A new issue of my ‘overlay’ journal Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic — this one is on the history of Lovecraftian scholarship and fandom.
JoIF – new issue on Lovecraft
17 Saturday Jul 2010
Category Archives: My general observations
JURN is now one year old
02 Tuesday Feb 2010
Posted in My general observations
JURN is now one year old. It’s been a long project, but a unique one and one that’s certainly been worth doing. JURN is now mature enough to call “finished”, and as such would welcome more links from university websites. For the next six months it’ll basically be in maintenance mode. Enjoy.
If anyone wants to employ me to find, sort and describe online resources — I’m available.
Meanwhile, I’m now off to make an animated film for a while…
Readability
31 Thursday Dec 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations
Readability is an interesting experiment. With one button-click it attempts to auto-detect the interesting/worthwhile content on a web-page, throws out the clutter, and then presents you with that selected content as a simple page of nicely formatted text.
Before (“watch TV, use social medja, read our twits!” — blah!):
After (just read the article):
It’s intended to work on pages which have a decent amount of article text, which you’d like to read comfortably. What it needs now is a neat text-to-speech button addon, which would convert the article to speech and then add it into a combined personal daily podcast*
Running it on the Jurn blog correctly picked the most substantial post currently on the front page, the group test of business search-engines, and just showed me that. I’m impressed. Readability is another pointer (along with the excellent SurfClarity and Stylish FF addons) to a future in which the intelligent user enjoys a robustly ad-blocked, domain-blocked, user-in-control browsing experience. It won’t just be Google’s caffeine update which will be giving webjunk a hard time in 2010.
* There are some decent SAPI TTS voices out there, believe it or not, and I can highly recommend the American-accented NeoSpeech VW Paul and the British-accented ScanSoft Daniel. If you have such extra voices, to change the default Windows 7 voice you need to delve into: Control Panel – Ease of Access – Ease of Access Center – Start Narrator – Voice Settings – then change your SAPI voice. Or you can use the TextAloud Firefox toolbar, which makes it easy to change voices at the flick of a button — although you’ll still need to edit certain words using the Pronunciation Editor, to get flawless readings.
Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic, No.6
29 Tuesday Dec 2009
Posted in My general observations
Issue No.6 of JURN’s own overlay “house journal”, on talking animals and humanimals. Enjoy.
Most Obscure Academic Search-Engine of 2009 Award
29 Tuesday Dec 2009
Posted in My general observations
And the winner of the Most Obscure Academic Search-Engine of 2009 Award goes to the… Academic search engine about the Sun Mushroom. Don’t chuckle too much, though. Out of seemingly obscure research can come wonders. As Roger Scruton said in England (2000)…
“Those who make discoveries frequently have no use for them. But almost invariably a use is found, and that which was most useless, and perhaps even valued for its pristine futility, like the theory of the transfinite cardinals, is suddenly revealed to be an indispensable asset of mankind. Who would have supposed that Boole’s algebra and Frere and Russell’s logic would lead to anything more than the rarefied speculations of philosophy? In fact they led in time to the computer revolution.”
A group test of business research engines
21 Monday Dec 2009
Posted in Academic search, My general observations
A group-test of business research engines.
Just a quick test, looking for open free texts. I was testing with the term “intrapreneur”.
Only paywall articles on the first page of results. On the second page, one free PDF (“The impact of the library ‘intrapreneur’ on technology”). On the third page, two free PDFs (“Innovation through intrapreneurship: The road less travelled” and “From employees to intrapreneurs”).
* Microsoft Academic Search (indexing almost all science and tech, in beta):
Three papers, all free full-text PDFs not yet available from other engines — “Skunkwork as a learning methodology : findings from venture development projects in industry”; “Behavioral Consequences of an Entrepreneurial Climate”; and “When do ideas survive in organizations?”. In terms of free content for this search, Microsoft is directly comparable to Google Scholar — three results. And, frankly, noticeably better results.
* Google Books:
The first page of 18 results had “limited preview” options for the likely-looking books: Intrapreneuring in action: a handbook for business innovation; Entrepreneurship and the internationalisation of Asian firms; Strategic entrepreneurship; Enterprise and small business: principles, practice and policy; and Creating the Intrapreneur: The Search for Leadership Excellence.
* Biznar.com:
I had to add the search modifers -emeraldinsight -metapress -jstor -elsevier -questia to remove a slew of paywall material.
First page of results were all from either the press-agency Reuters or the popular portal BNET (part of FindArticles.com). Second page results were also all from BNET. Third page results were mostly from Reuters, but did include three articles from BusinessWeek — although clicking through on these merely bounced me to the BusinessWeek front-page, not to the article. There was a sidebar option to filter results by publisher. I chose to filter by Google Scholar, but that returned Google Books and paywall journal results (see the Google Scholar test, above).
