Wikipedia and the role of the non-expert

SOCRATES: In the matter of just and unjust, fair and foul, good and evil, which are the subjects of our present consultation, ought we to follow the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion of the one man who has understanding, and whom we ought to fear and reverence more than all the rest of the world: and whom deserting we shall destroy and injure that principle in us which may be assumed to be improved by justice and deteriorated by injustice; is there not such a principle?

CRITO: Certainly, there is, Socrates.

      -Plato, Crito, 47c-d [trans. by Benjamin Jowett] [link]

It seems that Wikipedia is getting into trouble with the experts…again. As he explains in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education), Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse, an academic with years of experience researching the Haymarket Affair (i.e., an expert on the topic), ran into difficulty editing the Wikipedia article on the event because his suggested improvements constituted original research, contradicted the scholarly majority opinion, and lacked sufficient source attribution. Basically, Messer-Kruse attempted to correct commonly believed factual inaccuracies and was summarily shot-down.

Too Big to Know (Essential Readings in the Philosophy of LIS)

If David Weinberger is to be believed, the Internet hasn’t just changed how we access information, it has altered the very meaning of ‘knowledge’. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Weinberger claims that “for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument.” Supposedly, the networked, collaborative, and social nature of the Internet has changed our very understanding of knowledge to the point that knowledge is no longer tied to concepts of truth, objectivity, or certainty. Instead, as Weinberger argues in his recent book, Too Big to Know, “knowledge is a property of the network” (p. xiii). That is, the Internet has profoundly changed what it means to be a fact, to be true, or to be known. This book has been making the rounds among librarians, so I thought it might be a good idea to try to explain Weinberger’s argument and what librarians should–and should not–take away from it.

Join the digital humanities…or else

On Sunday, I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with none other than Duke professor and HASTAC founder Cathy Davidson. At issue was the tone of her recent blog post, “How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us to National Digital Literacy.” I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but you know, it’s been bugging me a little bit. Allow me to quote her introduction to the post…

“Here’s the entrance exam question for 21st century literacy:

QUESTION: If SOPA/PIPA had been passed into U.S. law in 2002, would Wikipedia exist today? If either law had passed in 2012, would Wikipedia exist in 2022? Why or why not? Discuss.

If you cannot answer that question, you are not literate nor are you in control of your life—even if you think you are.” [my emphasis]

Now, I don’t know about you, but when a leading scholar (the leading scholar?) in the digital humanities argues that a nuanced understanding of SOPA and PIPA are necessary conditions for both literacy and personal autonomy, it strikes me as hyperbolic at best, and elitist and condescending at worst. I, for one, have no idea what Wikipedia would be like in 2022 if SOPA had passed. Apparently, I’m an illiterate slave to the system. Surely, Davidson doesn’t really think that personal autonomy is a function of how Web-savvy we are. Well, I posed the question and she responded: ”If we live our lives on the Web and don’t understand its positives AND negatives, we do not control our lives. All of us.” This is equivalent to saying that if we do control our lives, then either we don’t live on the Web or we do understand the positives and negatives of the Web…or both (which is weird).

Life after Google: You Have Options

Back in October, the geeks were crapping their collective shorts in anger at some ill-advised changes coming out of Mountain View. If you’ll recall, Google tweaked Reader and rolled out some crappy apps in what was called the week Google messed up. “We’re leaving Google!” the geeks proclaimed. This sort of “you changed your service, so I’m going elsewhere” bloviating is rather common with social media, so I decided to call the bluff: is it really possible to quit Google? Well, for the past 84 days I’ve been Google-free as part of my Life after Google experiment. That’s twelve weeks without using Google search or any other Google products. I am (almost) completely Google free*…and what an 84 days it’s been.

Come work with me!

