pie and aphasia

2006-12-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

Webs: Invisible and 2.o

Here is how useless I am: I never think about the "invisible web." Actually, that's not entirely true, sometimes I think about it while I'm at the Reference Desk. I think about the ways in which the library online catalog and the databases are so much more specifically useful and generally harder to use than the "Google-web." This vague musing has never, however, progressed to wanting to do something about this, or wondering at the algorithmic structures and limitations underlying web searches. I tend to just habituate and take what I get. So I've been kind of participating in a digital dual-citizenship born of ignorance. Like Persephone in Hades, I spend half my time Googling acquaintances and shopping for boots on the "Publicly Indexable Web" and the rest of my time "underground" on subject specific, password protected "invisible" databases.

Ru and Horowitz observe the difficulty and necessity of making the "invisible web" accessible to the average user. They observe invisible web indexes usually either index the surface of the website, or index a portion of the contents of the site. Both of these approaches have the disadvantage of relying primarily on human indexing, which is subject to the subjective experience and preferences of the person doing the indexing...

The Notess article "The Terrible Twos" was helpful to me in that it gives a context to the proliferation of 2.0's in the information world. Notess describes the idea of "Web 2.0" as a simple way of conceptual differentiating the current incarnation and capabilities of the Internet from previous iterations. He includes a discussion of some of the technology that has influenced and been influenced by 2.0, including Ajax and Apis. Certain concepts identified with Web 2.0 including tagging, clouds, "the long tail," wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc. are easily extensible to other branches of information science, including news and of course, libraries. The idea of "Library 2.0" must certainly be a fairly limited play on the "Web 2.0" idea, as libraries have been through so many "versions" they must be on the 100.0's at least by now.

I am of a divided mind about the usefulness of 2.0 as a way of conceptualizing the different ways we use the web or libraries, or anything, today. I think the term is valuable and should certainly be "kept" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Criticism because it is currently in use among information professionals, who evidently feel the need to call the newest web something...My ambivalence about the term comes from my feeling that the Internet is so dynamic and such a work in progress it is hard to know what you're naming when you assign it a name.

2006-11-22T07:21:00.000-08:00

Digital Library archaeology and Search Interface Aesthetics: Nicholson and Rose

Digital resources are wildly fresh territory for "information science" and everyone else in so many ways. As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and it's applications increasingly prolific, we need new ways to measure, evaluate and improve the digital tools that have become so integral to almost every aspect of our lives.

We are only able to conceptualize things using and building on frameworks and tools we already use. In this tradition, Scott Nicholson makes a case for the appropriation of the practices and theories of physical archaeology for the study and evaluation of digital libraries. While this practice of "digital archaeology" is extensible to any digitally based resource, the article focuses on its digital applications. Information science can use the methodology and theory of other sciences to study analogous phenomena. Archaeology lends itself particularly well to this use because of its evolutionary history, focusing in the beginning on "gathering and describing" in traditional archaeology, progressing into pattern finding in "new archaeology" and finally transitioning into supplementing gathering, describing and apophenia (making connections where none previously existed) with an increased focus on postprocessual archaeology, examining the processes of study and the individuals involved.

Nicholson's argument is most interesting to me at the point he introduces postprocessual archeology with it's user-centered focus, allowing "the researcher to bring in qualitative elements to the quantitative bibliomining process." He notes the failure of pure descriptive and pattern-finding research to take into account the subjective needs of individual users. This move to user-focused research reminds me of the dialectic of ontologies versus collaborative tagging. Ontologies correspond to the descriptive and patterning phases of archaeology, while collaborative tagging assumes the user-centered approach of postprocessural archaeology.

The Rose article, "Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web," also addresses the issue of a need for researchers to take a more user-focused approach. Rose argues that the majority of search engine interfaces are still too reflective of the technology that powers them, and not reflective enough of the needs of the people who make use of them. Rose discusses three areas of user behavior which should be studied to improve interface design: 1. the variety of information-seeking goals 2. cultural and situational context and 3. the iterative nature of the search task. He suggests that studies in these areas should promote the evolution of web interfaces that guide use more efficiently and effectively.

