Category: Internet Culture and Technology

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.

Today is Open Access Day

Open Access Day LogoToday, October 14th, 2008, is Open Access Day which I discovered the University of Alberta library promotes thanks to Erika.

The Canadian libraries supporting OAD are listed on the Open Access Day 2008 wiki. I love the U of Calgary comment, “We’re considering options but will definitely mark the day.” U of Alberta, by contrast has a number of initiatives including a Open Access blog and a We Support Open Access (PDF) poster.

Of particular interest is the SPARC Author’s Addendum which is a form for author’s to fill out to assert their copyright when signing agreements with publishers. It basically adds an addendum to whatever agreement you are signing that asserts that you retain copyright and that you retain the right to reproduce the article for non-commercial purposes. It is a nice little “tool”. Now we need one like that for graduate students when they are signing the Theses Canada license. What would it assert?

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Stan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.

  • “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information” by Michael L. Benedikt is a reprint of a classic paper where he argues that,

    If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature” of “space itself” then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)

    That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)

  • “Toward a Definition of ‘Virtual Worlds'” by Mark W Bell is a short “Think Piece” defining “virtual worlds” as “A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” (p. 2)

These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars – or the people within the space (and persistent time.)

Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!

Image of Book CoverSo … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM – see Lohr Free the Avatars – this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando – a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)

Theses Canada: What you (a graduate student) should know

Being on the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research council my attention was drawn to the issue of what happens to theses. In my day you bound a bunch of copies and one went off to Libraries and Archives Canada where it was indexed, but could not be read online. Since 1997 it looks like they have been digitizing the theses working with contractors. Now they ask graduate students to sign a non-exclusive license that gives LAC remarkable rights. See the page for graduate students, What you should know – at the bottom is the link to the PDF of the license they have to sign which includes the following language:

[I] hereby grant a non-exclusive, for the full term of copyright protection, royalty free license to Library and Archives Canada:

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

(b) to authorize, sub-license, sub-contract or procure any of the acts mentioned in paragraph (a).

I find this language too broad. I can understand why Theses Canada wants these rights in order to be able to run a genuinely useful service that makes Canadian research accessible, but this license is just too broad, especially when enforced by universities that require all graduate students to sign it. There is provision on the Theses Canada site for graduates delaying submission (if they want to register patents, for example) and I’m guessing that most universities would respect a student’s wish to not sign the license.

There is a separate issue around copyright. Part of the License includes this:

If third-party copyrighted material was included in my thesis, I have obtained written copyright permission from the copyright owners to do the acts mentioned in paragraph (a) above for the full term of copyright protection.

I wonder if the accessibility of theses online and the terms of the License might change the willingness of other copyright owners to grant permissions to graduate students.