Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

Fall is just around the corner and I'm starting to think about all the great things my favorite season brings. One event that I've followed for the past few years has been The September Project . I've lifted the description from the website ...it's below...get involved if you can. Welcome to the 5 th annual September Project! The September Project is a grassroots effort to encourage events about freedom and democracy in all libraries in all countries during the month of September. September Project events are free and organized locally. In 2004, we began the September Project to break the silence following September 11, and to invite all people into libraries to consider topics of patriotism, democracy, and citizenship. Initially, events focused on September 11 and largely took place on September 11. As the project evolved, events spread throughout the month of September and focused on issues of freedom and democracy. To date, public, academic, school, government, ...

A recent Fast Company feed by Robert Scoble that offers some incisive nuggets on Twitter, RSS , MSFT , and several other user/tech trends has me thinking about the ever-changing public sphere. I am particularly curious about the claim that Twitter will continue to emerge as the update/news/marketing vehicle of preference. I can certainly see how this would work, and Scoble's habits of information foraging and consumption are in line with my own as well as so many others. Print media plays less and less of a role in my life and, like Scoble, RSS feeds seem less attractive to me these days. Scoble argues in this piece, which is actually highlights from a week's worth of tweetstream (ah, postmodern narrative once again), that Twitter is the public conversation with diverse interests. I read his piece to fuse Twitter with blogs' messages in a way that complements both...ultimately creating a dialogue and remediation of events of interest. His specific claim is, "Twitt...

About a week from now BotCamp starts. One might ask, "What the heck is BotCamp?" Well, first one (that would be you) might peruse the description for the NSF-funded project entitled Bot 2.0: Botany through Web 2.0, the Memex and Social Learning . It's cool and it's at UNC. The official blurb, as lifted from the MRC web site and our NSF grant, is: Bot 2.0 project is an innovative technological approach to retaining student interest in the biological and botanical sciences and addresses the lack of diversity in the student population pursing the botanical sciences. The project involves introducing students from area universities and community colleges to a three-phase curriculum involving reading and field exercises that incorporate inquiry-based learning, communal learning, and reflection. For my part in this project I am talking with Bot participants about their experiences and expectations with regard to botany, science curriculum writ large, issues of "literac...

Today's New York Times featured an excellent article that illuminates some points made in my previous post last Friday. The piece, entitled " Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto " details tactics for technology development and maximization at work in Kenya and other low-tech areas of Africa. The second portion of the article focuses on the influence of Google in Kenya, Google's increasing physical presence there, and the citizens' hopes for what Google can enable them to achieve. The article is linked above and pasted below. Hopefully, it adds to my supposition that perceived lackluster earnings reports from Google matter little when it comes to the company's influence on identity, ethos, and aspirations of global individuals and groups. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/business/worldbusiness/20ping.html?_r=1&ref=africa&oref=slogin

Google reported 2nd quarter earnings yesterday afternoon , meeting analyst estimates, however warnings from company execs prompted a pretty significant drop in GOOG stock. Shares of GOOG fell over 10 percent in after hours trading Thursday and continued to hold the decline today. Google chairman Eric Schmidt's description of the economy as "challenging", coupled with admissions of slower hiring at Google and decreased consumer click-throughs of ads, are being cited as common analyst concerns. In a financial respect, some of the analyst concerns are warranted in the short term, but longer term they are not. It's also important to note that Google continues to lead our ever-emerging online experience even if they're not growing as rapidly as they were 6 months ago and if revenue looks different this quarter than it did last (when analysts were surprised at earnings and GOOG skyrocketed as a result). Importantly, there is no competition for Google in many of their c...

Library Journal featured an article recently that profiles findings on how libraries might endeavor to generate and sustain new support. The piece, entitled OCLC Report Suggests Ways To Generate New Library Support , synthesizes important findings from a recent study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For those of you who attended ALA in Anaheim last month this may be familiar ground. Read the article, of course, but note that among the key findings are the following points: *The most committed funding supporters are not the heaviest users *Many people are unaware of library services *“Passionate librarians” help generate library funding *Voters who see the library as 'transformational' as opposed to 'informational' are more likely to favor it *Increasing support for libraries may not necessarily mean a trade-off with financing other public services What I find to be a really inspiring and important is the underlying theme that the library space is a dyna...