2006-11-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

Digital Context

Shifting our culture into a digital, "ubicomp" format profoundly changes the way we live. We are beyond the point where we are able to pretend that technology is a tool we use to perform certain tasks. Our relationship with the technological environment is much deeper and more reciprocal. We are created by the technology we have created. The allowances and limitations we find in being able to instantly find information, access almost any text, or communicate with people across the world, change the very shape of who we are in the world.

Both of the articles we read this week discuss an aspect of this shift. In "Reading behavior in the digital environment: changes in reading behavior over the past ten years," Ziming Liu studies the ways the proliferation of digital text impacts the quantity and quality of our reading behavior. Ziming finds that although people in today's text rich environment spend more time reading than they did in the print-only past, the depth and concentration applied to reading has declined. Reading online includes more scanning, keyword searching and following links and less careful, focused reading with annotation.

Ziming includes discussion of the "printing to read" phenomenon we've discussed in class. I found her mention of the Strassman statement "the human nervous system has a special control mechanism for the coordination of the hand with the focusing muscles of the eye..." (Ziming, 709) to be especially interesting. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, will this control mechanism begin to change if we habitually subject our eyes to screen based print? In the more immediate future, what will happen to scholarship, writing and "the academy" as our future scholars, writers and professor are raised on a diet increasingly high in web-based print?

In "The public library as a meeting-place in a multicultural and digital context: The necessity of low-intensive meeting-places," Ragnar Audunson advocates public libraries as an ideal "low-context" public space for members of an increasingly diverse and fragmented public. Audunson describes "high-context" places as arenas of primary engagement, where people form their unique, exclusive identities. "Low-context" public spaces, by contrast, are neutral places where people can meet, observe, and co-exist with people outside of their primary identity subgroups.

Two phenomenon contribute to our current need for low-context public spaces: 1) migration and the "globalization" of society and 2) the Internet, and it's ironic consequence of cutting people off from their neighbors just as they are being connected with people who share their interests around the world. Audunson argues that the public library is perfectly primed as an answer to this need for a "third space" or low-context place, to increase understanding between cultures and interest groups. According to Audunson, democracy "presupposes a degree of cultural community." To perpetuate democracy in a diversified society, we must find a way to celebrate diversity, while simultaneously building bridges to create "cultural community."

One really interesting thing about this article is that it was written by Norwegian, whose experiences with migration reflect the reality of the European Union at a time when the United States is intensely involved in it's own negotiation of integrating immigrant culture. There are amazing parallels between the role public libraries play in European democracies, and the role the public library is establishing in the United States.

I am also really interested in Audunson's idea of the public library as a "bridge between the virtual and the physical." The Internet has broadened our affiliations to identifications that vastly transcend geographical boundaries. Local government can seem irrelevant when all the news in the world is at your fingertips instantly. Audunson says using a public library is a local act of community involvement. Public libraries are also access points for the digital world, making them a balance of these two ways of belonging.

This reminds me of the Walter Benjamin essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html which though written when newspapers were considered "technology," is deeply applicable to the issues the Internet raises in our lives. Benjamin discusses the difference between "knowledge" and "information." He argues that "knowledge" is local, gained through interaction with other people, and tells us how to do things we need to be able to do to live in our immediate environments. "Information" is global, and disconnected from our immediate survival needs. Being a Marxist critic, Benjamin went on to assign value to these distinct terms, for reasons that still seem to apply.

2006-11-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

I took Thomas Steele's advice and chose this article on collaborative tagging as a viable alternative to ontologies for web organization, for my second article, because I am fascinated by the prospect of "good mob rule" that collaborative tagging seems to offer.

This article makes a very convincing case that ontologies are outmoded methods of organizing information, unsuited to a digital environment. Our most familiar ontologies, library catalogs, rely on methods designed to work with physical objects on a library shelf. Clay Shirky argues very coherently that while ontologies work relatively well for the conditions of a physical library, where every book published falls into a pre-established physical hierarchy, such as the Dewey Decimal, or Library of Congress classification systems. Shirky goes on to show how utterly inadequate and limited these ontologies are for categorizing something as broad, unphysical and unrestricted, as the Internet.

Collaborative classification, or folksonomies, allow for nuance and individuality to permeate findability. Shirky gives the example of people looking for "movies" having distinct interests from those searching for "film" or "cinema." In ontological systems, "experts" decide these interests are all the same, and should be lumped together, but the sensitivity of collaborative classification lets these subtle differences be guides.