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while: since I quit using Google, I’ve spent most of my time in the fetal position under my desk. I’ll post an update on Google really soon, I promise, but in the meantime…

Hoo-boy! Have I got a job for you! You may remember that the library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga recently hired two new librarian positions. Well, we’re at it again, and this time we’re looking for a Web Design & Instruction Librarian. You can read through the ad yourself (here’s the detailed description), but it goes something like this. We’re looking for a forward-thinking librarian to help redesign and then manage our website and content management systems, as well as play an active role in our award-winning instruction program (multiple PRIMO databases and last year’s ACRL President’s Program Innovation Award, if you must ask). Web-development + library instruction = this job.*

The job ad explains what you’d be doing, but I’d also like to point out that you’d be joining a kick-ass team of librarians. Our librarians are well-established presences at national and international conferences; ALA, ACRL, Internet Librarian, LOEX, CIL, Brick and Click, you name it and we’re presenting. We’re also at the forefront of some pretty cool new initiatives. Library Boing Boing? That’s our guy. OCLC’s Web-Scale Management Services? That’s us, too. Trust me, if you want to get creative or pursue novel initiatives, this is the place to be.

What’s that? You’re worried that a gun rack won’t fit in your Prius and you don’t know how to make moonshine? Well, don’t worry, Chattanooga is actually a remarkably progressive city. Did you know that the New York Times recently placed Chattanooga in it’s top 45 travel destinations in the world? (Granted, we kind of have an in) Chattanooga is also routinely ranked as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., due in no small part to a great housing market, a nationally respected art scene, a killer restaurant scene (weighted towards locavorism), the nation’s fastest Internet speeds, internationally renowned outdoor activities, and environmentalism in your face (from the solar farm at the airport to the electric-car recharging stations to more LEED buildings than you can shake a sustainably harvested stick at). What’s not to love? We’re like a smaller version of Portland…with fewer hipsters and more fried chicken.

"I use eleven herbs and spices...you've probably never heard of them."

So…ummm…yeah. Come work at UTC. Who knows, in a few months you could have the office right next to mine!

 

*And, on a personal note, I want to give a big shout-out to the person you’d be following: Caitlin Shanley, who recently left us for a sweet job at Penn. If you apply for this job and are even half as awesome as Caitlin, I know you’ll be hired. (And, Shanley, if you’re reading this, I tried to send you a care package of your favorite things, but my barbecue pit died out before I could catch a squirrel. Sorry.)

 

The Pitfalls of Political Librarianship

Image by korephotos on Flickr

Recently, David Lankes has argued that

librarians must be political. That is they must be aware of politics, aid their members in political pursuits, and actively participate in the political process.

With the recent media attention given to the various Occupy Movement libraries, Lankes’s sentiment seems to fit in with the current  library zeitgeist. Reading is empowerment! Knowledge is power! Libraries are the arsenal of democracy! (That last one may be a mixed metaphor.) And, you know, there’s something to be said for approaching librarianship as a political activity. It’s compelling to think of libraries as change-agents and of librarians as some sort of 21st Century salonnières fomenting revolution in the streets. An informed public is necessary in a flourishing, progressive republic and, as a nexus for information, libraries serve a vital political role. But, it’s one thing for libraries to serve a valuable socio-politcal function (which they certainly do), and quite another thing to treat librarianship as inherently political.

Life after Google…One Month Sober

By Todd Huffman on Flickr

The blog has been quiet for a few weeks, but don’t think I’ve forgotten about my little Life after Google project. It’s now been exactly one month without Google and the nausea and vomiting have mostly subsided, though I still wake up in a cold-sweat at times.

If you’ll recall, the parameters of the experiment require that I avoid Google and Google-related products to the best of my ability, with exceptions for (1) minimal use of GMail, (2) using Google to illustrate a point, and (3) when it would interfere with my abilities as a reference librarian. So far, I’m pleased to say that I have barely entered the world of Google at all. Here are three permanent changes I’ve made; three alternatives to Google that I’ll be sticking with.

Getting rid of Chrome

I thought that not using Chrome would be the most difficult thing. I mean, it’s such a fast browser. Hell, it just overtook Firefox in worldwide usage. Thankfully, there are a lot of good alternatives out there. I’ve been having a lot of fun with Opera, it is incredibly fast, though it is incredibly resource-intensive, so I can only really use it on my work computer. At home, with only 2Gb of RAM it can start to crawl. I’ve always kept Firefox on standby, but even it can feel a bit bloated at times.

