In an otherwise excellent op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards bemoans the narrative logic that organizes political campaign coverage:

Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

I understand her frustration, but I am skeptical that rejecting narrative templates is a desirable, or even a possible solution. People construct their understanding of the world through narratives, not chains of logical argument. Even in domains where the latter predominate, like science, there is usually a move to the narrative mode when discussing the larger implications of one’s argument. So the idea that we’re going to somehow replace our narrative templates with something else seems like a non-starter. Better to focus on how our repetoire of narrative templates might be expanded, and how groups outside centers of power might sucessfully disseminate narratives that communicate their ideas.

Last summer, tired of Firefox 2’s slow and crashy performance on OSX, I switched to using Safari as my primary browser. Though I still opened up Firefox to manage research sources with Zotero and to debug web apps with Firebug, Safari plus Inquisitor was fantastic for everyday browsing–until the recent update to Safari 3.1. Suddenly my fast and sleek browsing experience became a nightmare of crashes. Uninstalling Inquisitor didn’t help, and neither did uninstalling Flash. So farewell Safari, and on to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 turns out to be really nice, and all the key add-ons I need seem to be working for it. I installed Firebug 1.1 and the current development version of Zotero. YSlow works too, although you need to edit its install.rdf and change the maxVersion from 3.0b4pre to 3.0b4. Now I’ve got a browser almost as fast and good-looking as Safari, with far less crashes, and no need to switch applications when I want to save citations or do some debugging. Thanks, Firefox coders!

My pleasure reading over the last couple of weeks has been W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the story of a man who is haunted throughout his life by his inability, or unwillingness, to remember his origins. Last night, I was reading Anthony Giddens for a class on memory and archives that I’m taking this semester, and I came across a passage that perfectly describes Sebald’s eponymous protagonist:

Giddens on ontological insecurity (click image for context).

Both Austerlitz and the anonymous narrator repeatedly remark on his feelings of disconnection from and aversion to the flow of time, and throughout the book Sebald makes the reader feel what it is to experience time as “a series of discrete moments,” as when he describes a massive clock in a railway station:

During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of the hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.

Giddens discusses the “ontologically insecure individual” as if he were a deviation from the norm, where normality is defined in terms of being able to sustain an autobiographical narrative. Certainly that is the assumption of narrative psychologists, who analyze the stories people tell about themselves and correlate mental health with tales of redemption, told in the third person. They would no doubt reward Austerlitz’s melancholy and fragmented first-person recollections with a cocktail of prescription drugs. But maybe Austerlitz isn’t such an oddball. Zygmunt Bauman contends that the linear, novelistic experience of time has been replaced in our current society by what he calls “pointillist time”:

Bauman on pointillist time (click image for context).

If Bauman is right, ontological insecurity is now the norm, and whatever autobiographical narratives we do manage to piece together function only retrospectively, rather than motivating our future plans and actions.

Wikia Search has launched. Wikia Search is Jimmy Wales’ new project, an effort to apply an “open” Wikipedia-style approach to the creation of a search engine. I haven’t been following the project closely, so I don’t know the details of how it works. But despite my reservations about the “open and transparent” Kool Aid that Wales and so many others are selling, I am glad to see such experimentation. I have been thinking a lot lately about the critical role of indexing and search infrastructure, and coming to the conclusion that there is too much research focused solely on the technological aspects of such infrastructure, and too little creative thinking about the social, economic, and political dimesions of how we provide it. Current orthodoxy seems to assume that such infrastructure should be completely provided by private companies who profit from advertising. This seems “obvious” given the success of Google, and the failure of non-commercial systems such as libraries to cope with the web. Yet I wonder if this story is too simple, and whether Google’s dominance, coupled with the radical hypercapitalist ideology that has held sway the past couple of decades, has blinded us to alternative approaches. Certainly the disadvantages of the completely privatized approach are beginning to become apparent in many areas: the troublesome co-dependence of contextual advertising and link spam, the disturbing implications of perfecting personalized search, and the temptations for private search providers to trade for their own account. Analogies between the web and the physical world are always questionable, but I wonder what the U.S. would be like if it had entrusted the construction of its transportation network, signage, maps, and such solely to private companies funded by advertisers? Would that have been the best way to support the people and companies who depend on that infrastructure to find and be found? I doubt it.

Via my advisor, Michael Buckland:

In the 1960s a rare book dealer, Bernard Breslauer, made a bequest to UCLA to establish a Breslauer Chair in Bibliography. He lived on to a ripe old age and only now is the Chair being established in the Department of Information Studies. It is a regular fulltime, full professor position, but with some unusual conditions attached:

• An obligation to collaborate with the rich and varied special collections at UCLA, though the nature and extent of the collaboration is unspecified;
• To occasionally organize workshops or conferences, possibly jointly with others; and
• The fortunate incumbent will have as a personal research fund the interest on a $1.5 million endowment (perhaps $70,000 a year or more, which is not to be used for his/her salary).

