CiteI’dLike

If you were to invent del.icio.us for academics, how would it work? It would allow for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing. It would pull metadata from academic resource databases. It would allow me (the layprof) to organize collected essays and citations with a minimum of clickage. And it would do all these things in a browser, from on or off campus, independent of platform. In short, it would be quite like CiteULike.

This is a little story about my first pass into CiteULike, and if it’s not entirely a happy story, we should still bear in mind the possibilities, the promise, the 2.0ness of it all.

I abjectly learned about CiteULike just recently (designed by Richard Cameron over a year ago). Sitting through some screencasts made by Tannis Morgan at UBC , I saw how this social bookmarking tool could be useful not only as a way to track journal contents, specifically tagged articles, and other academics’ bookmarks — through RSS — but also as a means to build a library of collected resources — available anywhere and to all.

Holy digital hotness! said I. I’ll try it for myself! And here’s where minor chords start to well up in the background.

Creating an account on CiteULike was childsplay; in ten seconds I was ready to bookmark and collect. Stunned a bit by the possibilities, and revived a bit by narcissism, I decided to start a collection with articles I’ve written. Tough luck, bucko. Though CiteULike offers to browse through some 6500 journals, this roundup doesn’t include the ones that have sponsored my thoughts. In fact, many of the journals seem to be science-related. As ever, the humanist is the redheaded stepchild of resource sharing ventures.

That’s ok, said I. I’ll find some article that’s at least in my field. I saw that Nineteenth-Century Contexts was one of the proffered journals, and scanning a recent edition I saw listed an article about Mary Shelley by Diane Long Hoeveler. Very good, said I. I’ll collect that:

Two links offered to let me ‘view the article online’. Excellent idea! But these links led me to publisher sites, one of which offered a “free sample,” the other demanded $33.67 plus tax. Much disturbing mention of shopping carts. This will never do, said I. Since I am off campus, what I seem need is a way for CiteULike to create paths into Bowdoin’s collections.

So I added the citation to the mysterious Hoeveler article to my own collection, tagging it in the process. Only one-word tagging, please.

A couple of cool features to notice here: I (or anyone) can track my collection through RSS. And metadata from this collection can be gussied up for EndNote with just one click (note how my tags turned into keywords in this EndNote record):

But the problem remained: how to actually connect to the article? I dug around in CiteULike’s FAQs and felt more assured that offcampus proxy access to articles would make those shopping carts disappear. For this functionality, CiteULike pointed me to a COinS Browser Extension written by Dan Chudnov at Yale .

In order to install this little extension, I had to first install Greasemonkey in my Firefox browser — not too difficult, but, trust me, we’ve lost the layprofs by now. The COinS extension allowed me to designate my own institution’s OpenURL resolver, and plug that resolver into OpenURL links now ‘discovered’ in my browser. That way, theoretically, one could click on a resource link on any site and actually access that resource through one’s own institution. You can see this in action here: note the new link that invites me to “Check availability @ Bowdoin”.

But, alas, here’s what happened to me when I clicked that invitation to check availability@Bowdoin:

Note that none of the metadata for the article has been passed through except for the article’s date. At this point I had neither the time nor the skill nor the patience to figure out where the glitch was; I only knew that I was off campus and out of luck accessing an article I found on CiteULike.

Never give up, I told myself. With one last bit of inspiration, I decided to see whether the little bookmarklet that CiteULike distributes (“Post to CiteULike”, rather like del.icio.us’s “Remember this” bookmarklet) would work going the other way. That is, suppose I’m signed into Bowdoin’s databases, and I run across an article I’d like to post onto the CiteULike. That’s just a click of the button, right?

The FAQs warn me that automatic metadata export into CiteULike would only occur with supported databases, which are: AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Anthrosource, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BMJ, Blackwell Synergy, CiteSeer, HighWire, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, IoP Electronic Journals, JSTOR, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, Nature, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, arXiv.org e-Print archive. (See what I mean about the humanities?) Well, JSTOR seemed my best bet, so I rooted around in Bowdoin’s library site until I found an article on Mary Shelley in JSTOR. Here was one from ELH: “Narratives of Seductions and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein” (Ok I see what you mean about the humanities).

When I clicked my bookmarklet to Post to CiteULike, here’s what happened:

Hmm…. that really didn’t take the drudge out of drudgery, did it? I mean, yes, some barebones metadata is passed through, but all to the title field; I have a fair amount of tending, cutting, and pasting to do if I want this to be a real citation. If I feel like more work, I can download a PDF version of the article to my computer, then upload it into CiteULike so I can privately retrieve the article wherever I am. I can’t share the full text with other Mary Shelley aficionados, though: they have to try their own luck tunneling into their own publisher-paying institutions. Otherwise, you know, that’d be stealing.

I believe wholeheartedly that around the world, from within and without institutional walls, academics are happily collecting and sharing resources with CiteULike. I can see this happening minute by minute on the home page:

But at least right here & right now, I can’t fully play. And I feel swamped by “everyone”. How many of “everyone’s” tags link to articles I can understand, much less evaluate and collect?

Once the mechanics were ironed out, this would be my next wish for CiteULike: the creation of discipline-based communities, so I could track the tags of colleagues pondering British literature — and feel less intimidated by clustering geophysicists.

Minding our own business

We need no special issue of Techne to tell us that digital technology comes bundled with a host of political implications. We know that we’re newly vulnerable to tracking, that Google is noting our every search; we know that hackers and spies skulk through networks; we know that access, permissions, and digital rights policy is set by administrators answerable to… well, not us.

Graham Longford’s contribution to the special issue of Techne, Pedagogies of Digital Citizenship and the Politics of Code, enumerates the ways technological citizenship (his words in italics) has devolved. Unsurprisingly, it’s the standard postlapsarian plot, the dark invasion. It’s a colonization of cyberspace by proprietary code and various legislative initiatives designed to protect it; it’s a major renegotiation of the terms and conditions of cybercitizenship as embodied in the design of the early Internet. What can redeem us and restore the early design? Pray for it: open source, with its reconfiguration of existing protocol technologies.

I was a bit surprised, though, to see rounded up among the usual compromisers of digital freedom — privacy and rights-eroding identifiers such as cookies, autofill, and DRM — a less obvious villain: customization. You’d think that self-managed customization of web services would put some power back into the hands of end-users, but Longford’s having none of it.

Why not? Here are ways, according to his essay, that the proliferation of web portals through which users gain access to information and services customized to their specific needs and interests … impinges on the nature of on-line citizenship:

• pseudo-personalizable tools: customization options available to users through processes that are far from neutral, such as menus that support only certain kinds of activities on the web (shopping, sports, MSM breaking news, shopping, horoscopes, weather, shopping…)

• the promotion of passivity, since users are encouraged to assume a posture of waiting for information to be brought to them

• the creation of a self-edited ‘Daily Me’ delivered to… electronic doorsteps; your choices wall off the infinitude that is life: web portals and customization tools enculturate [sic] users into certain kinds of habits, conduct and expectations that condition their use and experience of the web, with the potential for spillover into the off-line world.

• and, extending the last point, the inculcation of entitlement, the co-option of the web in favor of consumer empowerment and personal fulfillment rather than as a means to negotiate difference and overcome intolerance.

Longford and his sources [1] may have a point or two here, but these “impingements” seem tallied in a pre-RSS world. We’re no longer hostage to portal menus (though a Google toolbar might seduce you into surrendering); managing your own diet of feeds seems as much of a hunt, an active gathering and tending — and perhaps even a means of self-broadcasting — as it does a process of consumption.

Moreover, inveighing against customization — and defining the web, instead, as best used to confront difference — seems largely blind to the needs of actual, day-to-day work online. Who could get anything done with someone constantly tugging at one’s sleeve, like an unmanageable child, to look at something else, look at something else? There are times to cast one’s eye broadly over the world — to tear into a good international paper, or far-flung novel, or obscure recording, or whatever. But if one is seriously tracking developments in a field, one needs to be able to track. Maybe it’s time to use another term for this process, now that XML-based technology is allowing us to more efficiently harvest information for ourselves: not “customization,” but “cultivation.”

The application of such activity to an academic library environment is far from settled, or even defined. MyLibrary, an open source package allowing library users to configure their own resource lists, is a prominent first step, and as far as I can tell, the jury is out on its effectiveness. Lehigh deems its implementation successful, while NC State has issued a rather melancholy five-years-down-the-road report on the limits of MyLibrary — students, at least undergraduates, won’t use this tool much unless it’s tied into course requirements, ie a CMS.

Perhaps the specific problem with MyLibrary is that it was developed early, in the shadow of that first wave of menu-driven, static customization. Here’s a mock-up of its newest, 3.0 interface — not a whisper of RSS, not a hint of tagging here:

Helping patrons purposely chart their way through an ever-increasing universe of digital information is exactly what libraries should be doing, and ‘cultivation’ tools are the way to do it. Since it is open source, MyLibrary may well evolve into something more feed-based, more dynamic, more immediately useful; if not, another personalization tool will step into the breach.

Treating all patrons alike, enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach to the web, may correspond to a fantasy of global equality and universal dialogue. But in fact, if we are not to be bewildered or distracted by what’s out there — if we are to really apply the tradition of academic specialization to the web — we need to put these tools to work for our individually defined pursuits.

We may deplore, along with Rousseau, the unnatural fact of individualized labor; we may even agree with Wendell Berry (“The Unsettling of America”) that “the disease of modern culture is specialization… the abdication to specialists of various competencies and responsibilities that were once personal and universal.” The web’s ever-growing reach understandably feeds universalist fantasies.

