Greetings from a low-tech lair

I'm only able to write for a moment tonight. I'm staying at my parents' house, where internet access is dial-up only. So retro! On the radio this evening I heard Obama vow to make broadband accessible to all, an initiative that may help to bridge the digital divide, but still might not do much to propel technology-resistant members of my parents' generation any further into the information age. Of course, there's the question of why they need to go any further, when they're already able to do email and they profess to have no interest in YouTube or online radio. I don't presume to assert what anyone else needs; I just know my daily existence would suffer without DSL! Does that make me the dependent one?

While here in D.C. I've visited the Library of Congress (an aspirant librarian's Mecca!) and the Newseum (image inundation & sound-byte surfeit). I loved the LoC's exhibits; they always feature such thought-provoking documents and artifacts. And my favorite part of the Newseum was the collection of historic newspapers, the raw material of eventual "history." I wish I had more time tonight to reflect on these visits... maybe in a future post. For now, it's time to climb into my childhood bed and dream sweet dreams of all-digital fiber optic blazing-fast internet service!

Open source *this*!

Reading recently about both open source computing and copyright laws got me thinking about the music industry, and companies' purported rights to songs and samples, and how we might measure what's lost or gained for whom when copyright laws put limits on creativity, speech, and commerce. It seems evident to me that the only ones who benefit from tight copyright laws (and even that "benefit" is dubious) are music companies: not the artists, not music purchasers, and certainly not the general public.

I'll take the example of The Grey Album, Danger Mouse's unauthorized mash-up of Beatles songs and Jay-Z lyrics. I'm using this example because I'm an enormous fan of the Beatles' original studio recordings, and I generally don't even have much use for covers of the songs. (I'll make exceptions for, say, The Wailing Souls' amped-up reggae interpretation of "Tomorrow Never Knows" -- they infuse it really well with their own energy; check it out! -- but listening, say, to William Shatner's berserk rendition of "Lucy in the Sky" makes my ears cry.) Anyway, my point is, I have an immense respect for the beauty and purity of the original album versions of the Beatles' songs, so I can even catch a glimmer of EMI's ostensible reasoning when they absolutely prohibit any other artist from licensing a Beatles sample. Of course, their motives are unlikely to be so aesthetic; more likely they want to keep public focus on the studio stars themselves, rather than some underground mixmasters who don't "deserve" to earn money from the guitar strummings of others, funneling it from the original artists. Seems fair enough, on the face of it.

But the example of The Grey Album shows just how inapplicable such justifications for overweening copyright laws are. First of all, in this particular case, Danger Mouse made his album freely available online, so he can't be accused of profiteering. Secondly, I submit that there's scarcely a Beatles fan alive who would merely download heavily remixed versions of their songs instead of buying The White Album, but who would have bought The White Album if only those Danger Mouse MP3s weren't available. That just makes no sense, and it shows how flimsy the financial argument is in this case. As a matter of fact, a freely available version of The Grey Album could potentially serve as excellent free advertising of Beatles songs to the Jay-Z fans who might not already own a Beatles album. Why does EMI want to limit the scope of its own product?

Perhaps they would indeed say it's about musical integrity; they wouldn't want great classic songs to be associated with sub-par or amateurish overlays. That possibility bugs me too, as I hinted above, but I trust that the classics will stand on their own, no matter who does what to certain versions of them. And why should we be prohibited from hearing the vast array of new interpretations that are possible? Listening to parts of The Grey Album for the first time this evening on YouTube I was struck by the way Danger Mouse drew out the most sinuous mini-riffs of "Long, Long, Long" and looped them into their own groovily flowing backdrop; I felt delighted to hear new possibilities within such familiar samples. Then I felt anger: why doesn't EMI want me to hear that? How could it possibly affect them one way or another if I want to listen to the fruits of various artists' combined imaginations?

Of course there's a parallel to open source computing, and the ways free access to code can open up endless possibilities in computing. I love the whole concept of boundless information sharing and its implicit possibilities; I suppose that's one of the reasons I'm becoming a librarian!

I have become cyborg.

It's a strange feeling to have spent so much time indoors tapping into cyberspace on so many consecutive sunny summer days. Between my two distance-learning MLIS classes and my online editing job, it feels like I'm constantly typing, clicking, scanning, and linking. Even on the last couple of days when I've sat outside to read, my reading material has been Discovering Computers, which makes me feel like I'm online.

I do believe that all this connectivity is affecting the way I think, as well. The more technology evolves, the more it infiltrates our own malleable brains. It's part enhancement, part infestation, part mystery. I read a really interesting article about this phenomenon today:

What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

I can feel the phenomena discussed in the article: I sometimes rely on silicon memory as much as my own; often my concentration doesn't feel as intense as it once might have been; multitasking is a way of life. In casual conversation, when near my laptop, I'm wont to say things like, "That reminds me of... wait, who was the 'reciprocal altruism' guy? ... [Quickly googling "reciprocal altruism" author] ... right, Robert Trivers!" And although I'm glad for the memory boost, I'm unlikely to read a whole article that turns up. But I truly appreciate that I have the option to read not just one but 137,000 pages that pop up instantly!

