Friday June 16, 2006

Digital, flexible paper

Take a look at http://www.plasticlogic.com/lifeisflexible.php

Pretty neat stuff. What caught my attention are the designs. Good technology alone isn't the solution to e-books. You've got to have usable designs and the bright winners of this contest clearly have good ideas and have thought about the human being actually using the device and situations in which flexible digital paper could be useful.

She frequently had recourse to digital aid

Happy Bloomsday, everyone. In honor of the occasion, I'd like to refer you to a catechistic passage about Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly from Episode 17 ("Ithaca") of Joyce's Ulysses, available in full online at Project Gutenberg. Kudos to PG, as usual, for the "plain vanilla" text that serves so many purposes so well. There's also a version broken down by episode that was copied from PG, I think, by a resourceful and helpful professor at U Penn.

Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?

What to do with our wives.

What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?

Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball, nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts, chess or backgammon): embroidery, darning or knitting for the policeaided clothing society: musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano and flute, guitar and piano: legal scrivenery or envelope addressing: biweekly visits to variety entertainments: commercial activity as pleasantly commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in a cool dairy shop or warm cigar divan: the clandestine satisfaction of erotic irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically controlled: social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals and with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity: courses of evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction agreeable.

What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?

In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of a city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political complications, internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid. After completion of laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), ALIAS (a mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture).

What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.

More on the nora project

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend a live demonstration of the nora project at JCDL 2006.  As you may recall from Amanda's previous post, the nora project aims to develop tools for detecting patterns in humanities collections.  The demo I attended was part of a presentation provocatively titled "Exploring Erotics in Emily Dickinson's Correspondence with Text Mining and Visual Interfaces".  The data source for this particular demo was a collection of about 300 letters written by Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law.  The tool is being used to help scholars in the interpretation of literary work.  You can actually launch the demo application (click on "Nora Visualization") from the nora project website.  Below is a screenshot I took this morning from the downloadable demo tool (with bogus ratings inserted by me for illustration purposes).



In a nutshell, the tool allows you to browse a collection of Emily Dickinson poems, and rate the poem on a 1-5 scale according to some predefined criteria.  The criteria in this case was the erotic nature of the poem (red is "hot", black is "not hot").  The user ratings provide a baseline for the text mining algorithm to do it's work of classifying the remaining poems as "hot" or "not hot" using a Naive Bayes algorithm.  The predicted "hot" poems are marked in purple.  The tool highlights words within the collection that were algorithmically associated with "hotness" and "non hotness", and provides scatterplots for detecting patterns over time.

The great thing about this tool is that it supports open-ended interpretive analysis, not bound to a specific collection or topic dimension.  In the future I expect to see text mining tools like this embedded as services in a variety of digital libraries and repositories.

Thursday June 15, 2006

Librarians and Search Industry

Librarians are sometimes cast as being separate or somehow removed from the IT and Search & Retrieval fields. So, when I was reading this month's Search Engine Report, I was happy to see that Search Engine Watch hires - and really seems to value - librarians ("you know, those human search engines that have helped people for thousands of years").

The Report references one librarian's search-related blog. For a large, international list of other library-related blogs, check out http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html.  

Big

Here is a search engine that takes simple search to a whole new level.

Wednesday June 14, 2006

Digital time capsules: Zittrain at JCDL2006

Yesterday I attended a fascinating presentation by Jonathan Zittrain at the JCDL 2006 conference.  His topic was "Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal".  One problem he posed is how we should deal with retracted or edited information published in the open information environment.  Sometimes information is published that is controversial (e.g. Danish newspaper cartoons controversy) or incredibly sensitive (e.g. scholarly articles on how to contaminate the milk supply).  Sometimes there is a compelling public interest to redact or retract this information because of its sensitive nature at the present time.  For content published in digital form, edits can occur silently, and digital archives can be purged from databases and filesystems.  But there can also be a compelling long term interest in preserving controversial content for historical and cultural research.

How do we deal with these competing interests to censor and archive sensitive materials?  One idea Zittrain raised is that of an archive encryption key.  Rather then destroy censored materials from the public information space one could encrypt it with a key that can only be decrypted at some point in the future.  This would function as digital time capsule, allowing scholarly access to sensitive materials at later presumably less sensitive date.

The idea is not without its problems (how to encypt on a time basis? how long to encrypt?), but is interesting nonetheless.

Monday June 12, 2006

More on Authority & Wikipedia

The topic is not new, but I appreciated this Jaron Lanier article and this editorial by Robert McHenry, which both criticize Wikipedia in terms of editorial authority and voice. Lanier lashes out at the "hive mentality" that he says drives Wikipedia and meta- aggregator websites. Ironically, I found Lanier's article through the Arts & Letters Daily aggregator site - a publication of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I agree with much of what Lanier says in terms of Wikipedia authority and bias concerns, but I don't agree that multitudes of people are consciously flocking to Wikipedia because they trust and seek out hive-generated information sources. I think Wikipedia's traffic is mostly just an acknowledgement that there is too much information out there and people are trying to simplify their search process. The same with Google. It is much easier to have one place to search for things, one place to look up quick-answer questions. And as I surfed around Wikipedia, I also had to wonder how many of the entries were created entirely through Google searches...

