If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.
Let’s step back and marvel at another indication of the power and sudden inexorability of Wikipedia — can you imagine a distinguished historian feeling that he owed it to the world to improve the Encyclopedia Britannica, and urging colleagues to do their part too? For no credit and no money?
If historians and other academic experts should really be raising the quality of Wikipedia, this begs the question of who their exertions would be for. An initial answer, I suspect, would be: not for each other, and not for their students. As Rosenzweig writes (in a peer-reviewed journal, of course, and not an encyclopedia),
Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias — digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative — for research papers.
And so an obligation to Wikipedia seems outwardly directed, keyed to a general public’s understanding (that Cleaveresque ‘family’ using a family encyclopedia). This raises further questions. Are we seeing a technologically-enabled resurgence of the public intellectual? If so, what would it mean to take on this role in a communally edited space impervious to individual identity and, as Rosenzweig notes, suspicious of expertise?
Since an edifying or even identifiable relationship with Wikipedia users seems impossible, let’s posit that obligation to it is not primarily to a public, but really to a field of knowledge as it is represented in public. In other words, if the Wikipedia page on the American Revolution is becoming the de facto online summation of this event, and if historians don’t weigh in, their knowledge fails to apply where it’s most needed.
But I wonder about how good academics generally are at writing encyclopedia articles. In many cases, it’s not at all the kind of work they do when researching or teaching — it’s not what their intellectual life is about. In general encyclopedias have settled into tended repositories of knowledge, not the active sites of inquiry that universities strive to be.
This reliance on a hundred year old hedged claim in another encyclopedia about the political impact of a 200+-year-old encyclopedia may seem abundantly timid, but it exists — at least today — in an Wikipedia article whose neutrality is nonetheless flagged as disputed. Wikipedia strives to resolve dispute, to traffic in the indisputable — while a university that lived by that principle would be a zombie campus, at best.
Whether or not you believe in the power of online collectivism, and whether or not you think that Wikipedia represents that collectivism, you have to hand it to it (them?): Wikipedia knows what it is and what it is not. It couldn’t be more explicit about its limitations: it accepts no original research, no original ideas. And it does not pretend to satisfy research; its founder, Jimbo Wales, reportedly offers this advice to students: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”
So, again, why might thoughtful and original academics pay particular attention to an environment that is in many ways alien to them — and even entertain notions of obligation to it? I have a few guesses, all of them broad, none of them substantiated:
Academic publishing is sluggish — Is there any write-up about Wikipedia that does not refer to its vast coverage, its low barrier of entry, and what Rosenzweig calls its “open-source mode of production and distribution”? Academics yearn to see their work actually get distributed in the world, and they are caught in increasingly sluggish and narrow channels of communication. Wikipedia actually publishes effort, instantly and in retrievable form, to an audience that can respond to it.
No doubt about it, academic publishing constricts the discourse it should support, but the invigoration of it in a digital environment will probably be quite different from the structure and dynamics of a wildly popular collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia may have the most to teach us through its stubborn emphasis of what it is not: are we listening? This is a world in which, as the entry on ‘expert’ tells us (today, at least), “an intellectual elite may or may not be correct about a particular issue in their field of expertise.” The “may or may not” ambivalence about expertise, the faith in correctness at all cost… not exactly the environment for nuance, originality, or intellectual leadership.
The academic star system is stifling — This is a corollary to the above point, because recognized stars get into print more often, or at least can lean on the rusty gears of publication. And stars are stars — let’s face it — they energize events, they get the grants, they make things happen. But I suspect many academics — even stars — are titillated by Wikipedia’s oft-noted indifference to expertise. By depersonalizing and flattening and opening the field of contribution, Wikipedia seductively suggests that truth will prevail on its own — no lollygagging on laurels here.
Whatever we think of laurels, it is indisputable that peer-review, the basic engine of academic appraisal, depends on identification and reputation. Escaping the burdens of apprenticeship, labor-validation, review, and professional development may seem liberating, but a specified affiliation and whatever responsibility (or lack thereof) that implies are enabling conditions of academic discourse. A university can’t function without overt hierarchies–campus rituals are almost entirely organized around the individual’s passage through sanctified levels. Anonymity may prove surprisingly difficult for those whose sense of work is so deeply rooted in acknowledged position.
Neutrality is only fair — Wikipedia’s sternly enforced Neutral Point of View policy seems to offer respite from a world riddled with clashing theoretical frameworks. Humanists and scientists alike may feel that it’s exhausting to interpret morning noon and night — all the while moving practically through the world, negotiating its incoherencies. Wikipedia’s banishment of originality lightens the burden of this reconciliation; it sings the siren song of the incontestably evident.
The ban on spin attempts to keep things calm and cordial, but to what end? Wikipedia’s NPOV might seem related to the disinterested analysis beloved of academicians, but, as Rosenzweig points out, Wikipedian neutrality leads to a great deal of waffling and prim skirting of controversy. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a polite series of self-cancelling on-the-other-hands proves a poor substitute for interpretive power and conviction. Poor and censorious. For a surprising little totalitarian chill, I recommend Wikipedia’s page about NPOV disputes : “there is a strong inductive argument that, if a page is in an NPOV dispute, it very probably is not neutral.”
