Metamedia

The Camel Book Drive

Link: Rocketboom June 13 2007: Camel Book Drive video

A terrific story from Rocketboom about the old fashioned way of spreading Literacy: distributing books by camel in Kenya.

This is how it was for us Euro-descendants too, before the advent of mass reproduction of cheap books, and especially before the Typographic revolution.

Notice how 80% of the people reached by the Camel Book Drive program can not read, so the emphasis is on reaching children who will then grow up reading.  After all, in most villages for most of literate history, only a privileged few could read, and as such, usually read aloud to groups.

(There is a great depiction of this in one of the episodes at the beginning of  Pasolini's film version of The Decameron, where an old man is reading from a book to a large group gathered around him.)

Of course, digital books won't work - yet - in such a situation. Computers are still physical objects and so are the wires needed for access.

So if Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia wants to get a free encyclopedia into the hands of every person on the planet, it means those camels will get a lightened burden, but what will they carrying into that village? Fossil fuel generators ? PCs ? Fiber ? Uplinks ?

I hope he is talking to Iqbal Qadir, but I hope they are both learning from the Appropriate Technology model. Otherwise, all we are doing it plugging them into the cult of consuming Big Science / Big Technology.

Sometimes, camels are the most appropriate technology.

Books, too.

The Persistent of Tags

About the persistence over time of tags, from an academic perspective.

The Skeptical Librarian: 

One of the problems with tags and folksonomy is that they will not preserve a terribly useful legacy for access.  Terms come and go in usage faster than ever. To rely only on tag clouds will mean information will be harder to find in any kind of precise way in 10 years.

Tagger:

For an individual, the terms are whatever you tag them as and the terms will change for you as you grow, but they do reach a pretty quickly diminishing limit (as Marlow, Naaman, et al have found) as a tagger reaches a mature level in tagging practice.

Of course, between any two random taggers, their tag sets may vary markedly, but overall, an object reaches a stable proportion of tag representation after only about 100 markings (Golder and Huberman 2006), so it doesn't take many users tagging to get a very useful and stable core tag set.

So I don't see tag distribution change as a negative but a huge positive: objects get additionally tagged as the audience conceptualizations of them change, so they will remain pertinent over time, making objects EASIER to find.

But they will also have historical depth, unlike say, the Dewey decimal or Library of Congress time fixed taxonomies, which have historical stasis (rather than depth), and hence pertinence drift.

However, there is discussion about "tag decay," the obsolescence of tags. But that is simply a property of the type of data it is and should be handled with standard data management practices.

Pruning old or irrelevant tags is (well, should be/will be) a standard data management practice. Golder and Huberman's findings about the stability of the central core of tags is very important for our situation -- cleaning out one, a hundred, or even a thousand graduating students' personal tags will not adversely impact the central tag core for an item.

For example: As a student, I would tag a library journal article with tags for the class, term and Professor I was doing the research for. If the article was used in that class by that Prof year after year, more students might take this way and so the tags will stay. If not, then the tags will diminish as the old student data is cleaned out and disappear as they should.

Finally, I don't believe anyone is seriously advocating the replacement of standard controlled vocabularies by tagging and folksonomy.  In fact, the argument that tagging will replace standard taxonomic metadata is a straw man in such arguments. 

Rather, the purpose of tagging and the reason for its incredibly swift adoption and growth  is that it is  filling the big niche between controlled conceptual taxonomies and brute force lexical search. All three are complementary tools.

Sources:

Marlow, Naaman, et al. 2006
http://www.danah.org/papers/Hypertext2006.pdf

Golder and Huberman 2006
http://jis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/2/198

The Book HelpDesk

Michael Nanfito, ex-librarian, sent me a link to this funny video about how to use a book, courtesy of your local computer support HelpDesk.

Actually, thinking back on my days studying Medieval Latin makes me sympathize. I recall the struggle to not just learn Carolingian script (which was nothing compared to Merovingian) , but of course, the letters and words are all run together.

This was the first time I became really aware of how modern and strange silent reading is. Medieval manuscripts were were not books to be read in our sense, but rather guides for oral pronunciation, for reading out loud.

And that is not to mention the ligatures which make no sense at all to a silent reader, but make complete sense to a scribe reading aloud.  Viz, "et" is a very common Latin verb ending and also the word ""and" and was very commonly written with the ancestor of the ampersand &. Hence text such as

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet

would appear sort of as

crasam&quinunquamamavitquiqueamavitcrasam&

which works just fine if you read it out loud.

That was a valuable lesson for me, since only a few years later I ended up teaching Sanskrit to graduate students, which is usually written in Devanagari script in modern times. It makes no sense until your realize that it a close representation of the spoken form of the language, retaining sandhi in its written form. So reading aloud is a great help in learning the language -- not the usual experience for native speakers of English or French.