Marcus' World

At the Movies: "No"

Last Thursday afternoon, still quite jetlagged, I watched a matinee screening of No.

It's a fictionalized account of the 1988 election in Chile that ousted Augusto Pinochet after 15 years of autocratic rule.  Pinochet only called the election due to international pressure, without believing he would lose.  Thanks to a clever advertising campaign that gave Chileans a sense of optimism again--or so the story goes in the film--Pinochet loses the election, shocking Chile and the world. 

The critics have been kind. On the other hand, many people who were involved in the campaign against Pinochet have objected strongly that the film is riddled with errors and simplifications.

I don't know, wasn't there.  In 1988 I thought chili was something you ate.

Times have changed.  In 2013, as the person responsible for library and instructional technology at Samuel Merritt University, watching this film was fascinating.  The activists opposed to Pinochet debate fiercely about means vs. ends, and I've been part of many formulations of this age-old debate. 

The debate in No runs thusly: "Sure, catchy ad jingles are cute and everything.  But people are dying on the streets of Santiago, this is no laughing matter."  "Do you want to win this thing or not? You have to make people happy to get them to pay attention."  And so on, and so forth.  Insert whatever specifics you know about the unresolved tensions in your workplace, and No will resonate. 

Had I seen this in 1988, while eating my chili, I would have sided wholely with the idealists.  Back then (at the ripe old age of 11) fashion was shallow and advertising was evil.  In college, I was already much more pragmatic...taking the advertising man's point of view during a similar debate in a social justice course. 

When I became a librarian, my zeal for open access was initially idealistic all the way--who cares about tenure and rewards?? Information should be free!! I still think that's true, but have accepted that tenure/rewards are here to stay. The name of the game is to change the reward system rather than shouting from the soapbox. I still like my line from that college debate: "Do you want to make noise or do want to make change?"

So yes. Go see No.

Singapore Signage

We arrived home from Malaysia and Singapore Wednesday evening. I'm still working through jet lag, hence the decision to draft this blog post at 5 AM!

In my last note I'd promised this next post would be about Singapore's signage. We were in Singapore for three days of our trip, out of 13 total.  During that time I kept snapping pictures of signs, as I was fascinated by what might seem paternalistic to US eyes but is not perceived this way--I presume--by Singaporeans. 

In particular, the many admonishments to drive safely and courteously struck me. In the US we don't want bad driving, of course...but we also don't make such a point to encourage safe driving.  Pi Wen pointed out that there are similar messages in Malaysia, which I can't read since they are in Malay. Singapore's signs are in English. Pi Wen's cousin Ron, who lives in Singapore, pointed out that the signs are needed because Signaporeans drive crazily.  Maybe so. For my money Singaporean roads are much more orderly than those in Kuala Lumpur, where I always feared for my life even though Pi Wen was driving expertly.

Another segment of Singapore's signs are about the "commonweal" or "public good."  This is related to the road signs, in a way, as the overall thrust is about concern for others. But the road signs are about a specific situation, other signs are about the citizen spirit more generally.

Pi Wen attended the National University of Singapore before coming to the US. She found living in a tiny city-state in which the chief activity was shopping to be "oppressive."  Maybe all this public-minded signage has a downside, a certain micromanaging quality.  Even if so, it is refreshing compared to the "winner take all" ethos of the United States. The grass is always greener, of course, so take this commentary with a grain of salt.

Below are four pictures of Singaporean signs.  The first is a road sign, "Be considerate/Signal early." It's somewhat blurry, captured by my iPhone on the bridge between the Gardens by the Bay and the Marina Sands (two Singaporean landmarks). The Singapore Flyer, "the world's largest observation wheel," is in the background.

The other three pictures are examples of more general public-spiritedness. I hope you enjoy them all.

Thirty-Six

Greetings from Singapore. I have a particularly strong attachment to this city-state's many forms of signage.  While being driven by Pi Wen's relatives yesterday, we passed an electronic road sign that advised, "Be considerate/Signal early."

