augmentation

Dirty Tricks, Cyber-style

2011-02-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

ThinkProgress is reporting that the law firm of the US Chamber of Commerce (an NGO) hired several cyber-security firms to help them sabotage their political opponents:

"[A] law firm representing the US Chamber of Commerce ... is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents ... with a surreptitious sabotage campaign."
"According to e-mails ... the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams [whose] attorney Richard Wyatt ... was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com."

This sabotage campaign included feeding false information to discredit opponents, but also spying on the personal lives of opponents and their families:

"New emails reveal that the private spy company investigated the families and children of the Chamber’s political opponents. The apparent spearhead of this project was Aaron Barr, an executive at HB Gary. Barr circulated numerous emails and documents detailing information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives. One of the targets was Mike Gehrke, a former staffer with Change to Win. Among the information circulated about Gehrke was the specific “Jewish church” he attended and a link to pictures of his wife and two children ..."

Given how amazing their software is, I'm a bit bummed that Palantir was involved in this.

"Night Dragon" stalks big oil

2011-02-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

According to a new report by McAfee (pdf):

"Attackers using several locations in China have [waged] attacks against global oil, gas, and petrochemical companies, as well as individuals and executives in Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Greece, and the US to acquire proprietary and highly confidential information."

These attacks (nicknamed "Night Dragon" by McAfee analysts) include social engineering, shrink-wrapped toolkits, and a handful of IE exploits. Hackers have been able to access sensitive data, both business-related and personal.

McAfee is calling 2010 a watershed year for computer security, at which hacking evolved from dangerous nuisance (e.g., Code Red, Sasser, Conficker) to genuine threat (e.g., Stuxnet). For a long time, hacking was brushed off as vandalism and petty crime. As critical systems discover the magnitude of their vulnerability, computing security is rapidly becoming part of national security.

Internet 'kill switches'

2011-02-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

Shutting off the Egyptian Internet has (finally) drawn attention to a US Senate bill that seeks to permit the same sort of thing here. CNET has a nice summary:

In December, a Senate committee approved a bill introduced last summer and scheduled to be re-introduced soon, by senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Collins (R-ME) [with the support of at least some Democrats], which would [give American presidents] power over privately-owned computer systems during a "national cyber emergency." The latest public version includes controversial new language saying that the federal government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems "shall not be subject to judicial review."

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Science enters the network age

2011-01-30T23:55:00.000-08:00

Writing at SEED magazine, John Wilbanks has drawn attention to the transformation currently taking place in academic publishing, namely the slow shift from paper to digital that is also gradually opening models of knowledge sharing in bold new ways.

"Publishers like Hindawi and BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science use Creative Commons copyright licenses to grant all rights to their users to make and distribute copies, to remake and remix the knowledge, reserving only the mandate for attribution. ... This is how we maximize our societal investment in science: by making sure it can be read, understood, and used by the network culture."

Imagine a world where scientific knowledge were not trapped behind proprietary walls, where anyone could access cutting-edge research, participating according to their ability. Imagine how this might accelerate the pace of innovation and change, speed discovery of errors, and expand the community of scholars.

Imagine.

The Tweet of Damocles

2011-01-30T23:29:00.000-08:00

Clearly, social media are expanding dialogue throughout the world, and have the potential to radically reduce the costs of grassroots organizing. But they can also make it easy to track the words (if not deeds) of users, especially those naive enough to believe new media can somehow transcend traditional power politics. Writing for the New York Times, Scott Shane writes of how repressive governments are using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to build profiles of dissidents, map the networks of their friends and allies, and to sow misinformation.

"The Iranian police eagerly followed the electronic trails left by activists, which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown that followed. The government even crowd-sourced its hunt for enemies, posting on the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to identify them."

Of course, the ability to track the movement of memes through networks can also be used for good. It's also likely that savvy users may always find lower-risk ways to connect. But there's a serious problem with assuming that any technology is an unqualified social good, or rather, that any technology is beyond corruption. While they may not have anticipated that the Mubarak government would completely quash the Egyptian Internet, organizers were well aware that both Facebook and Twitter could be used against them, and urged protesters to communicate by more direct means (photocopies and faxes).

The same tools that move us towards a world of ends can also be used by those who desperately want to hold the center of that world. Mind the gap.

How Egypt pulled the plug

2011-01-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

GigaOM has an interesting piece on how Egypt Switched Off the Internet.

"Plenty of nations place limitations on communications, sometimes very severe ones. But there are only a few examples of regimes shutting down communications entirely — Burma’s military leaders notably cut connectivity during the protests of 2007, and Nepal did a similar thing after the king took control of the government in 2005 as part of his battle against insurgents. Local Chinese authorities have also conducted similar, short-lived blockades."

That Egypt's Internet could be smothered so easily should be sobering for the "Internet will set us free" crowd, but that news is still emerging shows that it's still not so easy to control the external message.

Perhaps we'll ultimately see support for Keck and Sikkink's "boomerang effect," but events in Egypt (and Iran) show how the power of social and mobile media to coordinate collective action at local levels can be blunted. Moreover, it shows why protest organizers should be prepared for the sudden loss of such tools.

Egypt: 404

2011-01-27T23:55:00.000-08:00

CNET and many others are reporting that all Internet traffic in Egypt has gone offline.

I hadn't realized we would be importing the Internet kill switch. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov are onto something?

Addendum: It appears that the darkness is not (yet) total.

Sedition in a box

2011-01-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

Symantec just released its Mid-Term Internet Security Threat Report, and surprise, surprise - the Wild West is getting wilder. It used to be that knocking a server offline, or stealing confidential data took programming savvy. Not anymore.

According to Symantec, the greatest threat to the Internet today are plug-and-play "Web Attack Toolkits," which enable script kiddies to roll with the big boys.

Nerdcore could rise up

2011-01-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

Estonia could get elevated - NCS is reporting that the country has formed the Computer Emergency Response Team of Estonia (CERT-E, also known as the Cyber Defense League), a militia intended to protect the country should someone try to out-do the 2007 attacks on the country:

"The league, made up of a group of Estonian programmers, computer scientists and software engineers would be the country’s main leg of defense in the event of a second cyberwar, but an all-volunteer unit may not pack enough nerdpower for confident security. Instead, Estonian officials are considering a draft among the country’s IT work force, Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo told NPR this week."

"We are thinking of introducing this conscript service, a cyber service,” Aaviksoo said. “This is an idea that we’ve been playing around [with]."

Sort of like the Global Frequency, but with uniforms.

US strategy to prevent leaks, leaked

2011-01-09T21:41:00.000-08:00

TechSpot News is reporting that MSNBC has received a memo detailing the US' government strategy to prevent leaks in a "post-Wikileaks environment."