I've written earlier about how much folksonomies appeal to my basic nature and desire to believe in the wisdom of "the people." This re-enforces that belief. Shirky addresses the unavoidable biases inherent in a classification system designed by a small team of experts deciding what an information object is "about." This is particularly dangerous and inappropriate in the context of organizing the web, because the "aboutness" of anything is so difficult to determine, when links and interactive content make the "isness" of web content so difficult to define.

2006-11-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

Digital Archiving: http://kopal.langzeitarchivierung.de/index.php.en

Here's my idea in development...I have a Colombian friend who is a professor of Communication here at OU, and her area of expertise is "citizen's media." She is one of the founders of an international citizen's media organization called OURMedia/NuestrosMedios http://www.ourmedianet.org/general/index.eng.html.

Apparently, there is a vast collection of citizen's media documents, in print, audio, and video format stacked in boxes in the basement of the Cultural ministry building in Bogota, Colombia. So...the big idea is that this summer, I am going to go to Bogota with her and check this out, and one of my friend's Ph.D students and I are going to try to create a digital archive for this material, hosted through the Communication Department at OU. I've talked to my advisor about this, and she seems to think I should be able to count my work on this toward three hours of "Directed Project" credit...Though I don't yet have a SLIS faculty advisor for my part in the project (any suggestions? volunteers?)...

Anyway, this is pretty intimidatingly enormous for me, but it is causing me to think seriously about digital archiving, and it's potential to give a voice to unheard populations and expand the range of scholarship. One of my biggest questions about digital archiving is the issue of longevity. How can we make sure that electronically archived information remains accessible?

I chose the kopal: data into the future website for myself, because they are a cooperative organization attempting to realize permanent solutions for long term electronic archiving of documents and information. The kopal project is sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and is partnered with the German National Library and IBM. Their goal is to find ways around the caveats traditionally associated with electronic document storage, including coping with software becoming "outdated" and finding stable hosts. Kopal will incorporate the IBM DIAS (Digital Information Archiving System) http://www-5.ibm.com/nl/dias/, as well as offering a range of other solutions for smaller archive projects. I've forwarded this site and some of the links it includes to other people involved in the project, and I think it may provide us with some good practical ideas.

2006-10-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

Delicious! Organizing the web...Ding and Golder & Huberman articles

Before this week, I didn't know about del.icio.us. I knew it existed, but I didn't know what it was, and imagined it was a resource for people smarter or more organized than me. After reading this week's articles, I was inspired to check out the webpage and now I have an account and I am compulsively bookmarking and tagging all the time.

The fact that we were assigned the Ding article "A review of ontologies with the Semantic Web in view" and the Golder and Huberman article "Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems," to read as a pair, sets up a neat dialectic of possibilities for web organization. I am too ignorant of...things...to be sure, but it seemed to me that the Semantic Web and Collaborative Tagging (folksonomies) are being presented as two divergent visions for organizing the web into something more "controlled" than the current Google-"indexed" chaos.

The ideas of Semantic Web and Collaborative Tagging/Folksonomy are particularly interesting in contrast to one another. The way I understand the Semantic Web is that it requires formalized ontologies, tools and special "languages," constructed by "experts." It is based on assigned meta-data and heuristics. Ontologies are meant to "help people and computers to access the information they need and to effectively communicate with each other." To achieve this end, requires relatively traditional hierarchical structures of "knowledge" and levels of "expertness." Folksonomies are pure, best case scenario, anarchy. The practice of collaborative tagging embodies everything optimistic about anarchy and apparently, proves "the wisdom of the people." According to the Golder and Huberman article, over time, collaborative tagging arrives at stable and objective consensus, or a high level of useful "aboutness."

Neither ontologies nor collaborative tagging are without their caveats, as any attempt humans make to decide what something is about is subject to the influences of culture. I personally favor collaborative tagging over formal ontologies, but I am fully willing to admit that may only because I don't understand ontologies!

2006-10-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Anarchists, Panhellenic reconstruction, and Aboutness: My meta-data blog entry

In the past week, I've had long lunches over pho and felafels, respectively, with an anarchist and a panhellenic reconstructionist, both of whom are currently working on their ph.d's in various fields. Neither of these people have my blog info, so I'm going to feel free to appropriate from these conversations with impunity.

