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Hellman, Eric: Book Metadata Under a Bushel

2013-06-19T01:52:00Z

They don't allow witnesses, spectators or journalists to carry cell phones or kindles or iPads into the Federal Courthouse in New York. But books are OK. So every publishing executive at the iBookStore antitrust trial carries a book with them instead. For example, The Verge spotted Penguin's David Shanks sporting Robert B. Parker's Wonderland . The press takes a picture, and the next day the book, which just so happens to be an exciting new release, gets its cover onto the front page of the business section, not to mention Go To Hellman.

This opportunistic book publicity reminded me of the biblical parable:

No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. Nor doth a scroll seller speak its name so no man canst hear. Nay, he shouteth from high mountain tops the holy numbers of the scroll.
- Luke 11:33 (more or less).

So you would think that book publishers would also be spreading metadata for their books far and wide, and would make it as easy as possible for developers to propagate the word. But the tyranny of "the way we've always done things" still holds sway in that world. And so, the HarperCollins OpenBook API and the BookSmash developer competition, which I ranted about in my last post, need to be understood as the positive steps they are. They are opportunities for publishers and developers to engage in ways that aren't chiseled in stone.

For my part, I've been engaging with some very helpful people at HarperCollins. Together, we found some documentation issues that had me unsure about the resources being offered to challenge participants.

First of all, the entire text of the 196 books listed in the resources spreadsheet are being made available. This is very cool. Also, 20% samples of all EPUB books in the HarperCollins catalog are available through the standard API.

Hints:

If you're participating in the challenge, you need to use a different endpoint than the one offered by the API demo tool to get un-truncated text. Yes, you copy the url it gives you (host name "diner") and replace the endpoint url with one reported in the text on the demo tool (host name "api").
If you want to use the catalog API to get ISBNs to use in the content API, note that only books/ISBNs with Sub_Format='EPUB' have preview content associated with them.
The API does request throttling in a funny way. If you make too many requests in a short period of time, the API tells you "Developer Inactive". That result seems to get stuck in a server-side cache.
The HC people seem eager to improve the API, so don't hesitate to report issues in their forums. If you've ever developed an API, you know that you have to whack at it a bit to get things right.

If you play with this API a bit, it'll be pretty obvious to you that "building an API" is not the way things have always been done in the book industry. Here's how things are done: Publishers cause ONIX XML files that describe their books to come into existence. These files are shipped to "trading partners". The reason, more or less, that the publishers do this is because way back when, Amazon forced them to do it that way instead of the horrible old ways they used to do things.

So the reason that the HarperCollins API, and others like it, are significant, is not because they'll be useful in their current form. It's because big publishers have realized that getting bossed around by Amazon might not be a smartest thing to do, and maybe having more direct relationships with developers would be a good idea.

Book Metadata Under a Bushel

2013-06-19T04:52:00Z

Full story at the Verge

No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. Nor doth a scroll seller speak its name so no man canst hear. Nay, he shouteth from high mountain tops the holy numbers of the scroll.
- Luke 11:33 (more or less).

If you're participating in the challenge, you need to use a different endpoint than the one offered by the API demo tool to get un-truncated text. Yes, you copy the url it gives you (host name "diner") and replace the endpoint url with one reported in the text on the demo tool (host name "api").
If you want to use the catalog API to get ISBNs to use in the content API, note that only books/ISBNs with Sub_Format='EPUB' have preview content associated with them.
The API does request throttling in a funny way. If you make too many requests in a short period of time, the API tells you "Developer Inactive". That result seems to get stuck in a server-side cache.
The HC people seem eager to improve the API, so don't hesitate to report issues in their forums. If you've ever developed an API, you know that you have to whack at it a bit to get things right.

The Deletionist

2013-06-19T01:41:25Z

I’m pleased to announce the release of a project that I’ve been working on with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul for the past two years: The Deletionist. This is a bookmarklet (easily added to the bookmark bar in one’s browser) that automatically creates erasure poetry from any page on the World Wide Web, revealing an alterate mesh of texts called the Worl. Amaranth and I presented The Deletionist for the first time today at E-Poetry in London, at Kingston University.

The Deletionist

2013-06-19T01:41:25Z

My Workshop on “Multimodality in Comics Teaching and Scholarship.”

2013-06-19T02:06:49Z

I had to delete some of the unpublished images at the end of this presentation, but I’m sharing as much of it as I can. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed presenting it! We had a lot of fun.

Make It Easier To Learn

2013-06-19T01:53:55Z

I am really enjoying listening to Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. It’s good enough I’m probably going to want it on paper by the end of the book. I was interested in it due to my interest in clear thinking, but I also had a predisposition to be interested in the author due to his fascinating work on happiness:

There are a number of interesting and useful concepts in the book, but today I’m thinking about the idea of cognitive ease.