Each initial assessment should be completed by January 28, 2011, and should include the following ...
Assess what your agency has done or plans to do to address any perceived vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or gaps on automated systems ...
Assess weakness or gaps ... and formulate plans to resolve the issues or to shift or acquire resources to address those weaknesses or gaps.
Assess your agency's plans for changes and upgrades to current classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites, and online collaboration environments as well as for all new classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites or online collaboration environments that are in the planning, implementation, or testing phases ...
Assess all security, counterintelligence, and information assurance policy and regulatory documents that have been established by and for your department or agency.

Censorship, Digg?

2010-08-05T13:56:00.000-07:00

Alternet has posted an article about an effort by self-identified conservatives to censor Digg rankings. For those unfamiliar with Digg, it's essentially a platform for crowd-sourced submission and ranking of websites and postings.

A year-long investigation has uncovered a rather effective campaign to "bury" new submissions contrary to the agenda of these conservative activists. These "Digg Patriots" (there are several similar groups) gave such Diggs an avalanche of negative votes (thus elevating "conservative-supporting" posts), coordinating their attacks and using multiple account profiles.

So much for the inherent democracy of the Interwebs.

Secrets from the Future

2010-07-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Wired is reporting on public-private intelligence projects which mine relational and other data from broad swaths of the Interwebs. Nothing terribly new here, but it's interesting seeing more approaches like this emerge. Here's an overview promo from one such company, Recorded Future:

You can't hide from the future.

Senate partisan networks

2010-06-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

SNA in R

2010-06-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

Last summer, Drew Conway (NYU) gave an excellent introduction to using the igraph package for basic Social Network Analysis in R:

Gephi GEXF

2010-06-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

It appears to offer the best of all worlds (h/t to Dr. Pangloss).

PdF 2010 is NOW!

2010-06-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

If you are in NYC over the next two days (June 3-4) and have both time and interest (as well as the $500-600 registration fee), consider attending the sixth annual Personal Democracy Forum at CUNY.

PDF is the place to be if you're interested interrelations of informational technology and governance. Full schedule can be found here.

Interwebs and regime change

2010-06-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

Information Policy has an interesting report on a presentation that Evgeny Morozov (Georgetown Institute for the Study of Diplomacy) gave at Foreign Policy's Washington office:

"Authoritarian regimes have learned how to block certain computers from accessing the Web... The Internet is not the first free speech facilitator to fall short of expectations. ... Since the Cold War, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the US-funded broadcaster, has used shortwave frequencies to report news to countries that ban free press. But throughout history, oppressive regimes have countered with espionage and misinformation campaigns to discredit the broadcasts"

e-scholarship

2010-06-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Rise of Crowd Science

The Chronicle just posted an article on Big Data:

"Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the NSF. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the UW eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information. Persuading scientists to fully embrace the age of big data, though, will require a change in academic reward structures to give new currency to papers with more authors than ever and to scientists who spend their careers crunching other peoples' numbers."

Computational humanities

... and yet another:

"Data-diggers are gunning to debunk old claims based on 'anecdotal' evidence and answer once-impossible questions about the evolution of ideas, language, and culture. ... Google has changed the landscape. Pouring hundreds of millions into digitization, the company did in a few years what Mr. Unsworth believes would have taken libraries decades: It has digitized over 12M books in over 300 languages, more than 10% of all books ever printed."
"[Yet] some worry that the lure of money and technology will increasingly push computation front and center. ... whether transferring the lab model to a discipline like literary studies really works. Trumpener is dubious. Twenty postdocs carrying out one person's vision? She fears an "academia on autopilot," generating lots of research "without necessarily sharp critical intelligences guiding every phase of it."

Citizen media and oil spills

2010-06-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

Oil Reporter is an iPod app that lets locals help with the spill recovery effort by reporting what they see on the ground.

"Users can upload photos and videos, reporting oil sighting, harmed wildlife sightings and much more.”

Biometrics in crowds

2010-05-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

Wired is reporting on Smart-Iris, a DARPA-funded device that (inventor Marc Christensen et al. claim) can zero in on individual irises in a moving crowd, regardless of angle:

"A long line of people, moving through a line, could be scanned by wall-mounted cameras and they wouldn’t even notice it was happening ... new algorithms are being developed ... to identify individuals based on segments of their iris, rather than a full frontal scan."

Seems Tom Cruise might not be quite so crazy, after all.

The Physics of Data

2010-05-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

If you have time, I recommend watching Marissa Mayer's presentation at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) last Fall. She shows how Google is connecting social data (e.g., search queries) with more tangible ("meatspace") data to create predictive models that are ... well, predictive. Also significant (especially in the light of ...) are Google's efforts to expose data in ways that are more dynamic, such as Fusion Tables and Public Data Explorer (or even within basic search results - click through for more features).

Imagine where we'll be once scholars (of all persuasions) start making their data public and using tools designed for collaborative, cumulative research. Personally, I'm imagining something like a mash-up between an online Provalis suite, Public Data Explorer, and the steadily expanding universe of online data and commentary.

Mobile phones, citizen media

2010-05-31T01:40:00.000-07:00

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 was held this May 6-7 in Santiago, Chile. MobileActive.org was there, and has an interesting write-up:

"Mobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen media around the world. They were instrumental in helping capture photos and videos on the streets of Tehran during 2009 protests that followed the elections there. A video captured during that time even won a prestigious journalism award. ... at least three distinctive advantages mobile phones have over traditional multimedia capturing devices: (1) they are always in our pockets and therefore always accessible (2) when there is a data connection, they allow instant uploading and live coverage and (3) they allow reporters to capture multimedia in more situations, by being lighter to transport, and appearing more innocuous in situations like protests."

NodeXL: SNA for Excel

2010-05-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

NodeXL is an Excel template that supports network visualization. It's about time (why hasn't MS already made SNA a central feature?).

Anyway, the template offers full network/graph customization, dynamic filtering, ability to calculate basic network metrics, as well as the ability to directly import networks from email and popular social network sites.

Geodata clearing house

2010-05-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

"[G]eospatial data are critically important for disaster response, protecting the environment, and many other challenges. But much of this information is in danger of being lost due to evolving technology and other threats."

"The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program will fund development of a CIESIN clearinghouse at Columbia's Earth Institute ... These electronic resources are essential to research, education, and sustainable development and only grow more valuable over time."

Interesting links: 05.28.10

2010-05-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

Current: A News Project

"Current shows a snapshot of what the entire internet-using population in America has been thinking for the last 24 hours, in the form of their collective search history.

