ECHO Blogging Central

This is a transcript of my talk at the iDigBio Augmenting OCR Hackathon, presenting preliminary results of my efforts before the event.

For my preliminary work, I tried to improve the inputs to our OCR process through looking at the outputs of a naive OCR.
One of the first things that we can do to improve the quality of our inputs to OCR is to not feed them handwriting.  To quote Homer Simpson, "Remember son, if you don't try, you can't fail."  So let's not try feeding our OCR processes handwritten materials.
To do this, we need to try to detect the presence of handwriting.  When you try to feed handwriting to OCR, you get a lot of gibberish.  If we can detect handwriting, we can route some of our material to "humans in the loop" -- not wasting their time with things we could be OCRing.  So how do we do this?
My approach was to use the outputs of [naive] OCR to detect the gibberish it produces when it sees handwriting to try to determine when there was handwriting present in the images.  The first thing I did before I started programming, was classifying OCR output from the lichen samples by visual inspection: whether I thought there was hand writing present or not, based on looking at the OCR outputs.  Step two was to automate the classifications.
I tried this initially on the results that came out of ABBY and then the results that came out of Tesseract, and I was really surprised by how hard it was for me as a human to spot gibberish.  I could spot it, but in a lot of cases -- ABBY does a great job of cleaning up its OCR output -- so in a lot of cases, particularly the labels that were all printed with the exception of some species name that was handwritten, ABBY generally misses those.  Tesseract, on the other hand, does not produce outputs that are quite as clean.

So the really interesting thing about this to me is that while we were able to get 70-75% accuracy on both ABBY and Tesseract, if you look at the difference between the false positives that come out of ABBY and Tesseract and the false negatives, I think there is some real potential here for making a much more sophisticated algorithm.  Maybe the goal is to pump things through ABBY for OCR, but beforehand look at Tesseract output to determine whether there is handwriting or not.
The next thing I did was try to automate this.  I just used some regular expressions to look for representative gibberish, and then based on the number of matches got results that matched the visual inspection, though you do get some false positives. 
The next thing I want to do with this is to come up with a way to filter the results based on doing a detection on ABBY [output] and doing a detection on Tesseract [output].
The next thing that I wanted to work on was label extraction.

We're all familiar with the entomology labels and problems associated with them.
So if you pump that image of Cerceris through Tesseract, you end up with a lot of garbage. You end up with a lot of gibberish, a lot of blank lines, some recognizable words.  That "Cerceris compacta" is, I believe, the result of a post-digitzation process: it looks like an artifact of somebody using Photoshop or ImageMagick to add labels to the image.  The rest of it is the actual label contents, and it's pretty horrible.  We've all stared at this; we've all seen it.
So how do you sort the labels in these images from rulers, holes in styrofoam, and bugs?  I tried a couple of approaches.  I first tried to traverse the image itself, looking for  contrast differences between the more-or-less white labels and their backgrounds.  The problem I found with that was that the highest contrast regions of the image are the difference between print and the labels behind the print.  So you're looking for a fairly low-contrast difference--and there are shadows involved.  Probably, if I had more math I could do this, but this was too hard.

So my second try was to use the output of OCR that produces these word bounding boxes to determine where labels might be, because labels have words on them. 
If you run Tesseract or Ocropus with an "hocr" option, you get these pseudo-HTML files that have bounding boxes around the text.  Here you see this text element inside a span; the span has these HTML attributes that say "this is an OCR word".  Most importantly, you have the title attribute as the bounding box definition of a rectangle. 
If you extract that and re-apply it to an image, you see that there are a lot of rectangles on the image, but not all the rectangles are words.  You've got bees, you've got rulers; you've got a lot of random trash in the styrofoam.
So how do we sort good rectangles from bad rectangles?  First I did a pass looking at the OCR text itself.  If the bounding box was around text that looked like a word, I decided that this was a good rectangle.  Next, I did a pass by size.  A lot of the dots in the stryofoam come out looking suspiciously word-like for reasons I don't understand.  So if the area of the rectangle was smaller than .015% of the image, I threw it away.
The result was [above]: you see rectangles marked with green that pass my filter and rectangles marked with red that don't.  So you get rid of the bee, you get rid of part of the ruler -- more important, you get rid of a lot of the trash over here. [Pointing to small red rectangles on styrofoam.] There are some bugs in this--we end up getting rid of "Arizona" for reasons I need to look at--but it does clean the thing up pretty nicely.

Question: A very simple solution to this would be for the guys at Berkeley to take two photographs -- one of the bee and ruler, one of the labels.  I'm just thinking how much simpler that would be.

Me: If the guys in Berkeley had a workflow that took the picture--even with the bee--agaist a black background, that would trivialize this problem completely! 

Question: If the photos were taken against a background of wallpaper with random letters, it couldn't be much worse than this [styrofoam].  The idea is that you could make this a lot easier if you would go to the museums and say, we'll participate, we'll do your OCRing, but you must take photographs this way.

Me: You're absolutely right.  You could even hand them a piece of cardboard that was a particular color and say, "Use this and we'll do it for you, don't use it and we won't."  I completly agree.  But this is what we're starting with, so this is what I'm working on.
The next thing is to aggregate all those word boxes into the labels [they constitute]. For each rectangle, look at all of the other rectangles in the system, expand them both a little bit, determine if they overlap, and if they do, consolidate them into a new rectangle, and repeat the process until there are no more consolidations to be done. [Thanks to Sara Brumfield for this algorithm.]
If you do that, the blue boxes are the consolidated rectangles.  Here you see a rectangle around the U.C. Berkeley label, a rectangle around the collector, and a pretty glorious rectangle around the determination that does not include the border. 
Having done that, you want to further filter those rectangles.  Labels contain words, so you can reject any rectangles that were "primitives" -- you can get rid of the ruler rectangle, for example, because it was just a single [primitive] rectangle that was pretty large. 
So you make sure that all of your rectangles were created through consolidation, then you crop the results.  And you end up automatically extracting these images from that sample -- some of which are pretty good, some of which are not.  We've got some extra trash here, we cropped the top of "Arizona" here.  But for some of the labels -- I don't think I could do better than that determination label by hand. 
Then you feed the results back into Tesseract one by one, then we combine the text files in Y-axis order to produce a single file for all those images.  (Not something that's a necessary step, but that does allow us to compare the results with the "raw" OCR.)  How did we do?
This is a resulting text file -- we've got a date that's pretty recognizable, we've got a label that's recognizable, and the determination is pretty nice.
Let's compare it to the raw result.  In the cropped results, we somehow missed the "Cerceris compacta", we did a much nicer job on the date, and the determination is actually pretty nice.
Let's try it on a different specimen image.
We run the same process over this Stigmus image.  We again find labels pretty well.
 When we crop them out, the autocrop pulls them out into these three images.

