Infomatters

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What is Google up to?

One of my students pointed me to a good read in the New Yorker on Google: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin. The subject of just what google might be up to has been an intriguing one for me recently, what with my own university joining the great digitization project and rumors circulating at recent conferences on the company’s purchases of dark fiber networks. Toobin makes the comment at the end of his article that “it’s folly to judge the company’s behavior on moral grounds. Its shareholders certainly don’t.” Is this really so? Are we not all stakeholders in this information space and don’t we have an interest in how access to the published work is controlled? Google’s corporate page contains several interesting quotes http://www.google.ca/corporate/index.html:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

” As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it.”

Oh well, that’s alright then.

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Computer science seeks sex appeal (part II)

Last year I wrote about the search for a sexier topics among computer science types that it was hoped would renew student interest in the field. The latest data indicates that interest in CS as a major appears to have dropped 70% in recent years. Data to be released March 1st by CRA will reveal “a second year of double digit declines” in the number of enrolled CS students: http://www.cra.org/wp/index.php?p=104.

The peak years of interest for the field were the early 1980s and the late 1990s, which may point to a cyclical process (just like the cyclical warming of our atmosphere!) but the current interest levels are equivalent to those reported for the the mid-1970s. No equivalent data exists for information schools or LIS programs but most that I know are informally reporting very healthy enrollments. Of course, most iSchools are graduate programs so the comparison is not entirely fair. That said, computer science graduate programs are reporting declines also but the numbers are still up over their recent lows of 2000-2001. In absolute terms, there are still roughly 50,000 CS graduate students in the US each year, which swamps the number of information program grads by about a factor of 10. Still, these metrics are only part of the story. Our school graduates about 100 people per year and we have no plans to grow this number although there is healthy demand from applicants. A fuller picture also would have to look at the employment patterns of graduates and this is a complicated picture. CS grads generally do earn better than average wages but there are serious declines in employment prospects for programmers and database administrators. Similarly, our grads tend to get jobs pretty quickly (half are employed before they graduate) but the variability in salary is quite significant, depending on where grads ply their trade. As a senior professional told my intro class this week, there will be no jobs for them as traditional catalogers, but plenty of opportunities for them to help implement better information systems and services. Regardless, in the sex appeal stakes, we all know information trumps computation.

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Networking the novel?

As experiments in collective authorship through digital media go, the various encyclopedia have it comparatively easy. The Penguin publishing house, in collaboration with De Montfort University in the UK, has started an experiment in collective writing of a novel which, if early results are an indication, might prove the unfortunate truth of at least one interpretion of the expression: ‘many hands make light work’ . It’s live, it’s now and it’s open to influence at: http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/About. The real question is what it will look like after a few weeks? Will people deliberately try to make nonsense or will a narrative emerge? Could this tell us something about the structural inevitabilities of language or groups? Is this the birth of a new genre? Currently it’s a horrible mish-mash but one wonders………

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Citizendium launches

A competitor to Wikipedia has been officially launched this week (though it’s been around for a while): Citizendium, a somewhat rough looking ‘citizens compendium of everything’ promises to be loosely controlled and edited, and to offer ‘gentle oversight’ that improves on Wikipedia. You can check it out at http://www.citizendium.org/ but will need to sign up to really view it. I had a few wrinkles doing so with Safari on my Mac but did so eventually and chose the random page option to get a feel for it. I was taken to an entry, as luck would have it, on Sean O Casey, the Irish writer which admitted at the end that this article “was originally based on, and may contain material from, the Wikipedia entry with this title”. Of course I had to try that out and found that is certainly was based on it. In fact, it was it, practically word for word with only minor editing and minus the image. Further reading reveals a decision to fork Wikipedia articles for Citizendium but this is now under review and as the discussion surrounding the resource indicates, there is currently an experiment ongoing to unfork all these articlees to encourage new, original versions from people. This makes Citizendium a real-time experiment in human behavior in information space. It will make for interesting viewing.

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From chips to groups

Two news stories breaking today point to the range of information issues in contemportary life. First, researchers at CIT and UCLA have developed a super dense computer chip that is the size of a white blood cell, opening the door to another level in computational design. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is adopting new technology that will lessen the need for traders to jump about, shouting and jostling, in return for a quieter, PDA-enabled process. Today, the exchange officially goes paperless (heard that one before?). The links between these stories will not be made often but these are related events, representing possible extremes of enquiry for those interested in information related issues. Is the ability to draw these relationships meaningfully a measure of the information field’s value or should we just consider these two very different events?