Facts are simple, fact are good — A corollary, again, to the above point. Wikipedia leads us into a world of passive construction, where things have been proven, have been shown, have been accepted. Once all that messy agency is wiped out, we are left with qualified data in its proper place. Enjoy a small chuckle that the “Fact” entry in Wikipedia is today double-flagged as containing “disputed factual accuracy” and “original or unverified claims” . The fact remains that in Wikipedia, things are either proven or not, accepted or not, controversial or not — it’s an organized and binary landscape.
The pursuit of just the facts ma’m orients Wikipedia towards what’s been commonly agreed, but it can also lull thought to sleep. As a historian, Rosenzweig knows very well that “good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose.” Let’s go back to that “Fact” entry in Wikipedia and partake of its droning tautology: “A fact that was once a fact and hence becomes disproven may once again become a fact if the factual evidence supporting its validity become increasingly factual in light of new and, ultimately, factual evidence.” ‘Nuff said.
Data is (are) cool — Though Rosenzweig gives props to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia — finding it to clock in somewhere in-between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the prohibitively expensive American National Biography Online — you can sense in his article a purer enthusiasm for Wikipedia as object. Its open content can be exported for research — “downloaded, manipulated, and ‘data mined’… Wikipedia can therefore be used for other purposes.” One of these purposes might start to feel like research: measuring activity in a somewhat transparent online environment. As faddish tracking of Wikipedia contrails suggests, passage through it becomes an enticing reflection of its users — you can trace patterns and behaviors to your heart’s content.
But what is all this data telling you? Who do Wikipedia’s users represent? How much should we take Wikipedia’s ground rules as exemplary? Tautology looms: we’re studying Wikipedia to learn how Wikipedia works. Take a research paper like “Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system” — here’s how its it resolves: “Wikipedia is a fascinating topic of study and requires careful examination of its underlying social and cultural processes…. One of the most urgent items on the research agenda is to describe and explain the concrete processes by which knowledge and truth is produced and adjudicated.” What’s behind this compulsion — the requirement of examination, the urgency of such a research agenda? Could it be mirroring of Wikipedia’s own faith in neutral truth-production?
Again this feeling of compulsion attending Wikipedia. Maybe you feel it too. If so, it’s probably too late to suggest that another wiki, another platform, another construct might better deliver your truth.
Please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s just that I was so excited to meet you — I had so many preconceptions, I had heard so much about you. And then when I actually met you, you seemed kind of standoff-ish and, I admit, sort of different from what I thought you’d be. But I still like you — don’t get me wrong.
When I first heard about you I thought: finally! A way for scholars to tag up an OPAC as well as electronic journals — a tool enabling social discovery by a defined community swimming through carefully selected resources. In short, I thought you’d be more sophisticated and more focused than del.icio.us. I thought: finally, it will be easy for a specific class or a set group of scholars to sift together through premium resources: collaborative discovery centered on the information source most unique to Penn, the Penn library.
But when we actually met you were so confusing (and I’m not alone in thinking so). Your home page hit me right off the bat with pictures of birds and a big tagcloud, a cloud that seemed more random than representative:
What does it mean that Lauder_Institute_Area_Studies dwarfs united_states? I think it means that you haven’t gotten around enough to render a representative or even very interesting snapshot of the Penn community — so until you do, I suggest you don’t wear this raw data on your sleeve.
I know your type — you’re enamored of presenting data as it comes into your system — makes you seem extra dynamic. But until you get more play, you’re not delivering useful information with your overall clouds and ‘latest tagged’ lists. In fact, I doubt such look-ma-it’s-web2.0 features will ever be that useful to anyone, however big you get.
I guess my point is, first impressions are important — so you should use your home page to introduce yourself, rather than show off. I finally found my way to the “About” page (tiny button, my friend! why so shy?), a page that finally addresses the question, “What is PennTags”? And here you got kind of weird. You started pretending that del.icio.us doesn’t even exist. Or, to put it another way, you said almost nothing about yourself that couldn’t be said about del.icio.us. You bragged:
Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then can’t find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It’s both personal and portable.
Well ok, but I thought your beauty, PennTags, would be that you would be different from del.icio.us — that instead of letting anyone tag anything just ‘out there’ on the open web, you’d let a defined community — namely, Penn and sub-communities within Penn — tag things that are available by virtue of being at Penn. Otherwise, why reinvent the wheel? Ignoring the popular kid & just pretending to be him won’t impress many who are likely to be drawn to you in the first place.
Jumping into some of your posts, though, I found that your users are in fact using you as I thought they might — they are tagging your library’s catalog records, and they are tagging articles available in your library’s database, as well as outside websites. Following these links put me on quite different adventures.