Thoughtfulness! Paternalism! Whatever you might think of it, it was not something I've ever seen in the US.  I need to do an entire post on Singaporean signage, which I'll do next week.

Last week I turned thirty-six. The day before we enjoyed a delectable feast at Oakland's own Commis. On the day of, my staff treated me to yummy cupcakes.  On the day after, our anniversary, Pi Wen and I flew to Malaysia. Yesterday we took the bus to Singapore, and will head back to Kuala Lumpur Wednesday.

So it's been busy. Several times on this trip I've been offered a fork and spoon while everyone else just uses chopsticks.  I can handle chopsticks, not in the classical style but enough to get by. Offering me the "Western" implements used to annoy me. I'd fume (to myself at first and later to Pi Wen) about being singled out, set apart, as if my whitness weren't different enough.

During this trip all that's chnaged. I see the gesture as what it's intended to be: thoughtful. Courteous. Maybe a bit paternalistic, ok.  But just like I appreciate that road sign (which would have elicited eye rolls at certain stages of my youth), I now see the upside of the good ol' fork and spoon treatment too. I'll chalk it up to reaching thirty-six, still far from wise but at least less uptight than I used to be.

Old Wine in New Bottles: Lorcan Dempsey in EDUCAUSE Review

Thanks to the member of my staff who pointed me to Lorcan Dempsey's excellent piece in the December 2012 EDUCAUSE Review, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention."  In this piece Dempsey, who now works for OCLC and used to work for JISC, synthesizes many ideas that he's previously developed on his blog.  He also weaves in work from elsewhere, all in an effort to better understand the current status and potential evolution of the library catalog.

It's a meaty piece, best read closely to allow time for Dempsey's many ideas to germinate.  The gestalt of the piece is a call to place old wine in new bottles.  One fundamental contribution of librarianship is to provide the means of organizing and retrieving information objects--books, serials, maps, DVDs. etc. This has required classification schemes, union catalogs, MARC records...the entire cataloging apparatus. 

All of that intellectual work is still valid and useful and important--this is the "old wine."  But we haven't yet figured out to graft these principles onto the "new bottles" of born-digital objects.  Library cataloging rules date from a time when you had to physically publish or manufacture a work.

Cataloging protocols evolved over centuries, so it will take a while to make a fundamental transition toward describing digital objects. (Just linking to web sites from within the catalog doesn't count.)  This transition will only occur if librarians acknowledge the fundamental shift that Dempsey describes--that the library catalog, as a record of a locally selected and managed collection, will represent an ever-decreasing share of the user's information base.

Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, iTunes, Pandora--these are all information sources that library patrons have access to without any need to use the library.  If we keep perfecting the catalog as we currently understand it, we'll eventually have a perfect catalog that nobody uses.  It's better to embrace the world entire, both in and outside our walls, and give what's floating online the organization and curation it so desperately needs.

East of the Mississippi

In spring 2010 I'd lived in the Bay Area for almost three years.  By that point Pi Wen and I were dating and life was looking good again. I was back in Berkeley after one year in San Francisco, and much happier to be in the East Bay.

That May I was still working at UCSF, which was under a period of forced staff furloughs as a budget saving maneuver. (Samuel Merritt started that August, after an interview in early June.) In practice this meant 1.5 days or so--can't remember the details--of unpaid leave per month.  You could roll over that leave, adding it to regular vacation.  By May 2010 I had accrued a lot of leave, of both the paid and unpaid varieties.

That year the Medical Library Association conference was in Washington, DC (my home from 2002-2004). I attended the conference, and built around it a trip that included stops in New York City (home from 2004-2007); Tennessee (my ancestral home); and Ohio (my childhood home.)

All of these places are east of the Mississippi River. That year I developed a new theory of US travel, which is that anything east of the Mississippi is close to each other. 

