Posts Tagged: humanities

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14
Aug 09

The Road to Digital Considered

A recent posting on Ars Technica about the American Chemical Society’s “road to digital” publishing spurred an interesting discussion, but a surprising number of posters fumed about the loss of print. I took a moment to write about the issue, using what little I know about how things work for my own society, the American Folklore Society:

I, too, enjoy serendipity and have profited immensely in my intellectual and professional development from reading the card behind the one for which I was searching while in the card catalog or from seeing the title of a book on the shelf above the one for which I was looking. That said, that notion of browsing is not really lost in the digital realm. These things are called “browsers” after all and the rise of the multi-tab interface that allows one to open multiple other texts while one stays focused on another speaks directly to the ability to browse easily in the digital realm.

I am the editor of a website for a small scholarly society in the humanities, the American Folklore Society, that is about to make its premiere on October 1. We are deploying this new/additional communication platform in addition to our journal of record, the Journal of American Folklore. JAF already exists in print and digital form: as a paper product produced and shipped by the University of Illinois Press and as an electronic product available through Project Muse (5 most recent years) and through JSTOR. Having had a chance to talk some with the CIO for JSTOR through the Project Bamboo workshops, I have to say that JSTOR is really trying to do this right. And I would bet that they, too, are looking for some better format than PDF that is, in some ways, too heavily focused on print as an eventual outcome. (You would think in this era of XML and XSLT we would be there already, but, alas, we are not.)

Our society is not alone in being somewhat dependent on the revenue generated by subscriptions to the journal. Like any number of scholarly societies, subscriptions are considerably larger than the active members in the field and are largely dependent upon libraries around the world. In some way, libraries subsidize small scholarly societies as well as, perhaps, large ones. Perhaps that is as it should be. The true cost of running a scholarly society, as opposed to a professional society which can probably charge more for membership, can probably never be born by its members — unless, perhaps, they agglomerate into larger and larger groups for economies of scale. E.g., the American Anthropological Association. (Which now has a number of breakaway groups and journals because the views of the center cannot encompass the many views of its many edges.)

At the same time as all this is happening, libraries have been bearing the costs of both print and digital editions of scholarly products like journals. That kind of expansion of costs for, ostensibly, the same product was bearable when money was less of a concern. But it’s a concern now and likely to remain one for a while. And so, libraries now have to begin making choices that perhaps should have been made a long time ago. Not surprisingly, they find digital more cost effective across a number of fronts.

The obvious needs to be said here: digital production in no way inhibits users from printing out materials and reading them the old-fashioned way. It’s just that the cost of doing so, and the hassle of it to some degree, is now directly born by the print user and not by the larger economy. Pay as you go, as it were. With any luck, some of the hassle will get removed as print-on-demand devices become more common and more available so one could download an entire copy of a journal and have it printed and bound — that’s one of the satisfactions of hoisting a book that I don’t know the digital realm will ever replace.

I should be clear: I love books. I love the way they feel, smell, look. I paid my way through undergrad and parts of grad doing graphic design work. I love the printed page. But I’m also a realist, and we’re in serious need of a re-think about how all this goes. I know some will lament the loss of page numbers for citations, but what need the page number when you can search the text for the quotation yourself and get to it faster than flipping through pages and scanning paragraphs?

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8
Aug 09

The Cult of the Author in the New Economy

The writers at Wired are regularly wrong — the “long boom” anyone? — but they are usually thought-provoking in the process. At the very least, folks like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson are prolific, practically living embodiments of what is sometimes called Google’s approach to doing business: “Have a lot of ideas; fail often.”

Chris Anderson is, of course, most famous — if one ignores his current infamy for suggesting that everything should be free — for describing the long tail, which suggests, as per the diagram below, that there is a reasonable income to be made in the “long tail” of sales that occurs over time. The high “head” on the left of the graph is where hits live. Anderson’s argument is that there is more money in the long tail and that retailers like Amazon.com, Netflix, and iTunes have already discovered this and can, thanks to lowering costs by having an internet storefront and centralized, and efficient, inventory systems (or digital inventory in the case of iTunes) take advantage of the overall scene.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail”

This is, as Kevin Kelly points out, extremely good news for two groups: the retailers who occupy these markets and the consumers who shop in them who now have access to considerably more, and considerably more varied, commodities.

Everyone wins, right?

Well, certainly the mainstream media/content producers continue to win as they stay focused on producing the hits that occupy the head. They spend a lot in order to make a lot. They have an infrastructure for doing so. There may be some settling, and some shrinkage Anderson seems to suggest at times in his argument, but at least in this moment in time there seems little reason to believe that such industries won’t continue to play significant roles in the market place.