The 'simplification of searching' is one service issue that reference and instruction librarians see daily. From a patron's perspective, why should they have to search in X database for articles on religion and Y database for articles on engineering or psychology books. The trade-off many patrons make, of course, is to use a much simpler search tool like Google and accept (often fewer) results with questionable authority. Very different from choosing Wikipedia because of it's community-authored nature.

[Disclaimer: I do have a library bias, but NCSU's new online catalog by Endeca and Google Scholar searching services take giant steps toward simplifying the research process for our patrons.] 

Thursday June 08, 2006

ngc4lib and the localness of catalogs

A few days ago Eric Morgan spun off a new list, ngc4lib, from web4lib. This new list focuses on what a catalog is with the abbreviation
standing for Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries. Subscribe at
LISTSERV-AT-LISTSERV.ND-DOT-EDU. Already some robust discussion has ensued about
defining a catalog and whether such a category as a primary user exists. Some
of the members of the Horseless Library (Tito and myself) have subscribed. I
should add that Eric Morgan once upon a time worked here at NCSU though before my
time so I've never met him.


Sone of the questions being debated are whether a primary user exists for a
given catalog and what makes a catalog unique from other search tools. What is
getting lost in the discussion a bit is the word local. Much is being made of
comparisons to Amazon and other completely public and open tools with some
commentators stating that there is no such thing as a primary user. I disagree.



The easy thing is to state that there are primary local user communities
attached to libraries, be they faculty, staff, and students for an academic
setting like here or residents who reside in a given town for a public library.
If user groups outside of those primary groups benefit from a catalog, that is
nice, but it is certainly not essential. What I think commentators who say
there is no primary user are really arguing for is a type of interface design
that promotes ease of widespread usage - no one needs to be taught how to use
Amazon or shop Wal-Mart.


However, our situation in academic settings is a bit more complex. I argued
yesterday that a catalog can be defined not just by its searching ability, but
by an economic dimension as well. Catalogs delineate what is locally owned or
rented or payed for and hence what some sort of privileged user group actually
has access to once the discovery part of a catalog is done. It's important to
realize - and I forgot to say this on the list - that having access does not
fully equate to immediate availability. Nonetheless, one way I tend to think of
a catalog is proof of ownership which equals some measure of access rights
(without payment) and provides services too as compared to a tool like Amazon
which simply provides proof of publication while also providing some services.


Things may get messier still as catalogs begin incorporating functionality that
Amazon and other Web 2.0 enterprises already embody. In earlier posts, we
discussed reviews and Tito said

"Relating this to an earlier discussion on the ordering of reviews, if our local library catalog included both NCSU submitted reviews, and reviews from a shared pool of user contributed
content from other universities, would it make sense to bias the display of the NCSU submitted reviews over the shared reviews?  One can imagine a system that would gracefully degrade from local to global display.  Such a bias would be easy to build in, but would it be desirable?

This idea has potential relevance for other types of user contributed content such as book lists, tags, annotations, etc.  How important is the local institution in these contexts?"

So I have two questions: Just how local should a catalog be?
And just how important is the localness of a catalog as opposed to the
universality of an Amazon or WorldCat?

Friday June 02, 2006

Microsoft research in search awards announced

You may have previously heard about the "Accelerating Search in Academic Research Awards" offered by Microsoft to further research in the search field.  Well, here are the first 12 winners of these awards.

More on reviews, specifically for libraries

John Blyberg, of the Ann Arbor District Library, recently posted some interesting comments on the idea of a shared repository of user contributed content (including reviews) for all libraries to use.

I?m all for it?but with some caution. Isn?t that what Amazon is now? If
you take away the e-commerce, Amazon is a collection of reviews, tags,
and ratings on an insanely large amount of material. Interesting?
Indeed. Useful? Of course. But I feel the need to point out that
libraries are community-based institutions. They are supported by local
taxpayers and are run, mostly, by members of the communities they
serve. As such, wouldn?t we want any social element that is
incorporated into our OPAC to reflect the tastes and opinions and
personality of our community?

I take his point to be that access to globally available content is nice, but local contributed content is more valuable.  This makes sense to me in the public library context.

Does it make in the academic library context?  Relating this to an earlier discussion on the ordering of reviews, if our local library catalog included both NCSU submitted reviews, and reviews from a shared pool of user contributed content from other universities, would it make sense to bias the display of the NCSU submitted reviews over the shared reviews?  One can imagine a system that would gracefully degrade from local to global display.  Such a bias would be easy to build in, but would it be desirable?

This idea has potential relevance for other types of user contributed content such as book lists, tags, annotations, etc.  How important is the local institution in these contexts?

Of related interest is Clay Shirky's idea of situated software.

