Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 5

IN THE PRESENT issue of KindleReads for DragonWeb I have collected articles tackling some aspects of the digital, more often than not, those of digital humanities. From the argument against regular search as a means of research method to the processing of geographical and historical data, these essays propose and present the possible future trajectory of genuine scholarship - a compass for all interested parties, as it were.

Table of Contents

- Against Search

- Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History

- Two Decades of the Web: A Utopia No Longer

- Burritos, Browsers, and Books

Against Search

Lev Manovich, July 21, 2011

Early 21st century humanities and media studies researchers have access to unprecedented amounts of media – more than they can possibly study, let alone simply watch or even search. (For examples of large media collections, see the list of repositories made available to the participants of Digging Into Data 2011 Competition, www.diggingintodata.org).

The basic method of humanities and media studies which worked fine when the number of media objects were small – see all images or video, notice patterns, and interpret them – no longer works. For example, how do you study 167,00 images on Art Now Flickr gallery, 236,000 professional design portfolios on coroflot.com (both numbers as of 7/2011), or 176,000 Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographs taken between 1935 and 1944 digitized by Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/)?

Given the size of typical contemporary digital media collections, simply seeing what’s inside them is impossible.

Although it may appear that the reasons for this are the limitations of human vision and human information processing, I think that it is actually the fault of current interface designs and web technology. Standard interfaces for massive digital media collections such as list, gallery, grid, and slide do now allow us to see the contents of a whole collection. These interfaces usually they only display a few items at a time (regardless of whether you are in a browing mode, or in a search mode). This access method does not allow us to understand the “shape” of overall collection and notice interesting patters.

The popular media access technologies of the 19th and 20th century such as slide lanterns, film projectors, microfilm readers, Moviola and Steenbeck, record players, audio and video tape recorders, VCR, and DVD players were designed to access single media items at a time at a limited range of speeds. This went hand in hand with the media distribution mechanisms: record and video stores, libraries, television and radio would all only make available a few items at a time. For instance, you could not watch more than a few TV channels at the same time, or borrow more than a few videotapes from a library.

At the same time, hierarchical classification systems used in library catalogs made it difficult to browse a collection or navigate it in orders not supported by catalogs. When you walked from shelf to shelf, you were typically following a classiffication based on subjects, with books organized by author names inside each category.

Together, these distribution and classification systems encouraged 20th century media researchers to decide before hand what media items to see, hear, or read. A researcher usually started with some subject in mind – films by a particular author, works by a particular photographer, or categories such as “1950s experimental American films” and “early 20th century Paris postcards.” It was impossible to imagine navigating through all films ever made or all postcards ever printed. (One of the the first media projects which organizes its narrative around navigation of a media archive is Jean-Luck Godard’s "Histoire(s) du cinéma" which draws samples from hundreds of films. ) The popular social science method for working with larger media sets in an objective manner – content analysis, i.e. tagging of semantics in a media collection by several people using a predefined vocabulary of terms also requires that a researcher decide before hand what information would be relevant to tag.

Unfortunately, the current standard in media access – computer search – does not take us out of this paradigm. Search interface is a blank frame waiting for you to type something. Before you click on search button, you have to decide what keywords and phrases to search for. So while the search brings a dramatic increase in speed of access, it assumes is that you know beforehand something about the collection worth exploring further.

We need the techniques for efficient browsing of content and discovery of patterns in massive media collections. Consider this defintion of “browse”: “To scan, to casually look through in order to find items of interest, especially without knowledge of what to look for beforehand” (“Browse”, Wiktionary). Consider also one of the meanings of the word “exploration”: “to travel somewhere in search of discovery” (“Exploration”, Wiktionary.) How can we discover interesting things in massive media collections? I.e., how can we browse through them efficiently and effectively, without a knowledge of what we want to find?

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Anja Wiesinger wrote an interesting response to this post:

http://neuneun.com/2011/07/in-search-of/

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Some notes on the history of search engines and media collection interfaces - for article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfilm "Using the daguerreotype process, John Benjamin Dancer was one of the first to produce micro-photographs, in 1839. He achieved a reduction ratio of 160:1".

"In 1896, Canadian engineer Reginald A. Fessenden suggested microforms were a compact solution to engineers' unwieldy but frequently consulted materials. He proposed that up to 150,000,000 words could be made to fit in a square inch, and that a one foot cube could contain 1.5 million volumes"

"The year 1938 also saw another major event in the history of microfilm when University Microfilms International (UMI) was established by Eugene Power."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Goldberg):
Emanuel Goldberg "introduced his “Statistical Machine,” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents (US patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931). This technology was used in a variant form in 1938 by Vannevar Bush in his “microfilm rapid selector,” his “comparator” (for cryptanalysis), and was the technological basis for the imaginary Memex in Bush’s influential 1945 essay “As we may think.”

