Taking it personally

The old personalized web portal wars may have been bloody, but the concept is obviously here to stay. My Yahoo, My AOL, even serenely uncluttered Google plays with personalized searches and feeds.

So why wouldn’t an academic library offer a similar service? A one-stop expandable agglomeration of the kind of information a prof might want to check, such as

It would take a good amount of integration and design, but we know that feeds and links can be custom-ordered on one page, a page rich in day to day concerns, a page seamlessly blending a user-defined mélange of data.

Here’s an up & running start: North Carolina State University’s My Library , which brings library account information together with course information, and promises, in the near future, to mix in journal alerts & personal link collections.

A tool for making collections accessible via web portals, the Internet Scout Project’s Personal Toolkit, is worth taking a look at along these lines. It’s a Mellon-funded open source project geared towards “discipline-based” collections. The D-Lib description of the project lists the following features:

Going electric

Electronic paper? Sounds oxymoronic, but this phenomenon a-borning could make the thought of e-books and e-newspapers more bearable.

A description of E Ink’s new electronic ink display describes it as “somewhat like a miniaturized Etch-a-Sketch based on electricity, instead of magnetism.” Once the high-contrast, thin, flexible surface is “printed,” it needs no further power to maintain the image — thereby requiring 99% less energy than LCDs.

E Ink isn’t alone; Fujitsu has also developed “film-substrate-based bendable color electronic paper with an image memory,” the company announced last summer. Their product should come to market in 2007.

And what would we use electronic paper for? Portable displays, of course – but also for menus, manuals, retail price displays — any kind of posted, quickly-changing information. Like, for instance, the definition of paper.

Call-’em-as-you-see-’em museum

The folksonomy juggernaut is rolling towards museums, as an intriguing article in this month’s D-Lib Magazine (“Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement”) makes clear.

As anyone who has tried tagging images with metadata knows, it’s tricky business; opening up the effort to a collective, in its instictive wisdom, seems a path to the social engagement that has lit up del.cio.us and Flickr – and may, incidentally, improve discovery.

The D-Lib article, however, raises many more questions than answers. How to confine the ‘regular folk’ taggers to using directed, compact terms, rather than spill out wordy reactions to art, or – worse yet – offer personal information for follow-up appraisals? When and how to apply categorization of terms? Which artwork should be available for tagging: one already sought out (“Help others find this work”) or a series randomly served up (“Help us tag our inventory”)?

These and many other questions haunt the prototype tool The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project – quixotically nicknamed “Steve”. I played around a little with this tool today, but wasn’t able to find much with it; it seems barely developed. Few terms garner a hit: one of them, “woman”, retrieves a video installation at the Guggenheim by Pipilotti Rist. But “video” does not retrieve the same piece; instead, it calls up two pictures of a Nam June Paik installation – pictures in which it is really difficult to pick out what’s going on.

The insufficiency of “woman” or “video” to really describe a piece of art goes to the heart of what’s unsatisfying about social tagging of art, at least as exemplified at this early stage. The illustrations accompanying the D-Lib piece show prototypical tagging on the most childish level, the lowest common denominator. What is a piece about? Look at the descriptors in this prototypical markup:

If that were the typical range of a ‘folk’ pool, who would want to fish in it? Is it too much to say that such tagging strips away the identity of not only this particular man, but this particular piece of art? What I’m suggesting is that such elemental descriptors, widely applied, won’t be of much use – even for someone trolling around for generic images of “senior citizen” – unless they are integrated into more controlled cataloguing (actual title, creator, material, dates, genre, some kind of categorization).

In that way, folksonomy could help my hunt for, say, that video piece by Rist in 1998 that featured a woman, or a chair, or whatever. Maybe it’s inevitable that the only way to overcome subjectivity, idiosyncrasy, and ignorance is to force ‘folks’ into the most basic description of the most basic elements of a piece of art. But that’s a dumbing down – a flattening of response – that may not be worth whatever gains in search functionality it promises.