The theme of much of both of these conversations was my traditional favorite: reality and by extension, truth, the nature of knowledge, human communication, etc...I love to make people tell me why they think "facts" or facts, why things are the way things are...These two come from VERY different ontological perspectives, but both seemed to believe that knowledge and the purpose of information and objects is decided by public consensus. Maybe they were just humoring, because that is what I spend all of my time thinking about, or maybe I was projecting, but that's beside the point. My perception rules with an iron fist here...

Anyway, I was thinking of all of this as I read this weeks articles on meta-data, meta-data schemes and meta-data optimization. One of the basic caveats of meta-data of any kind is that "data ABOUT data" requires that some person or computer decide what a document (book, picture, artifact, antelope, etc) is ABOUT. Wait. Is aboutness an objective fact? An immutable quality and object is "born" possessing? Or is "aboutness" a very abstract idea, constructed out of the culture and experiences of the audience for that document? Of course, I think it is the latter...but I will even concede that within a perfectly homogeneous community, it would be possible to decide what a document is about with a fair degree of authority. However, are our libraries and research communities ever truly homogeneous? Even if they were, is it possible that an alternative "aboutness" meta-data tag might expand research and open up perspectives?

Digitization and the Internet add new aspects of this to consider. We can't do away with meta-data because it is the foundation of "findability" in libraries and on the Internet, so some determination of "aboutness" has to be made. The Internet allows this process to become increasingly democratic, with the creation of "folksonomies" and self-assigned tagging becoming more and more prevalent.

The MODAL (Metadata, Objectives and principles, Domains, and Architectural Layout) framework outlined in the Greenberg article provides a valuable tool for "getting meta" on meta-data. If we agree that meta-data is essential to locating information, items and documents in a digital environment, it follows that we need to have tools for studying and comparing these schemes, in order to figure out what types of meta-data work best and in what situations.

The Dawson and Hamilton article is worth the paper on which I printed it out, if only for introducing me to the term "data shoogling." How magnificent and vaguely obscene is that?

Anyway, before reading this article I was all but unaware of the phenomenon of "search engine optimization," of which "data shoogling" is a distinct offshoot. I am embarrassingly ignorant of the algorithmic complexity involved in "marketing" databases by embedding tags that improve their Google "position." This article discusses techniques to increase Google-accessibility without compromising website content or traditional "meta-data" attributes. The authors discuss the "meta-data v. Google" phenomenon, in which we find ourselves with an elaborate and long-established tradition of complex meta-data assignation that isn't used in the main information seeking behavior ("Googling"), practiced by most of the world. "Data shoogling' seeks to preserve meta-data while still optimizing the google-ability of a website. I really like the idea presented here, that Google's supremacy may not be eternal, and losing the depth of information meta-data provides, could ultimately prove a terrible loss as technology becomes more sophisticated, and the Internet evolves.

2006-10-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

Small step for a man: Defining and Evaluating "Usability" of Digital Libraries: Ferreira and Jeng

I read in the Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1002/p03s03-nbgn.html that new digital audio technology had been used to "listen again" to Neil Armstrong's famous moon-landing speech. Apparently, Armstrong has long claimed to have said the landing was "a small step for A man..." and that the "A" has been left out of the quote since it happened. According to the article, and Australian computer programmer used sensitive digital sound equipment to enable listeners to hear the omitted "A" in the quote for the first time ever. This "discovery" made me wonder about the effects of technology on our perception....What else have we been missing? What does it mean to hear and see what can't be experienced with human senses? As we get closer to "ubicomp" will there be more and more augmentation to our senses in everyday life?

This is only tangentially related to these articles, but I was thinking about it at the same time, so, oh well. Want to see me try to connect this story to digital library evaluations? Here goes: The moon landing constituted a literal and metaphoric "new frontier" for science and exploration, reviewing (or rather, re-hearing) the seminal moment of the moon landing using technology developed so many years after the event shows us how our desire to explore and discover often out paces our ability to evaluate and understand what we are experiencing in our discoveries. I will argue that digital libraries are an example of this kind of "frontiering" that is happening so fast and changing our lives so dramatically, that we aren't prepared to evaluate their impact and effectiveness. The evaluation tools and criteria we use for print libraries aren't adequate to usefully analyze digital libraries, just as the sound equipment available at the time of the moon landing wasn't adequate to really hear what was going on...Hm. A ridiculous stretch but I'm kind of proud of it anyway...

