Epistemographer

See, now this is what I call using new media to do history in innovative ways:

“The Lost City. A group of architecture students have to reconstruct the historical evolution of the city of Lausanne. They have to understand how the old urban structure of the city from the Middle Age survived and melted in the actual city. Instead of using a current map of Lausanne, they download on their phone the 1850 map. The group members split into the city centre and attempt to follow the old streets as displayed on the phone.


“From time to time, they bump into a building or they are not able to find where the urban tissue hides the old structure. In these cases, the students drop a landmark on the virtual map. Later on, in class, the actual map and the historical map are merged with the landmarks the students defined on their field trip. Finally, the professor collect the maps built by the students and use them in his next lecture.”

[via Anne Galloway]

“Scientists create and collect their own data, while humanists work with data collected by others” (heard at the DLF Cyberinfrastructure and Humanities panel).

Thoughts?

I’ve been hanging around at the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum in Baltimore. Most of my notes are jotted on low-tech paper, but I did type in my notes on John Unsworth’s keynote address, “Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” (slides here) Here’re my raw, unedited notes:

Basic vocabulary of “cyberinfrastructure” can be problematic

Term comes from Atkins report (“Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure”), Blue-ribbon panel funded by NSF

• NSF expects recommendations when giving funds


• ACLS panel more like an amicus brief, and less concerned with how to disburse actual funds

“Cyberinfrastructure” described in layers:

• layer below cyberinfrastructure comprises hardware, etc..


• layer above cyberinfrastructure comprises “software programs, services, information, knowledge and social practices” in specific local contexts and practices


• cyberinfrastructure itself lies between these layers, of enabling “hardware, algorithms, software, communications, personnel”


• most important is that this is a shared layer across practices and sites, but isn’t “electronic plumbing” shared by everything

I. Am. So. There.

Interesting; on the heels of my post yesterday about filing vs. tagging comes Joi Ito, pointing toward a post by David Weinberger that seems to resonate:

Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses: “But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.

He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of “ethnoclassification” (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it “folksonomy.”) He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we’re making for ourselves. Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell’s article on “collaborative knowledge gardening.”

Joi sez:

I’ve also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he’s talking about.I totally agree that this “ethnoclassification” is really an amazing solution to the metadata problem. Although, as they point out, there are some problems, I think that we’ll find solutions. I feeling very taggy these days. I think there should be more cross-site tag linking. Blog categories, wiki pages, music meta data, and many other things can be “tagged”. TAGCON 2005! Sorry. Just kidding.

I called my mom tonight to watch the last few pitches of the NLCS game seven, and to watch the Cardinals win the pennant. She grew up in St. Louis, and had actually flown out to catch a game of the first Cards-Dodgers post-season series; as the last pitch was thrown, she murmured in joyous disbelief, “I saw this team…I saw them play…”

When I was growing up, there was one baseball team in the world, and their uniforms were red and white, with a goofy bird named Fred perched on a bat. We went to St. Louis at least once a year to visit my grandparents and other relatives, and the highlight for me was the yearly trip to the nearest Venture (a local store), where my parents or grandparents would buy me a new, shiny red Cardinals warmup jacket. I’m not kidding when I say that I used up a jacket a year – I wore it every day to school, ate in it, slept in it, lived in it. To this day, the phrase “Cardinals jacket” seems like a single, continuous word rather than a noun modified by an adjective.

I wore a cardinals hat, ate Cardinals birthday cakes, and the first baseball card I remember explicitly saving up to buy was a Vince Coleman rookie card (which I’ve still got in a binder in my parent’s attic). In 1985, when I was in third grade, I made a bet with Kara Messenger that my birds would beat the Royals – I lost that bet, but to this day it’s my most vivid memory of that year.