When the item tagged is in the OPAC
OPAC tagging is pretty darn sweet — and you pulled this off with Voyager, no less. When I clicked on a post referring to a book on Godard, I didn’t get to access the book (obviously), but I was routed to its catalog record, and I found that the user-contributed tag and summary had made the trip with me, and appeared in a yellow box right in the OPAC:
After seeing this trick, PennTags, I started to warm to you. People who know nothing about you or about tagging or even about bookmarking are bound to wonder what these yellow notes are on showing up on the bottom of OPAC records — maybe you’ll recruit more users this way, and get smarter. At the very least, you’re giving library records a sense of life; any way to enliven the OPAC with user contributions is a-ok with me.
But I wonder how you’ll manage any significant success — imagine ten such yellow PennTag records clinging onto a record in the catalog. You’ll have to be careful to keep a balance between authoritative metadata and folksonomy, between succinct official catalog records and long contributed summations.
When the item tagged is in a journal database
What about when someone posts and tags a journal article in you? I clicked on such a record, and, not to my surprise, got dumped at a Penn database log-in screen — which means that if I were affiliated with Penn, I’d go right to the article. Since I’m not, I see nothing — no user summations, no fun yellow boxes. This begs the questions again about who is using PennTags, and for what purpose. Frankly, I felt ignored by you here. If you are of, by, & for people behind Penn’s walls, then perhaps you should live behind that wall too — it’s not particularly interesting, for someone who can’t get at resources, to see how they’re being tagged.
That said, clicking on the title of another posted article, a JSTOR title, took me — much to my surprise — right into the article; I was ushered straight in thanks to my own institution. That experience started me dreaming again, PennTags, about an openURL world, filled with cross-institutional tagging of academic assets. At the very least it renewed my hope that I might find you of use while waiting for my own library to get tagging off the ground.
When the item tagged is an outside website
Then there are the outside websites that are being posted and tagged in you, just as they’re tagged in del.icio.us. As you know, I think it’s redundant and a little silly to use you just for this purpose, but I’m also warming to the idea of tagging websites right alongside OPAC records and journal articles. You see, PennTags, I’m open to persuasion; you just haven’t taken the time to articulate the benefits of this mix. You’re actually allowing your users to bring resources into your library, in a way. Rather than reinventing a wheel, you’re melting a wall. That’s a big step, and it’s one to think about — not take for granted.
Yeah, inside/outside tagging has plenty of potential, no doubt about it, but here again I’m a little let down. Here’s the deal, PennTags: I think you could be a little more proactive about what academic tagging could or even should be. Could it be hierarchical? Might it be user-faceted? Are there ways to enforce best practices? By offering little firm guidance, you’re once again playing pseudo-del.icio.us, leaving everything up to an undifferentiated swamp.
But look around, PennTags: you operate in a world full of productive distinctions. You even list some, shyly — they get buried in a section called “More Tagging Tips”:
How hard would it be to invite your users to think along these lines, gently, somewhere in the tagging process? Can tagging evolve to something beyond a single ‘fill in whatever you want’ open field? I know you don’t want to come across as bossy or proscriptive or — god forbid — librarian-like, but I wonder if just a couple of criteria particularly useful to your academic community (say Topic and Relevance) could be quietly promoted, just as del.icio.us already subtly promotes tagging uniformity through ‘recommended tags.’
The thing to keep your eye on is use: how these tags are used by actual populations, in actual classes or other sub-groupings, for actual purposes. I find it pretty weird that you’re asking people to think about tagging with an uncle in mind — unless this is an uncle at Penn. Relevance is a subjective and fairly meaningless call against a wide-open horizon (where many uncles live), but within the context of english242 students working collectively on a presentation about Keats’s illness, say, “Relevance” becomes a powerful way of characterizing a resource.
Imagine, too, if you allowed any kind of distinction among users — how interestingly instructors and students, say, could interact within a classroom framework as what they are (in the institution’s eye) through you. Or professors and research assistants. Or members of a class and those outside the class. Or librarians. Or alumni. These distinctions shape the day-to-day life of your campus, and though I suspect you imagine yourself to be leveling the playing field in exciting new ways, you don’t have to dumb the field down that much. Nor do user distinctions need to control the way people use you. Building them in would only help when it become desirable to browse or subscribe to the tagging work of a certain subset of the campus community. Here’s your advantage over del.icio.us: you operate in a circumscribed world organized around definable purposes, roles, means, events.
I think you’d be even cooler if you presented yourself as not just another collective knowledge base, but as the way that only Penn could make the knowledge of the world work for definable ends. That’s why I think your most promising feature is ‘Projects’. Right now you only allow one owner post to a given project, but maybe in the future you’ll loosen up and let many users work on a given project — and maybe even specified classes of users. Then, I suspect, the RSS functionality you’ve already built in would start to be useful not merely to the curious, but to a much more involved user-base: the tasked.
Well, PennTags, you can guess by the way I’ve gone on here that I actually am pretty attracted to you, and I look forward to seeing how you mature. You’re raising awareness of tagging in academic settings — and you’re not just sitting around wondering about what that might mean — you’re actually putting tags into motion. That’s the only way any of us is really going to learn how this 2.0 phenom might work for us. So — way to be, & keep in touch.
