PDA 2012: Social Network Data

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First after-lunch session at PDA 2012 on Social Network Data. Let’s get to it.

Arc-chiving: saving social links for study by Marc A. Smith at Social Media Research Foundation
This is the “what’s new since last year talk.” Trying to build the “Firefox of GraphML” open tools for collecting and visualizing social media data to show patterns of connections. Open tool: NodeXL (works with Excel 2007 and Excel 2010). Creating a platform for sharing data sets: NodeXLGraphGallery.

“2011 was the year of the crowd.” Many, many people gathered in crowds in social media. Through using the NodeXL tools, you can see the social networks and online community connections. [Nice visualizations for doing analyses]

Publishing on taxonomy of social media (lots of work on open scholarship). Lots of stuff still to do. More workshops are coming so keep an eye out for them and new features/tools/etc..

Need to get companies and people to play together in order to truly be able to document social media networks and connections. [I think there are a lot of conversations that need to happen around privacy, social good, connections, research, preservation, etc. in order to move these kind of programs forward.]

Personal Interaction Archiving: Saving our Attitudes, Beliefs, and Interests by Megan Alicia Winget of UT Austin

“Thing” based behavior of looking at archiving things (e.g. objects) versus interaction based behavior (e.g. Foursquare and Yelp). Many options for archiving and preserving their interactions online. Winget is giving a theoretical talk instead of tool-based talk.

Bookmarking as a new type of commonplace book. “Everything old is new again.” Commonplace book= place to store quotes, excerpts, etc. in journal form. Using bookmarking tools is a way of returning to an early way of reading and writing, skipping around and reading many things at once. Remixing, annotating, etc. are very old ideas. People now annotate and highlight through ebook tools and can share them, if they choose to do so. Readers are having “wordless conversations” through their annotations.

Need to think about ownership and representation when looking at uploaded annotations. Need to think about ownership versus licensing in the online and digital world. Need to understand the relationships among people, artifacts, and their interactions.

Take Home Messages
Studying social media is important and you can use NodeXL to study connections and visualize the connections. Very interesting and useful for researchers interested in social media and online social connections. Need to think about things and interactions in order to truly document and preserve the context of our lives and our communities.

PDA 2012: Media Types

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Second morning session: media types. Let’s see what we have to talk about now.

Processing and Delivering Email Archives in Special Collections using MUSE Peter Chan from Stanford University
Email archiving is important, but there are many challenges: copyright and privacy, sensitive information, description, and delivering. So how do you bulk process/archive emails? Description is especially important and difficult because we must include useful metadata and description in order to make the email archives useful for people.

MUSE is a project at Stanford for email archiving and actually do something useful with the emails. Can do sentiment analysis and also group analysis. [I’ve used this before and it is quite fun.] Can also look at image attachments as a slideshow. Lots of very cool improvements on MUSE since the last time I used it. Very cool.

Processing emails with MUSE: edit pre-built lexicon and screen for sensitive information and mark for restriction, group by known projects, conferences, etc. and can use MUSE functions to create usable archives at the institutional level. Deliver metadata about the emails on the web via summary information, sentiment visualizations, etc. In the reading room, can deliver individual emails and attachments. Gaps: sophisticated search, original view via the creator’s email folders/tags, delivery mode for metadata, lexicons, and foreign language support.

parallel-flickr Aaron Straup Cope
Link to information: parallel-flickr appendix

“For all intents and purposes, no one backs up their photos.” Flickr has a lot of trust from users and people just assume that their photos will always be there. But we really need backups because every system fails at some time.

parallel-flickr uses the Flickr API to pull out the photos and photo information. The source files are then fed into the database and then uploaded to the website. Also can pulls in photos you favorite on Flickr. You can use parallel-flickr just for yourself or for sharing with others.

Note: Seems very interesting and important, but I’m just not following this talk. I need to go through his extra information after the conference to get a better handle on this.

