This past summer I traveled to Chicago to hang out with librarians who were attending ALA Annual, but I took one day to ride the train out to the suburb I’d lived and danced in while living my previous life as teacher at the Academy of Movement and Music and a dancer and occasional choreographer for Momenta.

I’ve spent years trying desperately not to think about what life would have been like if I’d decided to pursue dance as a career, missing it so much that I didn’t even attend live dance performances for years. But I was finally ready to go back and immerse myself in the familiar sounds and smells of the old building, dig through the archived performance videos for hours and hours, and trace my favorite barre with my fingers (it was wobbly, and therefore forced me not to rely on it for balance).

Digging through archived performance videos is kind of a hit-or-miss affair. They’re labeled, helpfully, “summer dance festival 1999″ and “Evening 7/21/2001″ and the like, with no cataloging. (The librarian in me wanted to apply for a leave of absence to spend a few months making finding aids for them!) But in the end I was able to find three pieces that I’d choreographed. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent some time making them sharable online. And here’s one of them, choreographed in 2000 for some of the group of teachers and alumni who gather every summer to put on their own show. Some were and are professional dancers. Others (like me at the time) hadn’t danced in a long while, but still made yearly pilgrimages back to the Momenta studios to participate in this show.

Bring It On from Iris on Vimeo.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Thank you for indulging me.

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All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre

A few friends and I have started a Shakespeare Project. We want to read Shakespeare’s plays, starting with the ones we’re least familiar with and moving up to the biggies we all remember from college, taking about two weeks to read each one. (This is kind of a repeat of a project my family undertook when I was in high school. We’d all read a play a week and then sit down on Sundays to watch the BBC versions of the plays. It was a project I mostly resented at the time, but now really want to do.) So every morning I get up, make hot chocolate while feeding the cat, and then spend half an hour or 45 minutes reading a few scenes of Shakespeare. When the cat finishes his breakfast, he jumps up to sit quietly with his front paws planted as near to the left-hand edge of my Complete Works of Shakespeare as possible so that I can run my fingers along his head and shoulders while I read and sip hot chocolate. Pretty idyllic.

Anyway, I was reading All’s Well That Ends Well, which I had just seen beautifully performed by the National Theatre about 10 days ago, and I suddenly realized that there had been whole little scenes of action in the production that simply don’t show up in the dialog on the page. The actors and directors had taken the time to wonder why some of those off-hand lines were there, and to build that world into their production. Left to my own devices, novice that I am, I’m incapable of seeing the world that exists between the lines of dialog on the page, but that world is so much richer and more fascinating than the pure dialog admits.

As I taught a couple classes of freshmen this week and tried to build a picture of college-level research for them, I wondered yet again how to bridge the gap between expert and novice. I see conversations where they see bits of data. I see interconnections between vocabulary and lines of arguement where they see result list after result list that doesn’t contain “sources on my topic” (by which they mean “sources that say what I’m about to argue”). How do I first describe the world between the lines for them, and then help them develop the capacity to imagine it for themselves?

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Here’s how it works:

1. Talk about how writing a research paper is like participating in a conversation.
   When you enter a conversation at a party, you need to know a) who’s talking, b) what they’re talking about, and c) how they’re talking about it. Parroting back what people say is not a conversation. Actually contributing to the conversation means having a grasp of the topic and the vocabulary that is in use within that conversation. Relevant vocabulary is also important because search is basically vocabulary matching.
2. Write a “topic” up on the board.
   This should not be a beautifully narrowed topic, both because that makes the exercise harder and because that’s not actually reaching students where they are. In both cases, for me, the students were at the “I want to do something about globalization and agriculture” stage. Yesterday I got a student volunteer to write his topic on the board. Today’s class was a little more structured and twice as long, so I picked a topic that I knew would serve as a robust enough foundation for all the components of the class.
3. Invite students to come up and write the answers to two questions: “Who might have studied this topic?” and “What questions might they have asked of the topic?”
   So, for example, if the topic is “organic food” students might write “EPA,” or “Behavioral economists,” or “farmers,” or “doctors,” or “sociologists” (these are examples from this morning’s exercise). Some questions included “is organic food more nutritious than conventionally grown food?” and “what motivates people to buy organic food?”
4. Talk as a group about what terms might crop up in the articles by the different groups, building searches as you go.
   Basically, that black board full of groups and questions serves as the basis for the rest of the class. Searching Google? Show how to limit to .gov sources to hit those EPA people. Searching Academic Search Premier? Talk about differences in disciplinary language and collect subject headings that match the topic at hand. Having trouble with students still typing “effect of pesticides on the production of corn” into search boxes? The blackboard helps you remind students to step outside of their own phrasing of the topic and choose meaningful terms that would have appeared in, for example, a report from the USDA. STILL having trouble? Do it again. And again. And little by little it sinks in.

An added benefit of this technique is that it gets the whole class up and moving near the beginning. I can’t tell you how much this changes the atmosphere of a morning class full of sceptical freshmen. I don’t know why it helps, but I’ll go with it.

Looking back, I can see now that hashtags not only allowed people to gather together categories of posts, but they also gave a kind of short-hand context to those posts. A brief post like “Mediocre at best” reads differently if it’s tagged “#IL2009” or “#ProjectRunway.” The first sounds like a conference attendee who’s underwhelmed by a session. The second sounds like a critique of a fashion design on a reality TV show. Totally different contexts lead to totally different readings.

And as it turns out, short-hand contexts are pretty useful rhetorical things online, particularly in asynchronous conversations or when you’re only allowed a few words at a time. Lately the amateur anthropologist in me has been fascinated by the ways I’ve seen hashtags used not so much to allow people to gather posts together but instead to imply a category or topic that in turn supply a context for the preceding post. They let posters signal “I’m joking” or “here’s how I want you to interpret my post” without ruining the moment with a dry pronouncements of intent.

