technogoggles

Am in Newcastle at Thinking Digital today and tomorrow (thanks RIG) hoping to see Tara Shears from CERN / Large Hadron Collider, and Dan Lyons (should be fun) and a heap of others mostly drawn from the non-web.  I'm hoping to meet a few 'doers' too.  There are enough talkers on the conference circuit.  Shame it co-incides with FutureSonic as I'd like to have seen Adam Greenfield talk.  Hey ho.

It's also an opportunity to digest a heap of stuff that I've been reading and trying to make sense of like probability theory and randomness and how that's useful in presenting information and actually, designing services; search and particularly support for 'browse' behaviour (as Muddy, Rattle's new product prepares for launch this is a big deal) and the stuff coming out of searchology; and getting up-to-speed with domain driven design.  I'm also excited about receiving a copy of the Schulze and Webb horizonless map which has made me wonder (and S&W always make me wonder) about 'seeing' and using Sky Map has made the idea of representing things you're currently looking at, even more exciting.  For example, I'm a bit short sighted and I don't like glasses (taking them on and off in different contexts bugs me - where do you put 'em?) and hate thought of contact lenses scratching my retina, so when I need to see things far away I often use my mobile phone camera / camera.  It brings things into focus.  It's my better eyes.  But It'd be nice to overlay that "better eyes" view with a point-of-focus where other elements in the frame go out of focus, like peripheral vision, they bend and morph around a focal point not unlike the horizonless map of a fish eye lens (thought the distortion on the 'centre').  Just a thought.

Anyway, if you're at #tdc do say hello.

Here is a talk I gave the other day to some business folks which kinda distils a lot of the things I find interesting around some key themes.  It's called "web futures: consumer behaviours and business opportunities".



Be nice to get your thoughts on it.  

Kettles seem to be (becoming) a standard measure for power consumption don't they? It's like anthropomorphism only instead of objects taking on human traits we have intangible stuff like electricity taking on the form and activity of objects. Objectifimorphism?

I listened to Clever.com a programme on the excellent Analysis strand on Radio 4 on the 15th March.  It was narrated by Stephen Fry and it concerned the issue of whether the web is bad for us, you know, whether it's making us dumber, negating the need to endure pre-digital learning processes.  That kind of thing.  But the programme itself, good as it was wasn't what was interesting.  The interesting thing was that it represented what I want to call a social Proximity Fuze. Steve Bowbrick and Jem Stone at the BBC had the idea of getting listeners to the broadcast programme on twitter to use a hashtag (in this case #goodradioclub) to allow other listeners to see the comments, feedback and annotations of others. 


As a lifestream for a programme its got some value to start to describe the effect of the programme.   Using that stream of comment and annotation as a way to deliver semantic value on the programme itself could create interesting ways into programmes especially as programmes often suffer from a lack of meta-description, a lack of hooks with which to snag you in the long tail of their life (most broadcast stuff seems to disappear into the Long Tail rapidly).

So what could you do?  You could look for the tensions in the data. For example, undertaking term frequency analysis on the tweets and the transcript could show how the programme and the listeners' experience coincide. You could also start to look at the frequency of the comments themselves, do they relate to the contentious aspects of the programme?  They may be good proxies for "interestingness" in the timeline.  Parsing this data through something like Daytum would provide a first means to test if it is indeed interesting.   

This is all good.  But the thing that has been playing with me since I took part in this was how it brought back a sense of the "watercooler" effect.  That Holy Grail of social phenomenons that define a programme as an event.  In this case however, as the listeners provide a commentary to accompany the programme (like SMS text message tickering on acid especially when viewed in a UI like Monitter), what is being created is a "social TX", a reason to take part in the original broadcast.  This is critical because as programmes are increasingly subject to time shifting the social 'value' is dispersed to.  Bringing people together around a TX enables value to coalesced, the scheduled TX is a trigger and the Good Radio Club is an example of a Proximity Fuze. 

A Proximity Fuze  is a fuze which triggers close to something rather than on impact (and which itself is based on the Doppler Effect) and it strikes me that it could be a useful way to thinking about designing for programmes.  Not sure about the military overtones but I like the idea of proximity being a trigger.  Proximity, nearness, as defining a relationship is nice.  And #goodradioclub is nice because it starts to provide some value to the TX (transmission date) based on your proximity to it.  The twitter feed or #goodradioclub is representation of a Proximity Fuze, a trigger to provide value around a social TX.  The anticipation and involvement of listeners starts to create 'ripples' into the programmes and out to other audiences who are at different proximities to the TX.

Of course there are issues. Scaling is a bit messy.  The #goodradioclub exercise on Clever.com was mentioned by Stephen Fry at the top of the programme which meant the 'club' was larger than anticipated and it did limit the ability to engage with other people around the content.  But it's a relatively minor issue.

Building programme experiences around existing social technologies, forcing the 'overhead' onto the users (in this case through the use of the hashtag) means you can innovate and be flexible in creating those experiences rather than trying to create bespoke, proprietary experiences. 

This post is undertaken for the Ada Lovelace Pledge.

I've been fortunate to work with a number of brilliant women in technology.  Mostly those I met at the BBC including Paula La Dieu, Alice Taylor, Anne Fairbrother, Priya Prakash and Anno Mitchell and those I only met fleetingly but who's reputation and work was well known, like Fiona Romeo and Kim Plowright. (The BBC had a clutch of women who were outstanding and perhaps this rubbed off on me as I nominated a meeting room at the BBC to be called Ada Lovelace. It was.).  Beyond my immediate working environment I've been influenced by writers like Geniveve Bell and Kathy Sierra (tho better in print than speaking methinks) and of course danah boyd.  I would choose danah for this Ada day but I imagine she's incredibly popular already and doesn't need another blog post.  Someone less well known who's been at least as significant an influence as danah is Susan Leigh Star and she doesn't get mentioned much, so here you go. I'm a fan of Actor Network Theory and Susan Leigh Star was someone who took that methodological approach to look at technology in all it's forms. She deconstructed it and rebuilt it again in some marvellous ways.

Her book "Sorting Things Out" is still an inspiration in looking at people classify things and the daily politics involved in that classification process.  It's not Technology with a capital T and I think that's what I learnt most from Susan's work.  Technology doesn't exist as such, it's just in-human stuff, not that calling it that denigrates it in any way, rather it serves to empower it by showing that materials have the potential for effects rather than being 'objects' subservient to humans with 'agency'.  I wouldn't usually advocate an academic, because on the whole I think they're not that useful, but Susan's work has stood out for me as being practical and insightful  and despite its subject matter not always being that sexy she manages to make her work interesting. 

That's it.  Well done Susan, there's a trophy waiting for you in Sheffield. ;)

Does anyone fancy meeting for a coffee in Cape Town?  Don't come especially, but if you happen to be in the area then email me (james dot boardwell at gmail dot com) and let's meet... I'm here until the evening of the 13th...

image by DanieVDM

My kids watch a lot of content through the iPlayer and one of the things that I've noticed is they use Google to search iplayer: Google is their default way in to web content.  Fine. However, Google returns urls for programmes that are beyond the 7 day window, whereas searching from iPlayer itself brings back only those programmes within the 7 day window.

Searching for "iplayer (programme name)" you get the most 'relevant' search results, in this case an episode of the programme rather than say, the series, as it turns out there is no concept of a "series" as the model for iPlayer is based on pips (programme information pages), now pids (programme IDs), the key thing there being 'programmes':

And, this is the view when following that top link for "something special" a cbeebies programme (which my eldest son finds for my youngest):

This is the view from iPlayer for the same search:

This post kinda came out of a presentation I gave at bathcamp and the previous post on The Cost of Knowledge.  That presentation was about how the domain of formal knowledge as presented by academic publications was needlessly costing us as taxpayers millions of pounds a year *and* yet still kept this 'knowledge' under copyright so you couldn't access it without paying and so, it heeded the transfer of knowledge. 

As I was writing that talk it struck me that citations, the format for attribution in print, was fundamental to the structure of power that had emerged in higher education.  This post is about that.  It's about how citations are technologies and the reason I think it's interesting is that this presents a different lens on what we see as technologies which can help us do better Design Research.  The lens I want to describe is one espoused by Bruno Latour and others around Actor Network Theory.  They have an interesting take on technology which can be summed up in the following quote: "technology is society made durable" (Latour).   

Let's begin with a story.  Derek is an academic, a lecturer in Geography at a "red brick" University.  He could rest on his laurels and take his salary.  But he wants to progress, get more money and become a senior lecturer.  One way to further his career is to do research.  To do research takes time and he either eeks out this time from his teaching schedule or he 'pitches' research proposals to one of a few research councils and grant bodies.  One project on "cities of data" is successful.  One of the requirements of the research is that it is made public.  The grant body does this.  However, the grant bodies publication has little kudos in the academic world and *it is not considered as a measure when being considered for promotion*, although the ability to get funding is.  So Derek needs to publish his work for peer review to be "measured" for quality by peers and if he's successful it is published in one of a few journals.

Derek wants to pick a journal that will look 'good' on his record, something well known.  But another factor for consideration is how the journal is perceived in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).  The RAE is a process run by the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) that measures University department 'quality' based on their knowledge output. His choice of publication is based upon which will give him the best possible chance of receiving a high measure.  Popular publications measure more highly as higher supply supposedly pushes up the quality threshold.  Ony the very best is published.    

Derek references his peer group, people whom study the same or relevant subjects to his. In turn they reference him.  Those that break from the cycle of genre busting authors, those who create neologisms, signifiers to describe new concepts.  They get lots of citations.  They're in the 'head' of the citation index and not in the Long Tail with it's clusters of sub-discipline citation 'niches'.

We can see from this simplified story how citations embed social practice, values and people. They are also the things around which these things cohere.  They are in short, technologies. They're almost too innocuous to be seen to be 'powerful'.  But they are: 

1. They're the basis for academic standing - acknowledging an intellectual debt

2. They're the basis upon which over £1bn in funding is distributed each year to academics and depertments in Universities to research stuff. Citations are the metric used for judging the rating by which funding is allocated.

3. Every year academics are hired on their ability to get cited. It's a skill which in part creates ways of defining concepts (neologisms and new concepts being potentially more powerful 'hooks' for other people to reference).

And they have formats. It\s no wonder we're educated in how to cite others' work (see this list for a failry exhaustive description of different ways to format citations).  It's a big deal. 

There is a committee looking at this apparently (thanks to someone at bathcamp for pointing this out with the ajoinder, "I know about all this stuff but find all the web2.0 stuff far more interesting") called REF (Research Excellence Framework):

REF, which replaces peer-review judgments in science subjects with a system of metrics, including a count of the number of times researchers' published work is cited by their peers..  (link)

The REF is basing its measure of how well researchers produce knowledge or add to the body of knowledge in circulation on "bibliometrics".  It's a whole new science of citations!

So what?  Looking at non-human things as cohering power can be helpful in Design Research.  Many researchers still look at people as the only active participants (popular in Humanist philosophy).  They have exclusive agency.  However, in describing how things happen and describing all the actors (human and non-human) involved in the process you can start to better understand where power resides.  In this instance not with the HEFCE or with the individual academics but with a textual format, the citation. This then could and should be a focus for thinking through the problem of Higher Education funding.

Update:
The Guardian has a good article of the effects of 'bibliometricity' which it argues is 'narrowing'  study, making research more niche and resulting in academic research being gamed, becoming little more than a popularity contest:

Adding to the problem is the fact that methods to measure research impact are becoming more numerical. For example, the number of times an article is cited by others has become a proxy for quality. There is even a formula that will reduce a researchers' whole career to one digit, called the H-index (http://bit.ly/H-index), which been used for recruiting researchers for tenure in the US. "A lot of people feel that their H-index is the most important thing on their CV," says Bentley.

This focus on numbers encourages both researchers and journals to play games to raise their impact scores. Some play harder than others. A journal called Behavioral and Brain Sciences has come up with a nifty way of boosting its impact factor - how often authors in it are cited. It now identifies a "target article", and then commissions a dozen comments to appear alongside it, giving the article 12 citations directly on publication.

The game playing in the UK's research assessment exercise is another example, says Bentley. "When considering what articles to submit for evaluation, you may have this really good one in a low-ranking journal, and then you have something in a high-ranking journal, and you always submit that high-ranking article to the RAE even if you think that what you wrote was much better in the other one."

Worth a read.

 

 

There has been lots written about knowledge in recent times. How the interenet has made knowledge 'open' and how social media is enabling enterprises and individuals to share information cost effectively, reducing the trasncation cost of communicating and socialising to really low levels. And we've had the eLearning industry come and (nearly, hopefully, go) and got a place where Google is indexing print works as well as the web.  Knowledge is becoming very open indeed.

And yet we're still in a position where one of the main industries that create knowledge, Higher Education, are bound by arcane copyright laws.  I say arcane because there is no reason why they need be.  We have a situation where Bristol University - but one of the Universities I could get stats for but not atypical - spends £376000 on books in 2006/7 or £22 per student and £2 455 847 on serials or £142 per student.  Thats nearly £2.5 million pounds in one year on buying in the knowledge produced mainly by academics funded to do their work by the taxpayer through research bodies like the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

There are approimately 171 Universities and Colleges of Higher Education in the UK.  They won't all spend as much as Bristol.  But if the average spend was just half of that it would amount to £213 000 750. A lot of money for something where the cost of an open solution would be negligible and would actually be fit for purpose. 

But what really grates is that as a taxpayer and someone involved in research and who likes to knowl what people involved in similar research are doing there's a big chunk of knowledge that I am excluded from unless I pay for it (again).  It's copyrighted.  Danah Boyd has written about the frustration of being someone who is essentially doing Public Good and paid to share their knowledge of the world through the research work they've done, being tied down to a closed system.  Sure many academics can get around this by publishing drafts of their work or amended versions.  And some Universities are biting back by creating Open Access Repositories such as OpenDOAR (which now has over 1200 listings).