When we spotted something interesting, we recorded it in a highly structured way that could be accurately and quickly communicated over a two-way radio, to be transcribed by specialists at our border camp and relayed to intelligence analysts in Brussells.

The story, says Conover, is only one aspect of reporting. The other part? Gathering structured metadata, which could be stored in a database—or expressed as linked data.¹

Newspapers already have classification systems and professional taxonomists. The New York Times’ classifications system, in use since 1851, now aggregates stories from the archives in Times Topics, a website and API.²

What if, in addition to these classifications, each story had even more structured metadata?
Capturing metadata ranges from automatic to manual. Some automatic capture is already standard (timestamps) or could be (saving GPS coordinates from a photo or storing timestamps), and some information needing manual capture (like the number of alarms of a fire) is already reported.

Dan compares the “old way” with his “new way”:

The old way:

Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2005. He gives the street address, the date and time, who was victimized, who put it out, how extensive the fire was and what investigators think might have caused it. He files the story, sits with an editor as it’s reviewed, then goes home. Later, he takes a phone call from another editor. This editor wants to know the value of the property damaged in the fire, but nobody has done that estimate yet, so the editor adds a statement to that effect. The story is published and stored in an electronic archive, where it is searchable by keyword.

The new way:

Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2010. In addition to a street address, he records a six-digit grid coordinate that isn’t intended for publication. His word-processing program captures the date and time he writes in his story and converts it to a Zulu time signature, which is also appended to the file.

As he records the names of the victimized and the departments involved in putting out the fire, he highlights each first reference for computer comparison. If the proper name he highlights has never been mentioned by the organization, Dan’s newswriting word processor prompts him to compare the subject to a list of near-matches and either associate the name with an existing digital file or approve the creation of a new one.

When Dan codes the story subject as “fire,” his word processor gives him a new series of fields to complete. How many alarms? Official cause? Forest fire (y/n)? Official damage estimate? Addresses of other properties damaged by the fire? And so on. Every answer he can’t provide is coded “Pending.”

Later, Dan sits with an editor as his story is reviewed, but a second editor decides not to call him at home because he sees the answer to the damage-estimate question in the file’s metadata. The story is published and archived electronically, along with extensive metadata that now exists in a relational database. New information (the name of victims, for instance) automatically generates new files, which are retained by the news organization’s database but not published.

And those information fields Dan coded as “Pending?” Dan and his editors will be prompted to provide that structured information later — and the prompting will continue until the data set is completed.

- Dan Conover in The “Lack of Vision” thing? Well, here’s a hopeful vision for you

And that data set? It might even be saleable, even though each individual story had perhaps been given away for free. Dan highlights some possibilities, and entire industries have grown around repackaging free and non-free data (e.g. U.S. Census data, phone book data). I think of mashups such as Everyblock and hyperlocal news sites like outside.in.

1. Some news organizations, like the New York Times (see Linked Open Data) and the BBC (overview, tech blog) are already embracing linked data.
2. I delved into Times Topics’ taxonomy and vocabulary in an earlier post.

‘Conversations’ is deliberately plural, I think, to evoke the many conversations, invisible to one another: “The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.”

Using Salmon, an aggregator pushes comments back to a “Salmon endpoint” (via POST). These can be published (or moderated) upstream at the original source. See also the summary of the Salmon protocol.

Comments swimming upstream…

Fragmentation of conversation.

Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media

Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data.

A better social Web on mobile devices.

Poor integration between social media and location services.

Difficulty of coherently engaging in social activity across many channels.

Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media.

from “The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch” encountered via Ed H. Chi’s post at the PARC Augmented Social Cognition blog.

The trends? Openness, portability, aggregation of distributed content. Hopefully we’ll see more on all these fronts in 2010 and beyond. Hinchcliffe also suggests that we want “Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices.”

See the full post at ZDNet for more discussion and references to a number of standards, formats, and related developments. In the next post, I’ll highlight Salmon, a protocol for distributed commenting, which I’d neither encountered nor heard of.