Anyway, I love the Google Chrome browsing experience so much that I decided to see what other Webkit-based browsers are out there. Thankfully, there are a ton. Comodo Dragon looks almost exactly like Chrome, though with better security and no Google tracking. Maxthon is incredibly popular in Asia and it offers the added bonuses of customizable skins, a built-in feed-reader, built-in notepad, mouse gestures, and more. It even runs a Trident engine in the background for when you run into those old Microsoft web-pages that only work in Internet Explorer. Finally, I just downloaded SRWare Iron, another Chrome lookalike that gets rid of all that pesky tracking. I figure I’ll go back and forth between Comodo Dragon, Maxthon, and Opera before settling on one. Chrome has officially been uninstalled from my computer.

So long Reader

I had come to rely on Reader as my de facto homepage; probably 75% of my time online was spent in Reader. Thankfully, Netvibes offers a great alternative. And it really is great. Netvibes works almost exactly the same as Reader, right down to the same keyboard shortcuts (I need my J and K keys to work). What’s more, Netvibes offers a fairly substantial array of viewing options, including a mosaic view, a widget view, and more, customizable to the folder level. Right now I’ve got my news-oriented folders set to a standard Reader-style view, and my photography and art folders set to a mosaic view…very nice. Of course, there are a few downsides. It’s a bit slower than Reader, both in terms of time to load the page and time between refreshing feeds. This isn’t a problem on a laptop or desktop, but the mobile version takes forever to load. Hopefully they’ll work on that.

Finding Photos

I was invited to speak in New York this past weekend, and I was sure that it would be a pain finding good backgrounds for my slides without the help of Google Images . But, surprise, surprise, Google Image Search is worse than useless compared to Yahoo’s Image search, and for one simple reason: Flickr. Yahoo owns Flickr and image searches tend to come out of Flickr first and foremost. What’s more, you can filter by license and search solely Creative Commons works. Google used to allow that, but not any more (as far as I can tell). Basically, Yahoo Image Search is the best way to search Flickr, and whether I’m designing slides for a presentation, digital displays for the library, or other marketing “stuff”, Flickr is the place to go.

The rest

As to the rest, there are some hits and misses. It’s hard not using Google Maps and I admit that I used Maps on my phone once or twice. There are a few lingering committee projects I have going in Google Docs. As photos go, I may go back to Picasa, because the Windows media gallery is simply awful. There are other hangups, to be sure, and I’ll blog about them later, if I make it another month.

Google has everything! (but the library has more!)

(This is part of my Life after Google project which, as you’ll recall, allows me to use Google for the purposes of illustrating a point. So, don’t start ragging on me because I used Google.)

by mikeandanna on Flickr

If you’ve taught any library instruction sessions over the past few years, you’ve probably had that helpful student who points out that “Google has everything!” I had That Guy this past Friday and he wouldn’t back down: library instruction is unnecessary because he can get everything he needs using Google and Google Scholar. “I don’t really need to use the library ’cause it’s all in Google anyway,” he said. Maybe you’ve had the same student in a recent class? Maybe you’ve had a faculty member or administrative-type express the same sentiment? Maybe you’ve given in to your anger and lashed out in a cardigan-bedecked fury, leaving behind a room of broken bodies covered in cat dander? Maybe not, but whatever the case, it sure is annoying, isn’t it?

So, how do we counter the popular belief that everything is in Google? Sure, we can talk about credibility, about the cost of subscriptions, about search engine optimization, about the difference between the Surface Web and the Deep Web…I’m sure you have approximately ninety bajillion responses to the Bill Mahers of the world. But you know what sticks? Numbers. If you really want to drive the point home that Google is only a moderately helpful research tool, why not quickly show your students that, far from being “everything”, a Google search returns fewer articles than a fairly standard library database? It goes like this…

When Friday’s student insisted that Google has “everything”, I decided to call him on his bluff. I looked him straight in the eye and coolly said, “Boy, I’m ’bout *this close* to smacking the taste out your mouth.” And, out loud, I said, “Want to put that to a test? What’s your topic?” “Alcoholism,” he replied. Now, this was the part of class before we talk about narrowing topics, so I indulged him in his overly broad topic. I pointed down the middle of the room and asked everyone on the left side of the room to go to Google and look up “alcoholism”. The students on the right were to go to the rather ordinary Academic OneFile database and do the same, limiting just to full-text articles. Here’s a screen capture from Google:

A regular Google search for the term "alcoholism"

Notice, there are supposedly 5.07 million articles available. Wow. What does Academic OneFile have in full-text?

