Last week a group of us from the Jamoma project were finishing up some work on a paper we submitted to ICMC.

During the process, Trond Lossius and I were talking when somehow we were off on a tangent about mapping. Trond mentioned that one example of mapping is BabelFish: given some input, it produces a translated output.

The implication of this is that many of our mappings in the computer-based arts are like BabelFish: they work in simple one-to-one or limited context translations. BabelFish can manage the translation of words, but it can’t handle the translation of meaning nor understand the context within which a word appears to make a better selection.

I find this parallel with BabelFish quite compelling, and have been thinking about it ever since…