Epistemographer

…yeah. So, not much to say at the moment. Heaps of coding, swamped with both Center work and outside projects. Oh, and I’m getting married in a week and a half. Hence, not so much with the blogging, even though I’d planned to make a spectacular re-entrance after a summer off¹.

Sigh.

Well, on the brighter side, I’ll be spending the next few days at a workshop that promises to offer all sorts of food for thought and chewy discussion; I’ll blog my notes and any other crazy hijinks that ensue. Promise.

¹ That blogroll? Totally a work in progress. Just need to find time to import my bookmarks. Meanwhile, please don’t point and laugh.

A short request, thrown out to the blogosphere:

When I moved in with my somewhat-more-Jewishly-observant-than-I girlfriend (now fiancee), I started keeping a kosher kitchen. Needless to say, this has been quite an adjustment for a formerly bacon-frying, shrimp-barbecuing, agnostically secular Jew like myself, and I’ve decided to start a blog to chronicle my adventures as I explore cooking under kosher constraints. Rather than do this myself, I’d love to find a few collaborators – so, if you or someone you know matches these criteria, please get in touch :

1. Engaging writing style
2. Love of food and cooking

1. Recently started keeping kosher, less for your own beliefs than because of those of your boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancee/spouse/co-habitant. By “keeping kosher,” I mean you’re at least adhering to some of the major tenets (no pork/shellfish, two sets of dishes, kosher meat, etc.) in and/or out of your home. I’m aware that these things are totally idiosyncratic (that’s part of the point), so if you think you even might fit, please drop me a line.

In short, I’m looking for a few smart foodies whose love of cheeseburgers is outweighed by their love for someone else, and who would be willing to join me as I continue to adjust to eating and cooking with one metaphorical arm tied behind my back.

A few days ago, David Weinberger posted about something that’s afoot at the New York Times:

The NYTimes.com site is re-fashioning itself, launching in April. That’s what Robert Larson, director of product management and development of NYTimes.com, told me when I interviewed him for the issue of Release 1.0 that came out last week. (Here’s the article’s first section.) They’re doing something bold and important, which I think may mark a turning point…but perhaps not the one NYTimes.com envisions.


The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See “Note on Links” at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you’ll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google’s rankings.

Let’s call a spade a spade – these topic archives aren’t about adding value to individual NYT news stories, but rather are about marketing those stories to more targeted audiences. Not to join the legions of bloggers lining up to gripe about this, but man oh man is this not what they need to do to stay relevant in the digital age. I’m sure that there’s a ton that I don’t know, and I’m not privy to the economics of newspaper production, but drawing on a lot of time studying the history of media/business as well as my own experience working at washingtonpost.com in the heady days of 1998, this seems like a seriously missed opportunity:

• First off, $2.95 is still a hell of a lot to pay for a news story. Consider the fact that $2.95 buys you three songs at the iTunes store; is the labor involved with the production of one news story equivalent to that required to produce three audio tracks? Moreover, the costs of producing those archived news stories have already been covered by a combination of past subscription/newsstand fees and advertisements…the actual costs of providing a NYT story from 1910 lie in the realm of data preservation and migration, and while not insubstantial, I’m dubious about the business model.
• Another point about the price, in the form of a thought experiment: who exactly is going to pay $2.95 for a single news story? It’s not a casual reader, by any means…the NYT is betting that there will be people who either don’t care about the expense, or who need a given story enough to shell out. Essentially, this boils their market down to the wealthy (probably with institutional affiliations) or the desperate, and in both cases the buyer in question finds herself in a classic adversarial relationship with the seller. The NYT sees its stories as having a fixed value ($2.95), and isn’t going to part with them for less.
• Enough about the price – here’s my bigger point: there’s nothing new here as regards the NYT’s relationship to the larger information ecosystem. Any new NYT initiative doesn’t come in a vacuum; they’re struggling to remain relevant in a new blog-driven digital culture that is structured to value free and freely-linkable information, while at the same time trying to extract some sort of value from the content they’ve gone to the considerable expense to migrate online. What’s a media company to do? Easy answer: don’t antagonize your consumers, befriend them. Don’t clutch so tightly to your product – instead, understand that the more an article is linked-to, the more it’s discussed, the more valuable it becomes. Set up systems to encourage linking – permalinks are a good start, but a really radical system would go even further in 4 easy steps:
  • Drop the price to something that someone will pay without thinking twice – my instinct is somewhere between a dime and a quarter
  • Micropayments are still expensive to process, so don’t deal with credit cards on a per-transaction basis; require users to set up accounts funded with an initial deposit of $10, which will automatically replenish from your credit card when you drop below a certain threshold (like my highway EZ-Pass). Make the transaction as invisible and frictionless as possible.
  • Create an associates system like the one that drives massive amounts of traffic to Amazon every day; every time someone “buys” an article through a post on my blog, I get a cut of the proceeds. This not only gives bloggers (the early-adopters and mavens of our current digital landscape) incentive to buy into the system, it harnesses their diverse expertise and audiences as marketing for your own articles (think The Long Tail meets James Surowiecki).
  • Only allow referral associates to cash out in high enough increments (think $50, for example) that the vast majority will simply leave their relatively meager proceeds in their accounts, using them to buy access to other articles (again, much the way that most bloggers tend to use their Amazon Associates proceeds to buy – you guessed it – more things from Amazon).
  It’d be a risky-seeming strategy, but one which would fit with one of the dominant trends in the online world (toward partnering with one’s customers and breaking down the hard-and-fast categories of producer and consumer), and which would go a long, looooong way toward reversing the erosion of the NYT’s stature as a go-to source in the increasingly fragmented online world.

