I learned last night that Brian Shackel died on May 9th in England. For anyone even remotely familiar with the literature on usability and HCI, Brian was a foundational figure who led the development of operational definitions and measures of usability. I worked with Brian for eight years at the HUSAT Research Institute in Loughborough, a group he founded in 1970 to advance human and social research in the area of sofware design. He was an incredible character, full of commitment to user-centered design and the development of the science of human-computer interaction. To those who worked with him he was always known as “Prof”, and his eye for detail in proofreading the many reports we produced was legendary – he would pull out his multi-colored pen, push it to red and invariably find constructions or wordings that irked him (you could never say ‘overall’ in a report without Brian inking it and noting in the margins: “Overalls are what workmen wear!”). Brian could be a somewhat combative character when discussing issues of importance and he was tenacious in ensuring his points were noted, but he had the remarkable skill of all great leaders in being able to argue the point heatedly without ever allowing disagreements to interfere with his treatment of you as a person. Brian opened many doors for me in my career and he took great pride in seeing the influence of HUSAT spread across the globe through its projects and its people. Unlike many academics, Brian keenly understood the importance of influencing practice and he committed a large part of his life to ensuring the development of international standards that have shaped technology design for millions. There’s a formal obituary at: http://www.ergonomics.org.uk/page.php?s=7&p=101 which outlines his diverse career highlights. Brian was a one-off, we’ll not see his kind in academia again and I miss him already.
Information in a time of war
I am simultaneously heartened and horrified by reading the online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive (http://www.bl.uk/iraqdiary.html). The library has been extensively looted, causing some to liken the current situation to the 13th century sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols. In the abstract this is depressing but Eskander’s diary puts a much more human face on recent events. He writes of the fear that drives people from the library, the threats that his staff routinely receive, the difficulties in tracing collections that are known to have been stolen and distributed, including rare treasures traded on the black market. His library has 39 armed guards, and part of his job is to track down staff who are kidnapped. What is heartening in any of this? The fact that he lives and he continues to work on developing this precious resource. The fact that he can communicate to the outside world what is happening so that we cannot claim ignorance of the plunder in the years ahead. Libraries appear quaint to many people in the ‘developed’ world, but we lose sight of the value and role of curated knowledge and free exchange of ideas at our peril. History shows that those who seek to control always want to limit both the flow of information and the accurate recording of events. You can learn how the ALA is responding at http://www.ala.org/ala/iro/iraq.htm
Computing too important to be left to men!
I learned today of the death of one of the legends of IR, Prof Karen Sparck Jones of University of Cambridge — there’s a nice note about her at:http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2007040403. The expression above about the need for more women to study CS is hers, and she was right. Her work crossed boundaries from automated language processing to privacy. Gender aside, we just need more thinkers like her in this field.
Ireland as Knowledge Society
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
Killam lecture 2007
I just returned from Dalhousie University where I delivered the final lecture in the Killam Lecture series (http://dalgrad.dal.ca/killam/lectures/2006/). The trip was fraught with travel difficulties that make one wonder at the false confidence provided by technology. My return flight was cancelled when I arrived at the airport, fully 45 minutes (and a $55 taxi ride) after I had checked the web site which reported it as on schedule. The lack of any human representative at the United desk meant passengers were forced to call a helpline and wait over 60 minutes to get help – if you had no cell phone, who knows what you would do? That one hour turned into news that it would be 2 days and 4 flights before I could get home again, though it was only 65 minutes before I made my views on this particular socio-technical structure known to its designers in less than technical language. Just how hard can it be to leverage the interconnectedness of everyone to provide clear instructions on what is happening and how it will be resolved? Very hard, one imagines, but very much harder when the attitude of the airlines seems to be one of shoulder-shrugging indifference and the knee-jerk locking down of all spare seating capacity to control its allocation in the days ahead for maximum profit.
Travel woes aside, the Killam lecture was a marvellous event and allowed me to speak fairly directly about third force issues of design ethics, human and social values, and the need for new perspectives that transcend simple disciplinary divisions. The Q&A at the end took us even further into such territory and I was delighted to have the chance to hear so many voices raised in favor of us taking greater control over our information architecture.
Continuous partial attention syndrome
The Chicago Sun Times explored the idea that we are overwhelmed with data and cognitively suffering from multitasking in an interesting piece this week: http://tinyurl.com/24ajsp. And for once, the journalist actually reported what I said accurately. The angle taken seems to be that too much digital information use is in danger of dumbing us down and while that plays well as a story, the various people interviewed don’t actually offer much support for this. The real point is that humans are limited information processors (‘skinny pipes’ rather than broadband, as my colleague Randolph Bias likes to say) and multitasking can carry a cost.
Wikipedia antics
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!
Connectile dysfunction
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?
Why preservation matters
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.
The Third Force
The information field represents a third force that is vital to our future well being. Sure we need technological advances and we need to understand how to leverage economic benefit from all the data that is out there, but as we now enter the first century in which more than half the world resides in an urban environment, the emerging socio-technical world in which we all reside needs to be understood as more than a computing and business environment. Without this other perspective we will not attend fully to important matters of policy and governance, design and interaction, curation and accuracy, and education and enhancement in our lives. The trouble with most discussions of information is they are tied so closely to a narrow view of technology that it is easy to lose sight of how enveloped we are becoming in new practices, behaviours and experiences. Yet it is these very human and cultural aspects which will prove vital to our ability to shape the kind of world in which we wish to live. I employed the term ‘third force’ in recent talks to emphasize how important it is for those of us in the information field to engage actively when the other forces of dominate discussions of how the future will be. I am not beating up on the business or technological agenda of others, I accept them as necessary. But I do object to discussions of information and our world being dominated by business and technological interests. If technology meeting the free market is all we need, why do I have to pay for bundled cable rather than the channels I actually watch? Why do libraries have to purchase journals they never use to get access to a few the scholars they support really read? Why are DVDs regionalized for playback? Why must I upgrade my software and hardware on a manufacturer’s cycle rather than my genuine need? Why are my 10 year old floppy disks gathering dust but my 50 year old vinyl records still sounding joyous? Why is educational software so bad, and gaming software so violent? Why must I limit the use of my own words once I agree to have them published in a scholarly journal? Why is most policy on information infrastructure so out of touch with our professional and personal lives? Who will steward our cultural resources when there is no obvious profit margin to be gained? And don’t forget all the other questions about access to information, the right to read what you want, the accuracy of information and so forth. The answers to these questions might point you in a new direction for thinking about our world and how we want it to be. May the third force be with you!