Look! There goes one now! Posted by cole007 on Flickr.

It’s quite easy now to push back on such millennial hyperventilating from a number of perspectives. Digital multitasking is distracting and dangerous; scanning, sampling, and mashing are destroying deep thought; the internet presents to children any number of emotional and physical risks. From my own perch in libraryworld, I’ve long been skeptical of concepts like “Net Generation Students,” which can lead to embarrassing institutional lunges into quickly expiring playpens, even as I applaud many of the service advances that get marshaled under such banners.

The most typical marketing is “revolutionary” — it were ever thus. Meanwhile the hungry sheep stay hungry. But now that we’re all sober and nostalgic for the good old virtues — close analysis, deep thought, transcendent expression — now that we’re virtuously skeptical about the effects of technology on real learning — I feel like pushing the other way a bit. I would never want to end up in a corner where intellectual worth was measured by detachment from the stunning shifts in communication of our day. That’s too often a stale corner, I think of it as full of Causabons, where ignorance or even fear is sanctified.

Hence, a couple of completely anecdotal observations, ala Prensky, though I’ll lay off on italics.

Even at this late date, some students wash into my classroom with a timorous attitude towards “computers.” Whether or not this is an affectation, a discourse of detachment from technology persists with some amount of vigor, even (or especially?) among “digital natives” at highly selective colleges. And yet the student so loath to do something new with computers in a course setting is tricked out — you can count on it — with a phone of some degree of smartness, an overactive Facebook account, a laptop, a digital music delivery system, and a cherished, variously organized, and promiscuously shared media library juggled between devices.

So perhaps we should set aside the easy binaries — digital native, displaced digital immigrant — and focus more on local competencies (whoops! italics!). The challenge, often, is to apply facility within one kind of digital environment to another — to bring what’s lively and engaging about community discourse in Facebook, say, into a new and different application, as defined by an instructor. Faced with a course blog (say), students are rarely starting from scratch, just as they’re rarely truly innovative users of the environment right out of the gate. They’re somewhere in the middle: endowed with some skills from their ‘other’ life, a life that can seem at once more playful and more serious than what’s going on in the classroom — skills that may or may not pertain to the effort at hand. We can’t assume that this pertinence will be discerned and exercised.

The question of local technical competence and portability thereof is a version of the larger question hovering over the classroom: what is the relationship of what’s learned here to the outside, impervious world? How can we know that classroom skills will really apply out in the field?

The good news for educators, I think, is that “digital natives” come into the room used to figuring out local rules and expectations: ready to be guided in that way. They’ve figured out how to get through so many various environments, and through a certain plasticity and perhaps even detachment (the world is full of strange games) they’ve succeeded. If playing to the “twitch speed” of this generation (a particularly unfortunate Prenskyism) leads education into the shallows, we might better address the adaptability necessarily cultivated by anyone who wants to think with or write to others today.

If “sustainability” is a touchstone du jour, the emphasis of any number of academic courses and programs, my quick claim, backed up by no data whatsoever, is that “adaptability” will be much more important to “digital natives.” When it comes to communication technology hurtling towards who knows where, no skill set is sustainable below a level of purely abstract values — and the effective persistence of such values (critical thought, intellectual honesty) pretty much depends on transference of skills between worlds. “One dead / One powerless to be born,” a burnt out “digital immigrant” might say of these worlds. “O children, what do ye reply?”

Aided Eye, anyone? Small shivers of horror and wonder ran down my spine when reading today about adapted eye-tracking technology, described as “a sixth sense” by researchers presenting the proof of concept in the French Alps. According to this Discovery article, tech wizards have been concocting intimate feedback loops between GPS, customized databases, and biofeedback for a steady stream of just-in-time information.

Here’s the scenario: you’re walking down the street and looking at a location, wondering what’s there. You blink a set amount of times to get information. Trackers reading your eye’s positioning connect to GPS and a database, and a pulse of information comes streaming onto your phone — no, it wants to be closer — it comes into your ear through text-to-speech conversion.

