Epistemographer

So, I’d been gone so long that my front page went blank. I remarked to someone today that this is the blog equivalent of leaving your fly down, but I think a better analogy is letting your grass go unmowed until it’s knee-high; the stigma comes not just from the visible neglect, but its particularly public character. Makes me realize two things:

1. I do think of blogging as a very public thing. A coworker here at the Center said today that it’s more like a broadcast than a conversation, and I sort of didn’t feel like broadcasting for the last month. No real reason; just was “in my own head” for a few weeks, and am just feeling an outward pull now.


2. I’m struck by the extent to which I think of my blog (and blogs in general) in terms of feeds, rather than as a tangible site, with design and an actual presence. RSS has become my dominant paradigm for online information, and it was almost a shock to see my blank blog index page – almost like the way that catching the flu reminds us that as much as we think of ourselves as minds, soaring across information landscapes, we’re still rooted in physical, fallible bodies.

Anyhow, I’m back.

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…

Around midnight last night, I flipped on my TiVo to see what it’d collected over the weekend, and realized that the first two episodes of Season 4 of 24 premiered Sunday night. Needless to say, I tore through ‘em immediately, happily rekindling my relationship with what’s arguably the most addictive show on TV.

Something struck me midway through the second episode; the experience of watching them back-to-back reminded me much more of the way I watched Season 1 (downloaded divx files) and Season 2 (DVDs via Netflix) than the way I watched Season 3 (live, week by week). There’s almost a compulsive feeling to it; one hourlong episode isn’t enough, and it’s difficult to turn off the TV with the next one at your fingertips.

On last Thursday’s episode of Charlie Rose, Kiefer Sutherland (the star and exec. producer of 24) made the point that they were starting this season in January so that they could run straight for 20 weeks. The producers apparently found that many viewers lost momentum during the several weeks off over the winter holiday, and again in early spring, so they adjusted the schedule to ensure one uninterrupted experience. I’m wondering if their sensitivity to audience preferences went even a step further; given the wild success of 24 on DVD, the decision to show the first four episodes in the span of two nights almost seems a conscious choice to mimic that success, offering viewers an initial experience that bears a closer experience to watching the show on DVD (where, notably, each disc holds four episodes) than on broadcast television.

Following the thread of my previous post, the proliferation of referral rewards programs has led to an interesting consequence; the commodification of referrals. If a referral to purchase a given product has a specific value (whether a commission of up to 10% from Amazon or 1/4 of an iPod from TiVo), then it seems natural that a market will spring up to allow the barter or sale of that referral.

It seems not too farfetched to imagine a sophisticated consumer who simply factors the value of a given product referral into the cost of that product itself – for example, someone who sets up two Amazon.com accounts; one to create Associates links and the other to purchase goods through those links, in essence buying both the goods and the Associates commission.

Put this together with the booming popularity of Google Ads and we have a return to the traveling sales representative model for middlemen, one in which rather than buying goods from producers and selling them at a profit (the wholesaler/retailer model that boomed through the last century), these mediators earn a commission from producers for delivering consumers – a model in which mediators work for producers, not themselves.

So, in addition to being a TiVo addict, I’m a member of their rewards program, which means that I can earn points toward all sorts of goodies when people activating new TiVo service put me down as having referred them. And like the headline says, I ain’t too proud to beg, so if you happen to get a new TiVo and wouldn’t mind writing in “josh@epistemographer.com,” or have gotten a TiVo in the past 60 days (the credit can be retroactive) and would be willing to say I referred you, shoot me an e-mail and I’d be mighty grateful!

At a cafe tonight, I noticed a bulletin board posting advertising a pocket-sized electronic game that would play twenty questions, which reminded me of an online artificial intelligence experiment that plays a spookily accurate game of twenty questions about which I blogged a year and a half ago.

When I got home I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that they’re related, and that the former is in fact an implementation of the latter (seems like a licensed snapshot of the neural net at a given moment). This seems absolutely brilliant – the manufacturers got hundreds thousands of people to collaboratively develop a very sophisticated knowledge base, which they’re (the manufacturers) now licensing to whomever they can.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere…

It’s been five months since I defended my dissertation and started work at George Mason; four months since I last wrote anything substantial beyond book/research proposals or short, unsigned book reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. I’ve spent that time recovering from the whole dissertation process, mulling over what went right and what I can do better next time (the mere presence of the phrase “next time” there is telling), and justifying my relative unproductivity as a necessary recuperation after writing a dissertation. One month slipped into two, and now four months have flown by, much more quickly and effortlessly than I’d anticipated.

I’ve been busy, mind you, immersing myself in the world of humanities computing and pushing the “making technology” part of my brain harder than it’s been pushed…well, ever. My job’s fantastic, and I’ve been thriving in an environment where I’m expected to spend time reflexively analyzing information technology, then actually implementing those analyses in tangible ways. Put simply, I’m in a great place, with great people, and I still can’t believe how much I lucked out. But, I’ve lately been feeling like there’s something missing. There’s this sensation that I’ve been getting for the past month or so, a very tangible and almost physical pressure building somewhere between my eyebrows and the crown of my head. After a week of taking Tylenol to no avail, it occurred to me that this might not be a physical symptom, but a mental one.

I started paying attention to how I was spending my days, and I quickly realized that there’s something off-kilter in my life – in short, I spend my days soaking up information: from blogs, from books, from journals and newspapers, from colleagues, from conferences. This isn’t something to which I’m unaccustomed; after all, I spent the better part of two years in a research mode, learning about the video industry in preparation for writing my dissertation. But there’s a key difference – all the information I was taking in was directed, filtered for an eventual goal. I weighed every note, every line of an interview, every trade journal article with regard to its place in the final product.