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Libraries and the socio-technical system of tenure

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion released a new report in December that questions the role of monographs, and more directly, the responsibilities of publishers and university presses in facilitating tenure decisions for scholars in the humanities. The report is available at: http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion and raises the spectre of faculty failing to take appropriate responsibility for tenure decisions by placing an undue emphasis on the successful production of published monographs by new professors. Since successful publication of a monograph requires the author to pass the review stage of the press, so the argument goes, then such reviewers have more influence on eventual tenure than the faculty making up the P&T committee at the candidate’s institution. The report contains some disturbing data, suggesting that PhD’s in the fields represented by MLA have only about a 35% chance of getting tenure when viewed as a complete pool, and that the the standards for receiving tenure are becoming ever more demanding. Not only are faculty making decision based on the outcomes of publishers’ reviews of proposals, the report argues that publishers themselves are more concerned with publishing essays, editions and textbooks that they can sell rather than monographs that impress tenure committees. Of course, taking a socio-technical systems perspective here one has to bring the libraries into the equation. Since libraries form a large (the largest?) market for scholarly books, the declining interest of libraries in purchasing monographs, particularly in the humanities, means that utlimately, tenurability of faculty can rest on the decision of a librarian to purchase a work (and how many librarians now graduate from programs that do not require an understanding of research?). This is no idle concern. The Association of Research Libraries reports that monograph purchases are falling as expenditures on serials rise prohibitively. Some where in all this, innovation and quality of research output are squashed, if not lost, when it comes to judging the work of scholars. Of course, everyone would agree that assessment of quality should never rely solely on the judgements of those whose primary motive is profit, but there is a real danger that this is where we are in certain disciplines. New digital scholarship must start finding clearer indices for quality.

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Information behavior reveals fraud

If you’ve dabbled in online auctions or sales you will no doubt have wondered just how reliable are the various reputation ratings sellers report to convince you of their integrity. Interesting news this week from researchers at CMU who report that fraudsters in online auctions and selling sites can be reliably identified by the pattern of behaviour they reveal (http://tinyurl.com/yyr32m). The key seems to be identifying link patterns between group members, with fraudsters tending to display a clear pattern of communicating more with members in another group than the group of legitimate buyers and sellers on the site. This ‘bipartite core’ which can be clearly seen when the various transactions are plotted as a graph seems to be a strong indicator of the perpetrator working with accomplices to maintain a clean record on the original site while engaging in fraud with partners. The precise details are not yet revealed but most interesting is the emergence of this type of behavioral index from a massive data set using data mining techniques. What other indices of human behavior are out there to be uncovered is intruiging to consider. With Ebay reporting over 200 million registered users, the problem of small N for behavioral research might just start to appear quaintly old-fashioned.

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The attention economy: image or immolation?

In a world of data smog it’s clear that gaining attention is becoming a major concern for business, politicians, charities and even academics. You can find an interesting review of Richard Lanham’s book “The Economy of Attention” at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/goldhaber/index.html. You might want to think about your attention and how it gets captured before you do a search on Malachi Richster. He set fire to himself in Chicago earlier this month as a protest against the war in Iraq. Wikipedia claims he gained notoriety for this but I question this. Did that news filter through to you? Should it have? Coverage seems more prolific in the blogosphere but one might feel that an event such as this, whether you think him a martyr or a madman, warrants more of our attention than what passes for news daily on all major channels. As Goldharber says in his review of Lanham’s book, a new kind of economy will require a somewhat new kind of economics, and the argument is just what this will be. Sadly, it seems while we are waiting to find out, it may already be decided for us, only not just by economists.

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iSchool Caucus Panel at ASIST

I moderated a panel of deans at ASIST 2006, all there to discuss the iSchool movement (formerly ‘project’, now ‘caucus’). Panelists were Ray von Dran of Syracuse, Olivia Frost of Michigan, Jim Thomas of PSU, Michelle Cloonan of Simmons, and Linda Smith of Illinois. Almost 100 people turned up at 8am Monday morning to engage and we went to the floor pretty quickly after some introductory remarks from all to learn what people thought. There were more comments and questions than we could get to (and one or two speeches from people who probably wanted to be on the panel) but generally there seemed to be a pattern to the questions.

