Archive for September, 2009

Coding’s Place in the Digital Humanities

An observer of the 2008 meeting of Museums and the Web noted that:

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I fundamentally believe that at least in the museum world there isn’t much danger of the technology folks unseating the curators of the world from their positions of power. I’m more interested in building skilled teams within museums so that the intelligent content people aren’t beholden to external media companies but rather their internal programmers who feel like they are part of the team and understand the overall mission of the museum as well as how to pull UTF-8 data out of a MySQL database.

About all I can say is that universities in general and humanities in particular could be inserted wherever museums appears above and the statement would be perfect. Ideally, programming would not only be folded into teams but also into individual players. There really is no reason why humanists shouldn’t have at least some exposure to the basics of coding.

To see the quotation above in its original context, you only need to look here.

859 days ago / Tagged: coding, digital, humanities 0

Seth Godin on Why Marketing Is Too Important to Leave to Marketers

I don’t know that I would throw marketers out, but perhaps it would be interesting to re-think the nature of marketing. Godin has long been known for preaching the other side of Anderson’s long-tail — think Kelly’s 1000 true fans — and urging businesses to create something remarkable that gives people a reason to talk about it, to build relationships to it, and, through it, to others. This talk is mostly about the latter dimension. At the end, he gives a preview of his next schtick/argument: the importance of developing tribes.

My real question is how can universities take this kind of approach and fold it into what we are already doing, what we do best, and also begin to build a future? I’ll have more to say in a few days.

861 days ago / Tagged: marketing, universities 0

One Next Book: Coding Creativity

As I begin seriously to write The Makers of Things, I am already thinking about where I am next headed. Part of me is interested in trying to think about the nature of creativity in the Cajun-Creole music scene; another part of me is interested in attempting something like an ethnography of a coding project. Towards that end, I am starting to keep a list of books I’d like to read:

Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesly 1995).
Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O’Reilly, 2004).
Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (Pragmatic Programmers).
Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Three Rivers Press, 2008).
Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work (Apress, 2009).
And of course Joel Spolsky’s books.

862 days ago / Tagged: books, creativity, research 0

Typography Matters

As what I would like to call, with a great deal of hope, the humanistic revolution rolls forward, there are a wide variety of skills, or competences, with which we need to be at least familiar. Competence would be great, and certainly I regard mastery as something to which most humanists will turn to professionals. Nevertheless, the most effective communication begins with some awareness of its channels. At its root, print communication comes down to design and prose design begins with typography. In our current era, typography actually has two branches: print and screen. Most designers are aware of the differences and the limitations of each — in this particular instance, screen design is actually more limiting because so much of the infrastructure is really beyond the designer’s control.

A few websites that offer some basics of design are:

The Grid System, which offers a very basic principle to guide all design work — I do not necessarily agree with all aspects of the grid, but like the system of thirds taught to beginning photographers it is meant more to be a rule you discard as you gain mastery.

At the same time, there are a number of sites maintained by designers which are not only about design but also demonstrate design in many ways:

Swiss Miss has a somewhat lurid title, but offers regular insight into the European modern design style — think Helvetica and Ikea.

866 days ago 0

Knowledge One Click Away

As I continue to think about how IT is changing the game for both major research universities and smaller players, I am continually drawn to the fact that, first, most universities do a terrible job of branding, and, second, that more universities haven’t seized the advent of open access as one of the ways to build their recognition.

Let me begin with a situation that I faced when I was working in Indiana University’s Executive Education unit back in the mid-90s. We were a six million dollar operation looking to grow to eight, but we were stymied by the fact that IU’s brand just couldn’t get us there. Well, yes, you might respond, but if you’re an executive and the company is writing the check, and they offer you a chance to go to Harvard for a week or Indiana for two weeks, which one would you choose? Harvard wins every time, no?

No. Harvard wins when you try to play on their turf, which we’ll call “big ideas” for now. It’s where the VIPs, the Very Important Places, play. You know who they are because they are the same universities from which the political science and economic wonks are drawn when it comes time for one of the major news outlets to cover a story. (Curious that no one blames them for our current political and economic mess, but that’s for another time.) Those names are: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, et cetera. Some of the big publics get to play here, too: Michigan, the UCs, et cetera redux.