Academic OneFile keyword, full-text search for "alcoholism"

Academic OneFile has  5,272 academic journal articles, 3,531 magazine articles, 11,875 news articles, and 669 other sources at 8:13 p.m. on November 7, 2011. That’s a rather paltry grand total of just over 21,000 full-text articles. Crap. The Google kids are right: Google has everything! Needless to say, the students on the left felt vindicated…until I asked them to scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the next page of results. And then the next page. And the next page. On the smartboards in the front of the room I advanced through Google’s results ten at a time until we all got to this:

Page 87 of Google search for "alcoholism" at 8:16p.m., 11/07/11

868 web pages. That’s it. Adding the omitted results brings it to an even 1,000. Now, about that 5.07 million? Maybe Google can reduce their figure by, oh, I don’t know, about 99.9998%. Google may index more than five million websites related to alcoholism, but the search results are capped.

It’s as simple as that. If your students argue that Google has everything, show them that a basic library database offers 20 times as many articles in full-text. Even a Subject Search for ‘Alcoholism’ yields more than 13,000 articles. Heck, the narrow subject of ‘Alcoholism, Genetic Aspects’ has almost 657 articles, compared to Google’s 703 articles for ‘Alcoholism and Genetics’. I’m telling you, letting the students see these numbers for themselves can quickly sway them back towards the library. Add in the cherry that they won’t have to worry about whether the library source is acceptable as one of their minimum of 15 sources, and you’ve got a compelling argument that will sway even the most die-hard Google fan.

That is, of course, assuming the Google fan is relatively inexperienced in academic research. With an experienced understanding of how to manipulate Google results, you can get some amazing things. Try playing A Google A Day if you don’t believe me. An experienced researcher knows how to tweak filters, pick the right keywords, and get freaky with the Boolean operators. The trick I’m suggesting isn’t for them; they already know that Google has a lot, but it doesn’t have everything. The trick I’m suggesting is for the novice researcher. It’s for library instruction classes, not one-on-ones with faculty and graduate students. It’s for students with broad, Freshman-level topics. It’s just a rhetorical trick designed to call into question the commonly held belief that you can find more in Google than in the library. And, as a rhetorical device, it introduces valuable questions. Why does Google cap their results? How useful is it to have millions of results? How does Google decide which 1,000 results to display? Sure, Google may have 50 billion pages indexed, and you may find websites on just about everything, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to show that, from a practical standpoint, the library has more.

Life after Google

by lugfpj on Flickr

Remember when Google was just a search engine? Yeah, me neither. With the way Google has infiltrated every nook and cranny of our digital lives, it’s almost hard to imagine life before Google. For the past two years, I’ve used Google services like Search, Reader, Blogger, Alerts, News, and Buzz as my means of professional communication. I use Chrome on my PC and Android on my phone. I’ve used Picasa to manage photos, YouTube for entertainment, and Earth to explore. And I’m not even going to start with Maps, Calendar, Notebook, Scholar, Images…you get the idea. And now, I’m supposed to join Google+, the future of social media. A seamless integration and consolidation of existing Google services into a harmonious user-experience that addresses the beauty and richness of sharing in–

Damn it. No. Just no. I’m not having this social media crap. Google, you’ve reached your breaking point. And I don’t know if you’re being diabolical, or just capricious, but it’s not cool to haphazardly screw around with your most popular services just because you really, really, really want me to start circling my +1 in your hangout. Besides sounding pervy, that’s just not the way to customer loyalty.  Your fans are roundly criticizing you and calling this the week you messed up. And though the grumblings about Google haven’t reached angry Apple fan-boy levels of derp yet, I’m sure that in the near future we’ll hear people loudly proclaiming that they’re “done with Google” (probably the same people who “moved to Canada” after the last election, if you catch my drift).