Over time, though, I drifted from the Cardinals. I went to college in Baltimore and started going to Orioles games. My grandmother passed away, then my grandfather, and we stopped going to St. Louis regularly; my ties to my mom’s side of the family loosened somewhat without my grandparents to hold us all together. I’ve found a life of my own, first in Baltimore, then Ithaca, then NY, and now back in DC, and the little kid who would never take off his Cardinals jacket seems very far away, hardly recognizable at all.

And then, something happens like tonight, when I watch two pop flies and a ground ball to second and all of a sudden I see that bird perched on the bat on a player’s chest and my eyes well up as I remember the power that simple drawing held for me, and I can feel the smooth satin over my arms, taste the plate of toasted ravioli in front of me and see my grandfather sitting in his chair, just inches from the TV screen because he had nothing left but the slightest peripheral vision, chewing on a cigar and listening to Joe Buck call the pitches. I miss them, the Cardinals jackets and the toasted ravioli and most of all my grandparents, and I’m astonished by how vividly I can feel them all, a cascade of memories triggered by a team I barely follow anymore, made up of players whose names I no longer know, standing in the shadow of a storied past.

Dan Froomkin offers the best concise read on the election that I’ve seen:

So maybe on Nov. 2, Americans won’t be voting for presidential candidates as much as for competing realities.

No time for a long post now, but I was just deciding which folder into which to sort a particular e-mail, and realized that the system of categorized folders I’d been using for the better part of a decade doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore. This actually seems to fit with a trend I’ve been noticing, a fundamental shift going on in information technology between filing (the spatial organization of information into discrete containers) and tagging (the labeling of discrete pieces of information with metadata). It seems like all the hot new tools (Gmail, wikipedia, del.icio.us, Spotlight, etc.) work with tags, and require a different way of conceptualizing information that, at its core, is fundamentally non-spatial. This strikes me as a big deal, one worth mulling over…

Slashdot just published an interview with Neal Stephenson, pretty much all of which is must-reading. Check out the whole thing, but one quote that particularly jumped out at me is his observation on bookstores, which seems to encapsulate many of my conclusions about video stores into a few lines:

There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there’s no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it’s true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

I’ve been meaning to post something about Movable Type for a while – especially since I realized that people actually read this blog (when I actually post to it regularly), and that my words occasionally have an impact beyond what I’d expect.

Back when everyone went bonkers over Six Apart’s licensing scheme for Movable Type 3.0 (myself included), it looked like people would be fleeing MT in droves. My worries at the time centered mainly on the fact that as a developer, especially one who tends to take on underfunded projects, I was at the mercy of Six Apart if they started aiming for the corporate market and priced people like me out of using their software. “Geez,” said I, “maybe I’d better just switch over to open source stuff, ‘cause then I’ll always be free.”

The lesson of the past five months has essentially been: um nope. Two main reasons for this…

First, I actually tried using WordPress for a freelance blog project, and realized that it was more than worth paying for the polished backend and database schema of MT if I’m designing for less computer-literate users.

Secondly, Six Apart sprang into action like no company I’ve ever seen. I’d mostly just like to echo Brad Choate’s thoughts on the matter:

Say what you will about the whole MT 3.0D licensing debacle, Six Apart is an awesome company.


They’ve really worked hard to resolve the public relations nightmare they found themselves in last month. And they’ve made changes which should appeal to most everyone. Sure, they made some mistakes. What company doesn’t?


What they continue to get right is that they listen and respond. And it perfectly demonstrates the power of the software they produce. Especially when it comes to corporate-to-user communications.


…


I tell you, this is lightning fast response. And unheard-of behavior for a corporation. Typically, a corporation sets pricing for their products and customers just have to deal. The level of outrage from Movable Type users is proof positive that Movable Type is a product that is dear to many. The swift and gracious response on the part of Six Apart shows their commitment to their users and to the MT community.

In the months since, I’ve interacted personally with people on the Six Apart sales team regarding multiple projects, and I’ve been quite impressed with how responsive and willing to work with customers they’ve been. In sum, please consider my “sky is falling” panic retracted, and my faith in Six Apart and their software fully restored.