An interesting new film from Russia, on it’s way to these shores (hopefully in wide enough release that I can actually see it): Night Watch. Evidently part of a trilogy, it’s looks stylish and quick….what Underworld should have been. Check the trailer, and see what you think. Lots of comments at IMDB from the Russian release of the film (evidently this was the highest grossing film in the country’s history).
From LISNews originally, another person at the top of a librarian food chain who just doesn’t get it. To wit:
Lately, I’ve been wandering around Blogland, and I’m struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms. Here, as the philosopher Roger Scruton said of Reality TV, ‘[a]ll fig leaves, whether of language, thought or behavior, have now been removed.’ What desperate craving for attention is indicated by this kind of mundane, online journaling? Surely, one writes a diary for one’s personal satisfaction; journaling is, after all, a deeply private act.
No, Blaise…you might write a diary for your personal satisfaction. Journaling, for you is a deeply private act. Plus: “…no respect for seemliness..”? What sort of bizarro 1950’s world is this supposed to be? We create our own established social norms here on the ‘net. Virtual communities derive their own set of performance standards and codes, and it doesn’t matter how “public” or “private” the delineation of those communities may be. Bloggers who choose to reveal their personal lives online do not all do so out of some form of deep narcissism, nor from any exhibitionistic tendencies…except, of course, those that do. They do so for their own reasons.
One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they chose to they expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
Wow…”sententious drivel”? And your comment about the Wikipedia is unbecoming of someone who once published a paper entitled Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition. The Wikipedia is the ultimate form of distributed cognition. And this is one librarian who most assuredly knows nothing of the sort. Your “time-honored editorial and filtering functions” are going the way of the dodo thanks to the distribution of publication power, personal publication and archiving, folksonomic tagging/syndication/massive metadata collaboration, and other technological innovations. Those functions can be (and I would argue, will be) filled in other ways very, very soon.
Admittedly, some blogs are highly professional, reliable and informative, but most are not.
The same is true of, oh….every form of communication known to mankind.
Since we’re on a run of movie trailers…This deserves more than an “Interesting” link on my sidebar.
The amazing trailer for the new Joss Whedon film, based on the all-too-short-lived show Firefly. If you are any sort of sci-fi fan, and haven’t seen Firefly, do so immediately. It’s a sci-fi western, with great characters and backstory. I’m excited about this much more than I am Revenge of the Sith, and if you’d have told me that when I was 10 that I’d want to see another sci-fi film before I would the final Star Wars film, I’d have called you a scruffy-looking nerf herder.
I desperately hope this doesn’t suck. It’s got a lot going for it: Romero (obviously), Leguizamo is good, Dennis Hopper, and Asia Argento (daughter of Dario Argento, the king of Italian Horror). I wasn’t happy with the Truck From Hell shot in the trailer, but the living dead look good, and we all know where the social commentary will go with this one, so…here’s keeping my fingers crossed!
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I had no idea until I saw it on Information Wants to Be Free that there was a discussion going on regarding whether or not our very own Jessamyn Charity West was “important” enough to have her own Wikipedia page.
Laying aside the fact that I think the answer is obvious (damn straight she is!) there is a degree to which the question is an interesting one. Meredith says:
Significant to whom? How is that even a valid question? Imposing this sort of authority on the wikipedia seems rather arbitrary to me and goes against what a wiki should be. But I digress…
Well…the Wikipedia has a set of standards that they use to judge inclusion of biographies. This is probably not a terrible thing. For one it keeps people from putting up derogatory biographies about other people they know. I am all for wikis being whatever they want to be…open or closed. Wikipedia made that choice, and have stated standards for inclusion. Works for me, as long as the reasons are public.
Would I prefer it to be more open? Of course. I’d love to be able to enter biographies of “non-important” people. The possibility of using Wikipedia as a form of personal biography is a really interesting one, and I think one could make a solid argument for allowing it.
At least, one small one. From Canoe:
A federal magistrate has ruled that two North Carolina universities do not have to reveal the identities of two students accused of sharing copyrighted music on the Internet.
Also see the discussion on Slashdot.
More really interesting discussion from Jeff Pomerantz, this time re: IP and scholarly work. It is better have control of your own IP, or give it up in order to get publicity?
But if (1) a db that I care about being indexed in does not automatically hoover up this journal’s contents, & (2) it is not possible to submit my own article to be indexed, then Houston, we have a problem. Given a choice between retaining copyight & having my work disseminated, well, that’s almost a no-brainer. Databases are the source that scholars traditionally go to when doing lit reviews, so obviously I’d want to have my work in them.
