In the post-finals reconstruction of my life, i acquired a new bookshelf and reorganized all of my books into genre-specific clusters that make sense to me. I updated my excel spreadsheet of all books (and where they were lent). I mentioned this to a friend who suggested that i check out Library and now i’m frustrated.

There are so many things that i want a library tool to do for me, but keeping tabs on the purchase price and condition aren’t amongst them. In fact, these categories make me twitch. I’m a hoarder and my conditions are very personal and sentimental (“strawberry stains from best friend’s trip to France” are amongst them). There’s something psychologically tormenting about knowing that a tool could be made to suit my needs, but that it’s not worth the effort of converting from Excel because the actual tool for my purported use provides no advantages (and simultaneously reminds me that i don’t collect games or care about design-driven normative values about books like worth… although i did declare all of my rare books for my renter’s insurance). The secondary frustration is knowing that i could build such a tool for myself, but am too lazy and justify it by telling myself that it’s not a good use of my time or hands.

So, instead i’ll whimper and note my top two feature desires in case i get around to it later or in case anyone else is planning on building such a tool or in case i’m just clueless and don’t know of something else out there.

– Auto-fill from author name and/or title, not ISBN. How many people search Amazon based on ISBN? If i had that information, i would already have done the Amazon search. Make a good guess. And make multiple suggestions. And if you’re wrong, i’m probably just learning about a book that i needed to know about anyhow.

– Let me construct a bibliographic reference from it. The amount of time i spend manually creating bibliographies is horrid. And i never get them right anyhow.

Burt’s theories on structural holes were immensely influentual when i was writing “Faceted Id/entity.” Thus, i was stoked to read a discussion of his work in the NYTimes: Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal It Outside Your Group. The article concerns his current research on creativity and how creative people are often noted to be bridges between diverse groups. They are taking material that is not valuable to one community and making use of it elsewhere where it is exceptionally valuable.

[Note to the operationally minded: Read the logical ordering of the above statements again. Burt’s research concerns tracking creative people. This does not necessarily mean that one becomes creative by positioning oneself as bridges. Logical ordering matters.]

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In the last two weeks, i’ve attended two different gathering of minds that involved a distributed group of academics of all types, designers, pundits, technology creators, businesspeople, etc. I don’t have time for larger reviews on the discussions, but i wanted to record a few meta-notes for my own memory and for the readers’ entertainment.

Personal. I feel like the intellectual bastard child of loopy parents who never saw eye-to-eye. Maybe they got along before i was born, but i kind of doubt it. I can’t tell if my responsibility is to be the good kid who tries to help them make sense of each other or be the bad child who pits them against one another. In any case, i’m glad to have all of my parents in a room with one another, even when they’re not playing nice.

Backchanneling. I finally realized why selective backchanneling irks me. One thing that i bank on at conferences is that the attendees create a cohesive view of being annoyed with the conference. This happens because no one attends a conference for the content; they attend to talk to people. Thus, people love to find new ways to bitch about how the speakers are boring/irrelevant/valueless, the establishment is being disrespectful to the attendees (i.e. no power/WiFi), the planning is poor, things are running too long, there’s not enough food, etc. You name it, people always find a way to bitch at a gathering. And this serves a super valuable role at these meetings. It creates a point of shared context in which people can get to know one another well.

The thing about the IRC backchannel is that it’s *obvious* that there is a second-place to the conference. Thus, those not participating create another target of dislike in addition to the conference. One can despise the conference as well as the IRC channel. In most events, people don’t hate either the actual organizers of the conference or the participants of the IRC channel (since they’re friends anyhow); they simply despise the organization. With only a fraction of people participating, the IRC channel doesn’t become a communication tool; it becomes a second place. And since people are in both the IRC channel and the conference simultaneously, it means that you can’t just disregard that population – they are weaved too tightly. (You can disregard the conference attendees that just sit in the bar the whole time.)

When i bring this up to people, everyone loves to tell me that anyone could get on the channel so get over it. This *horrifies* me because it rings of “any person of color can get on the Internet so the race divide is their fault.” There are many reasons why people don’t feel comfortable on the IRC channel. It’s not their home domain; they don’t use laptops during conferences or they don’t have the skills to install the backchannel; they don’t execute well with continuous partial attention; speed typing is not comfortable…. You name it. It’s an environment that privileges those comfortable in it already. That said, i was quite impressed with the number of people that i saw engage for the first time at each event. Both non-participant groups said that they weren’t a fan of that behavior, but they were glad to be able to read it and contribute occasionally. Anyhow, i have to chew more on why this bugs me, but it still does. (In connection with Liz and Clay.)

Translation. I realize that there’s a lot of translation when you have diverse groups gather. That translation is not simply terminology, but culture and values. That said, it will never work when one group is required to defend themselves to the other, to prove their worth. I’ve learned that an event will be problematic if any group has to go on the defensive. Yet, at almost all events i’ve been to lately, there has been one marginalized group that felt that they had to prove themselves, that they had to stand up for their worth. This screws with everything.

This makes me realize how crucial the privilege conversation is. We all have situations where we are privileged, either because we’re in the majority or otherwise a part of the normative values. We usually talk about privilege in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. And we normally fail to ever convince anyone to make sense out of what it means to acknowledge privilege and try to put it down. I realize that this is a task that more people need to take up actively. We may not learn to give up privilege based on the qualities written on our bodies or otherwise part of our life-long identity, but maybe we can learn to give up privilege based on more localized, ephemeral situations. What does it mean to be in a room where there are two groups and you’re part of the dominant group? In this case, the number one responsibility of the dominant group is to do their darndest to open up and listen to the other group. Truly listen. Truly encourage. Not simply challenge to prove themselves, but figure out how to empower that group.