Kahneman is also well known as a nobel prize winner for his work on prospect theory. This is, roughly, the idea that people are more likely to act to avoid loss than to achieve a gain. In his work is a warning that we are not the rational players that economists would believe that we are. Part of the discussion he has on this issue is that when we feel cognitive ease, we’re likely to focus on that, and believe it, rather than something that causes cognitive stress or strain. Obviously, in a book focused on helping the reader identify their own cognitive biases and how to think past them, Kahneman points out qualities of cognitive ease so we can be aware when we’re feeling them and be more skeptical of the information. However, I also heard in that section very specific instructions for a good user design/experience. So what produces cognitive ease?

Maximize legibility (clear fonts, contrasting backgrounds, use bold to emphasize the important points)
Use simple language when possible
Make a memorable message (slogans, catch phrases, etc)

Good design? It sets people up for cognitive ease. Good communication skills? Also sets people up for cognitive ease. User experience? The same. Which I’ve always focused on as an aspect of making it easier for people to learn and incorporate information. Though from Kahneman’s work I now see something that should have been obvious before: that’s it’s not always employed for good.

That being the case, I’d like to think that libraries and educators are doing good, and any work we can do to create environments of cognitive ease for our patrons and students would be a good thing. And it appears I’m not the first person interested in design to make the connection between Kahneman’s cognitive ease and good design. Check out his stuff, at a minimum scan the wikipedia entry. It’s good context for our work!

New Acquisitions in Manuscript and Print

2013-06-18T23:01:00Z

On 5 June 2013, the British Library bought four lots in the Mendham Sale at Sotheby's, London. The Library's view was that the sale was regrettable, and Roly Keating (our Chief Executive) expressed his reservations as joint-signatory in a letter published in The Times on 11 May. However, once it...

Italian journalist to be beatified for helping Jews escape persecution

2013-06-18T20:39:11Z

Journalist who helped saved Jews from Holocaust is on the path to be named a saint.

An Italian journalist and father of seven, who helped hundreds of Jews to escape Nazi persecution, will be beatified on June 15 in the Italian city of Carpri.Odoardo Focherini who died aged 37 in the Hersbrueck Nazi concentration camp will be beatified in recognition of the lives he saved and the people he helped.

Organisers of his beatification Mass are expecting 4,000 people and approximately 20 bishops to attend the Mass which will place Focherini on the path to canonisation.

Odoardo Focherini will be the first Italian beatified for helping Jewish people during the Holocaust.Focherini helped Jews escape Nazi death camps by providing them with false documents so that they could cross the Swiss border to safety. He was eventually arrested and died in the camp of Hersbruck from an infected leg.

via CatholicHerald

Airplanes! Gen Con! History!

2013-06-18T19:46:48Z

Man, I cannot stop using exclamation points today. Must be the caffeine.

If you have no idea what I’ve been up to this month: I’m kicking off an oral history of women in tabletop games and live-action roleplaying. I’ll be spending the next 12-14 months interviewing women for the project. There’s a starter post about the project, and a GoFundMe to help me cover my travel expenses. I’ve managed to swing tickets to and from Gen Con, and already had a pass. I still need to cover meals, my hotel room, and misc transport (like taxis.) Gen Con 2013 is the first “away” trip to do on site interviews.

Now that I know I have the flights to get to and from Gen Con, I’m starting to schedule the interviews I’ll be doing at the con. If you self-identity as a woman, and either work with or enjoy playing tabletop games, and/or LARP, I’d love to talk to you. Drop me a line via my contact page, and we’ll see what we can get on the books.

Thank you so much, to the people who have helped me get this far, and the people who have already said yes. I couldn’t do this without you.

re:log: Tracking the Movements of Conference Attendees via WiFi

2013-06-18T20:44:26Z

re:log [opendatacity.de] by German data designers OpenDataCity reveals the movements of about 6,700 different electronic devices during re:publica 2013, a prestigious European conference on the topic of Digital Society.

A dynamic map of the conference location shows the approximate locations of the devices when they were connected to the local WiFi hotspots. An interactive timeline underneath allows to explore the dynamic changes over time, while a rectangular area can be drawn to more specifically highlight and follow a smaller amount of dots.

The visualization was based on tracking the MAC addresses of the devices according to the WiFi hotspot they were connected to. This data, which can be downloaded, was fully anonymized, yet the authors mention their desire to allow people to look up their own MAC address in the future.

