The occasion of a little makeover for good old Clayfox (thanks Jai in New Delhi!) has me thinking back over all its incarnations, most of which have been slightly hideous. Without WordPress and its myriad of free themes, I hate to think of the garish rags that might be tricking out these musings.
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.
In the perfect world we never seem to live in, migration of scholarship to the web would mean endlessly networked citations. It would mean new metrics for gauging the impact of any given publication, substantiating tenure/promotion and grant proposals with hard evidence. It would give us new tools to map the interplay of research in an interdisciplinary age. Machines would be prosthetic connectors of our truest thoughts.
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”:
Every once in a while Clayfox drifts into the tag clouds. And yet its heart has never quite followed. Maybe that’s because most often those clouds don’t prove to be so very informative after all.
Let’s review: tag clouds are a way to visualize the frequency of application of (usually uncontrolled) keywords to a corpus of stuff by a number of people. In many — even most — cases I wouldn’t call these taggers a ‘community’, unless we water down the definition of ‘community’ to a collection of people who have signed up for an online service. Even within the context of one academic tagging experiment, that can be thin or lumpy tea….
Even populous and richly tagged environments like Flickr can puff up clouds that seem, well, rather vaporous. Look at the cloud of “all time most popular tags,” and what is revealed?
It seems that when taking digital pictures with NIKONS and CANONS Flickrites gravitate to WEDDINGS and PARTIES, they focus on FRIENDS and FAMILY, they like to TRAVEL on VACATION to the BEACH or to places like CALIFORNIA and FRANCE and JAPAN. Well, well, blow me over with a feather.
Even as a means of self-portrayal, cloud tags come up short — at least to an unstrategic tagger like myself. I use and love del.icio.us — but the cloud that it serves up of my tagging activity has never been of more interest than, say, an alphabetical list of my tags. And I’ve never really discovered much about anyone else by scanning a cloud of their del.icio.us tags. Have you?
But I’m not anti-cloud, far from it. I just happen to think that clouds are a lot more interesting to human beings when they are of words in a text, rather than of tags applied to objects. Tag clouds open up all kinds of blurry mysteries: who’s doing the tagging? how canny or consistent are the taggers? what is the extent of the corpus being tagged? But a word cloud of a given text can be as revelatory as word mining — a re-mapping of a document to bring out its frequencies, its quirks, its long tails.
And word clouds, at least those generated on the addictive new Wordle , can be quite beautiful as well. I can imagine students really learning from them, or at least investigating the vocabulary field of, say, a poem from new angles.
As an example, I’ve created word clouds of two poems by William Blake: the introduction to Songs of Innocence, and the introduction to Songs of Experience. Compare them below, and you’ll quickly see that the Innocence poem is more repetitious, aural, interactive, while the world of the Experience poem is more disperse, visual, occupied by distances. You could get all that by reading the poems themselves, without any scrambling of their words and plumping up of their frequencies. But word clouds are a way of remapping a fixed world of meaning, visually exploring it — an engaging thing to do even if they drive you back, in the end, into fresh appreciation for syntax and line structure and the very contexts they explode. Enjoy!
Clayfox has never been deluged with comments, despite some provocatively insouciant — if not downright ignorant — claims. It’s a quiet place, this blog, offering arcane pondering that trips barely a ripple in the chat-o-sphere. But let’s consider quality as an inverse of quantity. Indeed, I’ve been honored to net responses from a few mindful colleagues, nostalgic friends, quizzical strangers, and producers of a couple of the projects touched on here — reacting to or extending my quick generalizations.
Spam has been kept largely at bay by the popular WordPress plugin Spam Karma 2. Dr. Dave gets fooled once in a great while — I too was an early sucker for those “I love your blog!” Trojan insincerities — but on the whole, he’s been a valiant defender against relentless bots, and commentary has been a quiet and easily managed thing here.
