EPUB is just HTML + CSS in a tasty ZIP package. Let’s have more of it!
That’s the message of this 3 minute spiel I gave David Weinberger when he interviewed me at LOD-LAM back in June. Resulting video is on YouTube and below.
EPUB is just HTML + CSS in a tasty ZIP package. Let’s have more of it!
That’s the message of this 3 minute spiel I gave David Weinberger when he interviewed me at LOD-LAM back in June. Resulting video is on YouTube and below.
Tags: ePub, LODLAM, videos
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science | Comments (0)
Loro Aroyo gave a talk in DERI on Friday, based on her “Crowdsourcing community science” slide deck. She was in town for Smita‘s viva. This is a deck of interest to anybody in digital cultural heritage.
The slide on “Ways to use the crowd” seemed particularly useful to me:
Posted in information ecosystem, PhD diary, social web | Comments (0)
If you were building a user interface for the Web of data, for books, it just might look like Small Demons.
Unfortunately you can’t see much without logging in, so go get yourself a beta account. (I’ve already complained about asking for a birthday. My new one is 29 Feb 1904, you can help me celebrate in 2012!)
Their data on Ireland is pretty sketchy so far. They do offer to help you buy Guiness on Amazon though. :)
Tags: quotes, social reading
Posted in books and reading, library and information science, semantic web, social semantic web | Comments (0)
What are the laws of information? Frank van Harmelen proposes seven laws of information science in his keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011. ((He presents them as “computer science laws” underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate laws of information science, in my terminology.))
I wish every presentation came with this sort of summary: slides and transcript, presented in a linear fashion. But these laws deserve more attention and discussion–especially from information scientists. So I needed something even punchier to share, (prioritized thanks to Karen).
Tags: Frank van Harmelen, ISWC, ISWC2011, keynotes
Posted in computer science, information ecosystem, library and information science, PhD diary, semantic web | Comments (0)
Yesterday I overheard two guys talking in the grocery store:
I am more of a John Lennon than you are.
The response?
My hair has more volume, therefore I am.
A brief, informal argument. Halloween-themed, I presume.
Tags: informal argumentation, John Lennon, overheard
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary | Comments (1)
Thanksgiving weekend doesn’t really register in Europe. But this year it will for me: I’m going to Amsterdam for Quantified Self Europe, since I’m lucky enough to have a scholarship covering conference fees.
Today I proposed two talks:
Ironically, self-surveillance was an academic interest of mine before it became a personal one: Back in 2009, Nathan Yau and I wrote a paper for the ASIST Bulletin about self-surveillance (PDF) [less pretty in HTML]. It helped interest me in the Semantic Web, too: putting data in standard formats would make it easier to make data-driven visualizations, so lifetracking and the quantified self movement is a great usecase for the (social) Semantic Web. QS also shows how privacy cuts both ways and could provide an early-adopter audience for the kind of fine-grained privacy tools a colleague is developing.
(A first reply to Nic’s encouragement)
Tags: lifetracking, panopticon, privacy, proposals, Quantified Self, self-surveillance, sousveillance, surveillance
Posted in semantic web, social semantic web | Comments (0)
Sometimes people are important to you not for who they are, but for what they do. Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, is one such person. While I never met him, Michael’s work has definitely impacted my life: The last book I finished ((The Book of Dragons, by Edith Nesbit: highly recommended, especially if you like silly explanations or fairy tales with morals.)), like most of my fiction reading over the past 3 years, was a public domain ebook. I love the illustrations.
In 1971, the idea of pleasure reading on screens must have been novel. The personal computer had just been invented; a KENBAK-1 would set you back $750 — equivalent to $4200 in 2011 dollars ((CPI Inflation Calculator)).
Project Gutenberg’s first text — the U.S. Declaration of Independence — was keyed into a mainframe, about one month after Unix was first released ((Computer history timeline 1960-1980)) ((Project Gutenberg Digital Library Seeks To Spur Literacy:
Library hopes to offer 1 million electronic books in 100 languages, 2007-07-20, Jeffrey Thomas)). That mainframe, a Xerox Sigma V, was one of the first 15 computers on the Internet (well, technically, ARPANET) ((Amazingly, this predated NCSA. You can see the building–Thomas Siebel–hosting the node thanks to a UIUC Communication Technology and Society class assignment)). Project Gutenberg is an echo of the generosity of some UIUC sysadmins: The first digital library began a gift back to the world in appreciation of access to that computer.
Thanks, Michael.
Originally via @muttinmall
Tags: ARPANET, computer history, crowdsourcing, digital library history, ebooks, gift economy, mainframes, Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science | Comments (0)
This is my kind of performance art, from this year’s Printer’s Ball. Got pictures, anybody?
Busted Books: The Great Soaking. Performance by Davis Schneiderman. Attendees are invited to use a artisan-constructed dunk tank to soak either a book or a Kindle—depending upon the dunker’s feelings regarding the printed word and e-readers. With this simple choice, this physical act, readers can finally stop theorizing about the future of the book and do something about it.
Tags: books, dunk tanks, ereaders, humor, kindle
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, random thoughts | Comments (0)
Today the DERI Reading Group starts up again for the fall. I’m talking about three papers from the IMPACT project.
For now this is just to provide my colleagues with links; check back later for slides, etc.Scroll down for slides and video.
Reading Group talk: Using Controlled Natural Language and First Order Logic to improve e-consultation discussion forums from Jodi Schneider on Vimeo.
Tags: IMPACT, paper summaries, reading group
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social semantic web | Comments (1)
“The only constant is change.” – Heraclitis
How well do you know Wikipedia? Get to know it a little better by looking at how your favorite article changes over time. To inspire you, here are two examples.
Jon Udell’s screencast about ‘Heavy Metal Umlaut’ is a classic, looking back (in 2005) at the first two years of that article. It points out the accumulation of information, vandalism (and its swift reversion), formatting changes, and issues around the verifiability of facts.
In a recent article for the Awl ((The Awl is *woefully* distracting. I urge you not to follow any links. (Thanks a lot Louis!) )), Emily Morris sifts through 2,303 edits of ‘Lolita’ to pull out nitpicking revision comments, interesting diffs, and statistics.
Tags: change, Wikipedia
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science, social web | Comments (0)