But not everything is about “big ideas,” especially right now when a whole host of folks are beginning to believe that maybe, just maybe it would be a good idea not to depend only on good idea but also to keep around some of those guys with dirt under their fingernails. (One version of this actually comes from a Harvard business faculty member who has come up with the idea of an “industrial commons” — see “Restoring American Competitiveness in the July-August 2009 edition of the Harvard Business Review.)

So associating yourself, your brand if you will, with a kind of practical approach to the world may not be a bad way to go at this particular moment in time. Here I’m thinking of a place like Indiana University, where you may just never get credit for all the amazing ideas you do create because you are in the Midwest. (Apparently only Michigan, Chicago, and Northwestern can regularly get credit for big ideas, from what I can tell.)

The same also goes for little Louisiana. While we are chasing the movie industry, like every other city in America, throwing gobs of tax breaks at it, we are surrounded, quite literally, by dozens and dozens of light manufacturing operations who are innovating on something like a daily basis. Not only that, but their children and their workers attend our university. Imagine what would happen if we were to pour our faculty in all those places and let the whole situation simmer for a little while.

Then what could we do? We could make sure that all that knowledge, all those ideas, were a mere click away from our university’s home page and not sequestered away on faculty home pages or entombed in the pages of journals that no one but our faculty can read. (I love you JSTOR, but you get what I’m saying here, yes?)

I like the way Wharton has done it:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2338

But that is one ugly URL. (Which is to an article re-evaluating Chris Anderson’s Long Tail idea using Netflix data.)

I have already discussed what I perceive to be IU’s somewhat dispersed appearance on iTunesU. We really need to get more organized. No one is saying we have to organize the way scholars work or organize what they work on — despite my daydream above, I don’t see it happening — but we do need to organize their research results. We want to push them out in front of as many audiences as possible. But the university needs to take this on as a distinct task. The digital library unit is one place to start, but as Harvard’s open access initiative reveals, the word needs to come down from the very top, or as MIT’s Open Courseware suggests, it needs to be part of the culture.

Harvard and MIT, and Stanford, with things like SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere), have solidified their digital beachhead. I am sure others are working hard on this, because it has to be clear that those who succeed and survive whatever transformation higher education is going through, or is about to go through is you follow Business Week‘s argument, universities need to get ahead of the curve if they aren’t going to go flying off the road.

868 days ago 0

My Mac Life

I get asked this often enough by colleagues, friends, and students that I thought it would be easiest just to compile all the answers into a single post and then point people to it. What’s the question you ask? What apps do I use?

The short answer is that I try out any number of apps because I’m always curious to see how other people imagine problems. I pay for a small percentage of those apps. And I end up depending upon a fraction of that. And, no, I don’t mind paying for apps I don’t use. None of the apps listed below represented a monumental investment — nothing like paying for either Microsoft Office or even the Student and Home edition. In fact, for that same $150 you pay for the latter, you could buy the first three apps listed here. The fact is the Mac software world is filled with really great deals on software that will help you work the way you want to work. You only have to explore the territory a bit.

That said, I know plenty of people who never explore the territory at all and are very productive cranking out novels and essays and all manner of other things using Microsoft Word. More power to them. Because there is also some portion of the population out there that isn’t getting near as much work done because they are always seeking the holy grail of productivity, the perfect solution to whatever they think their problem is. (Their problem being that they think some piece of software will magically make the words come. It won’t.) I spent plenty of time in the first group, and, given the chance, I would gladly spend a lot more time with the latter group — hey, Merlin Mann has made a good living and travels all around the world pretty much talking and writing about what he imagines will be the solution to his creativity woes. So much so that that is now his topic.

It’s a wacky world.

The Apps I Use

That said, here’s what I use:

Writing

For long-form writing, I tend to use Scrivener, an app actually coded by a novelist and writer. I like it because it does several things well: it let’s me outline and organize writing quickly and in a way that I can “see” and “feel” — hard to qualify this latter dimension, I know. It also let’s me take snapshots of pieces of my outline so if I want to roll-back changes or keep different versions of a section — for different outputs — that’s all taken care of in-app and in a way that’s easily previewed. I can also split the screen and put media with which I am working next to where I am writing. If I am trying to describe a landscape, I can look at it, zoom in and out, pan and tilt. If I am listening to an audio file in order to transcribe it, I can do that within the app. Or I can work with PDFs without having to switch windows or switch apps. None of that. It’s a bit like iTunes for writers.

