Laurie N. Taylor April 4th, 2008
I’m currently at the Center for Literary Studies (CLC) Codework: Exploring relations between creative writing practices and software engineering workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, held at West Virginia University (and it’s April 3-6, 2008 and there’s more on it here). Ted Nelson, coiner of the word hypertext and media studies visionary spoke. Sandy Baldwin opened by introducing Nelson - describing Nelson as a luminary, and having him speak as astronomical - and then describing how Nelson influenced his own English practice and work.
Nelson began by explaining his preference for open ended speaking, and then introduced his new book-in-progress “geeks bearing gifts” on the false rhetoric surrounding current software. Nelson continued on, explaining that current software and applications aren’t about technology, but are really packages of conventions selected by someone, with an agenda, and mentioned OOXML as an example, that he’s been fascinated with making a document system and not the fake paper simulators we have now, and he showed latest version of the Xanadu Project (xanarama.net). Nelson’s reputation as a visionary and a great speaker are well earned, so well earned that I stopped taking notes after realizing that my notes would not do his presentation justice in the slightest. I believe the presentation was recorded, though, so once that’s posted I’ll add a link to it.
Laurie N. Taylor February 3rd, 2008
“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”
The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.
In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.
Laurie N. Taylor January 2nd, 2008
Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” told of a fictional library with every possible book. Within the vast library, all useful books and books of gibberish would be included together putting the process of finding information into a desperate state.
The rise in digital archives without a corresponding rise in organizational structures could lead to a “Servers of Babel” scenario, at least for awhile, when we’re archiving 27 exabytes (27,000 petabytes, or 27 billion gigabytes) of data in the next two years. Finding new ways to organize and create useful means for accessing this information–and finding ways to preserve decaying, deprecated, and dying files and formats–will make for exciting research and work for 2008 and beyond.
Laurie N. Taylor December 26th, 2007
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations - political, governmental, and other - have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselves and it will be more interesting to see what others do with them, using them for teaching, research, and hopefully new creative projects.
In thinking about the Queen on YouTube, it also seems like Queen Elizabeth is always the correct queen-size, being large and small enough for any format, like the always one and more of the royal “we”. While queen-sized on US women’s clothing is used to mean large or plus-sized, it’s often a normal woman’s size. Like the large-yet-normal-size known as queen-size, Queen Elizabeth seems to be sized appropriately for any media format. Hopefully, other public figures will learn from her appropriate-sizing and size themselves to speak through different media formats in the most appropriate and productive ways possible.
Laurie N. Taylor November 6th, 2007
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an post about libraries in the digital age. The post notes that digitization projects often lead to a patchwork of online materials that aren’t available within an integrated interface. This is certainly true for the time being, but steps toward integration can be seen in the WorldCat’s full catalog listings for so many different libraries and from corporations as they attempt to catalog or at least extract catalog-style metadata from information sources. For instance, Microsoft Live Labs’ pages have a note on their work on entity abstraction and the image of it is listed here. I started noticing the same sort of information in Google Search results, and here’s another sample image.
Laurie N. Taylor October 28th, 2007
This is the mindmap I made for the Baldwin Digital Library Project using Mind42, which is a new online mindmapping service. Mind42 is free and allows for collaboration, so it’s a nice service for many uses. However, I’m hoping to find something that will display the nodes in motion (like the Visual Thesaurus but I’m not looking for the search/query functionality). I want the motion purely for visual interest, but I’m having trouble finding something free and easy for use in creating the visual-motion mindmap. I’m guessing a simple Flash animation would be best for my needs, but I’d appreciate any recommendations for something that I could recommend to folks who don’t have Flash so that I can get people interested in mapping their workflows and then playing with them for efficiency.
Laurie N. Taylor October 15th, 2007
Yahoo recently improved their web search to by adding related terms and other possible searches in a directory-esque structure for general searches. The change means that general searches bring up the other concepts. This is an interesting and useful change because it will likely help people improve their searches and their search abilities by teaching people how the search works (at least in terms of the words-concepts and general hierarchy) and how to think of their terms/topics in order to get the best results.
I’m hoping this will be a great way for people to learn how to better search by searching. Because the learning aspect is embedded and helpful, and requires no additional effort, this should be really useful and really well used by many. This is also a great example of an interface being more complex and less complicated at the same time. This is elegant design because it embeds the additional material after the search instead of requiring users to see or use new information until after it benefits them.