And that’s the simple scenario. Another ‘proof of concept’: memory assistance! One of the worst questions in the world — and one of the most universal — is that on-the-spot inquiry, “Have you two met?” Once upon a time, a response of frantic blinking was mere anxiety, as the target of such inquiry calibrated an answer. But in the sunshaded future, that rapid blinking will be an Aided Eye wearer’s infrared sensor-delivered request for data from whatever Facebook’s molted into, from a “lifelog” that will recall the face and tell you what you need to carry on the conversation. (encountered 4.28.2020 23:09:03. likes sunsets and walks on the beach. trust level 7.)

Word from the Alps is that such a system can be mounted onto glasses, though technicians are struggling with how to deliver data feedback. “A tiny screen embedded inside the glasses or an audio system are both options.”

So yes the parties we’ll go to in our glinting iModos — reading other sunglassed faces with our right eye, reading data streaming back with our left. Making clever and timely observations about objects in the room, best database wins. Winking direct messages over to someone who may be smiling, or may be triggering a private replay of an archived video.

We’ll all wear our sunglasses at night — and in fact while we sleep — because you never know when you might wake up in the middle of the night and need to know something.

Data never wants you to be in the dark.

So the first surprise about the recent Open Video Conference was how inclusive it felt, how it swept one up (one used to being a party of one) into a collective vision of the future. This was a healthy conference, due to a very specific rallying point — open video — and a greatly heterogeneous crowd well-nigh forced to bump up against different populations. And so the OVC overstuffed into NYU law classrooms programmers of various types of expertise and roguery, filmmakers with various types of produced work, genial lawyers, political activists, software evangelists, corporate and public media reps, educators, archivists… the “full stack,” as one friend put it, of expertise at pretty much every level of reinventing the way video acts on the web. And a concern rooted in very granular details of code seemed tangibly connected to the way we all will live.

An introduction to OVC

I can’t resist opposing this sense of inclusiveness and vitality to the MLAs I’ve attended, in which extravagant claims for the reinvention of subjectivity or sexuality or post-colonial discourse, say, clash against the most trenchant resistance to actual change. Humanists are nothing if not self-conscious, and the ironies of securing or justifying a tenured career by espousing the critical ‘trouble’ of the moment are oft felt. But MLA sessions addressing the dramatic changes in the way we are actually communicating and transmitting culture — the media revolution happening on our watch — were quirky and underattended (at least before I gave up on them circa 2004), and likely to devolve into older academics warning acolytes not to risk their careers in digital pursuits.

But back to the OVC in 2009. Others will publish some good summaries of sessions and events — I’m starting to see a few now (for example, Scott Macaulay’s blog posts on Filmmaker) — so I’ll keep here to the level of broad and subjective generalizations.

It smelled like teen spirit. Let me hasten to say, I mean that in a positive way, deriving from my experience in a public high school that gathered up a range of different classes, maturities, predilections, abilities, perspectives — drew us all up into something like genuine and still-forming enthusiasm. And so it would be easy for anyone who attended OVC to correlate speakers to various high school stereotypes: the genial hippie, the homecoming queen, the class clown, the truant, the rebel, the exchange students, the dropout, the goths, the a.v. geeks, the musicians, the art students, the nerds, the student government types…. Like high school, the conference made me feel like the future was right around the corner, momentous decisions were just ahead, and sudden and budding capacities were going to change the world. Who wouldn’t want to really feel this again, and at a conference no less?

Ray Blumenthal drawings of OVC speakers

Openness means simplification. It is touching and generous of hard core programming geeks to craft advances that inexorably shift arcane wizardry into the practical and even mundane. Thus on the immediate horizon we’re getting HTML 5 that simply incorporates a video tag, Ogg containers that free video content from restrictive plugins or presentation frames, a Wikipedia that offers easy browser-based video editing. We’re seeing entities like the Internet Archive offering to store and stream personal video without restriction, providing a range of transcoding, taking on what amounts to API service. We’re seeing advances in time-based metadata and accessibility features that make relevant pieces of video easier to find, reference, and recontextualize. We’re getting CC licensing clarifying subsequent use of content. All these efforts to simplify away impediments bolster an active, democratic engagement in heretofore complex and specialized processes, in what until now has been owned and manipulated by the very few.

