jodischneider.com/blog

What’s the difference between place and location? My tentative answer:
A location has coordinates. A place has coordinates plus something more (culture, politics, maybe time).

I started thinking about this because of Paul David Erb’s twitter coverage of a talk at the Scholars’ Lab. I didn’t understand this tweet:

Places, not locations, provide the backdrop for historical events. The key idea is to map events and tie them to locations.

and Paul didn’t have a quick answer, either. After some unsuccessful searching for the original paper (which took me to several databases) and scanning citations from speaker Ian Johnson’s university bio page and “long bio [DOC]“, I started thinking about the problem more generally. Googling for “ian johnson” gis places locations led me to an interesting source: papers and presentations for Harvard’s China Historical GIS group. Lex Berman gave a concise explanation in one of his papers: [1]

If we are to take the sum of the information about what transpired at a
particular geographic location over the course of time, we must realize that
what we are not observing a single persistent identity, but a series of
historical instances. Each instance of an historical place, although it may
indeed be seen as occupying a certain temporal extent and geographic
extent, actually makes more sense in a political and cultural context which
expands and contracts.

He also says:

We have extensive historical documentation about the administrative units that were
established, abolished, re-named, or re-established in roughly the same
geographic space as today’s Beijing.

Those are all the same location. But they’re different places. Suddenly I understood (at least some small part of) the difference Ian Johnson must have been articulating.

My database searches, on the other hand, were a rich source of follow-up reading about space and place, on a variety of topics from computer science, to history of the book, to social science, to geopolitics. For me, database searching is great for keeping my fingers busy while engaging my head. And for turning up lots of things I’d like to read. However, I didn’t have enough data to figure out what paper Ian Johnson was referring to (something he wrote about places, locations, mapping events). In retrospect, writing him would have been most reasonable. Failing that, his profile might have been a better place to start. Other search strategies you’d suggest?

Lex Berman on Finding Places in the Past: What's in a Name?

Lex Berman has some beautiful slides (ZIP). [2]

[1] Berman, Merrick Lex. (2006 February). Persistence or Transience? Tracking the evolution of places over time with historical Geographic Information Systems [GIS]. Presented at Hist2006 – Geschichte im Netz Conference, Berlin.

[2] Berman, Merrick Lex. (2005 December). Places in the Past: What’s in a Name? Presented at PACSL GeoHistory Network Conference, Philadelphia.

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Sarah Seastone circa 2003

I never met her, but she was part of my life for almost a decade.

Sarah Seastone was the editor, archivist, and Web designer for the Math Forum. She helped numerous teachers create early webpages about topics like tessellations and fractals, and taught many of them about the Web. Here’s a definition she gave of the Web.

Sarah was a great encouragement to me when I started answering questions for Dr. Math, as an undergraduate in the mid 90’s. She always knew lots of resources, and was always happy to share them. A thread about women in math is typical. While I pressed “send”, Sarah contributed ideas. She knew and kept track of resources throughout the world.

Sarah was one of the first people I knew who really knew how to search the Web. Just about everything in the Dr. Math archives of that era was culled by Sarah as worth saving. As Dr. Math’s archivist, she must have read through a lot of the email sent by the project.

She also wrote many, many archived Dr. Math answers herself.

I knew her through email, sarah@forum.swarthmore.edu, and am sad to say I never met her in person.

Sarah Seastone circa 1965

Images from http://mathforum.org/~sarah/ and http://www.hemlockgorge.org/hgs65/HGSTeachers.htm

Part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009. Read about more women in technology.

Clay Shirky writes of newspapers in an age of revolution: 15 years of anticipated problems* viewed optimistically, patched with one-size-fits-all solutions. Those solutions don’t attack the main issue: “the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.” It’s a revolution, he says, drawing on the print revolution of the early 1400s, and no one knows what will happen.

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Shirky sees the future of journalism as “overlapping special cases” with a variety of funding and business models. It’s a time for experimentation, and while he sees failure and risk, he has hope, too:

Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

Society needs reporting, not newspapers. That need is real, and worth restating:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Go read the whole essay, then let it stew with other thoughts on the future of publishing.

*Circa 1993: “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Via John Dupuis’ post in Confessions of a Science Librarian.

Yesterday, Steven Berlin Johnson spoke at SXSW about the information ecosystem and the future of news. Fortunately, for those of us playing at home, he blogged a transcript.

Johnson adds international and war reporting to investigative reporting as the areas at risk due to the implosion of news funding. Johnson envisions a bright future in other areas, citing a well-developed information ecosystem in technology, and comparing coverage of the 2008 and 1992 U.S. Presidential elections.

Extending his ecosystem metaphor, Johnson introduces technology journalism as the “old-growth forest” of web journalism. Ecologists use (real-world) old growth “to research natural ecosystems”, so by extension, Johnson says, “it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism”. While this argument holds no water, it’s certainly suggestive.

in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. … most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.

