A new issue of JoDI has been published. It includes

• an article on browsing web sites in ways designers didn’t anticipate (Exploring Out-of-turn Interactions with Websites),
• a study on longitudinal database use (A Longitudinal Study of Database Usage Within a General Audience Digital Library),
• an article that describes how a combination of  an object-oriented database and a full-text index improved performance for named entity extraction from historical texts (CONDITOR1: Topic Maps and DITA labelling tool for textual documents with historical information ), and
• an article that describes text mining for building ontologies (Text and Web Mining Approaches in Order to Build Specialized Ontologies).

This is a regular issue that follows three themed issues of JoDI, covering topics such as spatial hypermedia, social information retrieval for learning, and user-generated content for digital libraries. These, and many other, issues may be found in the JoDI archive.

I’ve been going through some of the analytic Twitter tools/sites listed in oneforty. It’s a mixed bag, as should be expected, with some nice tools. In this post, I’ll talk about TweetReach, TweetStats, and Twitoaster; the rest will have to wait.

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At Daniel Tunkelang’s suggestion, I revisited Google Squared, having written about it when it was first released. At the time, I tried a couple of queries (not a formal evaluation), and found some useful results, and some bogus ones. This time, I re-ran the same queries as before, and compared the results with my saved queries. For the query ‘airplane accidents’, the new results were considerably worse. For the query ‘acts of terrorism’, there were no initial results, but when I put in some instances (WTC attack, Oklahoma City bombing, Khobar towers, marine barracks) I got back a similar list to the one I had constructed in June.

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Social media: a bigger game-changer than the Gutenberg press? More popular than porn on the Internet?

Socialnomics has collected some very persuasive stats into this beautifully designed dynamic-text video, “Social Media Revolution.” It’s worth watching in HD, full-screen mode (you’ll need to click through to YouTube for that though). Also, some YouTube commenters take issue with a few of the stats – so I wouldn’t necessarily use this for source material. I think it’s true in essence, however.

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Evgeny Morozov about the way that governments (but particularly authoritarian ones) have embraced social media for the purposes of disinformation and control. The typical assumption that the availability of communication technology increases dissenters’ ability to communicate and  to organize is rooted in the example of the fax machine and copier that were used in the USSR to distribute Samizdat (self-published) works. The devices are different these days, but the same equation is assumed to hold: connectivity x devices = democracy. Last summer’s post-election riots in Tehran, with the attendant Twitter narration, were taken in the same spirit.

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OK, it’s a sonnet, not an ode, but still. Making Light is one of my favorite blogs, run by science fiction editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden; it has a rich subject range and a great community of commenters. I also enjoy its commenters’ tendency to break into verse at the least provocation. Google Wave (which Jeremy discussed here) was the topic of a recent post titled “Panhandling for invites” in which Abi Sutherland offers this delight:

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don’t frame.

Go here to see the whole sonnet.

An e-mail exchange with an old friend caused me to reflect on research in HCIR a decade ago: in the Hypertext conference series there was a lot of churn and innovation around ways to represent structure, about literary hypertext, and about novel interaction techniques that allow people to express information seeking intent in interesting ways. Much of that cottage garden research was swept away by the steam engine of the web, for better of for worse. The demands of scalability led to the abandonment of all sorts of niceties (such as link integrity, for example), including a rich model of interaction. SIGLINK, ACM’s SIG on hypertext, renamed itself SIGWEB in an attempt to stay relevant. The main impact of all that research seemed to be the idea that you could click on blue-underlined text to do something.

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According to a press release from Johns Hopkins (via @pentcheff), its library “received a $300,000 grant from NSF to study the feasibility of developing, operating and sustaining an open access repository of articles from NSF-sponsored research.” This grant was inspired by NLM’s PubMedCentral repository of NIH-funded medical research. This is interesting from the perspective of HCIR because if the precedent holds, this collection will be publicly searchable and downloadable, making it a good candidate as a research collection.

Another interesting–and more controversial–implication is the issue of copyright: given that a large chunk of research published by the ACM, over which ACM currently claims copyright. Will the NSF require these to be included? Will the ACM release the publications, or will it just provide metadata and keep the full papers hidden in the ACM DL? It will be interesting to see how JHU goes about identifying the stakeholders for this activity.

A quick pointer to a workshop sponsored by SDForum’s Virtual Worlds SIG  (which I co-chair along with Bob Ketner of The Tech and  Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI):

The “Virtual Worlds in 2020” Workshop
Palo Alto, CA
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009

From the program description:
This is the 3rd annual “Future of Virtual Worlds” session – the Virtual Worlds in 2020 Workshop. This year it’s an interactive workshop where you can bring ideas, input, and questions for a rare, long term view of virtual worlds, at the Virtual Worlds SIG.

In just a few weeks we enter a new decade equipped with abilities that existed only in science fiction a few years ago. Although plans for using using graphical, collaborative virtual worlds predate the internet itself by many years, many advances in productivity remain unclaimed. It’s time now to take a look ahead. This workshop will produce a set of inputs showing what might be possible – along with a list of challenges to be overcome along the way over the next decade. Continue Reading

Miles Efron’s latest blog post about humanities computing reminded me of a breakout discussion we had at the BooksOnline’08 workshop about expectations of humanities scholars with respect to computation. I don’t remember everyone who was at that table, but we talked about the need to build tools for specific analyses, and how that might take someone several months to do. My take is that while we cannot (and should not) expect researchers in the humanities to create complex systems (we don’t even expect some CS types to do it!), a certain proficiency with scripting should be a desirable (if not required) part of any Masters’ program, along side philosophy and ancient languages.

It doesn’t matter if students learn how to use perl, Ruby, Groovy, or some other language du jour; what’s important is that they gain  the problem-solving skills and the confidence to apply them to problems that interest them. Modern programming languages can be much more expressive, and modern computers are more forgiving of unoptimized code, making it easier to get stuff to work. Giving students the ability to express themselves in a new medium should improve both the scholar and the scholarship. And this applies to iSchools, too.