Sunday, December 14, 2008
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.
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