Information retrieval
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retreival#Timeline

"1950: The term "information retrieval" appears to have been coined by Calvin Mooers."

Source URL: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/07/against-search.html
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Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History

Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land

By Patricia Cohen

Few battles in history have been more scrutinized than Gettysburg’s three blood-soaked days in July 1863, the turning point in the Civil War. Still, there were questions that all the diaries, official reports and correspondence couldn’t answer precisely. What, for example, could Gen. Robert E. Lee actually see when he issued a series of fateful orders that turned the tide against the Confederate Army nearly 150 years ago?

Now historians have a new tool that can help. Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

Like the crew on the starship Enterprise, humanists are exploring a new frontier of the scholarly universe: space.

“Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.” It adds layers of information to a map that can be added or taken off at will in various combinations; the same location can also be viewed back and forth over time at the click of a mouse.

Today visitors to Gettysburg can climb to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary, where Lee stationed himself on July 2, the second day of fighting; or stand on Seminary Ridge, where the next day Lee watched from behind the Confederate lines as thousands of his men advanced across the open farmland to their deaths in the notorious Pickett’s Charge. But they won’t see what the general saw because the intervening years have altered the topography. Over the decades a quarry, a reservoir, different plants and trees have been added, and elevations have changed as a result of mechanical plowing and erosion.

Geographic Information Systems, known as GIS, allowed Ms. Knowles and her colleagues to recreate a digital version of the original Gettysburg battlefield from historical maps, documented descriptions of troop positions and scenery, and renderings of historic roads, fences, buildings and vegetation. “The only way I knew how to answer the question,” about what Lee saw, Ms. Knowles said, “was to recreate the ground digitally using GIS and then ask the GIS program: What can you see from a certain position on the digital landscape, and what can you not see?”

She said her work helps “make Lee’s dilemma more vivid and personal.” Nineteenth-century military leaders relied primarily on their own eyes, and small differences in elevation were strategically important. “Lee probably could not have possibly seen the massive federal forces building up on the eastern side of the battlefield on Day 2 during the famous attack on Little Round Top,” Ms. Knowles said. “He had to make decisions with really inadequate information.”

So did Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who was vilified in the Confederacy partly because of his decision on July 2 to take his troops on a long countermarch to avoid detection rather than attack Little Round Top directly. The march “made Longstreet the goat of Gettysburg,” Ms. Knowles said. But there was no way that Longstreet could have seen that Little Round Top was undefended at the time. “The analysis says Longstreet made the best decision he could,” added Ms. Knowles, who is currently working on a digital map of the Nazis’ territorial conquests and forced labor camps in Europe.

New methods of computer-assisted geographic analysis can also offer new interpretations of familiar topics. Geoff Cunfer, a historian at the University of Saskatchewan, revisited causes of the 1930s Dust Bowl by analyzing data from all 208 counties in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas that were affected, an impossible undertaking without this system. He found that the traditional explanation of farmers’ extensively plowing the land without care for environmental limits was only true in some places. Barely plowed Southern counties also suffered from the plague of dust. Using reports of annual precipitation, unplowed grassland, wind direction, droughts, agricultural censuses, historical studies and previous reports on dust storms — “a messy shoebox full of newspaper clippings” — Mr. Cunfer created data sets that could be plotted on maps.

He discovered that dust storms regularly occurred in the 19th century and were a natural part of plains ecology before any plowing occurred, but were “unreported and unpublicized,” he said.

Advanced mapping tools, around since the 1960s, were initially used primarily for environmental analysis and urban planning. In the late 1980s and 1990s geographic historical information systems enabled scholars to take census information and other quantifiable data and plot changes in a location over time. By the late 1990s professional networks and organizations began to form, but this sort of mapmaking remained on the margins.

This system insists on precision, explained David Bodenhamer, a historian at Indiana University who is editing a series of books on the spatial humanities. Every bit of data is represented by a point, a closed polygon or a pixel on a map. Critics complained this exactitude did not allow for multiple viewpoints.

By the mid-2000s technological developments enabled scholars to break out of the strict map format and add photographs and texts to create what Mr. Bodenhamer calls “deep maps,” which can capture more than one perspective.

