Digital Library Center Blog | UF

In working on metadata concerns, we recently had cause to pull a full list of all creators in the UF Digital Collections. This is infrastructure-style work (meaning not-glorious and not-exciting to most folks, but critically important). While behind-the-scenes metadata work is only exciting to some of us, the products of that work are exciting for everyone. Long-term deliverables take more time, but in the short term we can see visualizations and other fun things like wordles.

For instance, of the thousands and thousands (and thousands) of authors/creators, Florida and University are clearly dominant, as illustrated in the wordles below.

The Robert Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a resource blog and earlier this week they blogged about the UF Digital Collections and the Between the Beads Exhibit!

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can be  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape.

The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. The current console gaming market changed in response to the Sony PlayStation 2 both because of the system and because so many had grown up with games. In the last console release, however, Nintendo showed how they got it by releasing the Wii and inviting all non-players and casual players to get into gaming and inviting existing players to learn to play in new ways. Nintendo used a disruptive technology to their advantage–investing in its development instead of in the best graphics card on the market and instead of pushing an ever-increasing polygon count, they focused on playability and leveraged it for an even greater market share and for a community of Nintendo followers.

Google announced yesterday that they’re scanning microfilm to digitize historical newspapers, which is just the latest of their work to get more content online. This could be seen as an evolutionary innovation, where Google has digitized books and now they’re working on newspapers. However, Google gets it because they make interoperable and open content. Google is digitizing whatever it can and indexing whatever it can to ensure that it has access to the most data for use by Google’s search engine and for Google’s paid services like advertisements. Google isn’t simply adding newspapers into this collective vat of information, though. Google has shown time and again that they’re adding and indexing content so that it can be faceted–for searching only by news or only by places with mapped locations–and that they’re allowing those facets to be connected together in context.

Placing content in context is an enormous task, especially when context means historical, spatial, cultural, social, and personal. Some of the existing components in traditional library records (if complete) can be extended and mined to create a basic infrastructure that can then be further enhanced, mined, and adapted for further use and this is what Google has done. This enhancement, mining, and adaptation are also what UF’s Digital Library Center has been doing for several years beginning in earnest with the Ephemeral Cities Project. The Ephemeral Cities Project began before I came to the Digital Library Center and its goals are only now beginning to be fully realized with the Map It! feature for items in the UF Digital Collections, enabled through KML becoming an Open Standard in 2008 leading to our use of the Google Maps API.

We’ve also been digitizing newspapers for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project, the same reasons Google is interested. Newspapers tell the stories of history in the making, connecting the current social and personal concerns to the larger cultural and historical movements and eras, and newspapers tell the local stories of their areas, along with the larger national and international stories of their days.

What surprises me most is not that Google gets it in terms of seeing the immediate need and the long tail future goals for massive amounts of interoperable data, but that there are so many people who got it and were working toward so much earlier than I’d have expected. In UF’s Digital Library Center alone, Director Erich Kesse first proposed the Ephemeral Cities Project in 2003 and Mark Sullivan (our wonderful programmer at the time who’s still with us as well) began developing the digital library software for users to access such data and for the digital library staff to most easily create the necessary metadata within the digitization process. I can’t say that I got it in 2003, but I’m glad so many others did so that the infrastructure is in place to help support the wonderful projects to come.

I’m also extremely happy that Google gets it in particular because they have the business infrastructure to make the incredibly tedious and expensive work of digitizing materials in context affordable and sustainable through ads which have a return on investment value. Universities return investments from society in the form of knowledge, a more educated and capable workforce and community, and through the infrastructure necessary for other advances, but in difficult economic times the investment itself becomes more difficult. Luckily for all, Google gets the full context of their investment and knows that digitized materials have more value when they can easily be used, thus ensuring greater usage. The smart business plan for Google requires keeping materials open and usable by as many others as possible,making it good business for Google to do what’s already in the public interest. Of course, Google is facing monopolistic concerns and smart business models can go bad with changes in leadership, so its smartest public institutions like universities to continue getting it and ensuring that the digital revolution brings as many benefits as it can for accessing, using, and understanding information while building the infrastructure for the next innovations be they sustaining or disruptive.

This is another news release. Normally I don’t like to re-post news since it’s already handled by RSS feeds. However,  at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester, there’s so much news with so many new people that it’s good to share to help get the word out through the clamor. The newness of the fall semester should start to quiet down in the next few weeks though.

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The Library Virtual Worlds Group at the University of Florida Libraries will be hosting a virtual lecture by Paul Fishwick, Professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, on Friday, September 12, 11am-12pm. Prof.
Fishwick will be leading a discussion on the role of libraries in virtual worlds as well as providing a tour of his recent work in Second China. Pre-lecture questions posed by Prof. Fishwick will be posted on the Virtual Worlds Group wiki by September 8.

