DailyNotes/2005/01/12

I have been reflecting in a number of different ways on the type of work I am setting out to do in 2005. First, I have written Seamless Use and Reuse of Digital Content by Scholars, a formal statement of my current and future research interests. Second, I have written more personally on the style and approach which which I like to approach my work. A number of those reflections are listed below. Thirdly, I have tried to articulate in very nitty-gritty terms the specifics of my work. See below.

Style of work

Hands-on experimentation

I think of myself as a "scholar-geek" because I create, tweak, research, reverse-engineer, and hack the software tools that I use in my own research and teaching. I delight in squeezing the utmost possible functionality from the tools and infrastructure. Not only do I hope that this utility become a routine part of everyone's toolkit, but also because I think that we can advance the entire scholarly enterprise through the creation of better infrastructure and tools.

Perhaps paradoxically, this work requires much play.

Interdisciplinary focus

In addition to being a scholar-geek, I'm also an interdisciplinarian or multidisciplinarian or trandisciplinarian (whatever the term of the day might be). And if you believe some of the knowledge pundits of the day, so is every scholar and knowledge worker: we all work across (or aspire to talk across) disciplinary lines today. I would hasten to add that interdisciplinarity hardly means the death of disciplinarity. Tools and content specialized for a particular discipline or group continue to be necessary and, in fact, foundational. But they are not sufficient. In the same way that we need to dialog across disciplinary boundaries, so it is that our tools and digital content and information also be "connectable" across the same boundaries.

Specific work for 2005

Some work for me to focus on this year:

• Writing daily or as close to daily in MyWikis and my weblogs as an integral process of anticipating, planning, reflecting on, and sharing what I'm learning and discovering.

• Becoming an active user of and driver for the ScholarsBox by hands-on work, both in creating digital documents with the ScholarsBox and allied tools and in terms of programming the ScholarsBox.

• Focusing on digital collections of bibliographic citations and images as the first types of collections with which to experiment in the ScholarsBox. In the long term, we want to create collections containing multiple types of digital content types. We will start with single content type collections to simplify the problem.

• There are so many immediate good things to do with wikis and blogs, particularly with advancing the wiki and weblogs for the purposes of PersonalKnowledgePublishing, the building of PersonalDigitalLibrary, the publishing and sharing of collections, ObjectEmbeddedNarrative. This is a hot area, with lots of interested parties looking at various pieces. Our work will probably fall in two areas: 1) just building up our conventional infrastructure in this area as a group, an activity that may or may not lead to any novel angles and 2) work at integrating our blogs and wikis with the other members of the FourDomainsOfInteroperability, which I think will immediately yield novel and useful results. Some more concrete examples? Writing macros in MovableType or WordPress or MoinMoin for easy embedding of ScholarsBox collections and links to books, scholarly articles, etc.

• Identifying in detail the large and small projects that can be taken on the move towards to the AnySourceTypeServiceIdeality. For example, hacking the clipboard, building FireFoxBrowser/BrowserExtensions that will let me highlight text in my wiki and instantly publish the selection to my blogs.

• Publishing the ScholarsBox and our various FireFoxBrowser/BrowserExtensions as out as well-documented OpenSource software so that others can help build it and use specific services.

• Participating more deeply in the work at the CDL, including CaliforniaDigitalLibrary/MetasearchInfrastructure -- but I really want to be the kid in the candy store for a bit with the CDL materials.

• Publishing our findings in various venues as appropriate, including peer-reviewed journals and conferences

• Sharing what we are learning in our meetings and my proposed BuildingCyberinfrastructureSeminar.

No doubt this list will continue to evolve, but it is a good start from which I can build.

In so many ways, I love the way that weblogs and wikis have afforded many to write for others with a very personal voice. I certainly write many sentences beginning with "I". Nonetheless, I aspire also to write a whole lot without any mention of me, me, me. Is the focus on myself a reflection of not having anything useful to say about the world at large, topics of interest to more than the few people who know me personally?

Not necessarily. Our knowledge of the world often is grounded deeply in personal experience. We often aspire to get beyond my own particular experiences, to participate a member of a larger group -- but we must often start with ourselves. Blogging and writing on this wiki represent some of those first and necessary steps.