The almost 400 students surveyed by OCLC think of commercial search engines as a perfect fit for their lifestyle and their needs, and they turn to them first whenever looking for information. The respondents respect the libraries, and feel that they can find quality information through them, but they almost never delve into library websites first to find information. Their instant ‘brand’ identification for libraries is ‘book.’
In short, libraries seem to exist as a point of last resort in the minds of many college students — a complicated, confusing, sometimes outdated facility to be approached for information only when Google fails. The pull-quotes in the OCLC report are inflected with grammatical errors, just to rub salt in the wounds. Rampant illiteracy or OCLC sabotage? You decide:
Hidebound notions of what academic libraries are actually doing these days make it all the more important to find new ways to expose services. The LibX Firefox Extension, for example, embeds links to library resources in a variety of more user-friendly websites (their screenshots show little logos popping up in Amazon and Google searches, as well as New York Times book reviews). LibX is another one of these nifty localizing extensions that Firefox has inspired — and it works with COinS.
A less technical way of exposing those expensive electronic library services is to take particular note of how students actually learn about them, according to the OCLC study. Have a look with me at this chart, which breaks down the ways college students (and broader populations, for comparison’s sake) find out about electronic information sources *besides* through search engines:
Librarians themselves are way down on the chart — and they rate even lower for the non-college crowd. So what’s at the top? ‘Friends’ and ‘Links’: more reasons to make it easy for students to create, store, and share links to library resources. But look at who’s coming in third–beating out other media, advertising, and my cousin who works for CNN: Teachers. Teachers, way above librarians. While librarians are increasingly framing themselves as teachers — the ‘instructional librarian’ is a familiar role and position by now — such data suggests we think of teachers as front-line librarians, or at least librarian-proxies.
Consider, too, this chart showing “Cross-referencing Sources to Validate Information”:
Though it’s hard to see in this small version, the chart shows that college students (in green) and the general population (in orange) validate the information they find on sites most often by comparing other websites with similar information (80-82%). But in second place, at least for the college crowd, here comes our unexpected resource champ, the Teacher, with an impressive 78%. That source of information validation beats out checking library materials (64%) and checking with a librarian (36%).
Given their relatively exalted position on the information food chain, teachers need all the training and support they can get from librarians. We should throw out the assumption that just because someone wrote a dissertation, he knows all about how to use library resources and can pass on this wisdom to students. The ground is changing too fast, and the unsupported instructor will not have time to keep up. That’s not his job–it’s the librarian’s.
Case in point: a European history and philosophy librarian mentioned to me the other day that Blackwell Synergy is becoming a significant point of access to important journals in his areas. And perhaps you thought of this database (if you thought of it at all) as focused on science?
The point is, in a healthy educational environment, a teacher will be backed up with well-selected electronic resources that are ever one click away in the course management system, tended and manicured by librarians. This is indirect, ongoing training – for teachers as well as for their students – in the use of resources, delivered at the point where it’s most needed. Such targeted support could actually minimize class disruption (no need for librarians to come point out where resources are, if they’re already being well-delivered), while letting students hold on to the fantasy (which they evidently need in these perilous times) that the library is all about books.
If it once took a special type of person to be a library cataloguer — one comfortable in back offices & around heavy rule books, methodical, perhaps quiet — now everyone wants to get in on the action. The rise of self-cataloguing has been one of the more inexorable effects of digital media. The discovery within cataloguing of social connections now seems to be another.
Of course long before all this web stuff we were being trained to collect content in various forms, and value assemblages as inherent identifyers of taste. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent presentation at Columbia’s Correcting Course forum carries this age-old ritual into my lifetime; he talks about a mass paperback industry that marketed (unread? unreadable?) books as class identification… VHRs marooned on shelves, monuments of their owner’s cinematic pleasures …. the fine art of of mixed tapes, now supplanted of course by playlists….
The fetishistic Mac application Delicious Library wraps a collection database into a pretty package so… so… well, so you can have a virtual representation of all your books — all your video games — all your DVDs, right on the hard drive of your computer. Scan the item’s UPC barcode with a webcam, and presto, metadata from Amazon flies right into your own library database — including cover art. Awesome, right?
Ok it’s actually fairly purposeless. You can assign items ratings, and you can designate their location in actual space, but I doubt many are actually relying on Delicious Library to find stuff. If you lend out an item to a friend, you can track it with DL — but really, if you’re lending out more than you can remember & your friends can’t be trusted to return things, well, maybe a policy change is in order. And DL’s symbiosis with Amazon’s API is worrisome — Amazon-hosted One-Click Shopping recommendations are just a click away.
But describe Delicious Library to someone, and it’s possible that they’ll turn cataloguer right in front of your eyes: huh, my things in a database….
^ Finding Nemo and other treasures: virtual shelving in Delicious Library
LibraryThing — straight outta Portland Maine, btw — is a web app significantly tastier than its desktop cousin because it networks people’s collections. LibraryThing still invites you to play with representations of your books on virtual shelves for yourself — but now you’re doing your assembling among & amid a myriad of intersecting libraries. Now metadata is up for grabs, unregulated by Amazon or any other detached entity: social tagging comes to the fore. You can hear the 2.0 pitch — it’s del.icio.us for books! — and lo, tagging abounds.
