I had the privilege of chairing a symposium organized by the Irish Manuscript Commission which invited participants from a variety of Irish cultural institutions to discuss issues arising from the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement. Presentations from Jill Cousins, Director of Europeana and her colleagues, Georgia Angelaki, Paul Keller and Lucie Guibault sought to bring clarity to the new agreement and the issues emerging from the online presentation of digital cultural artefacts.

Unfortunately I had to leave during what was shaping up to be a very lively roundtable discussion. The presentations laid bare some of the salient points that surround Europeana’s new DEA. The key points of the new agreement are changes to licensing that will open up metadata submitted by contributors to wider and most ominous to many contributors to commercial uses. Metadata submitted must be done under a CC0 license placing it entirely in the public domain. Thumbnails provided are not covered under the CC0 and the contributors have the opportunity to define their licensing. This has alarmed many past contributors who see their data suddenly becoming prey to commercial vultures and open to be radically reused with or without any attribution.

This symposium provided a forum for free and open discussion of these issues as well as the challenges presented by the online. I opened the session with a short welcome which I include here should you be interested:

“The DHO has been privileged to work with the IMC and Europeana over the past two years. We have facilitated some of the technicalities involved in the metadata aggregation process and many of you have worked with Niall O’Leary directly in this. Thanks to many of you who have shared your cultural objects with Europeana in the past. The nature of the relationship has I hope been mutually beneficial.

Europeana has been a powerful initiative during the past decade and we hope it will continue to take a leadership role in increasing the freedom of access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage. It’s a fluid world though and we are here today because Europeana is changing. The objective remains the same but Europeana is moving from the role of being solely a portal to your collections to service becoming a service platform – dedicated to increasing access to the metadata representing the contributed artefacts.

What does this all mean? Well, today we have an opportunity to find out and to interact directly with the folks from Europeana to get the answers we need to make our own decisions. Each of your own institutions has its own objectives and briefs and you have to make a decision as to whether these coincide or are furthered under the new Europeana offering and their new Data Exchange Agreement. It’s crucial that you do take the time to consider your own objectives around what is presented today and how it is best served in this changing cultural space. In this fluid world there are new challenges to how we do what we have done in the past. The way that we engage with our audiences have changed…your artefacts have become data (and metadata) and more importantly people (through such social media as facebook, flickr or twitter) look to new ways to connect with you. Likewise new services and applications — especially in the mobile arena mean that your cultural objects may find new forms of expression — either by your own efforts — or by someone else’s.

And this is a crucial observation. There is a challenge to how you have carried out your own curatorial and dissemination activities and how you have sought to meet your objectives — but this also provides new opportunities. Europeana offers an opportunity. What you have to decide is whether it is an opportunity that makes sense for your institution.

At the DHO we have spent the last couple years demonstrating some of the ways that working with metadata can positively change the user experience of the digital collection. We have engaged with Europeana and with many of you to explore how people engage with ever larger collections of artefacts. The magnitude of these collections challenges the traditional ways of browsing and in many cases denies the utility of the search function. We have chosen to demonstrate how cutting edge data visualisation techniques can provide a route to discovery. And we have been thrilled with the response. DHO:Discovery has been one our response to the challenges that we have seen Irish cultural institutions facing and we have seen similar efforts undertaken by many of yourselves.

Working with Europeana has been one of those responses many of you have undertaken and we have all shared their objective to provide access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage. Although Europeana remains committed to this objective their new DEA has asked providers to commit contributed metadata and thumbnails to the public domain. The new DEA is a response to the changes taking place in the cultural sector and we are all called upon to find opportunities in the changes taking place. This has huge implications for existing and future contributors who may worry about others making commercial use of their data. One of the obvious and positive responses here is to be open innovators and to seize the powerful opportunity for you to both share and to draw benefit from what others are sharing to create new ways of meeting your own objectives.

Current EU directives have waded into this nebulous area and have similarly challenged our perceived notions of who has the rights to objects that we present online. And again we come back to this question of how to deal with the challenge.

Today we are all here to ask the questions and the participants from Europeana have come to brief us and to attempt to respond to these queries.”

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The premise of the Information Diet by Clay Johnson is: ‘What if we started managing our information consumption like we managed our food consumption?’ And so it begins. This is a fascinating book framed as an open discussion in which Johnson carries along this metaphor of information intake being likened to nutritional sustenance. The initial chapters explore overeating and the obesity of America, but the reader is increasingly wondering how far the author planning on carrying this overeating consumption metaphor. As the narrative starts to move into the realm of information provision and the ‘industrialization of information’ the author’s intentions become clearer. The case study of AOL’s Blogsmith software that allows for the measurement of information’s impact on revenue and profitability highlights is quite fascinating and paints a picture of information becoming turned into ‘fast food’ — that is easily absorbed, desired, but of limited or destructive nutritional value.