A friend passed along a link to Yahoo!‘s 10th birthday “Netrospective.” Great interface design, intriguing use of comments to both foster dialogue and actually collect some history – seems like a really great exhibit, though one thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I know they’re your competitors and all, Yahoo!, but really – no mention of Google in the 100 canonical moments during the past 10 years of web history? Please.

Update: Ahem. Janet’s right. #17 is in fact a reference to Google, using the keyword “backrub” as a way to avoid putting the competitor’s name front and center. Please consider my above comment retracted.

So, I spent six years of my life getting trained to be part of a priesthood, and like any priesthood, mine is pretty particular about holding Supreme Knowledge close to its vest (after all, the only thing that makes members of a priesthood special is that they have ways of knowing stuff that others don’t). One of the odd things about some factions of the Science Studies world (and yes, I say some – it’s a pretty balkanized place) is their massive discomfort with the idea of being too loose with their theoretical insights. It’s a conservatism borne out of ten years of intellectual siege, as well as a knowledge that a sophisticated understanding of how knowledge is produced could be pretty dangerous in the wrong hands (though, as Josh Marshall explains, it might be too late).

With that in mind, I’ve been particularly impressed with what Alex Pang’s been doing over on his (recently-bylined) blog at Red Herring. He’s had the gig for a year now and while it’s ostensibly a blog about future trends, what he’s fundamentally doing is popularizing Science Studies ideas and applying them to contemporary situations. This isn’t dumbing-down, it’s distillation, dropping book references left and right and offering accessible ways into STS scholarship for his readers. Consider today’s entry:

It retrospect, it now seems that much of the 19th century was a long experiment in changing our perceptions of space and time. Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that rail travel affected the way Europeans thought about space and geography, and that the telegraph and electric light promoted a new view (metaphorically and literally) of urban space.


Stephen Kern, in his brilliant but controversial book The Culture of Time and Space, argued that the growth of news and mass media, rapid travel by train and steamship, telegraph and telephone, mass migration, and avant-garde art movements like Futurism, all dramatically changed European perceptions of space and time around the turn of the last century. Space seemed more fractured, with fewer parts connecting or blending into each other; time was experienced as disjointed and discontinuous. It wasn’t just Picasso or Marinetti who had this experience, Kern contends: millions had their perceptions of space and time reworked, thanks in large part to technology.

He’s bringing Science Studies to a larger audience, and reading his work there for months is one of the inspirations for my current project of daily postings. Once I hit my stride and find my voice, I only hope it’s as clear and accessible as his…

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With that in mind, this post by Dorothea at Caveat Lector resonated. She writes:

“For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes…We need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff…is really pretty bad…We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.”

This echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing among librarians (at times, I feel like “eavesdropping” is a more appropriate word for what I’ve been doing w/r/t the library world); there’s a crisis of purpose in that world, in a world where libraries have to compete with Google, Wikipedia, and other massively accessible information resources, users aren’t immediately going to libraries as their first choice for information.

At question, though, are the means that will enable those users to use that information (what Raymond Yee calls “Gather, Create, Share“ tools). The natural thing for librarians to do is to start building such tools, but many have been finding that they’re not quite sure exactly what scholars and researchers want (to be fair, those users have been remarkably bad at actually communicating what they want and need), and one of the big discussions in the world of digital library tool-building seems to be whether to build tools themselves, or make resources available and leave the tool-building to users. That’s our argument at CHNM – since we’re users ourselves, we know better than librarians what historians need/want from information tools. Of course, as anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not exactly a normal historian, which raises the difficult question of whether we’re building tools for historians, or just tools for early-adopter, gearhead database-designing historian/programmers…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with sleep…to put it simply, I just don’t get tired when normal people seem to. That’s not to say that I don’t every get sleepy; I do, it’s just that it happens when the sun comes up, rather than when the sun sets. It runs in my family, too…my Mom is worse than I, and her dad was just the same.

That’s not to say that I just toss and turn – one might say that I learned my limits early on in life, and embraced my nocturnal nature. As a child, I used to spend hours each night reading by flashlight, a practice which gave way somewhere in high school to the late radio broadcast of Larry King. In college, the one-two whammy of a heavy courseload and 2 am reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central meant that I was more likely to see 4 am than I was to see 9 am, and by the time I got to grad school, it was A&E’s 3 am episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and journal articles with which I whiled away the early morning hours. When I needed to be up early, I would take a sleeping aid of some kind (Sominex et al), which usually got the job done but left me feeling all sorts of groggy the next day.

Then, while doing a research on insomnia a few years ago, I discovered melatonin supplements. It was a revelation; I could take a pill and within a half-hour feel the easy sleepiness that everyone around me seemed to take for granted. I’ve never been formally tested, but it seems pretty clear that the supplements make up for the melatonin that my own body doesn’t seem to produce once the sun sets. For more than three years, melatonin has been a part of my nightly routine, and I’ve actually enjoyed a regular, dare I say “normal” sleeping schedule.

That is, unless something happens like tonight; I opened the medicine cabinet to find the bottle empty. “Crap,” I thought. It was too late to go to a drugstore, too late to replenish my supply. See, the odd thing is that melatonin doesn’t build up in your system, so if I don’t take it one night, it’s right back to my old tendencies. Thus, it’s close to 4 in the morning, and after spending several hours clearing my inbox, fiddling with blog templates and catching up on other work, I’m still uncomfortably wide awake.

I’ve got to admit, it’s an extremely familiar feeling, and one that I don’t miss in the least.

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.

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.