Tweetie

Jill Gengler: I love being able to save someone’s bacon.

Tom Coates: The great slab of fatty prok that I pretned to call a brain is almost totally recumbent this morning. Come on piggy!

We’re making progress at archiving individual streams, I think. But the overall conversation, “what was I seeing then”, and the links between things? Needs work, at least chez moi!

MediaCommons has just announced funding from the NEH to create “digital portfolios”:
“Given this proliferation, what we need as scholars may be less a system that will manage our communication for us than a system that will allow us to manage our communication, a system than recognizes that the key aspect of scholarly communication into the future may be less the distribution of the products of our research than the management of the social networks through which our research is distributed.” [emphasis mine] MediaCommons as Digital Scholarly Network: Unveiling the Profile System. Via @kfitz.

So scholars don’t have to roll their own,¹ or depend on dubiously-funded startups.²

While the announcement implies “less is more”, Kathleen’s sample profile strikes me as a lifestream. Streams themselves are more “more” than “less”. (‘Firehose’ comes to mind.) So streams alone aren’t going to solve scholarly communication. But streams can be sliced and diced any number of ways. First the data. Then, if there’s interest, maybe some services.

1. Personally I’m all for rolling your own. At least in theory. The first lifestream I ever noticed was code4lib’ber Mark Matienzo’s self-hosted planet , which aggregates his blog posts (both personal and work), tweets, youtube uploads, delicious bookmarks, and last.fm scrobbles. Brilliant, but thus far I’ve been too shy & lazy to follow suit.
2. FriendFeed popularized lifestreams. When Facebook bought FriendFeed back in August, my networks of librarians and scientists had several discussions of alternatives for scientists and other scholars.

If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.

-Sergey Brin, New York Times, A Library To Last Forever

Brin is wrong: the proposed Google Books settlement will not smooth the way for other digitization projects. It creates a red carpet for Google while leaving everyone else at risk of copyright infringement.

The safe harbor provisions apply only to Google. Anyone else who wants to use one of these books would face the draconian penalties of statutory copyright infringement if it turned out the book was actually still copyrighted. Even with all this effort, one will not be able to say with certainty that a book is in the public domain. To do that would require a legislative change – and not a negotiated settlement.

– Peter Hirtle, LibraryLawBlog: The Google Book Settlement and the Public Domain.

Monopoly is not the only risk. Others include³ reader privacy, access to culture, suitability for bulk and some research users (metadata, etc.). Too bad Brin isn’t acknowledging that!

Don’t know what all the fuss is with Google Books and the proposed settlement? Wired has a good outline from April.

1. “Several European nations, including France and Germany, have expressed concern that the proposed settlement gives Google a monopoly in content. Since the settlement was the result of a class action against Google, it applies only to Google. Other companies would not be free to digitise books under the same terms.” (bolding mine) – Nigel Kendall, Times (UK) Online, Google Book Search: why it matters
2. “Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project.” (bolding mine) – Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (pardon the paywall)
3. Of course there are lots of benefits, too!

I remembered reading a few great papers on using IRC at conferences (these days twitter is the rage); what I didn’t remember was writing a mini-bibliography (shared below).

For teachers interested in using digital backchannels like IRC, IM, or twitter, the most pertinent is #6 below: Yardi, The role of the backchannel in collaborative learning environments. A new paper by graduate students at UBC is also worth a read: Nobarany, S., & Haraty, M. (2009 April 20). Supporting Classroom Discussions Using a Trust-enhanced Private Backchannel.” [author PDF] Proceedings of Human Interface Technologies 2008/9 Conference. Adding to the tools available, MIT media lab has a backchannel service, which they’ve written about [ACM copy].

UIUC’s LEEP program uses IRC as a backchannel in distance classes. (Though I hear they’re promoting verbal discussion with Elluminate this fall.) I found it very valuable to have private ‘whispers’ to classmates during our synchronous ‘live session’ classes. For me, it was also great to be able to type a question when I had it, without waiting for a pause in the audio lecture.