[writing in progress...]

Whenever I think of libraries, especially one such as the CDL, I feel like a kid in a candy store. So many exquisite delectables, many more than I can possibly eat; the glee of abundance; the joy of running around. It's not the most apt image, but it is a resonant one for me.

I made a non-New Year's New Year's resolution to spend more time at the CaliforniaDigitalLibrary, doing a lot more hands-on work. Here I want to write about what this kid wants to do in the candy store this year.

In the early part of the year, the focus is clearly on MetaSearch, specifically, work on the CaliforniaDigitalLibrary/MetasearchInfrastructure. Right now, we have implementing the X-server API interface to MetaLib in the ScholarsBox. We're still figuring out some of the API but have already run into some significant limitations. An immediate priority is figuring everything that is already there and identifying what would be good changes to have in the MetaLib interface.

Work is going well on the MetaSearch front -- but I have felt the tension between really nailing down a technical issue behind bibliographic metadata interoperability (see MarcXmlToOpenUrlCrosswalk) and getting back to being a user and making collections. (as in a Scholar's Box collection of Milosz books and articles). They should go hand in hand, but it's actually hard to jump back and forth.

Other ideas:

• working with the images that are at the CDL and blending them with my own and others

[writing in progress...]

I was hoping to teach such a seminar in Spring 2005 but did not get permission to do so. I'll leave the following write-up in the hope that I'll get to teach this course one day:

---

I've offered to teach a class or seminar on the topic of "Building a cyberinfrastructure: A Hacker's Guide" (or something like that). Over the last six years I've spent at the Interactive University Project, I have learned a lot about a wide range of topics: XML, user-centric design, K-12 education, web services, weblogging, digital libraries, scholarly communication, among other things. I also have been able to teach others a great deal, though probably less than I could do with a more systematic approach, such as a class or seminar.

Now I have an opportunity I'm now pulling together a class or seminar. Because I have yet to work out the scope or format or the exact audience for the course, I want to work out my ideas here.

In my brainstorming about the course, I came up with the semi-facetious title, "Building a cyberinfrastructure: A Hacker's Guide". There has been a significant amount of attention paid to the term cyberinfrastructure recently, among members of both the science and engineering side of the house and the humanities and social science half. The work we have been doing at the Interactive University, particularly our partnership with the CDL, covers some aspects of cyberinfrastructure. I throw in the qualification "A Hacker's Guide" because I would like our seminar to take a very practical tack to the cyberinfrastucture questions. What if we had to build cyberinfrastructure today, with what we know, making the best out of what is here already? How might we hack together cyberinfrastructure (I use hacking in the positive way that hacks.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Hacks Series has: "O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term "hacking" for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own."

A few general observations:

• The audience that comes immediately to mind is a group of my colleagues at the Interactive University, in addition to allied groups and a small group of other interested folks.

• I am leaning towards a seminar over a course, at least at the beginning. A seminar not only distributes the work but is also a clearer indication that the expertise is distributed too. While I clearly have some sense of the overall themes and a reasonable handle on some of many of the technical aspects, there are huge swaths of intellectual territory for which I have only questions, if that. Learning from others is a major goal for me in this seminar.

• There are many perspectives to have on this topic, and the view on cyberinfrastructure will differ depending on whether you the CIO of a major research university, a researcher, a manager of an information technology group, a scholar who just wants to use information technology but not build it, a programmer. Acknowledging the existence of these perspectives and working with them might be fruitful. Trying to deal with too many angles of thought might also be an unhelpful distraction.

I hope to begin the seminar in early February. If we follow a semester model and go to the end of May, that would be 16 weeks. That sounds way too long for a starter seminar. Maybe I'll try for 6 weeks, meeting once a week. I want to whet folks' appetite for more, not aggravate them with too much of what they don't find useful. Let me work with both a 6 and 16 week model to flesh out my thinking.