Thursday June 01, 2006

What to do with a million books

From the Issues in Scholarly Communication blog at UIUC comes an announcement of a colloquium titled What to Do With a Million Books. Proof, by the way, that a catchy title is worth a million . . . extremely valuable objects. From the call for papers:

Digitizing 'a million books' is not only a problem for computer scientists. Tomorrow, a million scholars will have to re-evaluate their notions of archive, textuality and materiality in the wake of these developments. Our familiar modes of scholarly edition, analysis, interpretation and publication are being challenged and transformed in a world where blogs and wikis are busy creating new knowledge and folksonomies are shaping our access to online archives.

Market segmentation for digital library services?

Please excuse the marketing term in the title. Lately, I've been wondering whether there is value in applying the concept of "market segmentation" to universities in the context of digital library services. In other words, developing library services configured to the needs or wants of specific segments of the local university community. Higher education institutions offer plenty of available attributes for segmentation. For example:

Level:
* Freshman/Sophomore
* Junior/Senior
* Graduate

Departments:
* Nuclear Engineering
* History
* Zoology
* ...

Then there is the Biglan classification that can be used to subdivide academic disciplines along three dimensions:
* Hard vs. Soft
* Pure vs. Applied
* Life vs. Nonlife

Here is a chart that I created that applies the Biglan classfication to NCSU colleges:

Are these useful distinctions from a library services point of view?  Could these attributes serve as basis for developing targeted library portals?  See "The recombinant library: portals and people" for more information on libraries and portals.

Friday May 26, 2006

Amazon Reviews - Do user evaluations behave the opposite of the Long Tail?

Amazon does display user reviews of books in order of other
users' usefulness ratings and that mechanism is interesting for several reasons
(reviews move higher up the list based on the number of positive evaluations by
others). First, it's the same sort of technique used more or less by Google to
sort pages and by Web of Science to measure impact for journal articles.


It also distinctly creates an 'anti-Long Tail' situation. It appears that
rather quickly a few reviews are tagged as being useful by people and gain the
favored first page. The odds of these reviews ever losing this hallowed ground
becomes smaller and smaller as more people evaluate them ? especially if they
are positive. Who goes past the first page or two of reviews to look at, say
#100, when the top 2 or 3 or 5 are judged useful by dozens of people? There's
nothing inherently wrong with this phenomenon (in fact it is quite useful in
many ways), but it has me wondering at modeling this situation. Just how low is
the tipping point for viewers to tag a review as useful before it permanently
gains the favored viewing position? Reviews that are garbage (immature,
threats, profanity, etc.) get pushed out most likely, but perhaps so do
unorthodox, but legitimate and thoughtful positions.

Moreover, reviews that are late-comers to a list have a
disproportionate chance of never getting seen, no matter what their quality may
be. Once the leaders on a reviews list reach some number of reviews, it seems like
it would be very difficult to budge them off. Even if there is a separate
display for the most recent reviews, that display area is likely to offer very
ephemeral real estate and the question then becomes one of how quickly must a
new review attract enough attention to garner enough favorable evaluations to
move itself into a more favorable permanent position in the list of all reviews
for a given book? Given that the leading ?incumbent? reviews are also occupying
permanently visible ground, even a new reviews area seems to offer scant hope
for new reviews to become popular if the already popular reviews have enough of
an edge in the number of evaluations (but what that edge might be I don?t know).
And if a new review does not garner enough positive evaluations during its
short life-span as a new review, most likely this pattern damns it to permanent
obscurity in the longer list of reviews.


Now what does this all mean? Even as Amazon and other entities begin exploring
and exploiting the Long Tail, feedback mechanisms for items both in and out of
the Long Tail seem to some extent to rely on the central clustering of the
'Short Tail' or 'Short Hump or ?Big Hump' to work - and I find that intriguing.

Thursday May 25, 2006

AmazonOnlineReader

Looks like Amazon.com is provided a new interface (very similar to Google Book Search) for viewing books online called AmazonOnlineReader (example).  This is a dedicated page turner application, and does provide an easier to use interface for browsing their large page scans.  Additional features include the ability to search for text in the book, and the ability to add highlights/notes/tags to sections of text.

Perhaps of greater significance is that Amazon is offering full text online access to already purchased books with a feature called "Amazon Upgrade".  Apparently I only have two books in my account that are eligible for this service (despite having purchased dozens of books on Amazon).  The reason is that they are getting publisher approval to put these books in the upgrade program.  I think the two books in my account are out of print.

In one case the online access price is 1/3 Amazon's print copy retail price.  In the other case Amazon does not sell the hardcover new directly so charging for the scanned copy of the book is a new non-cannabilized revenue source. 

For those interested in the gory details, check out the Amazon Upgrade FAQ.

Hmmm, I wonder if/when Google will charge for online access to scanned library books.  I suppose scanning the books now gives them the option to work out a deal with the publishers later.

Tuesday May 23, 2006

My, how times have changed

Encyclopedia Britannica commercial from 1991.