Recently, the Third International Plagiarism Conference was held at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-tyne, UK. The conference theme was "Transforming Practice for an Authentic Future". To get a flavor for the conference and its proceedings check out the link above as well as Gerry McKiernan's blog for a sampling of his presentation. The blog Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 also works for a cursory glance at topical considerations. The point of my post is to remark on this notion of authenticity. Haven' we already had this conversation? At least philosophically, have we had it? Not to get all Baudrillard and what not, but I can't see such a conference happening in France for example, or in the French intellectual tradition rather. The French love their language, but also celebrate its fluidity and its versatility. English, on the other hand, has always suffered from policing and surveillance in efforts to control it and to make it rational in its ...

I've been reading a lot of feeds of late that speculate on ways to teach, work with, "reach", etc. digital natives . This of course begs conjecture on what a digital native is and who might qualify for such status. Such deliberations seem fair enough, though they are familiar protocol for those aiming to educate in "new times" (see the cult stud work of Stuart Hall as well as the ed work of Robert Helfenbein ). Anyway, my first reaction is to suggest that any attempt is always already reactionary. Digital natives, like most who drive new paradigms, author their own space and regardless of how curriculum designers feel about the merits of such "new" practices and their attendant spaces such authoring is hegemonic in its own right. Once the digital natives are inserted upon the load road to hegemony they are (at least in the near term) positioned against those who aspire to "educate", "observe", or "characterize" who and wha...

Following up on the previous post and on recent posts from Jacob and Paul where they're contemplating notions of the social versus the collaborative, I've gotta revisit some important conceptual touchstones. In my last post I valorized Seattle and its " Libraries For All " initiative, labeling such thrusts emblematic of a healthy community...possibly even one that's invested in pursuit of utopias. I'm still excited about "Libraries For All". I have also read Paul Jones' post and Jacob Kramer- Duffield's meditation on Paul's post. Good stuff. I've linked them here (and below in my blogroll )...read at your leisure. One of the points that they're considering is how to operationalize terms like "social" and "collaborative" with regard to software, the virtual, and the hyperreal . When I think about this I find myself returning to my cultural studies roots and the early work of media and social theorists, na...

This upcoming Saturday in Seattle the last of the building /refurbishing projects that have comprised the "Libraries For All" initiative will officially be complete. This is really great to see such an initiative coalesce and be completed over the course of the last ten years. Seattle is a special place for a lot of reasons but the inclination of community members to actually value (and fund) projects like this one differentiate it from other locales that either don't, can't, or (worse-yet) delay such support. Materiality matters and its easy to get so disembodied via our networked world that what is actually happening in our community goes un -scrutinized. Place still matters. Development, non-development, investment (or lack of) are amplified in accelerated globalized spaces. In an era of spatial theory we tend to think that place doesn't matter as much, but it does. Place matters differently and probably matters more than it used to. Seeing communities take a...

One of my academic interests is tussling with French theory. I like it because when I'm wasting time around other academics it seems useful as a lingua franca, sounds pretentious at just about all social gatherings, and for the most part is irrelevant to anything shaking down on a daily basis. However, there are a few French theorists that ARE useful when endeavoring to figure out how to conceptualize our social interactions. Guy Debord is one that I've spent many years reading and now, more than ever, his work seems prescient (in ways he probably never envisioned...or maybe he did). Debord, along with Henri Lefebvre, was one of the key figures/propagater of the Situationist International movement in the late 1960s. Having worked through Marxism and post-structuralism Debord (and Lefebvre) levied critiques on the emerging post-industrial organization of our society and the spaces that were springing forth. To borrow from REM, Debord commented on life and how we live it. ...

I’ve been pining to make this post for a couple of weeks now, ever since the July issue of Wired came out. It’s the issue with a cover that claims, or intimates depending on your hyperbole register, that we’ve breached a boundary where profound change now dominates. Specifically, the claim is that we are seeing the “end of science”. Rather, we are seeing the end of how scientific method gets constructed. It’s a good and useful read that focuses on how access to and manipulation of large amounts of data can enable us to (for)see patterns and attributes of “scientific” phenomena. This can be anything from political voting behavior to issues of disease outbreak to understanding outer space. Good points and all true. Being an academic, I am used to seeing claims of the “beginning of this” or “the end of that”; such monikers are abundant in conference programs and journals (I’d love to see someone claim “we’re seeing the middle of such and such”). But the Wired article isn’t a let down…it ...

i've had a hiatus from the blog attributable to this beautiful one on the left...what an experience! more blogging soon! hill