Epistemographer

UPDATE: Found someone. I’ll explain more about this when we’ve got the finished product up. Thanks, everyone…

For a project we’ve got going on at NYPL, I need to get about 1200 references from spreadsheets into Zotero; I’m figuring it’s generously maybe 15-20 hours of work, since roughly half are represented in NYPL’s catalog (and thus are easy fodder for ingesting). I’ve been asking around, and keep coming up short…anyone out there in the blogosphere want to do a little freelancing or have a student who they’d like to refer? Timeframe is very short (ideally within a week turnaround, maybe two)…if interested, leave a comment below and I’ll e-mail regarding money stuff.

…albeit the next to least popular one according to New York Magazine’s feature on YouTube. Next to last, baby! The only one after me was, well, a history professor. I just knew that moving from a university to a library was a step up in the cultural firmament!

It’s now been more than two weeks since I heard the news that Roy Rosenzweig was gone; two weeks caught between an irrepressible urge to say something and a complete inability to find the right configuration of words. I spent most of that time reading what others had written, and the things that stick with me are the small, concrete details, as if I’m still unable to wrap my mind around the whole of who Roy was and what he achieved in his life. And yet since I still feel as though something needs to be said, I’ll simply say this:

Until I encountered Roy and the Center he’d created, I had a diverse collection of academic and technological interests, and it took three years of quiet osmosis and subtle mentoring for them to cohere. It wasn’t until I left GMU earlier this year that I began to truly appreciate what he did for me, and I’ll spend the rest of my career paying that forward. For now, though it’s just a beginning, this is dedicated to Roy…

In the digital equivalent of letting my lawn get so overgrown that it overtook the house, Dreamhost shut down epistemographer.com a few days ago (according to them, an RSS plugin was out of control, spiking load on my shared server). So, I’ve rolled back to a vanilla Wordpress installation, and hopefully the process of building from scratch will start my blogging engine once more. If nothing else, there’s all sorts of cool stuff going on at NYPL that I really ought to be telling y’all about…

We got the boxes moved, the kitchen unpacked, and have been scoping out the new neighborhood. It’s all felt a bit off-kilter, however, until tonight…

…that big sigh of relief I just heaved (which might have been audible all the way down the east coast) was prompted by a happy little green light on my Airport Extreme, letting me know that our DSL is now up and running (two days ahead of Verizon’s schedule, nonetheless!) – w00t!

If my guess is right, there will be a whole lot of new people checking out this site today, as the news about my new job (as well as this URL) hits the in-house New York Public Library staff newsletter. With that in mind, let me just say hello to all my new colleagues! I’m slowly getting my bearings, and look forward to exploring the far reaches of the NYPL in months to come. In the meantime, please don’t be shy; don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail to say hello and invite me ‘round for a conversation if you’re either doing or want to be doing digital work in one form or another.

One caveat – if you click around this site, you’ll discover that a) “poky” doesn’t begin to describe how slow it can be, and b) there are a few spots here and there that are works in progress. The former is a function of a web host with whom I’m increasingly dissatisfied, but the latter is more problematic – there’s something rather embarrassing about being heralded as a digital visionary of sorts while at the same having let my own online presentation of self fall into disrepair. All I can do is plead my own current state of transition, and hope that as I get my feet under me at NYPL, this site will grow into my new identity.

Among the most nerve-wracking implications of recent life changes was the need for us to figure out what to do with our condo. Thankfully, after an attempt at a word-of-mouth FSBO and then a formal listing with a realtor, we were offered a contract over the weekend. While the offer wasn’t everything we wanted, we find solace in the fact that we bought at the height of the market and are selling less than two years later at a price that lets us at least limp away with all limbs intact. The movers come on Friday, and by the end of the weekend we’ll be happily getting our bearings in a new apartment in Brooklyn.

For those of you who’ve seen me through the past two years of home ownership, it’ll come as little surprise that I spent our last Sunday afternoon in DC spread out on our patch of outdoor space, toolbox open and tools scattered about, sawing and hammering away. The particular project at hand was the making of window screens (a requirement of our buyer), and so I managed to pick up one last bit of DIY knowledge, adding to what in hindsight is a pretty substantial list. Two years ago, I didn’t know how to:

• Hang sheetrock
• Pull up carpet
• Lay hardwood plank flooring
• Refinish stair treads
• Put up glass tile
• Caulk a bathtub
• Mud a drywall corner
• Move an electrical socket
• Install butcher block
• Replace a kitchen garbage disposal
• Build a built-in bookcase
• Sink cabinets into a wall
• Install built-in wardrobes
• Replace a bathroom ceiling fan
• Grow a tomato plant

• Build a wall

It’s been a good run…how we’re going to go back the world of renting (where even painting a wall might require a landlord’s permission) is beyond me…

File under ironic…

Several pieces of news that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks, but might as well announce publicly before I head to SXSWi on Monday (heading down late ‘cause my sister chose this weekend to get married, one of the handful of events worth missing “Geek Spring Break“ for):

1) In mid-April, I’ll be leaving the Center for History and New Media to take a newly-created job as the Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library. While I’m incredibly sad to be leaving the amazing team at CHNM, this is a ridiculously amazing opportunity, and I’m looking forward to continued work on the intersection of scholarship, education and information technology.

