Thanks to the Tomorrow’s Professor Listserv at Stanford I cam across the
” href=”http://www.glion.org/?a=6202&p=1512″>Glion Declaration on “The University at the Millenium”. The declaration of the identified IT and alliances as two opportunities:
Two opportunities ó new alliances and the use of information technology ó now offer the possibility of expanding the range and usefulness of scholarship and providing unprecedented benefits to society.
StrangeBanana: Computer-generated webpage design is “Just Another Website” with a twist. You can see a random new design for the site just by pressing “refresh”. They also show you how to use any design you like for your own page. I got this from the Biased History of Interactive Media site blogged before.
The founders of Mackarel, David Groff and Kevin Steele, have created A Biased History of Interactive Media which has a great chapter on When multimedia was black and white which reminds me (an old HyperCard programmer) of the “good old days.” The chapter is a great little intro to early multimedia on the Mac. They mention a number of then new HyperCard stacks like Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony leading up to their Mackarel Stack, which I remember. The interface to the chapter is deliberately HyperCard-like.
Chapter 2 is about “When bevelled edges were cool” … remember those days? Shudder?
The Metacombine Multidimensional Visualization Project has been developing Java interactive visualizations for digital libraries. They use prefuse: an interactive visualization toolkit to create the multi-dimensional visualizations. They also have a good section on the dimensionality reduction techniques they use like principal component analysis.
IBM runs a ITtoolbox or “Networking Knowledge Base” for the “Professional IT Community. They have a section on Business Intelligence Text Mining with good links to papers and a link to a section on tools.
StÈfan has a blog entry on Dogpile Search Comparitor tool which produces a venn diagram of the results from different search engines. The interface, however, has a fatal flaw. You can’t link to the resulting sites that are common to more than one search engine (and presumably are the ones you want). The little pills in the middle – which stand for the shared results link to a Dogpile listing, not to the resulting site itself.
The Globe and Mail today had a section on Education with an article about A new world of digital libraries by Kate L. Barrette. The story quotes Michael Ridley, Chief Information Office and Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph to the effect that now they spend 63% of their acquisitions budget on digital resources (31% for print) compared to five years ago when it was 20% digital. That is a big change in the ratio of digital to print.
Continue reading Online Library Budgets
The paper I read every morning, The Globe and Mail has twice in the last week (today, Nov. 2, and Saturday past) had a highly designed front page focused on just one story. They are going “layout crazy” where they don’t present the news, but instead try to get attention. Why?
Continue reading Globe and Mail: Layout Crazy
Wendell Piez pointed me to an article in Ubiquity: An ACM IT Magazine and Forum with the title Why People Don’t Read Online and What to do About It. It is by Michelle Cameron (Vol 6, Issue 40, Nov. 2-8, 2005) and is short and easy to read. It nicely summarizes the reasons people don’t read off the screen and how to write for those who scan. The last guideline is:
Know when to stop writing. Like now.
Thanks to my colleague Joanne Buckley who buys hardcover novels, I just finished John Banville’s The Sea along with some of the others Booker nominees like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Reviewers like Michiko Kakutani in A Wordy Widower With a Past – New York Times are dissappointed in the choice of The Sea for the Booker prize over the other candidates and I think they are wrong.
Never Let Me Go is a light, though well written, work of “speculative fiction” (which is what Atwood wants to call “science fiction” with pretentions to high literature. The premise is not original, but the unfolding of the lives of the children cloned for organ donation is elusively written. At the end of the day it is neither particularly interesting speculation or convincing human drama.
Saturday is gripping in the beginning, but then languishes. I found myself jumping to the end. McEwan is again trying to write a literary thriller and he doesn’t quite have it. Give me Le CarrÈ’s pacing over McEwan.
The Sea on the other hand has the carefully crafted prose of Ishiguro hauntingly tripped-up by deliberate undigestible images and words. Banville is trying to go beyond smooth poetic prose by inserting disturbing anachronisms and physically repugnant images. For those of us tired of stylistics there is much to think about in The Sea.
Further, Banville succeeds at revealing precisely that polished, culture conscious, and uninspired academic who woud value crafted prose. The narrator Max is dealing with the failure of all his poise to make meaningful relationships in the face of death. Without being banal, Banville plots an educated man’s reflections simultaneously on when he came of age with his coming to terms with failed age. These reflections combine the petulant pedantry that comes with failure with a remained nose for the smell of others. A novel that will leave you flat and depressed for a weekend, but won’t leave you.