I'll end this post by embedding my favorite music video, which has everything to do with the way information and technology are saturating our lives today.



(Royksopp: Remind Me)

Think like a machine

I finally succeeded in importing my reference links from Connotea, Zotero, and Del.icio.us into RefWorks, thanks to some helpful tips from classmates and blind exploration. Each of the programs was easy enough to use on its own, but synthesizing different programs created all sorts of little challenges. And I'm still baffled over why the programmers couldn't make certain tasks a bit easier: just for example, why doesn't Del.icio.us allow me to create folders? Isn't that a pretty basic element of data organization? (Or did I fail to find the way to do so?)

I've been reminded today of a mantra that my tech-savvy husband has oft repeated when working with computers: "Think like a machine." For instance, when for some odd mechanical reason my Del.icio.us RSS feed would only import my 30 most recent items, I found that the best course of action was to find a way to group the remaining items in a separate locale and do a new RSS feed, accommodating its inexplicable quirk. Since, as I pointed out above, Del.icio.us didn't let me organize references into folders, I had to find a way to group the remaining items: I tagged each remaining item with a single word ("text"), then bundled every reference with the "text" tag into a new bundle called "Text," and did an RSS feed for the Text bundle. Naturally, if I were working with a human being, a few friendly words could have clarified my intentions in far less time than the bundle project, but I admit that I actually enjoy solving machine-puzzles in creative ways like that. What a feeling of accomplishment to have found a path through the cryptic channels of techno-obscurity!

Information overload!

I've done virtually nothing all day but tag items for our bookmarking/metadata assignment. It's been interesting to skim so many different articles about libraries and digital culture, but tagging them feels a bit arbitrary; it's making me aware that even the same librarian might not tag items uniformly. And even small differences in tagging might limit a search. For example, a savvy researcher would do well to look up both the tags "digital libraries" and "digital library," or perhaps use the search term " 'digital libraries' OR 'digital library'." Of course, I realize that smart search engines (like Google) can adjust for these small discrepancies, but could a search engine also retrieve the tag "classification of information" if you only look up "data categorization"?

During this assignment I've been having unfortunate flashbacks to a week-long job I took in college (a single week was more than enough) as a data enterer. Nothing could be more boring than simple data entry -- insert disk; enter predesignated keypad code; eject disk -- it was like factory work. At least in this case I've been dealing with engaging content, searching according to my own interests, and making informed decisions about labeling and organization. Still, I admit that this assignment has given me stabs of anxiety: are certain types of library work uncomfortably close to data entry?

Open Access and Data Mining

I only recently watched all of the online videos that have been assigned for this course, and I found them very interesting. For example, the video titled Second-Generation Open Access: Building an Open Content really opened my eyes to the necessity of widespread information sharing for making progress in the health field. John Wilbanks did a great job of conveying the importance of a Science Commons in order to manage the flood of scientific information and make it accessible, as well as all the factors that stand in the way of this ideal. It’s a little ironic that economic interests are one of the factors hindering open access, while in the meantime countless redundant studies (that open access could have prevented) create so much financial waste, themselves.

I’m also interested in what Wilbanks said about data mining, such as the current use of (an admittedly flawed) semantic web language to allow fact-extraction through analysis of nouns and verbs within texts. I’m not surprised that the system is, in his words, “inaccurate and lousy,” since it’s always been so very difficult to get machines to understand human language. My husband is a professor of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language, so he has a great deal to say about the implications of the shortcomings of artificial intelligence and the elusiveness of meaning. Perhaps I’ll link to one of his published articles in my RefWorks account.

Oh no, does PC stand for "poor choice"?

The past week’s course readings seem designed to instill in me an acute feeling of Macintosh envy – something to which I’ve been prone for years, in fact, without ever making the leap to change my PC ways. I’ve heard from many people (and the readings confirm) that Macs are much better for graphic design (in which I had an interest some years ago; I worked a post-college summer internship as a graphic designer) and for electronic music composition, sound design, and sequencing, in which I’m currently developing an interest. Our recent readings showed me some of the reasons Mac software is so diverse and interoperable: for example, with various programmers able to do so many different things with assorted programs and put them on an integrated platform for the user’s simplicity, it’s no surprise that a range of creative applications are possible.

The readings on LINUX I’m finding it harder to get into, because I’ve not yet used this system. I’ve glanced at the technical terminology and such, but I still don’t have a firm idea of how it works; I’ll have to do more investigating.

Finally, I’ve also been reading more in DC2009, and learning many technical details to flesh out my computer literacy. Also interesting are some of the sidebars, especially ones that predict future technology, such as body-heat powered notebook computers: very Matrix!