2) My first book, From Betamax to Blockbuster, has been officially launched by the MIT Press and should drop in early 2008 (was hoping for sooner, but they’re pitching it as a trade press and we missed the window for an early Fall 2007 release.

3) Jenny and I will be moving up to NYC sometime in late April / early May (I’ll be commuting back and forth for my first few weeks at NYPL). Right now, we’re looking to sell our place in DC; if interested, (or you know of anyone who might be) please do get in touch. And if you know of any good 2.5-3BR apts opening up in the general Park Slope area, we’re looking for a rental.

4) Yeah, I said we’re ideally looking for a 3BR apt. We’ll need the extra room(s), ‘cause come September-ish, there’ll be three of us. More on that to come…

(for those of you who aren’t in the academic tech community, this is going to seem a bit inside-baseball…feel free to move right along)

Over the weekend, Bruce D’Arcus wrote a blog post about Zotero in which he said that “one gets the sense of a project at the portals of the cathedral gazing out at the bazaar, but not yet ready to step out the door.” This has sparked a bunch of discussion among us Zoterons over the past few days, and I wanted to distill a bit of it here.

From my particular perspective within the Zotero project, it’s less that we’re not ready to step out the door than the simple fact that we’ve been so focused on short-term goals that bigger conversations like the ones Bruce wants to open up have fallen by the wayside. Yes, we’ve been less than responsive to Bruce’s requests, but not out of any deep or unconscious desire to stay within the cathedral. In fact, I’d argue that the cathedral/bazaar dichotomy, while useful for highlighting different modes of work, is also rather reductionist, and can distill the gray areas of actual practice into black and white strawmen.

There are a number of models for open source projects; the one we’ve been trying to follow at Zotero is one of open participation, driven by participants themselves. At this point, if you want to participate, you can get full read access to our bug tracking and versioning system, and write access once you’ve proven yourself. While the dev list has been low-traffic (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “dead”), the forums are extremely active, and we’re proud of a level of responsiveness by the whole team there that far surpasses expectations for an open source project. There are mechanisms for discussion, and we are deeply committed to F/OSS principles (along those lines, we’re going a step further and opening up our bug tracking system to full anonymous read access; Dan Stillman posted the details on the dev list yesterday). When we introduce something new, we see it as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one: the Word plugin, for example, is a first draft, and we’d love to see someone elaborate on it. As for OpenOffice functionality, we haven’t had time yet to really start that conversation (either with words or code), but we’d love to see someone else do so (and in fact might be able to compensate them for their time).

On the Word plugin: it seems to have come out of nowhere mainly because it did come out of nowhere. One of our developers, who’s currently in college, needed to write a paper and came back with a working Word plugin. This wasn’t a top-down directive so much as him saying “Hey, this’d be cool,” and pulling it out of thin air (he’s actually got quite a reputation around CHNM for suddenly producing incredibly cool bits of code). As for the OpenOffice functionality, when Kari wrote “We do indeed have plans to add support for OpenOffice—it should happen sometime in 2007” the meaning behind that was “We’ve been talking to Bruce and others, and we’re hoping to work with them later in 2007 to get a similar plugin running for OpenOffice.” The statement was more opaque than it might have been, but it doesn’t belie a master plan evolving within CHNM to exclude OpenOffice folks (heck, we’d love it if someone else would step up and start building that functionality, rather than waiting for us to do so).

In the end, I think (and this is now just speaking for myself, rather than on behalf of Zotero as a whole) that the one thing that we could do better is make the process of feature development more transparent; it seems that Bruce’s main concern is that there are discussions happening and decisions being made behind closed doors, without real community participation. This is true on some levels; since most of us have offices along the same hall, we have a bunch of informal conversations that we don’t report back to the dev list or forums immediately (unlike most traditional open source projects, in which virtually all essential discussion happens in public, electronic fora). Our first concern has been simply getting software out the door that appeals both to our sense of good design as well as what our grant funders want, and in that rush we’ve often taken the route of quick conversations and decisions which can appear opaque from outside the CHNM offices. With that in mind, we’re going to try to do better, pushing those discussions out onto the dev list (where anyone else who’s concerned can join in while things are being figured out) when possible, and doing frequent reports on in-house projects and planned features out to the group…

Beyond that, however, there is an aspect by which Zotero will be always a bit cathedral-like; our current model is more like a service, where the core app is developed by a relatively small group of in-house or vetted devs, but with tons of hooks and an API enabling the flourishing of third-party utilities that extend it. We’ve created detailed developer documentation, including a sample utility, and we’ll be adding more to this as our APIs stabilize. Zotero has been built from Day 1 to be extensible in nearly every way possible. In short, less a massive cathedral than a small building in the middle of the bazaar…