Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Today we held an event at the University of Alberta around developing a new form of collaboration. Peter Robison from the University of Saskatchewan organized the day’s discussion and we had participants from across the country, though most were from the medieval editing community in Western Canada.

Peter started us off by arguing that we need intelligent documents and the way he is doing that is working with RDF. He believes “the interface is the enemy” of researchers trying to study across documents. He believes that XML/TEI isn’t enough; we need intelligent documents that carry assertions that can help other users of the data. I’m intrigued by this idea of “assertions” and I know Allen Renear has been working on what can be said about a document.

Dan O’Donnell argued that we should think about interchange rather than interoperability. He pointed out that most people want access to the data of others to do their own analysis and repurpose for their own. Brent Nelson talked about his Digital Donne project and bringing traditional researchers into digital projects. He then talked about his cabinet of curiosities project. Allison Muiri talked about her Grub Street project and legal issues around involving a larger community.

One issue that we went back and forth on was the place of interface. I’m convinced that the idea of the separation of form and content is just one assertion among many. In some situations it makes sense to talk about separating interface, in others it doesn’t.

One thing we are all struggling with is essentially the human processes. Computers are really not the issue, what we need is support for changing the research culture:

– How do you get participation?
– How do you encourage openness to interchange?
– What will our universities allow us to do?
– How will we get credit for what we are doing?
– How can we run production services or who can run them for us?

Yin Liu talked about how we are here because we have failed. This was in response to Peter’s claim that we were here because we had all succeeded. Yin also said that she would like to no longer list herself as a digital humanist but as a medievalist. The time may come when we are all digital humanists – that, of course, is the culture change we are interested in.

Meagan Timney talked about linking – linking of people, linking of digital humanities to traditional disciplines, linking to training of undergraduates. Dean Irvine talked about how to pitch editing outside of the humanities. Training became a keyword – editing is a way to train students in informatics.

We ended by brainstorming about a partnership that could bring together many of the players in Canada while providing an inclusive culture for new scholars. What could a new type of organization look like?

Nigerian scam,Scam checker tool,419 scam ,scam baiting,scammers database,scam,avoid scam mail tips and awareness

I just found an interesting site about Nigerian scams. The site has some history, it has a bibliography of books on the subject, it has an archive of example emails, and it tracks people who seem to be fraud artists. While the site at times seems to have an amateur side it has a lot of information.

I must admit that I’m interested in this as I’ve begun to think of spam as a form of creative writing. Spammers have to tell a story that will entice people to start up a dialogue so that they can ask for an advance. Who writes these stories? What sorts of people maintain the dialogue? What do these stories tell us about ourselves? Why Nigeria?

Glass

Thanks to Erik I have discovered an interesting web annotation feature called Glass. At the moment they are in beta and you have to get an invitation code to get an account, but they aren’t that hard to get.

Glass lets you add glass slides to web pages that you can invite other Glass users to see. These slides can hold conversations about a web site. You could use it to discuss an interface with a graphic designer. There might be educational uses too.

The interface of Glass is clean and it seems to nicely meet a need. Now … can we make a game with it? Can we do with it what PMOG (now called the Nethernet) was doing?

Tom McCarthy: International Necronautical Society

One of the people short-listed for the Man Booker prize is Tom McCarthy who, among other things created the International Necronautical Society. This “semi-ficticious organization” reminds me of OULIPO. They are “in our house” and recruiting. They have a lovely Joint Statement on Inauthenticity. A necronaut according to the Urban Dictionary is an “Annoying hacker and general asshole in Counter-Strike and other online games.” Or it could be someone who navigates death.

They have a Twitter feed, twitter.com/necronauts

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Malcolm Gladwell has a nice essay in the New Yorker titled Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (October 4, 2010.) He argues that social media are not well suited for sustained activism despite the stories told about Twitter and Tehran. He argues that activist movements tend to be discplined, strategic, hierarchical and built on strong ties. Social media, by contrast, support weak ties where lots of people do just a little (at no risk to themselves.) Social media are not likely to provide the strong social ties that gets people out to a sit-in. Social media don’t support the sort of strategic planning and hierarchical division of labor needed for activism. Finally, social media don’t support the discipline needed by, for example, non-violent tactics. You can’t train all your volunteers over Twitter. He concludes:

It (social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Jenkins: It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution

I came across this older article by Tom Jenkins from Globe and Mail that makes the case for investment in digital content. The article, It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution (Monday, March 2, 2009), is by Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo’s Open Text Corp. He is also on the SSHRC council.

