Told ya!

Long silence. Last quarter got so hard. Resulted in a needed reevaluation of my priorities, in which I decided to quit my job (which wasn’t really info pro related) so I could pursue my own projects in a self-directed way. Also resulted in some long overdue me time. I did whatever I wanted this break, and it was so great. I mostly read, watched various smartypants tv shows at my parents house (they have satellite tv, but I just watched Discovery, History, History International, and Smithsonian), got a little craftsy, and slept. I had forgotten what happiness was, but I remember now.

In any case, I have instituted for myself “20% time.” Mondays are my days to work on my own projects, and I’m very excited about this. I still don’t have a solid plan for what I want to look into, so I made a List of 100. Here it is:

List of 100 20% time project ideas

1. Learn a programming language
2. learn scheme
3. learn python
4. review PIM apps
5. UI study
6. perfect my soup broth
7. put together fortunes art
8. work on portfolio
9. make a recipe wiki
10. review techs
11. jog
12. celebrate
13. work on website design
14. make videos
15. study japanese
16. write japanese
17. review various applications with UI in mind
18. generate some UI oriented interviews with friends
19. learn javascript
20. camp by the moonlight
21. draw pictures
22. bake bread
23. exercise
24. write wikipedia articles
25. edit wikipedia articles
26. read some professional literature
27. evaluate some professional literature
28. make cookies
29. make a podcast
30. build a taxonomy of games
31. sew a book bag
32. draw
33. develop a better understanding of what an API is
34. understand the RSS model
35. get a solid understanding of what is meant by “data model”
36. finish Dreaming in Code
37. work on website design/layout
38. study general design principles
39. analyze music services
40. learn to play the piano
41. make amvs
42. learn about more environmentally friendly house cleaning practices
43. draw on my casual pants
44. practice/reinforce logical thinking habits
45. study rituals
46. write Hello World
47. think about ways software devs communicate professionally
48. explore KM tools for devs/engineers
49. buff up my search/reference skills
50. play DDR
51. Go outside sometimes
52. keep up with Naruto manga
53. read about games
54. finish Raph Koster’s book
55. test run other text editors
56. get familiar with Vista
57. get really familiar with MS Office 2007 (the ribbon)
58. play a little Civ (no, don’t)
59. take pictures (need camera first)
60. make a kitty blog for Zane’s kittens
61. meditate
62. find a way to display my google calendar the way I want it, with each of my calendars displayed on my desktop or as a widget.
63. look up/review other metadata schemes/-as
64. dance a bit
65. really dig in to remember the milk
66. do some reference work for friends
67. design my portfolio layout
68. get a sense of programming language frameworks
69. watch/review new anime
70. play my trombone
71. fiddle with apps
72. become a quicksilver master, prophet
73. Read the knowing-doing gap
74. draw pictures of a memex, other stuff from As We May Think
75. write silly stories about Katamari Damacy
76. dig deep deep deep into the art and architecture thesaurus
77. write code for a simple game
78. investigate design in different disciplines
79. search for employers in the northeast
80. try to figure out how to anticipate what’s coming rather than analyze what’s present
81. contribute more to other fora/lists/blogs
82. look for paths to more activity in professional organizations
83. learn more about metadata practices in pub/gov and corp libraries
84. read that consulting book
85. read fun books too
86. collect something and document it
87. learn some basic music theory
88. finish ambient findability
89. make up songs and write them down
90. explore hype machine a bit more
91. try to design a game (rudimentary)
92. test something, try to break it
93. emphasize building up over tearing down in analysis/reviews
94. work on ways to explain in lay terms all the info geekery I’m into
95. ask more questions of people
96. work on networking/conversational skills
97. see if other people do 20% time, what they do
98. still want to poke around in various systems
99. look at repositories
100. keyword penny arcade comics for easier search

Making a list of 100 is kind of hard, but in the end it feels really good to have done so. (I wonder if it’s feasible to do this in a collaborative setting.) The themes in my list are:

• Developing technical expertise and creative capacity at the same time
• I’ll have to incorporate some portfolio time so I don’t stress out too much about it
• 20% time should be regenerative to some extent, which means it doesn’t all have to be professionally oriented or specifically goal-driven
• Games are a little more interesting to me than I had originally realized
• School gets in the way of my finishing a bunch of books
• Clearly, I want to develop my analysis/reviewing skills
• My project ideas are largely solitary initiatives

This stuff sounds fun. I’m really happy I decided to do this.