There seemed to be some problem with their site scripts, since all results had the title “$result->getTitle()”. There were three likely results when searching only the free articles. These hits were: “Analysis of strategic management of intrapreneurial venture capital and angel capital investments” (2008) from the International Journal of Strategic Management; “Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship and Development: A Practitioner View of Organizational Intrapreneurship” (2007) from the Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship; and “Understanding Intrapreneurship: a Process Model for the Logic of Action Used by Intrapreneurs” (2007) from the now seemingly defunct Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship. Not bad, but other results were just press-releases and/or article-spam material from Market Wire; Black Enterprise; Internet Bookwatch; Malaysian Business; and Deseret News.
* BASE:
37 results from academic repositories. But of the first 12 results tested only one had a full-text PDF associated with it, our old friend from Google Scholar “The Impact of the Library ‘Intrapreneur’ on Technology”. One of the results was actually pay-walled and had an associated shopping-cart(!).
* Open J-Gate (searching peer reviewed journal only, and searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):
Zero results. Surprisingly, there were also zero results when searching just the trade journals.
Zero results.
* Northern Light Business Research Engine (set to “all” recent news search, searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):
Zero results.
* Google News:
Results from articles in the Times of India, the Patriot Ledger, Western News, Financial Chronicle website (India).
* TicTOCS and JournalTOCS:
Zero results.
* FUSE:
All the results below, from one keyword. All are free and full-text. I’ve since optimised to remove a couple of duplicates, a ‘call for papers’, and one Powerpoint.
DSpace@MIT : The Pursuit of Acquisition Intrapreneurs (2002). Massachusetts Institute of Technology report.
DRIVING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN INTERNAL CORPORATE VENTURES … (2003). Proceedings of the 2003 U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference.
Fostering Innovation and Intrapreneurship in an R&D Organization (1995). Report for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare dept.
RELEVANCE OF INTRAPRENEURSHIP IN SMB : THE INFLUENCE OF AGENCY CONFLICTS AND INSTITUTIONALIZED PRACTICES (2008). From USASBE 2008 conference proceedings.
Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs in Corporations (2006). Vikalpa journal. (although painfully mis-titled with the Chomsky quote “Corporations are essentially fascist and incompatible to democracy …”).
Individual Intentions towards Entrepreneurship vs. Intrapreneurship (2008). Paper from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurs conference.
Innovation through Intrapreneurship: The Road Less Travelled (2006). Vikalpa journal.
Fostering Intrapreneurship : The new Competitive Edge (2008). Paper from the Conference on Global Competition & Competitiveness of Indian Corporates.
The Impact of Intrapreneurial Programs on Fortune 500 Manufacturing Firms (2000). From the Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.
Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (2009). Harvard Business School Working Papers.
THE STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING IMPERATIVE (2007). From the journal Acta Commercii.
THE ENTREPRENEUR AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP: OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS OF THEIR ROLE IN SOCIETY (1998). Proceedings of the International Council for Small Business World Conference.
Since FUSE is a CSE, you can also “force” full-text results using filetype:pdf — although as you can see from the above results, that would remove a couple of useful results.
10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009
17 Thursday Dec 2009
Posted in Academic search, My general observations
My 10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009 (apart from JURN and Earworm of course):
1. Journal TOCs.
2. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
3. Microsoft Bing. Google responded by adding the useful filtering options on a sidebar. Google CSE’s add the new Custom Search Element.
4. Basic name authority in Google News results.
5. Various search-engines introduce filters allowing users to filter results for Creative Commons content.
6. Microsoft Academic Search (technology and computing-oriented, beta).
7. SurfClarity : persistent session-to-session URL blocking for your Google search results.
8. Auto-detect and auto-translate Chinese on the web, while keeping page-layouts intact.
10. AWOL’s comprehensive 2009 list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies. Not really a tool, but if you point an on-the-fly CSE at it, it becomes a search-engine that includes more content (e.g. contributor profiles, calls for papers) than the article-level indexing available via JURN.
And, of special note for innovation in the display of search results, Spezify. And for innovation in the parsing of “in the wild” citations, FireCite.
An automated script for link/quote blogging
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations
I’ve made a little script to automate a regular and tedious aspect of blogging — the hand-coding of a web link followed by a selected quote.
To use my script you highlight/select the quote you want to blog, then right-click on your desired quote. The script does all the linking and coding for you, and outputs a link/quote to your clipboard in the following manner:—
D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Trees will have their own blogs wrote…
“Maybe that’s what LOLcat is for, in the long-view — to give us a form of language that will differentiate human from non-human on the web?”