Seminal texts

We should definitely read and study some of the "seminal texts" of cyberinfrastructure. Besides the NSF report and all the Unsworth-led ACLS work, should we include Nat'l Academies Press, Preparing for the Revolution: (2002), page 3, in chapter Executive Summary, which has a quote:

It is therefore important that university strategies include: the development of sufficient in-house expertise among faculty and staff to track technological trends and assess various courses of action; the opportunity for experimentation; and the ability to form alliances with other academic institutions as well as with for-profit and governmental organizations.

I must come back to sketch actual topics for the seminar. (Some things come immediately to mind: reading the seminal documents behind the cyberinfrastructure discourse, looking at disciplinary-based computational efforts, a study of desktop writing tools, scholarly publishing, intellectual property issues,....)

I'd definitely want folks to be mainting weblogs and wikis for the seminar to give folks a real sense of what it is like to create digital content of intellectual and social value (we hope) over some sustained period of time.

David Greenbaum is speaking at Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library Administrators. David will be talking about "developing faculty and teacher toolkits that gather and share digital content."

I'm working with David to provide attendees a reading list of "key articles, web sites, or monographs" for participants to read.

First of all, I don't think that there is one piece of writing that nicely summarizes all that we are thinking about in terms of the gathering and sharing of digital content. Obviously, there the obligatory websites: Interactive University and Raymond Yee's work blog and wiki entries on Scholar's Box. If the attendees have not yet heard about blogs and wikis, we can suggest Educational Blogging (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Stephen Downes and Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Brian Lamb. Weblogging presents very interesting possibilities for education. Chris Ashley’s article is an excellent introduction. Fall 2001: Weblogging: Another kind of website

Raymond Yee's article on the Second-Generation Web tries to draw together bits and pieces from all these elements that have informed our technical development: The sea change of the Web: What is the Second-Generation, Semantic Web?

Reading the current discussions on folksonomies and ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies can be instructive because, in many ways, it is about tensions between the institutional and the personal (themes in content development when so many have tools to develop digital content). A good entry point is Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment:

There's a useful and engaging discussion unfolding about "folksonomies" -- emergent, user-shaped taxonomies of metadata like those in Flickr and Delicious (Adam Mathes' thorough and detailed paper is here, Lou Rosenfeld offers measured dissent here, Clay Shirky fires back here).

Although Jon Udell's essay on internet-based collaboration in the sciences (Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration) is long and a bit dated, it is packed with insights, especially on the use of XML and the universal canvas in the context of the university.

The Network Really Is the Computer by Tim O'Reilly is an eloquent speech that helped us to understand the concept of the Web as a network of computational objects. Check out some of his lates writings: Read/Write Web: Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 3: eBooks & Remix Culture:

In Safari U, what we have is a framework where we have a database of 3000 books in XML. Here's an interface that lets you pick and choose what you want, re-assemble it, mix it with your own material into specific custom purposes. We're targeting right now at two markets. One is the academic and training market, where people want to put together custom training materials - that's been a request we've had for a long time. I think similarly we're seeing it in a corporate context, where a company says: I support these technologies and I want to put together a custom library. We're not really seeing it at the user level, which I think was your question.

That being said, one of the key ideas from the Creative Commons that I really embrace is the idea that all creativity is rooted in re-use. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration. The smartest thing that any publisher can do is to make sure that we allow our customers to surprise us with ways that they have remixed our ideas and our material with their own.

Lingua Franca - March 2001 | Feature: May the Course Be With You: May the Course Be With You Universities claim the right to sell classes on the internet. The faculty strikes back. by John Palattella (A good place to start in thinking about issues of intellectual property and the university is a wry and stimulating essay in Lingua Franca, which mentions prominently the University of California. )

Folks can learn more about learning objects and related standards by consulting Raymond Yee's annotated bibliography: Summer 2002: Understanding educational technology interoperability standards: An annotated resource list

Princeton historian Robert Darnton’s essay The New Age of the Book in The New York Review of Books provides one of the most inspirational images of what the Web can do for historical monographs.

---

BTW, since I am creating essentially a bibliographic/resource list, it would be cool to mark this list of resources up as a MODS collection -- but that must await another day.

MoinMoin Powered