Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Globe and Mail: The big ideas of 2009

Saturday’s Globe and Mail had a full page on The Big Ideas of 2009. The listed five, three of which have to do with information technology and two with biology.

  1. Do-It-Yourself DNA
  2. The 3-D Revolution (as in 3-D movies and screens)
  3. The Age of Avatars (as in your avatars will become transportable across virtual worlds)
  4. Grow Your Own Tissue
  5. Reality Check for Social Networks (as in Social Networks aren’t getting the advertising and will lose momentum)

These ideas seem to be about the body and space with the possible exception of the 5th which is not really a big idea so much as a correction. I would like to suggest a different list around time:

  1. 3-D Social Year It’s Facebook
  2. Genome Online Networks Technology
  3. DNA Cells Web Tissue Users
  4. 000 Second Time World Human User Sites
  5. Life Canada said Ko using virtual advertising avatars

This list was generated scientifically. I took the text of the Globe story (edited it down to just the titles, text and authors), ran it through the TAPoRware List Words (with a stop word list), and then took the sequence of high frequency words in the order they appeared and broke it into phrases (without deleting any). This is a technique I learned from David Hoover who performed it at the Face of Text conference. It is surprising how often you can find suggestive phrases in a frequency sorted word list. I will let you interpret this oracle, but remember that you read “Second Time” here first. This list is what the Globe author’s really meant for 2009.

As an aside, I should say that the reason I am blogging this today (January 9th) is because Saturday’s paper (January 3rd) was delivered to our house today. I didn’t confuse things as we were travelling Saturday and the paper was cancelled until Monday. When we called the circulation desk they told us other people in Edmonton had had the wrong papers delivered. Here is the note I sent the editors this morning:

 I would like to thank the Globe and Mail for delivering Saturday’s (Jan. 3rd) paper to my house today (Jan. 9th.) As the Globe knows, we are behind in Edmonton and need the chance to catch up with all the timeless opinions gathered. It was particularly kind of the Globe since I hadn’t read Saturday’s edition as I was traveling. I managed to get half way through the paper before realizing that I was reading old news.

I do want to take issue with your list of 5 burgeoning ideas (A 10). Two of “the big ideas” have to do with the compression of space (“The 3-D Revolution” and “The Age of Avatars”) but you neglected the big ideas in the compression of time. I would suggest that the really big idea is the “New News” otherwise known as nNews or iNews. What matters in this day of personalization is what news is new to the individual avatar, and what time they are in (like the burgeoning age of avatars.) In Second Life my avatar wants second news, and today you delivered.

What I don’t understand is why we got Saturday’s paper while others apparently got Monday’s. (This is according to the kind and real human at the circulation desk who told us others got their New News too, but a different edition.) How did you know I was exactly 6 days behind?

UNESCO: Intangible Cultural Heritage

If one were to ask what cultural practices are incompatible with information technology you would come up with something like UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. ICH is the culture that isn’t material like books, paintings, sculpture and buildings. It is the folk practices and oral traditions. ICH is defined in Article 2 of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris, 17 October 2003),

For the purposes of this Convention,

1. The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments, as well as with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development.

2. The “intangible cultural heritage”, as defined in paragraph 1 above, is manifested inter alia in the following domains:

(a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;

(b) performing arts;

(c) social practices, rituals and festive events;

(d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;

(e) traditional craftsmanship.

The history of this convention is rooted in finding ways to preserve heritage that, not being material, can’t be preserved through physical preservation or representation. It is therefore concerned with preserving that which resists technologies of information.

Picture of the Tenores di Bitti

I came across this on the site of Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”, a voice group signing in the pastoral oral tradition of Sardinia that has been added to the Intangible Heritage list (as of 2008). As the UNESCO site puts it,

Canto a tenore has developed within the pastoral culture of Sardinia. It represents a form of polyphonic singing performed by a group of four men using four different voices called bassu, contra, boche and mesu boche. One of its characteristics is the deep and guttural timbre of the bassu and contra voices. It is performed standing in a close circle. The solo singers chants a piece of prose or a poem while the other voices form an accompanying chorus.

What is interesting is that this group is named after an Italian anthropologist, Michelangelo “Mialinu” Pira whose best known book, La rivolta dell’oggetto: antropologia della Sardegna (The revolt of the object: an anthropology of Sardinia) is partly about the effects of technology on pastoral culture. (The book is online.)

We will know the digital culture partly by what it is not, and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage are a bureaucratic process for defining that which is oral, practices, and local.

The Pool

Screen shot of The PoolThe Pool is a project from the University of Maine new media group, Still Water who also developed ThoughtMesh. It is a collaboration between faculty and students that provides a visual space where ideas can be described (intent), approached and released. (The metaphor is fishing and releasing.) It encourages sharing, rating, and redevelopment of ideas. The have pools for code and art.