Remember the Web? Practical challenges of Bookmarking for Keeps Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard founder)
Link to talk

Pinboard.in founded in 2009, 9 million archived bookmarks, and 4 TB stored web content. “The search engine does not replace the need for your own bookmarks.” Archive bookmarks because link rot is a large problem. By archiving your bookmarks, you’ll be able to get to what you want (you can sign up for this extra service through Pinboard). Challenges to getting the content: adversarial servers (paywalls/authentication, sessions, streaming content, geoidiocy), desperate advertisers (hyperpagination, interstitials, URL shorteners, IP law), and inner platform effect (dynamic loading, infinite load, #!hashbang URLs, third-party comments, Flash).

Take Home Message
Email archiving is important and MUSE makes these large email archives actually usable (and makes fun visualizations). MUSE is still being developed, but is already cool and useful project. Back up your data and files. Check out Pinboard for archiving your bookmarks.

PDA 2012: Cases and Examples

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First morning session: case studies and examples. Let’s get into it.

How My Family Archives Affected Othersby Stan James (on Twitter @wanderingstan)
Talking about his grandmother and grandfather and how his grandmother burned all her letters after she had let her children read the letters. [Note: Stan spoke at PDA 2011 about his family archiving project] His father is still scanning his materials.

Three points: personal archiving is a hot space; much room for creativity; archiving and relationships

Still working on the family archives and checking out other social media sites to share the images and documents. Used Drupal platform to create own family website (lots more work than he thought it would be). Lots of great features on the website because have tagging metadata. Lots and lots of photos. Began using maps, especially Google Street View, to see how geographical locations have changed since the photos were taken years ago. Also has had many text documents scanned and transcribed via Mechanical Turk. Lots of mashups on the website, like covers from TIME on the website based on the date of the letters written.

Using simple questions and randomly selected photos to get the rest of the metadata entered by the family members (using the website). This project has helped the family members become closer and need to make the interfaces easier to use, especially for those who are not familiar with technology or have mobility issues.

You need to think about privacy concerns of others who are in the photos (but not part of the family) and also geo-location codes for those who don’t want their homes marked online.

The Personal Archive of Sven G. by Sven Goyvaerts
Unfortunately not here

What I’ve learned from gardening my Brain Jerry Michalski, The REXpedition
[Talking now instead of after lunch]

Talking about The Brain and using it for 15 years in one brain space. It’s mind-mapping software. Each link is called “a thought” and links together various thoughts and maps out the connections. Very good if you are a visual thinker and can make your own links to various thoughts. You can drag and drop new links into “the brain” on your desktop. Good way to create context and to make sense out of the world, but you have to rely on organizations like the Internet Archive to be able to find old websites. You can use The Brain instead of bookmarks. Does have a notes field. Doesn’t take a lot of time according to Jerry and helps him improve his memory. Can see his brain at JerrysBrain.com. He isn’t sure what to do with this now because, while it is great for him, he wants to figure out how it could be helpful for others. He wants to do collaborative sense-making.

Unstable Archives: Performing the Franko B Archive by Jo An Morfin-Guerrero (fine art conservator and student at Bristol University)
Part of PhD research on preservation of media and different artistic practices. Franko B is an artist who currently lives in London and does many different types of art including performance art. He started collecting documentation of his artistic work and donated to Live Art Archives at Bristol University. Very controversial to document performance art because you are preserving something that has been created to be ephemeral. [I think this is a very interesting philosophical and theoretical debate] Because the artist himself has collected the documentation and donated to the university in 2009, it is a bit less controversial to archive this collection.

First she just dealt with materiality of the collection because the materials were in very poor containers and not indexed. Then she began worked with the materials and the database records to do media archaeology to see what the materials together mean. Lots of interesting dilemmas for archiving. How do you show moving behaviors through time with static archives? How do you convey the ephemeral nature of the performance art?