Primer on searching C-SPAN's Video dbase

["The] C-SPAN Video Library has placed a "how to" brief "how to" search video tutorial online offering a basic introduction to searching this content rich database with a lot of material that's difficult if not impossible to find anywhere else."

Monitoring online identities

2010-05-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

From the Pew Internet and American Life Project study of 2,253 Americans:

"The increased prevalence of self-monitoring and observation of others creates a dynamic environment where people promote themselves or shroud themselves depending on their intended audience and circumstances. There are good reasons to be more vigilant. Online reputation matters; 44% of online adults have searched for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity. People are now more likely to work for an employer that has policies about how they present themselves online and co-workers and business competitors now keep closer tabs on one another ... even neighbors have become more curious about finding information about one another online. Yet, even those who are careful about their own disclosures have to stay on top of the identifying material that others may have posted about them on social networking profiles, photo- and video-sharing sites, Twitter, and blogs."

Interesting links: 05.26.10

2010-05-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century
“On May 17 … educators, parents and policy experts gathered at The New School in NYC ... to offer visions for the future of education and share promising moments ... to increase the relevancy of learning by meeting kids where their interests are and helping them identify, discover, trace and follow that interest”
Ethnicity and Geography of Facebook Users

“ePluribus: Ethnicity on Social Networks, by the Facebook data science team includes some interesting estimates of the geographic distributions of Facebook users.”
Legislation Before Congress to Make CRS Reports Public

“The Legislation: S. Res. 118 and H.R. 3762. As of today, both bills are listed as “referred to committee.” The House bill appears stalled since nothing has happened with it since October, 2009. ”
Consumer Genetic Tests Under Scrutiny

"On May 19, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a toughly worded letter to three CEOs, including Pathway Genomics, [who] was preparing to sell an over-the-counter genetic-testing kit ... called Genetic Health Report, purported to test for more than 70 health issues, including predispositions to Alzheimer's, breast cancer, and diabetes."
ITU calls for broadband access for half the world by 2015

“The number of Internet users has more than doubled since 2003 … and today more than 25 per cent of the world’s population is using the Internet … more efforts are needed to increase the number of Internet users. While today 75 per cent of all households have a TV, only 25 per cent have Internet access. In the developing countries, home Internet penetration is as low as 12 per cent.”
Physical Visualization of Urban Social Data

“Social Bits is a research design project focused on putting digital information in a physical context. A collection of small interventions located at Istanbul aim to explore the physical display of urban data. … Urban Mood visualizes the real-time mood of the citizens of İstanbul through a simple keyword projection and sound installation. Urbansphere Wearables is a collection of beautiful T-shirts that reflect the daily keywords of the city by using the data streams of social networks.”

Web 3.0

2010-05-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

An overview of the (dream of) Semantic Web:

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Interesting links: 5.22.10

2010-05-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

Diplopedia

"[A] wiki running on the State Department's intranet ... houses a unique collection of information pertaining to diplomacy, international relations, and Department of State tradecraft."

Gov 2.0 Expo 2010

"The rise of Government 2.0 signals the emergence of IT innovation and the Web as a platform for fostering efficiencies within government and citizen participation. How can we harness these innovations to decrease waste and increase productivity? Gov 2.0 Expo brings stakeholders together to explore transformative technologies and discover new solutions."

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

"This past week in government 2.0 news was full, as always, particularly for this correspondent as the Gov 2.0 Expo comes to Washington next week. Bernard Kouchner may have written that the "universal spirit of the Enlightenment should run through the new media" but this week, the zeitgeist of the government information revolution online was powered by open data."

Interesting links: 5.21.10

2010-05-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

Stanford's “Bookless Library”

"Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering."

Learning via place-based games

"Augmented reality (AR) games combine real world experiences with virtual information ... Educators can create quests or stories for students to follow and introduce virtual characters students meet along the way ... [using] a mobile phone's GPS technology. It can capture geo-tagged audio recordings, photos and videos that student players can access when they reach a particular location or meet a particular character ... [who] can talk with students, provide information, exchange items or respond to tasks. Authors can also create virtual items that players can retrieve and exchange."

An example: "... students learn the effects of urban renewal policies on local neighborhood residents when they tour a once vibrant Irish neighborhood and hear from real and virtual residents about the destruction that took place years ago in the name of development."

Imagining the Internet

"The opening ceremony of WWW2010 included a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web ... The panel featured Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; David Ferriero, archivist of the US; James Hendler a semantic Web expert from Rensselaer and moderator for the discussion; Paul Jones, UNC professor and director of iBiblio.org; Andrew McLaughlin, deputy U.S. chief technology officer; and Nigel Shadbolt, director of the Web Science Trust and Web Foundation."

WikiLeaks' founder's passport confiscated

"Forcing [Julian] Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks. One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world. Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies."

MetaFilter trafficking rescue

2010-05-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

Over the past two days, dozens of volunteers in the Metafilter community helped someone rescue their friend from human traffickers.

A few excerpts from the thread (I recommend reading it in full):

The initial plea:

My friend and former student K arrived in DC yesterday, along with a friend. She came over on some kind of travel exchange program put together by a Russian travel agency ... The program promised a job offer in advance, but didn't deliver. ... Her contact in the USA ... has asked her and her friend to meet in NYC tonight around midnight, with promises of hostess work in a lounge. Yes, I know how horrific that sounds- that's why I am working all possible angles here.

The thread is then quickly filled with responses, such as this:

The Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-###-#### ... Please, even if they insist on going to New York, ask them to reach out to the hotline. ... And add me to the list of DCers who can help out if you need anything on the ground.

There are scores of helpful posts, with MetaFilter users doing everything from tracking down the address of the lounge in NYC (as well as its history and web presence), to calling dozens of anti-trafficking and support organizations in DC and NYC, to offers of support for the original poster (who was in the midst of a cross-country drive), and much, much more.

Ultimately, these two women were persuaded about the danger they faced, and returned to DC:

I just heard their voices on the phone. They are safe with one of us. Confirmed. Rejoicing.

There's been a lot of hullabaloo in the past about how the Internet isolates people, leads us to shallow relationships and triviality (mostly discredited). In this instance, it seems the Internet also allows us to be bigger, and more capable together that we could possibly be alone.

And that is a very good thing.

Interesting links 5-20-10

2010-05-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

A data visualization tour

"The goal of visualization is to aid our understanding of data by leveraging the human visual system's highly tuned ability to see patterns, spot trends, and identify outliers. Well-designed visual representations can replace cognitive calculations with simple perceptual inferences and improve comprehension, memory, and decision making. By making data more accessible and appealing, visual representations may also help engage more diverse audiences in exploration and analysis."

Open Science Summit

"[The] advent of a truly "Open Science" which will profoundly affect the pace and character of subsequent theory and tool-driven paradigm shifts ... politicians and pundits point to the expectation that Science and Technology will let humanity invent its way out of the problems we've created."

Brits to Digitize 40M Newspaper Pages

"Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries ... looking at key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a 'critical mass' of material for researchers ... "

Revolution R for academia

Revolution R Enterprise is designed for corporations, government agencies and academic researchers that require the highest levels of performance, reliability and computational power for their large-scale data analysis. It is optimized to run the fastest computations of any R software on a wide-range of platforms - features a visual development environment (i.e., no more command-line).

RR Enterprise is FREE for academic researchers.

Digital diplomacy at US State Department

"How do you move from a culture of "need to know" to a culture of "need to share?" Richard Boly thinks about the answer to that question every day. Boly, a speaker at next week's Gov 2.0 Expo, is the director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department. His office is an applied technology think tank within the agency that's focused on improving the agency's communication and knowledge sharing.

"Boly is responsible for overseeing Virtual Presence Posts (VPPs), enterprise search, classified web publishing, and social networking, including the development of StateBook."

Digital copiers, identity theft

2010-04-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

CBS News just ran a piece on the risk that the hard drives in digital photocopiers pose for identity theft. Most businesses (including police departments) seem completely unaware that photocopiers and fax machines retain digital copies, and unless these are wiped clean, they can be easily recovered with freely available forensic software.

The investigators bought four used machines, two of which had been owned by the Buffalo NY Police Department and yielded tens of thousands of files from their sex crimes, domestic violence and narcotics units. Another had payroll records (including names, addresses and SSNs), but perhaps most disturbing was the copier that had been owned by an insurance company, which contained 300 pages of personal medical records.

Thousands of used digital copiers are sold every day.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2010-04-20T17:06:00.002-07:00

Google released summary data on government requests for take-downs and user information today.

Perhaps most revealing is the complete absence of data on China.

Strong versus weak ties

2010-04-13T21:16:00.004-07:00

It seems there's a lot we don't yet understand about social networks. Contrary to Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties" (pdf), we are beginning to discover that strong connections may be more important for social change.

Makes sense. Situational awareness (e.g., job opportunities) can be expanded by communicating with folks further from the center of our flocks. But when we have more to risk - striving for real change, requiring sustained commitment and significant self-sacrifice - mutual trust becomes more important.

It seems that to be informed and effective, we need to cultivate both weak and strong relationships.

Emergency Communications

2010-04-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

I've not seen reporting that corroborates this, but supposedly volunteer geeks were able to re-establish on-the-ground communications within weeks of Katrina using Mobile Repeater and Mesh Node backpacks (think portable wifi array, deployed by foot).

It seems likely that the Federal government could have responded as quickly, if they had the interest or the manpower (the National Guard was elsewhere, if I recall correctly), but this is impressive. Apparently, disaster relief organizations (and the military) have been using similar systems for some time.

An interesting alternative to centralized infrastructure (public or private).

Your credit are belong to us

2010-03-26T11:31:00.003-07:00

CNET News is reporting that Albert Gonzales has been convicted in last year's theft of millions of credit card numbers from T.J.Maxx, BJ's Wholesale Club, and Barnes & Noble (the largest reported theft of its kind to-date) and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

And thus ends the criminal career of the soupnazi - only a gazillion criminal hackers to go.

Cyberwar declared

2010-03-09T06:25:00.003-08:00

According to the UK's Times Online:

In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month [emphasis added].

That's a helluva lot of guacamole - and potentially complicates the online civil liberties debate. ZDNet has more details.

Twitter networks

2010-03-07T19:48:00.004-08:00

Those interested in rigorous study of the attempted use of information technology in collective action should check out Maltego, an open-source (not free) application that can map relationships between Twitter users, based on message text.

Above is one graph of last year's protests in Iran.

Technology's double edge

2010-02-12T10:04:00.002-08:00

For all the potential that SMS technologies offer to civil dissent, their use to promote freedom and justice is not a foregone conclusion.
Last month saw perhaps its worst abuse - text messages urging inter-religious murder, including burning the corpses to destroy evidence.

R and why it matters ... a lot.

2010-02-11T12:51:00.002-08:00

For those who haven't heard, "R" is an open-source statistical language (and environment) that is rapidly gaining ground as the "go-to" tool for statisticians of all stripes.
If you haven't made the jump yet, REvolution Analytics has posted its webinar overview of R, which includes some powerful and downright fascinating uses.

Awesome stuff!

Defining “edu tech”

2010-01-21T07:49:00.003-08:00

D'arcy Norman is an edutech developer with U Calgary's Teaching & Learning Centre who has interesting things to say about educational technology.

“Educational Technology” is one of those terms that makes me squirm. ... It positions technology as being “hard” and needing “experts” and “support” in order to be used by mere mortals. It raises the anxiety to a level that scares many people away. ... It also aligns with the notion of a consumer-based society – educational technology is something to be produced in a laboratory somewhere, to be consumed in the classroom."
...
[D'arcy's definition] "if I’m pressed to give one, is probably 'educational technology is whatever stuff you need to use to support the practice of effective teaching and learning.' ... There isn’t really such a thing as 'educational technology' – there is technology, used in the context of teaching and learning."

Well said.

5 Best Mind Map Aps

2009-12-30T23:39:00.003-08:00

Lifehacker has posted a crowd-generated list they're calling "Hive Five: Five Best Mind Mapping Applications." If you're the sort to take notes on your computer (in between Facebook binges), then these might be your cup o' tea.

Alternately, you might find mind mapping to be helpful in theory (or argument) development.

Palantir relational profiling

2009-12-30T13:51:00.003-08:00

Where are my socks? You'll be looking for yours too, once you watch this video demonstrating Palantir Technologies new software for detailing and analyzing links between individuals and organizations. Most features have been done before, but I've never seen them so well integrated, and some I've never seen (e.g., drag-linking text to assign relations between entities).

H/T Collision of Influences for the screenshot.

Odd words reveal authors

2009-12-15T08:39:00.001-08:00

After mapping the words used least by several famous authors (i.e., "unique word" curves), Sebastian Bernhardsson (Umea U, Sweden) and his team have discovered distinct patterns for each writer (BBC).

It always surprises me how such technically simple approaches (i.e., concordances) can reveal so much.

Cell phone as text scanner

2009-01-07T20:35:00.006-08:00

If you've ever been to the LOC (or done fieldwork in places where photocopies are costly or otherwise limited), you may have thought about dragging along a scanner to make digital copies (I even have a nice case for mine).