A preview of new video functionality in Firefox 3.5

Openness can trigger honesty. At OVC I saw how an ethical imperative to be open goes beyond releasing code for the world to see, involves more than offering source content up for unconceptualized future use. I appreciated, through long tail examples like Earth-Touch and BoingBoingTV, that open video offers resistance to over-produced, bogus dramatization, and other commercial attempts to sweeten the pot for paying audiences. Earth-Touch’s HD yet relatively spare videos of actual animals in the field (like these suckling seals), put side by side with Disney’s over-soundtracked, hyper-narrated, dramatically manipulated presentation of (say) thrashing whales, made me feel afresh how corrosive the corn-syrup of ratings bait can be.

Americans must demand more from their broken down public media. Predictably shamed by Canadians actively funding independent video and Norwegians proactively releasing material on peer-to-peer networks, we Yankees (derives from Dutch word for “pirate”, Matt Mason observed) are reduced to handwringing about cultural treasure locked away by rights restrictions, about public broadcasting networks refusing *free* content from desperate filmmakers, by cable fee pittances funding public access tv stations that seem lost in 1982. It takes a Metavid to liberate CSPAN, for crying out loud, from hopeless VHS tape inconsequence. Perhaps PBS, NPR and the like should shift away from membership drives, with their appeals for rather nebulous support, and more to what Alyce Myatt called the “tip jar”: ways of driving direct loyalty to and remuneration for actual programs.

Nev. Senator John Ensign discusses American morality, via Metavid

We haven’t even begun to know what we can do with video. The highlight of the OVC for me was, of course, the education panel, during which CCNMTL released code for VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning). During the session, I was struck by how infrastructure, access, and distribution are still dominant topics when people are thinking about educational use of video. These are foundational concerns, but those of us wrestling with how to actually incorporate video meaningfully into curricula — how to make working with video a truly transformative learning experience — have to drive the conversation to the next level: from *access* to *effective use*. Otherwise we can get indifferent and unmotivated broadcasting, subscription services that offer a shopping cart parody of ‘participation’, substitution of awkwardly filmed stagecraft for interpersonal dynamics, false assumptions about expanding the classroom, and a devolvement of educational inquiry into the polarized insufficiencies of passive consumption or blind expression. Video DJs Eclectic Method offered an interesting example of video sampling set to audio beats, and there was no shortage of video artists offering cut-ups and remashes, but much of this active video re-manipulation seems to be paddling around so far in the relatively shallow but fun waters of entertainment and parody.

Rock & Remix from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

This stuff is dangerous. For the most part, OVC offered a benign and even symbiotic vision of the future. Yochai Benkler set the tone at the opening keynote, cheering the advancement of participatory culture, the rise of a “5th estate” of engaged citizens able to watch and produce and determine their own world like never before. To many this can help out not only our public culture, but also the wheezing dinosaurs (or Murdoch-monsters?) who are looking for better business models, more compelling content, stronger engagement with audience. Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism (pay what you wish!), spoke engagingly of “virtuous circles,” in which merchants canny enough to pirate piracy get ahead. Radiohead was invoked.

But in a surprise move, the failure of Clay Shirky to make it to the conference opened up spot for a mystery final speaker — and he turned out to be a real pirate, Peter Sunde of the controversial bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Patched in from Sweden, swigging some mysterious liquid, and professing indifference to incarceration, Sunde signaled no real politics and no limits. He tweaked media corporations by saying they should actually pay him to distribute their products for free, and announced that the Swedish National Theater would be presenting his recent and upcoming trial by authorities. Presumably they’ll be drawing on some lines he’s fed the press in the wake of a guilty sentence (now on appeal) — rather than pay restitution, “I would rather burn everything I owned.” Another Pirate Bay founder as been quoted as saying, “We chose to treat the trial as a theater play and as such it’s been far better than we ever could have believed.” Or, Sunde again: “This has been ‘Season One’ of The Pirate Bay series, and today’s judgment is just the cliffhanger,” he said. “But thanks Hollywood, you taught us that the good guys win in the end.”