But what about individual/independent producers? Do they get to win, too?

While the public may be interested in, and be profiting from, the greater variety of materials available to them, it would seem that the advantage lies with the content aggregators like Amazon and Netflix and iTunes who can successfully ride the long tail, as it were, by selling an obscure novel here, renting an odd film there, or making available a one-hit wonder from two decades ago. That kind of aggregation might make economic sense for the aggregator, but does it work for the aggregated?

Kelly thinks there is a way to make a living in the long tail, and it consists in cultivating and maintain 1000 true fans. Kelly’s description of a true fan is:

someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

His economic argument for 1000 true fans runs like this:

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

It’s an interesting idea. Kelly suggests that some things a content creator is going to have to learn to give away — in the case of musicians it may very well be the music itself — in order to establish a relationship with an audience and sell them other things, e.g., concert tickets, tee shirts, autographed copies of special collections and/or collectibles. The goal is to cultivate within any given audience the true fans who will reside at the center of concentric rings:

True Fans

.

Kelly admits that there will be movement into and out of the circles: creators will “connect” with audience members differentially — with different individuals for different reasons at different moments within their lives. But, he argues, the only way to make that connection, to establish the relationship that will become your economic lifeline that will enable you to continue creating content, is to be open to the relationship, and to recognize its importance, in the first place. Kelly’s argument is quite clear:

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The Cult of the Author

Stay tuned for an update in the next few days…

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6
Aug 09

More on RAW and JPEG

This past spring Pravina Shukla asked me what a JPEG file was and what was the best way to interact with them (if that was the format that your fieldwork data was in). I asked on Mahalo and got an answer, but I continue to read around in hopes of finding better answers to her questions and to the many folks who ask me:

  • There’s a detailed explanation of RAW files over at Luminous Landscape. It’s part of their “Understanding …” series.
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29
Jul 09

The Difference Digital Makes

This is my own response to the current discussion being held by the Digital Humanities On-line Seminar:

It strikes me that both the ongoing discussion about what difference digital makes and McCarty’s wonderment about Grafton and company really are two facets of the same jewel at which we all seem to keep staring, mistaking it, if I may continue the metaphor for just a moment more, for the light which it refracts. (I’m going to return to this Gothic moment later.)

The point of reading, it seems to me, is to engage in better and more diverse kinds of dialogue. Wisdom does not flow from books, but from conversations between people. Perhaps this reveals my own deep indebtedness to philosophers like Karl Jaspers but such an idea is found in folk philosophies around the world. (E.g., the rural Irish concern for the man who keeps too much to himself.)

Here, digital does make a difference, even if only that difference is, as other posters have noted, once of making things happen more readily. Still, the chance conversation between the scholar and the ordinary citizen is much more likely to happen in a place where both can be, if not simultaneously, at least in a deferred fashion. For this, I look no further than my own research with rice farmers and meta shop workers who regularly check my blog and my Flickr account to see what I’ve been up to and to wonder why I forgot to interview so-and-so. (I really should.)

In turn, they submit to me, and to others, there own photographs and videos from their own archives, greatly expanding the historical record as they do so.

I am fairly certain that many, many of us share this active difference that the digital makes possible — and by active difference I mean an orientation by action. Some of this is born out by the analysis that I am currently doing looking at the narratives collected by Project Bamboo from a variety of scholars sprinkled across the nation. So far, the common themes are really things people want to be able to do: access, search, digitize, manage, collaborate, preserve, compute. (It’s interesting that compute really amounts to the smallest percentage of actions people wish to perform.) They want all these actions to be pervaded by two properties: annotated (metadata) and authentic (authorized).

What’s interesting about these actions is that under “collaborate” a number of the narratives/scenarios are really about opening up the scholarly convention not only to students but also to just regular people, who have their own ideas and practices. (And, to answer from a folklorist’s perspective an earlier conversation about is a prototype a theory? Yes, from my own experience as a field researcher, most folks do not have theories about why they do what they do. They don’t need to. It’s embedded in the doing. It can be drawn out to some degree, but not directly.)

So I don’t mind if the book dematerializes. Let it go. The codex is a particular manifestation of a much longer-lived idea: that marks in the physical can lead to conversations that lead to ideas. (And, yes, this probably resembles Heideegger’s sense of “aletheia,” but I did warn you with a reference to Jaspers up front where this note was headed.)

All of this reminds me of the construction binge our good Abbott Suger kicked off and put a whole lot of masons to work, all of whom had competing senses of what the right proportions were. The legacy of the ideas they carried in their head can be glimpsed in the architectural mess that is Chartres, among other cathedrals. The advantage we now enjoy is that many of those same workers carry smartphones and regularly check e-mail and our blog pages, if we but invite them.

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16
Jul 09

One Digital Difference

Recently in the Digital Humanities On-line Seminar, there arose the question of what difference does being digital make? Or, rather, does it many any real difference apart from speeding things up? That is, has the digital only sped up otherwise conventional work?

I have two responses to such a question. The first is the observation that at least one dimension of this question suggests that speeding things up or making more convenient certain facets of work are trivial. I make no claim that any work getting done within a quickened digital regime is any better than work done by hand — one imagines the shuffling of note cards versus a quick search through a database, but the quality of the work is always in what was written on the cards, what was entered in the database. The absurdity of such claims is revealed in the fact that books and the printing press achieved the same, if not greater, speed of dissemination — and probably of composition later — than the previous tradition of copied manuscripts. So it’s not worth bothering about.

The other observation is that such speeding up or making more convenient is not enough, that unless computing radically transforms humanistic study, it has not lived up to its promise nor potential. My response to this dimension of the complaint is that such tipping points are rarely perceived during their own time but are usually discerned later. The tipping points are, in fact, sometimes a matter for historical argument.

That’s all fine and good. Let history decide and all that. In the mean time, I can report on one digital difference I have enjoyed in the lat few weeks.

I am finishing up work on my analysis of the scholarly narratives collected by Project Bamboo. In the end, I focused on forty or so texts that I first simply collected as text documents stuffed in a directory. I also had a list of the texts I had chosen in a table in a Word file. The two really needed to get together, and so, since my SQL-foo is still incredibly weak, and I didn’t feel like running sed or awk through my collection of texts, I decided to download and install Filemaker Pro — for the record that’s a link to the Amazon.com page and I would be indebted to anyone who wanted to buy a copy for me: UL is broke and I am on my own fronting the cost. Filemaker is a cross-platform database app that can also act a as a GUI front-end to MySQL databases, and so I am hoping it will help me make the transition.

I had already read and to some degree categorized all the texts I put into my Filemaker database, and I had already learned a fair amount about them using IBM’s Many Eyes — that link takes directly to the corpus I uploaded there and some of the visualizations I set up. With the FM database I was able to automate a few simple tasks, like determining the size of each text by counting its words. But where I was really able to fly was being able to do searches either on tags or on the texts themselves looking for particular words or usages. Almost instantly, I could pull up the 7 seven texts that mentioned X or the 12 that used the term Y.

All of this would have been perfectly do-able if all these texts existed only on paper, but the work would have gone much more slowly and I would probably have taken far fewer chances. (It may also be true that the slower work may have allowed for more digestion. I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s worth arguing.) What I liked was the ability to “play a hunch.” For me at least, sometimes scholarship is really about discerning patterns. The problem is at what level of cognition the patterns get distinguished. Quite often, for me at least, I know I sense a pattern but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I may even flounder around, scanning texts or flipping through pages hoping something will “catch my eye” or “jog my memory” or put the thought on the “tip of my tongue.”

One difference “the digital” makes in my own scholarship is being able to pursue a lead as soon as it pops into my mind. That may only amount to speed or convenience, but that’s a significant enough difference for me. Please don’t take my bionic memory, and recall, away from me.

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12
Jul 09

The “Digging into Data” Challenge

This looks like a terrific idea but it has a steep entry price. I could see UL putting something interesting together with a university in Canada or France focusing on our strength in Francophone studies, but there’s a lot of writing and negotiating to be done and I just don’t think we have the staff for it. Nevertheless, I am posting the link to the site here to encourage others and in case I change my mind:

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

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8
Jul 09

A Brief Note about Bamboo

From my note today to Sarah Spell — via Facebook:

It looks like Bamboo is largely going to be a consortium seeking to establish common APIs and services, with perhaps some standards for things like metadata in and through which a digital infrastructure for humanities research can get built. There are already a lot of pieces out there, but nothing/noone has woven them together into something coherent yet. Imagine something like JSTOR, another Mellon initiative, which is an incredible storehouse of humanities research — and beginning to take on the task of storing data as well, but imagine that kind of infrastructure for tools and ideas. It will immediately make a lot of data and ways to examine that data available and accessible to a wide variety of scholars. More importantly, that kind of accessibility will immediately be felt by students, who will find themselves capable of making contributions, though perhaps on very small scales, to real knowledge. Finally, such accessibility has the capacity to reach beyond the boundaries of campuses and to expose the good work of humanists and humanistic research to a larger public, which has shown itself interested in such topics but has had its collective hands tied in getting access to quality information, since that information is so often found in university libraries or in hard to find journals.

