Accept no substitutes

Day: June 9, 2005

JCDL: Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project

Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project by Neal Audenaert. Looking to support humanists who work particularly of a single author. Much like the Blake Project so far. This is a good presentation but it’s getting late in the day.
I wonder how does this talk about the tricks of Cervantes such as the idea that Don Q comes from a manuscript discovered by Cervantes that there are layers and layers of the story that we often miss in cleaned up translations. Not part of the business of the presentation, but what’s on my mind. The way that C works with narrative is complex and amazing. I want to know more.

Question period:
How to deal with language issues? Spanish mostly but remember that spelling in Spanish of the period was not standardized. Over 15 languages used overall including that from the icon collection.

Will the limits of the tools be discussed by scholars — of course.

JCDL: To Grow in Wisdom

To Grow in Wisdom: Vannevar Bush, Information Overload, and the Life of Leisure by David Levy
The “library problem” how to take on the problem of “information overload’
Josef Pieper “Leisure the Basis of Culture” same time as Bush. Why we need leisure and need to avoid the world of total work. Can we be more than complete functionaries and full time workers? Can we enter the world of slowness and stillness [and quietness]? Leisure is related to scholarship as in being receptively attuned. The first scholastics looked at ratio or rational the other intellectus or simply looking.
What happened to intellectus? Web helps solve only ratio. says Levy.
[Levy elides the profound religious and directly Catholic basis and some would say bias of Pieper’s work
He uses Bush as an empty vessel to fill with an areligious Pieper. To say well Bush was much like Pieper when he talked about info-overload say. But how much of that is really in Bush. Not much from what I recall from the biography of Bush.]
What can we do, ask Levy. Expand the dialog and metrics beyond effeciency and productivity. What does it take to become comtemplative? Great reading rooms in libraries inspire contemplation. What would it mean to create sanctuaries in cyberspace? [I think he means Sanctuaries] He did a conference on Information, Silence and Sanctuary
at LC he hopes to do a workshop on mindful work and technology winter 2006.
Without irony, Levy asks us to Google to find the references to the conference and to learn about his workshop. It has streaming video, he tells us.
In the question time, more comes about the importance of reflection. Does he recall that many monastaries saw a work as a form of contemplation?
Some good discussion. One questioner notes the inherent problems of supporting the contemplatives which forced so many to be virtually enslaved in order to support the meditators.

JCDL: Creating Information Representations for Education

Sarah Giersch moderating. Cathy Marshall first speaker.
“Turning the Page on Navigation” from Microsoft. A bit about the materiality of the book with the british library’s turning the pages project with a three d library. Turning a wodge of pages will be explained. Meaning what a wodge might be.
this a lot about ebook readers. i like cathy. i doubt ebook readers. observational methods about book-like interfaces for digital libraries. shows picture of some very geeky reading devices. says that this changes reading. now compares reading new yorker and reading new yorker online. watching people reading is like paint dry. funny web page of paint drying.
3 readers. regular new yorker readers. they self-recorded themselves reading. Start new New Yorker supposedly for the first time. 8 readers in the lab reading ebooks on ebook readers. Not online but on a now canceled microsoft ereader. readers read less pages on ereader.
citing roland barthes about “the pleasure of the text” here.
a lot about individuals who are studied talk about reading. amusing stories mostly.
one goes to poetry and to the funny last page first, for example.
now about navigation. the ebook folks did about the same things as paper readers. majority of navigation acts were forward page turns. but wait! pause for a wodge teaser. based on google image search.
Very detailed description of how folks read: touching head. turning page slowly or faster, dropping off to sleep, etc.
hands go into position for turning very much earlier than the action might require.
description of the materials and the materiality of the new yorker.
page flipping and imprecission is helpful Cathy argues.
Ben S asks how about the ways that paper does a crappy job and that we as new interfaces could improve? got any?
do you have an evolving theory of reading? ben says looks like 10 proposed research projects here looking at the kinds of reading, say. pleasure, business, factfinding, etc.

Next Nancy Kaplan. Network is going in and out on me so expect problems.
In the Company of Readers: The digital library book as a “practiced place.” de Certeau defines “Practiced places” as places in which an activity happens and where we feel in the presence of others — even while being alone. say like reading or walking on a well-worn path.
about reading by children in particular. those that are tweens and/or early teens. also a look at libraries’ social lives. notice people in all the library pictures.
books have annotations, dogears, left articles etc.
much said that annotations were great in their day but today kids are socialized away for annotation/
digital materials have no good annotation systems and none at all for children.
http://www.icdlbooks.org international children’s digital library.
needs. etc are needs not as defined by kids but by adults who “know whatm kids need”
kids want uniform actions. and they want games.
participatory design with kids to make interface elements using paper prototypes.
Alph is a flash delivered application that provides bookish interfaces with annotations or possibilities of annotations.
looking at “holes” louis sachar in the reader as one example. notes and about notes is shown.
now look for social interactions and learn about social interactions in digital reading.

JCDL: CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction

Session called: “CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction” Panel.

Mostly a talk about NSF Cyberinfrastructure Initiative. Not just tech issues. Human and social themes. Tech is not the problem. IP spoken of as copyright is — again. Funding etc.

Reagan Moore first. From SDSC. Overview of NSF presentation on cyberinfrastructure. TeraGrid noted. Diskspace dedicated at SDSC for “good projects in supercomputer areas” Very much a talk Dan Reed would love and could give. Most of this on the SDSC site where cyberinfrastructure is a front page feature.

Steve Wheatley of American Council of Learned Societies. About Humanities and Social Sciences. Here is their page. How small the funding is for Humanities as opposed to Science is addressed and to make sure that Humanites and SS are included in the funding. Are they really only trying to put their fingers in the NSF money pot? No No No Of course not ;-> This talk mostly borrowed from one by John Unsworth of UIUC and from the ACLS site linked to above and here. Stories about Humanities successes such as cuneiform compilations at Stanford. Humanities will help us know about the evolving cybercultures. Copyright and privacy are the two biggest problems. Privacy biggest for social science says he.

Cliff Lynch next. See his talk at UNC Symposium on ibiblio. No slides of course. This is Cliff afterall. He will be brief (hee hee we know better). He will offend us all eventually says he.
Nature of Cyberinfrastructure. What an odd word. In Europe, they use eWhatever as in eScience or eGov. That lets us focus on changes of practices of scholarship instead of changes of tools.
Questions of knowledge representation for example. Draft report from National Science Board about the management of long-lived data collections. And about digital curation centre in the UK [alert Helen Tibbo]. What are the disciplinary norm for sharing need to be paid attention to. Platforms for collaboration. How does the corpus of literature fit in? How to handle and mine this.
Two or three other things in conclusion. Funding strategies are not so new. Consider the history of the role of funding in the development of high performance networks for example. We cannot be nationally bound or disciplinarily bound. Especially Humanities for international cooperation and peer relationships. Break disciplinary silos [or siloes]. Funding agencies need to be open and not worry so much about which agency owns what parts, but they should collaborate even more broadly. Include arts, libraries etc. Don’t look from large gifts from on high, but plan to contribute [as we have in the past]. CI must be a multiway partnership.

Questions from audience:
Asks Steve about Privacy as an issue. News to her. Huge gov databases including census and health don’t allow some innovative access to their data.
Cliff steps in to talk about the dark side of CI. He says that Henry Brady on UC-Berkeley is the best on this problem. Medicine understands this, but social science has problems here. IRBs are also a big problem as they interfere with say oral histories. He cites this as a problem of privacy over-reach.
Greg Crane of Tufts. Begins rant about NSF funded research not funding any humanities or acknowledge previously funded humanities projects. Why should NSF or anyone fund this? Wikipedia has the biggest impact on general public without our [our being scholars] participation.
Reagan first. No examples in the slides, but yes humanities scholars do use supercomputers. He wavers to explain them tho. How do we reach the public? National Virtual Observatory is one he likes.
Steve now. Perhaps he was too subtle or too ironic in his talk. He nods to Cliff’s representation of knowledge. He sees CI as a way to open the discussions. He agrees that Humanities scholars don’t reach out to the public in production or in research.

Back to the panel. Some stuff not covered here. Cliff talks about DLI2 and about the need for more policy clarity from the federal agencies and about the ambivilence of NSF toward the humanities.
Cliff now gives props to text searching as not so bad, but worries about our ability to support image use across the broad world of scholarly communities.

Person from Bath asks about the silos of vocabulary that separate the disciplines and about standardizing datastructures with crosswalks. Reagan says that they are on it and mentions the multivalent browser for text parsing.

What about the cultural norms for sharing and for preservation within each discipline. People have to release their intellectual property [says Liz the moderator]
Steve: progress in the humanities moves forward funeral by funeral [he says he quotes someone he will not name]. Presses are understrain and must move to new technologies and social practice must also change. Learned Societies are acknowledging the need for collaboration.
Cliff: progess in datasharing are improving. Science does active collaboration and how multi-authored papers are now the norm. But humanities cannot cope well with that. back to datasharing. Reproducability of scientific work demands datasharing. Dead Sea Scrolls noted as bad humanities practice.

Cathy Blake [from UNC] talks about her work and how can tools get to agreements and disagreements and bring them to the fore via text mining (say).
Steve talks about the slowness of the cycle of discussion in the print culture. We are getting better he says.
Cliff says that in Health Sciences does this with analysis of clinical studies. Humanities are harder to do for various reasons.
Reagan says turn the question inside out. Publishing data is often required in science. what is the similar publication in humanities? sources? etc? he doesn’t see that in the same way.

Cyberspace is here, says guy from Norway whose name I didn’t catch. Rant about how it is here like it or not and detailed. Rant in a nice Norway way. How many funerals does it take for things to change? [humourously asked] but seriously what is the funeral rate necessary for progress?
Steve sees a tipping point at this very moment. We need to provide the infrastructure so that scholars don’t have to build a printing press before they publish. Infrastructure should be open so that any field can use it. That said the work may change the entire intellectual and scholarly landscape.
Cliff threatens to be controversal. Two different folks Active rejectors. Time will fix that. But there are also folks who don’t want to use the new stuff and why should they as long as they don’t block others. Now on younger scholars. Just because folks grew up with technology doesn’t mean that they know how to use it. So folks born after photoshop don’t necesssarily know how to use photoshop but need to be taught image manipulation say. So curiculum reform is needed.
Reagan says different research questions will be asked now that were not asked in the past. Since large scale analysis will be the future, collaboration will be necessary.

JCDL: Bud Tribble

Bud Tribble is now back at Apple. Once he was at Eazel a startup that almost made a great difference by creating the Nautulis file manager (it did more than just that) for Linux, but 2001 interfered and the company never found second round funding. I have a warm spot in my heart for him because while he was at NeXT he was the Vice President of Software Engineering and a key architect of the NextStep operating system. My NeXT is still alive! and I loved NeXTStep, an OS and interface to which Mac OS X still attempts to match.
Bub Tribble is the keynote speaker on “Digital Content: Creating, Sharing, Searching”

The wooden house of books or the house of wooden books or the house of wood carved to look like books — an amusement while we wait.

Tribble begins. I avoid, almost, saying the “trouble with Tribble.” Apple taps the human need to create and communicate. That is the soul of the company. How Apple leads digital content:
print with words and images. partnering with adobe and pagemaker to create desktop publishing.

also always involved in creation of sound and of music. iTunes roots etc are in the long relationship with musicians and with studios.

photos videos and movies from home to k-12 to major studios.

itunes, iphoto, imovies idvd garageband = ilife. consumer-based products

then “prosumer” products like final cut pro

then professional products

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info
from 2002. [see also 2003 report]

New information creation is growing at about 30% per year most on hard disk. 0.01% went onto paper.

What about material that needs to be digitized? Google is doing a lot of it. But most content is yet to be created and will be created digitially. Pulls out the “Digital Immigrants” v “Digital Natives” discussion [picked up from Marc Prensky but uncredited here]. 5 year old expects to be able to “pause” the TV (because TiVo has always been a part of her life).
State of Maine program in which every 7th grader gets an iBook (some years back). Universal access changed education there. We see a promo video about the program. More about the program here. Replicared at over 100 places [what places? not 100 states obviously]. The funds come often from not buying text books. [think vitalbook here]

So much for creating now on to sharing content.

Storage. lots and more to come.

Networks for sharing for moving things around. lots and lots more to come. thanks to dotcom boom. need better distribution of the bandwidth though. say to homes. US is 5th to 17th in the world for at home high speed access. wireless kicks this in the immediate term

legal framework to allow sharing. DRM is complex and not even understood well. p2p works great but the legal issues… bitTorrent gets attention here.

[break by Jones]

Open Standards – [interesting to hear from Apple, but he was at Eazel] he says open standards will win in the long run. American Memory’s maps are in some non-Apple viewable format. Props to European govs work on require open standards.

Funny retro pictures of what 5mbs then 4 gigs looked like shown. leading to ibm microdrive. Storage costs per MB drops faster than Moore’s Law. Drops by more than half in less than 12 months. gigabyes per square foot chart. No sign of slowing down.

Apple and content sharing — itunes music store. is sharing the right word for selling stuff online? one interesting thing is that they don’t use a browser; you can buy in the ‘jukebox’ instead. no adverts on the itunes music store [he says]. ownership is a personal issue rather than rental models which Apple sees as an emotional issue. that’s why they sell rather than rent music. Every songs of the 1.5 million at the itunes store has been bought once at least. Props to the Long Tail. Much about access for new musicians. Now more people buy mostly from itunes than get music via p2p.

Searching for digital content. Google for searching the net. But searching on your own laptop is a pain. Quote from star trek next gen about search command from picard. V. Bush gets props “As we may think.” Notes how Bush complained about “too much published” even in 1945.

Promotes Spotlight. [I have Tiger so I have Spotlight. I love it.] Shows off Spotlight [non-Tiger folks feel free to die of envy].
A bit about metadata there. You can add metadata. But no normal person will ever do that.

Open source projects. About 1/2 of the Mac OS is built on open source.

Long term archiving is hard. [thanks for telling us] Formats change as do the devices. Brewster gets props for Way Back.

univerally accessible digital repository:

continued operation of moore’s law

long term archiving

legal framework for ip needs attention

open standards

Questions:

not a question: guy talks about owning music and downloading. he hates the DRM from apple especially the “fair play” DRM for shuffle which killed his music.
tribble says work not done yet on drm. apple wants to innovate as is real and microsoft. not time for standards for drm because we are still in an innovation period.

follow up on drm. do you see how you can solve drm for long term archiving.
tribble gives props to lessig. how does stuff get into the public domain when it’s encrypted?

more on itunes. itunes is not sharing, says he. but selling only major labels there. how about “real music” by “real bands”
itunes now getting indys. over 1000 so far. started with the 4 majors for example. nine inch nails garageband mix gets props. questioner wants more emerging bands.

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