Take Home Message
Family archiving is a great way to bring multiple generations of the family together. It is a great way to share memories, but does take a lot of time to create. Check out TheBrain for mind-mapping and contextual bookmarks if you like visual linkages. Performance art in the archives means that we must find new ways of showing context and using the archives to create meaning (and being okay with not always having the answers). Very interesting trio of talks showing the diversity of personal archiving methods and tools.

Personal Digital Archiving 2012: Keynote by Mike Ashenfelder

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Happy Thursday, dear readers! Today is the first day of Personal Digital Archiving Conference at the Internet Archive. I’m excited to hear about lots of cool projects and tools, but not psyched to sit on wooden pews for two days. (The Internet Archive is in an old Christian Science church.) But let’s get into what Mike Ashenfelder has to say about the Library of Congress’ Personal Digital Archive Advice for the General Public.

“Sometimes we complicate things more than they need to be.”

Library of Congress is simplifying by helping people get started with their own personal digital archiving. Goal is to help the general public. Need to simplify our institutional-level digital preservation knowledge and share it with the general public. Basically, you scale down the workflow process for individuals.

Need to get the message out that people need to manage their digital assets because there is no such thing as benign neglect in the digital realm.

“Cells of history”: having people archive their own materials helps the institutional archives because the collections will already be processed when they come to the archives.

Photos are the main concern for most people. Cell phone cameras have exponentially increased the number of photos people take, keep, and want to maintain access to for future use.

Workflow:
Identify: What you want to save
Decide: What is most important
Organize: Keep it all in one place
Save Copies: In different places

Library of Congress can’t make any endorsements of projects, therefore has to point to other resources. Makes terminology more accessible to people. [Great tip: always use clear language. I’m a librarian and archivist and I don’t even appreciate the acronym soup and crazy lingo we seem to come up with to describe what we do.]

Library of Congress has many resources for the general public, including blogs, Facebook, and videos (iTunes and YouTube). [This is great because there is a lot of incorrect information about digital preservation, especially surrounding online materials.] You can check out the information on the Library of Congress’ Personal Archiving site. Also, the LoC has the Personal Archiving Day which coincides with ALA’s Preservation Week. They go to National Book Festival, too, which is the best outreach event for increasing people’s knowledge of preserving their own media. Unsurprisingly, people love to play with obsolete media at these outreach events.

Unsurprisingly, you need to listen to the public to make sure they understand the educational materials and to see what questions they have. Also, simplify all your writing and materials. Think haiku, not free verse.

Everyone needs to do more outreach and marketing to get people aware of digital archiving. Train the trainer in the public libraries and people will get excited to become involved. Community outreach is super-important and gets great collaborations and partnerships formed. You can find a Personal Archiving Day Kit on the Library of Congress’ website.

Take Home Message:
You’ve got to make it easy and not scare people if you want people to organize, tag, and archive their materials. I hope that more people feel that they want to and can preserve their materials so we don’t lose these materials. Maybe I can convince my library that we should hold a personal archiving day to help people start organizing and preserving their materials. Get into the community and get people excited to preserve their materials!

Things I think about on Fridays

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! Has it seemed like a particularly long week to you? I’ve been, as my momma would say, whooshed all week and am very much looking forward to a relaxing weekend. So let’s just sit, have a cup of tea, and share a few things before getting on with the weekend.

Before getting into the link love, I just thought I’d write a disclaimer to today’s post. Like I said, I’ve been whooshed. I have a huge presentation coming up soon which has taken up most of my brainspace, I’m trying to wrap up two grant projects (and associated reports), and I’ve been trying to keep on top of all the everyday life stuff we all have to deal with. So there really isn’t a theme to this post as it is kind of like the things I think about on Fridays. It’s all very random, although it usually makes sense in my head. I promise that soon I’ll have the brainspace to write some longer, coherent posts on the nature of libraries and archives. And, next week, there will be posts from the Personal Digital Archiving 2012 conference, but until then, take in the links below and then have a wonderful weekend.