Welcome to the new world. Snapter converts snaps to text, with a nifty perspective adjustment that even supports open-faced books. Priced at $20 or $49, it's a cost-effective alternative to schlepping a scanner around.

I imagine a very clever person could find a way to automatically send hi-res cellphone snaps to an archival location, for backup.

More from Newsweek

2008-11-06T12:33:00.007-08:00

Reporting on an interesting GOTV innovation from the Obama camp:

"The Obama campaign's New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a "flusher"—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station."

Fascinating.

Campaign cyberattacks

2008-11-06T12:21:00.003-08:00

The latest issue of Newsweek is reporting that both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns came under a "sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown foreign entity" over the summer.

Both campaigns reported what they initially thought were phishing attacks to the FBI, whose initial investigation determined that:

"You have a problem way bigger than what you understand ... You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

Newsweek is also reporting that the FBI believes the information could be used to provide background on the candidate's policy positions, and thus leverage for future negotiations.

100 University Libraries

2008-08-08T18:25:00.001-07:00

Anyone looking for digital material should check-out this list of 100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access, complements of collegedegree.com. I have to admit, I had no idea that this much digital material is freely available. What we now need is a searchable meta-catalog.

MS Excel SNA?

2008-07-30T15:54:00.003-07:00

Every year, Microsoft holds a Research Faculty Summit, to highlight the work being done in MS Research. This year, Marc Smith presented an add-in for MS Excel (2007*) that allows users to generate and manipulate social networks within more familiar environs.

I've always wondered why Excel lacked the capacity to display networks - seems like a no-brainer for Microsoft. Granted, SNA is far more complicated than it might appear at first blush, but with the growing availability of such data, I suspect more and more social scientists will learn how to use these tools.

Adding SNA capability to the most common desktop software in the world should speed things up a bit.

*Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work with earlier versions of MS Excel (another "feature" of Office 2007).

Periodic Table of Videos

2008-07-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is not social science, but one can easily imagine social science (and digital humanities) counterparts to this creative pedagogical device put together by a team of chemists and IT-specialists at the University of Nottingham. Their Periodic Table of Videos is a twist on the periodic table of chemical elements. It allows the user to click on any element in the table to view a short video describing the major properties of, and other notable facts about, the element. While not exactly a novel concept, what makes the table attractive is the high quality of the videos, which were produced by a "video journalist [Brady Haran] .. passionate about science communication." I think this serves as yet another example of the research and pedagogical value of forging collaborative partnerships between substantive experts and those well versed in the art and science of information technology.

While I'm thinking of it, one interesting pedagogical application for one of my areas of substantive interest would be a "Video-Annotated American Constitution," where the user can click on specific provisions of the Constitution to see videos and/or podcasts pertaining to it. This would be a multimedia enhancement to (more and more common) text-annotated versions, such as those created by Cornell University Law School, FindLaw, and Justia. Even better would be a fully Web 2.0 equipped version that allows users to upload content and offer their own comments and annotations.

New Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Wiki

2008-06-12T14:56:00.002-07:00

When Ken and I started this blog, we really were just looking for a convenient way to post pertinent websites for own personal collaborative purposes. This was only a few years ago, but at the time there was no tool (that we knew of) comparable to, say, Google Notebook. We also did not have easy access to a wiki. So, we settled upon a blog. To our surprise, we started attracting visitors, and we have tried to adapt our style and approach to accommodate your interests. Hopefully this has been successful, our periodic lulls in activity not withstanding.

Anyway, if we were starting today, we very well might have began with a format close to what Lisa Spiro has designed with her new "digitalresearchtools" wiki. This site has the potential to evolve into a very useful resource for those of us interested in applying information technologies to enhance research potential, and so I am pleased to put in a plug for it. According to the site's description:

"This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers."

Web 2.0 Teaching/Learning Tools

2008-06-12T13:11:00.001-07:00

Kathy Schrock has created a Diigo list of "links to support the use of Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning in the K-12 environment." However, many of the tools on her list are also applicable to this blog's focus upon tools for social science research. The list, which now includes over 60 entries, is organized according to the following categories: Aggregators, Collaboration Tools, Online Applications, Photo Sharing, Podcasting, Presentation Tools, Social Networking, Utilities, Video Sharing, and Web 2.0 Portals.

Beyond Red, Blue (and even Purple): CSM's New "Patchwork Nation" Page

2008-03-07T13:02:00.001-08:00

The Christian Science Monitor has just published a "Patchwork Nation" page designed for viewing the 2008 presidential election from the perspective of 11 geographically clustered "voter communities" defined according to a variety of religious, socio-economic, and cultural variables. Based upon the GIS analysis of James Gimpel (Professor of Government and Politics here at the University of Maryland), the page features a map with 3,142 counties color-coded as being statistically most like one of the 11 community types.
The map is also interactive, allowing the user to control which communities are displayed and whether or not counties lines are hidden or displayed. They are also tracking candidate visits to see what kind of voter communities the candidates are targeting. They are vague as to what else they have planned, but their stated intention is "to watch 11 different presidential elections unfold at the same time in real time, to see which issues matter to different kinds of communities and how the candidates change their messages depending on their audience." Sounds like text mining and/or automated content analysis may be in the works as well.

Macrophilia

2008-01-17T10:40:00.000-08:00

Billing itself as the place for "large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them," (theinfo) is an excellent resource for those curious - and experienced - about meaningfully engaging the vast volumes of content that comes with an online world.

Whether your focus is on content/data acquisition, analysis, or representation, there are mailing lists, data sets (or visualizations), and experienced advice available. (theinfo) is crowd-sourced - while the community appears small now, the potential exists for this to become a fantastic resource.

First-person reporting

2008-01-14T17:52:00.000-08:00

Ad hoc, first-person reporting from disasters and emergencies is now an established practice (e.g., the 2004 tsunami, or hurricane Katrina). With mash-ups, it has become common to situate such accounts within their geographical context (e.g., Google Earth kml layers for the London attacks).

Those interested in such phenomena should check out Ushahidi, which tracks Kenya's post-election violence. Local residents may submit incident reports via SMS, which viewers can later filter by location or type.

Analyzing text

2008-01-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

For those interested in fully and semi-automated approaches to analyzing unstructured text, the Text Analytics Wiki offers a way to familiarize yourselves with the range of techniques available, and to stay on top of the latest developments in the field.

A ton of content is already available - the TA Wiki links to relevant news aggregators, listservs, blogs, universities and private researchers, issue papers, software, conferences, and more.

Truly, a rich resource. Especially as documented political discourse so dramatically expanding with the growth of e-governance, campaign websites, blogs, and other online media.

