Epistemographer

Was out with a cold over the weekend, and in the process of getting back in the swing of things I seem to have slipped into an inverted nay/night schedule. For those who know me, this should come as no real suprise…I’ve got a tendency to get very focused and task-oriented when I’m working on a big project (which makes me vaguely concerned about what’s going to happen to me when I start dissertating with gusto).

At the moment, the project that’s keeping me up nights is a complete overhaul of an online database system I’ve been designing for the journal Social Studies of Science. The system itself is actually pretty cool, walking the user through the manuscript review process step by step, and coordinating the efforts of an Editor in Chief, a handful of Collaborating Editors, and hundreds of referees.

When I initially designed it, I’d set up a sort of rule-based process. Every time an action was taken, the system would figure out what had to happen next, and store those tasks in a constantly-updating mySQL table – sort of a central “To-Do” list. Unfortunately, I started to find that the people using the system (myself included), kept coming up with ways of doing things that deviated from the neat and tidy flowchart just enough that I wound up with orphaned tasks, left behind when a user wanted to skip a step or used that back button one too many times.

So, the past few days were devoted to gutting the whole system, excising any and all references to that “tasks” database table, and shifting to a paradigm based on momentary context – when a user opens the file of a given manuscript, a series of scripts look to see what’s already been done, and then suggest what still remains. For example, if a query was sent to ask someone to review the manuscript, the script checks to see if a response has been logged, and if it’s been more than a few weeks, prompts the user to nudge the prospective referee.

The funny thing is that as I was rewriting the code I realized that I’d unconsciously implemented the same paradigmatic shift in the way that AI researchers have conceptualized their work, from the older rule-based/symbolic systems to more current systems that are essentially reactive to their environment. Hell, I studied this stuff in several classes, and even wrote a paper or two on it back before the VCR took over my academic life, yet I didn’t think consciously of the importance of designing a system that is contextual until I’d done it the wrong way first.

The lesson here, I guess, is that there actually is quite a bit that one learns while working on a PhD in the humanities/social sciences that is exportable and directly relevant to day-to-day projects. Unfortunately, I only seem to consciously apply said knowledge in hindsight, once I’ve made the very mistakes that I studied and critiqued in the classroom. Phoebe Sengers would find this damned funny.

In the end, though, the strangest thing about this whole project is that I’m essentially practicing user-centered design, while one of my users is the very person whose work first clued me in to the necessity of contextual, user-centered design. It’s so circular, it makes my head spin.

Just stumbled across The Hacker FAQ, an “attempt to cover some of the issues that will invariably come up when people without previous experience of the hacker community try to hire a hacker.” Reading it, I’m struck by how the description of a hacker resonates with my impression of the academics whom I admire most (particularly the ways in which hackers let ideas “percolate”, and their task-based nature). This leads to a question, especially in light of the fact that I’m starting to grapple with questions of “what comes next after graduate school”: is academic culture ultimately more hacker-friendly?

How ironic is this: someone twisting the notion of social construction in the name of political gain, in the process unintentionally (or perhaps intentially) engaging in the very sort of social construction which he denounces. It’s either brilliant, or idiocy (I’m leaning toward the latter).

Another navel-gazing post about blogs. Yeah, there’ll probably be lots of navelgazing here at epistemographer.com (at least I didn’t call this The Reflexive Blog)…

So, as I was driving through torrential downpours from New York City to Ithaca tonight, I had a long cell-phone conversation with my mom about current affairs. Now, my mom is pretty up-to-the-minute as news consumers go, and we tend to have great talks about current affairs. However, I noticed something tonight – she hadn’t heard of a lot of the news items that I’ve been reading a lot about lately.

I asked her what she thought about the Iraq news of the past few days, and she assumed that I meant the presumed deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t thinking of the siege in Mosul at all when I asked the question – to me, the big Iraq news was the slow, Watergate-esque climb up the Bush administration heirarchy in the examination of its questionable actions in presenting the case for invading Iraq to the American people.

So we’re talking, and I find myself explaining all about Joseph Wilson and his mission to Niger, Bush’s State of the Union address, the much-discussed 16 words, and Wilson’s recent editorial claiming fraud on the part of the Bush administration. She’s heard something about the State of the Union speech, but not much else. I bring up the attempted vilification of Joseph Wilson, the Robert Novak column on Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, and the various articles and columns about the ramifications of a white house official blowing the cover of a CIA operative. This is all (pardon the phrase) news to my mom, and I realize that she and I simply aren’t existing in the same media worlds right now.

I don’t have access to cable TV at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn (heck, we barely get a decent NBC broadcast signal), and I read the daily newspapers online, so with the exception of NPR or other talk radio while driving, pretty much all the news I get is via a computer screen. More importantly, I’ve been getting more and more of my news from blogs like TPM or Eschaton these days. That’s not to say that I’d claim these blogs as indistinguishable from a journalistic institution like the Washington Post – I’m well aware of the lower barriers to entry inherent in blogging, and in fact appreciate that they result in even more explicit biases. I can triangulate in on an issue by reading posts on it from across the “ideoblogical” range (heh…aren’t I cute). Plus, I’m a good enough relativist to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an “objective” press, and that claims to truth are ultimately validated or discarded based on the number of people who believe them to be true, rather than by neutral observers.

But I’m getting off topic – my real point here is that my mom and I seemed to have an entirely different picture of what’s “news”, hers based on television, mine based on blogs, with newspapers somewhere in between. Here’s where this gets interesting: it doesn’t seem like we’re just learning through different media that happen to prioritize news differently…it’s that the news cycle, and in fact the entire gatekeeping function of the blogosphere is qualitatively different from that of the mass media. More than that – I feel like I’m ahead of the curve, like the issues that I’m thinking about and reading about haven’t really hit the television news cycle yet, leaving me and my blog-informed knowledge-world out of sync with the one defined by more the “mass” television and newspaper media.

Lately, it seems that this lag of mass media behing blogs ranges anywhere between a week and a month. I’d love to see an agenda-setting study about the actual role that blogs play in setting the agenda for the mass media (which would make sense, since one would might assume that those working in media would be more active bloggers and blog-readers)…

In the past few days, Jon Stewart keeps popping up at random moments. Not literally, of course, but he’s been mentioned by several different people in several different contexts.

First, I was looking over my calendar for August, and was reminded that I’d ordered tickets for the August 12th Daily Show (I’d forgotten, since I’d requested the tix about three months ago). Then, I was reading through back email on the Media Ecology listserv, which included a discussion of a Neil Postman appearance on the Daily Show, including a link to a great interview that Bill Moyers did with Jon Stewart (via Ken Rufo). Finally, I pull up Salon, to find a story critiquing the slate of late-night talk show hosts.

As I’m wont to do when a topic crosses my radar, I spent a few minutes surfing around and reading interviews with Stewart, and I realized something: not only does everybody like this guy (he’s practically the only person with a show on between 11 pm and 1 am on weeknights who survives the Salon article unscathed), but he has a credibility that few can match. I mean, this is a man whose hourlong conversation with Peter Jennings is sold by the New York Times.

This seems remarkable, in part because the only people I can think of who seem in Stewart’s genre (comedians whose material grapples with current affairs in some depth, and who have a national audience) are all known for their over-the-top personalities: Bill Maher and Dennis Miller are two who come to mind. Al Franken comes close, but he’s not nearly as prominent, and often a bit too smug. Stewart’s really the only one I can think of who has crafted a persona, and a show to accompany it, that is humble.

Humility, though tossed around like it’s going out of style, seems a pretty rare thing on our society. True humility (the assumption that others might know more than you, and the willingness to step back and learn from them) is hard to find, especially on television. I’ve been amazed in the past year or two to see the parade of intellectuals, politicians, artists, and writers who’ve been interviewed on the Daily Show, and the depth of the conversation that Stewart attempts, considering that he’s usually got about five or ten minutes with a given guest. The only show I’ve seen on TV that combined this sort of humility and depth was Later with Bob Costas back when he occupied the 1:30 to 2 am slot on NBC, which I used to watch religiously.

Not sure that there’s any real point to this, except to wonder “What might our political culture be like if we had more Jon Stewarts, and fewer Bill Mahers?”

Back in town after a week-plus in the Northwest, first in Portland for a wedding and to visit some friends, then a few days on the Olympic Peninsula, just driving around and exploring beaches, ports, and even a rainforest. We came back with an extra duffel bag full of books from Powells, tea from the Empress Hotel in Victoria, wine from our favorite Oregon vineyard and 7 lbs of roasted hazelnuts from a farmer’s stand in McMinnville, southwest of Portland.

Food tourism rules.