2013 Archival Technologies…06.18.13

2013-06-18T19:39:46Z

The Strategy Behind Gamification Consulting in Europe with Bart Briers

2013-06-18T19:31:31Z

Bart Briers Shares His Gamification Consulting Experience in Europe

The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts.

Our next episode is taking place Thursday – June 20th at 1 PM EST, featuring Thomas Hsu of Accenture.

This past week’s guest was Bart Briers, Director of Services and Solutions at CTG Belgium. Gabe and Bart talk about Bart’s approach to gamification consulting, what clients expect from Bart’s services, gamification in IT, and even a story about training on a…train. Watch the full interview below to learn more:

The post The Strategy Behind Gamification Consulting in Europe with Bart Briers appeared first on Gamification Co.

Current News: DigitalKoans Twitter Updates for 6/18/2013

2013-06-18T19:30:49Z

G8 Highlights Open Data as Crucial for Governance and Growth, http://t.co/r5yeN0NrS1 In Eventful Year, Wiley Sales, Earnings Fell, http://t.co/ZFmwA9dyqr Announcing ALM Reports—A New tool for Analyzing Article Impact, http://t.co/sdNYNKtN78 Digital Discord, http://t.co/9dCyrFKzyR ePub Metadata What Gets Shown?, http://t.co/FlXJnYpijV Jobless Forced to Pay for Library Internet Access Just as More Services Move Online, http://t.co/6YjITJbo2t Digital Scholarship

The post Current News: DigitalKoans Twitter Updates for 6/18/2013 appeared first on DigitalKoans.

DigitalCurationNews (6/18/2013) #digitalpreservation

2013-06-18T19:26:09Z

Trust and Digital Preservation [Presentations] What People Are Asking About Personal Digital Archiving Open Research Challenges in Digital Preservation: Call for Contributions! Scholarship in the Networked World: Big Data, Little Data, No Data [Presentation] Digital Scholarship | DigitalCurationNews

The post DigitalCurationNews (6/18/2013) #digitalpreservation appeared first on DigitalKoans.

Map Stack: Designing a Map in Easy and Fun Ways

2013-06-18T20:15:11Z

Map Stack [stamen.com] by Stamen Design aims to make it radically simpler for lay people to design completely unique, personalized maps.

The online visual map design service provides easy access to the color, opacity and brightness of any map background, road, label, or satellite imagery. Users can also create custom-made image overlays and layer effects, or layers that are used as cut-out masks for other layers.

Currently, the default styles include minimalistic black/white, watercolor or 3D-like terrain, which can all be freely changed and fine-tuned.

Tennant, Roy: Lessons From the River: Introduction

2013-06-18T17:59:36Z

I was 20 and living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains when a friend of mine suggested that we train to be commercial river guides. It was the Spring of 1978, and a large snowpack had finally broken the drought of the mid-1970s. River companies were scrambling to hire more staff to take advantage of the sudden opportunity. She was right — it was the chance of a lifetime, and I thank her for this guidance to this day.

My very first training trip had me joining a group of trainees who had already been at if for several days. All I saw was crashing and burning. This culminated when a trainee blew it and our boat came up against a razor-sharp rock (the rapid is called “Razorback” if that gives you any idea). Our trainer, an experienced guide, made the mistake of putting his hand out to push off the rock. He cut his hand, and became so disgusted with his boatload of newbies that he told us to put our paddles down.

For the entire rest of the trip (basically half of the river’s length), he took the boat down the river himself. We sat there immobile and ashamed. Seven people in a paddle boat and he guided the boat himself with a hand he couldn’t use. This was indelibly etched on my memory.

I learned a lot that day.

First, all I had seen to that point had been garbage. No one knew what they were doing except our trainer. This made me feel better. Second, I understood that it was possible for a single person to take a boat down that river by him or her self. I vowed that I would be able to do that one day. Soon, I could. Third, I understood that this would not be easy. Little did I know at the time how difficult it would be in the end.

I’ll skip over the difficulties to later that year when I got my chance to prove myself. I had been trained to guide a paddle boat (six passengers all with a paddle) and the boat I was given for my test was an oar boat (the guide rows with long oars and the passengers just ride). Rowing an oar boat is very different than guiding a paddle boat. Did I say anything about this error? Of course not. Even back then I wasn’t that stupid. Once I had done it, I said to myself, they could never say I couldn’t.

So after getting down the Stanislaus River in that oar boat moderately well I was approved to be a commercial whitewater river guide. It was also my 21st birthday. My boating friend and I jumped in my beat-up Sunbeam Alpine convertible and drove to Yosemite to celebrate.

That was just the beginning of my learning process, and I will be sharing those lessons in a series of posts that I hope you will find relevant or at least interesting.