Ten Universities with the Best Free Online Courses

2007-12-19T21:29:00.000-08:00

Education Portal has compiled a list of ten top Universities with the Best Free Online Courses. If the basic insight behind Will Hunt's quip in Goodwill Hunting (to the effect that someone with brains and drive could receive a better education paying nothing but library late fees than the typical privileged student who pays tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to attend a top university) had any truth at the time, it is no doubt even more true today. For one thing, you now don't even have to worry about late fees!

10 Semantic Apps to Watch

2007-12-01T07:52:00.000-08:00

Read/WriteWeb founder Richard MacManus has offered a list of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch and an interesting discussion about what "Semantic Apps" are.

These, apps, he explains, (1) use the web as a platform, (2) are distinct from "semantic web" technologies in that they may or may not rely upon metadata standards (such as RDF or OWL), and (3) "all try try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users."

Mind Mapping Tools -- Free and Otherwise

2007-11-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Mashable has created a convenient list of 30+ Mind Mapping Tools, both free and pay-for-use.

Networked content

2007-10-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

A very pleasant surprise - mere weeks after releasing QDA Miner 3.0, the team at Provalis Research have issued another features update.

Users now have the ability to import Atlas-ti 5.x "hermeneutic units" and to export co-occurrence matrices for network analysis.

Proprietary data formats have been a real limitation in CAQDAS software, keeping most users "locked-in" to whichever platform they use at the beginning of their work. I seriously doubt computer-supported data analysis will really "take-off" as long as such barriers exist.

Transfer to network analysis packages is less significant, only because QDA Miner has always had this feature (export matrix as Excel file, which most SNA packages read quite well). There are many examples of combined content and network analyses, but this seems to be a very underdeveloped technique in social science.

It's great to see developers of such great software continue to stretch and dissolve boundaries. Kudos to Normand for breaking down some walls.

The Web That Wasn't

2007-10-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Alex Wright (author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages) gave a fascinating presentation at Google last week, on The Web That Wasn't.

Laying out the web's pre-history (e.g., Otlet, Bush, Engelbart), Wright describes the contributions made by each of these men (and others), while covering some of the more creative ways that information architecture has been tweaked to promote a new scope and scale of human learning.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, I guarantee you'll learn something new.

CAQDAS on Puget Sound?

2007-10-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm back in the neighborhood, I'm curious to see whether there are any users or developers interested in computer-assisted social scholarship. I've a few projects already going (for which it might be nice to have collaborators), and a few ideas simmering.

Please feel free to forward this along - I'd really enjoy hearing from folks in the region (or even this time zone). Easiest way to contact me is through the comments (we moderate them to limit spam, but this also gives us the opportunity to communicate directly with posters).

50+ Social Bookmarking Sites

2007-10-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker has compiled a list of 50+ Social Bookmarking Sites.
Not much to add. Just that I found it informative.

Back to Basics: Note Taking

2007-10-14T19:43:00.000-07:00

Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker has offered a nice overview of techniques and tools for taking great notes in meetings, lectures, etc. The comments are also quite helpful, pointing to several software applications to assist with note taking and informative websites on the topic. For my money, using MS Word's Styles feature for creating flexible outlines remains my favorite tool for organizing my reading notes and for brainstorming ideas.

QDAMiner 3.0 ships

2007-10-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

We posted about the beta version back in May, but now the full version of QDAMiner 3.0 is finally available.

Part of the Provalis suite of quantitative and qualitative text analysis tools, QDAMiner now also supports image coding (comparable to Atlas.ti), supervised machine learning (document classification based on example), and offers many improvements to common (and not so common) analytical and data management tasks.

Again, both Mike and I have used Provalis software for years, and we're still discovering ways we can use it to interrogate text. Once the academy realizes how much of what we study is leaving an electronic record, tools like Provalis will become de rigueur for serious social scientists.

Web 3.0: The Elite Strike Back?

2007-10-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

I have been struck by the extent to which the "democracy" metaphor is used to describe Web 2.0 developments. As someone who has dabbled in the academic study of political theory in general, and democratic theory in particular, I have thought a lot lately about how important epistemological and information-cost assumptions are to the rationale for our political system, and how information technology may or may not therefore allow us to rethink the possibilities and limits of our democratic institutions. More specifically, I have thought that perhaps the apparent success of Web 2.0 at harnessing the "wisdom of the crowds" points to the real possibilities for a responsible and more equitable alternative to our representative-based legislatures and petition-vote based citizen initiatives.

I was therefore intrigued by Jason Calcanis' recent discussion of the advent of "Web 3.0," which is to him a marked improvement over Web 2.0 because it prevents "the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs' we've seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts." It seems to me that democratic theory is more relevant today than it has been in decades (which isn't saying much). Recommended reading for all Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 enthusiasts is Robert Dahl's Democracy and Its Critics, especially his "critique of guardianship" (Ch. 5) and his discussion in the penultimate chapter (Ch. 22) on what he views as the single greatest threat to "democracy in tomorrow's world": the rise of a technocratic elite "expert class" that uses its power-knowledge to restrain and subjugate non-experts rather than to empower and emancipate them.

Semantic Web vs. Web 2.0

2007-09-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

Tim O'Reilly offers interesting thoughts on the nature of the "semantic web" and how it differs from "web 2.0" in a recent post on his O'Reilly Radar. He think both terms are often misused, including in a recent Economist article on three web companies (ValuesOfN, Wesabe, and Tripit). While the distinction is probably obvious to a lot of people, I personally have found his discussion helpful, and I imagine most social scientists could as well.

Online political atlas

2007-09-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

For those of us who hope to engage students on issues such as political or economic development, the World Freedom Atlas is a fantastic resource.

Designer Zachary Johnson has created a very slick Flash interface for dozens of datasets (>300 variables) generated by academics, NGOs and IOs on the global distribution of human rights, governance, and development indicators between 1990 and 2006.

WFA not only maps national distributions of each, but also histograms and scatterplots, with the ability to show absolute values vs. change over time.

Can't wait to use it in my intro course.

H/T to information aesthetics for the link.

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

2007-09-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

Alex Iskhold has stimulated an interesting discussion at Read/WriteWeb on the somewhat disappointing progress over the past decade toward realizing the semantic web vision. At the heart of the problem, he argues, is the "bottom-up" approach to converting information from the web into RDF and OWL format. Although not offered in this post, he promises a future article outlining an alternative "top-down" model. I, for one, am on the edge of my seat.

Beyond Wiki: 20 References You Can't Do Without

2007-09-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

A good overview of essential online references is available from Scholastici.us.

Tracking Political Buzz

2007-09-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Matthew Hurst (Microsoft Live Labs and Data Mining) posted about five projects applying spidering, crawling, and text mining techniques to Track Political Buzz in the United States.