So why change what ain’t broke? Walking home, listening to a Digital Campus podcast (another fine offering from George Mason’s CHNM, oft-mentioned here), I heard about a little validation program that is such clever good citizenship, I had to install it: reCAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA’s twist is that it uses actual ‘rejects’ from OCR processing — image patches of text that OCR software isn’t sure what to make of during digitization — and works these mystery patches into the validation process. It is up to you, flesh and blood, to recognize the distorted word and type it back. When you ‘solve’ a reCAPTCHA to post a comment, say, you’re also contributing human brainpower to the digitization of a book in the Internet Archive . The reCAPTCHA motto conveys the doubleplay: “Stop Spam. Read Books.”
This is just a picture. For a true reCAPTCHA experience, you’ll have to post a comment.
You might wonder how much effect your little ‘solution’ has in the scheme of things. reCAPTCHA claims that 60 million CAPTCHAs are daily solved: that’s a lot of blurry text getting cleared up, a steady current of human recognition. You may also wonder how reCAPTCHA determines that your submitted solution is correct. The key is delivering two words to you to ‘solve’ at once: a word for which the answer is known, and a word that can’t be determined by OCR. If you correctly solve the ‘known’ word, reCAPTCHA has more confidence in your solution of the mystery word, and compares your solution to other presumed correct solutions of the word.
So that’s what you’re doing, should you favor Clayfox with a comment going forward: proving your human identity while hastening along the migration from print. Oh, and you’ll be registering — at least here — what you thought.
The web is spinning ever-faster, shards of content are scattering every which way, RSS and podcast feeds radiate in all directions, each new day brings new ways of grabbing & saving & sharing digital bits shorn of context.
It can seem so… centrifugal. Now that web content has slopped out all over the place, churning and reprocessing itself in a puppydog frenzy to deliver customized services, we might take a nostalgic moment to recall when “webmasters” published “pages” that we “surfed.” Somehow, while you were downloading that mp3, emailing your baby pics to all and sundry, setting up your personalized sports news alerts, punching up maps in your car — the very notion of a website became quaint.
To defenders of edifices and books and beautiful places, the 2.0 web world might seem a wilderness of fleeting, fractured signification: a million ephemeral pokes. Of course the web is still designed, even triumphantly, but that architecture is more likely to be in the form of submerged code — design that delivers a teeming, unfixed front end, the on-the-fly, just-in-time, gotta-go whimsies of what I want at the moment.
Two ways of plucking at the web at will — as if it were a lo-fat all-you-can-eat banquet — crossed my path lately. The first, Clipmarks (“Just the best parts of the page”), offers a browser-integrated clipping tool that will grab words, paragraphs, selected images, even video posted on YouTube & its ilk. The Clipmarks demo says it all, and will only detain you for 49 seconds:
Think about when John Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That line was part of a much longer speech. Imagine if instead of being able to clip that line from the speech, people were forced to listen to the entire speech every time.
Now imagine if that was a web page. What if you were forced to bookmark the entire page, but you really wanted to clip the part that mattered most. How many people would have the time or attention span for the whole thing?
We believe that information is easier and more enjoyable to digest in small portions. Kind of like movie trailers, sushi and cliff notes.
Armed with virtual scissors, web readers are less passive, less hostage to what someone else packaged, less hostage to the ‘writerly,’ as Barthes might suggest from the grave. But is improved appropriation of web content leading to a world of Cliff Notes movie trailers with the shelf life of sushi? Or, more portentously, “obnoxious, mean-spirited dialogue” conducted by anonymous clippers, fueled by uncertainly sourced and possibly stolen material?
Fortunately not every such tool is so blithely delivered into the Whatever Zone. The second grab-it tool coming across the transom recently is more purposeful in emphasis: MediaMatrix, developed at Michigan State University.
In an informative video introducing MediaMaker (a video that, ironically, can’t be easily embedded inline here), we see similarities to Clipmarks: server-side application, browser integration, links-driven. The difference here is that clipped objects load into an editor that encourages annotation, resizing, cropping, notes association, and metadata assignment. Streaming audio and video can be segmented without actually being copied or downloaded — through clever use of just URLs and text parameters. This is sophisticated, task-oriented clipping of media that Clipmarks can only dream about (at 3 a.m., drooling into its Cliffnotes).