Running those images through OCR, we get a comparison of the original, which had a whole lot of gibberish. 
The original did a decent job with the specimen number, but the autocrop version does as well.  In particular, for this location [field], the autocrop version is nearly perfect, whereas the original is just a mess.
My conclusion is that we can extract labels fairly effectly by first doing a naive pass of OCR and looking at the results of that, and that the results of OCR over the cropped images is less horrible than running OCR over the raw images -- though still not great. 
[2013-02-15 update: See the results of this approach and my write-up of the iDigBio Augmenting OCR Hackathon itself.]

Social media and public health is a diverse field, and there is always some new corner to explore! These days I am increasing my knowledge on the use of social media for disaster management and coordination. The reason for this is that I next week will be giving a lecture on the topic to students at the Master of Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen.

It has been exiting to dig into a new field and to experience how social media really presents great new opportunities, but of course also new challenges. Since I haven’t previously worked specifically with disaster management, I choose a few weeks ago to ask my Twitter followers for help on finding good literature and resource people in the field. And once again, Twitter didn’t let me down.

Blogs, website and hashtags

I got a lot of great inputs to blogs, websites, Twitter chats, hashtags and people to follow and hook up with on Twitter (a big thank you to all of you who responded!).

The blogs are a good starting point, especially since most of them offer great links to other resources. The most helpful so far have been the website/blog Social Media 4 Emergency Management. From here there is access to wikis, archives of Twitter chats (#smemchat), videos, blogs etc. on social media and emergency management. The only ‘problem’ with the website is that there is almost too much information.

Another super helpful resource is the blog idisaster2.0 (primarily run by @kim26stephens). It have lots of informative blog posts as well as a good bibliography of selected academic and government resources on social media and emergency management.

Own experiences with disasters and social media?

When I was asked to give the lecture, I hesitated for a moment, because what did I know about emergencies and disasters? Apart from my solid knowledge of social media in public health, including some superficial insight into its role in disasters, I had never had anything to do with disasters or least of all experienced it… However, the later is not true, I quickly realised. I have actually to some extend been in an emergency setting and I have in fact experienced the role of social media in a disaster situation.

Earthquake in Japan in 2011

I was in Japan, when the big earthquake, subsequent tsunami and finally the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis occurred in March 2011. Being relatively far from the epicenter of the disaster (I was based in Kobe in the Kansai region), I wasn’t directly surrounded by flooded buildings, elevated radiation risks or other immediate danger. But I was surrounded by potential danger, by worried friends and family in Denmark and by Japanese friends and colleagues with close relatives in the affected areas.

Looking back on my Facebook timeline, I can now see how social media actually played an important role for me during the emergency. I used Facebook to assure others that I was okay and kept them updated on my situation. I started following the Danish Embassy in Japan’s Facebook page through which they several times daily shared information about risks, advice on how to act and the organisation of potential evacuation. I encourage the mobilization of emotionally and financial support to Japan by sharing links and QR-codes. And I experienced how a Japanese colleague of mine after days of no contact with her sister living in Sendai where the tsunami hit, finally through Facebook got in contact and found out that her and her were safe…

So yes, I have actually experienced a disaster, and experienced how social media can be used in this kind of situation. I plan to share my experiences as a case with the students next week and hope that this real life experience can contribute to the understanding and some discussions.

Your help

Although I already got great tips from people on Twitter, I am still the happy receiver of inputs on social media and emergencies/disaster management. Suggestions on discussion topics, assignments or any other ideas on how to involve the students are more than welcome as are links to guidelines, scientific articles etc.

On December 21, 2012, Blake Ross—the boy genius behind Firefox and currently Facebook’s Director of Product—posted this to his Facebook page:

Some friends and I built this new iPhone app over the last 12 days. Check it out and let us know what you think!

The new iPhone app was Facebook Poke. One of the friends was Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. The story behind the app’s speedy development and Zuckerberg’s personal involvement holds lessons for the practice of digital humanities in colleges and universities.

Late last year, Facebook apparently entered negotiations with the developers of Snapchat, an app that lets users share pictures and messages that “self-destruct” shortly after opening. Feeding on user worries about Facebook’s privacy policies and use and retention of personal data, in little more than a matter of weeks, Snapchat had taken off among young people. By offering something Facebook didn’t—confidence that your sexts wouldn’t resurface in your job search—Snapchat exploded.

It is often said that Facebook doesn’t understand privacy. I disagree. Facebook understands privacy all too well, and it is willing to manipulate its users’ privacy tolerances for maximum gain. Facebook knows that every privacy setting is its own niche market, and if its privacy settings are complicated, it’s because the tolerances of its users are so varied. Facebook recognized that Snapchat had filled an unmet need in the privacy marketplace, and tried first to buy it. When that failed, it moved to fill the niche itself.

Crucially for our story, Facebook’s negotiations with Snapchat seem to have broken down just weeks before a scheduled holiday moratorium for submissions to Apple’s iTunes App Store. If Facebook wanted to compete over the holiday break (prime time for hooking up, on social media and otherwise) in the niche opened up by Snapchat, it had to move quickly. If Facebook couldn’t buy Snapchat, it had to build it. Less than two weeks later, Facebook Poke hit the iTunes App Store.

Facebook Poke quickly rose to the top of the app rankings, but has since fallen off dramatically in popularity. Snapchat remains among iTunes’ top 25 free apps. Snapchat continues adding users and has recently closed a substantial round of venture capital funding. To me Snapchat’s success in the face of such firepower suggests that Facebook’s users are becoming savvier players in the privacy marketplace. Surely there are lessons in this for those of us involved in digital asset management.

Yet there is another lesson digital humanists and digital librarians should draw from the Poke story. It is a lesson that depends very little on the ultimate outcome of the Poke/Snapchat horse race. It is a lesson about digital labor.

Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. It would not be illegitimate if he decided to spend his time delivering keynote speeches to shareholders and entertaining politicians in Davos. Instead, Zuckerberg spent the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas writing code. Zuckerberg identified the Poke app as a strategic necessity for the service he created, and he was not too proud to roll up his sleeves and help build it. Zuckerberg explained the management philosophy behind his “do it yourself” impulse in the letter he wrote to shareholders prior to Facebook’s IPO. In a section of the letter entitled “The Hacker Way,” Zuckerberg wrote:

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo….

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people….

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers – even managers whose primary job will not be to write code – to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

Now, listeners to Digital Campus will know that I am no fan of Facebook, which I abandoned years ago, and I’m not so naive as to swallow corporate boilerplate hook, line, and sinker. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in this case Zuckerberg was speaking from the heart and the not the wallet. As Business Insider’s Henry Blodget pointed out in the days of Facebook’s share price freefall immediately following its IPO, investors should have read Zuckerberg’s letter as a warning: he really believes this stuff. In the end, however, whether it’s heartfelt or not, or whether it actually reflects the reality of how Facebook operates, I share my colleague Audrey Watters’ sentiment that “as someone who thinks a lot about the necessity for more fearlessness, openness, speed, flexibility and real social value in education (technology) — and wow, I can’t believe I’m typing this — I find this part of Zuckerberg’s letter quite a compelling vision for shaking up a number of institutions (and not just “old media” or Wall Street).”

There is a widely held belief in the academy that the labor of those who think and talk is more valuable than the labor of those who build and do. Professorial contributions to knowledge are considered original research while librarians and educational technologists’ contributions to these endeavors are called service. These are not merely imagined prejudices. They are manifest in human resource classifications and in the terms of contracts that provide tenure to one group and, often, at will employment to the other.

Digital humanities is increasingly in the public eye. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Economist all have published feature articles on the subject recently. Some of this coverage has been positive, some of it modestly skeptical, but almost all of it has focused on the kinds of research questions digital humanities can (or maybe cannot) answer. How digital media and methods have changed humanities knowledge is an important question. But practicing digital humanists understand that an equally important aspect of the digital shift is the extent to which digital media and methods have changed humanities work and the traditional labor and power structures of the university. Perhaps most important has been the calling into question of the traditional hierarchy of academic labor which placed librarians “in service” to scholars. Time and again, digital humanities projects have succeeded by flattening distinctions and divisions between faculty, librarians, technicians, managers, and students. Time and again, they have failed by maintaining these divisions, by honoring traditional academic labor hierarchies rather than practicing something like the hacker way.

Blowing up the inherited management structures of the university isn’t an easy business. Even projects that understand and appreciate the tensions between these structures and the hacker way find it difficult to accommodate them. A good example of an attempt at such an accommodation has been the “community source” model of software development advanced by some in the academic technology field. Community source’s successes and failures, and the reasons for them, illustrate just how important it is to make room for the hacker way in digital humanities and academic technology projects.

As Brad Wheeler wrote in EDUCAUSE Review in 2007, a community source project is distinguished from more generic open source models by the fact that “many of the investments of developers’ time, design, and project governance come from institutional contributions by colleges, universities, and some commercial firms rather than from individuals.” Funders of open source software in the academic and cultural heritage fields have often preferred the community source model assuming that, because of high level institutional commitments, the projects it generates will be more sustainable than projects that rely mainly on volunteer developers. In these community source projects, foundations and government funding agencies put up major start-up funding on the condition that recipients commit regular staff time—”FTEs”—to work on the project alongside grant funded staff.

The community source model has proven effective in many cases. Among its success stories are Sakai, an open source learning management system, and Kuali, an open source platform for university administration. Just as often, however, community source projects have failed. As I argued in a grant proposal to the Library of Congress for CHNM’s Omeka + Neatline collaboration with UVa’s Scholars’ Lab, community source projects have usually failed in one of two ways: either they become mired in meetings and disagreements between partner institutions and never really get off the ground in the first place, or they stall after the original source of foundation or government funding runs out. In both cases, community source failures lie in the failure to win the “hearts and minds” of the developers working on the project, in the failure to flatten traditional hierarchies of academic labor, in the failure to do it “the hacker way.”

In the first case—projects that never really get off the ground—developers aren’t engaged early enough in the process. Because they rely on administrative commitments of human resources, conversations about community source projects must begin with administrators rather than developers. These collaborations are born out of meetings between administrators located at institutions that are often geographically distant and culturally very different. The conversations that result can frequently end in disagreement. But even where consensus is reached, it can be a fragile basis for collaboration. We often tend to think of collaboration as shared decision making. But as I have said in this space before, shared work and shared accomplishment are more important. As Zuckerberg has it, digital projects are “inherently hands-on and active”; that “instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works”; that “the best idea and implementation should always win—not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.” That is, the most successful digital work occurs at the level of work, not at the level of discussion, and for this reason hierarchies must be flattened. Everyone has to participate in the building.

In the second case—projects that stall after funding runs out—decisions are made for developers (about platforms, programming languages, communication channels, deadlines) early on in the planning process that may deeply affect their work at the level of code sometimes several months down the road. These decisions can stifle developer creativity or make their work unnecessarily difficult, both of which can lead to developer disinterest. Yet experience both inside and outside of the academy shows us that what sustains an open source project after funding runs out is the personal interest and commitment of developers. In the absence of additional funding, the only thing that will get bugs fixed and forum posts answered are committed developers. Developer interest is often a project’s best sustainability strategy. As Zuckerberg says, “hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.” But they have to want to do so.

When decisions are made for developers (and other “doers” on digital humanities and academic technology projects such as librarians, educational technologists, outreach coordinators, and project managers), they don’t. When they are put in a position of “service,” they don’t. When traditional hierarchies of academic labor are grafted onto digital humanities and academic technology projects that owe their success as much to the culture of the digital age as they do to the culture of the humanities, they don’t.

Facebook understands that the hacker way works best in the digital age. Successful digital humanists and academic technologists do too.

[This post is based on notes for a talk I was scheduled to deliver at a NERCOMP event in Amherst, Massachusetts on Monday, February 11, 2013. The title of that talk was intended to be "'Not My Job': Digital Humanities and the Unhelpful Hierarchies of Academic Labor." Unfortunately, the great Blizzard of 2013 kept me away. Thankfully, I have this blog, so all is not lost.]

[Image credit: Thomas Hawk]

Every once in a while, I'll get a boring email inviting me to be part of some kind of blog salon on a particular topic, the idea being that all the bloggers who are contacted will write about that topic during the assigned month. This never seems like a good idea.

