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?
Student success
The IEEE Professional Communication Society has awarded Arijit Sengupta and myself the Rudolph J. Joenk, Jr. Award for Best Paper of 2006 in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. The paper, “Query by Templates: Using the Shape of Information to Search Next-Generation Databases,” (see my pubs page for a copy) results originally from Dr. Sengupta’s doctoral dissertation which he completed at Indiana in Computer Science while we were both there. Jit is now an Assistant Professor at the Dept of Information Systems and Operations Management in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University and deserves most of the credit for this – not only was it his research work but he persisted with the paper when others may have been put off by some of the reviewers’ comments which indicated they did not really understand the concept of information shape and when his fellow faculty members wondered just what is a CS guy doing working on this kind of stuff? Congrats Jit!
Coalescing at CoLIS
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?
Ray von Dran passes
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
You are not alone in caring
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?
Laughing just to keep from crying?
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.
The economy and technology axis
Steven Landsburgh, author of More Sex is Safer Sex – The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, wrote a piece in the WSJ on June 9th entitled “A Brief History of Economic Time”. You have to forgive the rather dismissive tone of his reading of human history but he sums up his main argument neatly in a final pragraph: “Engineers figure out how to harness the power of technology; economists figure out how to harness the power of incentives. Our prosperity depends on both”. Oh dear, here we go again. The push to see the world only as advancing through economic and technological forces (with culture presumably lagging behind as the by-product) is relentless. No only does this reading push human endeavor into distinct (but imaginary) competing categories but it elevates economics (a social science, lest we forget) to unprecedented heights of insight and application. Funny, I remember my undergrad economics classes as being rather less than precise, despite all the mathematical jiggery-pokery, when it came to predicting human behavior. All this I could forgive but the reduction of human endeavor and culture to the purely technological and economic realms does little to help us understand some of the real problems we face or even the real joys of life.
This is, of course, rather typical of discourse on human development. But all ideas, (and ultimately our evolution and development, yes even our economic development is about ideas), are not the product of engineering or economic initiatives. Humans problem solve; it’s how we are wired. That we can solve some problems for the long-term and move onto new problems without having to rely only on our genetic transfer is another very human attribute. This is where the human record of knowledge plays a fundamental role. Through it we have accelerated the problem solving process. We have refined our knowledge into a transferable form and enabled a human to survey the world and its development through time. Does it make sense to consider libraries, museums, writings, and the internet as just engineering proposals enabled through economics? Perhaps one could distort their meanings to this interpretation but I am certain this is not the sense in which Steven Landsburg is using the terms – he seems to actually believe it’s all about engineering and economics as typically practiced. More likely this is again the reduction of culture to simple forces. Economics does matter, but economics is having a devilishly hard time figuring out information. And just what sort of economic argument can you make for works of art (other than their retail value to some collectors) that truly reflects what art means in human existence. Information is about meaning, and human meaning-making is complicated, nuanced and driven by more than concerns with costs and incentives. This is not to understate the value of incentives to our understanding of behavior but there are many studies of humans that reveal the a priori identification of incentives is problemmatic and one risks circularity by invoking the likely incentive only after the fact. There are few voices for this, and it complicates the simple reduction, so it is no wonder that economists get the ears of politicians and the newspaper editors. Too complicated? Well just think about HMO’s — the perfect marriage of incentives and medical engineering.
The price of culture?
Interesting piece the other morning on NPR about tomb raiders who plunder historical treasures and sell them. Nothing new here but one aspect of the story really jarred. Seems an international treaty set up in 1970 forms the dividing line between what is acceptable for museums and rich collectors to purchase and what is not. Case in point was a Guatamalan treasure on display in the a Texas museum. The item was stolen but purchased prior to the treaty, so it is ‘legally’ owned by the museum though naturally the Guatamalan authorities feel it is rightfully theirs. The settlement offered by the museum is to create a replica for the Guatamalans to display on site while the museum keeps the original. And apparently this is far more than most museums will offer. The problem is complicated by the arguments made by the collector community that rests on their love of the objects and their willingness to save and keep safe treasures that would otherwise be pilfered, destroyed or ruined. You can read/hear the story at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10457558. The parallels with events in Iraq, one of the birthplaces of civilization, where the state archives have been looted and offered back to the authorities for a ransom hardly warrant further comment. This raises very interesting questions about how we teach information to the next generation of professionals.
NexD Journal on IA and iSchools
The latest issue contains an interesting conversation between various design thinkers and practitioners that makes reference to the emergence of information architecture as a field (http://nextd.org/02/10/2/index.html). I love this quote from Peter Jones:
“Information architecture was more of an activity before 2000, now it’s a well-defined field of practice making aggressive inroads into i-schools, (if not yet the d-schools)”.
Of course, from my perspective it is more that the iSchools are making the inroads into the IA profession but interestingly, the notion of an iSchool seems to have wider currency than some might imagine.
recommendations-r-us
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!