Originally written 2007-12-09 for GSLIS LIS 590IIL, Interfaces to Info Systems. Edited for links, formatting, and typos.

Digital backchannels refer to private communication between individuals also taking part in a public digital conversation. Whispers in live session are one example of a digital backchannel.

I reviewed 6 papers on “backchannels”, expanding outwards from 4 papers I found in CHI and CSCW proceedings. See the annotations in references below for more details about these papers. I recommend 2 papers. The seminal paper about digital backchannels, which I expect to become a classic in time, is Cogdill et. al. [1]. A briefer, but less meaty treatment, is given by McCarthy and boyd’s analysis of chatlogs from an in-person conference [2].

One caution is that, while linguists have studied “face-to-face oral backchannel for three decades” [1], studies in the digital realm are much newer, and “its spelling has not stabilized yet, so it can be found in all of its forms — backchannel, back-channel, and back channel — in current usage.”[1]. When researchers talk about digital backchannels, they sometimes seem to include private messaging between two individuals in the same sweep as group chats concurrent to some other activity. For example, Kellogg et. al. [3] discuss characteristics of backchannels which we’ll find familiar from LEEP classes—from the main room and private messages respectively: “They allow listeners to provide non-interruptive feedback to the speaker (‘raising hands,’ asking questions via IM), but at the same time they may take on the more private character of the second more political sense of backchannel (allowing two audience members to chat via IM with one another with no indication to others that it is occurring).”

Here’s a bit more detail about the papers I recommend:

Cogdil et. al. [1] present a taxonomy for backchannel communication. They “identified five backchannel categories: process-oriented, content-oriented, participation-enabling, tangential and independent backchannel.”

The CSCW ‘04 conference had two events related to digital backchannels:

• a panel presentation about digital backchannels [4]
• an IRC chatroom for each of the conference’s three physical rooms

The chatrooms were logged for the duration of the conference, and McCarthy and boyd analyzed the chat logs[2]. (I wish I had a log of the chatroom from the panel session&emdash;talk about meta!)

McCarthy and boyd present two papers. One, coauthored with the panel presenters, is based on the panel presentation from CSCW [4]. It is their second paper—Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: experiences at an academic conference [2]—that I find worthwhile. This paper organizes the backchannel IRC logs from CSCW ‘04. With no apparent knowledge of Cogdil’s taxonomy, they provide concrete examples under their own rubric of “logistics, technology, people logistics, shared work, bonding”. These categories are overlapping with, but distinct from, Cogdil’s [1] conception. Additional discussion highlights social issues such as the privacy concerns of logging, the reactions of presenters, and the ingroup/outgroup concerns.

While these two papers [1] and [2] are the best of the lot, the others provide interesting context, because there are several sorts of research going on: pure sociological research (Cogdil [1]), social experiments (McCarthy and boyd [2]), educational research and experimentation ([6]), theoretical views on backchannels[4] , and commercial development projects ([3],[5]). (The last of these surprised me, but as Cogdil says, “Software designers can use these results to understand how the backchannel should function in digital conversation applications.” )

I think this variety is a microcosm of the sort of research presented in the ACM digital library. While browsing the suggested journals, I was especially struck by CHI, the JCDL, and CSCW. I downloaded papers on a variety of topics that seem within the province of librarians–even the traditional, non-digital sorts of librarians (perhaps I’ll write more about this sometime). I expected this in JCDL, since it is, of course, a joint conference, but I expected it less in the more mainstream ACM journals. Last semester, my IR class had an ongoing discussion about “what is information science” and where was the divide between computer science and library science, and library and information science. As UIUC embarks on the i-school movement with both ALA-accredited and non-ALA-accredited schools, I hope that this discussion of the relationship between information science and its sister fields will continue in larger forums, both within and outside of our classes.

From a usability perspective, I found it interesting that one paper explicitly referenced usability, while others talked of putting research into practice, tradeoffs, and trials.