But just around books — LibraryThing valiantly resists the siren call of other media on favor of bibliomania. It links its bibliographic records to OCLC’s Find a Library as well as Amazon and library OPACs via the good old Z39.50 client server protocol, and hosts discussion of titles among those who share it in their libraries.
In short, if you love books, LibraryThing seems an unrigged communal playpen, as well as a self-inventory tool. It provides branching recommendations based on mutual ownership, not Amazonian purchases. It presents clouds of a book’s common tags unseeded by commerce. It offers RSS subscriptions for any given tag, so you can track books as collections, not products, come in.
^Adding to my library in LibraryThing: I enter in a title, and LT checks it against a bibliographic database of my choosing. And I choose LC! No snappy webcam scan, alas, though barcodes are acceptable identifiers.
^Now that I’ve added my book to LibraryThing, I can see how others have tagged and rated it. Looks like some people don’t care for literary theory, and yet they own the book. Go figure. This title hasn’t been reviewed yet in LibraryThing, but many have.
^My so-far small library (the books on my desk right now).
Most intriguing of all, LibraryThing has recently added Library of Congress subjects into the mix. The premise is that user-created tags can coexist with library-tended subject headings, that folksonomy can play off of controlled hierarchy. At times, tags and subject headers coincide. In other instances, they hardly ever do. LibraryThing has only just embarked on this odd tango, and who knows where it will lead — but at the very least it should generate some intriguing friction.
^Exploring the tag “literary theory” on LibraryThing. I see heavy users of this tag, works most often tagged by the term, and the latest books into the system so tagged (and I can subscribe to the tag via RSS). I also see related LC Subject Headings, in case I feel like faceted browsing.
Already user-tags are sitting up a little straighter and paying more attention to themselves. Discussion on LibraryThing’s metablog, Thingology, has been spurred by subject headings to characterize — dare I say categorize — tags. Discussants finds tags to fall into recognizable camps: personal location notes (“living room,” “office”), personal use tags (“read,” “damaged,” “study”), broadcast opinion tags (“excellent,” “lame” ), and personal subject tags (anything in the uncontrolled descriptive universe). The half-hazard felicities of user-tag surfing is getting measured right up against the precision of subject headings.
All this driven by Tim Spalding, a web developer, not a librarian. Or is he? Should we settle for patron?
…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.
What did you do on your spring vacation? Me, I communed with ancestors — and not just the vividly alive ones. My mother had collected a good deal of basic facts and figures about her family and my father’s, and had fed this data into genealogical software installed on her computer. All that rich data was trapped on a local system; to distribute some of it to interested descendants, she would print out, collate, update, supplement…. Spring break: time to transplant the family tree online.
Thanks to the Mormons, the world of digitized genealogy is stabilized into basic metadata; most any family tree software ports its data into GEDCOM files. That allowed us to easily move all those dates and obscure birth locales to a web-based presentation, using a GEDCOM to HTML converter.
Actually, not just a presentation — really a dynamic social platform. The open-source package that I chose, PhpGedView, allows registered members to upload all kinds of supplementary information — photos, notes, what have you (and what *do* you have from those ghostly predecessors?). It pours out data in any number of ways — fan charts, calendars, relationship maps, you name it. It offers a customizable portal, with any number of ways to communicate with fellow registrants. And it protects the privacy of the living: unregistered visitors won’t know how old I am or where I was born or even my name, though they can browse to their hearts’ content among the dead.
Yesterday, Grace Parker (my great-great grandmother) turned 143. Meanwhile Gunilla ‘Golda’ Endler, another great-great grandmother (oh I have lots of ‘em) will be 152 later this month. Only a few photos currently festoon our family tree; my mother has diligently digitized many old portraits, but at huge resolution so she could print out copies for family members, so this work has to be web-optimized. It happens, though, that the tree already contains pictures of our April birthday girls: both Grace (my mother’s side, born in Kansas, died in Oregon) and Golda (my father’s side, born in Belarus, died in Sweden).
Happy birthdays, ladies — you’re no spring chickens, and I’m sure you never gave each other’s world much thought, but here you are, linked through one of those improbable combinations of American circumstances, and settled side-by-side on the web. Settled, at least, for now; despite those lock-in gazes, we know you’re both migrators.
Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last.
- Samuel Johnson
Wrong! — I gleefully thought, way back when I was slogging through an eighteenth century literature class in college — bored silly by Johnson’s lumbering, moralizing, psuedo-Oriental Rasselas, and, in contrast, completely delighted by Lawrence Sterne’s goofy carnival of the mind, Tristram Shandy. Wrong, you fat old authoritative Dr. Johnson, because here I am 220 years later savoring every Rabelaisian joke, every self-conscious pratfall, every typographic stunt of Tristram Shandy.
I had to admire the concision of the put-down, though. A quick slam of the sprawling, irresolute Shandy.
