Infophibian

Fans as archivists

Posted on February 11, 2011 by infophibian

I love stories like this one Boing Boing reported yesterday about fans who take it upon themselves to preserve material that creators can’t be bothered to save. The BBC has decided to get rid of several websites, without archiving them. A fan has stepped in, crawled all of the sites, and made then available as a bit torrent. As commenters on the article point out, this isn’t the only example of a creator (or copyright holder) not recognizing the value of a creative work. Many of the original Dr. Who television episodes, for instance, only exist now because fans pirated copies of them, setting up cameras to film their television sets as the episode aired (this was pre-VCR) or recording the audio using a microphone and recorder. Some silent-era films only exist today because prints headed for the garbage were pirated.

I wrote a paper about this in grad school (“Pirating for Preservation”), and it remains my favorite paper/presentation that I’ve done. I think it’s a fascinating case of illegal activity–unauthorized copying–serving a legitimate cultural purpose. Of course, this brings up questions of whether creators have the right to not preserve things, and what right fans have to expect them to. I think that when you have fans as committed as Dr. Who fans, you probably shouldn’t mess with them.

I also think fans and archivists can learn a lot from each other like, what should be selected for preservation and digital preservation best practices. Archivists should treat fans as allies. (Which shouldn’t be hard: it’s not as though the two categories of people are mutually exclusive. Most archivists I know are hard-core fans of something or other.)

Quick Hit: The phonebook as precursor to social media

Posted on November 5, 2010 by infophibian

I got a kick out of this post on reason.com about how the phonebook changed the world. From the article:

They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. “Hey strangers!” anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. “Here’s how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are.”

I wonder if people complained about the phonebook back then the way the complain about Facebook now.

By the way, if you’re interested in checking out a city directory, the “phonebook” before there were telephones, your local archives or maybe your public library should have them. (In Halifax, the Spring Garden location has the McAlpine’s City Directory on microfilm going back to 1891.) They often listed the profession in addition to the address of all a city’s residents, so they’re fun to browse through if you’re interested in what people did all day back in the day.

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

Hashtags deconstructed: #speakloudly

Posted on September 21, 2010 by infophibian

The hashtag: #speakloudly

The idea: People speak out about book banning and censorship.

The background: On September 18th, a Missouri newspaper published an opinion piece by some fundamentalist Christian guy, who wanted some books removed from school curricula because they depicted some things he didn’t agree with. One of those books is Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, a novel about a teenage girl who has been date raped. Rape is upsetting! Therefore we must not let teenagers read about it! It’s a knee-jerk reaction that does a disservice to teenagers who have actually been raped. (Actually, his argument was even more disturbing, conflating rape with pornography, as if the book was written to titillate rather than expose and explore something many people need help dealing with.)

By September 19th, Anderson had posted to her blog urging people to write to school officials and other authority figures in the region. An English teacher from Indiana, Paul Hankins set up the hashtag, and conversations began happening all over Twitter and beyond.

Examples:

smolderingink I’d like to take a moment to thank Mr. Scroggins for directing my attention to SPEAK. I hadn’t read it and now I’m going to #SpeakLoudly

MsEstep From a student today, “They don’t hide the ugly stuff in history so why hide the ugly stuff in books? Life ain’t pretty.” #SpeakLoudly

missmarymax So many juvenile/ YA books assigned in lit classes marginalize or erase female voices and experiences. Defend the outliers. #speakloudly

Miss_Tammy Don’t want your kid to read a particular book? Fine. Don’t want any other kids to read it either? Not fine. #SpeakLoudly

melaniegoodman Speak is about a girl silenced by rape; book banning only silences more girls who lose the opportunity to see they aren’t alone #speakloudly

Participants: Of course, authors are getting on board to defend their trade. Librarians and school teachers, those tireless defenders of intellectual freedom, are sharing stories from their readers and students. And readers are chiming in.

Why I love it: There’s so many cool things going on here. Authors using Twitter to engage with their fans and supporters. The power of using social media for decentralized activism. Tweets are coming in from people who are donating the book to their local library or school. A coordinated book drop has been planned. Letters are being written. I love that the action is going beyond Twitter and the blogosphere (as Anderson herself points out, the people who need to hear this stuff are probably not reading it there) and into real world action. People complain about young people being politically apathetic, but young people are among the loudest voices here.