Classes this quarter:

Ecological Information Systems

Catalogs, Cataloging, and Classification

Management of Information Organizations

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little conflicted about my course lineup this quarter. I had a hard time finding classes I wanted to take that didn’t conflict with classes I needed to take, so I’m a little less enthused than usual. I’m sure it’ll be fine, worthwhile, thought-expanding, etc. I just don’t see it very strongly right now.

Even though I don’t really plan on working in a traditional library setting, I’m kind of excited about my Cataloging class. I had almost developed a plan to start reading AACR2 over break, but then I realized I’d be doing it for class anyway so I held off.

Look forward to more posts on class content and whatever 20% time projects I’m working on!

Quicksilver

I use a Mac. Sweet little MacBook I’ve named Hermes, because I purchased this Mac so I could use Quicksilver. It felt a little weird to put a large sum of money down in essence for a free application to use on the product I purchased, but it really has been worth it. I haven’t upgraded to Leopard because I don’t even use my dock. All QS, all the time.

I recently started using the Shelf, which I have to say is pretty dang hot. A persistent clipboard that lets me hot-swap text on the fly in a couple of keystrokes? Sort of rocking my world right now. Except I put something on the Shelf that wasn’t right, and I wanted to remove it. And it took me about 30 minutes to figure out how to do that! On the one hand, it kind of boggles my mind that what I see as simple functionality seems so hard to get to, but on the other hand my Metadata class has done quite well in getting me acclimated to that fact, and figuring out solutions.

What all do I need to know to get QS to read items on the Shelf and move those items to the trash? At this point, I have to use my mouse to perform the function, and the mouse is evil.

A thought, as I design my experiment

When people look at the results of an image search, are they mentally performing a sorting task?

I’m looking at Fidel’s discussion of Jorgensen’s work here, comparing the describing, searching, and sorting tasks wrt Perceptual and Interpretive classes of image attributes. They are different. (Shock!)

If the state of image indexing is such that the characteristics indexers use to describe images is so different from that which they might use to sort them, no wonder I can’t find enough cute pictures of kittens.

I suppose I should keep reading.

Kick down the barrier

I just broke down a major weight dragging me down recently. I have an exit requirement to obtain my coveted degree, the portfolio. And tonight I finally sat down and looked at some samples, read some guidelines and guidance in producing it, and jotted down what I think are my good selling points, major themes to build around, and the most fabulous idea ever for a graphic (this portfolio will be website-style). I don’t know if I can pull it off, but if I can…I’m really excited about it in only the way I and other thesaurus geeks could be.

It feels really good to have that stuff largely settled. I feel released from my backburner fretting and fearing–to put it in the words of a coworker–that I’ll be homeless and live in a cardboard box failing at life if I can’t get this right.

List of 100

I was cherry picking my feed reader items (yes, I have lots of assignments due soon) and via Lifehacker I found this Lists of 100 suggestion to spark creativity. I am so excited about this! It seems like my kind of thing. I recently purchased silly Japanese stationery and now I know how I will use it.

Recently I wanted to make this blog a little less navel-gazy (it’s a word now!) and a little more production-focused. I think doing the list exercise will help with that.

Also, I had a really good Knowledge Management class last Thursday. I finally managed to put my finger on what was silently missing in our readings, and I think I made my points clear to others. People and resources don’t just magically come together to produce some innovative policy/product/etc. People make people and resources come together, and I’m interested in the details of that negotiation/diplomacy process.

I like (and ramble about) science.

Now that one of my assignments (not the lit review) is off my back for the time being, I feel like I can think freely again. It’s nice! And when paired with tea, I managed to have some reinforcing thoughts on science, social science research, and my “going through life with love” plan.

(For background, I just did a group lit review.) Social science research is great, and difficult. I like that it’s a significant influence in information science research. I think we call them user studies here, and sure I’m biased (B.A. Sociology) but I want more. We had a hard time finding some user studies (and not query data mining) regarding digital image search results, which was a bit frustrating after a while, but I can understand. I think there are two big factors that produce research intended to help improve services to people but that don’t talk to those people, which I will set out forthwith.