In 2005 Mr. Bodenhamer, collaborating with colleagues at Florida State University and West Virginia University, helped create the Polis Center in Indianapolis, which calls itself the first virtual spatial humanities center. One of their early projects was financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities: a detailed digital atlas of religion in North America that broke down denominations by county. Geographic Information Systems make it possible to analyze complex and changing patterns of political preferences, religious affiliation, migration and cultural influence in fresh ways by linking them to geography, Mr. Bodenhamer said.

Benjamin Ray, the director of the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive at the University of Virginia, said visualizing data helps you to analyze it. “The eye is a very good sorter of patterns,” he said. Mr. Ray had wondered why witchcraft charges spread so rapidly and widely in 1692 from Salem across 25 communities, whereas previous incidents had remained small and localized. When he plotted the accusations on a digital map that showed a progression over time, it struck him immediately: “It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.”

That made him examine what the Salem authorities did differently this time that failed to contain the hysteria. He found that the judges broke their own rules by permitting people to make accusations without posting a monetary bond, letting accusers be interviewed in groups and allowing “spectral evidence” — evidence only visible to the accuser — as sufficient for a conviction. After adding church affiliation to the map, he saw there was also a correlation between church membership and the accusers, which reflected a rift in the village over support for the minister.

Mr. Bodenhamer said the humanities had become too abstract and neglected physical space. The value of what scholars are calling “the spatial turn,” he added, is that “it allows you to ask new questions: Why is it that something developed here and not somewhere else, what is it about the context of this place?”

Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/arts/geographic-information-systems-help-scholars-see-history.html?_r=3&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all
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Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer

Evgeny Morozov traces the development of the web from the laboratories of the Cold War to the world of venture capital and big money

The “virtual community”: an idea that was the antithesis of Cold War paranoia

The internet is a child with many fathers. It is an extremely complex multi-module technology and each module—from communication protocols to browsers—has a convoluted history. The internet’s earliest roots lie in the rise of cybernetics during the 1950s. Later breakthroughs included the invention of packet switching in the 1960s, a novel way for transmitting data by breaking it into chunks. Various university and government networks began to appear in the early 1970s, and were interlinked in the 1980s. The first browsers came on line in the early 1990s—20 years ago this August.

Many seemingly unrelated developments in the computer industry played an important role. The idea of personalised, decentralised and playful computing was being advanced by the likes of Apple and Microsoft in the 1970s. In contrast, IBM’s idea of computing was of an expensive, centralised and institutional activity. If this latter view had prevailed, the internet might have never developed beyond email, which would probably have been limited to academics and investment bankers. That your mobile phone moonlights as a computer is not the result of inevitable technological trends, but the outcome of deeply ideological and now almost forgotten struggle between two different visions of computing.

Much of the credit for the technical advances of the internet goes to individuals such as Vint Cerf, creator of the first inter-network protocol, which helped to unify the numerous pre-internet networks; David D Clark, who helped to theorise the “end-to-end” principle, the precursor to the modern concept of “net neutrality”; and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web.

But studying the history of the internet is impossible without studying the ideas, biases, and desires of its early cheerleaders, a group distinct from the engineers. This included Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow, and the crowd that coalesced around Wired magazine after its launch in 1993. They were male, California-based, and had fond memories of the tumultuous hedonism of the 1960s.

These men emphasised the importance of community and shared experiences; they viewed humans as essentially good, influenced by rational deliberation, and tending towards co-operation. Anti-Hobbesian at heart, they viewed the state and its institutions as an obstacle to be overcome—and what better way to transcend them than via cyberspace? Their values had profound effects on the mechanics of the internet, not all of them positive. The proliferation of spam and cybercrime is, in part, the consequence of their failure to predict what might happen as a result of the internet’s open infrastructure. The first spam message dates back to 1978; now, 85 per cent of all email traffic in the world is spam.

Perhaps the cheerleaders’ greatest achievement was in wresting dominance of the internet from the founding engineers, whose mentality was that of the Cold War. These researchers greatly depended on the largesse of the US department of defence and its nervous anticipation of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. The idea of the “virtual community”—the antithesis of Cold War paranoia—was popularised by the writer and thinker Howard Rheingold. The term arose from his experiences with Well.com, an early precursor to Facebook.

But this cyber-boosterism was not without a serious side. Figures such as Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory and the spiritual leader of the “One Laptop per Child” movement, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Esther Dyson, the commentator and entrepreneur, helped to assure the public that the internet was not just a hangout for Bay Area hippies— it was also a serious place for doing business. And as the cyber-pundits kept promising, it was also a place for “getting empowered,” an attitude that made it a good fit for the broader neoliberal agenda of the 1990s.

This empowerment was supposed to come through the removal of intermediaries. Mainstream media outlets were to be replaced by bulletin boards, e-zines and later by forums and blogs. Elected representatives were to be replaced by “electronic townhalls” and direct online voting. This political aspiration even had its own founding document. Back in 1996, John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, penned the famous A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow hoped that the nation state would leave cyberspace alone. (French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent pledge to “civilise the internet” suggests that some nation states didn’t get Barlow’s memo.)

Overall, this vision of a world without intermediaries satisfied the communitarian former hippies and the libertarian anti-system cyber-pundits. They both wanted the internet to “flatten” the world, by which they meant level things out—make things fairer. (This was a decade before the author Thomas Friedman stumbled on the same metaphor and wrote his book The World is Flat, on the consequences of globalisation). That former hippies found themselves dining with venture capitalists only seemed to confirm the great bridging potential of the internet. The ex-hippies genuinely believed that all their utopian blueprints could be executed with the help of private capital.

Why the venture capitalists found the internet so appealing is a mystery: the market for online advertising at the time was tiny and the number of internet users negligible. In 1995, there were only 15m users, according to the website Internet World Stats. Start-ups were everywhere, but most were trading in promises of a bright future, not real services. The investors’ disregard for traditional methods of gauging financial performance—which eventually led to the dotcom bubble—suggests that their judgement was clouded by a toxic combination: rhetoric from the internet’s New Age cheerleaders; and neoliberal promises of new ways of doing commerce. Pets.com, which sold pet products to retail customers, is a textbook example. At one point, the website was spending close to $12m on advertising on revenues of $619,000. In 2000, the company collapsed in a heap of debt.

If there was one site that seemed to validate the ethos of the early pioneers—that people are good and, under the right conditions, will co-operate in the name of shared goals—it was Wikipedia. It is also one of the few sites that defied the for-profit model typical of internet start-ups. Wikipedia refuses to show ads or pay contributors. Instead, the site depends on donations from users and grants from foundations. Wikipedia is a painful reminder of what the web could have been had the early vision of the internet as a shared, communal space not been co-opted by big business.

Most internet enterprises had to build their business around advertising, which meant being subject to the trends of that industry—the most important of which is personalisation. Online ads are tailored to the interests of a given user. The more the website knows about a user, the more effective its advertising pitch. A clear picture of a user’s interests will also allow a website to tailor its content. Data from Google News shows that users who see a page with news that was collated on the basis of their previous activity end up clicking on more stories.

The logical end of this ever-increasing personalisation is of each user having his or her own online experience. This is a far cry from the early vision of the internet as a communal space. Instead of the internet, we may as well start talking of a billion “internets”—one for each user. Even the browser, the last bastion of shared experience, is on the way out, replaced by a panoply of apps for mobile phones and tablets such as the iPad that each provide a customised experience. This seems a clear deviation from the original plan.

It is not the only deviation. For many internet users, empowerment was an illusion. They may think they enjoy free access to cool services, but in reality, they are paying for that access with their privacy. Much of our information-sharing seems trivial—should we really care that some company knows what music we like? But, once this information is analysed alongside data from other similar services, it can generate insights about individuals and groups that are deeply interesting to most marketers and intelligence agencies. Based on its extensive data-mining across the web, RapLeaf, a San Francisco start-up, came up with the conclusion that Google’s engineers tend to eat more junk food than Microsoft’s.

If they can find out what you eat, they can find out what you read as well; from there, it’s not so hard to predict your political preferences—and manipulate you. We are careening towards a future where privacy becomes a very expensive commodity. There are already several start-ups providing privacy “at a fee.” Ironically, venture capitalists love these companies, and are busily funding solutions to the very problems they have previously helped to create.

The removal of online material is also a booming industry. For a fee that ranges from $3,000 to $15,000, a company such as Reputation.com can ensure that any sensitive information is buried deep in the last pages of Google’s search results, or disappears from the internet altogether. That company rose to prominence after it removed from the internet hundreds of photos of a Californian teenager who died in a car crash, at the request of the victim’s family. This, too, creates new kinds of inequalities: the maintenance of online reputation is dependent on ability to pay. At this point, the law can intervene, as in Finland, for example, where employers are banned from Googling the names of prospective employees. In Germany too, companies cannot check a potential employee’s social networking sites; but it is unlikely that such measures would take off in countries with weaker employment protection laws.

While we are being empowered as consumers, we are simultaneously being disempowered as citizens, something that the cyber-libertarian digital prophets didn’t foresee. “Electronic town halls” never took off either. When Barack Obama tried to hold one shortly after being elected president, the most popular question posed to him concerned the legalisation of mari-juana. The internet does not and cannot replace politics—it augments and amplifies it. The Tea Party in the US does not limit its activism to social media, but uses it as part of a broader political campaign. Politics is still primary and technology secondary.

However, one set of intermediaries may well be on the decline—print media—which has been quickly jettisoned by the younger generation. Search engines and social networking sites hold as much power today as newspapers and radio stations did three decades ago. The fact that they prefer to disguise their editorial practices in the form of nominally objective algorithms doesn’t make them any less political and influential.

Perhaps the mismatch between digital ideals and reality can be ascribed to the naivety of the technology pundits. But the real problem was that the internet’s early visionaries never translated their aspirations for a shared cyberspace into a set of concrete principles on which online regulation could be constructed. It’s as if they wanted to build an exemplary city on the hill, but never bothered to spell out how to keep it exemplary once it started growing.

Some fundamental questions about the communal aspects of the internet were sidestepped. Who would take out the trash—that is, deal with spamming and scamming? Who would be in charge of preserving historical memorabilia: the ephemeral tweets and blog posts that tend to disappear into the digital void? Who would deal with the problem of pollution—insidious practices such as “search engine optimisation,” or content farms that produce trivial content to earn advertising revenue? Who would protect the dignity of online citizens? Who would secure their privacy and protect them from defamation and libel?

These issues were perhaps not so pressing or evident in a decade when search engines were rudimentary and tweets and blogs didn’t exist. But it’s not so obvious that John Perry Barlow’s call on governments to exit cyberspace was a good one. In the absence of strong public institutions with oversight, corporations felt they could do what they wanted. In most cases, they just pretended these problems didn’t exist.

In the early days of the era of Web 2.0—the second-generation websites which had dynamic, shareable content or were social networks—it seemed that many such problems were imaginary: who needs to preserve tweets and blog posts if they can be easily found online? Now, with well-known services such as Digg, Flickr, and Delicious going through rough times, it’s not a given that your data is safe with them, for they might go under. There is always Google, which keeps a copy of most things—but then, one day it may go under too.

What the internet badly needed in its first two decades of existence, and what it needs still, is a book akin to Jane Jacob’s 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities which attacked the practices and attitudes of 1950s US urban planners and proved hugely influential. The structure of online space requires a similar critique.

The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square.

Source URL: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/06/morozov-web-no-utopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet/
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Burritos, Browsers, and Books [Draft]

By Dan Cohen

In the summer of 2007, Nate Silver decided to conduct a rigorous assessment of the inexpensive Mexican restaurants in his neighborhood, Chicago’s Wicker Park. Figuring that others might be interested in the results of his study, and that he might be able to use some feedback from an audience, he took his project online.

Silver had no prior experience in such an endeavor. By day he worked as a statistician and writer at Baseball Prospectus—an innovator, to be sure, having created a clever new standard for empirically measuring the value of players, an advanced form of the “sabermetrics” vividly described by Michael Lewis in Moneyball. But Silver had no experience as a food critic, nor as a web developer.

In time, his appetite took care of the former and the open web took care of the latter. Silver knit together a variety of free services as the tapestry for his culinary project. He set up a blog, The Burrito Bracket, using Google’s free Blogger web application. Weekly posts consisted of his visits to local restaurants, and the scores (in jalapeños) he awarded in twelve categories.

Home page of Nate Silver’s Burrito Bracket

Ranking system (upper left quadrant)

Being a sports geek, he organized the posts as a series of contests between two restaurants. Satisfying his urge to replicate March Madness, he modified another free application from Google, generally intended to create financial or data spreadsheets, to produce the “bracket” of the blog’s title.

Google Spreadsheets used to create the competition bracket

Like many of the savviest users of the web, Silver started small and improved the site as he went along. For instance, he had started to keep a photographic record of his restaurant visits and decided to share this documentary evidence. So he enlisted the photo-sharing site Flickr, creating an off-the-rack archive to accompany his textual descriptions and numerical scores. On August 15, 2007, he added a map to the site, geolocating each restaurant as he went along and color-coding the winners and losers.

Flickr photo archive for The Burrito Bracket (flickr.com)

Silver’s Google Map of Chicago’s Wicker Park (shaded in purple) with the location of each Mexican restaurant pinpointed

Even with its do-it-yourself enthusiasm and the allure of carne asada, Silver had trouble attracting an audience. He took to Yelp, a popular site for reviewing restaurants to plug The Burrito Bracket, and even thought about creating a Super Burrito Bracket, to cover all of Chicago. But eventually he abandoned the site following the climactic “Burrito Bowl I.”

With his web skills improved and a presidential election year approaching, Silver decided to try his mathematical approach on that subject instead—”an opportunity for a sort of Moneyball approach to politics,” as he would later put it. Initially, and with a nod to his obsession with Mexican food, he posted his empirical analyses of politics under the chili-pepper pseudonym “Poblano,” on the liberal website Daily Kos, which hosts blogs for its engaged readers.

Then, in March 2008, Silver registered his own web domain, with a title that was simultaneously and appropriately mathematical and political: fivethirtyeight.com, a reference to the total number of electors in the United States electoral college. He launched the site with a slight one-paragraph post on a recent poll from South Dakota and a summary of other recent polling from around the nation. As with The Burrito Bracket it was a modest start, but one that was modular and extensible. Silver soon added maps and charts to bolster his text.

FiveThirtyEight two months after launch, in May 2008

Nate Silver’s real name and FiveThiryEight didn’t remain obscure for long. His mathematical modeling of the competition between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination proved strikingly, almost creepily, accurate. Clear-eyed, well-written, statistically rigorous posts began to be passed from browsers to BlackBerries, from bloggers to political junkies to Beltway insiders. From those wired early subscribers to his site, Silver found an increasingly large audience of those looking for data-driven, deeply researched analysis rather than the conventional reporting that presented political forecasting as more art than science.

FiveThiryEight went from just 800 visitors a day in its first month to a daily audience of 600,000 by October 2008. On election day, FiveThiryEight received a remarkable 3
million
visitors, more than most daily newspapers
.

All of this attention for a site that most media coverage still called, with a hint of deprecation, a “blog,” or “aggregator” of polls, despite Silver’s rather obvious, if latent, journalistic skills. (Indeed, one of his roads not taken had been an offer, straight out of college, to become an assistant at The Washington Post. ) An article in the Colorado Daily on the emergent genre represented by FiveThirtyEight led with Ken Bickers, professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Colorado, saying that such sites were a new form of “quality blogs” (rather than, evidently, the uniformly second-rate blogs that had previously existed). The article then swerved into much more ominous territory, asking whether reading FiveThirtyEight and similar blogs was potentially dangerous, especially compared to the safe environs of the traditional newspaper. Surely these sites were superficial, and they very well might have a negative effect on their audience:

Mary Coussons-Read, a professor of psychology at CU Denver, says today’s quick turnaround of information helps to make it more compelling.

“Information travels so much more quickly,” she says. “(We expect) instant gratification. If people have a question, they want an answer.”

That real-time quality can bring with it the illusion that it’s possible to perceive a whole reality by accessing various bits of information.

“There’s this immediacy of the transfer of information that leads people to believe they’re seeing everything … and that they have an understanding of the meaning of it all,” she says.

And, Coussons-Read adds, there is pleasure in processing information.

“I sometimes feel like it’s almost a recreational activity and less of an information-gathering activity,” she says.

Is it addiction?

[Michele] Wolf says there is something addicting about all that data.

“I do feel some kind of high getting new information and being able to process it,” she says. “I’m also a rock climber. I think there are some characteristics that are shared. My addiction just happens to be information.”

While there’s no such mental-health diagnosis as political addiction, Jeanne White, chemical dependency counselor at Centennial Peaks Hospital in Louisville, says political information seeking could be considered an addictive process if it reaches an extreme.

This stereotype of blogs as the locus of “information” rather than knowledge, of “recreation” rather than education, was—and is—a common one, despite the wide variety of blogs, including many with long-form, erudite writing. Perhaps in 2008 such a characterization of FiveThirtyEight was unsurprising given that Silver’s only other credits to date were the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm (PECOTA) and The Burrito Bracket. Clearly, however, here was an intelligent researcher who had set his mind on a new topic to write about, with a fresh, insightful approach to the material. All he needed was a way to disseminate his findings. His audience appreciated his extraordinarily clever methods—at heart, academic techniques—for cutting through the mythologies and inadequacies of standard political commentary. All they needed was a web browser to find him.

A few journalists saw past the prevailing bias against non-traditional outlets like FiveThirtyEight. In the spring of 2010, Nate Silver bumped into Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, on a train platform in Boston. They struck up a conversation, which eventually turned into a discussion about how FiveThirtyEight might fit into the universe of the Times, which ultimately recognized the excellence of his work and wanted FiveThirtyEight to enhance their political reporting and commentary. That summer, a little more than two years after he had started FiveThirtyEight, Silver’s “blog” merged into the Times under a licensing deal. In less time than it takes for most students to earn a journalism degree, Silver had willed himself into writing for one of the world’s premier news outlets, taking a seat in the top tier of political analysis. A radically democratic medium had enabled him to do all of this, without the permission of any gatekeeper.