Most importantly, it’s got people talking about two really important issues: censorship in schools and teen rape survivors. The call for book banning is an attempt to silence marginalized voices (rape survivors), who will continue to be marginalized if they cannot talk about what happened to them. (In fact, that’s kinda the main point of the book. Talk about missing the point entirely, fundamentalist Christian guy.)

If you like this, you might also like: The upcoming Banned Books Week, aptly timed to start on September 25th, countering those attempted back-to-school purges (hashtag #bannedbooksweek). There’s also Canada’s Right to Know week, starting September 27th, if you are interested in our Freedom of Information laws.

Posted in Hashtags Deconstructed | Tagged activism, book banning, books, hashtags, social media, twitter | Leave a comment

Should we use social media to archive our lives?

Posted on August 20, 2010 by infophibian

I read an article today that asked if the new location-based service, Facebook Places, is a “benevolent archivist.” As an archivist myself (though not a professionally practicing one right now), I wonder this too. Especially since I sometimes use social media as a memory trigger, a way to look something up about myself.

Location and memory

Memory is tied to location in a powerful way. Think about when you go to the other room to ask someone a question, and upon getting there, forget what you were going to ask. Often, going back into the first room will jog your memory, even if the question has nothing to do with that room or the objects in it. Recently, when my partner and I were trying to remember something about a particular day, I said, “well, where did we go that day?” We both pulled out our smartphones to see where we’d checked in. Once we remembered that we’d trekked out to the mall in the suburbs to go clothes shopping, the rest of the day came back to us and we remembered what we’d forgotten (which had nothing to do with being at the mall).

I’d like a record of the places I used to frequent, so I can look back and remember them when I’ve moved away or they’re gone. That ethiopian place I used to eat at during my undergrad. All the different farmer’s markets I’ve been to, each with their own quirks. The cupcake place where I get my Friday end-of-week reward. When I remember the places, other memories come pouring back about the people I was with and the things I used to do.

Leaving a trail

Facebook statuses were originally designed to tell your friends what you were doing, (remember when “is” was mandatory after your name?) and later what you were thinking. When I first joined, I thought it was such a neat record of my life (the parts of it I wanted to display, anyway). I used to go back and read over my old updates (it used to be easier to do that without too much clicking and scrolling), but now I find it hard enough to keep up with my social networks, never mind going back and rereading.

I often feel too busy to consciously document my life. I used to save all my movie ticket stubs and go back over them to remember what I’d seen. Now I more often end up chucking them when I clean out my purse (and the paper they’re printed on these days means that the ink fades completely in a short time anyway). I used to journal, I rarely do anymore.

The reason the concept of social media as an archive is so appealing to me is that it offers a built-in way to document my life while going about the business of my life. It isn’t something I have to set aside time to do, it’s something I’m doing anyway. It’s not a contrived reconstruction of an event, like a journal entry would be, but a mixture of my thoughts with data about time, location and relationship to other people that’s automatically generated. Checking in on Foursquare, using Twitter, and updating Facebook makes me feel like I’m leaving a trail for future Nicole to find.

The problems

I wouldn’t be a very good archivist if I suggested that this was the solution. Digital files aren’t infallible, and they don’t last forever, although some folks are working on it. And then there’s the issue of custody. Who controls data about me? I’m turning it over to these sites a few sentences at a time. The trade-off for that is social connectivity. That also means I might not always have access to what I’ve written. If Twitter shuts down, I won’t be able to scroll through my status updates or search by keyword on social search sites. There’s also the issue of privacy. (This Electronic Frontier Foundation article on locational privacy is a good summary.)

Right now, social media services don’t function in a way that makes it easy to retrieve my information in an organized way. I’d love to see some kind of tool that aggregates my social media data in a way that gives a portrait of my life, with timelines, location information, links to blog posts, and other contextual information. Archivists? Librarians? Semantic web specialists? I’m looking at you.

Posted in Everything else | Tagged archives, facebook, facebook places, location, memorializing, memory, social media, twitter | 1 Comment

More tools to help me downsize my book collection

Posted on August 9, 2010 by infophibian

I wrote last month about using Bookcrossing and Bookmooch to help me get over two stumbling blocks in getting rid of book clutter: my desire to give the books to someone who will appreciate them, and my need to have a record of that the books I’ve given away, and where they went.