With the wisdom of age, I now am ready to concede that Johnson was half-right: nothing odd does “do” for long. Especially online. I’ll circle back to that emphasis in a moment — but first, let me submit that Tristram Shandy is far from odd, considered rightly. Part of the thrill of reading it in 1980-something *cough* was seeing evidence of postmodern friskiness that actually pre-dated the United States. Tristram’s obsessions stretched reflexivity back into exotically distant realms of bygone minutia (unlike the broad cardboard exoticism of Johnson’s Happy Valley). It seems that then, as well as now(-ish), conceptions were improbable, resolutions impossible; the world teemed with distraction, neurosis, and disordered influence; and authors invited readers to play games.
In fact, if we glance back at a couple of Tristram‘s more infamous tricks, we might feel that Sterne’s techniques are getting less odd by the day. When our author despairs at describing the concupiscible Widow Wadman, and throws open his pages to the reader (here’s paper ready to your hand. — Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can—and unlike your wife as your conscience will let you…) — is this not collaborative authoring space?
And when the narrator, picking up momentum by way of a vegitable [sic] diet, sits down and charts out the loopy plot lines of the novel as it’s progressed so far, even dropping in anchor points so we can check his graph against designated passages — is this not, however tongue-in-cheek, metadata visualization, or a mapping of information flow?
L–d! said my mother, what is all this story about? —-
A COCK and a BULL , said Yorick —- And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
Indeed, and though I haven’t read it (which is to hear it) for, well, many years, Tristram sticks with me–probably because I prefer open concoction to moralistic bullying, especially when it comes to narration. And this preference has had currency for a long time; Tristram Shandy has lasted just fine.
Yet Johnson’s other snap judgment — nothing odd will do long — seems to me all the more true in the virtual places we increasingly come crowding for intelligence. Which is not to say that there aren’t odd things online — far from it — surf randomly, and the web seems a veritable cacophony of twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle, –twiddle diddle, —- twoddle diddle, –twuddle diddle, —- prut-trut — krish –krash — krush. Not to mention diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle — hum — dum — drum.
But nothing odd does much online: you can park the most esoteric idiosyncratic wonderfully strange material on the web, but if you want it to get discovered, if you want it to work, if you want it to have an effect — if you want others to conceive of it (a favorite Shandyword) — then you must enter into common language and assumptions. This is so obvious it’s practically a truism — and yet see how many times we learn the lesson, how difficult it is to get out of our own heads.
Two quick, fairly pedestrian examples: John Kupersmith’s wonderful Library Terms that Users Understand shows how befuddled users can be by the simplest failure of librarians to realize that words like “Index” or “Database” or “Serial” can mean next to nothing to my Uncle Toby, just wanting to know where to find that Popular Mechanics article. Or let’s say you’ve given an OPAC a cute acronym and now you invite my Uncle Toby to “search EUNICE!” My poor uncle Toby blush’d.
Or have a look at Dan Cohen’s equally simple but solid advice about climbing up in Google ranks. Search engine optimization has its share of murk to it, but the basic path to visibility is: don’t be odd. Use a domain name that describes your resource (“chinook” or “aeoleus” sound great — but what are you airing?), use keywords in file names (with mod_rewrites, if necessary), get linked by highly linked sites (meaning, be understandable, and get understood by a widely understood site).
If this all sounds like it leads to a world as flat and predictable as, well, Johnson’s Rasselas, that’s not what I meant, not at all. It’s just that you can’t be *merely* odd or unique if you want to *do*: you need the sophistication to hook into conventional terms, general assumptions, broadly shared expectations. This involves a double-motion that might as well be called self-consciousness. Tristram‘s greatness is showing us how fun such contrivance can be. Sterne earns his pleasure (and ours too, he’s brought us jolting right along with him) when he sits back to marvel at himself, his magnificently clashing agendas: By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, — and at the same time.
If it were all digression, Johnson would have been completely right about Tristram Shandy. But it is progressive too, which means that it sobers up just enough to realize, despite its irrepressible uniqueness, that above all things in the world, ’tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.
…what unites our interest in digitization and open access in a digital world is that the material becomes ‘processable,’ or subject to computational processing. That is, the growth in the market of readers is not among groups of humans, but of machines, which are programmed to index, manipulate, mine, aggregate, decompose, and build up scholarly and other forms of content by algorithm. It is this machine ‘processability’ that makes digitized objects and open access materials most valuable to scholars.
Protest, fume, rail against the subjection of your most exquisitely developed thought to the dumb imperatives of ones and zeros — Waters is absolutely right. You want influence? Or, more to the point, you want to avoid obliteration in the vast digital swamp? You’d better know how to demarcate, classify, and optimize your work for machine crunching — or find someone who does. And pray that the stewards of such crunching, the information managers you never thought about, have your best interests in mind.
All this occurred to me while reading a new D-Lib piece by Daniel Cohen, director of research projects at the very creative Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Cohen also spoke at that ARL session, and at the time he sold me on Firefox scholar. His new article, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections”, offers two nice examples of humantist-friendly manipulation of machine “processability.”