The Ferreira and Jeng articles both attempt to define digital libraries and usability and formulate useful criteria for the evaluation of usability in the context of digital libraries. Both articles report research conducted to determine what aspects of a user's experience determine their experience of a "usable" site, and how this quality of usability can be measured. The Ferreira study looks for evidence of synergy between human computer interaction (HCI) theory and information science (IS) theory. This study uses the following criteria for evaluating the usability of digital libraries: learnability, efficiency and effectiveness of the digital library, management of errors, memorability, and user satisfaction. The Jeng article reports similar research evaluating digital libraries on the basis of the relationship between effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction and learnability. The Jeng study was of particular interest to me because of the inclusion of the issues of user "lostness" and "navigation distorientation" in digital libraries. Digital libraries are new territory, and the maps we devise to navigate and evaluate them must take into account the experiences of users.

2006-10-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: Schiff and Poe articles
I never used Wikipedia because I didn't know what it was. When I got Wikipedia results from Google searches, I sometimes looked at them, but figured they were something akin to "About.com" pages without the ads. I read them, but with a grain of salt...I never thought much about the structure, principles or philosophy behind Wikipedia until I started teaching library instruction to incoming freshmen here at Bizzell. Part of the presentation I was supposed to give involved convincing undergraduates that Wikipedia is NOT a scholarly source and why. Our instruction librarian is on a crusade to keep undergrads from quoting Wikipedia in papers. She scoured the "meta" pages and came up with a variety of statements emphasizing the unreliability of Wikipedia. I began to kind of mentally scoff at the website and any and all information it contained. I kept up this scoffing for about a year.

In early August I was trying to tell a Russian friend about a band I went to see once when I was in high school, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. I was having trouble coming up with a genre explanation tenable to a person whose first language is not English. He picked up his laptop, which had Wikipedia installed in the tool bar and looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_With_The_Thrill_Kill_Kult. There was a detailed description of the band, contextualizing them in music of the time, including complete discography and links to other websites. I was immediately converted. That is exactly the kind of organized information, readily available and incredibly useful, that Wikipedia can provide. I didn't need to quote it in a paper, and the "many eyeballs" that obsessively comb the music sections of the site function as more than enough peer review for a conversation on a summer afternoon.

The history and philosophical underpinnings of Wikipedia outlined in the Poe and Schiff articles raised my respect for Wikipedia even further. The personality and ontological differences between the site's "founders," Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger seemed to provide the necessary tension for a conceptual explosion like Wikipedia, which Marshall Poe calls "the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever know, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind."

Knowing about the anarchic idealism underlying Wikipedia's creation makes the site seem like an ongoing experiment in what technology allows humans to make and do on a grand scale, and without coercion or punishment. The fact that the site evolved from "Nupedia," a far more traditional, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia concept, seems to speak to the "evolution" of culture and communication made possible by the Internet in general. "Culture" is moving from a "dead white male" Canonical model to an aerobic entity constantly being created, managed and changed by "conducers." I think humans in general are moving past the idea of the individual "genius," represented by the idea of the great poet, author, musician or the film "auteur" operating in a vacuum and "creating." Authorship is becoming a community effort. While we will probably never get beyond some kind of ownership of creative goods, the concept of "open" software and "copyleft" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) Scientific discoveries are usually made in several places simultaneously. Wikipedia captures that collaborative idea of creation, harnesses and makes it accessible.

Besides appealing to my sense of anarchy, Wikipedia also speaks to my slippery grasp of reality, born of Saussurian linguistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure. In The Hive Poe writes:

Can we all agree on what an apple is exactly, or the shades of the color green? Not easily. The wiki offered a way for people to actually decide in common. On Wikipedia, an apple is what the contributors say it is right now. You can try to change the definition by throwing in your own two cents, but the community-the voices actually negotiating and renegotiating the definition-decides in the end.