Many wanted to know what we thought we were up to creating a caucus of schools (the question was phrased many ways but this was the gist). The answer, of course, was ‘to create a new field’. This answer seemed to convince most but not all, and it was with some relief on my part that Marcia Bates stood up and asked if it wasn’t about time that we stopped saying this and actually told people what we thought the new field was. Amen sister! When the ‘new’ answer starts to get old, as it has, it might be time for another one. I have a view but I’ll save that for another entry.

Quite rightly, some seasoned faculty members pointed out that the gathering of deans to talk about a new field was hardly going to be very exciting. We all agreed, that is why there has been an iSchool conference for the last two years to which doctoral students and faculty have flocked. Cue mumbles about how another conference based on this was bad for ASIST and why hadn’t the iSchool deans worked more with ASIST, which led to handwringing from all concerned but the truth is that the iSchool caucus is wary of affiliating with any professional society at this time so as to avoid alienating anyone. Fortunately nobody mentioned the links with CRA (oops). More directly, the caucus is not intended to be another professional society and it may even be only a temporary organization aimed at advancing the ‘new field’ (TM) before riding off into the sunset once it becomes clear that people respond to the term ‘Information School’ with something other than a blank stare. At least, this is my dream — let’s get the field understood a bit better and then move on (and please, no jokes about how many deans does it take to make a field understood?)

There were a number of comments about where the idea for an ischool movement orginated and the history of various developments at schools such as Pitt and Syracuse were outlined. Clearly this is not an overnight development but has been brewing for years, maybe decades. This led to discussion of how being ‘in’ the iSchool consortium could or might benefit our various programs locally and nationally. There is no doubt that many schools feel they should be included and, as a result, feel excluded by the requirements to have a doctoral program, sufficient external grants, and a direct report to the campus provost or chancellor. Naturally these criteria for membership were discussed and I believe most people were happy to learn that the iSchool Caucus has agreed to make affiliation a much more open affair going forward. Stay tuned but you can watch for updates at http://www.ischools.org/oc/

There is no major conspiracy afoot (sorry!). Rather there is a genuine attempt being made here by a group of schools to place the information field on a more stable and yes, visible platform. The schools involved are united by a dream of the future more than an identification with the past and it is possible that with this group taking the lead, many more schools involved in the human and social aspects of information across its lifecycle will benefit. Or we can just argue amongst ourselves, right?

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ASIST 2006

The conference was a great event over 6 days, depending on when you started. For me the official kick off was the iSchool party at the Cedar Door where our tab had to be upped several times to handle the thirsty hordes. I had dinner later with our first keynote, Laszlo Barabasi, who is a delightfully engaging guest and speaker. His keynote address was fast paced and pointed to the insights to be gained in viewing human activities on the web as scale-free networks incorporating bursts of activity. He argued that 10% of most networks provide the key to holding the network together and that fitness attracts a disproportionately large number of links from other sites. Of course, the mystery of what makes a site or a linked node super-fit remains something to be discovered (and sold, I suppose). You can find out more about the man and his work here: http://www.nd.edu/~alb/

Attendance was up and most people seemed genuinely happy with the program and the location – Austin makes for a great conference venue though I needed to work on people to move them beyond the dubious delights of 6th St when seeking entertainment. Several sessions just would not end — a well attended set of presentations on blogs ran 30 minutes over (it was lunchtime) as people just would not stop asking questions of the various presenters. And it was not just new areas that caught the buzz. The panel on historiography was equally in demand even on the last day! I make a point in my program notes that ASIST is one conference where the old and the new mix easily, and it is this type of perspective-mix that keeps me at ASIST year after year. It was also good to see so many PhD students and younger members – ASIST seems to have lost many of the younger set in recent years to the equally-large IA Summits but when President Mike Leach asked at the outset how many people were attending ASIST for the first time, it was good to see so many hands go up.

Peparing a conference program is a long process and I am glad it’s over. I had superb assistance from Dick Hill at ASIST and three executive program committee members (France Bouthillier, Javed Mostafa and Carole Palmer) but it remained a long slog which I am glad to hand over to next year’s committee (see the call for papers: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/am07cfp.html). While the society is good about awards events for various members, I think the program committee each year deserves a little more than a piece of paper commemorating their efforts and handed out in a rush at the poorly-attended business meeting. But this is a minor issue – the conference is its own reward, right? I’ll just not be rushing to serve on future program committees.

It was good to see so many faces there, and to talk to several readers of the blog – hello!! More later when I get a chance to think about it all.