With the exception of text, which can be custom-selected, Clipmarks grabs elements in the form that they have been fixed on a webpage (the image, the video, the song as is). MediaMatrix, on the other hand, lets you edit those elements for yourself: it lets you create out of what you collect, even as it encourages responsible tracking and attribution through “metadata skins” that appear during the annotation process.
A clipped sound file is edited on MediaMatrix
MediaMatrix encourages metadata application
But what then happens to your MediaMatrix clip-derived creations? Well, they hang like fruit on an individual’s “tree”…
Clipped and edited assets hang on a MediaMatrix tree
…and await plucking into essay/presentation spaces:
A MediaMatrix workspace, where one prepares presentations or multimedia essays
It’s here, oddly, where MediaMatrix starts to feel outpaced by the bubbleheaded Clipmarks. We’ve had recent occasion to think about centralized versus distributed models of publication; here we have a comparison that exemplifies the dichotomy. MediaMatrix imagines that you will collect and analyze the assets you’ve plucked out of various contexts within a rather gloomy, solitary, pre-formulated workspace. It’s a one-way ride: bits and pieces come out of the web and get imprisoned in “my portal”; if you want to work with them, you have to use MediaMatrix editing tools in a MediaMatrix environment. To publish your work, the best you can do is send out a URL that draws right back to MediaMatrix. What happens in MediaMatrix stays in MediaMatrix.
Clipmarks, in the other hand, cheerfully offers you any number of ways to fling your clipped treasures in any direction. You can save them on their site (and share them with fellow clippers, tossing them up into the communal winds to see what happens — sociability entirely lost on MediaMatrix), or you can push them to your email client, your printer, even your blog (a connection that was fairly easy for me to configure).
Where do you want it? Clipmarks sends your selection any which way.
Clipmarks frankly doesn’t care much about what happens to what you’ve clipped — leaving options for you if you do. Route your purloined selections of web content to the publication platform of your choice, private or public, online or off.
While we’re waiting for perfect digital object recontextualization engine, one that mashes up Clipmarks’s flexible and social publication with MediaMatrix’s editing power, analytic focus, and sense of responsibility, we might think about how to emphasize new wholes out of digital fragmentation. When “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” it will have to know about how to create connections with virtual splinters; “divided there is little we can do.” It is with an exhortative spirit that I clip here the whole Kennedy inauguration address, grabbed in two pieces from YouTube:
Today, YouTube; tomorrow, MyYouTubeSpace? I’ve pulled together a little demonstration of something that can be done today with the greatest of ease, something that does its part to elevate video out of the realm of slack-jawed consumption. A slick little new service called Mojiti allows you to write captions and overlay them onto video that has been previously created and posted. Mojiti, then, lets you annotate someone else’s video–which is a way of claiming it, analyzing it, perhaps even transforming it. Participating.
Here’s an example. Before seeing it scribbled over, have a look at my victim-video, a little snippet from The Daily Show (via YouTube) that lampoons social networking websites. It’s mighty entertaining unto itself, and it features an upcoming star of our University Seminar series, Siva Vaidhyanathan:
And now have a look at my annotated version of the very same video. As you’ll see, I’ve discovered a hidden subtext to the piece – watch with amazement as I prove it to you!
If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders.
The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously and communally edited encyclopedia that nobody predicted, while Sanger wanders in the web wilderness, in stubborn pursuit of distinctly pre-2.0 constructs of expertise.
Nupedia, Sanger’s original attempt to build an expert-authored online encyclopedia (and the predecessor of Wikipedia) crashed and burned. Now Sanger’s back with a similar idea: a “progressive fork” off of Wikipedia called Citizendium. His vision of harnessing “educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly” into rival encyclopedia generation awaits you here.
In Sanger’s new scenario, regular Joes and Janes would be welcome to pitch into Citizendium as long as they deferred to ‘editors’: subject-area specialists who “meet certain benchmark requirements–the same straight-up credentials that the offline world relies on.” These expert editors would claim the right to patrol topics by flashing credentials. If several editors with the right credentials claimed a topic, well, “the more the merrier”: disputes among them would be settled “by discipline-oriented editorial workgroups” that would be “staffed only by editors.”