The author lays out the threat by plumbing the intentions of many of the more popular information providers on the internet and through more conventional media and then shifts to discussing the ways in which we can and have to combat the information deluge for our own sake. The author makes frequent forays into his own experience to provide anecdotal evidence of the impact of ‘delusion’ resulting from becoming too deep in the political morass and likens this to a malady that increasingly effecting a greater proportion of the American populace.

This is a thought provoking book that poses a number of challenges to how we can maintain mental as well as physical health in a world that is ever changing how we receive and digest information. The metaphor is apt and exploring symptoms such as apnea, lack of concentration and providing remedies such as filtering, fitness and maintaining proper diet are intriguing. The use of information labeling — much like nutritional — is creative and although seemingly humorous…extremely apt.

All in all I enjoyed the reading experience and would recommend it for wide consumption. It reminds me of Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman or even going further back to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. This is not the first attempt to diagnosis the problem and surely won’t be the last, but this interesting parallel with nutrition and diet is … please pardon me for this… great food for thought ;-)

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The *Big* Data Glossary is actually a relatively *short* book, best enjoyed as an eBook in my estimation. This volume is similar to a number of recent releases from O’Reilly that have moved from being deep and comprehensive to providing a higher-level taste-test overview from a more conceptual standpoint. In this instance, the Big Data Glossary by Pete Warden could also be described as an annotated bibliography of the variety of tools and platforms recently emerged to work with linked data or large and rich datasets.

This glossary moved through the basic services and components that could be employed to create a comprehensive research environment to conduct data-mining or to create a deep visualisation for analysis. The concise volume is designed to provide a context for further exploration of the various tools and services defined and offers useful links for such exploration. The anticipated audience for this volume might be an academic researcher new to the areas mentioned or a developer transitioning from a more traditional data background. Although brief the volume does much to draw together a qualified list of services and accomplished much by identifying the stronger current players and summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of each. In this regard you might consider this book more of a technical industry survey. It is a valuable wee tome for getting up to speed quickly with the players and knowing how you might judge services with in a particular category as diverse as on-demand storage, data visualisation or natural language processing. Much like Designing Data VIsualisations which I previously reviewed, this volume too could fit very nicely into an introductory syllabus and provide and excellent guide for an introduction to data processing or digital research methodologies.

I have no criticisms of this book. It’s short and concise and although you’d certainly like more info, it does what it bills itself to do. And it does it well. It is the sort of book again that lends itself to an electronic format as the content by definition is constantly changing and evolving. If anything, the ways in which the various services are described textually probably could be accomplished in a tabular format which would facilitate better cross-service evaluation of features, strengths and weaknesses, but that’s what wikipedia is for. The descriptions here are brief enough that you will read through at least a chapter as whole (if not the entire volume) and come away with an informed understanding of a particular space.

I would recommend this book to anyone needing to quickly bring themselves up to speed on the available services in a specific area of data processing, those wishing to keep current with emerging players or those that are facing developing requirements documents that may need to provide definite technological references (or for that matter want to speak in real world terms about conceptual solutions).

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What a great excursion down a wonderful project! A lovely, short, step-by-step brief, DIY Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer inspires the reader to attempt their own bookbinding project. Although only 32 pages in length, the author makes the process of binding together a collection of magazines into a durable hardcover tome quite approachable and achievable.

I was interested in reading this book if only to appreciate the mechanics of bookbinding and I was very satisfied with the depth of coverage and for simple interest this volume delivers. Its a great project and with clear instructions and heavily illustrations, this is a recommended read for all.

There have been a few other quick reviews of this book and it isn’t surprising given a seemingly latent interest, especially among those in the eBook space, considering, and being conscious of materiality of the bound volume. I myself continue to find myself between the two worlds. When I was heading off on vacation I immediately stored a good library of electronic books on my iPad, but also made sure to have a few printed volumes packed in the suitcase. Nice to be in both worlds and still ambivalent. I find reference volumes to be optimal on the electronic platform and quite easily sit there and are supremely accessible. On the other hand, for leisure reading, I am still possibly more comfortable with the cover and pages in my hand. As far as mainstream newsmedia and magazines, I am happily at home on the iPad, quite possibly because of a perceived resource waste for short-lives materials.

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I was intrigued by an offhand reference to a ‘neat new service’ and consequently poked into infostripe. It’s a consolidated touchpoint for sharing your social media participation and identities in a compact and dynamic manner. Similar to some extent to about.me, it draws upon a certain amount of your digital narcissism. The biggest difference between about.me and infostripe appears to be in the flavour: about.me takes a very aesthetic-centred approach, where infostripe is deeply rich in content and concise presentation. About.me demands more manual creation of the information used to describe you, where infostripe attempts to automate this process by building a profile based on what you are contributing to the social mediashpere.

One of things that immediately strikes is that much in the way that RSS and RSS readers distanced readers from the author’s blog, infostripe is extracting a wider collection of your digital breadcrumbs and flowing them into a uniform presentation that allows the browser to avoid having to trawl the net for your activity. All of this pushes the bounds of privacy and the boundary between our private and public worlds, but at least in this, the service is rather transparent in this.

The lead developer is in Ottawa and I am of course pleased to see more solid Canadian vision and product deployment. Intriguing and worthy of some more investigation.

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The R Cookbook by Paul Teetor is a solid addition to the well respected series. Teetor provides a rich collection of useful examples written in the proven method and covering everything from installing, configuring and running R to carrying out sophisticated statistical analysis tasks that demonstrate the power of R. The book is targeted at a wide audience from R novice eager to just start playing in R to more experienced practitioners looking to hone and round out their R repertoire.

It can be used as an introductory training source for those who like to learn by doing and extrapolating knowledge from examples. It also has the useful ability of function as a reference source when plotting a particular R exercise.
The problem — solution — discussion pattern works well when the problem is clearly and concisely stated as Teetor does. As the book progresses it does move towards more advanced statistical manipulation and analysis, but then if you are using R in the first place then this is a fairly safe assumption. This is one of the more notable cookbook series for the thoroughness of the discussion. The inclusion of philosophical notes, parameter and options sections when necessary and finally the cross-indexing via the more information section set this book apart as a superb reference. In conjunction with the R in a Nutshell which was reviewed earlier, there are indispensable tools for the budding R enthusiast and in conjunction with the freely accessible R reference manuals from the Foundation form the optimal R library.
My only gripe is that there is less focus in this book on the visualisation end of R. That is not to say that there not vis exercises in the book. Simply that it is heavier on the analysis end on the language which is actually well and good as this is crucial to the latter and an area that I for one need the instruction.
This cookbook does not expect readers to arrive with extensive R knowledge and as I mentioned earlier is targeted for a broad audience of R practitioners.

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In The Art of Community, Jono Bacon tackles the task of explaining how to attract, build and maintain productive collaborative online communities. Bacon has had impressive credentials to author such a book and draws from his experience skillfully. With over ten years experience in the open source community he has the hands-on experience with initiatives such as community manager for Ubuntu, KDE and OpenAdvantage.

The book is organised logically with a healthy selection of applied chapters in designing a strategy, understanding the sociological aspects behind community formation, through understanding community health and dealing with issues that arise. Bacon freely admits that this is an absolutely fluid non-science in constant evolution and stays well to the principles couched in his own experience.

I like the lyrical style of the book. Bacon keeps the prose surprisingly light for the nature of the topic (i.e. he could easily fall to using too much jargon to impact a scientific palour — he effectively avoids this). I like his constant interjections from personal experience and informal language. Sections are kept shorter and readable and he has made an attempt to distill learning into a series of specific and focus points. Additionally he carries a useful thread through his narrative reminding the reader at regular instances of what has been covered and where we should be at in the process of understanding. Notwithstanding this he does not attempt to imply that there is a tried and proven process that will lead to success, instead suggesting that he is sharing one path of many. The definition of this path is well illustrated and logically delineated. The basis is provided for each and thus allow for individual adjustment or judgement of whether it is applicable.

This book effectively combines the philosophical with the technical specifics. Although generally aimed at the strategic level in the chapter on ‘Supporting Workflow with Tools’ for example, Bacon provides constructive and useful real world examples of hands-on use with specific tools, and consistently ties these to the larger principles of change management process in light of the wider principles of assessment and response.

This a useful book not just for those directly charged with the the emerging task of community manager, but also those that have the vision to realise the importance of maintaining community whether they are on the financial or marketing side of the organisation.

I would further recommend this book as a less detailed read for those hoping to quickly grasp the importance of the task and the evolution of the marketplace in the era of Enterprise 2.0.