But this month, it's as if there was a subliminal email sent to a crew of bloggers in the arts suggesting a salon about audience diversity, and how/why to move in that direction. The posts are meaty and the commenting is robust. So this week, I want to honor this conversation with links to a few of the great posts and a couple other sources that inform the way I think about diversity and engagement.

Admittedly, many of these posts exist in a bubble of inter-referencing (which I am only exacerbating with this post):

• Clay Lord weighs in on the data about audience representation in Bay Area theater, and the ways that a majority culture can oppress its own value systems on others. A rare blog post that combines personal narrative with statistical charts. 
• Diane Ragsdale responds with some thoughts on how funders could influence these issues, whether they should, and how organizations might respond. She references my recent post about the Irvine Foundation's new approach to arts funding (which includes, but does not solely focus on diversifying audience engagement).
• Barry Hessenius follows up with more thoughts on "coercive philanthropy" and how and whether funders make change possible in the field.
• And then Ian David Moss pulls it together with an interesting question about whether we're too focused on how to support and shift institutions instead of how to engage and empower individual people/audience members.

In some ways, what's more interesting is the world beyond this bubble. Some events:

• Aaron Dworkin, a pretty amazing individual in many ways, is putting together SphinxCon, a conference happening this weekend in Detroit with a focus on "empowering ideas for diversity in the arts." You should go and tell us all about it.
• I truly wish I could have attended Facing Race, which sounded like a completely awesome and transformative event this past fall in Baltimore. My sister attended, and I kicked myself about 87 times for not knowing about it or getting out there.
• And Carlton Turner runs Alternate Roots, another incredible artists' organization with a focus on social change that runs an annual conference/camp/experience which I have heard is mind-blowing in North Carolina.

And a couple museum-specific sites and resources:

• I've become intrigued by the Incluseum blog, which is run by a group of museum folk in Seattle with a mission to encourage social inclusion in museums. Their interests run the gamut from issues of socio-economic inclusion to race, gender, and physical and mental abilities.
• I recently met Jada Wright-Green, a museum professional who runs a site called Heritage Salon that looks at issues and possibilities in the African-American museum community. Jada is passionate about supporting the future of African-American heritage institutions and working to diversify the museum field as a whole.
• The Center for the Future of Museums maintains a good list of top ten resources on demographic change as related to museums. While few are prescriptive in offering suggestions on how museums might meet the challenge of a changing population, they provide good research fodder for starting points.
• And my favorite, unsurprisingly, is Elaine Heumann Gurian, who has written powerfully about the architecture of inclusion and exclusion in museums. Even amidst a sea of new books about museums and social change, I find myself reaching for Elaine's classics above all others.

Where do you fall in this conversation, and what resources have pushed your thinking about diversity?

The web search community, in recent months and years, has heard quite a bit about the 'knowledge graph'. The basic concept is reasonably straightforward - instead of a graph of pages, we propose a graph of knowledge where the nodes are atoms of information of some form and the links are relationships between those statements. The knowledge graph concept has become established enough for it to be used as a point of comparison between Bing and Google.

Last night, I went to see a performance of Kodo - regarded internationally as the premier taiko group. A search on Bing for 'kodo' produced the following result:

 

Bing showed good results for the web and images as well as a knowledge driven portion of the answer from wikipedia with links to play some of their songs. Not bad - but no mention of the performance.

As Kodo were performing at Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus, I did another search on Bing for the venue:

Here we see something better - the venue is recognized as a venue and consequently joined with the events that are known to Bing, including the concert I was attending. As the event information included a link to the performer (the blue Kodo link in the screen shot) I followed through and found Bing gave me event information.

In these interactions, we can see part of the promise of the knowledge graph, but many areas for improvements. The event node relates the performer to the venue to the event. However the venue information in this part of the graph is isolated from that used to deliver the result for the query purely about the venue (note that the addresses are different - a common problem with campus and mall-like areas). The above experience, I think, shows the true challenge of the knowledge graph proposition - bringing all the isolated data graphs together correctly when the nodes in the graphs are actually representations of the same real world entities.

Note that in exploring this particular scenario, Bing appeared to be doing a little better than Google, though Google had partial event information associated with the Kodo entity.

As these names are possibly taken from the listings information from different sources, the name of the performer is confusingly presented in different forms.

Much of what we see out there in the form of knowledge returned for searches is really isolated pockets of related information (the date and place of brith of a person, for example). The really interesting things start happening when the graphs of information become unified across type, allowing - as suggested by this example - the user to traverse from a performer to a venue to all the performers at that venue, etc. Perhaps 'knowledge engineer' will become a popular resume-buzz word in the near future as 'data scientest' has become recently.

 

Gangnam Style is being remixed and appropriated all over the planet. Reminds me of a wonderful recent piece by Tod Machover in which he talks about his daughter and her friends remixing as the principal way of sharing things they...

"Pix and It Didn't Happen" by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry. "A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light -- a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. Despite this,...

The New York TImes published an article today about Snapchat -- the service that lets you send photos and texts that quickly self-destruct as soon as the person you've sent them to has seen them. Impermanence is the point. Before...

Here's a link to a SocialBook version of the Aaron Swartz Reader, Speaking Truth to Power. In addition to SocialBook's conversation layer, this version also includes a number of excerpted video clips....

The early days of web search were essentially about observation. The web search engine observed the web (documents, links and user behaviours) and then delivered results based on those observations.

In recent years we have started to see more of a position of participation in web search engines. Examples of participation include:

• Hosting web sites for businesses - by getting their data on the web more useful targets are provided for user and a short loop is developed with the source of accurate data, i.e. the business.
• Providing feed proxy services (like feedburner) - by providing a service to bloggers, the search engine gets access to valuable user information.
• Hosting content - by hosting news articles and blogs directly, the search engine gets real time updates to content first as well as direct access to user behaviour.
• Exposing data editing tools like map editors - by offering crowd sourcing tools the search engine benefits the community by improving data and is the first to know about and leverage that fresh information.

Participation looks like a core strategy for search.

Think of the last time you overcame a huge obstacle. When you mastered arcane rules to achieve your goal. When you felt that sense of "fiero!"--an epic, fist-pumping win.

Was it while playing a game?

Last week, as part of my museum's year-long Loyalty Lab project, we hosted a workshop for Bay Area museum professionals with special guests Ian Kizu-Blair and Sam Lavigne of the game design firm Situate. Ian and Sam design real-world games that encourage people to engage in ordinary environments in extraordinary ways. They are the geniuses behind SF0, Ghosts of a Chance, and Journey to the End of the Night--games that encourage people to see their city or a museum in a new way through a series of unusual rules and challenges.