FiveThirtyEight on the New York Times website, 2010

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The story of Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight has many important lessons for academia, all stemming from the affordances of the open web. His efforts show the do-it-yourself nature of much of the most innovative work on the web, and how one can iterate toward perfection rather than publishing works in fully polished states. His tale underlines the principle that good is good, and that the web is extraordinarily proficient at finding and disseminating the best work, often through continual, post-publication, recursive review. FiveThirtyEight also shows the power of openness to foster that dissemination and the dialogue between author and audience. Finally, the open web enables and rewards unexpected uses and genres.

Undoubtedly it is true that the path from The Burrito Bracket to The New York Times may only be navigated by an exceptionally capable and smart individual. But the tools for replicating Silver’s work are just as open to anyone, and just as powerful. It was with that belief, and the desire to encourage other academics to take advantage of the open web, that Roy Rosenzweig and I wrote Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. We knew that the web, although fifteen years old at the time, was still somewhat alien to many professors, graduate students, and even undergraduates (who might be proficient at texting but know nothing about HTML), and we wanted to make the medium more familiar and approachable.

What we did not anticipate was another kind of resistance to the web, based not on an unfamiliarity with the digital realm or on Luddism but on the remarkable inertia of traditional academic methods and genres—the more subtle and widespread biases that hinder the academy’s adoption of new media. These prejudices are less comical, and more deep-seated, than newspapers’ penchant for tales of internet addiction. This resistance has less to do with the tools of the web and more to do with the web’s culture. It was not enough for us to conclude Digital History by saying how wonderful the openness of the web was; for many academics, this openness was part of the problem, a sign that it might be like “playing tennis with the net down,” as my graduate school mentor worriedly wrote to me.

In some respects, this opposition to the maximal use of the web is understandable. Almost by definition, academics have gotten to where they are by playing a highly scripted game extremely well. That means understanding and following self-reinforcing rules for success. For instance, in history and the humanities at most universities in the United States, there is a vertically integrated industry of monographs, beginning with the dissertation in graduate school—a proto-monograph—followed by the revisions to that work and the publication of it as a book to get tenure, followed by a second book to reach full professor status. Although we are beginning to see a slight liberalization of rules surrounding dissertations—in some places dissertations could be a series of essays or have digital components—graduate students infer that they would best be served on the job market by a traditional, analog monograph.

We thus find ourselves in a situation, now more than two decades into the era of the web, where the use of the medium in academia is modest, at best. Most academic journals have moved online but simply mimic their print editions, providing PDF facsimiles for download and having none of the functionality common to websites, such as venues for discussion. They are also largely gated, resistant not only to access by the general public but also to the coin of the web realm: the link. Similarly, when the Association of American University Presses recently asked its members about their digital publishing strategies, the presses tellingly remained steadfast in their fixation on the monograph. All of the top responses were about print-on-demand and the electronic distribution and discovery of their list, with a mere footnote for a smattering of efforts to host “databases, wikis, or blogs.” In other words, the AAUP members see themselves almost exclusively as book publishers, not as publishers of academic work in whatever form that may take. Surveys of faculty show comfort with decades-old software like word processors but an aversion to recent digital tools and methods. The professoriate may be more liberal politically than the most latte-filled ZIP code in San Francisco, but we are an extraordinarily conservative bunch when in comes to the progression and presentation of our own work. We have done far less than we should have by this point in imagining and enacting what academic work and communication might look like if it was digital first.

To be sure, as William Gibson has famously proclaimed, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Almost immediately following the advent of the web, which came out of the realm of physics, physicists began using the Los Alamos National Laboratory preprint server (later renamed ArXiv and moved to arXiv.org) to distribute scholarship directly to each other. Blogging has taken hold in some precincts of the academy, such as law and economics, and many in those disciplines rely on web-only outlets such as the Social Science Research Network. The future has had more trouble reaching the humanities, and perhaps this book is aimed slightly more at that side of campus than the science quad. But even among the early adopters, a conservatism reigns. For instance, one of the most prominent academic bloggers, the economist Tyler Cowen, still recommends to students a very traditional path for their own work. And far from being preferred by a large majority of faculty, quests to open scholarship to the general public often meet with skepticism.

If Digital History was about the mechanisms for moving academic work online, this book is about how the digital-first culture of the web might become more widespread and acceptable to the professoriate and their students. It is, by necessity, slightly more polemical than Digital History, since it takes direct aim at the conservatism of the academy that twenty years of the web have laid bare. But the web and the academy are not doomed to an inevitable clash of cultures. Viewed properly, the open web is perfectly in line with the fundamental academic goals of research, sharing of knowledge, and meritocracy. This book—and it is a book rather than a blog or stream of tweets because pragmatically that is the best way to reach its intended audience of the hesitant rather than preaching to the online choir—looks at several core academic values and asks how we can best pursue them in a digital age.