An IOU from Peter Sunde

By ending the OVC with a reminder of the heedless hijacking that corporations use as justification for locking down content, conference organizers seemed to undercut the compelling arguments that had been made for refined licensing, better business models, better standards, and more responsive and forward-thinking media development. We ended in a rather adolescent nihilism.

At first I thought this was a mistake, but thinking about it further, I decided that this ending was a final and appropriate flourish to an effective conference. It seems open, after all, to acknowledge that there is actual menace in the air — that this medium is being contested across a legal landscape that could, in its inability to keep up with an increasingly frantic dance, freeze up and lay waste to what now seems like unbounded aspiration. None of us is in control, nobody can predict much beyond a rather ruthless shakeup of the way we communicate — along with the need for us all to somehow survive it, possibly shape it, even learn from it together.

It seems clear that this sudden engagement, this sudden caring about the political freedom of Iranians has a lot to do with the medium itself. To those immersed in new media communication channels, it’s thrilling that “cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history,” to crib from the title of Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk. We’re sensing that new media is providing timelier, more accurate, and more effective information. Hence there is a parallel confrontation, with parallel cracks in authority: authoritarian government vs. uprising crowd, traditional media vs. participatory media. Since we can, by definition, participate in the latter showdown, we become invested in the former.

Thus twitterers avidly piled onto the #CNNfail movement to drive better coverage; Gawker tweaked the New York Times’s executive editor for a premature divine blessing of Ahmadinejad; and so many Tumblrs devoted to Iran have blossomed that it’s now a throwaway line. And handy! here’s a political map of Iran from the Berkman Center derived from the Iranian blogosphere:

Shirky’s TED talk is worth watching, especially against this Iranian elections backdrop. He succinctly heralds the “many to many” communication that is transforming media, the mashup of broadcast and chatter that encourages each to inflect the other. Have a look, if you have 17 minutes:

Shriky’s pre-Iran cases in this talk are China, forced by twitterers to quickly acknowledge the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and globally shamed by the shoddy construction that caused so many deaths then, and Barack Obama, forced by a community built on MyBarackObama.com to answer for his reversal on FISA surveillance during the 2008 presidential campaign. Shirky emphasizes a shift from crafting a message (done by an elite, broadcast to the masses) to forming groups (now amateurs can participate, messages can be customized for various groups, everything becomes much more conversational).

It bears noting, though, that the confrontations that Shirky describes ended murkily, from the point of those disruptive tech-wielding crowds. As Shirky narrates of the Sichuan insurgency, “the protests kept going and – finally – the Chinese cracked down. That was enough of citizen media.” He further acknowledges that the Chinese government shut down Twitter (along with Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, Blogger, and other services) during the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It may be, as Dan Rather has put it, “harder to turn out the lights” these days, but proving this with a quick flareup is different from keeping the lights on.

The pushback against Obama’s FISA reversal also frustrates the manyDavids-vs.-Goliath narrative, because the fact remains that, despite a flood of protest from his supporters on his website, despite their formation of the largest ‘group’ to gather on MyBarackObama.com, Obama was not swayed. A campaign spokesman last year danced around this awkwardly: “The fact that there is an open forum on BarackObama.com where supporters can say whether they agree or disagree speaks to a strength of our campaign.” The offended “netroots” may have forced some explanation, some acknowledgment of their anger, but in no way did they prevail.

So it remains to be seen whether Iran will offer the story we so clearly crave: in which the newly democratized media actually drive history, rather than just flare up in the dark, explode, and shimmer away into inconsequence. Whether or not you believe that story in these early days, you have to admire the way communication technology is stirring up personal investment in troubled places in our troubled world — as long as there is a showdown, a disaster, something to track in a feed.

I’ll leave off here with one exchange that seems, to me, to capture everything big-hearted and empty-headed that TwitterFaceFlickrTube inspires in the face of political events unfolding on the streets of Tehran:

“Stay safe” indeed….

Not surprisingly, if you visit the Internet mapping project, you’ll see that people tend to view the internet… differently. Some mappers note their age and number of hours on said internet, but flipping through the drawings I can’t quite discern trends based on these self-identifications. Well, maybe one: the 40-somethings seem quick to reach for cosmic imagery.