As you can see, it grabs the title from the page title, and it retains working links inside the quote. The basic format is:
Page link + Page title / wrote… / blockquote / “your quote” wrapped in html quote marks / close blockquote
Installation:
To install it, first install the Firefox addon ContextMenu Extensions for Firefox. Then restart Firefox in the usual way.
Then to install the script in Firefox go to: Tools / Addons / ContextMenu Extensions / Options / Custom Scripts / New Items. There you can create a new right-click menu item. Title it “Auto Blog”. A blank code window will appear. Into this code window paste the Auto Blog script (.txt file). Press Apply / OK, then exit the ContextMenu options panel, and also exit the Firefox Addons list.
Use:
The script should work straight away. Highlight a quote, then right-click on it. On your browser’s right-click menu you’ll have…
I also made a slightly different scholarly version, for use with long-form essay-style posts on academic blogs — when you perhaps want to do some basic referencing but don’t want to get all strict and Harvard about it. “Auto Essay Quote” (.txt file) which, on highlighting and copying, returns a quote/link/date to the clipboard thus…
“My argument here is that the major works of Moore’s career actively pursue the articulation of an historiographic vision, one that is roughly similar to the narrative Moore describes in the interview above, but that in his actual artistic output is a great deal more complex and ambivalent. While Moore in interviews describes history as an unstoppable progressive tide, as inevitably bound to redeem us and improve our lives, in his comic book writing he is concerned with how history is made by human beings, with how history happens.”
[ Source: The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision – accessed on 9th December 2009 ]
There’s no way for the script to grab author names unless they’re in the page title. Your milage may vary, in terms of how well a large quote line-wraps when it’s pasted into your blogging software. But both flaws are trivial matters to correct.
(Related on Jurn: OCR from Google Books pages)
Ten problems with Google Custom Search Engines
03 Thursday Dec 2009
1) Google often doesn’t seem to index quite everything at a site. Nor does it always index everything on a page or in a PDF file. Or perhaps it does index everything, but the algorithm that shapes each set of search results jettisons a few results for various reasons? The other possibility is that Google’s results are drawn from a pool of ‘shards’ of previous results, rather than direct from the core crawl data.
Solution: Google “Caffeine” and subsequent revamps?
2) Results from the main Google search can sometimes differ from those in your CSE. Your CSE will occasionally give radically less results from a site than the main Google does. Google doesn’t explain why this is, or the mechanism behind it. Perhaps there are several different versions of the Google index. Results are often much better when using a more sophisticated search method than simple keywords, searching “for phases” for instance. Sometimes you have to give up on trying to get your CSE to “see” the PDFs you want (although these are visible to the main Google) — and instead find a way to index just the linked table-of-contents pages (which will usually show up in your CSE).
Solution: A lot of extra work. Google could offer a “full Google” CSE to worthy non-profits.
3) Academics love to store the real content at some location that has a different URL than their home-page does. An unoptimised CSE may thus index a website containing ten pages, but not the 10,000 articles that they point to.
Solution: A lot of extra work, of the sort that JURN has undertaken, to find and then optimise the real “content location URL”.
4) Initial URL gathering can be arduous. Techies and web editorial staff at universities love to juggle directory structures, often for no discernible reason, and thus break links. Link-rot is severe in ejournal lists from more than two years ago, and lists over four years old often have around 80% dead links.
Solution: Techies need to set up robust redirects if they really have to break URLs. “Self-destruct tags” that delete a links-list page after a certain date, if it hasn’t been updated for more than two years.
5) Google CSEs cannot pick specific content (e.g.: a run of journal issues) from the meaningless database-driven URLs commonly found in academic repositories, since there is no repeating URL structure to grab onto. It’s a question of indexing “all or nothing”.
Solution: URL re-mapping services that are recognised and can be “unwrapped” by Google? Plain HTML “overlay” TOCs.
6) Editors don’t enforce proper file-names on published documents, which means many CSE search results are titled in the Google results as something like “&63! print_only sh4d7gh.indd” rather than “My Useful Title”. Nor do people add the home location URL and website title to the body of their document — which means that scholars can waste several minutes per article trying to find out where it came from. Some students may never manage to find the journal title for the article they downloaded.
Solution: Better publication standards at open access and independent ejournals.
7) Large Google CSE are easy to make, but take a lot of hand-crafting to properly optimise and maintain. “Dead” CSEs from late 2006, when the CSE service first appeared, litter the web. Most of these were also un-optimised. Despite the potential of CSEs, it’s really hard to find large subject-specific CSE that are both optimised and maintained. Most people now seem to use CSEs for indexing a single site or a small cluster of sites that they own.