For example, I’d have had no idea what a friend was talking about if he’d just said, “Remember that part in Star Wars where the characters are running from the troopers in Mos Eisley, and they scramble on board the Millennium Falcon and then have to wait several hours for the weather to improve before they can blast off? Yeah, me neither” (from stevelawson on friendfeed). But then he added “#nasaisharshingmyfuture,” to let us know that he’s talking about the way that modern day space travel isn’t living up to the promise of science fiction. Context. There are no other posts with that hashtag, so it’s certainly not serving a gathering function, but it implies a category, implies that there could be many more examples of this particular phenomenon, and therefore builds a whole imaginary context for the original statement.

Fascinating.

Like any rhetorical device, though, it’s a skill that needs developing. Some of the people I follow seem to be really good at it. I, on the other hand, could really use some practice.

Friday Flowers

It’s been a weird week. I’m feeling very get-off-my-lawn-ish about a bunch of things that really don’t deserve my ire (as well as a couple of things that do). It’s cloudy and very windy and generally feels like I’ve stepped into a scene from Wuthering Heights. I’m tired. So yeah, things are generally blah.

Luckily, it happens to be Friday, and on Fridays at Carleton they sell flowers in the student union. Students buy flowers for each other and stick them into each others’ mail boxes, and every time I walk past those mail boxes (this time on my way to get hot chocolate) I fall in love with this tradition and this campus all over again.

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There’ve been some bumps along the way, to be sure (I’m lookin’ at you, SLA realignment name change drama), but for the most part he’s managed to keep people from looking too closely at his vendor status.

And then he authored a report on open source ILS platforms.

From WikiLeaks:

This document was released only to a select number of existing customers of the company SirsiDynix, a proprietary library automation software vendor. According to our source it has not been released more broadly specifically because of the misinformation about open source software and possible libel per se against certain competitors contained therein.

SirsiDynix is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the largest public libraries in the U.S. (Queens Borough, NY) and this document does illustrate the less-than-ethical nature of this company.

The source states that the document should be leaked so that everyone can see to what extent SirsiDynix will attempt to spread falsehoods and smear open source and the proponents of open source.

I’m sure that others far better versed in these matters will write cogent and thoughtful responses to the document itself. I know of an effort underway to mark up the report and respond with some actual research to back up the counter-claims. With all of this serious thinking going on, I think I’ll just play court jester and point out my four favorite bits of the report.

1. The ubiquitous Asian woman who appears on every page and on the cover sheet, and always next to Abram’s name, making it seem like maybe that’s what he looks like.
2. The totally information-less charts that appear on page 4 straight out of the “If there’s a chart for it that makes it fact” school of rhetoric.
3. “Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly” (p. 6).
4. “Rogue programming teams may decide to create a better version, while exclaiming ‘Damn the torpedoes’” (p. 6). (I just love the “damn the torpedoes” phrase.)

Dear Stephen, we’ve seen your infomercial colors now. Next time you write such a report, please cite some sources. What you have here wouldn’t last 5 minutes on Wikipedia.

My Office from Iris on Vimeo.

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But while I take a moment to thank the library gods who made me a librarian for languages and literature, which means that I rely on an only mildly dysfunctional citation style, I’d like to thank the folks at APA for their stellar work. I realize it was a professional risk, printing all those errors and then flat out missing the point on a bunch of rules, but in the end you’ve successfully gotten us to think about just what the points of those rules actually were in the first place. Styles that too self-evidently conform to the rules of providing the least amount of information that will allow your readers to quickly evaluate and be able to find exactly what you saw, and that do this in ways that map to their discipline’s epistemology… these slacker styles that don’t make us rant and rave and then scratch our heads in utter bafflement do nothing to help us understand why attribution is structured the way it is, and what its fundamental goals really are. Kind of like you’d never think to wonder why a table top works best if oriented horizontally unless a company came out with a new and improved table top with no horizontal surface.

So thank you APA. You’ve got us all talking. Which means it’s about time to go back and do an actually useful revision now, don’cha think? Now that your devious mission has been accomplished?

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It was doubly inspiring because immediately after drafting that description of instruction librarianship in the liberal arts, I got to go and actually do that work with a 100-level course that is one of my perennial favorites: Linguistics 110.

I love this class because it absolutely embodies one point we made in our document: “Locating discussions of content relevant to the course within the context of library instruction makes explicit the connection between information gathering and knowledge production.” The professor teaches his class, talking about the different cortical pathways used to process kanji and kana (with a healthy dose of the convoluted history of Japanese writing systems and vocabulary). Meanwhile, I jump in every once in a while and show how to find out if the article he’s used as the basis for this lecture is still being cited in the literature and is still thought to be credible (he supplied me with the article information ahead of time), how to use terms from that paper to find more papers on similar topics, and how to evaluate the web site that popped up when he used Google to find images of these cortical pathways. Meanwhile, he riffs off of the papers that we find to talk about how they either confirm or complicate what he already knows, or how they relate to other concepts they’ve covered in class.

This feels so much closer to the way real research happens. It’s not set aside as “library day” when students will step outside of their roles as Students Of Linguistics and step into their roles as Students Who Must Soon Write a Paper. This is thesis development that’s built on class discussion and lecture, sprinkled with “but is this really credible,” encouraging the habit of taking facts and asking “but how would I find out more about that” and “what do I do with what I’ve found,” and always circling everything back around to how the new information informs thesis development and relates to the course content.

This model wouldn’t work for all courses, certainly, but every Fall I look forward to the call that will schedule this particular session.

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As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!

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