But this just in: an Argentinian professor has already embarked on a taxonomy of these maps! That’s right, she’s mapping the maps. So now my map of the internet looks like one giant mirror.

The Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” has been generating buzz for some time, especially since Stephen Wolfram, its eccentric progenitor, announced that it would be going live in mid-May. Expect the twittering to reach a crescendo.

Since the Wolfram|Alpha (WA, let’s say) promises to answer questions typed into a simple text box, it’s being described in the press as a Google-killer. The idea, in an alpha nutshell, is that WA interprets a natural language query and then combs through a gigantic pile of databases, both public and licensed, in order to respond with an answer — rather than Google’s list of web pages that may or may not contain an answer.

Wolfram recently gave a demonstration of WA at Harvard’s Berkman Center. The whole presentation is posted, but you can get a quicker sense of what WA aims to do in this surprisingly murky collection of screenshots:

From this demo and other the-Wolfram-is-coming reviews blooming like tremulous flowers in the rain, WA looks to be a fancy calculator, an atlas on steroids, a deft collator of visualized data.

But is it more than that? Beyond looking up and presenting information, will it give us genuine and new answers? Will it represent a significant push beyond Google’s suddenly modest ambition to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”?

Wolfram himself seems to think so:

…what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

… I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

Wolfram is know for making audacious claims about the power of computation; his massive boiling down of all complexity into relatively simple mathematical rules, A New Kind of Science, was a ‘surprise best seller’ on Amazon even though Wolfram posts all of it for free. The promise of a simple handle on an immensely complex world–frothing up into a good dose of post-religious hype–is irresistible. It’s quite congruent, when you think about it, to Google’s keyword-search doorway to the infinite.

But Google is best used to locate information, not to solve problems. Sure, if you type into its search field “square root of 81″ it will offer you a quick answer atop the usual pagerank results. Google has dabbled, in fact, with calculator functions. This slippage between search and calculation, though, is what alarms me.

A pernicious information illiteracy takes root — the world of clear ascription of responsibility suffers another blow — anytime someone starts assigning oracular power to the Google search algorithm. “It says [fill in information claim here].” I’ve seen college students actually cite a Google search in research–not research on Google search, mind you, but research on a subject informed by something that the search dug up one night. Who wrote and published the data is unimportant: in the middle of that dreary night, “It says….”

At an extreme point, we reach the absurdity of Carol Beer in Little Britain, overriding every thought and instinct as she dabbles on the keyboard and announces, after desultory searches, “Computer says no…”

Of course any decent web calculator will draw on good data, and won’t be nearly as mechanistic or useless or funny as Carol. But even an amazing one — and WA promises to be amazing — shouldn’t be confused with actual intelligence; assembling and synthesizing only gets you so far. One of WA’s biggest cheerleaders, Twine founder Nova Spivack, makes a similar point:

Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google — it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example — there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.

Spivack’s distinction between (WA’s) computation and (Google’s) look-up is helpful, as is his concession that WA, as elegantly structured as it may be, will only be useful in presenting and recombining known facts. Wolfram himself, no stranger to hyperbole, may wish to characterize WA as generating new knowledge. But until it develops algorithms for context, nuance, interpretation, influence, critique, seriousness, incoherence–until it embraces all of human expression, in all of its messiness–it will never offer sufficient answers to questions more debatable than “What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?”–just as Wikipedia cannot extend beyond professed neutrality.

So my fear of WA, knowing little about how it actually will work and feel, is that it will offer a fancy dashboard of pseudo-expertise, subtly diverting human inquiry into what’s pre-known. This seems an old fear, a fear of robots, and maybe, like many old human fears, it will melt away in the light of new threats.

In any case, by WA seems poised to offer a counterpoint to the semantic web, a different model of bringing structure to information to make search more responsive to the questions we ask. The road is strewn with various ‘natural language’ search disappointments — Ask Jeeves was deaf, Powerset seems blind to all but Wikipedia — and there’s reason to hope that Wolfram’s interpretation of natural language will be smarter, that it will process our questions and deliver them to large and various datasets. If it then answers authoritatively, though — caveat emptor.