But of course, that’s what the web can do. … As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve.

As Johnson envisions, “Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.”.
This is all by way of introduction to his new company, outside.in, which provides geographic search and alerting.

Johnson concludes, in part, by examining the filtering problem, and turning it into an opportunity:

Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?

Johnson expects (future) newspapers to function as filters, aiding the public in getting the news:

Information Ecosystem, as envisioned by Steven Berlin Johnson

Johnson does not address who’s going to pay for the filtering. He’s ready for a new model, but leaves that to the industry to discover for itself. “Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant.” When he acknowledges the short-term pain of the newspaper industry today, he worries:

we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way.

The entire transcript is well worth a read.

Via Steven Johnson on twitter.

Timothy Burke is my new hero. The death* of newspapers, he says, is a problem mainly because somebody’s got to pay for investigative reporting:

We don’t need newspapers to have film criticism or editorial commentary or consumer analysis of automobiles or comic strips or want ads or public records. It might be that existing online provision of those kinds of information could use serious improvement or has issues of its own. It might be that older audiences don’t know where to find some of that information, or have trouble consuming it in its online form. But there’s nothing that makes published newspapers or radio programming inherently superior at providing any of those functions, and arguably many things that make them quite inferior to the potential usefulness of online media. So throw the columnists and the reviewers and the lifestyle reporters off the newspaper liferaft.

So it comes down to independent, sustained investigation of public affairs. The argument that online media cannot provide this function comes down to money…

Burke gives more details and examples, and calls for new funding models, including philanthropic and/or foundation money. He concludes that the “The end of the newspaper model of the last century doesn’t have to be the end of independent investigative reporting.”

Go read the whole thing.
*It seems like death and rebirth, to me, especially with some major newspapers reinventing themselves online. But that’s another matter.

Burke first came to my attention last year, from a talk he gave to the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at March’s meeting on the Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data. Burke represented and reflected upon the user perspective, as an academic who searches catalogs outside his area of expertise.

Via John Dupuis’s friendfeed.

PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition team is doing really interesting work. From time to time, new projects surface on their blog.

Last week, PARC announced the site Mr.Taggy.com, a search engine based on social bookmarking tags:

The problem with using social tags is that they contain a lot of noise, because people often use different words to mean the same thing or the same words to mean different things. The TagSearch algorithm is part of our ongoing research to reduce the noise while amplifying the information signal from social tags.

Mr. Taggy uses “related tags” to reduce the noise.

Filtering makes a difference:

Mr. Taggy results for void

Mr. Taggy search results for void, filtered by semantic web

Searchers can thumbs-up or thumbs-down each result to provide further context.

Penguin recently put out an iPhone app. It’s one part browser, one part ereader. It’s a reasonable start, but it feels rough around the edges. While I may try a later version, I’m deleting this app for now. I’d rather see publishers using existing ereaders and browsers, rather than building their own—especially for title sales, which they say is coming.

While I’m sure that the Penguin2.0 team is doing the best with what they have, they would do well to focus on getting in the flow, rather than trying to be a destination. Get listed by existing mobile ereader software: treat iPhone’s Stanza, Ereader, and BookZ and other ereaders as intermediate consumers.

On to the details. The Penguin US app presents an array of options:

In fact, this page presents Penguin’s mobile site in their custom browser. (Note: to keep entry point URIs short, choose m, rather than mobile, for the subdomain.) Italics indicate suggestions from W3C mobile web best practices.

“Special Interest” may be an industry term, but I doubt it’s meaningful to most consumers (clarity). (It ranges from “African American” to “Short Reads”, and includes, for instance, “Current Affairs” and “Parenting”, BTW.)

Loading is v-e-r-y slow, even on wireless, going to subscreens… (Use the network sparingly.)

It’s slow going back home, too. (Are they providing caching information?) (Note 3 ways to get home from this screen: Besides the breadcrumb labeled ‘home’, and the global navigation in the lower left, the penguin icon in the upper right links to home. Cute, however provide only minimal navigation at the top of the page.)

Limit scrolling to one direction. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of whitespace in the margins.

This is the Classics page (scrolled overfar). The books themselves are at the bottom of this page (clarity, central meaning). I felt a bit disoriented at first, because news about classic titles is at the top of the page (e.g. Benjamin Button, a new production of All My Sons).

Podcasts sound great (capabilities). However, they do tie up the device (deficiencies).

The blog is not optimized for mobile viewing. For instance, there are missing plugins(deficiencies).

I’m sad that the Penguin Mobile ‘about’ page is just half a line overfull. (A pet peeve, clearly!) Perhaps the designers forgot about the service bar? Or tested in Safari (whose back button is smaller than the Penguin global navigation)? (testing)

It’s not all bad: Excerpts are always available, even without an internet connection. And I find this next screen charming: well-done!