When I read the line about “given a choice…” being a no-brainer, I agree, but in the opposite direction. I would gladly trade publicity for my own IP rights. Lets transfer this argument over to a much more potentially lucrative IP realm: music.
This is the traditional trade off for musicians in the US: rights vs publicity. Historically bands have offered up their IP in order to allow the music labels publicize them, make them famous, get them booked at arenas instead of bars, print t-shirts, etc. In a sense, they trade their IP for the ability of the public to “find” them, much as Jeff has argued is necessary in academia.
Now…would any sane person (not affiliated with the RIAA/MPAA) in this day and age argue that it’s better for content creators to trade their IP for publicity? Nearly every artist would be better off with their own IP rights.
Here we are, telling our students to not use Google only, use other information sources, use the databases that the library subscribes to… are we also really saying, to hell with commercial databases, if it’s on my website that’s sufficient? Have we gotten to a place where dbs are actually irrelevant in academia?
Honestly? We’re fast approaching, and as more and more universities start their own archives, or academics start archiving their own work (which I have always done, and highly recommend to anyone out there)….yes, we’re quickly moving away from the traditional databases. As more interesting and collaborative “cataloging” starts moving in to academia (tagging and folksonomies for one) I can see traditional database searches moving to the second line of search. Hell…if people (even librarians) were honest, I bet they are already a second line for a known items.
Still holed up at Falls Creek Falls, at the IT Symposium. Last night = Bingo and an open bar. Today = presentations, vendor swag, and a trail walk around the lake.
All in all, not a bad way to get paid. Learning a bit, which is nice…really good presentation this morning regarding smart classrooms, which had tips I really hadn’t thought of. So there is learning going on.
Currently sitting the lobby of the Inn at Falls Creek Falls State Park, mooching a very small, and nearly useless, wireless signal.
Get this: I’m at the 2005 IT Symposium for the state of TN. The State puts in a small wireless network for conference goers….and then blocks all traffic except port 80.
Which means no Thunderbird or other POP email, no IMAP, no IM, nothin’. Webmail works, but JEEZ…we’re at an IT Conference, right? You’re throttling our ports? For what possible reason?
I plan to get to the bottom of this ASAP. I can’t imagine why this is being done, and the organizers here blame it on people upstream of them…so I’ll check with them. More news as I get it.
So in a recent entry, Jessamyn talks Wikipedia and how librarians are going to have to get over their love affair with authority:
The debate we’ve seen happening over the authority, or lack thereof, of collaborative information systems such as Wikipedia is just scratching the surface of the debates we’ll be seeing in the years to come. Librarians ignore Wikipedia, and by extension the new face of information, at their peril. Keep in mind I’m not saying that we all have to run to the Internet to answer our questions, just that if we fail to see the impact these systems are having, and the openness and transparency they bring with them, then we fail to learn something crucial about the downsides to the inflexible authority of print.
Indeed…in a talk I gave the other day, I discussed a lot of new hip and trendy things in LibraryLand, but it never fails that I get gasps of astonishment when I show academics the Wikipedia. I’ve never been fond of authority as the answer to our information instabilities, but I’m even less so now with the living antithesis of authority on hand (and so remarkable!).
I blogged a bit ago about an academic paper I’ve got rattling around in my head having to do with new ways of viewing information sources as relating to the Coherence Theory of knowledge. Spoke briefly with Jeff Pomeratz from UNC regarding my idea via email, who said:
I agree, librarians are too hung up on authority as a criterion. It reminds me of the story I remember reading about early Renaissance scientists trying to discover how many teeth horses have. After checking all books that might have a reference to horses’ teeth & coming up with nothing, it was decided that it was an unanswerable question! That said, I don’t think authority as a criterion can be dismissed: I’d trust the accuracy of a statement on a topic from an expert on that topic over a statement from a non-expert any day. But why? That I leave to you to answer in a philosophically principled way. So I’d argue that authority has to be positioned relative to other criteria.
Authority as a criterion may not ever go away completely…as I said to Jeff, when I’m sick, I go to a doctor, after all. But as an end point for deciding validity or truth, it is clearly not the only answer that should be given. In libraries, we have the concept of a “subject expert” who is responsible for things relating to that subject…selecting books, answering tough reference questions, producing research guides. That’s an authority concept that I don’t really mind. Would it be better if they did this work in concert with other “experts?” I would argue yes…the more brains on the problem, the better.
When making arguments for a position, I think that examining the web of interconnections to that position is a better form of support than simply a reference to authority.
This all seems so self-evident to me, that sometimes it is difficult to present well. I’m re-reading stuff on coherence theory now, and hopefully can more fully form some actually arguments at some point. I’d love any thoughts that anyone might have to spur my brain in the right direction.