Solution: Users should remove old circa-2006 CSEs from the web. Subject-specific academic and business groups should consider building a collaborative CSE rather than a wiki.
8) Google’s search result ranking doesn’t work as well as it might in tightly defined academic searches. The PageRank wants to evenly “spread the results” across a variety of sites, and thus you’ll rarely see results from just one site dominating the first ten hits – although that may be exactly what a tight academic search requires.
Solution: For some types of CSE, this could probably be solved by delving into the optimisation features that Google offers for linked CSEs. Update: Google appears to have tweaked the algorithms to fix this problem.
9) Google searches have a problem with finding text at the end of long article titles, of the kind which are common in academia.
Solution: Authors and publishers should work to keep article and page titles under 50 characters.
10) You can’t have your CSE do a “search within search results”.
Solution: Manually build a set of pages containing the result URLs you want indexed, then get Google to see these as static pages which can then be added to your CSE.
Eno on classification and the death of uncool
02 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
Brian Eno in Prospect magazine, on the death of uncool…
“There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.”
Why is this interesting here on the JURN blog? Because Eno relates this apparent change to increasingly nuanced classifications of cultural products. Which must arise partly from our ability to tag and generally re-clump cultural products into ever finer categories (Amazon Listmania lists, Spotify playlists, etc) online, although one can see ample evidence that this was starting to happen in music before 1995 and the Web. Possibly there’s also some spillover from huge genre blockbusters, since better classification and cultural navigation routes mean that far more people can now migrate out from quality blockbuster experiences to similar but much more obscure product (e.g. from Harry Potter to The Giant Under The Snow).
Eno perhaps misses some subtleties. Category-proliferation is inclusive in the online world (Wikipedia pages which easily explain the finer points of said classification to the un-initiated, and searches that quickly offer up frictionless samples of it, easy-access online communities of interest). This plenitude helps to spread the range of sustained interests people have, which means British politeness has to go into overdrive to keep up, when we meet someone in person and they start talking about their interests — thus possibly contributing to the demise of “uncool”. But the real-world groups forming around / promoting these categories remain exclusionary, since age-related group dynamics and simple shyness kicks in (you won’t see many over-40s at your 8-bit electropop game-music night, or groups of eager adolescents at a classical concert). And perhaps even more exclusionary because the categories are so niche, and so the fragile boundaries need all the more patrolling. “Uncool” still potently exists in the real-world of cultural events, and in musical terms it’s still tightly intertwined with social class and age and personal prettiness.
Hopefully, though, Eno concludes by suggesting that…
“The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences” … “what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life”
I’m not sure that’s likely, at least not in the British context. The British climate has always been conducive to us drawing the curtains and “living in our imaginations” for six months of the year, often while sampling all sorts of exotic and fantastical influences and stories, but it doesn’t seem to have made the national character any the less reserved.
And I think it might be more useful to consider “old or foreign” as separate issues. Eno is being quietly political, by casually conflating them. Although, in the end, it’s true that they’re part of the same process of cultural assimilation and re-invention.
The British have always seen “the foreign” as potential material to be quietly appropriated and re-worked into the national culture and national identity. Be wary when the British start to pay serious cultural attention to “the foreign” — we usually want to assimilate it and neuter it. The attitude is that we don’t openly talk much about that process, though — hence the social usefulness of “uncool” at the moment of appropriation, while under the surface we’re actually quietly exotic-ising it so as to extract all the cool we can, ready for eventual re-shaping and re-deployment in the “taste wars” that have long served as a useful proxy for all sorts of other polite social conflicts in the British Isles. And then 30 years on, once it’s safely drained, to claim bits of it as our own and to forget its origin.
And popular unashamed interest in “the old” is nothing new. This neo-romantic antiquarian strain can perennially be seen everywhere in British pop culture since the circa 1966/7, from Pink Floyd weaving references to Hereward the Wake into their lyrics, to the Beatles neo-Victorian dress and moustaches on Sgt. Pepper, Peter Gabriel on Salisbury Hill, Jarman’s re-imagining of Shakespeare, Morrissey’s love of graveyards, Vivian Westwood’s clothes, Edward Larrikin warbling “everything that I adore came well before 1984”, to modern antiquarians such as Julian Cope. There are many parallels in art, film, and literature. There’s always been a sense that the past is a mine to be plundered for contemporary cultural production. What has changed recently in the culture is perhaps the sudden breakdown of the Blairite hegemony around Englishness and history, and that is perhaps what Eno is picking up on where he talks of…
“The idea that something is uncool because it’s old … has left the collective consciousness.”
Although this is certainly not the case with our architecture, where the credo among planners is still very much “old = neglect it, so we can demolish it”.