Also…check out the companion website to the book.

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The Map Your Moves Challenge fascinates me. New York’s Public Radio station WNYC has devised a data visualisation challenge for their listeners. Curious about what makes people move from and to their community they polled stories from their listeners and collected them into a structured dataset and have released it into the wild. Now this is very cool…they want to take real stories and understand how these stories interact and how they can learn about their own community from them. Absolutely brilliant!

You can listen to the initial announcement of the project on their streaming player. OK..“Valerie, let’s talk a little about data visualisation…” I am very impressed. Telling a story in a different way is very exciting. I would admit that there is some conflation between data vis and infographics, but I am very, very impressed by the fact that this is coming from a real life curiosity to answer real questions. This is definitely the best advert for ‘doing’ data visualisation that I have found. Interestingly as well, they seem to have an evolving survey form that adapts to the information people.

They have realesed the dataset into the wild at via drop.io and have opened it up to anyone to play with the data and to find new ways to present the stories that it represents. They even have an ‘official’ Census Project Editor. Wow! What I find very cool is the wonderfully engaged way in which this public radio station is asking questions about how their community is evolving. I have been very impressed by the interest of the general population of Ireland whenever the National Archives releases another tranche of census info. The newspapers cover this as a major event and it becomes the fodder for discussion in the pub and over the dinner table. I was very surprised (but maybe I shouldn’t be) that there was this similar engagement globally. The census project site on the wnyc website touts that:

Every 10 years the country “counts heads” and uses those numbers to determine everything from election districts to funding levels. But the story of our neighborhoods, cities, and states is much deeper than what’s in the numbers. Join the Brian Lehrer Show as we make sure our listeners count, from in-depth coverage of the census process to interactive projects and all sorts of stories about who we are and how we live in 2010.

They are interrogating the statistics…counting the numbers…because they represent individuals and they are using technology to reach down and find the stories behind the numbers. I find this amazingly gratifying and have downloaded the great dataset they provided to try my own naive hand at finding some interesting ways to see the stories through the user contributed information.

There is an ironic timing to this discussion. Here I am being so very impressed at a community wanting to understand itself through the sharing of stories, when the Steven Harper government in Canada have decided that census should really be a voluntary sort of thing (kind of defeating the purpose eh?) and that the state has for too long being interested in the constituent members of the national community. They have, with the claimed agreement of Statistics Canada, decided to discontinue the use of the long form which was distributed to 20% of the Canadian population and sought to understand the demography and livelihood of the community. Although it was aggregated and kept anonymous (Stats Can has an unblemished record and zealously protects the privacy of Canadians), this seems to have had little bearing on the decision. The controversy has now resulted in the resignation of the Head of Statistics Canada, Munir Sheikh over the issue. National newspapers have suggested that the national animal be changed from the beaver to the ostrich and that “Opting to know less about ourselves is about as smart as flying without instruments” quips James Travers in the Toronto Star. Perhaps the decision is simply telling about the nature of decision-maming in the the Canadian government. Ontario has represented its deep disagreement with the decision and more importantly reminded the federal government that it does in fact base crtitical welfare, health and public service decisions it makes from knowing about the people it serves — and the crucial data provided by Statistics Canada. A rather telling comment on the Canadian political system. Let’s watch and see how this one plays out. In the meantime, I applaud communities wanting to know more about themselves as a means of improving the lives of those that call a place home.

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Data visualisation has become very vogue in the digital humanities community. Although there have been a scattering of brave practitioners over the past few years, only very recently has this interdisciplinary area started to feature prominently at DH conferences as a mainstream practise worthy of consideration.

For the last few months I have been looking for an opportunity (i.e. a bit of time) to delve into R and Processing, specifically with an eye towards taking some existing visualisations I am working on to a new level.

The first book of interest is R in a Nutshell by James Adler recently published by O’Reilly.

R is a language and an environment to support data analytics and visualisation. Its approachable, extensible and open source. One of the advantages of R over other comers is the number of rather polished interpreters available for it and some of the great examples floating about that have been constructed in R. Hence my interest. I come to this interest from a digital humanities background and wondered whether the language could be of use for working with my own data coming from farm diaries exploring the cycle of seasonal farm activities.

I had an opportunity to peruse this volume and put it through it’s paces. I come to R as a neophyte having not attempted any custom data visualisation development aside from using commercial tools such as SAS, SPSS and Tableau or web services to create handcrafted visualisation for refinement in illustrator or Photoshop.