Wikipedian anonymity is quite obviously out of the question here. If the world of Wikipedia is mythically flat — built by faceless if not selfless peers — Citizendium is stunningly hierarchical, as if brandishing one’s identity could settle most any question of authority. One can easily imagine, though, a “straight-up credentials” demolition derby: institutions impugned, publications trashed, countries belittled, research areas broadswiped. If the offline world relies on credentials, it also relies on heterogeneity, microclimates, and quite local constructs of authority.
Citizendium would begin by mirroring Wikipedia, and, presumably, refine this populist chaff into premium wheat. Expertise standing on the shoulders of undifferentiated pygmies, as it were. And since Citizendium content would be freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia could in theory suck the refined content back into itself, without directly compromising on its disdain for egghead experts.
The reigning smackdown of Citizendium is Clay Shirky’s blog post last month entitled Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise — a precise attack that drew a defensive response from Sanger. I generally agree with Shirky, who sees disaster looming in Sanger’s dream of a self-certifying expertocracy shorn of institutional context. Shirky’s concluding dismissal, however, gives me pause:
Sanger is an incrementalist, and assumes that the current institutional framework for credentialling experts and giving them authority can largely be preserved in a process that is open and communally supported. The problem with incrementalism is that the very costs of being an institution, with the significant overhead of process, creates a U curve — it’s good to be a functioning hierarchy, and its good to be a functioning community with a core group, but most of the hybrids are less fit than either of the end points.
Such categorization is ominous for any of us skating the half-pipe of that ‘U’: those of us, that is, applying social software to learning environments. Ours is a hierarchical world, we want to build communally supported processes: are we doomed to hybrid mush? Admittedly, even the most starry-eyed 2.0 prophets have trouble describing how communal software is to work its magic, once it’s scooped out of the vast flickring seas and let loose within the tiny microclimate of a classroom. Yochai Benkler, for example, says much about networked production of educational texts, but little about peer production within a class (in, for example, his article Common Wisdom:. Peer Production of Educational Materials).
If social software depends on scale — the happy fact of human diversity that guarantees that someone, somewhere, is bound to perform a necessary function — then what happens when your field is winnowed down to, say, eight bright-eyed students with the same major? If your software is thoughtlessly cribbed from a quite different environment, one that depends on scale or interconnection that is foreign or even inimical to a classroom, you’re courting failure. Shirky’s notion of situated software — “small, purpose-built apps” — is well worth bearing in mind in this respect.
Whatever the tool it’s using, customized or off-the-rack, a classroom exists in a microclimate that consists not just of a gaggle of students, however skilled and productively interactive — it also contains a super-entity, an authority akin to Sanger’s editor: the credentialed teacher (and plenty of other shadowy figures behind her — but we won’t go into that here). Whatever is peer-produced in such an environment will be some fairly complicated blend of authoritative fiat and collaborative discovery. It will be as forced as it is fortuitous — a provenance quite different from Wikipedia, but perhaps a bit like Citizendium. However quixotic Sanger’s dream of expertise within a collaborative framework may seem, and however displaced onto a grudge match with Wikipedia it may be, it is worth tracking from the curvy heart of the U.
Harkening back to the salad days of college, I seem to remember a free-floating faith in the power of someone else’s notes to fill in cracks of attendance & attention. I doubt that much significant learning took place in power-cramming sessions entirely reliant on someone else’s diligently indented transcription of wisdom. But I’m struck now, thinking back, by the instinct to herd together in such situations.
A study tool named stu.dicio.us has recently made its debut, promising del.icio.us-like value through aggregation of communal effort. Now maybe some stranger from West Virginia Tech will save you from the consequences of having slept through Chemistry. Or maybe that concept your prof seems so fond of has been dropped in another class somewhere, in a context just different enough to fuel your next paper. Or maybe you can meet that hottie on the far side of the lecture hall because you’ve done a search limited to your school and this class and lo & behold here you both are, believing in the power of networking your notes.
