They skip over the most interesting and difficult part: How to get folks to use it! They casually mention that they built RSS right into the system, as if that was an immediate sell. I think it could be used to great effect in classes and in academic meetings, but it seems to have had a lukewarm reception in these venues.

In particular, the Association of Internet Researchers meeting encouraged tagging for the conference. First off: not sure that an academic conference encourages tagging. It seems to me to be something that has to happen over a long period of time. Second, they gave folks too many options: suggesting del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr tags, to an audience among whom (ironically, I think) tagging is not a common practice. In all, the effort fell flat. But it had the standard “let’s do it and see what happens” vibe. Nothing wrong with that vibe — it is very Web 2.0 — but as I said, the value of tagging something for a fairly broad conference seems limited to me, especially (and this is key!) if it isn’t integrated into the whole.

I’ve also had my classes tagging this semester. Since the class “home page” is an aggregator (like this one) it’s easy to pull the RSS from del.icio.us and integrate it with the standard stream. Yet only those who already knew about tagging are tagging.

I’m now thinking about the Cyberporn and Society course for next semester (yes, it is a little late), and how to better integrate tagging into the course. I think an important step is to provide more of an overview of what tagging is all about and how to do it so that students have a better idea of what it is.

It is always a trade-off in a course: how much time do you spend talking about blogging/wikis/bookmarking/etc. and how much time do you spend with the actual substance of the course. In other words, what is the ROI (return on instruction) for focusing on the “ways of doing” rather than the “ways of knowing.” I have generally shied away from “teaching the tools.” Set up some expectations for product — I always thought — and students would teach themselves the tools.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering this a bit. It’s a truism that we are never teaching, but hoping our students learn to learn. It strikes me that certain kinds of tools (how to use a library, for instance) have a very high long-term ROI. While my “don’t teach the tools” made sense when we were dealing with Flash or GoLive (v.1, yikes!), when it comes to social computing, it may be something worth really focusing time and resources on.

Sure, some of you may say “duh”! But that’s a bit of a new direction for me.

The majority of the discussion, both the meatiest and most discursive bits, occurred between Allan Adler and Lawrence Lessig. Lessig has his own post mortem, but a few things really stuck out for me, and these were threads that were largely left hanging.

Certainly, the take-away for me was that “fair use” needs to be re-defined for digital media. Or rather, “fair use” needs to be defined. What none of the parties would agree on is that one of the difficulties in translating fair use into the digital age is that it is fairly ambiguous in the analog age. There are certain uses that are clearly covered by fair use, certain uses that are clearly infringing, and a not insignificant number of uses that are really at the whim of whatever judge hears the case — if it gets that far.

But something that struck me even more directly was an overlooked difference of opinion. At one point, David Drummond (the representative from Google) claimed that “a digital card catalog requires a full copy” of the original texts. I quickly wondered whether this claim was true. Because if it is not true, it yields a much more interesting, and potentially tractable, description of the disagreement between Google and the publishers.

Since you do not have the benefit of (Wired editor) Chris Anderson’s frequently proffered visual aid (which led to a bit of eye rolling after it was produced a fourth and fifth time) let me start by reminding you of what Google Print Library (Google Book Search as of Thursday) provides you from copyrighted, in-print works. Amazon’s “search inside the book” actually reproduces the pages around the word or phrase you search for. Google only provides a certain number of words on each side, what they call a “snippet” of text.

Now, I could be wrong, but it seemed that all parties were relatively OK with this use, that they felt that it fell within the bounds of fair use. They did not articulate this precisely on the publisher/author side, but they instead focused on the way that this index was obtained: by scanning the full text of thousands of books. Even if this library never left Google HQ, it could easily be argued, as Adler said several times that night, that by scanning the books of several excellent research libraries, Google will have accumulated the largest digital library in the world. This hasn’t happened for free — scanning books is expensive — but it has happened without further money being paid to the publishers.

Frankly, this is the part of the project that I find most exciting, and those involved in the project must recognize that while “Googlifying” the physical library is an exciting project in itself, the “byproduct” of this — an immense, digitized store of human knowledge, is far from negligible. Indeed, as I have noted before, such a library becomes the largest potential pirate’s booty in the history of the internet. The question is not whether the information will be liberated, but how long that will take.

There is an alternative. There is no reason that Google should have to keep the original files. Word frequency “thumbprints” are enough to do the search, and it is possible to store the snippets without keeping them in their original format. Of course, if you store the snippets, it is just a matter of time to be able to reassemble them, but at least you get away from the “complete copy” issue.

Alternatively, I bet Google would avoid a world of hurt buy buying rather than borrowing these books. I think the authors and publishers would be happier with a more extensive licensing agreement, but they would have a lot less to complain about if they bought duplicates of the books (those that are in print) that they will be scanning. Worst case, how much could this cost? $60-$100 million?

In any case, it was an interesting discussion, and it wouldn’t have been if there hadn’t been someone there to at least volley with Lessig. I know he already has a lot of fans, but I have often been disappointed by the ability of those who write well to form their opinions “on the fly.” This is clearly not a problem for Lessig.

* What America really needs is wild elephants.

* Speaking of big animals. They upgraded the size of the shark that attacked my little sister: 18 feet, and about two tons. Or, roughly the size of a Chevy Suburban.

* Extreme Mormons: “How can you spread the Lord’s word when you are standing on the darn handlebars?”

* Never too early to learn the need for the long view.

* Progressive, the nation’s 3rd largest auto insurer, is paying beta customers who put a black box in their cars. Nose of the camel. I can’t say that I like that my insurance premiums cover irresponsible drivers, but I also don’t imagine (given the appropriate vehicle) ever driving across the Mohave at less than a hundred miles an hour. And once the ability to monitor is in place, it is only a matter of time before police enforcement is provided access to that data.

Now, what would be cool is if it calculated your premium in real time. You’d have your speedo, tach, and current minute-by-minute insurance rate. Take a corner a little quick, and your rate jumps up. Drive the speed limit on long freeway trips once a week only, and your rate gradually falls. Pay-as-you-go risk management.

* Electronics and solid object printers are, like, so five minutes ago. How about printing new organs. Sure, that scene in 5th Element seemed fanciful, but maybe not so much.

* Are you against the war? Do you think that the yellow ribbons send the wrong message? Do you not care too much about whether your car gets keyed by someone who “doesn’t take kindly” to folks who don’t support the government? Try the Question War magnet.

* You know what’s fun on a Friday night? Remote controlling decapitated fruit flies using lasers. Seriously.

* Please don’t leave any comments reviewing this post, as it may be considered patent infringement.

Now I am rectifying that. Heck, I might get wild and see what other wonders are hidden in my hard drive. The response appears unedited (though boy-oh-boy are there some bits I would like to edit in here; note that every time I write “clearly” it appears before something fairly opaque) and is offered as an example, though certainly not a model!

Perturbing a Network of Group Affiliations: The Role of Individual Choice in a Highly Structural Environment

In the Web of Group Affiliations, we have from Georg Simmel an essay that is all too easy to interpret, from the title if not from the thesis, as a highly structured and possibly functional view of society. Like his description itself, his argument appears structured at the universal level, but highly individualistic in more attenuated readings. Clearly, his attempt, as with many of the authors we have read this quarter, is to strike a reasoned balance between the tyranny of social position and unconstrained individual control. His analysis succeeds in many ways in doing this, providing an interesting, if sometimes contradictory, explanation of how individual choice both constrains and is constrained by the individuals†wills.

In reading Simmel, it is sometimes difficult to remember that he is writing in within a temporal context removed from the contemporary world. His approach is entirely compatible with recent theories that stretch across a myriad of appellations: post-structuralism and post-modernism in particular. His “pre-” ideas seem to fit so neatly into the “post-” theories presented by people like Pierre Lévy*, rather than those of his own contemporaries — particularly his contemporaries in American sociological thought. There are a number of parallels we might draw between these two authors: both speak of highly networked societies in which the individual somehow retains his or her (though the latter of this pair is perhaps not as present in Simmelâ€s analysis) individuality in the face of increasingly tightly knit networks of affiliations; both speak of the “construction” or “formation” of groups, a small but significant perspective shift from those who might claim that groups “emerge”; finally, both see the process of group affiliation, at least in its more recent incarnation, as fundamentally emancipatory.

In the remainder of this brief paper, I will discuss these themes in turn. Throughout, I will argue that Simmel provides us with an explanation of the social/individual dialectic that seems at first counter-intuitive. He argues, though never explicitly, that groups are the ultimate determinant of much of our behavior. The only, and vitally important, area in which the individual may have a degree of choice is in with what groups he or she chooses to affiliate. Intuitively, I think we would often assume just the opposite: that individuals have a certain choice in what they eat or where they decide to make their home, but that the choice of a group of family, friends, and associates is in the hands of fate (exercised through the “invisible hand” of social structure). Simmel seems to retain some of the social determinism found in, for example, Bourdieu, but argues that the most important of relations, that of the individual to the group, is one that can be freely made and unmade at will.

Vital to this discussion is Simmelâ€s view of the individual and how that individual acts. For Simmel, individualism is expressed exclusively through individual choice of groups. He claims that “as individuals, we form the personality out of particular elements of life, each of which has arisen from, or is interwoven with, society” (p. 141). Such a view demonstrates a very strong view of individual freedom to decide action, at least in an ideal, thoroughly modern, social context. Though the behavior and power of individuals is expressly restricted by the social milieu(x) in which they exist, there are such a variety of groups in which personalities may be expressed that little practical restriction can be found.

One might argue that there are those actions that are truly “individual” — like wearing pants on oneâ€s head to class meetings. Here an affiliation has been made — to the group in society often labeled as insane, for example — but stresses in the argument begin to show. These stresses exist within the traditional view of society, not the ideal type Simmel argues modern society is moving toward. In less enlightened societies, it may be impossible to find a group that valorizes pants-on-the-head behavior — but such a group should exist. Insanity as an ascriptive group is a symptom of traditional society, unless such a group is self-selected. Clearly, such a “natural” group is unlikely to be superseded by elective groups.

Groups that induct rather than self-select are inscribed by the rubric of “organic,” for Simmel. Kinship relations, because they exist ab ovo (literally!), remain one of these organic groups. We must ask, however, if Levi-Strauss†infamous avuncular relation remains a social fact when we are able to choose uncles. Strong views of structuralism are undermined when individuals are able to select which of a wide number of social constellations may be chosen. While uncles remain sacrosanct in The Web of Group Affiliations, marriage does not. Modern marriage, because it results not so much in the gift of a woman, but in the woman being located at the intersection of two separate kinship groups, has moved from being an organic to an “objective” construct.

Is there any limit to how much of life can move from the “organic” to the “objective”? For Simmel, there does not seem to be, though this is not entirely clear. How then does this differ from the most extreme individualist position? Actions are strongly inscribed by the rôle one plays in various groups. The “choice” to join a group, while it moves from being a group of proximity to one of propinquity, still relies to some significant degree on exigencies of the environment. Moreover, while the intersection of various groups — again in a way reminiscent of Bourdieu — may lead to a certain degree of unpredictability, there is in anything other than the ideal social situation a limited number of groups to which one can belong, and thus a limited spectrum of choices available.
Given that Simmel sees these groups as disciplined templates of behavior, it is vital that we gain some idea of how these groups are “formed.” Though it is instructive that Simmel (or at least his translator) used this term, it seems his description refers more to the evolution of social groups from those based on terminus a quo to those based on terminus ad quem. (It is also interesting that he does not discuss possible counter-examples; I am thinking here of Silicon Valley as a city invented with already-established purposes. Other examples exist, I am sure.) Objective groups “constitute a superstrucure which develops over and above those group-affiliations which are formed according to natural, immediately given criteria” (p. 135). This superstructure eventually supersedes the “natural” relationships. However, Simmel does not succumb to the ex machina view of evolutionary change. It is clear that the move from a quo to ad quem exists within some collective move toward group affiliations.

These groups come about as a result of what we might call “individualistic mutations” in this process from organic to objective. Simmel brings forward Giordano Bruno as an exemplar of one of these mutations. But here Simmel draws some tenuous connection to a more Weberian view of the leader have vast, if unintended, effects on the social system. The division of groups for administrative reasons “makes possible a much higher, organic synthesis of the whole” (p. 194).

This evolution of the group is more than simply mechanical. Despite the increasingly fragmented (or networked) set of group affiliations, it is necessary for a “group mind” to evolve at an organic level. This holistic creation from deliberately heterogeneous cannot occur outside of the volition of individual actors. While the creation of groups and the overall social structure may not be determinant, it relies directly on the work of individual actors. This is a bottom-up view of social structure. We might find some recent theorizing borrowed from the world of physics instructive. Much of physics have moved from attempting to deduce micro behavior from macro events, and instead have begun trying to model macro events by describing micro behavior. In both cases, physicists are describing a systemic whole, yet in the latter approach, the individual, the unusual, the micro is not only privileged, but presented as causative. Though this word, which implies a certain determinacy, is not often used, as the behavior of the macro is more than the sum of its parts. This “extra bit,” however, cannot be described outside the generative process introduced by individual actors.

Though this has been alluded to several times above, Simmelâ€s description contains a strong emancipatory positivism. While the world he describes presents a wide variety of possible conditions for the individual, he seems to hold out for a certain progressive view of the move from traditional to modern society. Only with a very loose reading do we find explanations of cyclical “regressions” to a quo organization. How, for example, do we account for fascism within this view of society? Can individuals actually make choices, rational or otherwise, about group affiliation within the material world? How does the emergence (formation!) of the national socialists play within this view? Not only did this organization rapidly lead to an a quo group (that is, “naturalized” and unavoidable), but it seemed to do so by drawing explicitly on a nostalgic recreation of traditional group values. The road to modern society has quite a few bumps and a cul-de-sac or two. Simmelâ€s position would be stronger if these were better accounted for.

There are a number of other possible criticisms that could be leveled against Simmelâ€s view. The clearest of these is the claim that the individual can ever really choose the groups with which he or she affiliates. Bourdieu does not seem to grant nearly the same amount of agency to remove oneself from an inherited habitus and Hollis might point out that granting the individual this power still does not account for how the desire to join particular groups is instated in the first place. In fact, these two questions could be considered related. Simmel seems unprepared to examine volition, and sees the individual as an inviolable “black box.” In part, no doubt, this is a matter of perspective and attempting to put reasonable bounds on social inquiry. However, in doing so, he seems to dismiss the reciprocal effects of society on the individualâ€s preferences. A solution to this problem is seen in extending his ideas to within the black box, within the individual (cf. Minskyâ€s “society of mind”). He alludes briefly to such an extension when discussing the formation of the individual from the forces of various groups, but does not go very far along this path. It would be a long path indeed, as it would require a causative agent at some point.

Nonetheless, I feel that Simmel does more than any of the other authors we have read so far in describing just what kinds of choices might be made by the individual actor. These choices are entirely structural, in that they are about relations to others in the group(s), and yet maintain a surprising degree of individuality. Especially in an era when proximity is rapidly diminishing (“disappearing” being far too strong a word) as a formative factor in social structure, his ideas find a new foothold and present a solid basis for further exploration.

* Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankindâ€s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Robert Bononno (trans.), (New York: Plenum, 1997).

There are plenty of specific and general examples of this that are commonly called up. Cell phones and email have changed the way students move around a university campus. So much so, I suspect, that on campuses that have more grass than we do up in frozen Buffalo have likely seen new patterns of erosion. In Japan, they refer to “thumb tribes” (親指族), or youth for whom the thumb has become king. They reportedly have stronger thumbs than the norm, and use them more often for pushing other buttons.

I also recall a science fiction novel in which the characters speak “IBM” and other languages based on the brand of computer they use. I think it would be fun to do a content analysis of Mac users’ blogs and PC users’ blogs to see if one uses certain terms (choose, start, crash) more often. Andrew suggested that Palm Graffitti might also change the way people write in a similar fashion. Certainly, some forms of internet dialect have leaked into everyday conversation, but that isn’t really the same thing.

Amazon has introduced what they call their Mechanical Turk in beta. The original Mechanical Turk was an artificial artificial intelligence, an Ottoman automaton chess player that beat both Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte in games. Of course, it was operated by a hidden human.

Amazon’s project falls on a number of attempts to harness collective micro-efforts by individuals. It pays participants a few cents for each “HIT,” each use of your cerebral computer. Some things are just easier using human brains, and until they figure out a way to scoop it out of your head, they are stuck with you as well.

In the past, this has been used as a clever way of defeating CAPTCHA-like systems. The bot (a spambot, for example) need only “outsource” the recognition part to a human. It turns out there are lots of things that can be so parted out to a human. The Wikipedia is only one example of this micro-effort. If any one person were to sit down an encyclopedia, people would think they were crazy. Sure, drafting full articled takes more of a macro-commitment, but most edits are only worth a few cents-worth of time, and people consider it to be a “give-a-penny-take-a-penny” form of knowledge distribution.

Amazon’s project is designed to provide classification of images, and other things humans seem to be better at. It will allow for a fairly easy programmatic interface to this process. The first thing I thought of, when I saw this, was content analysis in the traditional human-coded form. Of course, you are usually able to train coders, but if you have a really good codebook for a single item, and a little cash to pay for the process, you could do some pretty cool content analysis project this way. Intercoder reliability would inevitably go down, since there is no time afforded for decent training of your “recognizers” but, as they say, you can make it up in volume.

I mean, should it freak me out that CALEA now applies to any VoIP application, so that my Skype has to have a backdoor built in? Should that “bug me”? Moreover, does that mean that if I secure my voice communications, say by commenting out a backdoor in an open source VoIP application, I am violating federal law? And when open source is outlawed will only outlaws use open source?

Should I be bothered by experiments for remote controlling humans. There are other ways of compelling people to move, like microwaving crowds or using directional sonic blasts, but generally, when I think inner ear, I think “my stuff, leave it be.”

Should I worry about efforts to collect DNA from me if/when I am arrested. I’ve never been arrested, so I’ve never been fingerprinted (thus leaving “evil mastermind” available as a future career choice — Mwuahahaha!), but I have a feeling I wouldn’t really appreciate the FBI adding my DNA to their growing database. Gattaca wasn’t a great movie, but it would make an even worse model for public policy.

The main problem is that each of these pieces are not individually scary, it’s only when they are all collected and combined that privacy is breached. This, in the abstract, is difficult to get people excited about. Sure, you can point to issues of identity theft and other problems, and this is likely to get people interested, but the idea that the government may go one direction, and you the other — that you may want to protect this information because there is always the possibility, however remote, that you will end up at the wrong end of a policeman’s sniper scope — seems beyond what folks can be concerned about it. Sure, they say, the FBI might bend the rules here and there, but thatâ€s not the same as a modern Stasi. Besides, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, they say.

And, in the end, they are probably right. For two reasons. First, if the government goes the wrong way, I suspect most Americans will follow. “My country and my government right or wrong” is the new brand of patriotism. It hasn’t gone wrong enough yet that there is reason to fight directly against government authority, but that option must always be left open. (And, I would say indefinite detention of citizens is stepping very near the line.) Many in Europe understand this, and have privacy laws that reflect that fascism is not gone, it’s just been temporarily banished, and remains a threat worth protecting against. Most students don’t have a problem with the government or private companies having this information because they cannot imagine a situation in which they would choose to come into substantive conflict with either.

Second, maybe I’m the one out of the loop. Maybe privacy was just a social artifact of the mass society of the twentieth century. Maybe now, as we are transitioning from the mass to the network, it has become time to give up our quaint notions of personal privacy. Or if not give it up, at least have it change. Maybe we will retain some form of the “right to be left alone,” but our information — our data — will be wide open. Hard to say, really. I do suspect, though, that my kids will have a very different view of privacy than I do.

Halloween has passed, but in one of my seminars this semester, a few weeks down the road, we will be talking about privacy and it will once again be my job to try to scare people, to give them something to think about. In some ways, I think I usually manage to do this, but not enough that most will agree that something should be done about it. The best I can hope for is a collective “sho ga nai” from the students.

Maybe these things bother me because our guards aren’t that guarded. It’s not just the theoretical issue of a police state that bothers me. We are still very far from such a possibility, but recent events have shown how quickly that distance can be traversed, when it complies with the will or permission of the people. After all, we (reminder: the “good guys”) these days seriously debate how much torture is too much.

Everyone emailed me resumes and reasons for why they might or might not want to be appointed as group leaders. I will admit that I am surprised by how many didn’t want a leadership position. I suspect that this has a lot to do with experiences in which the leader did all the work for the group. If any of the leaders of the groups in this course end up doing all the work, they will have failed at their jobs. In fact, leadership is all about coordinating the efforts of the team.

The following people will be leading teams this semester: Croniser, Cunningham, Cywinski, Gianni, Kwiatkowski, Seibert, Tredo.

Each team will have three members, a couple will have four. The members of each team will not, as is common in many classes, be assigned randomly, or via informal processes. Each leader will be given 1000 points to allocate to closed bids on people they want on their team. They can allocate these in any way they like. If they are sure they want one person, they can bid all of their points for that person. If they want to spread those points across 10 people, ensuring that they get at least some of these, they can do that. Obviously, you want to be someone in demand…

Those of you who are not listed above as a team leader need to post answers to the following questions to your blogs by Monday (Halloween) night, at the latest. Remember: people besides the team leaders are going to see this, so be careful in crafting your self-advertisement.

1. What are you good at? Do you have particular talents or skills that would benefit a team? How have you demonstrated those skills? Be concise, but complete.

2. What do you most enjoy doing? What is your passion? What would you do if money were no object?

3. Think back to a project team you especially enjoyed working with. What about that team made it good? That is, what do you look for in a project team, its members, and its leaders?

4. Think back to your least favorite position. What is it that made it a bad fit for you?

5. What else is important for a team leader to know about you?

6. The end project proposal represents a proposed capstone project. Do you have some ideas — either general or more specific — for the form of project you would be most interested in working on?

The group leader has ultimate responsibility for his or her group’s work. The leader is my point of contact, and is the person responsible for making sure the project is completed. We will talk a bit about group dynamics and how best to accomplish work as a group, but the leader will have a significant degree of autonomy when it comes to how he or she decides how to move forward. Part of my evaluation of this person will include how well they have motivated their team to work together and accomplish their goals. Although the team leader is ultimately responsible for the final deliverables, if they end up doing all or most of the work themselves, they probably are not doing a very good job of guiding the group.

To that end, send me a copy of your resume, and an indication of why or why not you want a leadership role. The resume may be in plain text (my preference, and increasingly a requirement for applying for jobs), as a pdf, or in RTF or DOC format. A few sentences highlighting your experiences and interests in a leadership role should be enough.

The next step, at the end of the coming week, is to post to your blog an inventory of skills and interests that you think will help a team create a winning proposal. We’ll talk about this on Wednesday, and I’ll post more when we come to that.

So, this is coming way late for next week, and while I know that many of you do not get to the readings until Tuesday or Wednesday (I can tell from the blogging), I also know some of you get to them much earlier. Sorry about the lack of notice. However, from next week on, we are only reading from the books you should already have.

October 26 –Human Computer Interaction

* Gould, J. & Lewis, C. (1985). Design for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300-311.

* Gershon, N., Eick, S., & Card, S. (1998). Information visualization. interactions, 5(2), 9-15.

* Nardi, B.A. (2001). Activity theory and human-computer interaction. In Nardi, B.A. (Ed.), Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

November 2 – Computing in the Virtual Organization
* Brown & Duguid, all.

November 9 – Informatics of social change 1
* Vaidhyanathan, through p. 81.

November 16 – Informatics of social change 2
* Vaidhyanathan, all.

November 30– Mobility & Ubiquity
* Gershenfeld, all.

Students sometimes ask which blogs are getting the most hits. Well, during October (so far), the top number of hits have gone to:

1. Infomancy
2. Cyberporn & Society (currently hibernating)
3. Happy Together
4. Murky Waters of the Smurfs†Garden
5. Speaking American
6. Informusings
7. Yakkety-yak
8. Ben’s Com Theory
9. Reel Around the Weblog
10. Ethernity

For October 19

* Watch Weinberger’s and Levy’s addresses at the Library of Congress. (We’ll me watching some of the other addresses in this series later in the semester.)

* Miller, P. (2000) I am a name and a number. Ariande, 24.

* Fast, K., Leise, F., and Steckel, M. (2002). All about facets & controlled vocabularies, What is a controlled vocabulary?, Creating a controlled vocabulary, Synonym rings and authority files.

Recommended, but optional

* Levy, D. M. (1995). Cataloging in the digital order. Digital Libraries.

* Mann, T. (2005). Will Google print and keyword searching eliminate the need for LC cataloging and classification? AFSCME 2910.

* An introduction to the MARC format

Also a great intro to sxip, of course. I first heard about sxip about a year and a half ago? When is it going to blow up?

So what is del.icio.us, besides a pain to type? Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” site. I imagine that most of you already keep bookmarks in you browser for sites that you visit frequently or that you want to be able to find again. But what happens when you are at work and you don’t have access to those bookmarks? Del.icio.us solves that problem by allowing you to log on from anywhere on the web and use your list of bookmarks.

To use the service, you need to set up a free account. Then, you need to drag the bookmarklet to the quicklinks section of your favorite browser. (You can use del.icio.us without the bookmarklet, but you won’t.) Then, whenever you are surfing the web and see a site you want to bookmark for later, just click on the bookmarklet and you will be taken to a special page on del.icio.us. There, you write a quick note to yourself about why you decided to save this link, and what categories it falls under (“tag” it). Voila, you have a bookmark you can access later.

But wait! That’s not all! You also get…

There is an added bonus here, in that you can stalk your friends and others. You can see what they have been finding interesting during their own tours around the web. So, if you want to know what George Bush finds interesting lately, just look up his del.icio.us account. (If you know what it is, drop me an email.) For now, you could just check out mine. I have a handful of people who I track to see what they are bookmarking lately. (Not surprisingly, this is made easier through RSS, but we can hold off on that for later…)

But wait! That’s not all! You also get…

When you bookmark something, you assign it a “tag.” At a basic level, this is like putting a bookmark in a folder on your browser. But tagging is a little different, because you can put any number of tags on a single bookmark. For some time now, when I found a site that I thought would be useful for new graduate students, I tagged it with “advice.” That way, I can find it later when I need to.

But what happens when you can gather a whole bunch of bookmarks that people have freetagged (frietagged) together? Well, “advice” is a terrible example. I probably should have called it “grad_advice” to be a bit more specific. But if you look at the page that includes everyone’s advice tags, which is at http://del.icio.us/tag/advice you find all the advice the web has to offer, from how to pick up women to how to best settle insurance claims. Likewise, for almost any tag, or any bookmark, you can find dozens or hundreds of people who are collaboratively sorting out the web. Although there isn’t much there, people who are attending the Internet Research conference this week will be using the tag aoir6.

Moreover, when you bookmark something, you can find out who else has bookmarked it. For some bookmarks, you may be the only one to have found it interesting, and for some, there are thousands of others who thought it worth remembering. But what is interesting is when only two or three people have bookmarked a site. Even if you don’t know these people at all, you share at least this small interest, and you can go and see what else they have bookmarked.

The tag for the systems seminar is inf507. If you check out the page for that tag you will see that I have been bookmarking some things that I think are related to the class, and some of the other participants have started doing the same. Go, sign up, and start tagging.

As we will discuss in the coming weeks, this kind of tagging process is not limited to del.icio.us. Flickr lets you tag photographs, technorati lets you tag blog posts, and 43 things lets you tag life goals, for example. This creates a set of emergent organizing indexes, what some have been calling folksonomies

The interesting difference here is that the OCA is based on many hands making light work. Rather than spending millions of dollars digitizing the works of a major library, they are suggesting that smaller, focused collections be scanned by local libraries. The University of California, for example, will be scanning a collection of 15,000 books. Not small by any means, but perhaps more doable than an entire library.

The legal situation here is interesting, from a strategic position. Publishers who have been pushing against the Google plan may be far less interested in suing the University of California, or any of the hundreds of others who will be contributing to the larger project.

The idea of digitizing our current store of book-recorded knowledge is so appealing that I cannot imagine that the legal structures will be able to hold it at bay forever. Or, at least I hope that this is the case.

WASHINGTON, DC–Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project.” Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.

(via Mayfield)

Here’s a quick bio, stolen from the IR 6.0 Agenda:

Ang Peng Hwa is Professor of Media Management and Law at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A lawyer by training, he worked as a journalist before going on to pursue a Masters in communication management at the University of Southern California and a PhD in mass media at Michigan State University. He is a central committee member of the Consumers’ Association of Singapore and is the legal adviser to the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore. He has consulted for government and private bodies in Singapore, as well as international agencies such as the United Nations Development Program on law and policy issues regarding the Internet.

Call for papers

Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information (CAIS/ACSI)

2006 Annual Conference

June 1 – 3, 2006, York University, Toronto

Information Science Revisited: Approaches to Innovation

With focus on innovative research and on information science as an evolving field, the conference will provide information scientists with a forum for presentation on three areas that form the conference program theme:

1. System design and evaluation: Information retrieval, interface design, system effectiveness and efficiency, information architecture, cost analysis.

2. Information and users: User studies, information literacy, economic and political factors, government initiatives, information communities.

3. Analysis and organization of information: Informetrics and Webometrics, informatics, metadata, classification, information science theory.

Conference proposal submission: Proposals for CAIS/ACSI 2006 should include a title, be no more than 500 words long, and specify how they relate to one of the areas within the conference program theme. Proposals with clearly articulated theoretical grounding and methodology, and those that report on completed or ongoing research will be given preference. Diverse perspectives and methodologies are welcome. Proposals may be submitted in English or French. Doctoral candidates are especially invited to submit proposals for the conference. Highest ranked papers will, with permission of the authors, be published in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science / La revue canadienne de l’information et bibliothéconomie with their abstracts appearing in the proceedings.

Deadline for proposals is January 16, 2006. Proposals, including the name(s) of the author(s), complete mailing and e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, should be sent electronically in Word or Rich Text Format to Dr. Haidar Moukdad, CAIS/ACSI 2006 Program Chair at cais2006@cais-acsi.ca

Conference proposals will be refereed by the Program Committee. Authors will be notified of the Committee’s decision no later than February 20, 2006. Papers to appear as full-text in the electronic proceedings must be submitted no later than April 20, 2006. With permission of the authors, abstracts of all papers presented at the conference will also be published in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science / La revue canadienne de l’information et bibliothéconomie.

The CAIS/ACSI 2006 conference will be held June 1-3, 2006, and is part of the annual Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which runs from May 27 to June 4, 2006 at York University, Toronto, Ontario. Please see the Federation Web site at http://www.fedcan.ca/congress2006 for registration and accommodation details.

To remind you, we had a four-symbol code, consisting of H, A, L, and _. If these symbols were equally distributed, we the number of bits required is 2. We know this because the probability of each character is .25. So the number of bits required is

H = – ( .25 log2 .25 +
           .25 log2 .25 +
           .25 log2 .25 +
           .25 log2 .25 )

or 2.

It’s pretty easy to figure out how to code it into 2 bits:

H – 00
A – 01
L – 10
_ – 11

But, it is not true that (for example) in an English text the probability of E and Z occurring in a string is equal. E appears much more frequently. So, let’s say we observed a pattern that looked like

HAHHHLA_HHAHH_HALH_AHHH_HAHLHAHALH_HALAH

In practice, of course, you would want to have a lot more to go on, but let’s say this was enough to assume it was representative of the language. In this case, of 40 total characters, 20 are H, 10 are A, 5 are L, and 5 are _. Now, our probabilities are different, and so the number of bits required are also different:

H = – ( .5 log2 .5 +
           .25 log2 .25 +
           .125 log2 .125 +
           .125 log2 .125 )

Which ends up as 1.75 bits. How do you fit four symbols into 1.75 bits? Well, the trick is that a message fits in–on average–1.75 bits per character. That means that at least one character needs to fit into a single bit. In our case, the bit we would choose is clear: the H. H appears far more frequently than the other characters, and so it can be compressed more.

If I recall, a first attempt at this was this:

H 0
A 01
L 001
_ 0001

The problem here is that if H is 0 it can’t be a part of A. Otherwise, try to decode this:

0010001

It could be decoded in a few ways:

HAHHA
LHA
etc.

And that is no good at all.

Consider this instead:

H 0
A 10
L 110
_ 111

So to encode HAH_LAH you would end up with

0100111110100

You will see that when you chain these together (and you know where to start), you have only a single way of decoding.

Consider that chain.

We start with a 0 which can only be an H. It can’t be anything else, because H is the only character to start with a 0.

So we have H.

The second bit is a 1. Actually, this could be A, L, or _, so we’ll keep going.

The third bit is a 0, meaning we are up to 10. There is only one character that starts 10, so we know it is an A. We have HA, so far.

The fourth bit is a 0. Again, only an H starts with a 0, so we now have HAH.

The fifth bit is a 1. There are still three possible characters that start with a 1 bit: A, L or _. So we need to look at the next one.

The sixth bit is a 1. There are two possible characters that start with 11: L and _. So we need to go to yet another bit to figure it out.

The seventh bit is 1. So we have 111 and _ is the only possibility.

You get the idea.

Another way to think about the code is as a binary tree:

  0 /\ 1
    /  \
 H  0 /\ 1
       /  \
     A  0 /\ 1
           /  \
         L     _

This idea most directly important to schemes for efficiently encoding data; but it turns out that encoding data, as we have been reading, may have importance beyond digital computing machines and communication systems. It may be the stuff that the universe and life is made of.

The next step, which we did not get to, is to look at larger patterns. If we can save a quarter-bit by looking at single letters, what if we go to pairs? Q is followed by U far more often than by any other character. Therefore, the amount of information required to encode the pair is reduced. We can find similar regularities in bunches of 3, 4, 5, and 5000 characters (though we have diminishing returns for encoding).

Remember, Morse’s original idea was to encode whole messages to a particular number. This would be far more efficient than Morse code, and was a coding scheme used by the ancient Greeks (among others). He then thought about a dictionary, with a number for each word in the dictionary. This too would be a more efficient coding, though it would require more work on either side to encode/decode.

Finally, I was ambitious and hoped that we would get to talk a bit about finite state machines. The tree graph above shows how it would be easy to create a simple finite state machine to decode the string of 1s and 0s and form a message. Unfortunately, some portion of the class required time to grok. I do encourage you to work through some of these issues on your own, and for those who are reading from the Com Theory class, we’ll go beyond this a bit to talk about evolutionary models of finite state machines.

(I guess flight crews opt for a variety of runs, but the cross-country one is better for them because they only get paid for time in the air. The short Buffalo-NYC run — which they might make several times a day — basically pays half as much per hour because of the time spent on the ground in each city. However it works out, crews on our short flight might be going to Miami or LA on another day, and they wanted to let everyone know that they hadn’t this time.)

What I hadn’t thought about as much, until noted by Earth Wide Moth, was what one passenger called the surreal experience of watching the landing unfold via the seat-back monitors from inside the plane itself. There is something slightly uncanny about that experience I suppose, but also something fairly emblematic. It’s not unique: there is a standard cliche that shows up as a comedic moment when people are watching the news at home and seeing a house surrounded, only to slowly discover that it is their own. But it seems that situation is creeping outward.

The other extreme might be what appears in “Strange Days.” In the film, “users” (and the relationship to drug users is played out) of a device called a SQUID (Super-conducting QUantum Interface Device – basically a bunch of electrodes placed on the head that allow direct access to the sensory portions of the brain) trade experiences that have been recorded by others. The character played by Ralph Fiennes discovers a trade in snuff recordings. At one point, a character is forced to watch her own death, from the eyes of her killer, and this is recorded for later viewing.

Camera phones are already near ubiquitous, and those capable of streaming video are fairly widespread. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. The “surreality” of the Jet Blue experience was due to the simple fact that a video screen with network access was in front of passengers. But we are already approaching a time when that is norm rather than the exception. What will it mean when mirrors are everywhere? When everything we do will be judged by how it is captured and viewed by ourselves-as-others?

I am reminded of someone who, when it rained on her outdoor wedding, had the guests come back a second day to capture the wedding as she had envisioned it. They went through an empty ceremony, as a simulation of the way the “real” wedding should have happened, while the videographer recorded their perfect wedding.

Of course, maybe we always see ourselves through the eyes of, to use Mead’s phrase, the “generalized other.” But by making that view transparent, does it mean we can more easily step into the shoes of the other? Or does it mean a new era of narcissism, when we no longer need to empathize to understand what others see, we need only turn on our TV?

September 21: Information as a concept

• Baeyer, chapters 1-18.

September 28: Special Week: REAL ID conference and Axel Bruns presentation

• Follow (or engage in) the discussion at an online conference on Real ID, from September 19 through 23
• NPR on Real ID
• UPI Article on Real ID
• CNET FAQ on Real ID
• You are encouraged to attend a presentation by Axel Bruns: 6pm, CFA, DMS 235. We will begin class after his presentation, most likely at about 7:30 and discuss both issues raised in his talk and in the REAL ID conference.
• Abstract for the Bruns talk
• Boston Globe, “Are you a prosumer?”
• Wiipedia: Prosumer
• Be sure to post your opinions and reactions to the items above.

October 6: Information as Thing

• Bates, M. J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1043-1050.
• Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 351-360.
• Kidd, A. (1994). The marks are on the knowledge worker. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence. Boston.

UPDATE: fixed date.

I am using blogs in these two courses as a stand in for the pretty standard “response paper” found in many graduate courses. The idea here is to “engage” the readings in some way, extracting what you think the crux of the matter is and discussing it. This may be a synthetic essay that identifies a theme common to several readings, it may extend one of the ideas in the readings, or it may challenge some of the positions presented. Ideally, the readings inform and support your own ideas, acting as a kind of lever.

Over the next few weeks, especially, I will try to highlight some of the postings that seem to do this well. But at this stage, let me offer some general advice:

0. Be original. Make sure you are writing something that someone (not just me) would be interested in reading.

1. Have a thesis. No matter how short your entry is, it should have a central argument that is stated fairly early on. This may not be a general rule for writing, but for me it is. Any writing — from a note on the refrigerator to a multi-volume book — should have a clearly expressed thesis that is presented with evidence supporting the thesis.

1a. Have a title that reflects your thesis.

2. Assume an informed, third-person reader. Imagine that a graduate student at Stanford or Indiana or Keio is reading your entry. You should not start out with “What the author writes…” but identify the author and briefly recapitulate his or her position. This is equally true of commenting on the assigned readings, other things you find on the web, or your peers’ blog entries. A short sentence that says something like “John writes that Paul is short-sighted in his vision of the future of peas,” along with a hyperlink to the referenced item, is enough to orient a reader who may not be closely following our reading schedule or the ongoing conversation.

3. Contextual linking. I know that requirement for APA style slipped into the syllabus, but if there is an opportunity to link to a source, use it. As Lisa notes, blogging is all about the linking. (Yes, just like that.)

4. Check for spelling and typos. For now, this means copying and pasting your entry into Word or something similar to check for spelling. (I’ll work on building in a spell-checker, or there are spell-checkers you can install as plug-ins to Firefox and to IE.) You should also read over your entry for typos and homonyms, which may not be caught by your word processor’s spell checking function. Some of you would benefit greatly from reading your entries out loud, to see where you might be able to simplify and clarify.

5. While you are presenting an argument that is likely abstract, or general, make the evidence or examples as concrete as possible. Examples are a great way of providing something to think with.

6. Double-space between paragraphs. It makes reading much easier.

7. Tell me a story. All writing is ultimately about weaving a story; all the more so when you are trying to be persuasive.

For even more general advice to good blog entries, try here.

OK, on to some of the blogs in the informatics class:

* Generally, Andrew’s blog and Diane’s blog are good starting points within the systems seminar. These are among several others who are already doing an excellent job, and you can probably get a feeling for which these are on your own. I would recommend everyone identify the blogs you like, and steal some part of their approach. Note the style of making use of the citations, direct links to relevant information, and incisive analysis (literally “to dissolve”; taking apart the argument and making sure the pieces make sense). They rely on their own experience and knowledge, and each of you have unique experiences and knowledge you can apply to this process.

* Mr. von Tagger has an interesting first entry sets up what I think is an interesting question. The entry could have gone a lot further in answering it. I’m a bit less impressed by the answer in a follow-up, since it doesn’t seem to provide as careful an analysis as it might, but it’s an interesting effort. Seems to me that a bit of Lukacs might inform an answer.

* In his first couple entries, Charles invokes (without naming it) the idea of “appropriate technology”. His insights are interesting, though again, I wish he had continued to develop them a bit. I also like the image of him wielding gardening implements, both because I am a sucker for illustrative images, and because it builds toward an informatics tradition.

* Bonnie has an interesting “metablogging” post that ties blogging back to Hughes and the need to connect to others.

* Garrett (among several others) provides a good example of useful information foraging.

* You might also benefit by looking over some of the blog entries in your “sister” class in communication. How well are they doing these things? Can you follow their ideas without having been exposed to their readings?

I’m still hoping we can get enough people together during some semester to do a collaborative social software/social informatics grad class across several campuses, but I haven’t managed to coordinate it with anyone yet. Seems strange that given the nature of social software, courses seem to be focused on particular campuses. What I have in mind, and I’ve floated it by a few people now, is making ourselves — as teachers and students — reusable learning objects. That is, providing each instructor with autonomy over the local class, but also including some collaborative space with a speaker (or blogger, or whatever) space that is shared among the classes. Any time you add that kind of coordination, it makes for more planning time, etc., but my thought is that it could be fairly lightweight.