And, before I sign-off, I’ll note 3 things that struck me particularly from Cogdill et. al. [1]:

“We also expect that participation-enabling backchannel takes place in asynchronous environments, but that it deals more with protocols such as how to subscribe and unsubscribe from the discussion.”-Cogdill et. al. [1] p7. I think they’re really underestimating this. I have off-list conversations about the listserv NGC4LIB and about the work of a journal committee quite regularly.

One disadvantage I’ve noted in the new style of private messaging in live session is the increased difficulty of self-archiving chats: “Users who want to preserve a backchannel conversation must do so for themselves, perhaps using their client software to capture a session log or pasting the contents of their backchannel exchanges into a text file. “Cogdill et. al. [1] p5. I’ve considered using my regular IRC software for live session, in part for its automatic logging capabilities. Of course, this still doesn’t address lining up conversations in-context.

Finally, Cogdill notes some disadvantages of the lack of awareness that one has about others’ whispers. In person, whispers may be observed even though their content is unknown. “If two students are silent on the mainchannel but active on the backchannel, the teacher may want to ask the students if they need assistance or need more time to accomplish some task.” Cogdill et. al. [1] p5

If you’ve made it this far, I’d be curious to know what you think.

smile -Jodi

[1] Cogdill, S., Fanderclai, T., Kilborn, J., & Williams, M. (2001). Backchannel: Whispering in Digital Conversation [Citeseer PDF]. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-34)-Volume 4 – Volume 4, 4033. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2001.926500

Highly recommended (8 pages). Provides a “taxonomy of backchannel discourse”: process- oriented, content-oriented, participation-enabling, tangential, and independent backchannel.”, providing examples of each.

Describes various meanings of backchannel, notes that linguists have studied “face-to-face oral backchannel for three decades”, provides properties of “virtual backchannel” (private, multithreaded, and invisible). Their taxonomy was developed through analysis of “chat transcripts from several MUDs (text-based, persistent, user-extensible virtual environments). Thirty-six transcripts representing a total of 62 person hours of chat were studied”. Discusses possibilities for awareness and persistence of backchannels, and explains how this introduces self-censorship and group censorship. Typesetter’s errors in distinguishing italics from non-italics mar the presentation of the private/public distinctions in the chats analyzed.

[2] McCarthy, J. F., & boyd, D. M. (2005). Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: experiences at an academic conference[author's PDF]. CHI ‘05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1641-1644. doi: 10.1145/1056808.1056986 [ACM copy]

Highly recommended (4 pages). Provides a detailed analysis of the IRC channels used at CSCW 2004, including concrete examples of different types of exchanges. A bit different since it’s about supplementing in-person communication with digital backchannels.

[3] Kellogg, W. A., Erickson, T., Wolf, T. V., Levy, S., Christensen, J., Sussman, J., et al. (2006). Leveraging digital backchannels to enhance user experience in electronically mediated communication [Author PDF]. Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 451-454. doi: 10.1145/1180875.1180943 [ACM copy]

Discusses backchannels in the context of IBM VoIP conference call software which includes IM and visual backchannels.

[4] McCarthy, J. F., boyd, D., Churchill, E. F., Griswold, W. G., Lawley, E., & Zaner, M. (2004). Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: attention, intention and contention [Author PDF]. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 550-553. doi: 10.1145/1031607.1031700 [ACM copy]

Notes from the panel held at CSCW 2004 on digital backchannels. Primarily records biographies and prepared statements of panel members. Data collected from the whole of this conference led to the analysis [2].

[5] Yankelovich, N., McGinn, J., Wessler, M., Kaplan, J., Provino, J., & Fox, H. (2005). Private communications in public meetings. CHI ‘05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1873-1876. doi: 10.1145/1056808.1057044 [ACM copy]

Discusses Sun Microsystems’ Meeting Central software, for distributed audio conferencing, which has private text and voice chats. Discusses usability testing, including screenshots of before and after designs.