R in a Nutshell, as a book, is targeted at a user much like me. It offers a variety of approaches ranging from material for absolute beginners to experienced R users who would like to broaden their use of the environment. It allows for pick and choose areas of interest deigned to provide a bespoke learning course.

What do you need R for? Do you need to create customised statistical maniuplation of large datasets not typically accomplished using SPSS or SAS on your desktop? R may be the tool for you. This book is superb introduction to the tool, but it also serves the function of handy desktop companion for exploring further.

Starting from a detailed overview of the various ways in which R can be deployed on different operating systems and addressed as either a gui-based application to command line operation. Adler makes copious use of great examples of code to play with yourself. The structure of the book offers diverse patterns of approach to cater to people of all levels of experience with R. It is well organised and has the useful ability to locate information when it is of immediate applicability. If there is a downside, it is the amount of time it takes to play through examples to really determine whether R is the tool for you. I certainly can’t fault the book for this especially as it offers such a well structured approach to learning R. However, I can see where a digital humanities scholar who hadn’t ever considered doing any bit of code and waded into R right off the bat may simply be discouraged by a systematic process of introduction rather than a cookbook approach.

This is where we make a clever shift to our other book of interest: Getting Started with Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. As you might suspect this book takes a very different and possibly more useful to a neophyte approach — moreover, I really enjo

yed this book. In a word it is superb. It approaches learning Processing from simple beginnings and truly embraces the idea of learning by doing. It is full of exercises and short snippets of discussion that simply ‘get you Processing’. As an added benefit and a superb way to do things, the latest downloadable builds of Processing include all the examples in this book accessible through the Examples menu. So as you work along you can edit to your hearts content and if you want to start with code and just simply tweak, you have it at your finger tips. If your style of learning is otherwise and you want to manually work through the examples, do that and if at the end things don’t quite work out you have the working code readily available. This works very well.

The book is organised into a few simple and general chapters. As you dig down into the recipes within the chapters you are presented with the breadth of the language. This approach wouldn’t work if things were formal and too structured. However, this book is very informal in tone and approach and you playfully follow through, not really conscious that you are following a rigid path.

Even the typography of the book adds to the fun. There are oversized headers and very nicely visual word snippets of the ‘experience’ of playing with Processing. It adds a wonderfully lyrical aspect to the book and really engages so as to keep you reading and playing along with the authors. The book mixes visuals and textuals very well. The decision to use ‘sketchy’ visuals as though they were hand-drawn keeps with this informal and engaged approach. Works for me.

Processing is very powerful and I feel that after working through this book I can see some very exciting projects that I can consider for my own work. I feel armed with just enough information to be dangerous and look forward to playing further. For this I will fall back more on Processing (published a few years back) the more definitive guide to the wealth of options available in the language. This is where R in a Nutshell offer the bonus of being a fine tutorial, but also a very useful reference tool. These are books about rather different programming tools that offer very different perspectives on accomplishing similar things. They provided me with a great intro to both tools. many books promise to be logical in their structure and to build to the more complex. I found that R in a Nutshell adopted a more reasoned approach to this. By that I mean the author sought to provided a variety of structured paths through the material depending on level of expertise or desired outcome/usage of the language. These were well considered. I apprroached this from the perspective of the complete neophyte (not a difficult role to fill — nor that far-fetched). Getting Started with Processing was more fun.

I should note that both of these books were provided in electronic form for review and I am grateful to Mary Rotman at O’Reilly for making this possible.

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Eric Fischer has posted a new series of visualisations ‘Locals and Tourists’ depicting the location of photos taken in urban areas around the world. In this series he attempts to distinguish between those taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month) and those by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

What immediately struck me was his ingenious re-use of the existing data to create new information. By exploring individuals posted pictures over time he was able to hypothesise as to whether they were visiting or residing in a particular area. This allowed for a means to compare the gaze of the two groups.

I immediately started to explore his map of Dublin to see if any patterns emerged and then to try and suggest explanations for them. There is a healthy and regular mix of photos by both groups in the central core, but immediately to the east is a large blue box of photos taken by locals. It appears to surround the new Aviva Lansdowne Stadium in Ballsbridge. Additionally on the northside the National Botanical Gardens have a heavy concentration of photographs by locals.

The most practical application of Locals versus tourists is to consider how a visitor might use these visualisations to find the hidden city known only to its inhabitants — to find those secret spots worthy of capture by locals, but seemingly missed in the tourist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geotaggers’ World Atlas’ looking at from where the pictures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

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