2006-09-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

transversality...: the Atkinson article

The Internet has become our map as information seekers. When we want to know something, our first thought is to "Google" it. This new reality has opened endless speculation on the future role of libraries and librarianship. Ross Atkinson proposes that if libraries are to remain relevant participants in the process of scholarly communication, librarians need to assume the role of a rational, trusted third party, or "fair witness." The sheer quantity of information available on the Internet makes an impartial intermediary an invaluable tool for researchers. Atkinson believes librarians are uniquely suited for this role as fair witness because of the inherent attributes of libraries and librarians. Libraries provide a plurality of information sources and the very inclusion of materials in a library collection infers a certain degree of authority or legitimacy. Secondary attributes of libraries, including providing access to information sources and ensuring the application utility of the sources provided strengthen the argument for librarian as "fair witness." Libraries will remain vital spaces as long as librarians are able to serve this role, because information is only of value ot researchers when it is contextualized with other information. Working in an academic library, I am able to see a lot of value in Atkinson's ideas. The answers of so many librarians to challenges to the relevance of libraries sound overly defensive, but Atkinson makes a sold practical case for the one kind of future for libraries.

2006-09-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

50 milliseconds to make a good first impression: Lindgaard, Fernandes, Dudek and Brown

50 milliseconds is not an amount of time I can conceptualize, but according to the three phase study study conducted by Lindgaard, Fernandes, Dudek and Brown at Carleton University, it is long enough for an average website viewer to form an accurate and lasting opinion. The "halo effect" or importance of first impression in determining subsequent judgements of a person, experience or object, suggests these split-second reactions permanently color the way a user views a website. The authors discuss the speed of emotional versus "rational" responses in humans. Since emotional reactions are triggered much faster than rational reactions, it is possible to assume that first impressions are physiological, rather than cognitive. The scope of the study didn't permit the authors to determine what elements of websites contribute to positive first impressions, but it is pretty safe to assume that it is worth finding out...

One part of this study that particularly intrigues me is the idea that perception can be more important than "reality"...Lindgaard writes, "...objects in the world may not necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what matters is how they are perceived." In the context of web design, I guess this goes some distance toward collapsing the dialectic of "form vs. content." Effectively, a website IS how it APPEARS...

I am in the very beginning stages of trying to put together a basic template for my sememster project, and these findings makes me really consider the differences in writing a paper and putting together a website. I am so used to the linear format of paper-writing, where it is worthwhile to painstakingly craft sentences and artfully select adjectives. In website creation, if care isn't taken to create a good first impression, no one will ever read any sentence, painstakingly crafted or otherwise....

2006-09-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Mohamed article...
This one was a little more comprehensible for me than the Gradmann article..."meta-data" is an idea for which I have extensive conceptual scaffolding, beginning with my beloved "meta-narratives" and "meta-filmic scenes" from my days as an English major, and continuing through the "Organization of Information" class I took last semester, in which MARC records were actually explained to me in a way that made sense. I am not sure how meta-data is processed by Internet search engines or the mechanics of webpage rankings, but I am very interested in the ways descriptive meta-tags and/or Dublin Core ( http://dublincore.org/) affect what information we find, and therefore, what we know and even who we are, as in Morville's "you are what you find" idea...

The Mohamed article describes a multi-phase study conducted to determine the "impace of metadata in finding and ranking webpages through search engines." The study found that even in search engines that claim meta-data influences page rank order, there is "no significant difference int the rank order of the web pages that include metadata (Dublin Core and meta tags) and those that do not include any metadata at all." While I admittedly don't know anything about anything, these findings were kind of shocking to me...Aren't both metadata and search engines supposed to be about findability? And they don't work together? The Mohamed article also predicts more widespread use of Dublin Core in the future becasue of the international support Dublin Core receives, including the support of OCLC and the Library of Congress.

Dublin Core is kind of a fascinating concept. Their website lists the following search engines as supportive of Dublin Core Metadata Element sets:

Ultraseek
Swish-E
Microsoft's Index Server
Blue Angel Technologies MetaStar
Verity Search 97 Information Server

2006-09-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

"rdfs:frbr"-this means something to Stefan Gradmann

...but not really to me. Gradmann's article titled, rdfs:frbr-Towards and Implementation Model for Library Catalogs Using Semantic Web Technology, brilliantly illustrates the fact that I don't know anything about hardware or networking or the actual structures that support the Internet. So...I'm going to try to have something to say about this article, but my overwhelming impression from this article is of my own ignorance and stupidity.