[6] Yardi, S. (2006). The role of the backchannel in collaborative learning environments [Author PDF]. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Learning Sciences, 852-858. doi: 10.1145/1056808.1057044 [ACM copy]

“Students at UC Berkeley’s School of Information have participated in a persistent, online “backchannel” chatroom during class since the Fall of 2004.” Provides statistics about the chatroom usage, “indicating that a few users participate most often.” Posits the advantages as constructivist learning and peer-to-peer learning. Discusses the need for chatroom etiquette and the potential for distraction, as well as helpful inquiries.

I wanted to see whether Mendeley could reduce any of my pain points. While I’m not moving to Mendeley*, I do plan to take advantage of its whizz-bang PDF organization. When Mendeley offers Zotero integration, I think I’ll be set. *Zotero is opensource; Mendeley is merely free at the moment. Zotero also offers web archiving features while Mendeley is strictly for PDF organization.

I spend a lot of time reading and pulling materials into my library; I spend far less time organizing materials. So I decided I’d try the PDF metadata functions of each. Zotero can pull in materials lots of different ways, but it doesn’t yet have a “pull this PDF in from this URL” button for reports and things that aren’t in databases. I don’t want to spend my time typing up metadata (I’m lazy and busy, what can I say), but I do want to have an organized library. (Hey, got an organizing business? I’d pay for your services.) So the “get metadata for this PDF” features are of prime interest to me.

I usually have a “to read” pile lying around. I did a very non-scientific test, starting with a folder of 44 PDFs (“PDFs to read”). I dragged them into each program.

Zotero had a small point of failure: I expected “get PDF metadata” to be in the Preferences menu, but I had to look up its location on their website. Happily, it’s easy to find from the Support page of zotero.org: Retrieve PDF Metadata. The page explains that metadata comes from Google Scholar, based on the DOI if it’s embedded. That sounds like a reasonable methodology, but one that’s only going to work for recent journal articles and books published by e-savvy publishers. Most of the files I dump into “PDFs to read” are preprints from personal websites or reports from nonprofits’ websites. DOIs aren’t expected in that context.

Of my 44 test cases, Zotero says “No matching references found.” on 26 of them. Results from the 18 “successful” matches are spottier. The first one I checked leads me to believe that things haven’t changed since the last time I tried out this feature, maybe 8 or 10 months ago. It’s an article called A New Approach to Search [PDF], by Joe Weinman, and it’s available from his website. I can identify the source as Business Communications Review, October 2007 from small type in the footer. So can Mendeley. But Zotero calls it Peters, R. S. 1970. Ethics and education. Allen & Unwin Australia. I’m not really sure why. Google search, perhaps?

Zotero’s ‘identification’ of the next article is even stranger:
Capital, R. Sheriff’s Office moves to new facility. Cell 224: 6547. (Notice: the title and journal don’t even belong together!) This article is actually the contest-winning federated search article published by Computers in Libraries [PDF]. It’s available from the publisher’s website. While Information Today publishes some great articles about technology, their HTML doesn’t have any semantic information. Since no one’s yet written a screenscraper for their site, Zotero can’t auto-grab the metadata. But Mendeley successfully identifies this PDF, too.

I wondered whether Mendeley was grabbing metadata from the files so I took a closer look at these two files. Nope, there was very little usable metadata. (Adobe Bridge is great for reading XMP metadata.) Furthermore, the first article (by Weinman) lists its creator as Sharon Wallach; clearly neither program is pulling that.

Onward and upward: overall there are 4 bad identifications and 22 good identifications of the 44, from Zotero. The false positive score of 9% is the part that bothers me the most.

Mendeley does better but it’s not perfect. At first it appears to have identified all 44 PDFs, but there’s a fair bit of missing information (for instance 13 missing the “Published in” field). When I looked closely, I found 26 bad data, 4 could be improved, 2 weren’t identified. Which means I’m satisfied with only 12 of these, but there’s another important factor: Mendeley marks these files as ‘unreviewed’, meaning that the metadata is suspect until I review and/or correct it. So the false positives are easy to detect. This is reassuring. Especially since (unlike Zotero) only one of Mendeley’s identifications was worse than none at all, and it was dead easy to spot:
Fohjoft, W. J., Jg, J. T., Vtfe, T. F., Jo, F., Epo, O., Bcpvu, N. E., et al. (n.d.). !12 3/4 “#$%&$’,5.