I can visualize what this means in a spiritual level. To use your power to blow air into the disempowered group, to lift them up through encouragement.

One of the weird things about two events that i attended is that i got to watch as the power between two groups swapped. And both group failed to relinquish their privilege to fully listen because they were too overjoyed to be in the dominant group. Lesson learned… even those of us who talk about privilege fail to check our own on a constant basis.

Anyhow, that’s enough meta mumbling for a bit.

One of my professors presented this New Yorker cartoon in his lecture. It’s *brilliant*. What does it mean to present an abstract representation of an idea and have others “read” that idea? When does conveying something work and when does it not? What are the implications of such?

“What anthropologists state is either completely obvious or utterly wrong” – Professor Grayburn in my History of Anthropological Thought class.

Of course, this statement has much more poignance than its first read. I fundamentally believe that the most powerful research is stating what might appears obvious, but only after it was said… tying together threads that no one thought to tie together before.

In one of my classes, we are working on a phone project. Basically, we are given photo phones and required to come up with an application that will rely on structuring good reusable metadata. I can’t help but get cranky at this, although i can’t tell if it’s because i actually don’t believe in metadata structures or if it’s just a good target to critique. All the same, Cory’s Metacrap rant makes me smile all too much.

For the last few weeks, i’ve been trying to appreciate the information retrieval material that is being thrown my way in my classes. For those who don’t know, i’m housed in a department called “Information Management and Systems” (i.e. what happened to librarian sciences as it evolved).

I’m utterly fascinated by how people construct and maintain information, most notably *social* information. What categories do we create to relate to others? How do we construct models of social information in our heads? How do we access this?

Needless to say, this isn’t the focus of my classes, but i’m trying to overlay my goals onto the material and find some sort of appreciation for them. [My efforts remind me of my experiences with history classes in middle school. I despised history because i couldn’t make it relevant. At one point, a friend of mine told me to twist my perspective, to think of history as one giant storybook with fascinating characters. He suggested that i tried to figure out the motives and goals of the characters. Although my school focused on dates and memorization, i latched on to the material simply because i fell in love with the storybook.]

All the same, i’m finding myself utterly frustrated. All of the information retrieval work focuses on this external data, how to categorize it, create meta-data around it, access it, etc. In the process, it gets further and further removed from the structures of the mind. The goal is efficiency and the approach is often to create systems that seem most computationally logical and than to figure out how to make humans be able to access it. While these researchers acknowledge that people need to have immense skills to follow this protocol, their approaches still seem so foreign to me.

Of course, i find myself trapped to this as well. I had to critique SecureId the other day for a fellow researcher. This was a wonderful task because i’m a bit embarrassed by my naivety on that project. People are dreadful external categorizers. But, i just keep getting stuck on how bad people are at externalizing what they do so effectively internally that i cannot appreciate these attempts to do so. I need to figure out the proper “story” so that i can find this material interesting instead of just getting caught up in my irritation at their attempts.

In class this morning, one of our professors was talking about geographical information retrieval. Information is stored in association with a given place and thus by searching for that place, one can find information. [Note that while the professor was talking about documents, and professional ones at that, i immediately translated everything to think about social information, as that’s my bent.]

There are two ways to think about information. One is simply through the lens of the material; the second is through the lens of the experience of that material. Most material is associated with an event. Even along the lines of document creation, there is the location of which the material is created and experienced in addition to the location in which it might reference.

This made think that much information is actually expereienced along three axes: place, time, person. For any given set of information, it may be experienced in multiple places, times or across multiple people.

Information impacts place; it is not just situated there. It impacts the history, the vibe and perhaps scars the space itself (marks on the wall).

Information is often felt to be ephemeral in time, as we cannot return to a given time to experience it.

Information fundamentally impacts the people who experience it. They store that experience, that information and incorporate it into their identity. Also, they are likely to recall versions of that information/experience later, regardless of its accuracy.

When we talk about information retrieval, we’re talking about reconstructing the history, removing a set of information from the time/place/people who experienced it into a current situation. Time fundamentally changes. But what does it mean to have data stored with place and people instead of in a collected repository removed from those contextual bits? Should what be retrieved simply be the factual elements of information, or the more experiential? Can we have impact retrieval?

In class today, we were introduced to the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework/methodology. I am certainly not an expert on this approach, but i’m quite curious to learn more as it’s the first direct methodology that i’ve seen to address the socio-political impacts of technology creation and adoption. All too often in tech-land, we think of efficiency and desire as our metrics of the success of a piece of technology and its adoption. But there’s so much more to how and why these items are created and popularized.

Update 11/06/03: Ack, given that this is way too high on Google’s search for SCOT, i thought i’d give some proper references on the topic. Anyone who is interested in knowing what SCOT is (not just my version) should read:

Bijker, W. E. (1995). King of the road: the social construction of the safety bicycle. In Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change (pp. 19-100). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pinch, T. (1996). The social construction of technology: a review. In R.Fox (Ed.), Technological change (pp. 17-35). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Early anthropologists belkieved that distance is equivalent to the past. Thus, the further away someone is to the European central, the more likely they are to represent the past. This is embedded in the notion of “otherness.” Of course, we no longer believe that people far from us are that (biologically) different than us, but those early thoughts fundamentally framed some of our thoughts about difference.

For most people, those far away or in a distant past feel so still fundamentally different.

What is interesting about the web is that it starts to collapse time and space. In theory, this should eliminate the notions of “otherness” but somehow, in reality, i think that it will just create confusion. I’d hypothesize that people will continue to judge others along their local notions of similarity and create new barriers to time and space that did not previously exist. Of course, perhaps i’m just being pessimistic today.