The chair is in “Bibliography” but there is ample theoretical and historical justification for interpreting that term broadly to include documents of all genres and any media and to range over subject bibliography and the organization of information. It is not restricted to Historical (aka Analytical) Bibliography, the study of the making of printed books.

It is an exceptional and influential opportunity for the individual, for the department, and for a neglected niche where material culture, digital libraries, and humanities computing converge - but only if the right appointee can be found.

The position description is at http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/jobs/breslauer_announcement.pdf.

Please do not hesitate to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Any help in spreading the word would be appreciated.

Me, a few hours after passing my qualifying exam.

UC Berkeley I-School professor Paul Duguid is quoted in an article from tomorrow’s NYT about libraries rejecting Google’s digitization program in favor of working with the Internet Archive. The article focuses on Google’s clauses against allowing other commercial search engines to index the scans, but doesn’t mention another aspect of the deals which is worse: the OCR output of Google-scanned books isn’t made available to the participating libraries or to the public. Thus researchers who need digitized corpuses for developing information retrieval or natural language processing technology can’t make use of their own university libraries’ resources. This isn’t the case with books scanned by the Internet Archive, the OCR output of which are made available to everyone. Fortunately UC Berkeley is one of the libraries working with the Internet Archive’s scanning program, and the OCR output of those scans is proving to be very useful for my own research. As Clifford Lynch has written, providing access to library resources must go beyond simply making them available to human readers, toward making them available to be computed upon. Kudos to the libraries who are realizing this and choosing to work with the Internet Archive.

November 8, 2007 update: Some people have made the point that many of the library contracts that are publicly available specify that the libraries should receive OCR output. (Some of the the links on the Google Book Search Library Partners page lead to the pages that link to contracts, but you have to dig a bit.) So the contracts do mention OCR, but as I suspected they do not specify what the OCR output should consist of, because the libraries were thinking only of access to the digital files (i.e. people reading them), not computing on those files (i.e. machines processing them). Apparently (according to Peter Brantley) only UC had the foresight to think about that (and you can be sure that Google was thinking about it). So I stand by my assertion that the libraries that did not negotiate for the full OCR output made a mistake, and ceded a tremendous amount to Google.

I just got back from the premiere of Continuous City, a theater production being workshopped at UC Berkeley by Marianne Weems of The Builders Association. I helped create the website at which you can (via webcam) perform scenes and choruses that will then be incorporated into the show. But this was my first time seeing the offline portion of the production, and I was really impressed. So if you’re in the Bay Area, I highly recommend you go check it out sometime before the last show on October 14th. If you’re interested at all in networked culture, or even if you’re not and sick of the hype, you’ll find it very entertaining. If you’re not in the Bay Area, or you can’t make it to Berkeley in the next week and a half, you can see the completed version when it goes on tour over the next few years. (The software I’ve been building for the site will have matured by then too; right now it’s rather early beta–we started writing code about 6 weeks ago and some of the seams are definitely still showing. I’ll post something geeky about the process of creating the site later in the month.)

This is pretty wild. This weekend the UC Berkeley police are participating in Urban Shield, in which various disaster scenarios are simulated in order to train and test emergency-response teams. Apparently one simulation will take place on the UC Berkeley campus, according to an email from the Vice Chancellor:

Warren Hall will be the site of an “active shooter” simulation. Especially in light of the tragic events at Virginia Tech and other past incidents of campus violence, the University is committed to the highest level of preparation and prevention possible, and is proud to participate in this opportunity to provide realistic and valuable training to so many law enforcement agencies.

Police personnel will begin staging equipment and preparing the building on the evening of Friday, September 28. At 5:00 am on September 29 (Saturday) the exercise will begin. Activity will include role-player movements on the first and ground floor of Warren Hall, the arrival and departure of personnel and vehicles in Mulford Hall parking lot, and some loud noises. The scenario will repeat once every other hour for the entire weekend, day and night, ending before 9:00 am on Monday, October 1.

That’s at least 24 “active shooters” over the course of the weekend… jesus.

I’ve been turning a lot of pages lately, both figuratively and literally. The latter because I’m preparing for my qualifying exam (date TBA, but no later than December, hopefully). The former is due my renewed focus on academic life: I’ve left Yahoo! Research Berkeley, where I spent 2 great years exploring the enigma that is “social media.” I was sad to leave, but am happy to have more time to focus on my Ph.D. research, and to be more involved in all the great stuff going on at Berkeley, like the Berkeley Center for New Media. More on that later.