The maturation of the web means that those of us who have no business attempting layouts, who agonize endlessly over colors and fonts, who last stumbled around CSS (and last opened Dreamweaver) sometime back in the first Bush II era — well, we can grab our look and feel from the rack and save our energies for, I don’t know, wondering if connectivity is impoverishing.

You may not care for this current incarnation — you may find it distracting or commercial-feeling (yet not a single thing to buy!) — but I like how it surfaces a little more of the content piled up around here. I’m also a little intrigued by the view/popular metrics, all of which started from scratch after the May Day theme switchover. It’s been my firm belief that only a select few check in with this site; now I’ll get a sense of what those few are looking at without bothering with the likes of Google Analytics.

Since nothing is quite as self-indulgent as a blogger blogging about his blog, indulge me further, rare and wonderful reader, in a little amble through the Wayback….

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Clayfox 2005-recently– For its second outing as a blog (the first was a very brief and forgettable foray in the late ’90s), Clayfox embraced WordPress and adopted a theme called VeryPlainText that kept things, well, somewhat clean. The author of VeryPlainText graciously tweaked his code in response to my request that my “pages” could be commented upon, just like “posts.” We had a little conversation about whether “pages” were meant to be static & impervious to comments — and I saw his point — yet the Kapaga page had to register carping & complaints. The “CLAYFOX” header was generated dynamically from Flickr images tagged with their respective letters — an effect that seemed quite clever, 2.0, variety-inducing, and colorful on top of the veryplainness. Then the javascript that I swiped for this stopped working, so the letter images became static and predictable. Anyway, say hello to a Clayfox that is no more:

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Clayfox 2004-5– Making up for previous wretched excesses (see below), I was going for a clean look in the last days of hand-coding the whole site. A fritzed-out fox carried over earlier iconography, but otherwise this was demur signaling indeed:

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Clayfox 2002-3–Oh the Wayback Machine is pitiless; even if it can’t quite capture every tiled iteration of gradient, it still grabs enough of the Clayfox home page at this awkward stage to recall its crazy insouciance, its Fireworks firewords. Streaks evoke an even earlier atrocity, the months when the home page actually had snowflakes trickling across it.

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Clayfox 1998-2000–And finally on our nostalgia tour, we see a little infant site that really didn’t have a home page to speak of, just a series of handmade course webpages, hand-coded. We see electric blue text against a darker blue background, oh yes. I was actually proud of the fox/navigation in the header: like browser buttons, you see, except they were in the webpage! Each one had to be linked to a ‘next’ and ‘back’ page.

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I think we can agree that the years between 1998 and now have been kind to Clayfox, or at least have helped make it into something more presentable. The design sins you see before you in this look back persist in some fashion, doubtlessly, on the site. Clayfox wouldn’t be itself, somehow, without some awkward badinage of simplicity, flashiness, and underengaged interactive widgets. There’s strange fun in all that–I can’t explain it to myself, but the site has been intermittently compelling enough to keep alive all these years. Just wait until it hits puberty.

This year’s list does pack a punch though, even if it makes a complete hash of Time’s list fetish. Time threw the list open to online readers with a poll that got relentlessly, ingeniously hacked. Despite Time’s best efforts, a person called “moot” ended up topping the poll as the world’s most influential person, heading a list that defined and maintained across days of voting a mysterious acrostic: “Marblecake also the game.” This phrase means something to tittering hackers clustered around a bulletin board called 4chan.

Unable to run a real poll online, Time is now trying to laugh the whole thing off: “To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it’s worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.” Be that as it may, it’s worth further noting that “everyone moot beat out” was deliberately positioned on the list by “moot,” who did a fine job, actually, of endangering the jobs of hapless Time employees.

Of particular interest in this embarrassment is the testing of reCAPTCHA, the defense against spam comment submission once used by this website & still in use all over the web, including at Time’s ill-fated poll. The blog Music Machinery has been tracking Time’s losing struggle to shore up their poll against a flood of bogus submissions, and has a particularly detailed rundown of hackers’ manipulations of ReCAPTCHA.