Logically, this is absurd.  By this reasoning Portland, Maine is close to Mobile, Alabama.

But it's all relative.  Portland, Maine is close to Mobile compared to San Francisco.

In 2007, after moving to Berkeley, I felt displaced from all I'd known.  Culturally New York City was a world away from my hometown of Columbus, Ohio.  But at least it was in the same time zone, and I could get back to Ohio easily in a pinch.  Out here none of that was true anymore.  So, anytime I'm "east of the Mississippi" I must make the most of it.

Three years have passed since this first elaborate voyage.  The Bay Area is home now--the roots are deepening, the ligaments have thickened.  Mom and Bob will be stopping into town next month, because SF is a docking point for a cruise they're taking.  Pi Wen and I will BART into town that morning and show them around.  Easy breezy, piece of cake.  We know this place now (Pi Wen moved here just a few months before me).  If this cruise had taken place in 2008 I would have been a much less knowledgable tour guide.

Building a new home does not mean I never miss the old ones.  "East of the Mississippi" is now a way of life.  In 2011 we did not travel east; that was our wedding year, so people came to us.  In 2012 I added a week in Ohio after a conference in Pennsylvania--this included catching up with relatives I had not seen in years, and going to Athens, OH to visit where Pi Wen had gone to graduate school. 

This year a new version of "East" is in the offing.  I have a conference in Evanston, IL (my college town! Go Cats!) the last week of June.  Pi Wen lived in Evanston as well, and she'll join me.  Then it's off to Nashville, Tennessee, where I haven't been since that 2010 trip and Pi Wen has never been. Then...home to Oakland. All these journeys are an homage to my younger self, but I know where I'll grow old.

The 21st Century Academic Library

Two days ago we had an excellent librarians meeting at Samuel Merritt. If I had not been there I would have been at UC Berkeley, where the Commission on the Future of the UC Berkeley Library hosted a symposium to reimagine the 21st century research library.

The Commission is a faculty-led group which set to issue a report in mid-March. I presume that Friday's symposium--which featured former California state librarian Kevin Starr, among many other luminaries--was part of their information-gathering efforts.

The central question, as ever, is: what is the role of the academic library in the digital age? Is it to supply resources through vendor-developed packages? Is it to spearhead new modes of scholarly communication? What's the relationship between faculty, students and librarians? What will become of our grand physical spaces?

These questions will take a generation, or two, to sort out. Yesterday we had lunch with a friend who works at the UC Berkeley Library. She attended the symposium and found it to be very thought-provoking. In some form I've wrestled with these questions ever since I became a librarian, as have many of my colleagues and friends in the profession.

During that conversation I realized what's changed, in my head at least.  I used to want answers to all these questions TODAY, if not YESTERDAY.  Now I realize that these are huge, enormous questions that will never really be answered. All we can do is ride the wave and seek to shape its course. Patience is a virtue.

 

Marital Lessons at the Oscars

Last night I learned that Ben Affleck is 40 years old and was born in Berkeley. I discovered this by Googling "Ben Affleck" after watching his speech celebrating Argo as Best Picture.

I was so intrigued by Ben because of this statement he made about marriage (he's married to Jennifer Garner) during his speech: "It IS work, but it's the best kind of work."

This was such a great statement--true, heartfelt, mature, thoughtful. Most of my conceptions of marriage and romance growing up came from Motown or other pop songs. It was always easy, always sunny, always light. 

Obviously that is not true.  Marriage is work, hard work, exhausting work sometimes.  You have to reconsider all your notions, all your certainties, and make emotional space for another person.

The reward: along the way you become a better person yourself--more open, more open-minded, more relaxed, more light.  You do eventually reach that sunshine place Motown's best crooned about. But you have to earn it.