The Pool offers a very different message. This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (learn more -> purpose)

The Chronicle of Higher Education in New-Media Scholars’ Place in ‘the Pool’ Could Lead to Tenure (Andrea L. Foster, May 30, 2008, Volume 54, Issue 38, Page A10) discusses The Pool as an alternative form of peer review for getting tenure, which rather misses the point for me. What impresses me about this is the collaboration between students and faculty in experimentation around structured collaboration. The Pool could dry up, and some of the code pools seem rather poorly stocked, but that wouldn’t detract from what seems like thoughtful and sustained experimentation with social collaboration. The wiki, Flickr, Facebook and blog models of Web 2.0 social knowledge dominate our thinking about what is possible. The Pool reminds me that we don’t have to adapt successful models, there is room for new ideas. Catch this and release it.

News Overview Inline Listing – MacArthur Foundation

Poking around the MacArthur Foundation site I found an interesting recent study on Teens, Video Games and Civics by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The full report has too much to summarize in a blog entry. Here is their list of “Summary Findings at a Glance”:

  • Almost all teens play games.
  • Gender and age are key factors in describing teens’ video gaming.
  • Youth play many different kinds of video games.
  • The most popular games played by teens today span a variety of genres and ratings.
  • Gaming is often a social experience for teens.
  • Close to half of teens who play online games do so with people they know in their offline lives.
  • Teens encounter both pro-social and anti-social behavior while gaming.
  • The most popular game genres include games with violent and nonviolent content.
  • Parental monitoring of game play varies.
  • There are civic dimensions to video game play.
  • The quantity of game play is not strongly related to teens’ interest or engagement in civic and political activity.
  • The characteristics of game play and the contexts in which teens play games are strongly related to teens’
    interest and engagement in civic and political activities.
  • Playing games with others in person was related to civic and political outcomes, but playing with others online
    was not.
  • Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing
    to discussion boards), re more engaged civically and politically.
  • Civic gaming experiences are more equally distributed than many other civic learning opportunities. (p. viii)

This study brought in the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) who have released a White Paper on The Civic Potential of Video Games (PDF) which discusses the social and civic aspects of gaming. One interesting result (also found in the Pew summary) is that it seems that teens who play games socially in person “are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone.” (p. 18) Online gaming seems to be “a weak form of social interaction” (p. 20) compared to in person social gaming. Another finding that contradicts the accepted (parental) wisdom that gaming is bad for youth is that,

The stereotype of the antisocial gamer is not reflected in our data. Youth who play games frequently are just as civically and politically active as those who play games infrequently. (p. 24)

Pew Study: Teens, Video Games, and Civics

The Globe and Mail had a story today on Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites by Patrick White (Nov. 25, 2008) that reports on a MacArthur Foundation funded study on, Living and Learning with New Media. This study looked at how youth participate in “the new media ecology.” (p. 1 of the PDF Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.) The report describes the “always on” connectivity of youth and their “friendshi-driven” practices. I was intrigued by the description of a subset who “geek out.”

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. (p. 2 of the Two Page Summary)

The Digital Youth Project led by Mizuko Ito brought together researchers at USC and Berkeley. They have a book forthcoming from MIT Press called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media that is online at the site.

Rome Reborn in Google Earth

Image of Google Rome Ever wondered what it was like to stand in the Roman forum back in 320 CE? Well, growing up in Rome and being dragged through the now hot and dusty forum I have wondered what it was like back then amny times. Now I can fly around imperial Rome thanks to a collaboration between the Rome Reborn project led by Bernie Frischer at Virginia and Google Earth. You can download the latest Google Earth viewer and relevant layers at Google Earth Rome. All that is missing is people.

This project has recieved a lot of press like the BBC story, Google Earth revives ancient Rome. I first noticed it on the Italian Google News where it made the Top Stories front page yesterday (called Prima Pagina in the Italian.) The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno even blogged it on the Google blog inviting people to tour.

The idea that virtual technologies now let people experience the city that I guide as it appeared in 320 A.D. fills me with pride — a pride that I inherited from Rome’s glorious past.

As a humorous aside, there is an interesting view to be had if you go through the “floor” of ancient Rome. Then you see the satellite view of modern Rome (flattened) below the ancient 3D model in an interesting inversion of the archaeological layers.

Screen Shot from Google Earth Rome

Here you see the distinctive design of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio beneath the model. The lines are the flags for items of interest that you can click on to get descriptions of the buildings.

Ithaka: Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka organization has released a report on the Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources with support from the Strategic Content Alliance and JISC in the U.K. The report deals with the difficult question of how to sustain all the free online resources we have built in the first enthusiasm of the web.

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success. In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot turn to lessons of the past to find their way, but must see themselves as nimble players in a quickly shifting field.

Part of the problem is that we think of the digital as if it were a grant project with a print outcome. You do the research, you develop the resources, you publish it and then you move on. Digital publication seems to be cheaper and faster than print, but the true cost is the sustainability. You can get it up faster, but then you have to maintain it forever. The report argues that the problem is that academics, as smart as they are, don’t know how to think like entrepreneurs.

