(cognition, curation, hci, interface, knowledge, mapping, paths — )
18 Dec. 2007
Oh, man. I found this excellent e-mail to Litza as I was cleaning out my Inbox the other day (to put the direness of my need to clean my Inbox into perspective, the conversation below is about 2 years old). I'm still really obsessed with this idea although it kind of fell by the wayside. On a positive note, I think a lot of other stuff that's floated across my desk the last couple of years gives me a few more words to explain it with and possible actually do it at some point.
Litza: What do you mean exactly by the web interface "allowing the presentation of multiple sources at once on the screen"? Can you give me an example where this is done? Do you mean data sources? I like the idea of showing full paths -- do you mean "downstream" paths (where the user can go) or "upstream" (where the user came from) paths? That offers some interesting possibilities and challenges.
Alexis: Well, right now, to follow a link to related information, you have to actually leave the site, or open something in a new tab. Why not click on a link and have a window on the same page appear, so you can look at things simultaneously? I mean, that's how people see connections between ideas. I don't think it's done anywhere else yet, although there are some people trying, in various ways, to create systems that do this (like Ted Nelson). I guess you could create a whole new system to do it, but you could also do it on the Net as is, using existing technologies as "complex" as CSS (kludgy as that would be).
Note: this idea is something I was trying to get at in a comment on the NYPL Labs site just a mere month ago. The screen should be a workspace, not merely a reader. In some ways 2.0 has made this much more of a reality, but rarely do interfaces allow us to manipulate the information itself - we simply play with the design of things. There are a few exceptions to this, mashups being a good example thats really starting to explode a lot more.
As far as the concept of a workspace, it is totally unnecessary but I would love to implement the above using touch screens instead of mice.
(...continued) As for paths, I am referring not to where users have been (although that is okay), but rather how ideas are connected. Kind of like a flowchart. And each part of the flowchart is a link to something about that, and when you click it it opens in the window you are looking at, and you can still see the path and the new data next to any other windows you have open. If you are talkin about, I don't know, text mining, you might want information on Natural Language Processing, spiders, mapping, neurology, XML and Java and show how they are connected, and let users look at all of them together. Not the best example, but it works for the time. And then if they want to get really excited about the XML angle, you could have a finer path to go into more detail about XML, with its pros and cons and history and examples and technical specs.
Note: I finally have a succinct word for what the fuck I am talking about here. I want users to be able to actually curate their own libraries.
(...continued) On a grander scale, what about a system where everyone could create these sort of thought-paths, and you could access anyone else's thought-path on a topic and pull the actual thought-paths into your site to supplement/expand your own? Like maybe you are good at broad overviews of things (text mining), but the finer details of XML are not your forte - just find someone who is an expert, and pull their thought path to your site for those that want to follow that particular thread.
Note: The curated subjects are modular and reusable, probably by using XML.
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(cognition, information overload, learning, silence — )
10 Aug. 2007
S. and I played a game the other day. She asked me what I think about in the space between thoughts. Needless to say, I had no idea what she talking about, but then she started this game.
"Think of a movie."
Pause. "Okay."
"Think of a book."
Pause. "Okay."
"Think of a song." "Think of a color." "Think of a shape."
The weird part was, she never asked me what it was I thought of. So, of course, at first all I could think of was, "When is she going to ask me for my answers?" But she didn't, so, eventually, I started asking her the same questions back, and I gave her my answers even though she didn't ask for them. But she never offered up what she was thinking unless I asked specifically, and after a little while we fell into silence when she didn't have any more questions.
Then she asked me, "What did you think about in the spaces?"
"Well, when you asked me about a movie, I thought of Tears of the Black Tiger, because that's the last movie I saw. It wasn't nearly as creative as your answer - I wish I'd thought of something random and cool like you did, not just whatever the last thing I saw was."
Sometimes I am a little dense.
"No," she said, "I mean, what did you think about after that? When I wasn't saying anything? Where did your mind wander in between the conversation?"
Ah. Eureka. Now I got it.
She'd asked me to think of a sound, and I thought of the sound a car makes as it drives through a rainy street - sshhuuuuuuuusssshhhhhhhh - since that is my favorite sound. And that made me think of my apartment in DC, which happened to be a basement apartment with my bed just next to the little window that faced the street, and from which I regularly got to hear that sound as I went to sleep at night. And then I thought of my friend Devlan who is back in DC. I'm currently in the process of attempting to move back East, and thinking of DC got me thinking about moving, and ever so suddenly an idea flashed in my mind about a mashup of Craigslist and Googlemaps that I'd recently heard about, where the application pulls apartment price from Craigslist and maps it to a neighborhood using color (aka "heatmap"), so that you can look at the map and see immediately what the relative apartment price is in different parts of town. Then I combined DC and the digital maps into a new thought about the Center for History and New Media at GMU, which combines those two things (digital acrobatics and DC) in one entity. I thought about the lightning that happens in DC, as it accompanies the rain that makes the streets wet and that creates the sound I love, and this led - because the words sound the same - to lightning bugs, which led me to New York (where there are a lot of the little creatures).
I was using the silence in between questions to put things together into novel ways. I was going back over the things I'd heard, read, and been preoccupied with over the last few days - moving, information visualization and the digital realm, sounds - and combined them into something meaningful. I was adding meaning to disparate bits of information. Even my "boring" answer about the last movie I saw was my mind's way of incorporating my recent experiences into my overall knowledge base.
In other words, I was using the silence to learn.
And the more I've thought about this experience, the more I've noticed the connections between silence and learning, or stillness and productivity, in other arenas.
I've noticed the same phenomenom when I read, for instance. As I skim through a book, whether deeply or superficially, I don't pick up all that much. It's really only in the moments afterwards, when I find myself discussing it with a friend, jotting down notes about it in a journal, or pondering it in the shower in the morning that it really starts to kick in.
It made me think of a study I read about a while back, where researchers discovered that, when a rat falls asleep, the mind dreams about the day's events backwards - thus cementing them into memory and understanding their meaning relative to other events.
It's reminded me about an old zine I ran across about 10 years ago. I can't really even remember what it was called - Sloth? Loafer? - but it was basically an homage to everyone's favorite deadly sin, laziness. In it, the author put forth some rather interesting theories and referenced some supposedly real studies that proved that laziness actually improved productivity. Specifically, I remember him expounding on one theory that goes as follows: Bouts of laziness allow one's system to recharge, and when one is recharged, the quality of work put forth is actually significantly better than the quality of work one does when tired.
That, in turn, leads me to notice this in my own work habits - I prefer to work in ultra-productive spurts of 2-3 hours, knocking almost everything out of the way (and doing so well, I'd like to think). Then I basically screw off for about a full hour - none of this 15 minute break nonsense, we're talking a good, solid hour of chitchatting, surfing the net, picking my nose, updating my blog, etc. Then, after an hour, I pound out another 2-3 hours of killer work. Rinse, lather, repeat. On the other hand, days that I find myself trying to work straight through for a solid 8 hours invariably end worthlessly, with me looking back at all the work I have accomplished and realizing that I can probably fit it all into a thimble. According to Loafer (or whatever it was called), these are the same results several research studies came up with.
I thought about how much I like those spurts, and how they crop up everywhere in my life. All of my favorite movies, the movies that really move me, are quiet. Not silent - have you ever seen a silent movie? They're not very silent at all - but quiet. Still. Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Paris, Texas. The Conversation. Then there're the spurts in my productivity, both on the daily level, as above, but also on monthly or quarterly levels - I might have several months of still followed by several months of furious learning and productivity. And I thought about how I seem to be one of the few people that can't stand....can't stand...the constant buzz and noise that goes on in daily life - the constant squawk of the television or radio so ubiquituous in the public sphere. So on some level, it seemed to me, I must really respond to this quiet, to really get a lot out of it.
That attitude makes me think of something I read in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently, in which a professor lamented academia's current push to read more and more and more. Why, he cried, can't we go back to deep reading? What was so wrong with reading deeply, slowly, ponderously? Today, he said, we are so overburdened with data that we must merely skim, often missing the meaning, heart, and soul of the documents we read. It makes us stupider and we misunderstand what we read.
And this, in turn, was related to something said on Digital History Hacks a few months back. The sheer quantity of information we deal with now keeps us from ever being able to read everything, even though we still kill ourselves trying to do so. Instead, he proposed, why don't we stop reading when what we read stops changing our opinion on the subject we are researching? This is when we know that we have read what we need to.
Quantity of information, and information overload, has been cropping up a lot, not just on DHH. I noticed it in Ambient Findability as I was reading the other night. Inside Higher Ed. Usability experts are talking about. The Semantic Web folks. AI guys. Tufte and the MIT Media Lab. Visualization buffs. Librarians. "We must find ways to make the information more digestible!" they cry. "Quicker and easier to understand!"
But the one thing no one is really mentioning much is silence. I've thought of it. I've thought of it a lot. But I haven't been seeing it discussed much elsewhere, and I think that this is a shame. I think perhaps the answer to some of these questions - questions about usability, learning, information overload, and contentment - may reside in the quiet between the questions, and in the stillness between the push and pull of information. I think we've lost our value for silence. Learning doesn't take place in the time that we are reading, imbibing, searching, or consuming. It takes place in the still that occurs after this flurry of activity, in the calm that we give ourselves to actually ponder what it is we have just encountered.
Perhaps I will quietly think about this a little more.
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(book, cognition, culture wars, history, the more things change — )
30 Jul. 2007
One of my greatest pet peeves is when people come out with statements like, "Harkening back to a more innocent and happier time" (which I just read about 10 minutes ago as a statement describing the vibrancy of swing, which would have been a favorite during the innocent and happy Great Depression, for fuck's sake). Likewise, "Back in my day, [fill in the blank]" or, my personal favorite, "People were just so different then."
Why should this rub me the wrong way, even the most theoretically educated people ask me? Liberals. Conservatives. The religious. The not-so-religious. Men. Women. Poor people. Rich people. I hear this from all sides, albeit on different topics. Perhaps some grow wistful thinking of the glory days of the Victorian era, or others misty eyed thinking of their days hitchhiking cross country, or perhaps back to when everyone still said "Ma'am" and "Sir."
My complaint, though, is that these anecdotes or observations do not describe differences in people or attitudes, they describe differences only in customs. In other words, they don't describe some fundamental difference about the things we believe or desire - something fundamental about human nature itself - they only describe differences in the particulars of dress, actions, or behaviors. In time, nations might change who they hate or why they hate them, but it doesn't stop them from creating enemies of someone. Failing to see this strikes me as simultaneously failing to understand both history and human nature. And, needless to say, if we are to accept the maxim that understanding history allows us to make an attempt at not repeating it, the above attitude suggests to me that we're pretty much doomed to fail.
I've been especially reminded of this lately reading the fairly intriguing Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written originally in 1841 (yes, that's right, note it again - 1841), it details frauds, fads, and fashions that have gripped entire nations. It makes it quite clear that we keep falling for the same tricks over and over (and over and over), both in the text itself and for the reader who troubles him or herself to draw parallels to modern events that bear resemblance.
But what drew my attention even more than that was the way the author condescendingly talks about the buffoons who could possibly, possibly fall for such obvious nonsense. The disdain just drips off the pages. Without having the book in front of me, one example in particular springs to mind, in which he's deriding the common man for the ease with which he picks up and then drops various fads, and just how easily entertained he is by drek. But, the author decides, in a moment of charity, I suppose these poor, stupid souls must find something to make their dreary existence tolerable, so perhaps we should allow them their silly enjoyments (even though we, as educated men, can clearly appreciate how foolish such things are - aren't we grand?).
How many times have I heard this argument from the self-appointed intelligentsia, of which I sometimes hate to admit I am probably a member of, when discussing, say, Hollywood movies or television? Popular music? Bestsellers? Seriously - it kills me that we're still stuck in 1841 (or, realistically, 5000BC) in terms of how we interact with other people.
Perhaps the secret to all of this is that I should stop caring that we're doomed to fail, and just accept the world as it is. Perhaps that, after all, is the only way change will come to pass.
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