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8
Jul 09

Web Publishing Platforms for the Humanities

As I continue to work on the scholarly narratives for Project Bamboo, I have gleaned the following platforms that people are using, or would like to use, in the service of humanities projects:

  • Omeka is brought to you by the same folks who brought us Zotero and is described as “a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.”
  • CONTENTdm is described as digital collection management software. Its blurb is “CONTENTdm® makes everything in your digital collections available to everyone, everywhere. No matter the format — local history archives, newspapers, books, maps, slide libraries or audio/video — CONTENTdm can handle the storage, management and delivery of your collections to users across the Web.”
  • Pachyderm is “n easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author’s website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.” It appears to be available in three versions: hosted, as a managed deployment, and as a DIY open source download.
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7
Jul 09

Publications in/on/among the Digital Humanities

A recent issue of the [Humanist Discussion Group][hdg] noted the following publications:

Side note: Underlining titles and linking them presents interesting style issues, n’est-ce pas?

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6
Jul 09

Apple’s On-Line Seminars

A number of vendors, like Apple and Adobe but I’m sure others as well, provide a range of free on-line seminars that not only are instructional in how to create content — and even think about content creation — but are examples of that creation themselves. A good example is this pairs of presentations by Brian Storm of Storm Media that is directed at photojournalists and how by adding audio then can not only enrich their content but also potentially reach new markets, and thus new revenue streams. The first presentation focuses on why someone might want to do this and the basics of gathering inputs and the second on working in Final Cut Pro.

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4
Jul 09

JASO Revived On-line

The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford was not necessarily a ready reference or me, but its evolution — it lived from 1970 to 2005 in print and is now being brought back as an on-line publication — is interesting:

The Journal of the Anthropological society of Oxford (JASO) was originally launched in 1970 as a hard copy journal; it ceased publication in that form in 2005. It has now been re-launched to coincide with the Centenary of the Oxford Anthropological Society in 2009. The new online journal, called JASO-Online, will be a joint collaborative project between JASO, the Society, and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, which is hosting the website. Thus we hope it will appeal to all branches of the School, staff and students alike, and that it will be an active forum open to all for the discussion of anthropology and issues of interest to anthropologists. For the time being, at least, JASO-Online will be available as a free download, though we reserve the right to levy a charge at any time in the future. Contributors will not be paid for their contributions.

What I’ve been thinking about is how easy it is to publish a journal on-line. As numerous commentators have pointed out over the past decade: the costs of printing and distribution acted, at the very least, as a kind of test of resolve. Now, one only needs a connection — numerous publishing platforms are free. And so, the real problem is to have a readership, an audience. I think this will be the strength of learned and professional societies going forward. In creativity studies, this is described as the field, and within those studies the field is test bed for ideas introduced into the domain by an individual. (This is the DIFI model.) The conventional understanding is that the field in some way is the test for innovation, that an innovation is that which is not already in the domain but is still recognizable by the field as being a relevant extension or revision of the domain.

But, clearly, you have to have a field. I just wonder about the number of journals popping up that don’t have a field, an audience. They may describe a new domain, and it may be better than the extant domains, but without a field, one is perhaps talking quite loudly with no one around really to hear.

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2
Jul 09

Statements for Project Bamboo Proposal

It turns out I wrote down the wrong day for the annual rice field day at LSU’s Rice Station west of Rayne, and so I am home, with my cold, working on various Project Bamboo tasks.

Value Statement

The first thing I got done was to draft a value statement for scholarly / professional / learned societies:

The central focus of the learned society remains the pursuit of reliable knowledge and its effective communication within and without the society. Cyberinfrastructures expand the communicative modalities available to learned societies and their members. However, these same infrastructures threaten some of the most venerable revenue streams, emphasizing the importance of maximizing the return on investment in the digital realm. What learned societies need are at least interoperable, if not common, infrastructures that allow members to communicate and collaborate, in a trusted fashion, with other scholars, be they mutual members of the same society or in an adjacent field. By participating in a common technological ecosystem, learned societies can leverage their investment to give their members the tools and content they need to advance their own scholarship, and thus the impact of the society itself.

This has now been posted on the Bamboo Wiki. (N.B. I believe the wiki is currently private, so that link will probably not work.)

Case Statement

The second thing I did was to add a potential new case statement to the proposal that focused on the outreach / public relations potential of Bamboo:

Bamboo’s goal of increasing the visibility and accessibility of digital tools and content to humanities scholars themselves will necessarily not only radiate out to graduate and undergraduate students who will thus be able to participate in and work with these materials and methods but it will also increase the visibility of the work of humanities scholars to an increasingly connected public who are often in search of humanities content but are often stymied in their search for trusted materials and ideas.