Clearly the leaders of these initiatives are competent professionals; why do they not rely on processes that have proven effective in both commercial and not-for-profit contexts? We have concluded that a key reason for this is that academic researchers tend to approach these problems from a different perspective, and with a different mindset, than do commercial entrepreneurs. (Page 5)

For this reason the report presents an entrepreneurial start-up model which excludes academics who can’t focus soley on a project (which is most of us):

Running a start-up is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can. (Page 7)

This is the second time in a week or so I have heard people calling for the professionalization of academic resource development (the other time being at the Tools for Data-Driven Research meeting where the view was voiced that tool development should be taken out of the hands of the academics.) Reading the report I wonder what the role of academics in scholarly resources is, if any? It reminds me of calls for MBAs to run universities rather than academics. I wonder what it would look like to apply the logic of this report to the university itself (as a type of institution.) I think it fair to say that the university has clearly proven to be longer lasting (more sustainable) than commercial enterprises. For that matter ask how many software companies still exist ten years later (see my blog entry on In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters). To be fair I think the report is looking at models for large-scale academic resources like online journals and other non-profit resource organizations that are often run by professional staff already.  Hereis a list of their major points:

  1.  Most OAR projects should not assume ongoing support from initial funders.
  2. Sustainability plans must include and provide for resources to support future growth.
  3. OAR projects create value through the impact they have on users.
  4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers, and even acquisitions.
  5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative.
  6. OAR leaders must see both the needs of users and the competitive environment as dynamic and constantly changing.
  7. OAR leaders must become fully accountable both to their projects and to their funders.
  8. Catalysing a dynamic environment for agility, creativity, risk-taking, and innovation is imperative.

While I am skeptical of the entrepreneurial thinking the report starts with we can learn from these points about sustainability by looking at the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective still stands. We can and should think about the long term sustainability and we can learn from other perspectives.

The really useful part of the report is “Section 4: Revenue Generating Options for OAR  Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.

Alternative DNS roots

In the category of “why didn’t I think of that” I recently discovered that there are alternative DNS roots. Domain name services are what resolve domain names like “theoreti.ca” into an actual IP Address. The available root names like .com, .ca and so on are limited and you can’t invent your own like “.rockwell” without paying a lot or convincing ICANN. That’s where alternative DNS root name servers come in. Obviously there are good reasons to not use alternative roots systems. As the Internet Architecture Board puts it in RFC 2826:

To remain a global network, the Internet requires the existence of a globally unique public name space. The DNS name space is a hierarchical name space derived from a single, globally unique root. This is a technical constraint inherent in the design of the DNS. RFC 2826: IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root

That said, Guy pointed me to a blog entry on Why I use my own DNS resolvers that explains why one might want to run your own DNS service (speed) and how you can then use OpenNIC root servers to resolve alternative names.

Information Overload and Clay Shirky

Peter sent me to Clay Shirky’s It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York which starts with a chart from a IDC White Paper showing the growth of digital information. His title summarizes his position on the issue of Information Overload, but on the way he made the point that we have been complaining about overload for a while. To paraphrase Shirky, “if the problem doesn’t go away it is a fact.” Shirky jokes that the issue comes up over an over because “it makes us feel better” about not getting anything done.

I, like others, have used the overload meme to start talks and am now wondering about the meme. Recently I was researching a talk for CaSTA 2008 that started from this issue of excess information and found that Vannevar Bush had used overload as the problem to drive his essay, “As We May Think” in 1945.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think)

If Shirky is right that this is a fact, not a problem, and that we default to using it to leverage ideas as solutions, then we have to look again at the perception of overload. Some of the questions we might ask are:

  1. What is the history of the perception of overload?
  2. Is it something that can be solved or is it a like a philosophical problem that we return to informatics as a ground for discussion?
  3. Have structural changes in how information is produced and consumed affected our perception as Shirky claims? (He talks about FaceBook being a structural change for which our balancing filtering mechanisms haven’t caught up.)
  4. One common response in the academy is to call for less publishing (usually they call for more quality and less pressure on researchers to crank out books to get tenure.) Why doesn’t anyone listen (and stop writing?)
  5. What role do academics play in the long term selection and filtering that shapes the record down to a canon?

University Affairs: MLA changes course on web citations

University Affairs has a story by Tim Johnson on the latest MLA Style Manual, titled “MLA changes course on web citations”, where they quote me about the new MLA recommendation that URLs aren’t needed in citations (because they aren’t reliable.) I had a long discussion with Tim – being interviewed when they have talked to other people is a strange way to learn about a subject. In retrospect it would have been more useful to point out the emerging alternatives to URLs, some of which are designed to be more stable. Some that I know of:

  • TinyURL and similar projects let you get a short (“tiny”) URL that redirects to the full location.  A list of such tools is at http://daverohrer.com/15-tinyurl-alternatives-shorten-your-urls/
  • The Digital Object Identifier (DOI®) System allows unique identifiers to be allocated and then has a resolution system to point to a location(s). To quote from their Overview, a DOI “is a name (not a location) for an entity on digital networks. It provides a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks.”
  • The WayBack Machine grabs copies of web pages at regular intervals if allowed. You can thus see changes in the document over time.

In short, we don’t have a clear standard that has emerged, but we have alternatives that could provide us with a stable system.

I should add that the point of a citation is not what is in it, but whether it lets you easily find the referenced research so that we can recapitulate the research.