For short-form writing, if it’s just text or if I am working with a Scrivener output that needs some adjusting before getting mailed or e-mail, then I rely on Nisus Writer Express. Its native format is RTF, and it can produce fairly robust documents within that format:

Nisus Writer Express
This screenshot is from the Nisus site. I don’t think I’ve ever made a document that looked like this.

For more complex layouts, I have changed to Apple’s own Pages. This was brought about in part when I had to deal with a two-column layout, with illustrations, for an IEEE submission and Word simply couldn’t handle it. Don’t get me wrong: I use Word. I depended upon Word for two decades, but now that Pages offers a superior outlining view and seems to handle layout better than Word, the only reason I still keep a contemporary version of the latter around is because everyone else uses it and I have to be able to work with those documents. It’s no longer for the love.

Three, even four, apps for writing? Seems weird doesn’t it? Well, yes. And, no. Mostly it’s just two, Scrivener and NWE. And there’s really no thinking necessary for which app I am going to use. If it’s short, like a letter, or I am moving quickly, it’s going to be NWE. If it’s going to be anything more than a few sections, I’m going to fire up Scrivener.

Organizing

For those projects that have not matured into a writing activity yet, or may never be a writing project but maybe a teaching project or simply stuff I like to think about, I have long used DevonThink — I actually own the Pro version. It’s my kitchen sink application. I’ve looked at other apps, like Yojimbo — mostly because it has MobileMe syncing — but in the end I just keep using DevonThink. It does a marvelous job of letting me dump all kinds of information into it and then search for it when I need it. It also keeps track of URLs of web pages I’ve copied, and it appears that you will soon be able to tag things. Yay!

Most of my planning for teaching is done in Omnioutliner Pro. I have used OmniOutliner elsewhere in the past, for collecting notes or for organizing longer projects, but other apps now handle that space. (A number of us have been pressing the OmniGroup for years now to pay some attention to the app that has fathered both OmniFocus and OmniPlan, and perhaps they will at some point. For now, OO has languished, which has meant many of us have moved on.)

That said, I do try to use OmniFocus to keep up with everything I should be doing. I don’t know about anyone else, but one of my problems with GTD is that if I really do capture all the things that I need or want to do, it’s an overwhelming list. And so I end up writing down little tiny one-offs in my notebook, because peering into the great Pandorian box of OmniFocus is scare. I know, I know. A wiser man would move a chunk of things into a Later category. But, yes, I do try, and when I do, I use OmniFocus. (It’s nice because it syncs itself through MobileMe not only to both my Macs but also to my iPhone.

It’s for that reason that I recently picked up MacJournal. It looks to be able to do the same magical syncing thing, and to post materials to this blog. (How cool is that?)

Every digital image I have taken for the last 5 to 6 years is sitting in a Lightroom library.

All these magical apps! I don’t know at what point I went over to the iTunes way, but there it is. I was fairly happy, and reasonably productive, using nothing more than a text editor and outputting materials by writing in Markdown or MultiMarkdown and then running things through a series of Perl or PHP or Ruby scripts or some XML transformations. But it take up time. And no one else was doing it.

Yes, I would love it if my fellow humanists would use some version of plain text or at least used applications whose file formats were suitable to checking into modern version control systems like Subversion or Git, but they aren’t. By and large, most humanists are still using word processing applications, mostly Word, as fancy typewriters. And, hey, it works for them. But I’m not going to bang my head against a wall worrying about their data. I got plenty of my own data to worry about, and I’m hoping to produce more of it every day. The apps I use take reasonably good care of my data and do not lock it in a way that, should one of them fail, I will lose a huge amount of work.

Plus, plus, I just got tired of doing everything at the file level. Yeah, Spotlight works, but do I really feel like adding all the metadata by hand? Metadata is where it’s at when you’re in the middle of an information deluge, and these apps handle metadata superbly, making it easy for me to find stuff.

Are there more apps I use? Yes. Keynote, GraphicConverter, OmniGraffle. To name a few. SketchUp when I can. Photoshop and Illustrator when it’s time to go big.

This list is probably too much, too long. But you asked. (No, not you, but the person standing behind you. Oh? You didn’t know someone was standing behind you? Well, never mind. I don’t think they looked too dangerous.)

The Sites I Visit

I also sometimes get asked how I know all the things, about technology, that I know. The answer is I read a lot. Here is a short list of things I read with a promise that I will work on making it longer in the near future:

Finer Things in Mac is a non-stop stream of “hey, I didn’t know OS X or app X did that, or could do that.” Sometimes there are, usually well-deserved and well-considered, complaints and/or critiques.
For general news about the Mac world and sometimes insights either into design matters or the politics of it all, I read John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.
For trouble-shooting, I turn to my fellow denizens of the Macintoshian Achaia, one of many forums at Ars Technica, which has recently gone down hill, I’m afraid, so my only recommendation is for the forum itself. For general technical news — because we don’t live in an Apple-branded universe (thank goodness), I read Wired. The writing is sharper than AT, more thoughtful. (And there’s less re-blogging.) For re-blogging, there’s always Slashdot, and, increasingly it seems all the major news outlets. But then you knew that already, right?

It’s time to slip on the echo-chamber-noise-cancellation headphones and get back to work.

871 days ago / Tagged: computing, mac 0

Digital Humanities and Publishing Reading List

I have a bunch of these links stored up, and I need to begin organizing them. They will get moved to a page one day. For now, I’m collecting them in a post. All of these are summative documents in some fashion:

From the UK, there is the Communicating knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings report, which explores “how researchers publish and why, including the motivations that lead them to publish in different formats and the increase in collaboration and co-authorship. It also explores how researchers decide what to cite and the influence of research assessment on their behaviours and attitudes.”

871 days ago / Tagged: communications, digital, humanities, publishing 0

Evil Makes for Better Stories

We were still on our street on the way to drop-off this morning when Lily asked me a question about the white witch of Narnia. (I should note that Yung has been reading Narnia to Lily. I’m ambivalent about it. I haven’t read the books, but there is, from what I can tell from my glimpses of the film, some fairly lofty topics raised in the novel as well as some violent moments.)

Why does Jades do bad things, Daddy?

Does Jades scare you?

No, she replied.

Do you want to know why she does bad things?

Yes.

And so I tried to explain that Jades is a character in a story. She’s not real. She’s pretend. And because she isn’t real, there’s no way to know why she does what she does unless the story tells us. I was beginning to wind up a long exegesis on the subject, remembering all the times I had tried to communicate the same idea to my undergraduates, when Lily interrupted me to say: “She does bad things to make the story more interesting.”

Well, yes.

872 days ago / Tagged: lily 0

More Like This Please

The only problem with this clip is that they cut off the discussion that follows that unpacks what McFerrin does on stage. Still, it’s amazing to watch McFerrin at work.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

874 days ago / Tagged: communications, digital, humanities, teaching 0

A Hundred Hits

So … I think I have only looked at the statistics section of cPanel only once or twice before in the entire time I have been blogging, which dates back to somewhere like 2002 or 2003. (That’s right, before personal blogs jumped the shark.) When I first started maintaining a website, the front page hosted a welter of connections to different pieces of my portfolio: essays I had written, projects I had worked on, documents people could download — like a fieldwork log sheet or a guide on how to ask questions — and the blog was off to the side. All that stuff is there, or soon will be back, but it’s now pushed over to the left, and the blog is front and center … er, right. Or, a little off-center and to the right. (The off-center is probably revealing, and I do like to think that I am mostly right about things I write about, but that’s not my decision to make.)

I should be honest and admit that I haven’t really cared about readers. There were several reasons for this. The first reason was somewhat rhetorical: if I worried about audience, I wouldn’t necessarily write about the things that truly mattered to me, and I wanted to give myself time to discover that, to cast a broad net again and again until I knew for myself what it was I wanted to keep. The second reason was that I wasn’t even sure that I wanted any public to care about my blog. That is, and this is still somewhat the case, I rather liked the idea of the blog simply being my own on-line notebook. There are just so many ideas and things that pass through my hands, pass through my mind, that I really liked having a notebook in which I could catch it all and then search for it later.

I am not entirely convinced that I really want to break from either of those desires, but along the way, I found myself with something I had not planned on … readers.

That’s right. The Webalyzer application built into my hosting provider’s version of cPanel revealed to me that I have readers. Now I knew I had the occasional reader, mostly family and friends, and the occasional stray reader, but neither of those account for the fact that this website is now accruing over a hundred unique visitors a day — visitors that are not robots. (I was, to be honest, searching the logs in hopes of discovering that a certain set of readers had dropped in.)

