Category: Uncategorized

Geoffrey Nunberg is giving the keynote at the iConf 2012 conference in Toronto and is offering a superb historical and linguistic overview of the term ‘information’.  Who knew that the data-information-wisdom progression was such an old saw, to use his term, traceable back centuries.  Information is “not a process” either he argues though stating that hardly makes it so (doesn’t something happen between data and knowledge?) Oddly, no push back form the audience on that one!  Information used to mean refinement of thought, and Jane Austen seem’s to have used the term a lot that way, though not necessarily with nuances that have survived Hollywood versions of the books.  Sadly, time may have worked against him as he rushed through tons of slides and it all sort of faded out at the end, though Jonathan Furner, as commentator, made a brave attempt to bring it all together.   More to follow, the slides are promised….

 

 

 

 

A campaign organized under The Cost of Knowledge banner has thousands of scholars agreeing to boycott Elsevier publications by refusing to submit or to review articles for any of their journals. Since Jan 21, when Tim Gowers at Cambridge University blogged about what he saw as the unfair economic practices of the publisher, the campaign has grown quickly. In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education the publisher argues that they really add value to the whole knowledge distribution chain but it’s hard to have sympathy when they acknowledge indulging in price gouging during for a couple of decades before claiming “we got it wrong then…but we’ve become good citizens”.

Blaming library budgets for not keeping up is a curious tactic here but the reality is that academics are slow to organize alternative publishing options. Yes, scholars provide the raw material of research and reviewing, and are ultimately the arbiters of quality, but the record needs to be managed, maintained and organized for use if it is to work. I think someone should create a new role for people who do that 🙂

Hard to know if Steve Jobs ever experienced customer service from AT&T but if he did, one imagines he got more out of them than the rest of us. In trying to activate my new iPhone 4s I received the standard delays from AT&T that many have reported but with a few more wrinkles along the way that speak loudly to the poor user experience design underlying that company’s service operation.

First, the instructions I received were wrong. My phone, ordered through the mail, arrived supposedly set up for me but the screen I was directed to online for activation seemed to imagine something else entirely. It asked me to enter two multi-digit ICCID and IMIE numbers, one of which I was advised to locate by sliding open the “back of the phone to reveal it”….huh? I’ve seen people do some awful things to phones but sliding the back off an iphone is not one of them. Never fear, there was a sticker on the box with the relevant codes, but somehow that innovation never made it to the web design team. Heaven help anyone who tried to follow those instructions.

Number entered (spacing and layout could be improved here), I got the standard “we will send you an email when your phone is activated” msg along with the advise to continue using my old one until then. They also listed a number to call if I had not been activated within 4 hours. The trouble with this was that after 4 hours, the hotline for help would not be open according to their listed hours. Oops. Turns out, I was in good company, there’s a gaziilion videos on YouTube and posters on various forums complaining about waits up to 30 hours (who’s got that kind of time?) to receive activation.

12 hours later, still unactivated, I decided to call the hotline only for that number to have disappeared from my laptop screen, replaced by a generic ‘waiting’ message and spinning icon. No problem, I logged into my ATT account for live chat assistance whereupon I was led to a screen that told me to click a link “below” to start the chat. Oddly, there was no link, neither below nor above, and random clicking around the screen like one of Seligman’s chickens in a learned helplessness experiment gave me no joy, but it did confirm Seligman was onto something!

OK, desperation drove me to call the helpline (I hate calling some disembodied voice from who-knows-where anytime, never mind when in need) but wait, my older iPhone was now deactivated (because I had initiated activation of my new one, naturally).  Quaint as it might be, I have a land line so after giving the same identification details several times over first to the voice menu and then a real live human (I think)  I was told to hold on, they would be activating my phone “right now”. Now I can’t speak for everyone but that phrase means something specific to me. 10 mins later, old-fashioned phone pressed to ear, still no activation of sleek new one I mutter my dissatisfaction. The clearly frustrated voice at the other end disappeared to ask some other “expert” for help only to return and suggest I take the SIM card from my old 3 and put it into the new phone. Why would that work? Don’t ask. My protestations that these cards were different sizes and would not fit fell on deaf ears and I was told if that was my attitude (not quite those words but you get my meaning) I should just go to a store for assistance!  Ah yes, the very store experience I had eschewed when purchasing due to the promise of easy home delivery and set up.