I've been interested in applying game design concepts to museums for a long time (there are over sixty posts on this blog on the topic). While the phrase "gamification" has been overexposed and can lead to inane design choices, the underlying elements that make games powerful--narrative, a sense of purpose, opportunity to attain mastery--are universal. Particularly when it comes to a project like Loyalty Lab, whose goal is to encourage repeat and meaningful participation, game design techniques can help visitors feel a sense of measurable purpose and mastery as they deepen their engagement with the museum.

Ian and Sam asked us to design three seemingly-simple things: a challenge to overcome, rules to master, and a win condition to celebrate. I encourage any team to try this. It's not easy. Here's what we learned from each of these activities.

A Challenge to Overcome Every game has a central challenge or mission. Save the princess. Get four of a kind. Capture the flag. How could we design a simple, understandable challenge that visitors could accomplish in the course of a series of visits to the museum?

We've actually been experimenting quite a lot with this here at the MAH with a simple project called the Five Friday card. At the end of October, we started handing visitors business cards with all the Fridays through the end of 2012 listed on it. The "Five Friday Challenge" was simple: come on five Fridays before the end of the year, get your card punched, and earn a museum membership in 2013. Our goal was to help people see the museum as a Friday night habit. This experiment was surprisingly successful; despite the busy holiday season, we had 18 people complete the challenge (out of 500 cards distributed). The challenge was simple, understandable, and for the right person, pretty fun.

This is functionally another form of the scavenger hunt, where the goal is checkins over time instead of checkins at discrete locations. At their best, these kinds of challenges encourage people to explore the venue and feel comfortable coming back again and again. At their worst, it's just about getting the stamp and not about having the experience.

Based on the Loyalty Lab workshop, we're now talking about experimenting with a "bring a friend" challenge. We find that word of mouth is the most powerful way that people come to the museum, but once people become regulars, they may not be in the mindset of bringing others with them. We have families who are incredibly loyal to our programs, but they think of the museum as their family thing. Maybe a challenge that focuses on sharing that experience could give a nudge in a more social direction.

The hardest part of this element was thinking of challenges or missions that we felt were meaningful AND simple to convey. Abstract goals around learning or engagement don't boil down well to a short phrase. But it's worth realizing that for most visitors, they have some kind of simple goal in mind when they visit, whether it's "get inspired" or "survive until lunch." If we can offer understandable alternative goals that they haven't considered, we might be able to powerfully reframe the experience.

Rules to Follow Ian and Sam noted that most games are based on the fact that there are rules that serve as obstacles to achieving the goal at hand. They asked us to devise rules that would make it "extra-challenging" to experience the museum.

This was met with confusion and some resistance. We're all working so hard to reduce barriers to engagement, to make the museum experience less challenging, not more. There are secret rules everywhere in a museum that challenge people as they navigate our spaces.

But when we started reframing this in terms of idiosyncratic rituals, we got further. For example, at our museum, we've been giving out free small cups of hot chocolate at winter events in a little booth made from a couch box. We offer a variety of marshmallow types, and the "price" for different types of marshmallows is paid in high fives (see photo). This silly rule--pay for hot chocolate with high fives--creates a kind of ritual that is representative of our overall approach to whimsical engagement at family programs.

And I don't want to write off rules entirely. Recently, I was talking with a colleague about the American Repertory Theater's Donkey Show, a play that breaks a lot of conventional rules of theater in its club-style venue, vibe, and marketing. Artistic Director Diane Paulus has spoken powerfully about her desire to transform Oberon, the Donkey Show's venue, into an atypical theater space by stripping away all A.R.T. branding, blacking out the windows, and generally making it feel like an underground venue. Hearing her speak about this, I was torn. I was drawn to Diane's vision--who doesn't love the magic of discovery?--while at the same time struggling with the extent to which this approach creates a kind of exclusivity that is just as limiting as the "rules" of a normal theater.

Our rules define us. Whether your rules are about the things people can't do in your space or how they have to pay for things, it changes the overall feel and engagement with the institution. For me, the most powerful outcome of this exercise was how it got me thinking about our overt and covert rules, and how we might wholly "own" them to sculpt desired experiences.

If you are interested in rules, please check out this interview with Nikki Pugh about the Ministry of Rules, a really wonderful project in which children rewrote the rules for a museum.

Celebrating the Win Most games have a big finish. Whether it's the screen that pops up with pixelated fireworks or your own personal board game victory dance, games have clear endings, clear winners, and a bevy of special effects to celebrate.

How can we create celebratory endings to visitors' experiences in museums? This challenge elicited the most creative responses in our workshop, from take-home gifts to shared rituals. One of my favorite examples of a museum that does this beautifully is the Indianapolis Children's Museum, where they end each day with a parade that goes from their top floor to the bottom, collecting families along the way. Ending the experience can be particularly painful for children, who may have to be dragged from the museum sobbing. In Indianapolis, a shared song, some flags to wave, and a collective snowball of people rolling down to the exit replaces the tears with a celebratory event.


I'd love to hear what thoughts this brings up at your institution, and how you might use understandable challenges, tricky rules, or celebratory win conditions to build deeper relationships with your visitors and members. I know it's a challenge in itself to write a blog comment. You have to find something to say, battle the complicated comment system, and suffer an abstract payoff. But think of it as a game. Every comment that comes in earns you a celebratory cheer from Santa Cruz and all the readers around the world who benefit from your ideas. That's worth trying to win, right?

What do we really know about how our students generate answers to historical questions? Thanks to Sam Wineberg, Peter Seixas, Bob Bain, Stephane Levesque, and others in their orbits, we know a good bit about how K-12 history students reach their conclusions about the past, but when it comes to higher education, we know far too little. In fact, we’re often puzzled by the answers our students arrive at. Why did they assign great importance to a particular piece of evidence when our view is that this piece of evidence was just a of run of the mill source, not particularly worthy of extra attention? Why is it so hard to shake them from their belief that, say, people in the past wanted the same things that people today want?

To date, too many of our answers to these and other such questions have been based on folk wisdom about “kids today” or an over reliance on what we observe in our classrooms as being representative of “all students.” Real research, based on real data, would surely take us much farther down the road toward understanding how our students think.