In listing excerpts, they do keep with the color theme!


Excerpts start with a cover image and book information, pulled straight from a catalog, I presume. (limited, suitable) Tweaking formatting could make this more compact, with a more prominent title to next to, rather than below the cover image:


Scroll down to get to the first chapter:

It will be interesting to see how other publishers respond to the iPhone as an ebook platform. The Stanza free ereader for iPhone, for instance, currently has two publisher listings at the top of its online catalog: “Free Harlequin Love Stories” (4 novellas) as well as “Random House Free Library” (currently 9 recent titles, ranging from backlist massmarkets to summer and fall hardcover releases). Pan Macmillan (UK) is offering titles for purchase.

App name: Penguin US [appstore]
Maker: Penguin Group USA, web2.0
Cost: free
Quirks: Pages behave as fixed-width when zooming. Odd handling of double taps. Full-width is not used for excerpts in landscape mode.
Features: Free excerpts. Easy access to Penguin podcasts.

New to me:
Software aimed at individual scholars whose work is referenced outside of ISI-listed sources.

http://www.harzing.com/resources.htm#/pop.htm

“Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters
• Egghe’s g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.”

Free for personal non-profit use; Linux and Windows versions

I’d be very curious to hear about research comparing it to other methods. The author is professor of management and marketing at The University of Melbourne.

Karin Dalziel’s Why every Library Science student should learn programming reminds me that I’ve been thinking about, and meaning to write about, algorithmic (or computational) thinking.

What is computational thinking? It includes

• Thinking Recursively
• Thinking Abstractly
• Thinking Ahead (caching, pre-fetching…)
• Thinking Procedurally
• Thinking Logically
• Thinking Concurrently

That’s from Jeannette Wing slide 21 [PDF]; subsequent slides give examples. Or, if you prefer podcasts, she chatted about computation thinking with Jon Udell.

I would like to find examples of where librarians and archivists use computational thinking, especially outside the digital realm. It’s hard to argue that programming per se is needed for school media specialists or archivists. Some digital librarians and LIS educators also argue that, for digital librarians, managing programmers and interfacing with users are more pertinent skills than programming per se.

So I’d like to shift the debate. Instead of “should all LIS students learn to program”, I’d like to ask, what can LIS learn from computer science? Programming is only a very small part of computer science; as Jeannette M. Wing writes* [PDF]

Computer science is not computer programming. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires thinking at multiple levels of abstraction

and

Having to solve a particular problem, we might ask: How difficult is it to solve? and What’s the best way to solve it? Computer science rests on solid theoretical underpinnings to answer such questions precisely.

Can LIS benefit from considering problems in this way? As a librarian or information professional, have you ever considered a problem from this angle? How did it turn out?

* Jeannette M. Wing Computational Thinking [postprint, PDF] (2006 March). Communications of the ACM, Vol 49, No 3, 33-35.

Better than Free: ChangeThis issue 53.01

Wired’s Kevin Kelly looks at the internet as a copy machine. That makes it a harbringer of change:

the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
[Kelly]

Making money with free copies seems absurd. But it isn’t, because some things can’t be copied–such as trust. “When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” Kelly gives 8 answers:

1. immediacy
2. personalization
3. interpretation
4. authenticity
5. accessibility
6. embodiment
7. patronage
8. findability

These cannot be copied; they are ‘generative’:

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
[Kelly, page 4 ChangeThis 53.01 PDF]

About advertising, Kelly remarks:

Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the only solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.
[Kelly, page 9 ChangeThis 53.01 PDF]

Why I care

First, I’m fascinated by the evolution of publishing and how it relates to the communication of ideas. Kelly’s argument presents a rationale for free publishing. The interests of the players, the possibilities for commodification, and cheap distribution will drive the shifts ahead. ‘Free’ is one way for for readers, authors, and publishers to interact. Authors and musicians want an audience or, perhaps, compensation (depending on their needs); readers want content (or perhaps content of guaranteed quality); publishers want sales or, perhaps, wide distribution (depending on their for-profit-status and long-term goals). Whatever is ahead, it will be interesting to watch “the new ways money is made selling the free”.

Second, I recently read that “Google sees advertising as a form of information in and of itself.” Search engine-based advertising is Google’s best-known commodification. (I also read, recently, BTW, a humorous argument about how much their search engine sucked, because webmasters needed to supply keywords and use AdSense to actually have their pages found. Can’t find it again though. Alas.) In my view, Google’s great strengths are its massive diversification and its attention to usability. The movement towards enterprise Gmail and GoogleDocs, for instance, might be cast in terms of ‘selling the free’. It’s certainly diversification.

Third, I’m watching friends succeed (and get income) while giving away their work. It’s very gratifying.