It being 8.30am, no store was open (and did I mention no iphone was working either?)  but I called on the stroke of 9am and the first voice that answered told me “we’ve been hearing this problem a lot” and recommended I check that the new SIM card’s number really was the same as the number on card installed. Apparently it ain’t always so and you can imagine the confusion that causes. Cut to the chase — I checked, it was, but re-seating the SIM card anew, magic happened and activation was ensured (Oh Seligman, so this is how superstitions really get ingrained).

So what can we conclude from all this. Dodgy card fitting? Unlikely. Coincidence in timing? Even less so. A satisfied AT&T customer? No.   Pity the person without a spare phone and time in the morning to get it all going. Yes the new iPhone design is great, yes it is popular, but an information artifact is meaningful only in use, not in some abstract physical aesthetic category that wins awards. As a system, the iPhone/AT&T experience is a painful reminder of how easily interaction breaks down and how little some companies really think of their customers when trying to repair them. Apple, you are not blameless here.  Is there an award for that?

I enjoyed participating in the Metatheoretical Snowmen panel at ASIST 2011 in New Orleans organized excellently by Jenna Hartel. My role was to listen to the five minute presentations of others and then to react. The basic idea is that each panelist explains why one particular approach to explaining the information life of a snowman might offer  useful insights, and as a process it is an entertaining exercise in which underlying theoretical stances are articulated. The usual suspects were presented: analytical-philosophic, cognitivism, critical studies etc. But I was surprised to see user-centered design proposed as a metatheory too.

The format is engaging but like many such carvings of the world, I find such presentations unnecessarily divisive and exclusive. I am not sure anyone really lives within one metatheoretical framework (though I should say that invoking the analytic-philosophical approach as a means to question everything tends to cross discourse levels in a way that ensures a certain ‘win’) but even if they do, the existence of one need not preclude the value of another. Yet in education and ongoing arguments about theory, we tend to set these approaches in opposition as if this is the only way they can be examined.

Try thinking about theoretical approaches another way. Do humans perceive? Yes, within pretty well defined principles of psychophysics.  OK, so tick that box, the laws of perception apply to most of us. Are individuals susceptible to reward, reinforcement and punishment. Yep, those behaviorist rules apply to most of us too. Do humans think? Let’s hope so, and we can actually demonstrate this in most instances, so we are cognitive beings. Do we exist in a context of relationships with other people? Yes, we are social beings and we are part of a complex process of inter-related engagements and communications that shape our understandings and actions. Are their power relationships in society? I really have to answer that?

So, all of these perspectives apply to all of us some of the time — this is the beauty of existence. Choosing the level at which you decide to slice through the information life of people will reveal particular phenomena which are susceptible to analysis through some methods rather than others. What it won’t do is tell you all you need to know if you want to know it all. To really make progress, we need to make a vertical slice across these levels, examining the same human information actions at the physical,  perceptual, cognitive, organizational, and social levels. That’s hard, but if you want to at least make progress, stop acting like one theoretical position can do it better than another, unless you want to bound and qualify the ‘it’ considerably.

It’s been a busy summer requiring lots of work other than blogging (!) but I am pleased to announce that I’ve reached an agreement with UT Press to edit a new book series on Information. Here’s the official blurb, I’ll be looking for authors.

 

Announcing a New Series in Information Studies

The University of Texas School of Information and the University of Texas Press are pleased to announce an unprecedented partnership to produce a series of cutting-edge books that will chart and shape the rapidly changing landscape of information technology. Planned to launch in Fall 2013, these books will provide essential and accessible reading for both producers and consumers of information.

Our information age is not a story of incremental progress—this is a new Gutenberg era that is changing the world quickly, permanently, and in ways that that we cannot easily control. The series explores and explains the emergence of the new socio-technical infrastructure in which we all now routinely live and work, make purchases and perform services, learn and communicate, create and share, without pause or concern for distance.