Sharing notes is not cheating, insists stu.dicio.us. Everyone should have every advantage possible in increasing individual knowledge. The site rather mysteriously claims to be created for students, by students, and is rather predictably in beta.
There are bugs, and slender participation makes any 2.0 service like this awkward at first, but give it time. After a little tour, I think that stu.dicio.us is actually more useful for its lightweight organizational tools. There’s a sortable todo function – handy even if you aren’t interested in checking peers’ todos. The basic Textile formatting for notes encourages precision (see this testimony), and auto-save is built in. You can use simple brackets for auto-links to Wikipedia, Google, or Google scholar. You can upload files and access them whenever you want –as long as the service remains online. For those times when you can’t get online, stu.dicio.us offers an offline mode.
Here are a couple of screenshots. First, my fake schedule, with grades, notes, files, todos, and (sadly) no friends. This would be useful, I’d say, especially if it were within a course management environment:
… and someone’s notes, which i found by doing a search for history and columbia:
Enlightening? I doubt it – but misery does love company – and if you’re casting around randomly for any mention of history in anyone’s notes, chances are that you’re feeling a bit miserable.
You’ve wrangled that paper to a plausible conclusion — a bit of sleep is just around the corner — but hold on, not so fast, you’re Sisyphus after all. Citation formatting is a special curse, the inane labor at the end of hard work that holds all your effort hostage. Never does it seem less true that it’s the thought that counts.
The best portrait of this frustration that I know is Louis Menand’s New Yorker article from three years back, “The End Matter; The Nightmare of Citation.” (And no, I won’t properly cite it.) Menand mobilizes here a full sense of the tyranny that must be endured in the construction of endnotes —
Every error is an error of substance, a betrayal of ignorance and inexperience, the academic equivalent of the double dribble. That the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d’etre are long past reconstructing does not reduce the penalties for nonconformity.
Surely technology should free us from such tiresome finish-line ambushes. And yet, as Menand observes,
The notion that the personal computer has eliminated the bone-crushing inefficiency of the typewriter, and turned composing The End Matter into a drive in the word-processing park, belongs to the myth that all work on a computer is “fun”-one of the Digital Age’s cruellest jokes.
Microsoft Word, as Menand observes, is too often a baffling mess when it comes to foot/endnote generation, plaguing you with random formatting and automatically generated annoyances. Too many options: the exhauster citer just wants to be faultless and to be done.
EndNote — which is a plug-in in my version of MS Word — might seem to be a lifesaver. Indeed, many of us have been happy to sit through earnest training in this and similar tools, entranced by the promise of metadata pulled down from a network, stored in a local database, and spit back out, effortlessly, into formatted endnotes. Oh, you wanted APA 5th, not Turabian? Hold on just a sec – (click, click) – here you go! Choose a style, any style: here are 1012 to choose from!
And yet, in my personal experience, EndNote endnotes are chock full of flaws. I’m not here to assign blame — maybe it was an incomplete OPAC record, maybe the library filter was off, maybe EndNote dropped a field — at the end of the day (rather, the night), citations are liable to look like nothing in that overstuffed, unloved red style manual (which is all but impervious, anyway, to the need to cite digital sources). Back to fixing, fretting, fudging. Only EndNote is liable to overwrite your corrections: surprise!
And yet the dream of escaping such frustrations through technology won’t die — and shouldn’t. It seems only fair that our Babylonian predicaments be ameliorated, at least somewhat, by computers–our vast interconnected ever-churning never-complaining prostheses.
George Mason’s Center for History & New Media (a seemingly ever-inventive group) has had a promising tool chugging down the pike for some time that offers a new glimmer of hope. It manages citations and other research information in a web environment. When first I heard about it , they were calling this tool Firefox Scholar – now it’s been rebranded to Zotero: a term loosely based on the Albanian word for acquiring/mastering. Whatever – let’s trust that this promising project will prove to be less obscure than such an etymology.
