiar foods are less likely to suffering poisoning than persons who eat unrecognized substances.  Familiar persons are more likely to offer help than are strangers.  Preference for the familiar is a simple decision rule that makes sense from evolutionary and ecological perspectives.

Preferring the familiar can produce good decisions on contrived tasks not directly related to familiarity. For example, presented in the laboratory with pairs of cities and told to choose which city is larger, students more often chose as larger a recognized city that was paired with an unrecognized city. Because actual patterns of conversation and media content refer to larger cities more often than smaller cities, choosing the recognized city identifies the larger city with better than random odds. In fact, on the pairwise city-size decision task, American students correctly choose the larger city more often for German city pairs than for American city pairs.  The opposite was true for German students.  This surprising result indicates the merits of the recognition heuristic.  The recognition heuristic can be applied only to city pairs for which one city is recognized, and one isn't.  City pairs from a foreign country provided more scope for the recognition heuristic, and the recognition heuristic produced better decisions than decisions made when information could be recalled about both cities.[1]

Actual human decision processes point to important characteristics of practical decision logic. No formal decision logic can determine the scope of information that it considers. Every decision necessarily does not consider some possible information. An optimal decision is necessarily defined with respect to an assumed structure of information.  Recognition depends on biological capabilities, a wide range of life experiences, and non-problem-specific characteristics of the environment.  Recognition points to the huge scope of possibilities for useful information.[2]

More information, however, can make predictions less accurate.  In the real world, one does not know the data-generating process for the information under consideration.  Nor does one know whether that data-generating process is the same as the data-generating process relevant to the circumstances of the prediction.  Hence over-fitting and non-representative samples are always risks in real-world statistical applications.  More information can lead to a better estimate of the wrong data-generating process and hence worse predictions.[3]  The data-generating process for less information may be implicitly or explicitly better estimated and more consistent over time.  More information makes more known, but does not necessarily provide a better guide to the unknown.

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[1] Goldstein, Daniel G. and Gerd Gigerenzer, "Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic," Psychological Review v. 109, n. 1, pp. 75-90.

[2] Processing fluency at a lower level of sense than recognition is also important in decision-making.

[3] Thus, for example, in some situations the median, which uses only ordinal information, provides better predictions than the mean.  Gigerenzer, Gerd, "Why Heuristics Work," Perspectives on Psychological Sciences v. 3, n. 1, pp. 20-9, provides a nice overview of how biology ("adaptive toolbox") and real-world decision-making circumstances (ecological rationality) support fast and frugal heuristics.  Gigerenzer is an eminent academic and research leader in this field.  While I know much less, it seems to me that, in this short article, Gigerenzer doesn't adequately distinguish between "irrelevant information (or 'noise' )" and model mis-specification / structural change.  If one knows correctly the data-generating process, larger sample sizes typically serve well to increase prediction accuracy in the presence of noise.  That's not true for a mis-specified model.  Moreover, there is no statistical test for the true data-generating process for data not yet known.

Update:  Section 2 of Gerd Gigerenzer and Henry Brighton, "Homo Heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences," Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 107–143,  provides a good discussion of model mis-specification.  It uses the terms bias, variance, and noise in a way that might be jarring for someone focused on textbook statistics.  Textbook statistics, however, typically do not adequately recognize the reality that the true data-generating process is always unknown.   Moreover, in practical circumstances the law of large numbers confronts important limitations:

• increasing the sample size is often costly or not feasible
• a larger sample may create greater model mis-specification because different data-generating processes may apply to different subsets of the sample
• a larger sample enables greater over-fitting and increases the importance of correct parametrization

On the other hand, big datasets and complex algorithms have been successful in practical domains.

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In the U.S.,  sheet music became highly popular early in the twentieth century.  Tin Pan Alley in New York City, as well as less famous song publishers in Chicago, led publication of about 30 million copies of sheet music in 1910. By 1918, Woolworth's Five and Dime stores alone were selling 200 million copies of sheet music at a dime each.  Hit songs sold millions of copies of sheet music: top sellers were Whiting and Egan's "Till We Meet Again" (1918), 3.5 million copies; Kendis-Brockman's "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" (1919), 2.6 million copies; and Alfred Bryan's "Joan of Arc" (1917), more than 2 million copies.  At least five other songs also sold a million or more copies of sheet music.[1]

Prior to roughly 1890, print music was the only feasible way to distribute widely music. Before then, almost no one had heard any music other than live music.  The ability to read and accurately understand verbal texts requires much time and effort in specific education.  The ability to read and accurately recreate music from a musical text also requires much time and effort in specific education.   However, the later investment has narrower value and depends on less universally distributed natural skills.  The development of mechanical reproduction of music greatly lowered the total cost of high quality, mass access to the sound of authored musical works.