Now some of you reading this, or “reading” this, are either robots unknown to Webalyzer or comment spambots — and it really must be frustrating to those of you who are spambots that I have comments turned off — but that still can not account for the over 100 hits a day this site is getting. (As of late summer, early fall of 2009, the number is about 140.)

With readers come responsibility. I’m not in search of a readership. I don’t, at least as yet, have any desire to become an independent blogger. And I certainly don’t want to do it by posting about stuff I think readers will want to read about. Rather, I have always wanted to write about stuff that, well, I wanted to write about, and it’s nice to know that there are readers who are interested in reading what I want to write about. That’s not a selfish statement. Rather, it’s a way of foregrounding the idea that I when I write about something I am honestly interested in it and trying to think about it and that you are getting that when you read. If I have posted something, it’s because it matters to me — or is at least interesting to me.

There are more than enough people in this world who are willing to say anything or do anything to curry the favor of an audience. Some began with great integrity and then lost their way, either because they got to be popular and got caught up in the rush or because they are so desperately seeking to be popular, and some never had integrity to begin with. This, by the way, applies to all walks of life and not just bloggers. It applies to the business world and to the academy.

In fact, one of the realizations I have had is that people can be pretty much uncreative everywhere. Which saddens me greatly, but it explains a whole host of phenomena. (I’ll write about this at some point in the future, I promise.)

I hated writing that, but it’s balanced out by what I am about to say: that I am re-focusing this blog a bit. Having blogged now off and on for over six years and maintained this particular version of the site for about a year, I think it’s safe to say that this blog has really been about three things:

the digital humanities,
thoughts on things that happen in my daily life, and
creativity.

I listed creativity last because it has been far less a feature of this blog than I would like — you’ll find it mostly tagged as “making” so far. (Give me a minute to clean up the tagging system and I’ll make that a link to take you to those posts.) I plan to write about these “discovered” foci in upcoming posts.

And thanks for reading.

878 days ago / Tagged: creativity, digital, humanities 0

In Praise of SciFi Corridors

There’s a lovely post up at Den of Geek about the role of corridors in science fiction films. I wish there was more discussion, or at least I didn’t feel like there was much of an argument or analysis really offered. It’s more of a breezy tour. Still, it’s a great idea and I hope others take Anderson up on his suggestion and we see more pieces like this looking at texts from seemingly oddball perspectives. (If any of my intro to film students are reading this: here’s your chance.)

880 days ago / Tagged: film, scifi 0

How to Move Furniture with a Car Jack

With these preternatural, because they seem so premature, hints of autumn hitting us, it turned my mind to the fact that there are a variety of house projects in need of, hmm, completion. Almost all of them involve simply painting and affixing wood molding. In the case of the bathroom, both floor and ceiling need some molding, as does the top of the tub enclosure. The kitchen needs toe kicks beneath the cabinets and new crown molding where we installed the new window.

All of this because the promise of cool weather means I won’t mind spending a weekend painting and sawing wood trim on the carport. And painting. And sawing.

As my mind lingered on wood trim and I sat, as I am now, in the study, I realized that the book cases I built for Yung could use some attention. They are functional, but not finished. They could use some layering of finished millwork to dress them up a bit. To do that and to make everything work right, I needed to slip an additional piece of one by eight between the current side of the book case and the frame of the door that leads to the living room:

It’s not readily apparent, but the house is just out of plumb enough that the seven foot fall from the top of the frame to the bottom results in a narrowing of the gap between the book case and the door frame by about a quarter of an inch or so. When I first installed the cases, I was very focused on their being plumb. Only later, after they were already loaded with books did I realize that simply matching the extant, and sufficiently, plumb line of the door frame was the better idea. I had largely overlooked the discrepancy both because I didn’t feel like unloading the shelves in order to hammer on the bottom of the cases to shift them a quarter of an inch and because really, no one ever noticed. (I hate admitting that I actually used that as a reason.)

But now I, as I considered finishing out the cases, not only did I have a practical reason for setting things if not straight then parallel but it was a detail that kept nagging at me each time I passed through the door. But I was stuck with the reluctance of not wanting to unload 54 feet of shelving (2-foot shelves x 27 shelves).

I thought about a hammer. The standard hammers in my tool bag were simply too small. I would make a lot of noise and not get much movement.

So I thought about a bigger hammer: I could borrow a sledge from Gerard or someone else. But would I have enough room to swing it in the span of the 32-inch doorway?

