Category: Uncategorized

If you want an example of the cultural impact of technologies on language, look no further than the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Seems that hyphen usage has succumbed to the dual pressures of design-sensitive (oops) publication and shorthand keying styles of many interaction devices. While people have often been unsure of the correct use of hyphens, user confidence is not the determining factor it seems for the editors. Rather, hyphens ‘mess up the look of a nice bit of typography’, says Angus Stevenson. And who can possibly waste thumb pushes on creating a ‘-‘? That said, new words have been added, including the hyphenated ‘carbon-neutral’, part of an increased use of environmental terms. Meaning is just use, eh?

The 6th Conference on Conceptions of LIS was held in Boras, Sweden last week, hosted by the Swedish School of Library and Information Science. A more intimate affair than many such events, CoLIS had just over 100 attendees from Europe, North America and Australia and was marked by a relaxed, interactive style that maximized the sharing of perspectives. I found the conference particularly interesting in that theoretical discussions dominated and there was a comfort level with ideas, even opposing ideas, that never caused people to overheat or ignore each other. I was somewhat surprised at the amount of critical theory on display, one not terribly driven by Foucaultean concerns might have felt in a minority here, but there were enough good papers here to make the trip more productive than many other LIS conferences. I particularly enjoyed a presentation by David Bawden of City University in London who argued for a unified framework for information that broached physical, biological and human domains. Oddly, I had just raised a similar topic in my address when I pushed for the field to aim higher and ask significant, ‘big questions’ in its research (with a side-comment that we should declare a moratorium on new information seeking models). The audience responded to David’s talk enough to suggest this idea is not too worn out to be worth discussion, and indeed David made a strong case for this being an important issue for the field to address. The CoLIS papers will all find their way into a special issue of Information Research and I’ll post a link in due course. My own cleaned-up paper is in PDF form here. Next CoLIS is in London in Spring 2010 – we wouldn’t want to have too much of a good thing now would we?

I was out of the country when I learned the sad news of Ray’s death from colleagues. It’s impossible to convey in words the sadness one feels at the loss of a colleague and friend. Ray was a founding figure in the iSchool movement, urging us ever onwards to recognize the emergence of a new field that transcended the divisions of the last century. More than this, he was a lifeforce, seemingly boundlessly energized, always talking, laughing and connecting. I got to know him as a person over the last five years and always enjoyed dinner and drinks with him at conferences or meetings where we discussed travel, politics, music, and life beyond the normal matters of college business. Ray had opinions, and he was not shy about sharing them. There are many in the iSchool community who owe a dept to Ray, he was constantly concerned with the field, with developing new leaders, with ensuring the development of information as a legitimate discipline beyond his own career and his own school. That is the mark of the man, and that is his legacy to our field. You can read more about Ray’s life and leave a message of remembrance at: http://ischool.syr.edu/ray/about.aspx

Scott McNealy of SUN reportedly said a while back that “Privacy is dead. Get over it”, thereby encouraging further the sense of inevitability about spam, identifty theft and other wonderful consequences of our age. That the world did not revolt at the very utterance tells us either how sophisticated we are in ignoring the social forecasts of those who lead the tech industry or how passively we accept our world being shaped by others. You know where I stand on that particular dividing line and it therefore was with no small pleasure that I read this month’s Scientific American article on Latanya Sweeney of CMU’s Laboratory for International Data Privacy. She is leading groundbreaking work with her team aimed at providing better tools for individual privacy but what really caught my eye was her statement on what really needs to change: “Ultimately engineers and computer scientists will have to weave privacy protection into the design and usability of their new technologies, up front”. Yes indeed, a new kind of engineer and computer scientist is needed. Sound familiar?

I received probably an unusual spam yesterday (not that offers of drugs, porn or untold $$$ from family relatives in oil-rich nations constitute ‘usual’ but you get the idea) when a ‘stand-up comedian’ (do any of these people ever sit down?) asked me to register to vote for him in an online competition. The lure for me was that if he won, he would donate all of $500 to the Save Darfur campaign. Clearly anticipating the reluctance of spam readers everywhere to believe this, he promised to place of video of him making the donation on YouTube once the winnings came his way. What a wonderful concept — use new technology to subvent all rules of fair play yet make us feel reassured that we really are really cheating for a good cause. BTW, the prize was $10k, so he’s promising a hefty 5% of his winnings for this. In the interests of fair play I did register (using his email address) and voted for someone else.