First: Syllabus Finder. Where was this godsend when I was inefficiently wandering around the chaff of the web, trying to crib ideas for my own syllabi? It’s a very sensible, very needed genre-based search tool. First, it defines “document classification” through a very simple dictionary of keywords endemic to syllabi (“assignment,” “office hours,” etc.). This classification is fed into Google through its API service, along with the search query, for optimized searches. The results can then be further refined through more automated analysis or combined with other search results.
I gave it a spin, using canonical writers from the Romantic era as search terms. To my happy surprise, good old Ashes Sparks & Hypertext, a six year old syllabus for a seminar I taught back in the day at UC Berkeley, kept showing up — and at or near the top of results. #1 for Coleridge, #2 for Byron, #1 for Wordsworth, #2 for Blake, #4 for Hemans. Yeah, baby! But we drop down to #14 for Keats, alas, and as for Shelley, he just kept coming up as a “fatal error,” an “Uncaught SoapFault exception.” So Syllabus Finder is a little buggy — but, dare we say it, a little poetic too. Maybe we’re just overly pleased by taking the silver for Byron:
I don’t know what to make of the way this tool seems to like the Ashes Sparks syllabus — certainly I indulged in no optimization — no thought about how the thing would be retrieved. The only distinguishing feature of that document, really, is that it’s been online steadily for six years. It’s just one of those Google-blessed mysteries. Perhaps cannier post-processing could promote syllabi more deserving of prominence. But Syllabus Finder works pretty well–I’d recommend it to a fledgling (and not-so-fledgling) instructor. As Cohen puts it, it does a surprisingly good job at achieving its modest goal – on most topics for every ten documents it retrieves, about nine are syllabi – and it has thus far found and catalogued over 600,000 syllabi, synthesizing a collection of course materials considerably larger than any created or maintained by a professional organization, educational institution, or library, or by any other effort on the web to aggregate syllabi.
A second and more complex treat today from the George Mason wizards: H-Bot. This is an automated historical fact finder that can field natural language queries. (Or at least ones that begin with ‘what’ or ‘when’ or ‘who’; it’s not ready to handle where, which, how, or why). The algorithm here is “question answering” — which involves the identification of relevant documents, some natural language processing (to interpret queries), and statistical/linguistic analysis of retrieved documents. (In addition to the D-Lib article, there’s more on H-bot here)
Playing with H-Bot is fun. When did Hitler die? The answer in an eyeblink, as the Germans say: April 30, 1945. When did Gandhi die? Here’s a quirk:
Well sure, but that wasn’t the Gandhi I meant. Interestingly, here’s what happens when I ask the same question but tell H-Bot not to “check trusted websites first”:
Here’s a case when the unfiltered swamp actually answered my question — or read my mind — better than “trusted websites.” Quantity over quality? Very sensibly, H-Bot demurs when I ask “Is God dead?” or “When did God die?” (“I’m sorry. I cannot provide any answer on that.”) But ask it “Who is God?” and H-Bot serves up a perky little answer:
Simple-minded? Sure. But viable. Arguments will rage, hairs will split, blood will spill, but our dumb machines have given us an efficient pulse of information in the midst of the cacophony, delivered by strategic sifting of great gobs of data.
Which brings us to a final point that Cohen makes about machine data-mining: “Quantity may make up for a lack of quality.” Even the most ardent humanist can’t deny: when it comes to information, we’ve got a whole lot of quantity these days. It’s how we draw from such quantity that counts.
Social bookmarking is swell, but suddenly it seems so limited, so 2005. Or so it seems to me after watching Dan Chudnov’s screencast unAPI and the Gates of the Dawn of Social Clipboards a couple of times. I can attest that it’ll get you thinking — even if, like me, your programming skills extend not much beyond the coffee maker.
You know about gates, you know about dawn, and you should know that APIs are blending web services in dynamic ways. unAPI (‘un’ pronounced as in “universal,” not as in ”poor Syd Barrett, he’s un’appy”) is, as the term might suggest, a simple website API convention that allows a broad array of services to be syndicated and harvested. This is a lightweight, generic tool, unlike an API tailor-made to a service (like, say, the GoogleMaps API). More on unAPI here. Now, for some hurried idea of how unAPI enables social clipboarding, get comfortable and spend some quality minutes with the dchud screencast:
D’ja get that? Social bookmarking = a straightjacketed social clipboard, in which we share only urls and tags. With something like unAPI, the straightjacket comes off, the information we share gets richer and more varied. Click, drag, and toss into the communal pot objects that are linked to full bibliographic metadata — toss even whole images in. Once, in order to share information on the web, you had to code in HTML and FTP your creation up to a server. Then, blogs, wikis, and various administration tools like let you publish content through a web interface. Soon, it seems, you’ll be clicking and dragging web objects around directly. It’s a weird feeling: try it at a demo for Microsoft’s similar new experiment,Live Clipboard.
Chudnov’s emphasis on the new social possibilities of clipboards seems typical of 2.0 library services. My professional mission as a librarian is this:(he’s written)Help people build their own libraries. That’s it. That’s all I care about. Note the plural ‘people.’ If web objects can be readily swapped, studied, shared — if their harvesting and dissemination is conducted, from beginning to end, in networked spaces — it’s easier than ever to see that ‘collection’ is molting ever more into a publicly driven and defined activity.
