"Access to the collective works of humankind has been a win"

Ken Garrison:  When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking with you about, she had a naïve but kind of profound question, which is “Why are you doing this?  Why are you trying to archive the entire world and the entire internet?” 

Brewster Kahle:  It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that it seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win.  So, we all look back to the Library of Alexandria.  And by going and pulling together the works from all over the world and translating them then into Ancient Greek, they were able to come up with fantastic discoveries.  They knew how big the world was.  They knew it was round.  They knew how big it was within a couple percent.  Euclid authored “Elements,” which is what it is I still studied as geometry in high school.  So, fantastic things can come of it if you can leverage the works of other people.  And the reason why I got involved in the whole area of building the library back in 1980 was just kind of on that analogy and the thought that technology allows us to do this and it seems like a good thing to do.

— Interview with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive from WFMU’s Radio Free Culture, October 9, 2012. (link)

"There is the blueprint"

“Someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. ‘What meaning does your construction have?’ he asks. ‘What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?’

‘We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now,’ they answer.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say.”

— The city of Thekla, From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

"Professionals are often incapable of independent thought"

“By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had glimpsed the essential truth of the market: that even people who called themselves professionals are often incapable of independent thought…”

— From Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities, by Michael Lewis, New York Times, 2001

This quote, this assertion in this context, hit me like a lightning bolt 11 years ago and has rung in my head ever since.

Michael Lewis’s article, written for the Sunday Times Magazine, brilliantly teases out the excruciating ironies — the abject conflict — between new and old ways of thinking about expertise and authority. 

It is a story about about a boy from New Jersey who figures out that he is just as capable, in fact more capable, than established professionals at analyzing stocks. He makes about $800,000 in 6 months of trading, and as a result he is prosecuted by officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission who are both mystified by his very existence — and threatened by his implicit challenge to The Way Things Are Done (which, we have learned throughout a decade of financial crisis, is often a nonsensical house of cards).

Eventually, the Bloomberg News Service commissioned a study to explore the phenomenon of what were now being called ‘whisper numbers’. The study showed the whisper numbers, the numbers put out by the amateur Web sites, were mistaken, on average, by 21 percent. The professional Wall Street forecasts were mistaken, on average, by 44 percent. The reason the amateurs now held the balance of power in the market was that they were, on average, more than twice as accurate as the pros – this in spite of the fact that the entire financial system was rigged in favor of the pros. The big companies spoon-fed their scoops directly to the pros; the amateurs were flying by radar

[…]

It occurred to no one that the public might one day be as sophisticated in these matters as financial professionals.

[…]

Even a 14-year-old boy could see how it all worked, why some guy working for free out of his basement in Jackson, Mo., was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall Street. The companies that financial pros were paid to analyze were also the financial pros ‘biggest customers’. A year later, when the Internet bubble burst, the hollowness of the pros only became clearer.

[…] 

“At length, I phoned the Philadelphia office of the S.E.C., where I reached one of the investigators who had brought Jonathan Lebed to book. I was maybe the 50th journalist he’d spoken with that day, and apparently a lot of the others had had trouble grasping the finer points of securities law. At any rate, by the time I asked him to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with broadcasting one’s private opinion of a stock on the Internet, he was in no mood.

‘Tell me about the kid.’

‘He’s a little jerk.’

‘How so?’

'He is exactly what you or I hope our kids never turn out to be.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘No. I don’t need to.’

"As soon as they encounter archival content, they become researchers"

I came across this in one of my notebooks while I was preparing for the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki last week. It’s from a presentation by Peder Andrén at the European Cultural Commons workshop in Warsaw last October (2011). 

Peder is with the Swedish National Archives, and was talking about his focus on end-user experience with the APENet project (Archives Portal Europe).

Who are the users of archival content? Well, our users are not just browsing through, looking for media consumption. As soon as they encounter archival content, they become researchers. Even if they only want to know the name of their great grandmother, or the previous owner of their house, they are entering the process of creating a story. A history.

[40:50 in this video: http://youtu.be/5ibxKP5JPYo?t=40m45s ]

I was blown away by the beauty and simplicity - - the truth - - of that statement. 