Given how weird Google has been lately, I’ve decided to embark upon an experimental journey. Sure, Google does things that irritate us. Sure, Google doesn’t understand privacy. But, can we really live without Google? I don’t know, but I’m going to try. Over the next few months I’m going to intentionally divest myself from as many Google products and services as possible. My overarching question is this: can a moderately tech-savvy reference librarian manage to survive the Internet without the help of Google? Here’s the plan…

Technology is the future. Technology is the past.

Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, 2025 14th Street Photo by tunnelbug on Flickr

I’d like to take a moment to riff off of a tidy little post by Joe over at all these birds with teeth (BTW, one of my top two or three favorite library blogs). Joe’s recent post, “Drinking the Kool-Aid“, takes a look at the claim that we are heading towards a post-text world where video will become the dominant method of communication. As some have argued, video will soon eclipse text as the primary means of communication recording and sharing information. And libraries, following the trend away from knowledge collection and towards knowledge production, should follow suit and direct training, resources, facilities, even our very mission as librarians towards the new paradigm. But, as Joe argues,

The matter of the fact is that text is not dead (“Text” is a part of the world of visual communication) and if we intend to be taken seriously as sites of production then it behooves us to keep the lines to the past open for those in the future.

And he’s absolutely right. There is no prima facie reason to abandon a technology simply because something new and different has come along. Sure, it sometimes goes that way: we replaced the typewriter with the computer in less than two decades. Then again, for all the gee-whiz technology we’re buying, I’ve got five bucks that says you’ve got a pen or pencil within your reach.

That’s vintage Canadian money. I’m all about the Lauriers, baby.

Where am I going with this?

There’s an unfortunate tendency in some library circles to view new technologies or new theories as the one and only future of librarianship. It’s said that ebooks will replace print books, smartphones will replace desktops, the cloud will replace local storage, and so on. And that’s just the tech side of things. Library practice sees the same push towards replacement. Patron driven acquisitions will replace collection development. Transliteracy will replace information literacy. Knowledge construction will replace knowledge collection. Tagging will replace classification systems. You get the idea. And, you know, some of that may in fact happen. But, a lot of it won’t. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s worth keeping around. New Coke was grody to the max. The New Age movement is patent nonsense. New Jack Swing? Color Me Sadd.

Wow. That’s just one “Ooh, baby, ooh” from the worst pun ever. Sorry. by stgermh on Flickr

My point is just that some of our current practices are in need of replacement, but others will outlive each and every one of us. Sure, saying that text is dead is just hyperbolic rhetoric, not meant to be taken seriously. But, the threat of thinking in terms of obsolescence is very real. For all we know, ebooks may go the way of the microfiche; for all we know, social tagging may go the way of the card catalog. Maybe so, maybe not. But we should at least avoid the rhetoric; we shouldn’t turn our backs on the past because something better might come along.

Don’t get me wrong. The pitfalls of techno-theoretical boosterism don’t entail that we shouldn’t be advocates for new technologies and theories. If we don’t actively pursue, explore, and recommend new technology or new theory, we won’t be going anywhere as a profession. We need to embrace new technologies and see how far we can push them, even if they do turn out to be worthless in the long run. The important thing is that we don’t pretend that existing technologies no longer matter when something new comes along. We shouldn’t think in terms of replacement, we should think in terms of addition or enhancement. That is, we shouldn’t look at our print books begrudgingly because we think they’ll soon be replaced. We shouldn’t resent what we have because we want what’s yet to come.

If ebooks replace print books, so be it, but we shouldn’t give print books the cold shoulder just because Kindles just got cheaper. And we shouldn’t throw around hyperbolic “X is dead” statements until X is truly long gone. Spending time on future technology and trends is absolutely vital to our profession. But so is spending time on past technologies and trends, and we need to remember that the utility of the technologies and theories of the present can only be determined in relation to the past. I’m not saying we need to start teaching all about microfilm in library instruction or that the scriptorium is integral to the modern library. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that advancement necessarily means replacement. As Joe says: ”it behooves us to keep the lines to the past open for those in the future.” Again, we shouldn’t resent what we’ve got because something better might come along. Let text and print die a natural death, don’t let them die from neglect.

Yes, I know that these books weren’t replaced by ebooks. They were replaced by nothing at all. by shanegorski no Flickr