Librarians once spent time carefully assembling web links for their patrons, and what an onerous job — one plagued by link rot, bedeviled by the fluidity of the web. Social bookmarking is a welcome alternative to the professedly authoritative link collection because it leverages a vast range of expertise, instinct, and attention, while allowing for discovery and customization. A 2.0 librarian (for lack of a better term) will do everything he can to promote this kind of activity.
Similarly, digital collections were once mounted in standalone boxes, and left gathered in a corner of a library website. Social clipboarding is 2.0 collection because, once again, it drags assets out into the pale sunshine of use and interchange. The 2.0 librarian will do everything she can to ensure that a digital collection is easily discovered, harvested, tagged, swapped around, recontextualized, re-collected, and (whenever legal) re-published.
Such decentralized, user-driven, unpredictable shuffling of digital assets might seem to diminish the role of your library. You need not go there, you need not apply there for access, you need not be cognizant of the dimensions of its actual collection. But look at what’s going on behind the scenes, in terms of programming, standardization of conventions, preservation and exposure of assets. And in front of the scenes, you can bet that librarians will evolve ever more into consultants, offering strategies for the successful customization and manipulation of information. If APIs start scattering assets of all sorts onto communally shared clipboards, ‘collection’ takes another step towards the need-based, on-the-fly assemblage of information transforming our world (dare we say) into one big library.
Music promoters, child molesters, and now this. Rupert Murdoch’s social networking colonization, MySpace, is starting to be infiltrated by yet another band of predators. They tend to be around ninety years old, and most of them claim to be female. That ‘friend’ your sullen teen is busily adding to her MySpace collection may be none other than… a library?
Now this is a little embarrassing. Like the PG-13 cheap laugh, when the spunky granny grabs the mic and roks da house. Or like Helen Gurley Brown. Hey, Westmont Public Library is with it!Who I’d like to meet: You :) Westmont Public Library’s Interests: Books, Graphic Novels, Magazines, Music, Movies, Video Games. Status: Single. Zodiac sign: Capricorn. (Why are many of these MyFriendly libraries Capricorns? As in Tropic of? Isn’t that a Graphic Novel?) MyFriendly libraries tend to have other libraries in their friendspace. So with one click, here were are at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. Interests: General — helping people. instant messaging. RESEARCH yo! Books — the ones inside me. You go, Tom Ford! And Brooklyn College Library is in the house–or, as ‘she’ puts it, BC Library — Here on Your Space!
And check out that sassy 100-year-old, the Tonganoxie PL:
As an Xer happily removed from the MySpace generation (though my friends in bands almost dutifully keep pages there), I don’t really understand the appeal. The pages are ugly and ungainly; text can be impossible to pick out against garish image backgrounds, tinny sound files unspool the moment a page opens — it’s all reminiscent of wayback web hideousness, which all too often isn’t so wayback. Still, for better or worse, this is space that teens of all ages build . I guess it’s easy to share music, real-time flirtation, self-branding, endless LOLs. Mostly MySpace seems like high school online — full of chatter, hormones, and the pursuit of popularity. “It’s an unphysical way of hanging out.” Sure kid, great, but someday you’ll want better unphysical spaces. Tonight, at least, MySpace times out constantly. Hey Fox, buy some servers!
As they say, the kids love it; 46 million members just can’t be wrong, can they? Isn’t this democracy? And aren’t libraries at the core of democracy? At least these libraries are trying–but in MySpace they have little to offer, aside from a campy Hello! Nothing to build here, nothing to interact with or collect. To be fair: some libraries link to ‘blog’ entries, like, say, the one posted by Angela at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library listing teen movies, pizza taste-offs, and – spa night? Hmmm… Or the Tanganoxie Public Library’s list of their New Music CD Collection (topped off by Kelly Clarkson! Breakaway! LOL!!) But it’s very unidirectional. Information emanates from the ancient single female Capricorns to all you undifferentiated kids. The full extent of the idea is to show up In Your Extended Network.
This is piggybacking, really, on the idea of social software–just showing up when you should be interacting. Of course, just showing up to the party is a hoot when you’re 90. Links back to the OPAC, indexes of holdings, announcements of teen-centered activity: that’s fine, but how about the actual music? Can I bring library images or videos into MySpace? Can I build immediate links to cool passages of my favoriate favorite favorite books? Can I make a montage out of those awesome graphic novels? How can I collect anything other than a thumbnail picture of the library–a cute little building facade to add to my friends collection? When libraries stop billboarding and start actually transforming themselves into MySpaces–then we’ll have something.
Well, it’s a first step, and Rome wasn’t built in a day–even MySpace wasn’t built in a day, though it might seem otherwise. Here’s the 100 year old Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library: Who I’d like to meet: Anyone! Really! Well, put it like that, & you might be irresistible. A bit pathetic, but, whatever, popular. Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has, at this writing, 163 friends.