As I described a while ago, reCAPTCHA provides two words for a person to recognize and type: an image of a ‘control’ word that been identified by consensus, along with another image of an ‘unknown’ word. It’s a clever way to check if a captcha interpreter is trustworthy and then apply her interpretation to an ‘unknown’ word — and actually harness a comment/poll submission utility for text digitization projects.

In this instance, according to Music Machinery, the hackers tried to distinguish the ‘control’ word and match that, then flood reCAPTCHA with fake interpretations of the ‘unknown’ word (every ‘unknown’ word was interpreted as ‘penis,’ heh heh), creating a bogus consensus around ‘unknown’ words that would turn them into zombie ‘control’ words. An overwhelmed and standardized control, in turn, would facilitate autovoting.

In the end, again according to the Music Machinery narrative, all this business of distinguishing control words in reCAPTCHAs was enough of a speed bump that the hackers resorted to “brute force”: ie, interpreting both reCAPTCHA words and voting as frantically as they could by hand, with the help of some basic productivity utilities. This took a grimly dedicated team of devoted voters interpreting two reCAPTCHAs and casting votes over 200 times per hour per minute, for 40 or more hours while the poll was still open.

So what are we left with? Time embarrassed, reCAPTCHA tested, and a real contest, after all, for influence.

Citation mapping is a step towards this promise. Academics have been diligently appending to their research footnotes and endnotes of attributions all along; the hooks are there, all we need to do is link them up. Easier said than done, of course, as the Tower of Babylon still smolders. Citation formats and database structures vary; the semantic web is under construction; too often software used to generate citations (MS Office, Endnote, Zotero & the like) is disconnected from the end version of an article, meaning that the article has to be OCR’d and citations re-interpreted. For these and other reasons, as this recent D-Lib article enumerating problems with citation counts points out, “the rates of citation data accuracy and completeness are not precise enough to make fair assessments.”

That’s not stopping efforts to corral citations into paths of discovery, and as usual the science data managers are out in front. Thompson Reuter’s Web of Science, in particular, has been innovating bibliometric analysis and visualization; its Citation Mapping Tool debuted last summer. The tool ‘maps’ articles into generations, allowing you to travel back and forth between cited and citing. Here’s a visualization of how one article cites others:

As this review notes, the tool is far from exhaustive, thanks to database quirks and variation of records across journals. Exporting a citation map is underwhelming at present: you can download it as a flat image, but there is no way to harvest the data into data management. The tool presents some color coding options, so you can sort out ‘types’ of references, but designation of these codes again relies on consistency across fields that cannot be taken for granted.

But perhaps the biggest drawback to this or any version of simple citation mapping is its inability to reflect conceptual relationships. Citations, after all, are made to a variety of sources for a variety of reasons, not all of them equally germane to what an article is about. An article may cite something it’s refuting, or may be cluttered with window-dressing references, or may go out of its way to cite the work of mentors or colleagues more out of a sense of politesse than necessity. Until this variation of citation quality is somehow addressed, along with improved metadata standardization and database interoperation, it seems doubtful that citation mapping can, in the words of the WOS mapping reviewer, “represent, and make access to, the historical progress of human inquiry, including its interdisciplinary aspects.”

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Time to take another tack? As a recent NYT summary noted, data scientists at Los Alamos have come up with a new mapping of the connections between various disciplines. These connections are charted by tracking logs of click-throughs by researchers moving between journals. The project, detailed in PLoS, is seeking a more accurate way to measure and represent research interconnections than the more traditional citation mapping.

The PLoS report lists advantages of clickstream data: it is immediate information (versus the years that citation data can take to fall into place), it is based on private and actual navigation activity (versus the various motives for citation mentioned above). The report also notes a drawback to relying on clickstreams: “User interactions with scholarly web portals are shaped by many constraints, including citation links, search engine results, and user interface features.” It’s the same infrastructure problem haunting citation mapping.

In any case, the map of click-through connections is quite fun to look at – it’s color-coded by discipline. Humanities sort out to the middle, which is good and proper. Behold what the PLoS authors call a “first-ever glimpse of this terra incognita”: