Here is my favorite design slideshow from SlideShare, Paper Art by Peter Callesen:
Part of the 23 things exercise is to establish an account on SlideShare, mine is here. I guess there is shareware to convert other file formats to ppt files, so who knows, I might use it sometime.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thing #14 Tagging and Social Bookmarking
For me, this has turned out to be a very useful "thing." I was already using my personal google documents account to, rather awkwardly, "archive" my links and make it possible for me to get at them on different computers but the delicious.com site is much better suited to the purpose. I have already uploaded browser bookmarks to delicious and I imagine I will continue to use this tool frequently in the future.
For my own use I might tag the NebraskaAccess site as research_tool, Nebraska, full_text, virtual_library, database_access, govt_provider, and, learning from others tags, also as statevirtuallibraries.
For my own use I might tag the NebraskaAccess site as research_tool, Nebraska, full_text, virtual_library, database_access, govt_provider, and, learning from others tags, also as statevirtuallibraries.
Thing #13 What are you wearing right now?
I have experimented with twitter. I can see how using it to microblog could be useful to support a common effort, like sharing alerts about useful resources for a class, for example. Twitter is also presented as a way to sustain connections between people, as a friendship tool, so to speak. I'm more skeptical about that--or maybe type of people who twitter a lot about themselves are just not very interesting. Most of the tweets I encountered were pretty banal (and I would not claim my own were any more interesting). Even the tweets from the Nebraska Library Camp in Lincoln were, I thought (sorry people!) mostly just useless chatter.
I mentioned Steve Talbott in an earlier post. A phrase of his came to mind as I was lurking and scanning through what people have to say about themselves: "The technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level."
I mentioned Steve Talbott in an earlier post. A phrase of his came to mind as I was lurking and scanning through what people have to say about themselves: "The technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level."
Monday, December 22, 2008
Thing #12: A thing about LibraryThing
I got a Library Thing account some months ago. I added some books right then (Link), and I did find some interesting things by looking at the lists of others who have books I think are good. Nevertheless I did not keep adding books, mostly because of time issues. Bluntly put, while I think Library Thing is a neat idea and really works well, to contribute much to it, I would have to take more trouble than I am willing to. I rather spend the time reading or writing. I have a fairly well established routine for consuming a book, and taking a note about it if I think its worth it, and that doesn't include Library Thing.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Thing #11: We all blog about technology
I've already been blogging some about technology. Most entries in this blog that are not specifically addressed to the “NLC 23 things” are about the way that digital technology has led to a new struggle about what is in the public sphere, as a variety of economic interests attempt to privatize ideas, information, and works of art, literature, and science that were formerly considered part of our common cultural heritage. My shorthand index term for these entries has been “digital enclosure,” a term that others use as well, as you can see if you follow the links in those entries.
Much of the discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of digital technology seems shallow--in the “gee whiz, isn't it great!” and “ZOWIE guys!!! Get with it or Drop Dead!” mold. But there are exceptions. Here are some links to work that seems to me to offer intelligent, historically informed commentary on the influence of digital technology in today's world.
The first (and easiest to understand) is Dion Dennis's article The digital death rattle of the American middle class. The article is as much about the future of American education as it is about outsourcing and economic prosperity, as such. I particularly like Dennis's last two paragraphs. I have a feeling this piece, written in 2003, may age better than you might think, despite recent changes in political life due to the economic crisis and the 2008 election. Dennis is describing an ideology and a set of interests that are deeply rooted and influential in both political parties.
The most wide-ranging and sophisticated cultural critic of the way we are handling our new digital tools that I have encountered is Steve Talbott.
Here is a good on-line introduction to his approach. This includes, in a part titled “Hold a blossom to the light,” a very fine description of why an enormously skilled Waorani blowgun hunter in the Amazon rain forest really prefers to use a shotgun, although shells are expensive and hard to get, and although the gun does not serve his purpose (he knows this, too) as effectively as the traditional blowgun.
Its all about technology and how, at any level of sophistication, we can be attracted to tools that are culturally destructive.
I recently read Talbot's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, (O'Reilly Media, 2007), and I would like to cherry pick a couple of points he makes that I especially liked.
He asks and answers the question, how much of myself do I put on the line, how much do I really commit, when I venture onto the internet? The answer is almost nothing. This is the beginning of a devastating critique of utopian visions of on-line community, though that discussion is strung out throughout the rest of the book.
He shows how we sometimes use technology to evade a true conversation with the natural world, as with each other, and describes the result at one point as “a mad, free associating soliloquy.”
Talbott draws on Jane Healy's Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—For Better and Worse. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and pays close attention to how children and adults are made fit for their social world. His appreciation of the role of place in sustaining a healthy culture leads him to the conclusion that “to be a keystroke from everywhere means being nowhere in particular, and this means that making the Internet a healthy place for children is not for the time being a realistically achievable goal.”
Talbott is not a Luddite, he has been employed as a software programmer and technical writer, and through this connection, his book came to be published by O'Reilly media, a technology publisher who brings out some of the best books on computer programming.
Long ago the German writer Ernst Jünger suggested that “Our technological world is not an arena of unlimited possibilities, instead, it possesses an embryonic character which drives toward a predetermined maturity.” For Jünger this meant, in part, that technology reshapes the world only as a reflection of the human will to power. Leader of a German assault troop on the western front in World War I, wounded some 23 times in action, Jünger found great beauty in the amorality and spectacle of industrialized warfare. Jünger affirmed change, and greeted the chaos of two world wars and the rise of dictatorships in the twenties as small steps along the way to the transformation of the earth into a totally administered technological wonder, a work of pure art. His aesthetic appreciation of these changes grates on modern sensibilities. (We Americans like our history to be a moral homily, however shallow.)
Still, it is hard not to think of Jünger again: Where-ever you look at digital technology, whether at the more “populist” end of video games and on-line communities, or at the possibilities for information gathering and administrative control this technology offers to governments and corporations, or simply at the way technology enables what Steve Talbott calls “vacant efficiency,” and transforms economy and society in ways we don't anticipate, there is something embryonic in its appearance. What seems chaotic and free on the surface and at first glance, seems much less so with closer observation. As we look on, behind the chaos, bright surfaces of connective tissue self-assemble, curving back on themselves beyond our vision. Will this thing be beautiful, or a horror, or some deep hybrid of the two?
Much of the discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of digital technology seems shallow--in the “gee whiz, isn't it great!” and “ZOWIE guys!!! Get with it or Drop Dead!” mold. But there are exceptions. Here are some links to work that seems to me to offer intelligent, historically informed commentary on the influence of digital technology in today's world.
The first (and easiest to understand) is Dion Dennis's article The digital death rattle of the American middle class. The article is as much about the future of American education as it is about outsourcing and economic prosperity, as such. I particularly like Dennis's last two paragraphs. I have a feeling this piece, written in 2003, may age better than you might think, despite recent changes in political life due to the economic crisis and the 2008 election. Dennis is describing an ideology and a set of interests that are deeply rooted and influential in both political parties.
The most wide-ranging and sophisticated cultural critic of the way we are handling our new digital tools that I have encountered is Steve Talbott.
Here is a good on-line introduction to his approach. This includes, in a part titled “Hold a blossom to the light,” a very fine description of why an enormously skilled Waorani blowgun hunter in the Amazon rain forest really prefers to use a shotgun, although shells are expensive and hard to get, and although the gun does not serve his purpose (he knows this, too) as effectively as the traditional blowgun.
Its all about technology and how, at any level of sophistication, we can be attracted to tools that are culturally destructive.
I recently read Talbot's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, (O'Reilly Media, 2007), and I would like to cherry pick a couple of points he makes that I especially liked.
He asks and answers the question, how much of myself do I put on the line, how much do I really commit, when I venture onto the internet? The answer is almost nothing. This is the beginning of a devastating critique of utopian visions of on-line community, though that discussion is strung out throughout the rest of the book.
He shows how we sometimes use technology to evade a true conversation with the natural world, as with each other, and describes the result at one point as “a mad, free associating soliloquy.”
Talbott draws on Jane Healy's Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—For Better and Worse. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and pays close attention to how children and adults are made fit for their social world. His appreciation of the role of place in sustaining a healthy culture leads him to the conclusion that “to be a keystroke from everywhere means being nowhere in particular, and this means that making the Internet a healthy place for children is not for the time being a realistically achievable goal.”
Talbott is not a Luddite, he has been employed as a software programmer and technical writer, and through this connection, his book came to be published by O'Reilly media, a technology publisher who brings out some of the best books on computer programming.
Long ago the German writer Ernst Jünger suggested that “Our technological world is not an arena of unlimited possibilities, instead, it possesses an embryonic character which drives toward a predetermined maturity.” For Jünger this meant, in part, that technology reshapes the world only as a reflection of the human will to power. Leader of a German assault troop on the western front in World War I, wounded some 23 times in action, Jünger found great beauty in the amorality and spectacle of industrialized warfare. Jünger affirmed change, and greeted the chaos of two world wars and the rise of dictatorships in the twenties as small steps along the way to the transformation of the earth into a totally administered technological wonder, a work of pure art. His aesthetic appreciation of these changes grates on modern sensibilities. (We Americans like our history to be a moral homily, however shallow.)
Still, it is hard not to think of Jünger again: Where-ever you look at digital technology, whether at the more “populist” end of video games and on-line communities, or at the possibilities for information gathering and administrative control this technology offers to governments and corporations, or simply at the way technology enables what Steve Talbott calls “vacant efficiency,” and transforms economy and society in ways we don't anticipate, there is something embryonic in its appearance. What seems chaotic and free on the surface and at first glance, seems much less so with closer observation. As we look on, behind the chaos, bright surfaces of connective tissue self-assemble, curving back on themselves beyond our vision. Will this thing be beautiful, or a horror, or some deep hybrid of the two?
Monday, December 15, 2008
Thing #10 Play with image generator
Using piZap I created this image with a scan from Shaw's Zoology (circa 1812):
I had to trim the image in a desktop application though, because piZap left a black border on it that I did'nt like.
I had to trim the image in a desktop application though, because piZap left a black border on it that I did'nt like.
Thing #9: More uses for Flickr
I found this animal photo mashup site on www.programmableweb.com, which in turn is a good guide to finding mashups and even to making mashups of your own. If the question is how useful images you find on Flickr might be for library projects, the most difficult problem with using such images will always be copyright issues. This particular photo mashup only includes photos that are under a creative commons license, so you could, in theory, print some off for a related book display of some sort.
Thing #8: Discover Flickr
I surfed around on Flickr for a while, and found this photo of monkey skulls arranged by the Dogon. The photograph reminds me of ornament on the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna. In fact, the monkey skulls are somehow more impressive.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The digital redefinition of childhood? Another kind of digital enclosure?
Here is a link to a story about how certain words are being removed from Oxford University Press's young people's dictionary, to be replaced by others. The story's title is Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary but as Michael Gillelan notes in Laudator Temporis Acti
the words removed include many terms used to describe the countryside: Acorn, ash, sycamore, beech, chestnut, dandelion, holly, ivy, pasture, primrose, willow, and walnut among them. New words in the dictionary include blog, broadband, MP3,chatroom and voice mail. If you've read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, or Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, you'll be as horrified as I am.
the words removed include many terms used to describe the countryside: Acorn, ash, sycamore, beech, chestnut, dandelion, holly, ivy, pasture, primrose, willow, and walnut among them. New words in the dictionary include blog, broadband, MP3,chatroom and voice mail. If you've read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, or Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, you'll be as horrified as I am.
Thing #7: Finding Feeds
I have found some feeds with Technorati, but I definitely like Google's blog search the best of the tools listed. Searching per se may not actually be the best way to find the most interesting feeds, the best way is probably to follow well done blogs that are close to your own interests. For news, I have followed The Agonist for several years, and have found other useful feeds over time from there. If you find a blog you like, you can see what other sites link to it by entering that blog's URL into Touchgraph's Google Browser. This last is a very useful visual tool, if you have time to play around with it.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Thing #6 RSS feeds
I think RSS feeds are really useful, but maybe more for following a peripheral interest than an central one. Some people do go back and re-edit older entries, which, given the way I use the feeds, I might miss. Also, you might miss the advertising... which can be interesting on a book blog.
About Instant Messaging: Thing #5
I will probably continue to mix something of an attempt with a real blog with the 23 things posts for the NLC Nebraska Learns 2.0 posts. I have now signed up for instant messaging with Yahoo and had a short exchange with Christa at the Commission. It might be a useful tool at work, though I personally think e-mail works better for most purposes.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
A new book on the digital enclosure trend.
A new book, James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is available for free download from Yale University Press.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Technology and data loss
In the lastest Fall/Winter (print) issue of the American Archivist, Robert Dorman has an interesting article titled "The Creation and Destruction of the 1890 Federal Census."
As Dorman points out, both scholars and the public, historians and genealogists, are painfully aware of the loss, due to a fire in January 1921 and the fire's aftermath, of the only copy of the returns. For every preceeding census, and every later one, multiple copies were made of the returns. Dorman shows that the choice to create only a single record of returns for the 1890 census grew out of the "pervasive fiscal conservatism" of the government, an unprecedented bulkiness of returns due to a broader set of questions being asked than ever before, and from "bureaucratic hubris over the first use of the Hollerith electrical tabulating machines."
As Dorman says, all the statistical data from the census was extracted and published before the 1921 fire. What was lost in the fire were the names of the people, and with that the ability to tie the data to individual households. The names were not transferred to the punch cards used to enumerate the census. Having transferred data to punch cards, the bureaucrats argued that further copies, and even the binding of the returns as in previous censuses, was unneccessary. Both of these choices played a role in making the 1921 fire the disaster that it was. With family names, an important source of information about the last great era of immigration has been lost, as have the possibilites of aggregating data differently for different scholarly purposes.
As Dorman points out, both scholars and the public, historians and genealogists, are painfully aware of the loss, due to a fire in January 1921 and the fire's aftermath, of the only copy of the returns. For every preceeding census, and every later one, multiple copies were made of the returns. Dorman shows that the choice to create only a single record of returns for the 1890 census grew out of the "pervasive fiscal conservatism" of the government, an unprecedented bulkiness of returns due to a broader set of questions being asked than ever before, and from "bureaucratic hubris over the first use of the Hollerith electrical tabulating machines."
As Dorman says, all the statistical data from the census was extracted and published before the 1921 fire. What was lost in the fire were the names of the people, and with that the ability to tie the data to individual households. The names were not transferred to the punch cards used to enumerate the census. Having transferred data to punch cards, the bureaucrats argued that further copies, and even the binding of the returns as in previous censuses, was unneccessary. Both of these choices played a role in making the 1921 fire the disaster that it was. With family names, an important source of information about the last great era of immigration has been lost, as have the possibilites of aggregating data differently for different scholarly purposes.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Digital Enclosure again
Library Law describes how state archives' acceptance of "grants" from Ancestry.com may hobble people's ability to access archive materials on-line for the long term. Even the submitting of index materials to Google will be restricted, limiting people's ability to even find the materials. Restrictions will last for the life of the copyright on the digitized materials.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Here is a list of ways that digital technology seems to change scholarly research methods. The service that librarians have provided has been to offer a map of 'what is there' based on their knowledge of how knowledge is produced, recorded, and stored. So keeping up with such changes is necessary, as we try to understand how the library's intermediary role is changing or, as some people believe, dissolving.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Digital Enclosure
Noted in the German archivists' blog Archivalia, a study that takes note of the process of digital enclosure:
The public domain is a rich resource and an essential foundation for the Internet public library. It includes centuries of great literature and is a chronicle of civilization and learning. Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike. The lawyers and economists call this the “enclosure” of the public domain and it looms large as the future of the Internet public library plays out.
http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf
The public domain is a rich resource and an essential foundation for the Internet public library. It includes centuries of great literature and is a chronicle of civilization and learning. Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike. The lawyers and economists call this the “enclosure” of the public domain and it looms large as the future of the Internet public library plays out.
http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Nonsense words and seven and a half things
New nonsense:
Consporgulation: The application of Inter-forward Programming to maximal efficacy in customer management functionalities.
Thingwally: Thinggummy's nemesis.
Its an easy transition from this nonsense to the "seven and a half habits of highly successful lifelong learners." I have always been puzzled by the American tendency to present ideas about learning as if a therapist on Valium were speaking to an audience on Prozac. I can think of some fairly chaotic and nasty things to say about this, but as criticism of a superficial little slide show, it would be a waste of time. Be a little more frank? --If you don't continue to learn you will be either brain-dead or a serf with a big screen TV? I laughed especially hard at the notion of a written contract, which I suppose is just a nice, well-intended, middlebrow thought experiment. While I was trying to speed-up my trip through the site, the words of an old song that was popular in the early seventies came to me, the one about "all the little houses made of ticky-tacky." And inside them, how about all the little minds, "filled up with nicky-nacky?" Little homilies turn me off.
Consporgulation: The application of Inter-forward Programming to maximal efficacy in customer management functionalities.
Thingwally: Thinggummy's nemesis.
Its an easy transition from this nonsense to the "seven and a half habits of highly successful lifelong learners." I have always been puzzled by the American tendency to present ideas about learning as if a therapist on Valium were speaking to an audience on Prozac. I can think of some fairly chaotic and nasty things to say about this, but as criticism of a superficial little slide show, it would be a waste of time. Be a little more frank? --If you don't continue to learn you will be either brain-dead or a serf with a big screen TV? I laughed especially hard at the notion of a written contract, which I suppose is just a nice, well-intended, middlebrow thought experiment. While I was trying to speed-up my trip through the site, the words of an old song that was popular in the early seventies came to me, the one about "all the little houses made of ticky-tacky." And inside them, how about all the little minds, "filled up with nicky-nacky?" Little homilies turn me off.
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