And yet if you’re going to get work done in this environment, if you’re living among practical limitations of time and attention and self-cultivation, a platonic digital citizenship seems more viable: “‘This, then,’ I said, ‘my friend, if taken in a certain sense appears to be justice, this principle of doing one’s own business.’” (Republic, 433b)

[1] Lifted from Longford’s bibliography – some critics of customization:

Luke, Robert. 2002. “Habit@online: Web Portals as Purchasing Ideology.” Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 8: (Fall), 61-89.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Patelis, Korinna. 2000. “E-Mediation by America Online.” In Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, ed. Richard Rogers. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Editions, 49-63.

Sunstein, Cass. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

s.tag.gering towards

If the idea of faceless hoards organizing the web’s pro/con/fusion in absolutely uncontrolled fashion gets you hot, or bothered, or both, this article on folksonomy by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin in the latest issue of D-Lib is worth a look. It’s a nice rundown of behavior on those 900-pound gorillas of social tagging sites, del.icio.us and Flickr.

As they sift through the ways taggers converge or fail to converge, Guy and Tonkin emphasize a core debate: to control or not to control – or, as they put it, “whether it is preferable to have popular (but perhaps not intuitively obvious) tags, or to have a larger spread of relatively uncommon tags, possibly representing more accurate reflections or a wider spread of points of view.”

And here I’m swaying in the breeze. I’m convinced by Clay Shirky when he defends variation in a large-scale tagging environment -

[Varying] terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there’s no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches…. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

Sure, “film” is not “movie,” “gay” differs from “homosexual,” and God is in the details. But then I look at the stupid ways that tags can differ (misspellings, differing cases, different ways of connecting two words together, various transcoding of alphabets) and, well, you get the picture….

The new D-Lib article makes several interesting observations about tagging behavior that ameliorates Babylonian handwringing, though, such as

• only 10 to 15 percent of the tags they sampled were single-use tags: taggers do tend to play together

• social tagging services can and do foster ‘best practices,’ such as listing tags used by others, suggesting synonyms and plural constructions, designating an underscore as the best way to group words

• ‘tag bundling’ has emerged as a way to create hierarchical folksonomies, a natural extension of compound tags

• Unicode adoption will tighten up character standardization

Guy & Tonkin strike a nice balance — recognizing the benefit of a natural evolution of tagging, rather than ordained proscription, yet tracking the dangers of incoherency. They underscore that tagging serves two very different functions: personal organization, and collective interchange. The tension between these two functions is what gives this activity its kick.

When I think about how I use these social tagging sites, it seems to me that self-definition and outward discovery are very much at work, sometimes against each other: here is my portfolio of tags (my ‘narrative’, as the alchemical muser might put it), my unique collection: who coincides with me? what are the portfolios of those who share tags with me, anyway? where might they lead me? We read to identify (become more ourselves) even as we’re exploring (losing ourselves). Tagging, along with much networked activity, extends this familiar double-impulse into the social sphere of publication, scrambling the old divisions between authoring and reading.

Understanding optimal conditions for metadata ecologies will take time. Are tags, in the end, most powerful when they’re created by heterogeneous masses? Or are they more useful to a pre-defined group — one that shares a language, an interest, a project, a field of study? And what kind of prompts or suggestions or rules (if any) might further nurture this sudden, populist upsurge of categorizing? Open-ended publication of tags is a great beginning — just do it and see what happens — but, inevitably, harnessing all this new activity is what will help us better read ourselves.

Looming clouds

Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together.

Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – wherein three groups of RSS feeds (library-related feeds, news feeds, and blogs-I-like feeds) converge into 75 tags each. Here’s a picture of tonight’s harvest:

The library-related and news-related tags (top, middle) do tend to group up a bit, while the blogs-I-like tags (on the bottom) tend to straggle individually — a reflection of the scattered nature of my recreational surfing, perhaps. In any case, automated harvesting is hardly a science; since TagCloud is not drawing from any standardized metadata, the occurrence of certain terms can seem arbitrary or trivial. Or unnecessary … pizza queen, anyone?

I’ll add more feeds into the mix as I run across them, who knows what tags will emerge — or, once clicked, where they will lead. If they lead nowhere, keep in mind that TagCloud is beta.

So go ahead, head into the clouds.

TagCloud

Folksonomy meets RSS: TagCloud.

Yes I know: ‘folksonomy’ is a particularly hideous neologism – it basically means metadata assigned by a non-hierarchical community. D-Lib let the word rattle and clunk around a rundown of ‘social bookmarking tools’ in April. Ever since it’s been nagging me – it’s just too unholy of a mix of populism and taxonomy.

TagCloud describes itself as an “automated folksonomy tool” – which I think is a particularly trendy/tortured way of saying: it scans RSS feeds for frequency of terms, then display the most prominent terms in text that is scaled to represent frequency. You know, like Flickr’s tags.

It’s a work in progress, and Danny Sullivan has written about some of its limitations in SearchEngineWatch. But TagCloud seems like a good way to get a torrent of RSS-fed information into some kind of visual handle on the user end. You know, where folks live.