First, I wanted to share the link to the Darwin Manuscripts Project (found via InfoDocket). I’m excited to explore this site and it is always wonderful to see well-done digital, archives projects. Plus, this will be another great resource for those teaching the history of science or other history courses, in my opinion.

Next I wanted to share this article from Lifehacker: how to find your creative sweet spot. I enjoy articles about creativity and am hoping to mull over some of this article’s advice more this weekend. If you have any tips that have helped you get the creative juices going, please share them in comments.

Another article I wanted to share is, 25 documents you need before you die from the Wall Street Journal. Since it is time to file my taxes this weekend, it makes me think about updating all the other important documents I have. Take a look at the article, it is helpful (even if the title is a bit on the bleak side).

For a work break, you really must go see the funny/odd/interesting/delightful bunny video over on Hanna’s blog. Really, you owe it to yourself to go watch this video. It is just, well, there aren’t words.

Finally, I leave you with this cute kitten photo (from Beautiful Portals Tumblr) to help you relax and get ready for your weekend:

Kitten on Deck Photo

Kitten on Deck Photo

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more tech, library, and archives fun. Allons-y!

Quick Tech Tips for Friday

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Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are ready for the weekend and the tailend of your workweek is going well. Today, I just want to share a few cool tech posts that have come through my feeds recently and then send you on your way for the weekend.

Obviously, this post is not going to be one of my long posts about the nature of libraries and archives or thoughts I’ve had recently about teaching. Instead I feel like the kitten in the image below and want to just share a few links before heading out on an adventure (or at least going home to work on my laptop while sitting on the sofa instead of at my desk).

image of a black kitten looking out a window

kitten by My Aloysius via Beautiful Portals Tumblr

Since we are in the process of interviewing for positions at my institution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people go about promoting themselves and building a reputation. To that end, check out how to promote yourself without being sleazy. There is definitely a line between promoting yourself and being pushy/sleazy/annoying/etc.. Share this with your students to help them as they start to prepare for their careers and to build their networks.

Also, from helpful Lifehacker is the article on the best sites to raise money and get your ideas off the ground. Think of it as inspiration to do something productive this weekend and get some of your ideas launched.

Because we’ve been working on a digitization grant in the archives, I’ve also been thinking a lot about calibrating your monitor. This is a good overview on calibration and tools to help with it. Trust me, calibration is your friend and will make your work much easier.

Finally, is anyone else getting wanderlust? I definitely want to do some traveling this year. If you are looking forward to some travel time, check out the top 10 ways to travel smarter, safer, and cheaper. I especially loved seeing just how much a person can pack in a carry-on bag. I definitely need to up my game for carry-on packing for airplane travel.

And, finally, if you are feeling a bit blue (or need to make something because you might have forgotten that this coming Tuesday is Valentine’s Day), go make some lovely peppermint bark cheesecake truffles. I mean, who can feel poorly when eating one of these?

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a terrific weekend, and I’ll be back next week with some thoughts about libraries and archives. Allons-y!

Personal Connections FTW

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! It has been a long week, hasn’t it? I can hardly believe we are already in February and on my campus we are in the midst of midterm exams. Today, though, I don’t want to focus on exams or the fact that time is getting a bit to wibbly wobbly for my taste, but instead take a few moments to talk about personal connections and how they really are for the win.

We all know the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” And, I have to say, that for the most part this still holds true. But more than a trite saying, I think it’s the personal connections that we foster that make any of our work successful and our lives fulfilling.

For example, the last conference I attended was interesting to say the least. (Three people in the small cohort of which I was a part got horribly ill and we were all rather shocked by the lack of sidewalks around the hotel the conference was at which necessitated some interesting maneuvers to walk anywhere. But really, that’s neither here nor there.) What I really wanted to point out was that the personal connections I have with my cohortmates and the connections I made while at the conference were the best parts of the whole experience. I also found many of the sessions interesting and relevant which was awesome, but the time spent talking one-on-one is what really stood out for me at this conference as worthwhile.

