Author Archives for Fran
December 26, 2008 3:00 pm
Published by Fran
Spacefem.com: Dewey Decimal System Meme. Some seasonal silliness! via Impressions Scholarcast. Here’s mine: Fran’s Dewey Decimal Section: 002 The book Class: 000 Computer Science, Information & General Works Contains: Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations. What it says about you: You are very informative and up to date. You’re working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve. Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com
December 21, 2008 4:31 pm
Published by Fran
Knowledge angels are not Christmas decorations 2.0 but are “those people in information industries who are the most expert, understand innovations in their sector and add the most value to a company” according to an article on Alphagalileo. The phrase is based on “business angels” and one of the researchers who coined it stated: “Other possible names, such as, for instance, ‘consulting wizards’, ‘services magicians’, ‘knowledge-intensive demons’ or any further hybrid creatures resulting from the crossing of a management handbook and a magic trading cards, would sound less attractive.” It will be interesting to see how long it takes for... Read more »
December 16, 2008 3:58 pm
Published by Fran
The National Centre for Text Mining is “the first publicly-funded text mining centre in the world”. It is an initiative of Manchester and Liverpool universities, working with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Tokyo. They appear to be working mainly on biology texts at the moment, but I enjoyed the explanations of their techniques and processes, despite the technicality. There are links to events and seminars that are aimed at the scientific community but some would probably be of interest to more general semantic web enthusiasts.
December 14, 2008 2:12 pm
Published by Fran
The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is an info classic. It’s one of those delightful books that manages to be very erudite, cover a huge range of theory, but reads effortlessly and even had me laughing out loud from time to time. (My favourite anecdote was that BT’s answer to homeworkers’ sense of isolation was to pipe a soundtrack of canned background noise and chatter into their offices!) Essentially, the book argues that information and information technology cannot be separated from its social context and ignoring the human factors in technology adoption and use... Read more »
December 8, 2008 9:14 am
Published by Fran
The Fractal Nature of Knowledge « Not Otherwise Categorized… is Seth Earley’s response to a question about whether we “need more categories” as knowledge becomes more specialised. He points out that “categories are only meaningful given a specific scale” and that the level of abstraction you need depends on the context. The metaphor of the fractal nature of knowledge strikes me as quite a good one in this respect – a knowledge organisation system should allow you to pan out or zoom in to get different views, but obviously there are practical limits (Borges’s map of the empire that is... Read more »
December 4, 2008 1:59 pm
Published by Fran
I went on Tuesday to Online 2008 at Olympia. It seemed quieter than last year, so I took advantage of some of the free presentations. I listened to Laurent Le Meur talking about Agence France-Presse (AFP)’s efforts to create a multimedia news database – (Imageforum), Graham Beastall of Soutron Ltd on Taxonomy Development using Sharepoint, Scott Gavin on Knowledge Plaza, and Judith Lewis of i-level on the Dark Side of Social Media. Le Meur described the need to create a common metadata language to bring together journalists and photographers, who tended to think about subjects very differently. AFP use autocategorisation... Read more »
November 28, 2008 3:48 pm
Published by Fran
Following on from my post the other day, it occurred to me that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a bit like social media. We enforce a social norm not through pressure but through constant mutual observation. This post on the election of Obama and the Facebook effect seems to be a different slant on the same idea: Unit Structures – Regarding the Facebook Effect. Fred Stutzman claims “Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways. I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed. Because of the pragmatics... Read more »
November 26, 2008 1:56 pm
Published by Fran
I read a copy of The Future of Information Architecture: Conceiving a Better Way to Understand Taxonomy, Network and Intelligence because I couldn’t resist the title, but was left utterly baffled by the book. The author appears to have taught at some US universities, but no biography was provided and the preface declared that due to the “political incorrectness” of his ideas, no institution or establishment had supported him in writing and publishing the book. Nevertheless, he seems to have produced quite a few books over the last few years. The publisher, Chandos Press, apparently printed the book directly from... Read more »
November 22, 2008 12:00 pm
Published by Fran
Battle of Ideas: Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy? is a long video but well worth watching (it is divided into sections so doesn’t have to be seen in one go). The description says: “For many of us, divulging intimate details of our private lives via social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook has become the norm. But information and communication technologies have also facilitated surveillance and data gathering by government and big businesses. While in some contexts we seem so ready to give up our privacy, in others we seem increasingly anxious to protect it.” The debate was hosted... Read more »
November 14, 2008 9:15 am
Published by Fran
Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Amplification around a tag offers an interesting perspective on vocabulary control. Dempsey’s well-referenced article highlights the power of designating a tag for an event so that blogs, tweets, etc. are consistently labelled – pulling them all together and amplifying their impact. He says: “in a sense, the tag becomes the virtual venue for the event’s digital legacy”. This “gathering around a flag” in the infosphere strikes me as an interesting example of an intersection between branding, marketing, and knowledge management.