Please forgive me, Bookaneers, let's make igruffusa a verb

Hey gang,

What I'm about to do is a shameful thing, a faux pas that I will heretofore call an igruffusa, after the act itself. But, it does give me a chance to share what's going on this term, so I will do it shamelessly.

I've embarked on my great pursuit of a deeper practical understanding of information technology, I'm enrolled in a website design course, and a course on information retrieval systems . For Info Retrieval Systems, we are working on search engine optimization, and figuring out what makes a website more or less likely to be found in a web search. We made up, as a class, a nonsense word, for which there were no websites (harder than you think!) and each student group was charged with making a page and getting it to show up on Google and Bing. Where it ranks in relation to other students' pages determines our score.

For anyone who's interested in pretty basic SEO or Search Engine Optimization, check out this site that our instructor recommended: The Beginner's Guide to SEO. (Psssst, linking from other pages is one of the ways to boost your rating, hence this post. Also, click-through has something to do with ranking, too, so click on that igruffusa link up top and help a sister out.)

In other news, today is my birthday. AND, when are we having our next Bookaneers meeting? I was talking us up at some recent iSchool events. Don't make me look like a liar, team.

Land Ho

Several Bookaneers have been off adventuring this summer--which isn't quite over, but I'm (almost) back, so here I am, reporting on my own library-related experiences. Summer reading-wise I took advantage of the break to ingest some literature I'd been meaning to get around to (Cormac MCarthy? Verdict: Yes.), but not as much of the fodder for current social and political debate as some of these other posters.

I certainly had enough to think about, however; as I mentioned here before leaving, I spent a month in the picturesque hinterlands of Italy, leading a team to organize a private nonprofit library focused on architecture.* Heading out, I had my concerns, including how it would be to lead a team with little oversight (none from anyone with more library experience than myself), and the difficulty of judging the needs of a library I'd never seen, and for which we had very little information (not even a book count!).

What I found, however, was that it was a great opportunity to put into practice a lot of the principles we'd just begun touching on in last year's classes. With a tight schedule, I had to focus in quickly on what I thought we'd be able to accomplish, and get a working version of a cataloging standard visualized so that we could dive in with enough structure to ensure that we were moving towards a concrete goal. I had done quite a bit of research beforehand on different cataloging standards and organizational approaches. I know this will stand me in good stead in the future, but in the end I realized our library was small and specialized enough that it made the most sense for me to strike out and create a customized scheme myself, using only the general principles of more thorough and wide-ranging standards.

Thankfully, the three other interns I was managing turned out to be very motivated and capable, not to mention fun to work with--after only a few days, they were initiating unprompted discussions about the finer points of the library's categorization on our down time!--and the library was manageable, at a bit over 2,000 books. The time span we had to work with (four weeks, more or less), turned out to be just long enough to formulate a cataloging scheme; physically relocate the books, which were in two separate buildings (sometimes more than once...); work with the webmaster of the bibliography module we were using to fine-tune its capabilities to our needs--and those of future libraries to use the module; and enter the necessary data for each record (especially important, given the geographic dislocation between the library itself and the nonprofit headquarters, based in Seattle). One particular challenge was that we decided at least the titles of each work should be in the database in English; while much of the collection was in English, there were also significant portions in Italian, German, Latvian, and a few other languages. We had a range of linguistic abilities on the team, which came in immeasurably useful, but I know I became intimately acquainted with the useful, if at times humorous, ways of Google translate.

Of course the project evolved as it went on and now, looking back, there are things I would do a bit differently, but I'll just take this as a sign that I actually learned something. Overall I think we accomplished an impressive amount--even more than I expected--and as this was the first but not the last organizational project for NIAUSI, as well as their first attempt at using interns, we set a good precedent for the work to come. Most importantly, however, we acquitted ourselves well both in giving an accurate and useful picture of what is present in the library (including some amazing old books, and lots of personally autographed/gifted works), and in creating a structure for the library that will be useful and more intuitive for future researchers to navigate.

And Italy? That would require a blog of its own...

*The library currently has no public interface, but the organization, NIAUSI, also sponsors fellowships for travel to Italy; if you know anyone eligible for their upcoming round, encourage them to apply!

Doctorow's First Law

I know we've all been thinking a lot about copyright and its changing meaning in relation to digital texts. I think most of us have been thinking about it in terms of readers versus content providers, where readers' rights and relationship to the text are being diminished as content providers exert increasing control over the words of others.

Cory Doctorow provides an interesting fleshing-out of this struggle from an author's point of view in Doctorow's First Law.

In anticipation of the release of his new book, Doctorow has sought out publishers and content providers who will support his effort to release his work DRM-free. This is his second attempt, and after the frustrations of his first attempt, he came up with Doctorow's First Law: "Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit."

Read his post to find out what happened the second time around, and to get details on the ruling a few weeks ago that made exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Books the Bookaneers are reading (continued)

Thanks to Bookaneer Althea for initiating this post with the theme of summer reading.