Now I know that everyone seems to talk people’s ears off about networking, but I find networking difficult and awkward. However, doing research and keeping up with others and having something substantial to talk about it is easy and fun. It takes a while to build up a research agenda and relationships to make it to the point where “serendipitous” moments occur, but it is so rewarding when it happens.

Which brings me to the dreaded committee meetings. I think everyone knows my feelings about committee meetings–I love them when they are productive and get so frustrated and antsy when no progress occurs. As one of my wise colleagues said, “Little work actually happens in committee. Most of the work happens in the hallways before and after.”

So in committee work too, it’s the one-on-one, personal connections that get things done. For example, the last three years I’ve been working in the archives at my university (on top of all my work I was actually hired to do). Along with one part-time staff member, we’ve been processing collections, writing and managing grants, giving talks to classes, working with students on projects, planning digitization projects with the anthropology museum, and promoting the archives at every chance we get. And while we still don’t have the staff or the funding we need to have a full archives program, we are making more connections and more partnerships every day. (Soon the problem will be finding enough hours in the day to get it all done.)

Yesterday, after a committee meeting, this power of personal connections was brought home as we are now in beginning talks to work with the Biological Sciences Department through their natural history collection. It was a combination of meeting an awesome biology faculty member, having worked with the biological sciences department for the last 4 years, and trying to always connect with others that enabled talks of this new collaboration. Personal connections ftw! (Also hard work, lots and lots of hard work. There is no way around putting in the time that then allows one to build the credibility and body of work that reassures others that when you say you will do a project, you’ll actually come through.)

So those are just my few thoughts on personal connections for this Friday. To all my fellow librarians, archivists, and teachers out there, keep the faith in the work you do and the successes will come (even if they bring extra work with them). And, like my momma’s says, always be polite and help others because it helps you out, in the end.

On a techie note, I couldn’t help but share this article from Lifehacker:
stupid things you do online and how to fix them. I’m using this with my next information literacy class. Share it with anyone who needs a brush up on online security, behavior, etc..

Finally, let’s get you on your way to the weekend with Tolkien:

Tolkien from barrow blades via Beautiful Portals Tumblr

Tolkien from barrow blades via Beautiful Portals Tumblr

Have a wonderful weekend, full of tea and kittens with some good reads and eats, too. I’ll be back next Friday with some more thoughts on libraries, archives, and tech. Allons-y!

Inspiration for your weekend

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are well and have a lovely weekend planned. I was going to write a long, involved post about my experience at last week’s ALISE Conference and how I’ve changed my perceptions of conferences over the years, but unfortunately work tasks have caught up with me and I don’t have sufficient time nor brain space to write coherently about that topic today. I’m hoping that next week’s post will be about musing on conferences, networking, and our lovely professions. Instead, today I want to share some inspiration things I’ve seen/read on the web this last week because who doesn’t like some inspiration?

First, check out Lifehacker’s how to prioritize when everything is important so you can get control of your to-do list. Then, it will be easier for you to enjoy the weekend.

I highly suggest reading Neil Gaiman’s blog post, A speech I once gave: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton. It is a lovely read and will probably make you want to break out your copy of The Lord of the Rings for a read.

If you have some old books that are seriously beyond repair, you could get crafty this weekend and turn them into cute planters such as these. Usually I’m not up for cutting up books, it’s the librarian and archivist in me which objects, but these are adorable and you could always make up quasi-books (you know, if you’ve taken a book binding course or are super-crafty) if you didn’t want to cut up an actual book.

If you need some inspiration on what to make for food this weekend, check out this recipe for fresh spring rolls. Always a good choice for tasty eats.

Finally, how awesome is this escalator in the Tel Aviv Municipality Building? Super awesome!

Escalator in the Tel Aviv Municipality Building via Beautiful Portals

Escalator in the Tel Aviv Municipality Building via Beautiful Portals

Have a lovely weekend, full of reading, good food, talks with friends, and some time to sit back and get inspired. I’ll be back next week with actual talks about libraries, archives, conferences, tech, and such. Allons-y!