From “Why Don’t We Offer …” to Teaching Global Feminism This Year

2013-06-18T18:50:05Z

Watching Kaljah’s music video, a feminist remake of Timbaland’s Carry Out ft Justin Timberlake. Kelsey, on screen, is the one with her head down.

Sometime last fall, a couple of students asked me why we don’t offer any classes on women’s leadership. First, it’s a privilege to teach in a public school where questions like these can be taken seriously and acted on (we also offer classes like Activist Art, HIV/AIDS and Philosophy), and second, why don’t we offer any classes on women’s leadership?

I’d been aware of Half the Sky for some time, and began to think about that book as a way of grounding a new class in global women’s rights and leadership. I’ve now taught four sections of Global Feminism with about 100 kids since January, and the 8-week course is generally organized like this:

~ 2 weeks: Examine our own understanding of feminism and sexism in the United States; read Audre Lorde, bell hooks and others; what does “global feminism” mean, and how do we think about that in the context of cultural relativism?
~ 3-4 weeks: 1 week on each of three themes (gender-based violence, women’s health, and trafficking/prostitution), combined with watching the Half the Sky documentary, discussing the book, and contrasting with case studies in the United States (like the rape case in Steubenville, OH)
~2-3 weeks: Final project, which asks students to respond to the problems/themes in the class in some way (examples include funding a classroom library of feminist books; writing a research paper on gender and toys; launching a girls cross country team in the fall; designing and silk screening a t-shirt line; and creating a feminist music video, among others)

Really amazing, successful things:

Student feedback has been quite positive – and if not positive, then very useful. (“It was honestly one of the most serious and life-changing classes that I have ever taken here at the iSchool” … “I do suggest that we go to trips to learn more, talk to feminist groups and do more activities outside of class.”
The class was a space to share stories and experiences that are otherwise invisible. Throughout the course, students would talk about moments when they really connected with these (difficult) themes and I realized that there are very few occasions where we can talk about, say, street harassment in the classroom.
The final projects truly allowed students to investigate feminism from different perspectives and in different mediums.

Less successful things:

The structure of the final project is too flexible and poorly-defined for some students, and that resulted in some projects that lacked specificity or difficulty.
Students did 2-3 brief research presentations on a country of their choice to respond to the themes that we were discussing, and I/we saw a lot of value in the presentation itself (design of slides, confidence, etc) but I don’t think we got much from the content of the presentations.
I think that calling oneself a feminist is also an announcement that one is actively anti-sexist – which means, for example, that I don’t think you can call yourself a feminist and also affectionately call your friends “bitches.” I know that the same students who were talking about patriarchy might also have been drawing penis graffiti for fun. How do we assimilate our words into our way of being?

So, what’s next?

Based on student feedback and my own feeling that there’s just way more here than we were able to touch on, I’m going to change this from being a 27-hour “global history elective” to a 60-hour “module” in September 2013. We’ll be able to go in greater depth, and will also have time to plan some sort of conference/event for January 2014 that builds on the questions that have come out of the class. I want to do more trips and host speakers, which is something that Morgane and Allison worked on for their final project. I want to possibly do away with the presentations, and instead ask students to read Half the Sky with a friend or family member and document or share the conversations that they have. I want to build on Chanel and Medina’s NYC iMakers project (inspired by MAKERS) and have us all do an ethnographic project with women in our lives. I want us to make our way through the new feminism library, built by this year’s classes. And .. we’ll see!

Europeana: Creating a Digital Resource for Researchers…06.18.13

2013-06-18T18:31:52Z

British Library Labs…06.18.13

2013-06-18T18:26:35Z

RECOMMENDED: “A Map and Some Pins”: Open Data and Unlimited Horizons

2013-06-18T18:17:53Z

Tim Sherratt (@wragge on Twitter) has published his keynote address to April’s Digisam Conference in blog form, in which he makes an inspired and passionate case for making cultural heritage data openly available. Sherratt reminds us that this data is infused with history and “resists our attempts at reduction,” while calling into question the notion that digital methods of exploring cultural heritage are extractive:

The glories of messiness challenge the extractive metaphors that often characterise our use of digital data. We’re not merely digging or mining or drilling for oil, because each journey into the data offers new possibilities — our horizons are opened, because our categories refuse to be closed. These are journeys of enrichment, interpretation and creation, not extraction.

We’re putting stuff back, not taking it out.

He goes on to say:

What this means for cultural institutions is that the sharing of open data is not just about letting people create new apps or interfaces. It’s about letting people create new meanings. We should be encouraging them to use our APIs and LOD to poke holes in our assumptions to let the power pour out.