None are anywhere near as ambitious as VOSON (ANU, Canberra), their level of automated processing appears to vary widely, and they could all benefit from seriously (re)considering their information design. But they are all fairly serious attempts to distill relevant statistical and semantic information from the steadily expanding ocean of online political discourse.

These may seem like novelties now, but how long before it's critical that we apply (semi)automated tools to have any hope of seriously engaging the volume and variety of public discourse*?

* A 1999 paper used hand-coding to summarize 4,832 comments submitted for the Hoover National Forest (IN). According to a 2007 report on management plans for the Bitterroot, Lolo and Flathead National Forests (MT), hand-coding is still used. While the number of respondents was still relatively low (~2,800), other issues (e.g., the proposed elimination of the 2001 Roadless Area Rule) have garnered millions of comments.

Data visualization

2007-08-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, Smashing Magazine posted Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, a fascinating overview of 30+ online graphical experiments.

Most have been around awhile (at least in Internet terms), but we might all benefit from browsing these sites, and thinking about how patterns in our data might be better represented.

University Publishing in a Digital Age

2007-08-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't read through this yet, but Ithaka has published what promises to be an engaging report on the future of scholarly publication, called "University Publishing in a Digital Age."

Office 2.0 Database

2007-08-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

Ismael Chang Ghalimi at IT Redux is maintaining an "Office 2.0 Database," which is an extensive list of web based applications designed to enhance personal productivity with the advantages (e.g. cost, convenience, and collaborative capabilities) of Web 2.0 functionality. I have to confess, I've only heard of at most 15% of these applications. It is incredibly exciting to think what will be developed over the next few years. If he keeps it up, Ismael's database should be a good place to stay current on "Office 2.0" developments.

Sunlight

2007-08-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

Founded in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation funds efforts to provide greater transparency to democratic systems. Projects include MAPlight, The Center for Independent Media, OMB Watch, The Center for Democracy and Technology, The Center for Media and Democracy, CREW, and more:

Each applies info tech to create powerful tools to research political phenomena - achieving gains in speed and scale that I rarely see within the academy.

Fun with Excel

2007-07-31T05:28:00.000-07:00

My friends know how geeky I can get about graphing data (and information design, generally). I'm no slouch at MS Excel, but today I got schooled. Chris Gemignani at juice analytics has a fascinating screencast in which he replicates this NYT graphic:

I just learned a half-dozen new Excel tricks that I can't wait to try out myself.

*Apologies for the lull in postings this summer. Mike and his wife are new parents, and I'm moving to WWU in Bellingham next month. Busy, busy, busy.

Peer review 2.0

2007-06-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

In April, SUNY-Albany librarian Laura Cohen described what she saw as "Social Scholarship on the Rise," a trend for scholars to discuss and engage their work via blogs, social networking services, and "soft peer review" (among other things).

Earlier this week, we saw an astonishing example of this process in practice.

On Monday night danah boyd, Berkeley grad student, Annenberg Fellow, and cogent observer of the (relatively) new world of "networked publics," used her blog to publish preliminary observations from her fieldwork on youth engagement with sites like MySpace and Facebook, and asked for feedback.

She posted again yesterday, this time about her shock at the response - within 24 hours, her essay had been viewed 90,000 times, reported on (poorly) by the BBC, and directly commented on over 170 times (190 as of this morning).

Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.

Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.

Evolution of the Protest

2007-06-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

Wash U student Shlomo Goltz has made a fascinating and beautiful "graphic essay" of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, focusing on the role of technology in helping protesters to organize and mobilize on the street.

Also see work by Melissa A Wall (Cal State-Northridge), such as "Press Conferences or Puppets: NGOs' v Street Groups' Communication in the Battle of Seattle."

H/T to Howard Rheingold at SmartMobs for the Goltz link.

Language processing

2007-06-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Is social science on the verge of a paradigm shift? Research into large-scale natural language processing has been going for some time (especially in national security -- see here and here), but it also seems understanding of how such tools might be applied to social science may be emerging.

In "Data Catalysis: Facilitating Large-Scale Natural Language Data Processing" (presented at ISUC 2007) Patrick Pantel presents a USC project to extend such expertise to social scientists.

While there may still be a gap between such tools and the needs and understanding of most of us, Daniel Hopkins and Gary King recently demonstrated the feasibility of "Extracting Systematic Social Science Meaning from Text," using machine learning to categorize millions of political texts (websites, blogs) with accuracy rates rivaling human coders.

H/T to Mark Liberman at Language Log for the link to Pantel's paper.

Weaving images, metadata

2007-06-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (and Microsoft Live Labs) knocked one out of the park at TED this year, demonstrating Seadragon and Photosynth, which seem likely to fundamentally shift how we organize and view visual imagery (including text).

If you're pressed for time, jump ahead to 3min 48 seconds, where he demos the seamless integration and spatial orientation of thousands of Flickr images of Notre Dame cathedral, including their associated metadata.

As Aguera y Arcas points out, the network externalities of this technology could integrate spatial and visual memories far beyond anything we've ever seen. Food for thought.

Best collective action EVER

2007-06-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

If you're pressed for time, jump ahead to 4min 40 seconds.

I've seen it three times now, and I still can't believe it.

Notable Websites, A-Z

2007-06-01T07:12:00.000-07:00

The Internet Resources Newsletter has offered a list of A-Z Notable Websites.

I haven't seen anything quite as comprehensive of broad interest to academics, students, and researchers of all stripes.

New QDA Miner beta

2007-05-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

Normand Peladeau at Provalis Research has just released a beta version o f QDA Miner 3.0.

New features include:

Support for image coding (bmp, wmf, jpg, gif, png)
Query by example (e.g., "find things like this")
Automatic document classification (i.e., machine learning)
Greater integration with WordStat
... and much, much more.

Mike and I are both long-time Provalis users, but we are still discovering features of this powerful software suite (QDA Miner, Wordstat, Simstat).

For my money, it's the best thing out there if you study text (qualitatively, quantitatively, or both).

Intercoder agreement

2007-05-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot written about the relative merits of folksonomies vs controlled vocabularies (i.e., tagging), but few frame it in terms of intercoder agreement (measures by which content analysts assess coding reliability).

Recently, Moritz Stefaner at Well-formed Data posted a visualization to compare tagging practices, which could be a useful tool to draw researchers' attention to discrepancies across multiple coders.

A few annotation (aka "code-and-retrieve") packages currently come with embedded intercoder agreement tools. Fewer make much use of visualization tools, generally. My advice to developers is to seriously integrate both functions into the design of next generation CAQDAS software.