Traveling, Technology, and Fun

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you have a lovely weekend planned and that your week went well. This week has been very busy at my campus with our external reviewer here for the review of our information literacy program and the start of classes. So let’s get ready for the weekend with some tips on traveling, technology, and some fun stuff, too.

I know a lot of librarians are getting ready for the start of conference season, what with ALISE and ALA Midwinter conferences coming up in the next two weeks. (By the way, I’ll be in Dallas next week for ALISE, so if you are there do say hi.) Since conference season is starting, I thought it only appropriate to highlight two great resources from Lifehacker: airline scorecard (check before you decide which airline to fly) and
best tech-friendly airports and airlines (see where you can get wifi, etc.).

Also, check out Lifehacker’s article on the stay on top of the fight against SOPA/PIPA tools. Great to share with your library patrons and great to use to keep yourself informed.

So, did you sign up to learn to code this year with Codecademy? If not there is still time so head on over and start your course. It’s really a fun way to learn to code and you get nifty achievement badges, too (similar to Foursquare badges).

After you’ve planned your travel, learned some JavaScript, and gotten up-to-date with SOPA, take a break to make one of these lovely origami cat bookmarks. I’m going to make one and I’m sure my cat will have fun ripping it out of one of my books this weekend.

Finally, if you haven’t treated yourself to watching this Joy of Books video, you really should. It’s just delightful.

Have a wonderful, relaxing, productive, and fun weekend, dear readers! I’ll be back next week with some thoughts from my time at ALISE and other randomness. Allons-y!

Happy 2012!

/ dwakimoto

Happy 2012, dear readers! I hope you had a lovely holiday and are ready to dig into this new year. I had a nice break and can’t believe that we are already a week into 2012. Where does the time go? I thought to get us started, I’d offer up a few tips and a bit of fun as we make our way into this new year.

But first, I wanted to thank the readers of this blog for last year. The number of hits increased dramatically, which is great. I’m glad that this blog is continuing to be useful and readable for you, dear readers. It is fun to write and always great to receive feedback via comments.

Secondly not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I am excited so I wanted to share that I was selected as this week’s ACRL Member of the Week. So thanks ACRL! It’s fun to share why I enjoy academic librarianship so much.

Okay, now on to the tips and technology.

Lifehacker always does such nice end-of-the-year lists that I had to share another one: Most Popular Repurposing Tricks of 2011. To get you into Lifehacker’s lists for the new year, check out the article on the Best Time to Buy Anything in 2012. Who doesn’t like saving some money? This would be great to share with your patrons who I’m sure wouldn’t mind saving some money, too.

Also in the technology realm, I thought I’d share some information from Lifehacker on how you can Learn to Code with Free Weekly Lessons from Codeacademy this year. Go ahead and sign up, lessons start next week. I signed up and am excited about learning from Codeacademy. It never hurts to expand your tech skills (and help out your library and archives in the process).

Now let’s have a bit of fun before getting back to work!

If the post-holiday, back-to-work grind has gotten you stressed out, check out Lifehacker’s great article on Giving Better Massages. Messages are great for relieving stress and tension, plus the article gives tips at the end on self-massage which is great for when you can’t get someone to give you a massage.

Also, I’m happy to share that two of my very awesome friends (Hanna and Anna) have started a joint blog, the corner of your eye. Go on over, subscribe, and get your twice weekly dose of arts and culture reviews.

Anyone else extremely excited about The Hobbit coming out in December? I might be just a tiny bit excited (understatement of the year, thus far). So for my fellow fans, check out this lovely image from Beautiful Portals Tumblr:

I hope 2012 is going well for you and that you have a fantastic weekend planned. Read a good book, relax with a cup of tea, get a massage, and then get ready to take on this new year. See you next week with more good stuff. Allons-y!