Ability to capture & store PDFs, files, images, links, web pages in a browser platform.
A range of organization options, including folders & tagging & ‘smart’ collections.
iTunes-like interface.
Spotlight-like search-as-you-type.
…and, most relevant here:
Ability to sniff out a citation on a web page & capture it to your library
Citation export.
Zotero works with Firefox to sense when you are visiting a page with full bibliographic data (like an OPAC) and offers a little book icon; click it, and citation material comes flying into your computer.
Since suddenly there’s a profusion of browser-based store-organize-share tools (SOS?) for scholars, Zotero will be all the more valuable if it can be jiggered to play with academic social software like Connotea or the aforeglimpsedCiteULike – and, while we’re dreaming, if it can feed stored items into networked repositories. Since it’s free and open source, one can imagine any kind of evolution for this “next generation research tool.”
Will researching and citing on the web actually get a little easier? We’ll see – Zotero is in private beta now, but should be in public beta by the end of the month.
…the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.
That’s Thomas DeQuincey, mourning the shift of nineteenth century mail delivery from horse to locomotive. The definitive social history of mail — which has yet to be written, as far as I can tell — will doubtless ride DeQuincey’s essay The English Mail-Coach, or, The Glory of Motion. It’s an incredible and reckless piece, connecting war, class, nostalgia, sublimity, and disaster into an ever-quickening system of transmission.
I’ve never read anything quite like the passage in section II when, riding on a night mail coach that is being driven by a one-eyed coachman who has nodded off — and whacked out on laudanum himself — DeQuincey trips out helplessly as the mail coach drifts into the wrong lane, bears down onto a little carriage carrying two lovers, smashes into it, *and keeps going.*
Though DeQuincey is enthralled by the inexorable post horses, and seems to deplore the trains that replaced them, in truth his horses are mechanistic in the first place–prosthetic beyond control–representative of human will that can’t be reigned in. And if steel rails prevent loverslane smashups, they facilitate all the more the inhuman speed that makes delivery a sublime business.
So transmission keeps quickening. Now it’s so fast, the very notion of delivery is starting to creak. Trains supplanted horses. Planes outpaced the trains. Email outmoded mail. Now, at least for the hungry generation treading us down, instant messaging is nudging out email. Ever notice that it’s not ‘instant mailing?’ When delivery time is whittled down to instantaneous, we seem beyond mail altogether, and we’re even more and even less in control.
Whenever I used to hear a graybeard greet the idea of email with bafflement or hostility, I would be baffled in turn: who wouldn’t want to cut out the stamps, the delays, the deferred gratification of snailmail? Email is free (ok, free with an internet connection and the time it took to set up an account), archivable, portable — email is good.
But now, confronted with instant messaging, I feel like a graybeard. I don’t want to be that accessible. I want windows of privacy, I want time to react, I want to consider considered replies. Combining IM with work has always made me feel rather like an outsourced customer service drone, forced to click a screen within 15 seconds to prove I’m paying attention. Combining IM with friends has always felt wasteful — too many snappy words whose wit wilts as fast as they’re replaced.
And yet, truth be told, just as DeQuincey’s horses and trains were stages of the same rush, so are email and instant messaging. Now that my mail swims a networked world, it made eminent sense to move my email to Gmail‘s excellent platform (privacy qualms and data hostage threats notwithstanding). Exporting email that was hitherto locked up on my Mac was a chore, but doable, and now I can call up most anything that was ever sent to me, no matter where I am. Whenever I’m online a gentle Growl notification flashes a snippet of incoming mail, and Google has added chat right into their Gmail page.
So… I’m directly patched into a live network whenever I’m online. Yes, IM directly patched. Everything is imminently available. Growl: response. All this mechanized speed — Gmail is my latest surprise machine — and if I’m not careful… if I reply rashly… if I bungle an address…. Or if Google vaporizes my account… or if Gmail should crash altogether ….
The perilous instantaneous — I leave you with a bit from Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s fine essay “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)” (Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999) 1-49):
Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution.
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 