Print music peaked relative to other print revenue about 1919, well after the development of media for the mechanical reproduction of music.   Sheet music output grew tremendously from 1890 to 1919.  Media and machines for the mechanical reproduction of music also grew strongly from the end of the nineteenth century to 1919.[2]   In 1919, 107 million recorded disks and cylinders were produced.  In 1919, 54% of pianos produced were mechanically powered (self-playing).[3]  The nominal price of sheet music was much cheaper than that of recorded music and player pianos.  The nominal price of sheet music, of course, does not include the cost of learning to read it and to make high-fidelity music from it.  On the other hand, anyone can try to sing and may well enjoy the activity even without high-quality results.  Moreover, sheet music included visually attractive covers and probably was an object of common discussion.   Sheet music revenue actually rose relative to recordings revenue across the 1920s.  Increasing general interest in music, along with wealth and media-nominal-cost disparities, probably accounts for sheet music increasing in popularity along with the early development of mechanical reproduction of music.

Despite large declines in the real cost of recorded music, U.S. music industry print revenue relative to newspaper, periodical, and book industries print revenue has been surprisingly large in recent years.  In 1890, when almost no one had access to mechanically reproduced music,  print music industry revenue (sheet music and music books sold at wholesale) was 0.8% of newspaper, periodical, and book (wholesale book publishing) industries revenue.   This figure rose to 1.5% in 1919.   In 2007, sheet music and music books generated $1.7 billion in wholesale revenue.  That amount is 1.7% of newspaper, periodical, and book print revenue.[4]   Print music today plays no part  in popular culture, but, relative to other print, it generates revenue comparable to that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Why has print music revenue grown along with newspaper, periodical, and book print revenue?  Who buys print music today?  Education may be key to the answer.  Music instruction is now common in elementary and high-school education.  Elementary and high-school education is now universal.  Much print music is probably bought for elementary and high-school musical education.  Moreover, the market for selling print music to schools is probably less competitive than the retail market for sheet music early in the twentieth century.  A less competitive market implies higher prices.  Growth in formal musical education may have  helped to sustain revenue for the print music business.

Print music today is a totally different social object than it was early in the twentieth century.  Early in the twentieth century, a larger share of persons probably had fun looking at print music and making music from it.

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Notes:

[1] Sanjek (1996) pp. 32, 34; Goldberg (1930) pp. 218-9.

[2] On sheet music sales, see first paragraph above, and sheet music sales figures in the 1889-1935 datasheet.  The best-selling sheet music from 1902 to 1907 sold about 700,000 copies.  See Goldberg (1930) p. 219.  Sales by media for four Irving Berlin hit songs suggests a declining share of sheet music sales relative to recordings from 1919 to 1921.  Other evidence also suggests increasing importance of disk recordings.  In 1919, a recording of the song "Dardanella" sold almost a million copies, while the leading song in the following year, "Whispering", sold over two million recordings.  See Tawa (2005) p. 23.   In addition, radio broadcasting began with  broadcasting music in 1920.  The share of households owning a radio grew strongly across the 1920s to reach 39% in 1930.  After 1929, both sheet music and recorded music wholesale revenue dropped sharply.

[3] See the music media and piano datasheets for the relevant data.

[4] For the relevant data, see the print ratio datasheets.  Data for 2002 to 2004 indicates a music print ratio of 0.7%.  The problem appears to be definitional.  Data based on the 1997 NAICS shows $662 million in print music revenue in 2004, while data based on the 2002 NAICS shows $1,591 in print music revenue in that same year.  I'd guess that the 2002 NAICS figure is likely to be more accurate.  But even a music print ratio of 0.7% is comparable with the music print ratio in 1890, before popular use of media for mechanical reproduction of music.

References

Galbi, Douglas (2009), Music Media and Print Media in the U.S. from 1889 to 2007, also available as OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets)

Goldberg, Isaac (1930), Tin pan alley: a chronicle of the American popular music racket (New York: The John Day Company).

Sanjek, Russell, updated by David Sanjek (1996), Pennies from heaven: the American popular music business in the twentieth century (New York: Da Capo Press).

Tawa, Nicholas (2005), Supremely American: popular song in the 20th century (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press).

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