These days, I’ve been taking in huge amounts of information, but I don’t have somewhere to direct it. To put it simply, my mind seems stuck on input, and I need to start outputting or I’m going to overload. I spent so long working on one huge writing project, I realized, that I’m somewhat adrift without it. Maybe the best indication that something’s up is the fact that I’m not writing on a daily basis – this blog’s more or less lain fallow, and I haven’t touched my journal since the summer.

At about this point, I get fed up with myself. “Waaaaah,” a nagging voice in my head mocks. “Life’s so hard. Suck it up and do something about it. You’re feeling like you’re all input and no output? Start writing.” This is the switch that luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) is a core part of me, the safety valve that transmutes mopey navel-gazing into purposeful action. So, here’s where I am: my writing’s gone to shit and I’ve let myself slide into undisciplined patterns; I’ve basically been indulging in information gluttony. Needless to say, this is not a state of affairs that sits well with me, and it’s damn well time I did something about it.

So, here’s my New Year’s resolution: in addition to any miscellaneous things that might crop up, I’m going to write at least one substantial post every weekday, built around an idea and doing something vaguely interesting with it. I haven’t decided who my imagined reader will be yet (someone in my field? a layperson?), but I’ll figure it out at the pace of at least 250 words per day. And hopefully, I’ll shake off whatever malaise seems to have taken root under my forehead.

Just saw (via Joi Ito) that Chris Anderson is expanding his Wired Magazine article on “The Long Tail“ into a book-length project. He’s set up a Typepad blog and writes of his topic: “It’s a rich seam. This is the place where I’m going to collect everything I can about it.” Looking through his entries thus far, it seems like he’s already doing more than that, using the blog not just as a container to hold found material, but as a public space in which to wrestle with ideas and engage in a dialogue with readers before writing the book. I’ve come across a few other examples of this sort of thing (most notably The Red Couch, where Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are pitching, researching and writing a book in as visible a way as possible), and it raises a few questions about The Way Books Are Written.

The book writing process is traditionally a long, messy, and solitary one, and writers are often loath to let anyone take a peek at how their particular sausages are made. Moreover, there’s a certain fearful ethic of privacy that many hold dear – if I spread my ideas everywhere, why would somebody want to buy the finished book? Worse, what if somebody steals my ideas?

I’m reminded of a conversation I had a year and a half ago at the 4S conference in Atlanta, in which I argued for the usefulness of a blog as a primary form of discourse, not simply a support for traditional scholarly forms like journal articles or manuscripts. The response was that those traditional forms are the currency of the scholarly world; quite literally, they buy you tangible things like jobs and funding, and if you don’t throw all your effort into creating those articles and manuscripts others will use your ideas to do so, usurping your reward. My counter-argument was that people can only take credit for your ideas if you haven’t laid claim to them first, and that blogs offer a much quicker and efficient way to “own” an idea than the slow, cumbersome publishing process. Moreover, you shift the focus from ideas as commodified entities in and of themselves to yourself as a thinker and writer who creates such ideas (in essence, a shift from a focus on goods to one on services), which resonates with some other ideas I’ve had.

This, in essence, is what I see Chris Anderson doing. His new “The Long Tail” blog isn’t merely ancillary to his eventual book; rather, it’s a distinct and separate first step in a project that is greater than any one book, his project to build and “own” an idea, with potential rewards that far surpass mere book sales.

SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” border=“0” style=“float:left; margin:5px;” /> About a week ago, I received a copy of Jennifer Traig‘s new memoir,

Devil in the Details : Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. You can read the basics elsewhere – basically, the book’s blurb frames it as a story about a girl growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder who latches onto the elaborate practice of Jewish ritual (particularly the kosher laws) in a funny yet unhealthy way.


That’s kind of what happens in the book, but the plot isn’t ultimately what matters here. Traig bounces back and forth chronologically, and it’s difficult to find a straightforward narrative – anecdotes are superficially clustered together around a given theme (laid out in the beginning of each chapter), but she just sort of roams through her childhood, telling entertaining stories and laughing along with us at her own exploits.


In terms of the writing, this is a damned funny book, plain and simple. Traig nails an authorial voice that echoes the amused mortification of David Sedaris, and the portrait she paints of her home life crackles with vitality. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that she never really lets down her guard and stops laughing at herself long enough to take herself seriously, which is a shame because buried in this book is a hyperbolic example of a problem that many (if not most) younger Jews face today.


Traig introduces herself as a girl who grew up in a town with no real Jewish community, in a home which was, in many ways, conflicted about religion, and when she began to try to figure out her Jewish identity, she was more or less on her own. Of course, her particular spiritual journey (at least, as she frames it) was driven less by a desire to explore the religion than by an unhealthy obsession with practice, but by emphasizing practice to the point that it becomes meaningless outside of her own idiosyncratic blend of tics and compulsions, she highlights the tension between doing things and the underlying reasons for doing things.


This is something that is more than just a laughing matter, and something which I’d wager resonates as strongly with other Jews my age as it did with me. We grow up as minorities, aware that we’re different somehow; wanting to be like everyone else and yet not comfortable with the idea of completely assimilating. Traig’s memoir reminded me of Lisa Schiffman’s recent book Generation J, which chronicles the author’s attempt to reconcile her own ambivalence about being Jewish and doing Jewish, and the two books complement each other nicely. The difference here is that Traig wasn’t acting purely rationally – she avoided mixing milk and meat, or doing work on shabbat, because these rules offered a justification for her OCD. Her story is food for thought, reminding us that most of us are making an actual choice to practice (or not practice) religion by introducing us to an endearingly odd young girl who didn’t have that luxury.