I tend to view the various recommendations I get from companies such as Netflix and Amazon as little more than a guide, sometimes interesting, often not, but offering a glimpse into the various weightings they are using to gauge my preferences. It’s not hard to see how unsophisticated are the underlying categories employed by these recommenders when you follow them. You bought one old 70’s rock album then you must want the new Molly Hatchet box set, right? Not exactly sure what this tells us about Amazon but today I was offered a good deal on a snow thrower! You might wonder if something as telling as one’s residential address might be used as a clue to some purchasing preferences – but then again, maybe not, I gather barbequing has become a regular activity now in Ireland and homeowners there have started adding decks to their properties- we only ever used that word to refer to playing cards or ships when I was growing up. Global warming is everwhere so it may start snowing in Texas – good to know Amazon has me covered!

The Irish government has a Minister of State with responsibility for the Information Society — an interesting governmental appointment that reflects the realities of life in modern Ireland and the claim of the current government that the creation of an inclusive knowledge society is a priority. He speaks of encouraging and enabling the user of ICT’s in everyday life, even using phrases such as ‘e-inclusion’. It’s a bold idea but the financial commitment so far seems to have been limited to about 1mEuro per year since 2004, aimed at various projects which provide better information to citizens. To what extent the program will deliver on the stated mission of enabling access to those without resources (often the elderly, poor, and disabled) remains to be seen. See: http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/10008

Seems an author for Wikipedia has been claiming academic credentials he never had: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6423659.stm. The question of credibility is hardly unique to digital authors but this news will confirm the suspicions of some who find Wikipedia just too questionable an entity to trust. Amid the media coverage of this topic it is easy to forget how much plagiarism and fakery exists in all written work, and it may just be that structure of Wikipedia enables it to more easily identify such errors. Certainly “Essjay” was exposed faster here than many incidences of scientific fakery uncovered over the years – just check out the life and times of Cyril Burt!

On a trip to DC this week I experienced the other side of our networked world when engine trouble forced me to re-route. First, the airline set up a special telephone number (apprarently in real-time) to handle the customers on our non-functioning airplane but the rush from all and sundry to connect seemed to tax the system (you have never seen so many people dig out phones simultaneously to dial the same number with the same problem). This resulted in a person I spoke to advising me to “hang up and speak to an agent at the gate!” Once that little problem was solved I decided to purchase wifi access for the duration of my stay in the airport. Easier said than done. T-Mobile proved so difficult to connect with that I gave up. At first it seemed mildly irritating that I had to go through so many form fields and so many variants of a possible password to spend my money but it soon became far worse when ‘for security reasons’ the screen wiped out my just-entered credit card details before I could complete registration process. Not once, twice. The design assumes that user name creation is a simple matter of typing six letters, and that delays caused by failing to use a unique name don’t occur. Deviate from this and your time is up and you have to start again. Cue to quit T-Mobile and try Wayport. I succeeded with them (far easier process of account creation) but my account was good only until I left that airport. Once I landed in Houston (a mere 25 minutes later) I not only had no further coverage but Bush International Airport only offers coverage through Sprint. What a litany: telephone hotlines unable to deliver the service for which they they are created; three different wireless companies, no easy joining or extended coverage; 20 minutes of ‘registration’ to have 30 minutes of email. And THIS is the networked society?

A new report from the European Community on scientific information in the digital age contains a sobering reminder of the importance of information preservation. During the recent ‘anthrax alert’, the British Library received multiple enquiries for research data on the topic. Since research on anthrax practically stopped in the 1950s there were few places with comprehensive and authoritative holdings on the subject. Since the record of human knowledge predates any one of us by centuries, and given the certainty that some information not currently deemed useful will prove invaluable in the future, long-term planning and policies for storing and making accessible this record would seem vital. Want to trust this to the ‘free market’? Find the report at: http://tinyurl.com/29qxjg. Reminds me of the time Afghanistan hit the news a few years back. The map library at UT, one of the great ones, received so much traffic that it practically drowned the system and forced a shutdown. So, you never know you need it until you need it, and then you better be able to access it in a hurry.