The creation of this new series dedicated to information reflects the need to understand our times from the perspectives of multiple disciplines and perspectives. Placing emphasis on human and social concerns, the book series will serve as a focal point for intellectually deep and vital work that addresses the most pressing information issues of our time.  We seek authors who can bring scholarship and perspective to bear in the creation of thoughtful and highly readable manuscripts that examine closely the forces shaping the information worlds in which we reside.

The following are potential topics that are relevant to this series:

• Information work, practices, and organizational forms
• Digital records, archives, and curation across disciplines and collections
• Design and use of new products and services
• Scholarly practices and communication
• Health informatics
• The nature of creativity and intellectual work
• Intellectual property and law
• Intelligence, data mining, and cybersecurity
• Knowledge and literacy in a digital age

Series Editor:

Andrew Dillon is Dean of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the Louis T. Yule Regents Professor of Information, Professor of Psychology, and Information, Risk & Operations Management.

 

The economy in 2 mins and a few diagrams

 

Richard Reich connects the dots. The argument is persuasive but it’s the calm simplicity of the delivery that attracts here, the simple marriage of clear language and enhancing figures. It surely demands a response from the other side……

 

If you remember radio as a relaxed forum for intelligent discussion, then check out the new podcasts from iSchool students at our iSchool You site. This is a true student-run effort and to them all I say “Well Done!”

Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks phenomenon, it is hard to swallow some of the material that is turning up before us. Today’s Guardian reports on their digest of the Guantanamo files outlines how an 89 year old with senile dementia and a 14 year old kidnap victim conscripted at gunpoint by the taliban were both held as terrorist suspects. If these people really are, as Dick Cheney put it, ‘the worst of a very bad lot’ then perhaps we have less to fear from the taliban and more to fear of others. There is a mess unfolding before our eyes that will require some explaining in the days ahead.  Or maybe it won’t ever be explained properly. That we are reliant on a loose coalition of newspapers using purloined material to give us basic facts that run counter to multiple official accounts of what is happening is a matter that we should all consider important in the “information age”. We hear lots about the death of privacy, but what about the death of truth?

 

 

Launching a new journal is difficult but sustaining it is perhaps even harder. All the more credit then to the editors of the Journal of Information Architecture for getting over the hurdles and keeping the publication moving. In its second volume, issue 2 has just been released and while we might quibble over the ongoing discussion of what it means to be an IA, the title has survived and there’s a real group of professionals who make their living as information architects, despite the predictions of cynics.

For reasons that I can’t fully articulate, I’ve been frustrated with the quality of publications in many of our supposedly leading journals. Two decades of publishing my own work have taught me that there is huge variability in reviewer quality and one might be very surprised to learn that some of the top-ranked journals in IS, for example, provide the worst examples (by which I mean not rejections but comments that are extremely limited, occasionally incorrect or based on clear oversight of the paper’s true contents, or sometimes wilful ignorance). I am open to the idea that fully open reviewing might help though part of me clings to the ideal that double-blind reviewing is ‘fairer’. I have no doubt that the business of publication has taken on a new urgency as scholars try to establish their research credentials and publishers need to ensure sufficient content but it’s hard to overlook the fact that one does not have to look too hard at the literature to find methodologically or statistically-flawed studies, and that is before we cover the waterfront of trendy, incomplete and work uninformed by prior relevant scholarship that is presented as ‘cutting-edge’.

Seems the problems are not limited to our discipline. Prompted to read a couple of recent papers on the struggles of Computer Science to improve its publications quality, I found this blog entry at the CACM site, reporting that Moshe Vardi, editor in chief of Communication of the ACM feels it’s time for a change too. Apparently his keynote at the Informatics Europe conference called attention to shoddy refereeing practices in Computer Science. Bertrand Meyer. the blogger above, has a detailed strategy that he uses in his reviews to push this cause and it’s hard to object. I realize editors are supposed to maintain reviewing standards but with limited time and a reliance on completely volunteer faculty members to serve as your reviewers, the system as structured can be seen to have built-in problems.