First, it points to the critical academic ability to look at any genre without bias and asks whether we might be violating that principle with respect to the web. Upon reflection many of the best things we discover in scholarship are found by disregarding popularity and packaging, by approaching creative works without prejudice. We wouldn’t think much of the meandering novel Moby-Dick if Carl Van Doren hadn’t looked past decades of mixed reviews to find the genius in Melville’s writing. Art historians have similarly unearthed talented artists who did their work outside of the royal academies and the prominent schools of practice. As the unpretentious wine writer Alexis Lichine shrewdly said in the face of fancy labels and appeals to mythical “terroir”: “There is no substitute for pulling corks.”

Good is good, no matter the venue of publication or what the crowd thinks. Scholars surely understand that on a deep level, yet many persist in the valuing venue and medium over the content itself. This is especially true at crucial moments, such as promotion and tenure. Surely we can reorient ourselves to our true core value—to honor creativity and quality—which will still guide us to many traditionally published works but will also allow us to consider works in some nontraditional venues such as new open access journals or articles written and posted on a personal website or institutional repository, or digital projects.

The genre of the blog has been especially cursed by this lack of open-mindedness from the academy. Chapter 1, “What is a Blog?”, looks at the history of the blog and blogging, the anatomy and culture of a genre that is in many ways most representative of the open web. Saddled with an early characterization as being the locus of inane, narcissistic writing, the blog has had trouble making real inroads in academia, even though it is an extraordinarily flexible form and the perfect venue for a great deal of academic work. The chapter highlights some of the best examples of academic blogging and how they shape and advance arguments in a field. We can be more creative in thinking about the role of the blog within the academy, as a venue for communicating our work to colleagues as well as to a lay audience beyond the ivory tower.

This academic prejudice against the blog extends to other genres that have proliferated on the open web. Chapter 2, “Genres and the Open Web,” examines the incredible variety of those new forms, and how, with a careful eye, we might be able to import some of them profitably into the academy. Some of these genres, like the wiki, are well-known (thanks to Wikipedia, which academics have come to accept begrudgingly in the last five years). Other genres are rarer but take maximal advantage of the latitude of the open web: its malleability and interactivity. Rather than imposing the genres we know on the web—as we do when we post PDFs of print-first journal articles—we would do well to understand and adopt the web’s native genres, where helpful to scholarly pursuits.

But what of our academic interest in validity and excellence, enshrined in our peer review system? Chapter 3, “Good is Good,” examines the fundamental requirements of any such system: the necessity of highlighting only a minority of the total scholarly output, based on community standards, and of disseminating that minority of work to communities of thought and practice. The chapter compares print-age forms of vetting with native web forms of assessment and review, and proposes ways that digital methods can supplement—or even replace—our traditional modes of peer review.

“The Value, and Values, of Openness,” Chapter 4, broadly examines the nature of the web’s openness. Oddly, this openness is both the easiest trait of the web to understand and its most complex, once one begins to dig deeper. The web’s radical openness not only has led to calls for open access to academic work, which has complicated the traditional models of scholarly publishers and societies; it has also challenged our academic predisposition toward perfectionism—the desire to only publish in a “final” format, purged (as much as possible) of error. Critically, openness has also engendered unexpected uses of online materials—for instance, when Nate Silver refactored poll numbers from the raw data polling agencies posted.

Ultimately, openness is at the core of any academic model that can operate effectively on the web: it provides a way to disseminate our work easily, to assess what has been published, and to point to what’s good and valuable. Openness can naturally lead—indeed, is leading—to a fully functional shadow academic system for scholarly research and communication that exists beyond the more restrictive and inflexible structures of the past.

[Update, 7/29/11: I've answered Zach Schrag's criticism about the disciplinary scope of the book in a new paragraph beginning with "To be sure, as William Gibson..."]

[Update, 8/1/11: Added more about "good is good," beginning with the line on Alexis Lichine and continuing through the following paragraph, to address Sylvia Miller's point about promotion and tenure. Also fixed a few points of grammar, thanks to Sherman Dorn.]

Source URL: http://www.dancohen.org/2011/07/26/the-ivory-tower-and-the-open-web-introduction-burritos-browsers-and-books-draft/
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KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 5

http://www.dragonweb.hu/projektek/e-konyv/#kindlereads

August 2, 2011

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