Fortunately, scholars in other disciplines than history have done some hard thinking about these issues and, just as fortunately, have done that real research generating real data.

It’s not every day that a historian reads an article with a title like, “The Role of Intuitive Heuristics in Students’ Thinking: Ranking Chemical Substances,” but read it you should. [Science Education, 94/6, November 2010: 963-84] The authors, Jenine Maeyer and Vincente Talanquer, proceed from the assumption that the we better understand how our students think, the better our curricula can be. This is an entirely different approach from one that asks, “What should students who graduate with a degree in chemistry/history/sociology know?” That question needs to be answered in every discipline, but if learning is the goal of our teaching, then we must understand how that learning occurs as we design those curricula. To do otherwise is to waste our time and our students’.

Maeyer and Talanquer begin with a question: What are the cognitive constraints that impede their students’ ability to engage in the kind of careful and complex analysis that they want to induce in their courses? Drawing on 30 year’s worth of research from cognitive science as well as classroom research in the sciences, they describe two constraints and four reasoning strategies arising from those constraints. While they are writing about the analysis of chemical substances, a history teacher could very easily substitute “primary sources” and “history” for “substances” and “chemistry” and learn a lot from their results.

The two cognitive constraints they describe are implicit assumptions and heuristics (short cut reasoning procedures). In history, an implicit assumption would be that during the era of the women’s suffrage movement, all women wanted the vote, because of course women would want the vote. These implicit assumptions are very powerful and difficult to break down, in large part because they are so rooted in a learner’s view of how the world is.

Heuristics are the root of many problems in education in whatever discipline, but the authors argue that if students can learn how these heuristics govern their analytical strategies, they can then begin to learn differently. And once that happens, they are more likely to examine their implicit assumptions about the world.

All of us are beneficiaries and victims of our own heuristics. For example, the quick thinking that results from years of driving experience helps us recognize, without even thinking about it, that the car in front of us is about to do something stupid, so we slow down and give the driver room to do whatever he is about to do. The short cut reasoning procedures we develop as drivers lead us to reasonable conclusions at lightning speed.

But our short cut reasoning can also lead to into errors of analysis. Maeyer and Talanquer identify four heuristics that get in the way of the kinds of learning we want to induce: the representativeness heuristic, the recognition heuristic, one-reason decision making, and the arbitrary trend heuristic.

The representativeness heuristic is one in which we judge things as being similar based on how much they resemble one another at first glance. We see this often in our history classrooms as, for instance, when a student leaps to the conclusion that two works of art separated by both temporal and cultural boundaries must be similar because they kind of look alike.

The recognition heuristic is what happens when we look at a number of pieces of historical evidence, but recognize only one of them, and so assign a higher value to the one we recognize for no reason other than that we recognize it. In the history classroom, this happens when a student is confronted with four or five texts, one of which is familiar, and so focuses all of her attention on that text, to the point of deciding that this text is the most important in the group, even if it is not.

One-reason decision making happens when students make their decisions about evidence based on a single differentiating characteristic of that evidence. So, for instance, in that group of four or five texts, our student might decide that because only one of them actually mentioned something of importance that she is studying, it is somehow more important than the other four when trying to figure out what happened back when the texts were written.

The arbitrary trend heuristic is one we see not only in our students, but in the works of our colleagues. Because several historical sources were generated within a few miles of one another, or within a few weeks of one another, we assume that they must, somehow, be connected to one another, without any evidence to support this hypothesis.

All of these heuristics occur at various moments throughout the semester in our classrooms, regardless of the discipline we teach. Not all students utilize these short cut strategies all the time, but most of them deploy one or the other at some point in semester. Knowing that this is the case, we can then design our courses to address these thinking strategies.

I wish someone had assigned me this article 20 years ago. Of course, it hadn’t been written yet, so that wouldn’t have been possible. But if it had, and I’d read it back before I started teaching history, my life would have been so much easier and my student’s learning would have been so much richer.

I’ve had this call for papers for the ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ workshop at Science Museum on 18 July laying on my desktop for months:

The lived life serves as an organising principle across disciplines. We talk of the biographies of things and places, and we use personal narratives to give shape to history. Biography is central to historians’ work but often unacknowledged and untheorised: it is used to inspire and to set examples, and to order our thinking about the world, but is a primarily a literary mode; biographies written for popular audiences provide material for the most abstruse work across disciplines; and the canon of well-known lives dictates fashions in research.
For historians of science, technology and medicine this is a particularly pressing issue: their discipline is founded on the ‘great men’ account of discovery and advance, and, though that has long since been discarded, the role of the individual in historical narratives has not diminished, and heroic tales have themselves become a legitimate subject of inquiry. For writers and researchers in other fields, the question remains: how do the lives of individuals intersect with cultural trends and collective enterprise?

It has been laying there since November because there are so many different things in it I would like to take issue with:

- Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of biography long overdue?

- Does the notion of ‘biographies’ of things and places make sense?

- Are biography and historiography necessarily narrative (story-telling) genres?

- Is it really true that the role of the individual in historical writing hasn’t diminished?

But given the restriction of a 20 minutes talk and my need to say something new, I eventually found out (but not until deadline day, last Friday) that I would rather like to engage with the explicit occasion for the workshop meeting — Science Museum’s Turing-exhibition —  and ask whether biographical museum exhibitions are really possible?

I have to confess I haven’t seen Codebreaker yet — but will certainly do so, before the workshop (and if my abstract is accepted).

However, I have long been thinking about making a biographical exhibition here at Medical Museion. I would like to be able to combine the two major strands of my scholarly life so far, which are (1) writing (about) biography and (2) curating (and reflecting on) the use of material artefacts in science museum exhibitions on the other.

So far, however, I haven’t really seriously tried — and I think there are two reasons for this lack of action from my side.

One is more conceptual, having to do with the uncertain role of material things in the life-courses of scientists as opposed to the role of ideas, concepts, writing, etc. Symbols and text on paper and images have such a prominent place in the self-awareness of scientists. Just read their autobiographies; there are ideas, concepts, theories etc. on every page. But material artefacts play a much more humble role in the way scientists understand themselves in interviews and autobiographical reports.

The other reason is more practical: scientists like to save documents and images from their work for the archives and archives are by tradition often organised in person-defined document collections. But scientists rarely donate the material things they have worked with to museum collections. Material artefacts are mostly collected by museum with an eye to the historical importance of the things rather than as personal material archives.