It’s interesting to look at where Mendeley fails: non-scientific articles and documents with non-standard title pages. Mendeley chokes on Open Provenance Model and Funny in Farsi (no metadata at all) and label a Master’s report only with the year (2000).

I’m most interested about Funny in Farsi; I would expect better metadata from Random House, but sure enough Bridge doesn’t find any. I like Mendeley’s auto-rename feature, but on the files it doesn’t label, that renaming is a big disadvantage: filenames are often reasonable metadata. These three filenames (opm-v1.01.pdf, Funny_in_Farsi.pdf, and 2576.pdf) give either information about the contents or a chance at refinding it with a search engine. For opm-v1.01.pdf , googling the filename finds it immediately. For Funny_in_Farsi.pdf, searching for Funny in Farsi provides 8 search results, and a savvy searcher could get more metadata (e.g. the publisher’s name) from the results. Searching for 2576.pdf clarke open source finds the third.

I’m also interested in what neither Zotero nor Mendeley got right. Neither correctly identified a PDF with Highlights of the National Museum of American History. Drag and drop of citations (with ugly special characters and all) gives

Zotero:
Parton, J. 2004. Revolutionary Heroes and Other Historical Papers. Kessinger Publishing.

Mendeley:
Museum, N., & History, A. (2008). Star-Spangled Banner, 1814. Smithsonian.

Neither does well on the Palmer report, either:

Zotero:
Bird, A. 1994. Careers as repositories of knowledge: a new perspective on boundaryless careers. Journal of Organizational Behavior: 325-344.

Mendeley:
Factors, I., Palmer, C. I., Teffeau, P. I., Newton, P. C., Assistant, R., Research, I., et al.
(2008). No title. Library, (August).

With a closer look, you can see Mendeley takes the authors as:
Factors, Identifying
Palmer, C I C Institutional Repository Development Final Report Carole L
Teffeau, Principal Investigator Lauren C
Newton, Project Coordinator Mark P
Assistant, Research
Research, Informatics

If you want more details, please leave a comment or drop me a line; I had hoped to add info but decided just to push this out of my queue. I was thinking about it because Mendeley really does help me review the papers I’ve been meaning to read. Guess it’s time to think about that Mendeley to Zotero workflow again!

annotated incidental 4/25/09

“Over in Milan at the Salone di Mobile they’ve created a thing called The Incidental. It’s like a guide to the event but it’s user generated and a new one is printed every day. When I say user generated, I mean that literally. People grab the current day’s copy and scribble on it. So they annotate the map with their personal notes and recommendations. Each day the team collect the scribbled on ones, scan them in and print an amalgamated version out again. You have to see it, to get it. But it’s great to see someone doing something exciting with ‘almost instant’ printing and for a real event and a real client too.

The actual paper is beautiful and very exciting. It has a fabulous energy that has successfully migrated from the making of the thing to the actual thing. Which is also brilliant and rare. [Ben Terrett as quoted by Schulz and Webb]

The Incidental was created at and for Milan’s furniture/design fair with funding by The British Council.

Have you ever kept a calendar, tracked what you eat, or saved receipts? Simple data, like how much soda you drink, can tell a story:

Giving up Coke (or not) by Tim Graham

"I drink therefore I am" by Tim Graham

What is self-surveillance? Read my article! (Also in PDF). Or Nathan Yau’s blog.

Also added to to the publications page: Nathan Yau & Jodi Schneider “Self-Surveillance,” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Vol. 35, No. 5 June/July 2009, 24-30. [HTML][PDF] . Thanks to Diane Neal (NCCU/U. Western Ontario), who edited the special section on Visual Representation, Search and Retrieval for this issue, and to the Bulletin’s editor Irene Travis and designer Carla Badaracco (who made the 16 figures work for screen and print).

Hat tip to Jenny Levine, whose “How Public is your Privacy” often comes to mind.