Open data badass

Exchange between me, @arkland_swe, and @jacob_wang about Swedish open data/open heritage work

Lars: Well, we try to *do* thing. And surprisingly often you become a badass by just trying to do things

Jacob: Blablabla. You DO stuff some of us are merely talking about. Soon though, we’ll join the ranks.

Mike: Jacob - - tell us one specific badass-y thing our Swedish Humanities brothers and sisters have done that you admire.

Jacob: They have aggregated 4.2 million objects from 40 ors, content that is available through their open API - - BOOM!

Jacob: Lars, tell him how many objects you have delivered to Europeana - it’s like 100 times more than DK [Denmark] have.

Jacob: And Lars, tell Michael how many views you’ve had on Flickr…

“You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science of Nature.”

— Paul C. Lauterbur, Nobel prize winner for his original research on magnetic resonance imaging. His seminal paper was rejected by the journal Nature in 1973.  Quoted in  Kevin Davies article “Public Library of Science Opens Its Doors.” (Found via Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation , p.54.)

"Discarded in favor of self destruction"

“Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke to find the entire Greek army had vanished, leaving only a strange and monstrous prodigy beneath their walls. Rational procedure would have been, at the least, to test the Horse for concealed enemies as they were urgently advised to do by Capys the Elder, Laocoon and Cassandra. That alternative was present and available yet discarded in favor of self destruction.”

— From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, about why governments do things that are clearly contrary to their own self-interest. p 380

At the Rijksmuseum, knowledge needs to be shared

From a 2012 interview with Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum

[Starting around 2:50]

The Rijksmuseum is all about images. We want to share these images with everybody using the Internet. The technology is in fact about sharing. Of course, you design your own websites, create your own Facebook account, but in the end it’s all about sharing.

That’s why we have decided to put free to use, up to date information in the best available quality on the Internet. So whatever forum you’re on or what you’re looking for, you can download and use it as you like. The museum is about inspiration, learning, and knowledge. The Internet provides inspiration, when you are able to zoom in and touch the screen. In the museum, you’re not allowed to touch the collect, but on the Internet you are. On your iPhone you can magnify or reduce the  museum’s collection, which is very inspiring. You can print them in the highest quality on your bedcover or in a booklet; the possibilities are numerous.

Knowledge needs to be shared. The Rijksmuseum connects people to art and history and that connection, that exchange of knowledge, is of the utmost importance to us.

We have over a million objects in our collection, of which 200,000 can be found on the Internet. We employ over 450 people so it’s impossible for them to know everything there is about our collection. We invite people to have fun with our collection, to get inspired, but also to share their knowledge with us. If a person in India has information that is important to us, he can share this with us and at the same time with the rest of the community. This is why the Internet as provider of knowledge and source of inspiration is crucial for humanity and as such one of the most important inventions in history. 

via @LizzyJongma 

“The text message and the exclamation point are made for each other, and I’m glad they finally found each other…They’re both one-note forms of communication, without music, without connotation and atmosphere, but they do have their uses. To me, there’s no more shame in filling text messages with exclamation points, three at a time, if necessary, than there is in using strings of expletives while arguing politics at an Irish pub.”

— Walter Kern, on text messages and exclamation points. from Talking (Exclamation) Points, by Aimee Lee Ball, New York Times, published: July 1, 2011

“So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not create–intentionally and unintentionally–hundreds of temporary, evanescent copies. (If you doubt this, look in the cache of your browser.) Is there a day when you do not “distribute” or retransmit fragments of articles you have read, when you do not seek to share with friends some image or tune? Is there a day when you do not rework for your job, for your class work, or simply for pastiche or fun, some of the digital material around you? In a networked society, copying is not only easy, it is a necessary part of transmission, storage, caching, and, some would claim, even reading.”

— James Boyle on the inevitability of copying and reworking digital content in a networked society, from The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, page 51. (Boyle himself cites Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet in support of these assertions.)

“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work… Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.”

— Henry Ford, on innovation as a remix, from Kriby Ferguson: Embrace the Remix, at 5:21. http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html

UNYPL

unypl:

July 2012 Highlights from the Underground New York Public Library

Each one was its own moment. It’s great to see them all together.