There are other reasons I have trouble downsizing my book collection:

I like to look at books and reminisce about when I read them.
Giving away a book I haven’t read yet means admitting that I made a mistake in buying it. (Bookmooch helps with this because I can take comfort in the thought that whoever claims my book must really want it, and once I’ve sent some books off, I can use those points to get a book I’ll actually read).
I want people to know what I’ve read so that I can impress them with my interesting and cultured taste in books.
I want people to know what I’ve read so I can bond with people who share my taste.
I’ve been given a book as a gift, and feel guilty giving it away.
The book reminds me of someone I used to be. (Examples of who I used to be: A women’s studies major, an aspiring horror writer, a bad poetry writer, someone who cared wanted to learn about art for some reason, a lot less cynical.)
It’s too big a task to face.

It takes a variety of tactics to address all these issues. Here’s how I’ve used some of the tools:

Librarything: lets you catalogue your book collection

This helped with reason #7: When I first started to downsize my collection, I joined Librarything to help me get a handle on its unmanageable size. It forced me to go through all of my books one by one. As I catalogued, I tagged books with either “keep” or “maybe.” The keep tag was only for books that I planned to read or reread in the near future, books that had immense sentimental attachment, or reference books that I consult often. Maybe was code for “I know I should give this book away, but I’m not ready to part with it yet.” It gave me a chance to hang onto those books for a little while longer, while giving me an easy way to find which titles were expendable at a later date. The few books that I was ready to give away immediately did not get catalogued.

Goodreads: A social book review site that lets you track what you’re reading and what you want to read

I’ve only just discovered Goodreads, but I love that it lets you track your progress in a book (incentive to read more!), see what your friends are reading, and make wishlists. And I love that I can see a list of the books I’ve read (reason #1 and #6), along with the dates I read them and what I thought of them if I’ve chosen to fill in that information. It’s not quite the same as flipping through the pages of a well-loved book, but the visual trigger of the cover art is close.

This also helps with reason #3 and #4 (and is a little more honest than keeping books on my shelves that I haven’t read just to impress people. “My what interesting and cultured taste she has in books she wants to read,” I imagine people will say when they see my “to read” shelf on Goodreads).

I don’t always use all of these tools. Librarything was good for helping me get my collection under control initially, but when I moved I purged everything in the maybe category. Now I just use it to keep track of my physical collection, giving away books as I read them. I just started using Goodreads, and I probably won’t go back to record everything I’ve read up until now, so that’s a missing gap in the record. And shipping books to people on Bookmooch is expensive (especially when you live in Canada), so it’s not the only way I get rid of books. (Other strategies: leaving them in cafes that have bookshelves, foisting them on friends, putting a free box outside my house, donating them.)

If anyone has suggestions for how to tackle reason #5, I’d love to hear them.

Posted in Everything else | Tagged book hoarding, bookcrossing, bookmooch, goodreads, librarything | Leave a comment

Hashtags deconstructed: #18thcenturyinternet

Posted on August 6, 2010 by infophibian

The tag: #18thcenturyinternet

The idea: common internet memes (Double rainbow!), catchphrases (“Pics or it didn’t happen!”) and frustrations (spam offerings) are translated into eighteenth century (or what we imagine to be eighteenth century) speech. “Click here” becomes “depress thy rodent hither” Farmville becomes “Farme on the Villa” and Firefox becomes “Fireyvixen.”

Examples:

The most popular one I’ve seen retweeted:
Some other fun ones:

Ideal participants: If you’re a language geek (I’ve seen some criticism from this camp that some of the tweets are written in 16th century), history geek (dragging the American war of independence in there with “America has unfriended Great Britain. France likes this,” or just a web geek you’ll fun with this one.

Why I love it: Some of them are clever little puzzles that are fun to figure out. It took me awhile to realize that “leeches” translates to “virus” (I think?), a mention of being aflame refers to flame wars on message boards. It sometimes takes awhile to reverse-translate to popular catch-phrases, so when you get them you have that “I see what you did there” moment. It’s also a good round-up of past internet memes for those of us who get nostalgic about these things: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US, that badger song (remember viral video before YouTube?), Rick-rolling, LOL Cats, Keyboard Cat… ah, memories.