As the handy link to the right indicates, I’m in Portland, Oregon through the weekend, hanging out with my old friend Josh Berg and going to the wedding of two other friends. Probably won’t post anything until next week when I’m back in New York next week, so until then, enjoy this link to my version of the Happiest Place on Earth, where I spent a good two hours today…

So, I started this blog about a week and a half ago, and I’m already noticing something interesting happening – at random moments in my day, I catch myself composing a post about whatever’s on my mind at the moment. In the past few days, I’ve essentially written posts in my head on the possible role that a blog could play in my upcoming job search (coming this fall to a webpage near you), the play Urinetown and the nature of self-referential/self-conscious theater, and Howard Dean and the “internet candidate” meme, to name a few.

This is interesting for a few reasons, all of which connect to the nature of reading and writing…

1) The blog as a form is continually evolving, but I seem to have internalized a certain idea of what a blog post is and what distinguished it from, say, an academic paper or an Instant Message. I’d have to think more about what the norms might be (in fact, I’ll be thinking quite a bit about this, because I’d like to incorporate blogs, both as a practice and an object of study, into a course I’m designing for next spring titled Writing as a Technology), but I definitely feel like I’m playing with and testing the limits of a new genre.

2) As to where my understanding of this new genre comes from, I’d have to say that it’s mostly from reading other blogs. This is something I find really fascinating – you’ve got this new technology (a weblog), and people don’t initially know how to use it, so they import their understandings of precious technologies and use that knowledge to inform their use of the new one. Eventually some common understanding emerges, shaped by technological constraints and social consensus, and a community forms of people who’re all using the technology in roughly the same way.

3) The intriguing part to me is how newcomers (those who didn’t help define the norms in the first place) are socialized into this preexisting community. In my case, as I mentioned below, this happens via lurking – however, I’m bringing my own experiences from other literary forms into this one, so there’s a process by which I have to integrate my previous knowledge into this new form…maybe this is what I’m doing as I’m walking around writing in my head.

4) Blog-writing isn’t the only thing going on in my head these days – there’s dissertation writing as well. In fact, the two seem to be starting to bump up against one another, which is fascinating because on their surface they’d seem about as far apart as one could imagine. A blog post seems to generally be a shorter piece, taking one idea and developing it, then moving on to the next, not necessarily related, post. Sometimes, a blogger might pursue an idea over multiple posts, but the effect is that of a constellation of individual entries.

Meanwhile, a dissertation, as best as I understand it, is a monolithic form – yes, it’s ideally made up of smaller chapters that can each stand on their own, be published as articles, etc., but a dissertation ultimately seems to be conceptualized in its totality, as a single coherent edifice. Which helps to explain why we grad students tend to feel so much angst about the dissertation as a project, about how to even gain a foothold on its sheer surface, until we’re in the thick of it and we can grapple with its constituent parts. At least, that’s been my experience.

The upshot of all this is that I’m finding myself constantly writing to myself, in my head, and though the blog-writing-in-my-head and the dissertation-writing-in-my-head have mostly been going on separately, I’ve started to notice in the past few days that my blog-voice is starting to show up in my disertation-thinking, and vice versa. Now sure how this’ll play out, but it lends another dimension to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s comment on my first post.

5) The last thing that’s worth noting is that all of this “mind-blogging” has been happening when I’m not at a computer, and hence unable to actually turn those thoughts into words on a screen. I’ve come to terms with the fact that my “mind-dissertating” is productive, because as a writer I tend to do a lot of constructive work away from my keyboard, and this work tends to wind up back in my writing once I sit down and start typing. However, how do I come to terms with the fact that most of this “mind-blogging” will never make it to screen, both for reasons of distraction and of lack of time? Any thoughts from more seasoned bloggers out there?

Of course, one solution is just to spend more time at my desk, and less time wandering around thinking about stuff…

Spent the evening having a makeshift picnic on a roof deck in Manhattan…didn’t have a clear view of the fireworks on the East River, unfortunately, but we could see some in the distance over in Jersey. In honor of the fourth, here’s the most patriotic photo I could manage (no Mom, but two kinds of pies!)…

Both the blueberry and apple pies were cooked by my girlfriend, Jenny, who makes a damn fine flaky crust, not to mention cupcakes that rival those of the Magnolia Bakery itself…

Had a great night in Prospect Park last – caught a performance by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn concert series. Amazing music, a great crowd, and a generally cool temperature added up to one of those nights when you’re glad to be a New Yorker (even if only a de facto one). Now, if only there’s been a dance floor somewhere…