Prof. Fishwick received his B.S. in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University, M.S. in Applied Science from the College of William and Mary, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has also had much experience working with games and simulations for learning and cognition.

Come join us in Second Life at (Cybrary City, 97 x 15 x 24; slurl), or come join us in West 212 for a live simulcast. Questions about the event may be directed to Laura Jordan.
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On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources.

Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t get in the way of the learning objectives.

Our presentation was incredibly fun thanks to the wonderful crowd, and great set up from all of STS and especially Margaret Mellinger and Barbara MacApline. We were not only lucky in the great setup for our own presentation, but we also got to see Felice Frankel’s presentation. Frankel presented on her work in scientific photography, capturing the beauty and scientific information in her photographs and then using scientific photography to aid in working toward creating a visual scientific language for scientific literacy. Frankel also spoke on how many images have become too computer-focused in many senses, and this is true. Her photographs are computational, like good flowcharts and paralleling much of the current thought on computational modeling and representation (UF’s own Paul Fishwick’s work on aesthetic computing; Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric and situational/contextual modeling for interaction/testing; James Paul Gee’s work on situational learning in games; and many others). Even with all of this wonderful work, often the computer as artifice/interface seems to encourage the wrong inds of computation where computationally cleaned/corrected is favored over computationally modeled/accurately presented. Frankel’s work is especially excellent because it offers the visual equivalent of what a sound bite should be–even a glimpse and viewers are hooked into wanting to see and know more. Frankel mentioned a number of sites that showcase her work and methodology, including PicturingtoLearn.org and ImageAndMeaning.org.

Frankel also mentioned her interest in capturing the images for a book on the “science of cooking” and I can’t wait for her to do it! So much of gaming and new media is about the appropriate design of the interface to conceal and reveal the underlying structure to generate interest and to pull players/users in at a set pace. Frankel’s work pulls viewers in through its sheer beauty and then each images teaches how to look by making us want to continue looking and understanding what we’re seeing. These ways of seeing relate to aesthetics that communicate as well as the use of metaphor, with metaphor as a reduction/abstraction of information that still remains true to the integrity of the information and the image, the need for the transparency of the interface or the exposing of the interface to show context while editing noise (unnecessary/confusing information), and all to develop images that speak to multiple viewpoints and the modeled system as a method/view. Frankel’s work essentially exposes variables in play and combining this with the additional motivation of making/playing with something tasty through cooking is brilliant. The hands-on play using concepts best known from computing within real world style crafts continues to grow rapidly in popularity, including the knitting/hacking with sites like Ravelry (thanks to Merrie Davidson for pointing this out in our Library 2.0 meetings, otherwise I wouldn’t have known to read up on Ravelry and I could have missed the story on the success of Ravelry community funding drive) and on more traditionally tech-oriented sites like O’Reilly launching Makezine and on yet other sites like Boing Boing that are technologically agnostic in their fusions of hack/make cultures.

I’m too tired and jet-lagged to write more now, but the STS session was wonderful and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Quintura offers a tag cloud-style visual search for websites, which is below. It looks really nice, so hopefully it works for all the folks who’ve been looking for something like it. Right now I’ll be testing, but it does look nice and useful so here’s hoping.

Autotechnogeoglyphics

I’m not sure how I came across the “Pruned” blog’s post on autotechnogeoglyphics, but it’s the most wonderful word I’ve seen in sme time. auto-techno-geo-glyphics sounds of steampunk, science fiction, fantasy, epic world building and world altering technology, histories of giants, and it holds so much promise, so much potential for exploration. While the definition speaks more to reality, the word speaks to fantasy worlds of stone like Shadow of the Colossus, science-fiction worlds of steel, and ancient worlds of myth and reality, of stone, sediment, and things long lost.

“Pruned” explains autotechnogeoglyphics from the CLUI newsletter as:

Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”

As an information addict, I normally value words by utility. However, there are those words that go beyond the possible into the impossible, seeking for more than they can possibly find and finding all that they can in the process. autotechnogeoglyphics is one of those; it speaks to what it is and what it could be, helping to define studies of large-scale, made-designs in the Earth, made only over time with parts intentional and parts their sum unforeseeable in their planning, and all seen only with enough correct distance. It only seems right in all lowercase, perhaps because weighting the first letter seems to give priority to the auto over the rest, or perhaps the font isn’t right for a word of this magnitude. Hopefully autotechnogeoglyphics will appear enough to find its fit for font and scale, and hopefully it will also find and share new words that similarly sing.

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.