theorywatch

from The Atlantic.

Once they figure out how to put it in a cellphone, everyone will have one of these.

Classification rules!

Despite my ongoing interest in classification as a form of theorizing (thank you, dear Barbara Kwasnik!), I don’t teach our LIS 5043 (Organization of Information) class, either, which is a very good thing, because I’d be so tempted to use this as a textbook there. So I’ll just tag this as “thing as information” and let it go at that…. (well, no, I’ll also admit I gacked it from Friday humor, which is my favorite part of the AUTOCAT listserv!)

is now available from Microsoft for Windows. How I wish it were vaporware: now I suspect that we’re in for an endless series of “ontological upgrades.” *snorts*

Just finished Johannes Fabian’s short but stellar Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, which, as I suspected, also had some useful comments for those of us who are not anthropologists, such as this one on page 121: “Playing games of classification is one thing, letting what we classify disturb our peace of mind is another. A disturbed mind is a mind alive. Likewise the purpose of commenting on text is to show that it is alive. In anthropology, to extract explanations from texts or use them for analytical exercises, the business of scientific inquiry, should not depend on treating them as corpses.” [He didn't make the obvious pun above, so I'm treating that as my commentary on his text, though I'm not sure it works in Dutch.... probably not.]

However, his comparison of the conceptualization of virtual archives as opposed to that of databases a few pages later is very “disturbing” in terms of digital collections, and I will definitely think about that more seriously now.

Since somebody else has now taken over the entertaining but entirely thankless job of creating fun fantasy questions that will never be asked in our comprehensive exams, that obviously frees me up to post other things that may be a bit more prosaic but potentially useful: such as a link to Tim Spalding of LibraryThing’s recent post on the ngc4lib listserv about the new Google Booksearch API.

For people in my Digital Collections class, this is well worth reading (and trying the tester Tim Spalding has set up at LibraryThing). In fact, those people in the class who take all of this (especially the use, re-use, and non-use of library metadata) seriously (and I hope they do!) should already be among the 2,000 subscribers that ngc4lib has. After all, this metadata is not only our intellectual infrastructure: it’s our intellectual capital.

The very talented Dr. Jian Qin came to Syracuse as a new faculty member the same year as I started there as a doctoral student, so I am delighted to recommend this companion website to her recently published book, Metadata, from Neal-Schuman for anyone interested in a great introduction to the topic.

Now—buy the book!

Hmm, interesting that this fantasy by George Dyson doesn’t even mention human-supplied metadata….. and yet that would seem to be an integral part of the plot here. Or, more interestingly, if not, why not?

I like this primarily because of their approach in using a corpus drawn from YouTube comments. (And here’s the obligatory YouTube video about it — complete with comments!)

This caught my eye, not because I’m especially interested in so-called psychogeography and other forms of pop psychology, but because I’m fascinated by the apparent finding that northeastern Oklahoma (including Tulsa, which is where I live) is an outpost of neuroticism. Hmm, rival hypotheses, anyone? (Though without the actual data supporting these “maps,” I have to admit it’s a bit difficult.) However, you don’t have to be a member of researcher Richard Florida’s so-called “Creative Class” to play this little game, I think!

5433 is coming up fast, and relevant material is coming at me from all directions. For example, I was looking at a potential addition to the suggested reading list: Brenda Laurel’s terrific book Utopian Entrepreneur, which is about her experiences as CEO and founder of the Purple Moon software company, which led me to her website which led me to her book about design research, which led me to a complementary book on user observation suggested by a reviewer on Amazon, which led me to the author’s (Mike Kuniavsky’s) blog posting on wine on an informational object, which brought me back to Morville’s concept of ambient findability, which brought me back to the class.

I’m doing a little conceptual piece on relevance in my spare time, fortunately: otherwise all this would probably make me need a little glass of wine right about now.