If you like this, you might also like: Fake 1960s-style ads for Facebook, Skype and YouTube.

Posted in Hashtags Deconstructed | Tagged hashtags, silly, twitter | Leave a comment

What do I want to know?

Posted on August 5, 2010 by infophibian

Sometimes I don’t even try to be a smart consumer anymore. Anyone who has gone grocery shopping with me knows that I get paralyzed if I try to choose bodywash. I can never seem to remember what I bought last time or if I liked it.

I find it deeply troubling that there are so many choices. You can get bodywash with yogurt in it! But why? It bothers me a lot that I don’t know why. There is bodywash just for men, because men’s skin must be different than mine. There is bodywash with moisture beads and lotion ribbons and spermaceti* in it. It’s not just that I can’t choose, it’s that facing the array of choices makes me want to know why there are so many. I will stare at the shelf for much longer than is reasonable, hung up on this.

Too many choices means no choices at all. This paradox has been well-documented,** so I know what’s happening to me. The reason that there’s so many bodywash choices is that that’s how consumer capitalism works. That is the only reason there is yogurt in some bodywashes. The only reason.

I could do a lot of research on bodywash. I could look for magazine reviews, environmental audits of the company, any number of consumer review sites. I could even type “bodywash” into a number of Twitter search tools and look for tweets that look like legit people talking about their positive shower experiences. Or compare different brands on Social Mention and see which one rates best in the positive sentiment category. There are numerous ways of easily finding consumer information in this glorious age we live in.

Or I could let it go. I could realize that maybe I don’t need to know why there is yogurt in some bodywashes before I decide to buy it or not. I need to start asking myself some questions:

1) Does it matter? I have no allergies to sensitivities to scents or chemicals, they all cost about the same, and cynically, I think their environmental impact is probably all about the same too, so in this case, the answer is a big “nope!”

2) Is it worth my time? Will doing the research save me a lot of money? Enough money to make all the time I could be spending not reading about things like bodywash worthwhile? Will I learn something valuable? Am I really interested in this? In this case, again, nope!

When that fails, the best thing for me to do is to go shopping with a friend who will gently (or not-so-gently, as the situation warrants) pull me away when I start furrowing my brow. Or blindfold me, spin me around until I’m dizzy, and pick up the first one I point to.

This does not just apply to bodywash. It applies to a lot of decisions I have to make. Just because all the information is there, doesn’t mean I have to engage with it. It doesn’t mean that it matters. I can’t be informed on everything. Do I want to know about yogurt in bodywash, or do I want to spend my time on something meaningful to me?

_______

*That last one is not true. I hope.

**See, for instance, this book that I haven’t read and don’t intend to because it’s message has already permeated popular discourse. ***

***Citations like this show why I did not choose to become an academic.

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

The Food-Tweeter’s Manifesto

Posted on July 21, 2010 by infophibian

Whenever I end up talking with non-tweeters about why I love twitter (or why it might be a good tool for outreach to prospective students), somehow a variation of “I’m just not the kind of person who needs to share what I had for lunch” comes up. In the minds of the uninitiated, Twitter seems to be one big crowdsourced foodlog. Social media experts constantly tell us not to tweet what we eat. But a lot of us disagree.

The Food Tweeter’s Manifesto

We, the food tweeters, will not be discouraged. We will tweet about what we ate for lunch! (And dinner, and breakfast, and snacks and dessert…)

Because it’s interesting to us.

Because it’s interesting to our followers.

Because we’re foodies.

Because the shared rhythms of our lives connect us all.

Because we love our farmer’s markets.

Because it was delicious!

Because we are proud of what we made.

Because we want to share recipe ideas.

Because we love and appreciate the local restaurants that make our communities great.

Because we’re food writers.

Because food and consumption is political in many ways.

Because sharing food brings us together, and sharing stories about food brings us together across distances.

Because sometimes lunch is the best part our day.

Why do you tweet your lunch? Leave your answers in the comments, and I’ll add them to the list (with credit, of course).

Posted in Everything else | 2 Comments

Infophibian

Fans as archivists

Quick Hit: The phonebook as precursor to social media

More tools to help me downsize my book collection

Hashtags deconstructed: #18thcenturyinternet

What do I want to know?

The Food-Tweeter’s Manifesto

The Food Tweeter’s Manifesto

RSS

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories