Daniel Seidell on the curse of the special ‘arts issue’.
The arts issue
18 Saturday Jul 2009
Posted in Open Access publishing
Monthly Archives: July 2009
The good old days
16 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
Ah, the good old days…
[At] “The first library I worked in […] the database subscriptions were delivered on CD-ROMs and loaded on an IBM server for distribution throughout the local area network. […] a librarian would use a dial-up modem to connect to a commercial information services corporation, Dialog, which charged by the minute for connection time, and charged individual fees for searching a database, displaying citations, and for downloading each and every item. […] It was all too easy to spend $100 of the library’s money on a search which might take 8-10 minutes. […] Any student doing research had to physically be in the building in order to do any work. Once the search was completed, they then had to trek around the [library] stacks to locate the individual article in the [print] journal.”
Information Though the Ages – video lecture
16 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
A Long Now lecture from 2007, which I’ve heard as audio but which I now find is available as video from Fora TV. Alex Wright gives a 1½ hour lecture, Glut : Mastering Information Though the Ages.
Spezify
15 Wednesday Jul 2009
I can’t remember the last time I saw a new search-engine that more than mildly impressed me (*), but the just-launched Spezify is impressive and different. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links. I gave it a tough one: Mongolian folk song, and it delivered very well…
Yes, those are the results! And, as I know this search inside-out, I’d say they’re a reasonably strong and relevant set of results. It seems to be aggregating Yahoo / Bing / YouTube, maybe even Google, but it’s refreshing to see the way the results are mixed and presented. I can see my Visual Communications and Fine Arts students flocking to this.
Sadly, there’s no Firefox search-box addon yet.
* (Actually it was probably We feel fine)
If you’re a kid who speaks Arabic, and who loves landscape pictures, Google is working for you
15 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
A fab round-up of some recent Google research projects. Including… analyzing and searching Arabic text … help children aged 5 to 13 find what they are looking for … a system to measure distances in Flickr-sized collections of images (presumably leading to “show me long sweeping views” filter, and possibly to automatic geo-location of photographs in Google Earth) … and more.
Depth-sensing is, of-course, potentially on the way in pocket s-3D digicams. Depth information would be encoded in the image metadata, as a by-product of stereo-3D imaging.
“Web search” links vanish from Google Scholar
15 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch
There seem to be some changes going on at Google Scholar, under the hood. First the RefWorks functionality recently vanished, and now all “Web search” links have vanished. Scholar used to place “Web search” under many links, offering a one-click method of searching the Web for the title/author in the hope of finding the full-text or a commentary. Now we have to manually copy & paste.
‘Search Query Ambiguity’
14 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in How to improve academic search
An interesting-sounding new book suggests new ways of enabling better search-engine experiences, by presenting search-results differently according to the ambiguity of the search (i.e., show the results differently depending on what type of dummy the user seems to be). Search Query Ambiguity (June 2009) looks at how…
“Web search-engines currently do not guide users to construct less ambiguous (i.e., better) search queries, and do not sort results [ usefully ]. […] This book provides new methods of presenting and sorting search results based on search query ambiguity, without resorting to slow-loading and white-spaced-filled graphical methods […] three methods of information visualization and of sorting results are analysed in the environments of both single-term and multi-term search queries”
Although, as I wrote recently on this blog, this may be thinking about things the wrong way round — and may also not be practical due to the strain on back-end computational resources at the Google server farms.
We might instead use browser-embedded individual ‘search-profiles’ to silently shape the search terms and modifiers on-the-fly, in the browser, before they even hit the engine.
Review of ‘Search Engine Society’
14 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search
Online Journalism blog has just posted a long review of Search Engine Society (Oct 2008) by Alexander Halavais. It’s an examination of the power and politics of search, published by the left-wing Polity Press…
“highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links … leads to the ‘chunky’ nature of the web — in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.”
“Halavais introduces the blogger as a ‘search intellectual’, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as ‘a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines’ in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the ‘circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforce’.”
Validating interactive new media as a research output
14 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search, New media journal articles
It’s very rare to find an academic department website where the research outputs are all websites, and not only websites but well-made websites offering full-text and rich interactive content. I only found one such department while scouring the web for JURN (it was in Nottingham in the English Midlands, actually not far from me), and was pleased to see open access websites were all that the department produced.
Producing work in this way is not going to be an option for everyone — there will be skills and talent issues, issues with copyright vs. fair use in areas such as art history, issues of the cost of some specialist tools and the training to use them, and often intractable issues of time-management if one lacks the skills and thus has to work with a volunteer student to make your website, etc.
But the biggest hurdle is no doubt persuading the university managers that you deserve the same credit for a polished and rich website as for a journal article or a book. Leonardo magazine has an article in the Feb 2009 issue on this topic, and the basic PDF is freely available…
“This paper argues for redefining evaluation criteria for faculty working in new media research and makes specific recommendations for promotion and tenure committees in U.S. universities.”
Similar thoughts on how to validate new media, from a 2009 Reference Services Review study of how undergraduates access and comprehend research. “Undergraduate research in the public domain: the evaluation of non-academic sources online”…
“…finds that authority, accuracy, currency, coverage, and objectivity (as evaluative criteria for academic resources) are not always applicable to evaluating sources in the online public domain (blogs, wikis, forums, etc). Instead, she encourages librarians to look at whether online resources are at a level of scholarship appropriate to the task, support the argument of the assignment, add value, and present legitimate information. Unfortunately, many faculty members restrict students from using internet resources, such as Google Scholar, and in the worst-case situations, prohibit the use of anything except books and journals found in the library in hardcopy format.”
Google Scholar & More
13 Monday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch
I found another recent book on Google Scholar — Google Scholar & More: New Google Applications & Tools For Libraries (Routledge, Oct 2008). It originally sold for a whopping $150.00, but Amazon has 26 used copies from $37. And, oddly, there seem to be not a single review to be freely found online, not even on the Amazon U.K. or U.S. pages for the book. So I’m not sure what all that says about the book’s usefulness, but I thought I’d mention it here for those who may be interested that it can now be had cheap on Amazon.