The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution. …

Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.

This is the first public mention I’ve seen of an initiative to digitize Canadian content on a large scale. There has been discussion that OpenText (which got started with the New OED project) would support such a project. Let’s do it!

Society for Digital Humanities Papers

With my graduate students and colleagues I was involved in a number of papers at the SDH-SEMI The Society for Digital Humanities / La Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs conference at Congress 2010 in Montreal. They included:

  • “Exclusionary Practices: A Historical Look at Public Representations of Computers in the 1950s and Early 1960s” presented by Sophia Hoosien
  • “Before the Moments of Beginning” presented by Victoria Smith
  • I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure for Research in the Humanities: Expectations and Capacity”
  • Text Analysis for me Too: An embeddable text analysis widget” presented by Peter Organisciak
  • Daniel Sondheim talked about the interface of the citation from print to the web as part of a panel on INKE Interface Design.
  • “Theorizing Analytics” was presented by Stéfan Sinclair
  • “Academic Capacity in Canada’s Digital Humanities Community: Opportunities and Challenges” was presented by Lynne Siemens
  • “What do we say about ourselves? An analysis of the Day
    of DH 2009 data” was presented by Peter Organisciak
  • and I presented on “The Unreality of the Timeline” as part of a panel on temporal modeling at the CHA

As the papers get posted, I’ll blog them.

Historypin

Historypin is a very cool project that lets people attach their historic photographs to locations. It is a partnership with Google that allows images to be pinned on Google Street View and Google Maps.

I like the scale and ambition of this project – it invites a country to document itself. I also like the way they have captured the concept with a name (“Historypin”) and an image of the historic photo pinned over the current view.

More on Facebook and Privacy

For those interested, there is a fair amount of information about Facebook and privacy. See, for example the EFFs timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies. They also have a video (and instructions) on how to opt out of Instant Personalization. That’s if you can’t bear to quit entirely.

Matt McKeon has an animated visualization of the change in privacy from 2005 to now.

Jeff Jarvis has a nice long blog post on Buzz Machine on Confusing *a* public with *the* public. He makes the point that what we liked about Facebook was that we could control who our public was (who our circle of friends is.) He argues that Facebook confused our willingness to share information with a small public with a willingness to share with a large and corporate public. That is the promise of a social presence site – that it lets you control who you want to see what. Ning gets it, though the site is slow. I’ve used Ning to create family private networks.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com

From Twitter I discovered Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative on Wired.com by Ryan Singel.

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Ryan Singel is right. It is time to replace Facebook. They have decided that privacy is overrated and that their audience doesn’t care. They may be right, but those of us who do care need to vote with our feet (or fingers.) The first step is deactivating Facebook.

I’ve stayed on Facebook, despite the fact that I rarely check it, because old friends have found me on it (and it sends me an email when they befriend me.) It seems that my generation all started joining Facebook a couple of years ago and through it I got in touch with old school friends. That’s the power of social sites like Facebook – their value to us grows as more and more people join. When it was just youth on Facebook it was more of a curiousity, but now that it has become popular across generations, it is harder to quit. After all my long lost California cousins now stay in touch with me on Facebook. Thus Facebook has us where we are afraid to lose our online social presence if we close our account, which is why they can start monetizing our privacy. Singel has convinced me that they have deliberately made that choice.

For this reason I think we have to start deliberately deactivating our accounts, despite the social outcomes (which, to be fair, are not that great when you really think about it.) Deactivating is a message itself about privacy and the social that you send to others on Facebook. If enough people deactivate, the value of Facebook drops for others, which would probably panic Facebook into changing their policy. Imagine if word got out that people were dropping off Facebook – just the perception that it was no longer “the place to be” would threaten its business model. Social media depend on the perception of growth, for which reason they should fear a movement to drop out.

Now I have to figure out how to gracefully quit Facebook.