[You could think of this as something like Stanford's SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere) program. One-upping to a definite article: the THE (The Humanities Everywhere). Maybe.]

Use Statement

I remember a conversation from graduate school where students were trying to hash out where they thought the field was going. One of our cohort finally spoke up and said, “Well, I don’t know where the field is going, but I do know where I want to take it.” Perhaps, Project Bamboo is something like that for those of us at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

We have taken a multi-level approach to our efforts:

  • At the base level, there is an enormous benefit for an university like the University of Louisiana simply to be among the founding members of anything of the scope and scale as Project Bamboo. We are the only university from the Deep South to have participated throughout the process.
  • Building from such a base, we have already, as it were, used the fact of our participation in Bamboo to leverage state funding of a “digital humanities lab.”
  • Moving from an institutional scope to one focused more clearly on the humanities, we have emphasized the inevitability of the IT revolution and the ability to be in control of one’s own destiny to which Bamboo aspires to discuss with faculty not only our involvement in the consortium but also to begin to make them aware of the possibilities contained within under the rather diffuse rubric of the “digital humanities.”
  • At the level of particular disciplines, my involvement in Project Bamboo has also helped me steer a parallel project, the design and development of a new website / communications platform for the American Folklore Society, of which I have been named editor.
  • Finally, at a personal level, there can be no doubt the enormous professional development I have enjoyed thanks to the incredibly challenging conversations we have had as a result of the mixing of humanists, technologists, and archivists / librarians. The multi-disciplinary discussions have been amazing.
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2
Jul 09

The Humanities Need To Be This Good

An amazing talk by a molecular biologist:

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1
Jul 09

Making (Foot)Notes

As I began work on the analysis of the Scholarly Narratives deposited in the Project Bamboo planning wiki, I found I needed the occasional footnote to explain a few items that didn’t really deserve space in the text proper but still deserved to be addressed in some fashion. Such extra-textural information can customarily be contained in notes of some kind, either foot or end.

Fortunately, the variation of Markdown that I am using, MultiMarkdown by Fletcher Penney, contains note functionality.

All I have to do to embed a note into the text is to add [^1] in the body of the text and then at the end of the text add a mate [^1]: Followed by the body of the note. Simple, n’est-ce pas? The HTML it creates looks like this:

<a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" class="footnote">1</a>

And later:

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>

<li id="fn:1"><p> [footnote text here] 
<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#160;&#8617;</a></p></li>

</ol>
</div>

Note how the MultiMarkdown script generously creates a link to return you to the spot where you were reading in the text proper. Thank you, Mr. Penney.

But all of this, it turns out, opens up a larger can of worms that has been poked at by a number of individuals with sticks that reveals that there really is no terribly good solution to the problem of notes in HTML — this despite the fact that one would think that the very links that saturate HTML texts would do the job.

Well, they do, but not quite in the same way that footnotes do the job. One of the great advantages of footnotes, one that they have over endnotes to my mind and why I have always preferred footnotes, is that the reader doesn’t really leave the space, the cognitive space if you will, within which they are operating. If a number or symbol indicating a note is available is paired with an item that piques the reader’s curiosity, all she has to do is flick her eyes to the bottom of the page. Thanks to a pretty decent spatial memory built into the human brain and to the fact that the note you’ve just read had a particular symbol paired with it, returning to the approximate spot in the text from whence the reader came is usually not so difficult a task that it breaks the reader’s sense of flow. (I do not find that endnotes accomplish this at all, by the way, and I’m sorry that my own discipline has chosen endnotes over footnotes.)

But a web page is not a page except in name. The comparable physical space is really a screen.

The compromise has been for the most part to treat the web page as a page and to place notes at its distant, and sometimes unknown (from the reader’s point of view) bottom. The convention that the Markdown script follows, in giving a link back to where you were in the text, is also a common one. The idea is to achieve via technology what the reader used to do themselves physically. I don’t find the effect to be as smooth and it is likely, at least for this reader, at least half the time to result in me losing track of where I was.

There is a really terrific description of all this by Paula Petrik in a post where she also gives some really concrete and practical advice on how to construct notes according to one’s own preferences.

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29
Jun 09

NASA Wants Help Archiving Braun’s Notes

From the Wired article:

NASA is taking the rare step of reaching out to the public for help. The space agency is looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program.

“We’re looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,” said project manager Jason Crusan. “We don’t always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.”

The notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use, how to index the notes and how to create a useful database.

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