• Technical (by which I mean financial) limitations: These sorts of things are expensive. Finding people, finding people to talk to people, paying people, paying people to talk to people, paying people to record instances of these conversations, paying people to interpret/code/whatever. They take a lot of time and money. Also there’s a good deal of administrative hurdles to get through (and rightfully so). I mean, if you have to produce something on a deadline, it kind of is easier to theorize and publish that.
• Belief in a unified theory of everything at all times: I think there exist people who hold this belief who still value social styles of research, but still. Coming from this perspective, I can really see why one would think it’s not that important to consult actual people when constructing services/systems for their use. People do this, people do that. They want this, they want that. The general user this, the general user that. One can’t actually armchair hypothesize about “general users” without coming from the belief that people act according to grand principles that we can imagine, pursue, and implement.
  • And there are plenty of people who hold pretty strongly to the unified theory of everything at all times, and they end up not liking social research, and qualitative research more specifically. Secretly (okay, not so secretly) I think it’s because they (like me) find theorizing really fun, and that joy informs their belief systems.

Luckily, we have science! (For background, I don’t use science in a strict sense.) So we didn’t solve the world in one research effort? Try it again, this time with a different angle. Have we maybe defined some part of the world in a particular study? Test it out again, this time with a different angle. Tinker with methodology and see what comes out! To adapt the text on a shirt I really want but would feel embarrassed to wear in public: Science. It’s iterative, bitches! Maybe I should add Science to the list of concepts/deceased persons I would date if they had living human form.

And finally: lit reviews, professional conferences, etc. shouldn’t be about tearing projects and ideas down. I’ve been a mean tearer, and I’m largely over it. It’s not fun, not satisfying. I guess it’s like potato chips. Anyway, while I have periods where I’m tired of deliverables and I just want to sit and think, I do love that I get to dip into building things in my courses. This is hard work, and makes me respect and sympathize with other people who do hard project-based work. I can’t tear that stuff down, as if someone didn’t think of this or that or the other and their project it worthless or totally not applicable to me. Not anymore.

Interestingly, I also feel less and less like I can tear down critics as well. One of my cohort’s hypothetical replies to a critic was “Well what did you do?” and my first thought was “That’s not going-through-life-with-love.” (as in, the plan; not this person’s general life attitude.) A couple of weeks ago I read (via Lifehacker) a post on how to take criticism well, and it was good but it required a certain personal shift that neither I nor the post seemed to really define. Maybe I’m making that shift, and I call it my going-through-life-with-love plan? Regardless, the plan seems to be working for me. I’m much less of a tearer, but I’m no less a breaker. I still like to look at models, ideas, and some software apps and try and break them. And I see how, when I…how do I say this…inhabit my plan, I can work towards construction of a better model, offer assistance in areas that want refinement, or adapt a model for my needs. How very Wikipedia of me.

My main computer

I am scanning articles for a lit review. My eyes are not bleeding yet, but give it time! (really though, I like it. People research neat things)

Anyway, I ran across another phrase that struck me, from:

Social bookmarking, folksonomies, and Web 2.0 tools. By: Gordon-Murnane L

With respect to social bookmarking, Gordon-Murnane L says

“Links become portable. Users are no longer tied to their desks or even their laptops to access their links. As long as you have access to the Web, you have access to the links and sites you consider valuable. Not only can you access your links, you can also easily update, add, and edit new links while away from your main computer.”

I think I’m just a sliver away from not even having what I would term a “main computer.” My lappy (name: Hermes) has the furthest extent of all customizations I want, so I suppose that makes it my main computer, but I’m developing quite a set of resources on my user profile at school which I can access via SHTP, and I also have a distinct set of resources at the work computer that have certain access restrictions specific to the software on that computer. And if I had the dollars for an iphone like gadget, I’d probably make that as customized and focused as my laptop, but more focused on truly mobile apps like navigation resources, podcasts, and IM. (I’d do news/headlines but I get carsick really easily.)

This makes me curious as to what “main computer” means for other people. Funny how many of my off-the-cuff research ideas are primarily ontological and semantic. How did I manage not to major in linguistics as an undergrad? :)

Salient KM reading

Source: Dominique Foray, “A New Organizational Capability: Knowledge Management,” in The Economics of Knowledge, by Dominique Foray, The MIT Press, 2004

p. 214:  “The paradox of productivity can be expressed very simply as the delay between the appearance of new knowledge tools and instruments and the persistence of old forms of organization.”

This is textual academese expressing the content of the college education video. For srs!

Okay, back to work!

Volunteer high

Did my first volunteer session with SPL. Loved it! I didn’t change the world, but it still makes me really happy when I can show someone something, and I see the gears click together. I showed a gentleman how to find a link on a page, and how he could click on it with the mouse and it would take him to another web page, and how he could keep doing that, clicking on more and more links and it could take him to lots of new places on the web. His eyes lit up a bit as he started to see that bigger picture, and he said, “Well, I’ll be darned!”

How awesome is this!?! Could this ever get old? I doubt it.

However, I need to continue to slog through Metadata reading. The class isn’t quite what I was expecting, but still stuff I’m interested in. Right now it’s hard; this is probably the hardest class I’ve taken so far (but that’s probably because of its structure), but I suspect I like it. :) I think we’re working on the details of larger web efforts that I would like to see realized, even though I’m not totally confident that the semantic web is a realizable goal. In one of my earlier courses, the final class actually, we as a class had a discussion about information on the web. We talked about the potential for tagging and attempted to address the big heaping issue that for some people free is a good price for cataloging work despite the quality, as well as other organizing principles and OPACs and, and, and…. It was all very free form. Anyway, someone talked about how maybe books could be hyperlinked to each other in a catalog to show that they were related, and I said something to the effect of “right now, links are only on or off; either they connect one object to another or they don’t. I would like to know a little more about the nature of those links, why they’re linked, why someone thought they should be linked, and I want to know without having to spend time interpreting the two things to figure it out.” Something like that. In any case, that idea still follows me around (just like my other idea for investigating the rhetoric around resources that are professionally cataloged and resources that are collaboratively cataloged), and I see opportunities for it coming into reality through metadata on the www.

Somewhat related to the subject of rhetoric around organizing information, I saw what might become the library blog video meme du jour. Good stuff! I passed it along to my partner (as it’s so hard to find neat things within our culture and practice that I can take home) and he likes the Digital Ethnography group. He pointed me to Information R/evolution, which I hadn’t seen. I wonder when I can carve out time to look into the rhetoric stuff….

My new, most recent project: origami. Discrete tasks with (relatively) clear directions and a finished product within 20 minutes, as opposed to 10 weeks. And the coolest web resource I’ve found is Origami Club. I’ve been making pumpkins!

So productive!

What happens when I need to do some research methods reading, but I’ve had a grande mocha? I’ve finally started putting up a blogroll!

When I started this blog I had committed myself to not having everything I wanted on the site up and perfect at launch, and the blogroll was one of those things I decided to pass on until “a later date.” I’ve finally got it there, but it’s still not quite what I want it to be.

I’ve also started futzing around with the recent tags/categories distinction implementation, but I’m still not quite comfortable with it. It’s cool though, it’ll come.

As for research methods, I’ve tutored undergrads on social science research methodology (and I really enjoy it), so I’m just not very concerned. I am looking forward to dipping into stats though, as that’s a weak point for me right now.

And I’m getting very familiar with one of my personal/professional interests: computer/internet skills instruction. I had a job a few years ago where I got to do this and I found I really loved it, and the people I helped really appreciated me, sought me out, and talked to me about how their projects (which they were able to conduct with their newfound skills) were going. And this quarter (and probably for the rest of the academic year) I’m going to be volunteering with SPL on computer skills instruction. I’m really looking forward to it! Talking to people about what they want to do, and helping them become familiar with an environment in which they can achieve their goals…so great!

It was stuff like this that made me think I wanted to be a reference librarian: to save the world with individual assistance and skills instruction. Then I learned a little more about what reference is, and decided it wasn’t for me. I still really like things like instruction, tutoring, and consultation (though I could use more experience with this), just not in the reference package.

Totally unrelatedly: I’ve found that Pandora can be very predictive for some of my musical interests, as can Last.fm, particularly when I can’t express them in terms of a specific artist. However, my Daft Punk Pandora station, which I’ve seeded with Daft Punk and Justice, isn’t really producing much (though I’ve found a couple goodies on there). Same with Last.fm, except for the fact that I can’t seed a station with multiple artists (I think). What’s really strange is that recently, when I try out an artist-based station, it keeps feeding me Chromeo. And I don’t know how I feel about that (or them).

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Now playing on Last.fm: Justice Vs Simian – We Are Your Friends (Radio Edit)
via FoxyTunes