Open book test

While Wikipedia is the standard reference for what wikis can do, its newer cousin Wikibooks is, in many respects, a more daring venture. This is a collection of open-content textbooks – that is, modules freely available to and updatable by anyone, covering a wide range of subjects. (General FAQs here)

Material on Wikibooks is searchable by bookshelves, by category, and, most quaintly, by Dewey Decimal System.

The site claims to offer almost 11,000 books by now – all editable by anyone, and none hostage to the infamous pricing practices of textbook vendors. A cursory tour today yielded many more placeholders than actual textbooks, but the venture is only two years old.

The September Wikibook of the month is rich and impressive, however, and though it’s a computer programming text, it’s also of sentimental interest to this renegade Byronist: Ada Programming.

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart …. (CHP III.1)

In the swim

September is the new summer. In the latest batch of merry photos Flick’d up, we travel to Cape Cod with David, park Jessica in lovely Raina’s lovely yard, and camp. Scott raises almost $1400 by powering through 1.4 miles of choppy waters in the Provincentown Swim for Life. Kate spirits us to the dune shack. And Doug, happily, is throwing Tru-Row #10 nearby – which means lots and lots and lots of music. The northern lights were, alas, unphotographable.

Hello Rockies

In what’s turning into something of a tradition, I made a pilgrimage to Boulder & thereby aged within the safe confines of my origin. Though it’s been overrun by money, Boulder is ever beautiful, & it’s nice to see my globetrotting parents settle back in amid the deer.

Pinpointing devastation

As New Orleans was flooding, and burning, and suffering, two young computer programmers quickly launched Scipionus – a visual wiki of the calamity, charted onto Google Maps. On this site, users mark a location and report on it. The markers are color-coded – indicating new (green) and updated (purple) posts. A snapshot:

As this Wired News article notes, some of the postings are less than helpful – some beg for information on a particular spot, rather than report any – and none of the postings is authoritative. But at least it’s some communication.

Imagine if FEMA or some communication arm of the government had a disaster wiki like this ready to go. Any given marker could be made up of various layers: documented damage, immediate needs, community discussion, updated satellite images…. Properly marked, official and anecdotal data could share the same platform and the same goals: letting everyone know, asap, what’s happening at a given place under assault.

Help for help

Jason Kottke’s remaindered links today point to a slick PDF presentation by Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel illustrating design principles.

Of particular interest here is a case study of library redesign; these designers helped Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh transform from a cluttered headache into what looks like a perfectly pleasant place to find information.

The slides are worth clicking through, if only to gasp at the pre-transformation “reference desk.” I’m copying a few below:

New playpen

I just installed a MediaWiki 1.4.7 package on Clayfox’s shared Unix box. It actually wasn’t such an ordeal, even for a non-techie. But its coding conventions and image processing are just different enough from SnipSnap to make me wade around through what seems like endless documentation. Whatever doesn’t bore me to death will make me stronger….

This way to ClayfoxWiki.

Defending the group

An essay by Clay Shirky, called “A Group Is Its Worst Enemy”, has been floating around for a couple of years – but I just ran across it. It’s an interesting meditation on group dynamics and social software, shaped by crushed hopes for Usenet as well as a book about neurotics thwarting group goals (by the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion: “Experiences in Groups“).

What comes across in the Shirky piece is a sense of fragility – the need to protect group rights against “sandbagging” individuals. This protection cuts against bromides of democracy, generally, and some tenets of wikiland, in particular. For example, Shirky on the rights of a group:

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that’s quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.

The essay also emphasizes the importance of reputation as a regulating principle – which, in turn, suggests that functioning collaboration depends on recurrent, accoutable identity. OK so I have to sign in and get recognized. What about ease of use? Full access? Equal rights? Nope, Shirky argues for the virtue of barriers: ” It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.”

All in all, a forthright argument against anonymity, scalability, equality, and, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of software devoted to group interaction, ease:

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation…. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

Not exactly the Wiki Way, is it?