All this makes it difficult to display the material life of an individual scientist. The ‘material turn’ in the humanities doesn’t easily translate into artefact-based museum exhibitions about lives in science.

(featured image: cover of T. Soderqvist, ed., The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, Ashgate 2007)

One episode closer to the century mark, Amanda, Dan, Mills, and Tom welcome Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Tim Carmody for a debriefing on digital developments at the annual meetings of the MLA and AHA and a discussion of the tragic suicide of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Dan Cohen, Digital History at the 2013 AHA Meeting
Mark Sample, Digital Humanities at MLA 2013
MLA Commons
Aaron Swartz (Wikipedia)
Tim Carmody, Memory to myth: tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st century

Running time: 58:04
Download the .mp3

This is a terrific example of how shifts in the mechanisms of distribution and consumption work over time to produce significant changes in the mode of expression itself.

Last week I was delighted to be back at my old stomping grounds at Rice University’s Digital Media Commons to lead a workshop on “Doing Things with Text.” The workshop was part of Rice’s Digital Humanities Bootcamp Series, led by my former colleagues Geneva Henry and Melissa Bailar. I hoped to expose participants to a range of approaches and tools, provide opportunities for hands-on exploration and play, and foster discussion about the advantages and limitations of text analysis, topic modeling, text encoding, and metadata. Although we ran out of time before getting through my ambitious agenda, I hope my slides and exercises provide useful starting points for exploring text analysis and text encoding.

Here’s my short speech at the opening of Biohacking: Do it yourself! last Thursday evening:

In true hacker style, this opening is somewhat ad hoc-ish. We will spend about 20 minutes up here in the old auditorium; several people will say a few introductory words each, in several languages.

Then — because there isn’t room for us all down there — the speakers will go downstairs to the biohacker lab, where they will make the official opening (clip, clip with the scissor) while the web camera projects on the screen. And finally you will get drinks and popcorn from the microwave while you can move freely around between this floor and the biohacker lab.

So why are we doing this? What’s a biohacker lab doing in a medical museum and in this venerable old building from 1787? It’s not an irrelevant question, because some of our visitors think a museum like ours should restrict itself to real medical history – the history of epidemic diseases, surgical instruments from the 18th and 19th enturies, gory human body parts etc.

OK, believe it or not, we’re still in the history business. We’re still displaying things from the gruesome medical past. But we are also very eager to engage with the present and the future. As some of you know,  our latest exhibition is about the current obesity epidemic and the brand new treatment method called gastric bypass surgery that accidentally also cures type 2 diabetes.

In the exhibition (or rather installation) you’ll see tonight, we’re taking yet another step away from the past, to the future of biology and medicine — to the emerging worlds of synthetic biology and biohacking.

Other speakers will say more about synthetic biology and biohacking in a few moments. I’ll just give you the background to this project.

The idea behind the exhibition/installation started three years ago, when some ten small European science centers and art institutions met at Le Laboratorie in Paris to prepare an application from the European Community for an art-science project, called StudioLab.

One of the themes we decided on at the Paris meeting synthetic biology – a very hot topic among life scientists. Using small parts of life to build more complicated living parts. Like in the famous Lego bricks.

What was then, three years ago, a pretty vague idea, has now materialized in a very concrete art-design-science installation –thanks to an interdisciplinary collaboration between a couple of biohackers and scientists, an installation designer, a science communication specialist and a historian of ancient technology. They come from the UK, Germany, the United States, and Denmark, so this is a truly international project team, based locally here in Copenhagen.

Before I give the word over to these people who made this come true, I will say that it hasn’t escaped my notice that the idea of biohacking may have further implications for a museums like ours, and maybe for museums in general.

Because there’s something in the hacker culture – whether it’s computer hacking or biohacking – that points to the ongoing cultural change in the museum world. As I said to one of the biohackers at dinner earlier tonight: museums are struggling to become more open, to involve their users, to draw on the creativity of non-professionals, to crowdsource the cultural heritage, to engage citizens in the construction and re-construction of collections and exhibitions. The do-it-yourself attitude is spreading to museums too.

This is what some museum people call ‘museum 2.0‘. It’s pretty similar to what social media are doing to the world of publishing right now. Or what biohackers are trying to do for the life sciences.

As a museum I think we have very much to learn from the hacking culture – and I’m proud that we have been able to engage people from the local biohacker community here in Copenhagen to help us – not only to open this particular installation – but in the long run help us rethink what a museum might be.

Now, I will give the word to Rüdiger Trojok, a molecular biologist who’s currently finishing his Masters at the Technical University of Denmark; Malthe Borch, who has a masters in Biological engineering, and who’s a co-founder of the local biohacker space BiologiGaragen here in Copenhagen; and Sara Krugman, who’s an interaction designer, and currently completing her masters at The Copenhagen School of Interaction Design.

(Rüdiger, Malthe and Sara give short speeches)

Thank you, Rüdiger, Malthe and Sara! And now over to Emil Polny, who’s a project coordinator at the Center for Synthetic Biology here at the University of Copenhagen.

(Emil gives a short speech)

Thank you, Emil! And finally I’ll give the word to the people here at Medical Museion who have organised and curated the biohacking space, namely Karin Tybjerg, who’s an associate professor with a background in the history of science and technology and Louise Whiteley, who’s assistant professor with a background in theoretical neuroscience and science communication studies.

(Karin and Louise give short speeches)

Thank you Karin and Louise! And now comes the tricky logistical part of the opening. I will ask you all to wait here for two minutes – and we’ll show a short video while you wait – while our presenters walk down to the biohacking lab to open it. The reason is the lab room is so small, we cannot all be in there – so they will cut the ribbon in front of a video camera – and we’ll transmit it over the web and stream up on the screen behind me. And after they have cut the ribbon you can do whatever you want – take drink, eat some popcorn, sit and talk – or even go down and visit the biohacker space.

Thank you very much!  Enjoy your evening.

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Earlier this year, I was fascinated to read the account of a participatory project at the Morrison County Historical Society in Minnesota, in which community members were invited to write essays about “what’s it like” to have various life experiences in the County. One of the invited participants—the one who inspired the project—is a young transgender person. Mary Warner, the Museum Manager at the Historical Society, wrote a series of moving articles for her museum newsletter and later for the AASLH’s Small Museum Online Community about her experiences tackling big issues in a small museum. While the articles focus on the controversy around GLBT representation (which is fascinating), I was curious to learn more about the project itself.
I called Mary to learn more about this brilliant example of a small museum thinking in big and courageous ways about community participation in local history. For context, the Morrison County Historical Society has four paid staff members and engages about 2,000-3,000 visitors per year.
How did this project get started?
Like most of our projects here, it’s a case of organic development based on our mission, which is Morrison County history. We on staff have always had the sense that we want to collect the histories of people who don’t have their histories collected that often – to have a representative sample that’s not just the famous people or the rich people.
For example, we’re interested in GLBT and Jewish histories in our County – how do we get those stories? How do we get the history of the poor? We’re an actively collecting museum, and we’re always thinking about how we can take an inclusive approach with the artifacts and archives we collect.
But how did this specific project get started?
We had a board member who kept asking us to do oral histories. We on staff have so much to do, there are only four of us, and we know oral histories are so labor-intensive. We’ve done a few; I’ll interview someone for a specific reason for an article or to add to a file. But we wanted to do something a little more formal to capture more.
It’s sort of weird how it happened. We have this board member asking for oral histories. And then my son’s friend--I knew he was transgender--and so I wondered, if I do an essay project, would he write one for me? The whole “what’s it like” theme was based on him.
So did you start by approaching your son’s friend to see if he would participate?
When I start a project, I like to first get it into a written form that anybody can follow. That’s a habit for our volunteer projects – we have to figure out how are we going to communicate what we want from participants. So I put all the forms together first. And then I went to my son’s friend and asked him if he would he write an essay, and he did.
Why did you decide to collect essays as opposed to digital media, perhaps video or audio?
I think part of writing for us – we do this all the time – if there’s a web source, we will print it off and add it to the archive. We struggle with how to save digital media. If we do an essay project, it’s the written word, we can print it out and save it and it will be here in a hundred years.
A lot of museums start this kind of project with big intentions, but then they really struggle to get participation. I was impressed by how much success you’ve already had in capturing essays—not an easy thing to do. What did you do to recruit or encourage participation?
Well, our goal is 100 essays, and we’re not there yet. We have about 25 now. But it’s the kind of thing we need to keep pushing, and we haven’t in a while.
We went to the genealogy group, and a whole bunch of them submitted. I think one person may have submitted something directly on the web, but mostly these are solicited. You have to remind people, keep reaching out. It takes constant reaching out, and reminding. Not everyone feels confident about their writing. It would be a great thing to take into a school and do but we haven’t done that yet.
How did you decide to translate the essay project into an exhibition?
Whenever we are creating content, we like to use it in a variety of formats. We have two permanent exhibition galleries and then a long hallway that we use for a special exhibition that lasts about a year. We try to cycle artifacts and really milk all the content we create through exhibitions, our newsletter, on our website, and in programs.
So we decided to do the essay project, and then our curator said, hey this year let’s do our essay project as the exhibit.
So we pulled objects from our collection to connect with the essays. In one case, someone wrote an essay about being a newspaper boy, and he had already donated his newspaper bag.
How did you select which essays to turn into exhibits?
Really, it was about which stories we had good objects for. We didn’t ask people if we could exhibit them, but when we were explaining the essay project, we explained that the essays would be used. Most people know that if they are donating their stuff to the museum, it is going to be used – in the newsletter, on the website.
Where did the interest specifically in GLBT history come from? What kinds of conversations did you have with staff and board members about the potential touchiness of the issue?
There’s a history with the GLBT community with people not being out for the good share of our history, and then there’s a recent turning point, but we still have GLBT folks in our history – we know that about them, but how can we write about it now?
We didn’t discuss anything about the possibility of negative reaction, even though we know that the dominant attitude in Morrison County is anti-GLBT. It was just: here’s this essay project we’re going to do, and we have this inclusive attitude, so of course we’re going to collect this history. It’s ok. We’re going to do it.
The only time we had to really deal with it was when we experienced two incidents of blowback. One woman came in on a tour and said, “why are you displaying that?” I told her if we didn’t show that story, we would not be covering our history.
Once I had talked to the lady and told her this was where we were coming from, she thanked me and told me that she and her husband were going to talk about it and think about it. We’re not trying to change minds, but we do want to encourage people to go ahead and think about what you see.
And then there was the anonymous letter. It was pretty clear that this letter came from someone who was not already part of the museum. That letter didn’t come until after we’d talked about it in our local paper. We had published the same article in our newsletter and we didn’t hear a peep.
One of the things that came up in that anonymous letter was the person questioning whether it was “history” to talk about someone’s contemporary experience. Is that something you’ve heard other feedback about with this project?
Actually, we’ve heard it before. A few years ago, we had a music exhibit, and we put a cellphone on exhibit because there are ringtones that go with cellphones. A lot of people were engaged by it, but they also were confused about why it would be in the museum. We are interested in contemporary collecting, so we do it, and we are constantly educating people that current history is history too.

You’ve probably been there. A new job, a new project team, a new client. A great first meeting. Everyone is invited to talk, to listen, to contribute. Everyone is assured that their voices will be heard, their concerns addressed, their ideas taken seriously.

Fast forward a week, a month, a year. One by one, those voices have been silenced, those concerns dismissed, those ideas undermined. What remains are the ideas and concerns of the person who (it has now become clear) is in charge.

To do their jobs effectively, members of a project team need to know who the decision maker is. We all like democracy, those of us in education and cultural heritage especially so. If it’s truly a democracy, great. But if it’s a dictatorship, people would rather know from the outset than be led down a rhetorical primrose path of “democracy,” “consensus,” and “collaboration” only to have the rug pulled out from under them when the decision maker finally decides to assert his or her will.

If you are the decision maker, let us know. Anything less treats team members like children and wastes everybody’s time. What’s worse, it makes for shortsighted, haphazard, second-rate work product.

Having recently returned from a trip to Kauai where I used my beach search engine with middling success, I've now got a few updates out on the site.

Firstly, there is a full map showing either all the beaches in a location, or all the beaches from a search within a location. This was a pretty obvious missing feature.

Secondly, as this is an active map, you can zoom and pan the map which interactively restricts the set of results.

There are some minor improvements to other elements of the site as well.

Note - something that always interests me is the relationship between back-end data quality and the presentation of the data. By having a complete map of beaches, it highlights cases where there are duplicates in the results (a topic for another post).

If you are heading to Hawaii - give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Related articles Snorkel* and Surf* in Kauai and Maui The State of Hawai'i Demands a New Search Engine