 

 

 

Introducing Hypothes.is

On February 15 I attended a talk by Peter Brantley to learn more about Hypothes.is.  Brantley is Director of Scholarly Communications for Hypothes.is.  He was previously the Director of the Digital Library Foundation, and has also served on the Board of the International Digital Publishing Forum. He's long been an advocate for open Web standards and maximal access to online information.

So, what is Hypothes.is? Let's go straight to the source. Please take a moment to read this passage closely:

"Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site." [Bold mine]

Whereas Wikipedia thrives on anonymous line edits, Hypothes.is aims to leave a digital trail of people's thought processes as they traipse across the Web. At the "I Annotate" conference this April, a wide swath of the digital publishing community will take the next steps toward building this infrastructure. 

Brantley was speaking at the Friday Afternoon Seminar Series at Cal's Information School, a long-running event hosted by Professor Michael Buckland. It was a small crowd, mostly of people who knew him or knew about him (like me).  Questions fell along two main lines: what types of data would be possible to annotate? and who would own the resulting annotations? Let's take each in turn.

1. What is possible to annotate?: As the passage above indicates, Hypothes.is focuses on the curated annotation of written words that are rendered in a stable digital form. The Talmud, the world's first collaboratively annotated document, serves as one source of inspiration for this effort.

The word is the root unit, and so in this sense Hypothes.is has a pre-Web orientation. I've written often about how scholarly communication should evolve to enable "born digital" means of sharing and creating knowledge. We need to move "beyond the PDF" and create "scholarly HTML." 

So it may seem that my aims and those of Hypothes.is are contradictory. Not so. The infrastructure Hypothes.is building is one step along this path.

Why? Because the Talmud's collaborative edits required a very high degree of physical document management. This was possible and successful, but only with great care and within a relatively small (in proportion to the entire world) slice of geography. Today the Talmud could be thoughtfully critiqued online, by any interested believers located anywhere at all. Indeed, Brantley noted that leaders of many faith communities see great potential in Hypothes.is.

The ends--collaborative annotation, building community--have not changed. But the means have leapt beyond the printed page. Hypothes.is will build an important bridge to the preservation and understanding of Web native content that is 3d, visual, or otherwise not oriented by text. This is one place to start.

2. Ownership of annotations: If I annotate a blog post, do I own the annotation or does the blog owner? If that owner redistributes my annotation must I be compensated? Who owns what when?  Questions of this type arose on a few occasions.  The answer is that nobody knows and the rules will change.

Questions like this are conservative--let's not move too far without knowing the lay of the land. That's reasonable in most facets of life but short-sighted in a few. This is a chicken and egg problem. If we don't move at all until the rules are clear the rules may never change since we never moved.

Knowing this, Brantley reiterated his call for what many of us have long advocated: the evolution of copyright law to reflect the realities of the digital age.  We will get there, in fits and starts, and Hypothes.is will be part of the reason why.

Guest Blog Post at Superstition Review, "Deepening"

Three years ago I published a personal essay in the Superstition Review. A few weeks ago the kind folks at s [r] asked me to draft a guest blog post.  It appeared today. Please click on over to  "Deepening."

Thanks very much!

Three Years On

In the New Republic, Julia Ioffe offers an extensive profile of Washinton wunderkind Ezra Klein. A throway line in the article notes that Klein follows recipes to the letter while cooking, whereas his wife Annie Lowrey prefers "free jazz in the kitchen."

That's also the dynamic in the Banks-Looi household. I freak at the slighest deviation from a recipe, while Pi Wen finds a recipe to be very confining.  Who needs thyme when we have marjoram? Me. That's who.

Pi Wen and I met three years ago exactly, on February 12, 2010.  At the time my notion of "cooking" consisted of burning meat and overcooking pasta. Three years later I look for the best recipes in every Sunday Chronicle, and pine for an open kitchen in which we can more easily cook together. I'm still quite devoted to the boundaries of a recipe; that offers comfort, not constraint. But I always trust Pi Wen's substitutions and our meals always come out divine. What a difference true love makes.