American Presidency Project

2007-05-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California, Santa Barbara have produced an impressive collection of Presidential materials from Washington to present. As they describe it:

"The American Presidency Project is the only online resource that has consolidated, coded, and organized into a single searchable database:
Messages and Papers: Washington - Taft (1789-1913
Public Papers: Hoover to Bush (1929-1993)
Weekly Document Compilation: Clinton - G.W. Bush (1993-2007)"

Quite impressive. I hope the next step is to apply more sophisticated text mining tools to the corpus and organize the data to take fuller advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities.

The future of research

2007-05-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

From Language Log, Mark Liberman offers one of the most succinct explanations for why tech literacy is becoming critical for scholars of all disciplines. His notes from an NSF-sponsored workshop in Phoenix:

"By 2015, all publicly-funded research products and primary resources will be readily available, accessible, and usable via common infrastructure and tools through space, time, and across disciplines, stages of research, and modes of human expression."

Both Mike and I focus on developing tools and techniques for this new milieu; the mystery is how to engage our colleagues. I'm always asked to help senior faculty with things like email, but I'm also often surprised by the lack of tech saavy (or even interest) among grad students.

How do we help social science prepare for a digital academy? How do we raise awareness that it is going to happen?

Money and Politics 2.0

2007-04-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

MAPLight.org offers a well-designed interface for a rich dataset of bills, legislators, and money. Studying relationships between contributions and legislative voting is something of a tradition. Now everyone can join in!

Users can discover not only who gives the most, but the "success rates" for such "investments" (i.e., whether politicians supported their position). The data currently covers just California, but the plan is to add Congress next. Any chance this may improve the quality of political journalism? Of scholarship?

NOTE: Michael Calore has a write-up about MapLight on Wired.com: "Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington's Newest Watchdogs."

UPDATE 5-17-07: MAPLight Congress is now live.

1-Stop Shop for Web 2.0 Aps

2007-04-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

A new community directory, called Listio, allows users to discover, submit, and vote for Web 2.0 applications.

ISO the perfect wiki

2007-04-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

I've been perusing the Wiki tools page of Using Wiki in Education, in search of the perfect tool for one of our projects.

The ideal approach would enable us to:

create a simple interface for MySQL database records
provide read-only access to those records
use controlled taxonomies and/or folksonomies
support password-protected profiles
allow profiles to tag and annotate records
review and compare profiles for inter-coder agreement
query by tag or comment
append approved tags and comments to MySQL records

The project is a large text corpus that we are studying from a variety of methodological approaches, from content extraction that can't be fully automated, to semantic tagging and more fully "grounded" approaches.

Such a tool should have very broad applicability throughout the social sciences and law - indeed, any discipline that relies heavily on textual evidence.

Any suggestions would be enormously helpful.

CFP: Digital Humanities

2007-04-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

Via the Stoa Consortium, news that next October 21-22, Northwestern University (Chicago) will host the second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. The theme is "exploring the scholarly potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment."

My only question is who will hold the first US Colloquium on Digital Social Science? I realize we're a retro lot, but really - the world has changed. Let's move beyond pencils and post-its.

Visualizing development

2007-04-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

At last year's TED, Hans Rosling (Karolinska Institutet) presented a series of utterly amazing visualizations of world health and wealth data.

Produced by Gapminder (which Rosling founded).

H/T to Moritz Stefaner (Well-formed data) for the reminder.

Information U

2007-04-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

John Milan (Read/WriteWeb) has an interesting post on how "Web 2.0's Future All Depends on IT's Future." While most of the article focuses on the role of CIOs in selecting the next generation of IT winners, he closes with a brief discussion of Doug Neal's (Leading Edge Forum) contention that corporations would do better to focus on an "educational" (rather than surveillance) model, where IT is used to enable the sharing of ideas. Think of it as a "wisdom of crowds" for the corporate world.

Which leads me to wonder (yet again) the degree to which IT serves such purposes in the social sciences. True, most of us at least rely heavily on email. But how well have we really learned to use IT to facilitate our research? How many of us have a technological aptitude on par with our (other) intellectual training? Are our skills better or worse than those of the students we are tasked with educating?

I'm currently designing a brief survey to try to assess this question, which I'll deploy it later this month. I'm quite interested in hearing the attitudes and experiences of others on these issues. Comments and suggestions (substantive or strategic) are heartily encouraged.

The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation

2007-04-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

Conrad Barski has put together a short tutorial called"How To Tell Stuff To A Computer - The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation"

While this is mostly intuitive, I think his tripartite schematic ("guy in the garage," "writer," and "scientist") is useful for thinking about IT at the intersection of social science, on the one hand, and humanities, on the other.

As someone with first hand experience with the difficulties of straddling the traditional "two cultures" divide, and who has thought (perhaps mistakenly) that IT could serve as a bridge between the two, I think the "art of knowledge representation" sheds light on the realistic opportunities and limitations of employing computer science to that end.

Sophie's choice

2007-04-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

Sophie is an open-source multimedia platform that enables users to create rich and elegant text, video, audio and image files without programming skills.

An alpha version is available now (beta due in September). Perhaps more interesting, developers plan to make a OLPC version ($100 laptop) available.

Tinderbox tools

2007-04-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

Eastgate Tinderbox is a personal content management system for Macs that lets users store, organize and share notes, ideas and plans over the web, and offers a variety of visualizations to facilitate analysis and understanding.

I've been looking for something similar for Windows, to no avail. I'm very impressed by the architecture of this program.

New Online Journal: DHQ

2007-04-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly) is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), DHQ is also a community experiment in journal publication, with a commitment to:

experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
using open standards to deliver journal content
developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly international character of ADHO

Copyright 499: Pwned

2007-04-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned his work before, but if Cory Doctorow is still not on your radar, check out Brock Read's latest in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "A Blogger Infiltrates Academe."

An Annenberg Fellow at USC this year, Mr. Doctorow teaches an upper- division course on copyright (and copywrong). His students are podcasting the class; sound quality is sub-optimal, but I find them immensely informative and entertaining.

Another interesting note: frustrated by Blackboard's CMS, Mr. Doctorow and his students established a blog to manage course content. Well worth a look.

Playing with data

2007-04-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (New School) has put together a nice visualization that shows Electoral College results going back to 1789 in terms of the familiar "red state, blue state" maps.

The color-coding is sometimes a bit odd (Dems, Federalists and Whigs are all blue), but quite fascinating. I had no idea that both candidates in 1820 were Republican. The interface includes issue polling, though I don't know how to interpret the results. Overall, very interesting, likely useful for classrooms.

H/T to Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science for the link.

Google advanced operators

2007-04-06T12:58:00.000-07:00

Google search functions now summarized on this convenient "Cheat Sheet."