Hmmm.

I decided to try a low-tech approach. I sat on the floor, put my back against the wall, and pushed with my feet against the book cases.

Nah ah.

But something about the idea of pushing like that stuck in my head and as I walked away to consider my next option, it dawned on me: use one of the jacks from our cars and let the efficient, and relatively easy, transfer of power achieved by the turning of a screw do the work.

But would it work?

What you see in the photo is the jack from my truck. 2 x 8s at each end spread the pressure out so that I don’t leave a mark on any surface. A 2 x 4 completes the span and two miscellaneous pieces of 2 x materials keep the jack and the 2 x 4 aligned. And, yes, I did realize that the two by four my jump up from the pressure, which is why I stood on it while I turned the jack. The result?

Success!

881 days ago / Tagged: furniture, house, mechanics 0

Digital Virgils: The Digital Library Still Needs Librarians

Sometimes when we imagine the digital future, I think we often imagine it without human beings, at least in terms of trekking through the datasphere, aka searching. The promise of Google is that one can sit down in front of the legendarily simply Google search box and type in a series of queries, perhaps none terribly better phrased or constructed than the one before, until you get something like what you thought you wanted or would get. (The epistemology of search is incredibly fascinating in this way, since our very idea of a successful search is perhaps based on incorrect assumptions about what success will look like. Prior searches might have produced better results, but we were unable to see them.) Google of course has to maintain this appearance, since its entire revenue scheme is based on delivering ads tailored to your searches, placing sponsored links at the top or advertised results to the side. Google’s finances depend upon a fair number of us clicking on these results as successful results.

Add to this the very idea of progress built into almost all Western discourse since the Enlightenment, which is especially forceful in the realm of science and technology, and which frequently figures the diminishing necessity of our fellow human beings, and you get an image of the datasphere largely built on the intelligence of machines who serve our needs dispassionately and objectively. (We always worry about bias and judgement when other people are involved.)

Well, yeah, that could happen, but it would be a really bad place for someone like me. Because sometimes, when you really need a very particular thing, it is revealed to you that perhaps your search results are not as good as you think, and you really need a guide, a Virgil to take you by the hand and guide you through the search purgatory of your own making.

All this comes up because as I sat in line waiting to pick up my daughter from school, I engaged in one of the great pleasures of being stuck in traffic, I listened to a podcast. In this case, it was the Harvard Business School’s IdeaCast (which, truth be known, is rather uneven). This particular podcast was an interview with an author of a recent essay in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Restoring American Competitiveness.” The author, Gary Pisano, argued that one of problems with the American engine of innovation is that it isn’t firing on all cylinders. That we had shut down part of the engine when we outsourced so much of our manufacturing overseas. His argument, it seemed to me, was both a grand one, that making and inventing feed each other, and a fine one, that process innovations can often lead to product innovations.

I need to look up that article, I thought. When I got home later that day, I first searched, yup, Google. I got to the HBR home page and quickly found the way to get to the article on-line. Or at least the first few paragraphs of the article. The rest I could have for $6.50.

I’m not opposed to paying such a reasonable amount for the sake of my own curiosity, let alone my research. Still, one of the purposes of a library is to pool our resources in order to have a common pool of, well, resources. So I got on-line to see if our library carried the Harvard Business Review. My first few searches went awry. I couldn’t find HBR at all. Well, I thought, maybe I’ll have to call in a few favors with the business school folks: surely one of them subscribes. But it just didn’t seem right that our library didn’t have HBR. I better call, I thought.

And so I did and a very patient librarian found our subscription to HBR and the link to the URL that would get me full PDFs. Because I seemed to be trapped in some intellectual-digital acrobatic nightmare, she stayed with me on the phone until I got exactly where I needed to be, which took a while.

And so this post is a tribute to my Virgil, and to the Virgils everywhere, and to let you know that even when Colossus goes live, we will still need you.

886 days ago / Tagged: dls, humanities 0

Microsoft’s Vision for 2019

If only Microsoft’s execution was as good as its vision … some of the devices depicted here seem awfully close to things that the iPhone already does:

Still, the value of having a vision and of sharing it with a larger audience is not an action to be taken lightly. I myself look forward to Microsoft’s surface technology becoming ubiquitous and to having low-powered, large, multi-functional, multi-touch work surfaces.

887 days ago / Tagged: digitalmedia, future 0