The part of Gradmann's article I was able to grab was the idea of freeing librarian-generated metadata from the "golden cage" of the library catalog. The means Gradmann proposes for achieving this end are well beyond my comprehension, but it sounds like RDFS could be a really valuable tool for the standardization of "born digital" library metadata. The more I learn about catalog records and metadata, the more I wish similar sturctures could be applied to other information objects on the web.

2006-09-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Memex at 60: Internet or iPod? by Richard Veith
I was reading this article sitting outside the student Union, drinking a smoothie. One of the Reference librarian/faculty came by and asked what I was reading. I told her and she said, "Ah, the Memex! That's one of about three articles you really need to know about for library school." What are the other two?!?

Anyway, the concept of the Memex really interesting, even if it has been oft-misrepresented, as Veith claims in this article. Vannevar Bush was doing some pretty prescient, or at least predictive, thinking, to come up with some of those ideas in the 1930s...The Veith article warns us not to attribute to many psychic powers to Bush, while conceding the immense influence this article had and maybe still has on information scientists. For some reason, the aspect of the Memex that is most striking for me are the associative indexes and "trails" that seem to be sort of precursors to hyper-text. The "trails" here remind me of the concept of the "scent of information" Morville talks about in Ambient Findability. Associations are so important in research, but so subjective, and making their assignation into a "science" is problematic. The fact that Bush even conceptualized these kinds of mechanical associations is pretty amazing.

2006-08-31T20:22:00.000-07:00

Social Fiction!

http://www.socialfiction.org/index.php

2006-08-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

Libraries are so punk rock: Vaidyanathan "The Anarchist in the Library"

I have an embarrassing love of the aesthetics and language of anarchy. It's just so darn optimistic. As a symptom of this love, I adore all manifestations of muckraking: anti-globalization, anti-consumer society, ad-busters, etc... Documentaries, books, websites...I participate in capitalism and mainstream society, but anarchy is my hobby. I indulge it passionately, whimsically and ineffectually. I saw "Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Prices" (http://www.walmartmovie.com/) about a year ago, and haven't been to the place since. This makes me feel insufferably self-righteous, even as I drink Starbucks coffee and shop at the Gap....sigh... Anyway, the kinship between libraries and the Internet and anarchy seems quite natural. There is even an Anarchist Librarians Webring(http://www.infoshop.org/alibrarians/public_html/).

In the chapter, "The Perfect Library" from The Anarchist in the Library (http://www.amazon.com/Anarchist-In-Library-Between-Crashing/dp/0465089852/sr=8-1/qid=1157071516/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4241351-0343320?ie=UTF8&s=books), Siva Vaidhyanathan gives me my new favorite library quote: "The better they are, the more dangerous libraries can seem."

This chapter does an amazing and inspiring job of describing the potential for information-anarchy utopia and distopia. According to Vaidyanathan, the future of libraries and information access lies in the tension between potential and fear. The "perfect library" has the potential to create "a true free market of ideas," but could also be a disaster, allowing people to use information freedom to harm others, destroying the "entertainment industry" as we know it, and making it virtually impossible to filter valuable information from trash. Vaidyanathan traces many of the restrictions on information freedom, including the USA Patriot Act and the "pay-per-view" trend, to the threat the power "elite" perceive in the possibilities presented by a "perfect library." He describes harsh reactions stemming from the fear of information as "overkill and [they] reach far beyond the communications networks themselves to corrupt the inner workings of culture, science, education, commercial competition and even democracy itself." He says the power elite are becoming teh "power anxious."

Vaidyanathan's chapter pleases me just like my beloved muckraking documentaries please me. There are good guys (librarians!) to cheer on and bad guys (WTO, IMF, multi-nationals in general) to boo. It's good reading, but I'm not sure the lines can be that clearly drawn. I want to hate corporations and I am deeply suspicious of all forms of economic restrictions placed on libraries and information, but I also don't have any workable alternatives to propose. My inner anarchist likes to think that information anarchy would ultimately sort itself out, and lead to a more just and equitable world for everyone, and maybe it would, but it seems like pragmatism demands that we start where we are....

2006-08-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Here I am at the Reference Desk in Bizzell on a Saturday evening. A tourist-dad style man, complete with clip-on sunglasses, just stood directly across from the desk, smiled at me, and dumped some rocks out of his shoe. Otherwise, I've been asked for directions to the Holy Quaran and the bathroom. I was able to help with both requests.

I love the word "intertwingularity." I found this website by Googling the this word: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html
I think it's a pretty cool idea...

2006-08-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading this book, Ambient Findability, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007655/sr=8-1/qid=1156519707/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4241351-0343320?ie=UTF8) for my class and it is making me think I may actually belong in library school after all. To be quite honest, I am irritated by public relations, bored by management, and mystified by cataloging. Many parts of library school are an endurance test for me. In this book, however, Peter Morville talks about what I am interested in anyway, and in a way that not only interests me, but gives me hope for both my future as a library & information professional and as a relatively mentally healthy human being.

When people come up to the Reference Desk in a library, they want to know something that is represented by some kind of symbolic language; words, numbers, pictures, or musical notation. Tragicomically, the only tools library patrons have at their disposal are more words, numbers, pictures, etc. Usually just words. The space between what the patron wants and the words they use to ask is my favorite space in the library. Really, it is the reason I want to work here. I love trying to figure out why in the world people ask for things in the way that they do. How does anyone ever say what they mean? Then again, if "what we mean" are just thoughts made of more words and pictures and symbols...

Anyway, (actually maybe this is completely unrelated) this Morville book is fantastic because he touches on everything I feel and see when I think of the ways the Internet is changing people and the world. He draws lines between evolutionary psychology and the way we use technology to seek information. Our tools change much faster than we change. Human evolution has left us adapted to an environment that no longer resembles the one in which we live. Yet, this technology that is changing our environment has been designed by human minds and hands with the adaptations gained through all those years of evolution. Whew. When we sit down at a computer to find a "commodify your dissent" t-shirt, or a Russian cult film from the 80s on IMDB, or shop for vintage Volkswagon parts, our searching strategies are informed by survival behaviors and instincts developed millions of years ago for finding mammoths to kill or protecting ourselves and our young from being skewered or trampled. Morville thinks web designers need to study the actual information seeking behaviors of real people and design with those needs in mind.

2006-08-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

In 1998, everyone else in the world, especially everyone else my age, became a member of the global digital citizenry. I was too busy joining a German educational cult based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, making tofu and burying myself under a mound of environmentally correct cloth diapers which were very real, and in no way virtual.

A few years later, my daughter learned to feed herself and I got a life, a divorce, and a job in a public library. It was during long quiet afternoons at the circulation desk that I learned to stop worrying and love the Internet. My atomic affair with email grew quite organically out of my lifelong complete disbelief in reality.

I always avoided online gaming communities for the same reasons I avoid tiramisu and heroin. I am afraid I would like them, and then where would I be? The fact that I find the "physical" world I live in to be very much un- or sure- real, makes the idea of creating a "second life" for myself seem like a duplication of efforts. The idea of creating another, ideal self, using the intellectual secrets and superpowers of my "physical" created self is so seductive it gives me vertigo. I guess part of me is afraid I could get sucked in and never get out. I could "live there," online, in a place even more remote than the stories I already tell myself.

In "We Live Here: Games, Third Places and the Information Architecture of the Future," Andrew Hinton (http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-06/hinton.html) talks about virtual communities like Second Life, World of Warcraft and even MySpace and Facebook as virtual "3rd Places" that have developed to fill the vacuum of community recreation spaces left by our general contemporary isolation. This idea fascinates me. I love the idea of a low-consequence, interactive playing space for the viral transmission of ideas...the Internet as proverbial meme-kleenex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme), but everytime I think about this, I wonder about neurobiology and evolution. Think about online dating. Where you once might've formed a first impression of someone based on their chin or the way they smell, now we decide who we want to date based on their digital photograph and whether or not they "give good email." Is mating like this going to cause natural selection to seek out genetic traits like not splitting infinitives or not ending sentences with a preposition?

The James Paul Gee article "Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines," argues that the learning strategies built into the design of computer games, especially the interactive ones, demonstrate cutting edge educational principles that can and should be employed by mainstream educators. This initially made me think of the old wire-monkey-mama experiment, as if poor little anemic, egg-headed preschoolers were going to be put in front of giant glowing screen, but I decided I was being reactionary. The arguments in the article make a lot of sense to me, and as the mother of a 3rd grader, and as a student myself, I can see how the learning strategies in video games would be beneficial in every kind of educational context.