I'm currently taking a full load of classes, so my summer reading has been tempered by school (ha!). Seriously though, reading stuff other than the assigned class readings is like my own personal pastime.

Let me briefly mention a book that I'm currently reading.

The book is entitled Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters. Peters is a communications scholar at Indiana University and his book is fascinating. And, let me add right off the bat, his prose is some of the best scholarly writing I've read (for example, he strategically uses short sentences that pack a punch. Whatever happened to short sentences in academe?) As the title suggests, his main thesis is to trace the idea of communication through history. Yes, how we (perhaps the western world) have thought about communication has changed quite radically over the years. Our conception of "communication" -- indeed, the usage of the word as it is commonly used today -- is a decidedly modern phenomenon. For example, Peters repeatedly highlights the erotic overtones to certain conceptions of communication; specifically, the word "intercourse" used to mean what we think of as "communication," and vice versa.

I'm only through a few chapters, but let me talk about one chapter to spark your interest. The first chapter, entitled "Dialogue and Dissemination," discusses two opposing ideas of communication through the important historical figures of Socrates and Jesus. A close reading of Plato's Phaedrus serves as the vehicle for discussing what Socrates believed made for true, transcendental communication: dialogue. Taking place during a period of transition from Greek orality to literacy, Socrates argues that forms of communication (i.e., writing) other than one-to-one dialogue are morally wrong, because (and here comes more eroticism for you) reading is like being penetrated and ventriloquized by the author. Dialogue, on the other hand, is the truest form of communication, because it allows each person to understand one another more fully (the written word doesn't respond to questions).

As opposed to Socrates' privileging of dialogue, Jesus's Parable of the Sower privileges quite the opposite. By scattering or broadcasting one's message everywhere, the speaker has more chances to "plant that one seed." In other words, for Jesus, miscommunication with most people is natural. He doesn't expect most people to understand his teachings, only a small minority. By broadcasting, one is able to more broadly distribute Truth.

I'm doing Peters a disservice in this description, because his readings of these texts are much more nuanced. Nevertheless, you get the gist of it. Later chapters discuss, for example, how the 19th century's craze of spiritual mediums (mostly women) was a historical continuation of a longer tradition of "angelology" - the study of angels - in Christianity. In addition, the spiritual mediums often described their practice in terms of the "new media" of the day - the telegraph. (New media are always accompanied by new ghosts.)

I hope I have sparked your interest. Check it out!

I look forward to hearing what other Bookaneers have been reading this summer, even in their far flung travels.

Books that the Bookaneers are reading

Before we split up fro the summer, we bookaneers discussed a reading list that we would all work on, so that we had something productive to talk about at our first meeting of the new school year. I can't remember what I agreed to read, but I brought a copy of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it to New York with me, and I'm cracking through it. I wanted to share some of my impressions so far.

In the Winter, fellow bookaneers Rachel, Freeda and I, along with our buddy Caroline, worked on a project to study the Amazon Kindle as an educational delivery tool. (The video of a presentation that we did at the iEdge conference, along with a brief description of the project can be found here) As part of our research, we read a handful of books and articles that Tarleton Gillespie, a professor of communication at Cornell, recommended to us. (As another of many asides, we read the whole of Gillespie's Wired Shut for our reading group and loved it.) The Future of the Internet was part of that list.

For the Kindle project, we mainly focused on the chapter entitled "Tethered Appliances, Software as Service, and Perfect Enforcement" in which Zittrain talks through a number of examples of devices like the Kindle, TiVo or OnStar that have been designed to resist tinkering or repurposing, and the consequences and dangers of those devices.

This time around, I've started reading from the beginning, and I'm grasping more of what Zittrain sees as being at stake in that later chapter. According to his narrative of development and innovation, generativity--which he defines as the quality of an object to be built upon, adapted, and put to many different purposes--has been the distinctive quality of modern computing that has allowed for an explosion of development over the last 25 years. Zittrain describes play, cooperation and good faith as characterizing the communities of coding behind the internet, and how productive those communities have been as a result.

Unfortunately, generativity--which requires that a device be left open to change and therefore, in some ways, incomplete--has also been the quality that has made the modern computer vulnerable to exploitation from the outside. During the years when the PC was mainly the purview of the hobbyist, this vulnerability wasn't exactly dire. But, now that we live our lives largely mediated by computers, viruses, malware, bad code and a host of other vulnerability make the generative PC increasingly worrisome and unattractive.

This is Zittrain's explanation for why appliancized devices--computerized gadgets like the Kindle or the iPod that are designed for only one purpose and that are difficult to repurpose--are gaining in popularity. Zittrain is concerned about this trend for a number of reasons, which I won't go into until I've finished the book.

So far, friends, the book comes highly recommended. But why take my words for it, eh?

If you're interested in what else the bookaneers are reading, stay tuned, I'll post a reading list soon. And maybe by fellow bloggers can say a few words about what paper or ebook is on their bedside table at the moment.

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