Scholarpedia is an alternative to the Wikipedia. It is peer reviewed anonymously. It seems to have been seeded by the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Will it fly as an alternative?
Thanks to Judith for this.
The 2001 report from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council (of the National Academies of the USA), Innovation in Information Technology, has interesting charts about how key technologies like the Internet benefited from government research support. See Figure 1. The report introduces the Figure thus,
Figure 1 illustrates some of the many cases in which fundamental research in IT, conducted in industry and universities, led 10 to 15 years later to the introduction of entirely new product categories that became billion-dollar industries. It also illustrates the complex interplay between industry, universities, and government. The flow of ideas and people—the interaction between university research, industry research, and product development—is amply evident. (Chapter 1)
Our Lives in Digital Times is a report just out from Statistics Canada. A summary is available from The Daily of Friday, November 10, 2006.
The 23 page study reports:
The paperless
office is the office that never happened, with consumption of paper at an all-time high and the business of transporting paper thriving. Professional travel has most likely increased during a period when the Internet and videoconferencing
technology were taking-off, and; e-commerce sales do not justify recent fears of negative consequences on retail employment and real estate.The paper further demonstrates that some of the key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in changing behavioural patterns, including communication and spending patterns. People have never communicated more, something exemplified by the explosion in international calling and the massive amounts of e-mails and other electronic communications. (“Abstract”, p. 4)
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are not having the predicted effects of erasing distance, creating a paperless office, ending retail, or finishing off surface mail.
The paperless society, the end of mail, the end of traditional retail and numerous other such proclamations have all been grossly exaggerated with quantification at this point in time proving them faulty.more wrong. This conventional wisdom came crashing down from the very early stages of opening up the markets. (p. 11)
Instead ICTs are enabling talk – “people communicate more than ever and their patterns of associations are wider” (p. 17). ICTs are not helping us withdraw, they are letting us spread out (sometimes too thin.)
It is interesting to note that “This paper represents a new direction in Information Society research and analysis, in an attempt to begin to address the socio-economic outcomes and impacts of ICT.” (“Note to readers”, p. 6)
Netcraft has released their November 2006 Web Server Survey and “There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006.” According to Netcraft the Internet has doubled since May of 2004!
The National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data produced a final report (PDF is here) calling for a national research data “archive” called Data Canada. This report has a deja vu feel about it as I was on the National Data Archive Consultation (SSHRC and then National Archive project) that produced a Needs Assessment Report (PDF) in 2001 and then a Final Report (PDF) in 2002. Nothing happened as a result of these, so I think SSHRC is now working with the sciences and health to make the case across the disciplines. Why do we need the sciences to make our case?
We recommend the creation of a task force, dubbed Data Force, to prepare a full national implementation strategy, and mount a pilot project to show the value and impact of multi-person and multidisciplinary access to research data. Once such a national strategy is broadly supported and has obtained appropriate funding commitments, we propose the establishment of a dedicated national infrastructure, tentatively called Data Canada, to assume overall leadership in the development and execution of a strategic plan. The plan would encompass and presumably extend the NCASRD‚Äôs recommendations. (p. 3 of the “Executive Summary”)
Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history is a site that presents a timeline of browsing history emulations of different browser interfaces. It tries to give you a sense of evolution of the interface. Of course there is the Internet Archive if you want to see old site designs.
Walter Rafelsberger sent me a note about a project similar to the Pathway project I blogged. His project is Rhizome Navigation lets one navigate a space of wiki page titles or blogs in 3d. It uses access logs so it can, I assume, show how users navigate. Very neat – try the demo.
digg.com is a social networking site whose tools are showing up in more an more spots. They have some neat visualization tools in their digg labs, including Swarm (see picture to the left.) On their About page they describe digg thus:
Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.
What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site ‚Äî want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!
Thanks to Matt for this.
Larry Sanger forks the Wikipedia reports on an initiative by one of the founders of the Wikipedia to create an alternative by taking the content and setting up an editorial system with more control by expert editors. The alternative would be called the called the Citizendium.
The Wikipedia is an important example of a social knowledge network that has stirred up a lot of controversy this year. There is a literature now about the Wikipedia and its discontents. See, for example the Request for Comments (RFC) by Alan Liu about student use of the Wikipedia. He sees 2006 as a threshold year when students started using the Wikipedia like never before.
Is it a sign of maturity when web phenomena like the Wikipedia don’t just get reported with that “gee whiz, isn’t this neat” tone, but are being really debated?
A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)
Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:
“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)
The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)
As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)
With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)
Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?
For Derrida the age of the book is passing.
This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.
For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)
I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.