1. “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins 2. “The Birth of Tragedy,” by Friedrich Nietzsche 3. “Mary Poppins,” by Dr. P. L. Travers 4. “The Stranger Beside Me,” by Ann Rule 5. “Queer,” by William S. Burroughs 6. “Just My Type: A Book About Fonts,” by Simon Garfield 7. “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” by Elizabeth Smart 8. “Know Thyself,” by Na’im Akbar 9. “Star Wars (The Old Republic): Fatal Alliance,” by Sean Williams  10. “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” by Anne Tyler

I’m looking forward to the new characters who will come with their books to the Underground New York Public Library in August!     

"Faced with that nothingness…I decided to be a maker of things"

 

Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. ‘Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,’ he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. ‘I needed something to touch, to look at,’ he added.

‘Right then I decided to be a maker of things.’ One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser.

— via calebkramer

"A force is created between people"

“It is inspiring to meet with others around something. Around a cause. To work together with others gives you something. I experienced that when running a relay race as a kid: You could run faster when you had that baton in your hand because you had to hand it over to someone else, than if you were running alone. That is a fact: You get something. A force is created between people when they work together around something that they feel makes sense to them. That is the force that manifests itself in sociality.”

— From the book Med Villy by Villy Sørensen, edited by Sylvester Roepstorff, via Merete Sanderhoff

"The most futuristic thing I ever heard"

Quote:

A drummer mentor of mine mentioned to me that ‘you know now, that there are devices that you don’t have to play…that you can program, and it plays for you.’ And that was the most futuristic thing I ever heard. What wha what wha what what? Drums on a machine???“ 

— DJ Felix Da Housecat, Planet Rock And Other Tales of the 808 trailer

“…[our] learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmicall, epistemically changed - and changed precisely in the area of learning.”

— Davidson & Goldberg (2009), The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age, p. 19, as quoted in What Do We Keep and What Do We Throw Away by Dean Shareski Aug 22, 2011, Presentation for ABEL Summer Institute at York University in Toronto

Frozen choices

“Every such meeting, in other words, involves a thousand choices, but not a billion, because most of the big choices have already been made. These frozen choices are what gives institutions their vitality — they are in fact what make them institutions. Freed of the twin dangers of navel-gazing and random walks, an institution can concentrate its efforts on some persistent, medium-sized, and tractable problem, working at a scale and longevity unavailable to its individual participants.”

— Clay Shirky, Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis, December 2, 2011

Shirky continues,

Institutions also reduce the choices a society has to make. In the second half of the 20th century, “the news” was whatever was in the newspaper on the morning, or network TV at night. Advertisers knew where to reach shoppers. Politicians knew who to they had to talk to to get their message out (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not.) Readers understood an Letters page as the obvious way of getting wider circulation for their views.

That dual reduction of choices masks an essential asymmetry, though. Institutions are designed to reduce they choices for their members, but they only happen to reduce the choices in society. A publisher may want reporters at their desks at 10 am, and to be the main source of breaking news for the paper’s readers. The former desire is under the publisher’s control; the latter not.

“Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket–that is assuming they had passed the interview–and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were wisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.”

— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p 91. Link via Google Books

Richard Owen was the driving force behind the creation of London's Natural History Museum, which opened in 1880. In contrast to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum was dedicated to open access and civic engagement, according to Bryson.

“I think that in general we have a pathological response to anything we measure. We tend not to measure the thing we care about; we tend to measure something that indicates its presence. It’s often very hard to measure the thing that you’re hoping for.”

— Cory Doctorow, in an interview with Duke University’s Gerry Canavan about Whuffie and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

“Like other museum institutions SMK is used to being seen as a gatekeeper of cultural heritage. But our collections do not belong to us. They belong to the public. Free access ensures that our collections continue to be relevant to users now and in the future. Our motivation for sharing digitized images freely is to allow users to contribute their knowledge and co-create culture. In this way, SMK wishes to be a catalyst for the users’ creativity.”

— Karsten Ohrt, Director of The Statens Museum for Kunst (“SMK”, The National Gallery of Denmark), From a Creative Commons Case Study about the SMK’s pilot project in which they put 159 works online, in high-resolution, under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license.