Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Darnton: The Library in the New Age

Robert Darnton has a new book out The Case for Books and it touches on the issue of “google and the future of the book” (and the library.) There is an essay by Darnton in The New York Review of Books (v. 55, n. 10, June 12, 2008) that covers some of the ground. The essay is titled, “The Library in the New Age” and it argues,

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital repositories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

ISP Quarrel Partitions Internet: Wired.com

Wired.com has an interesting story about how an ISP Quarrel Partitions Internet. Cogent Communications, a US-based ISP shut down all connection with a Swedish ISP, Telia that made it impossible for Cogent customers to reach Telia customers on the Internet and vice-versa. And we thought the Internet was designed to bypass blockage! It turns out certain ISPs can arbitrarily block interconnection when in commercial disputes. They can do this by de-peering to disconnect from another ISP and then packet filtering of those packets that work their way through other channels.

This raises questions about the standard story of the Internet that presents packet-switching as a technology that makes it impossible for the Internet to be censored. As we have discovered under the general rubric of net neutrality, the ISPs now have the technology to block, slow, and filter packets (and have done so.) Thanks to Nancy for this.

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

SlightlyMorbid: Emergency notification system

Not long ago I blogged about death and your online identity. Now I’ve come across a service called SlightlyMorbid which will send prepared messages to contacts when they are contacted by a trusted party. It is a sort of dead-man’s switch for a bunch of last emails to your online friends who wouldn’t otherwise hear of your death. Great name for a service, though.

Street fighting, Earth’s calmest spot, e-mail rudeness

The Globe and Mail today (Thursday, Sept. 3rd, 2009) have an interesting tidbit on e-mail rudeness in the SOCIAL STUDIES column on Street fighting, Earth’s calmest spot, e-mail rudeness.

E-mail rudeness

Vicki Walker was forced out of her job as an accountant at a health-care company in Auckland, N.Z., after colleagues complained her e-mails were too “shouty” and confrontational. A tribunal heard that she spread disharmony among her co-workers by sending missives with entire sentences in capital letters. She also behaved “provocatively” by highlighting key phrases in bold or red, according to her employer, ProCare Health. The panel found that, while she had caused friction in her office, her conduct did not amount to grounds for dismissal. Her firm had no e-mail style guide, meaning employees could not be certain about what communications were deemed unacceptable. Ms. Walker was awarded $12,600 and plans to appeal for further compensation. (L6, by Michael Kesterton)

The New Zealand Herald has a story Emails spark woman’s sacking by Rebecca Lewis (Aug 30, 2009) with more detail including the one offensive email submitted as evidence.

Google Book Search Settlement

The Google Book Search Settlement, if approved by Judge Chin, may be a turning point in textual research. In principle, if the settlement goes through, then Google will release the full 7-10 million books for research (“non-consumptive”) use. Should get even the 500,000 public domain books for research we will have a historic corpus far larger than anything else. To quote the Greg Crane D-Lib article, “What can you do with a million books?” and “What effect will millions of books have on the textual disciplines?”

There is understandably a lot of concerns about the settlement especially about the ownership of orphan works. The American Library Association has a web site on the settlement, as do others. I think we need to also start talking about how to develop a research infrastructure to allow the millions of books to be used effectively. What would it look like? What could we do? Some ideas:

  • To be only usable by researchers there would have to be some sort of reasonable firewall.
  • It would be nice if it were truly multilingual/multicultural from the start. The books are, after all.
  • It would be nice if there was a mechanism for researchers to correct the OCRed text where they see typos. Why couldn’t we clean up the plain text together.
  • It would be nice if there was an open architecture search engine scaled to handle the collection and usable by research tools.

Update: Matt pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal on Tech’s Bigs Put Google’s Books Deal In Crosshairs.

search-cube – the Visual Search Engine

Screen Shot of Cube

Stan pointed me to search-cube – the Visual Search Engine which generates a 3D cube of images from your search results. It’s a mashup of Google image search. I’m not sure if it is more effective than just looking at the results from a Google Image search, but I like the way panels are missing so you can see through the cube to stuff on the other side.