In which vocabularies are expanded

Nice one, Howard!

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I sent that video’s URL to the head of the university where I work. He has a sense of humor, so might appreciate it, but he’s not the type of performer Rosenberg is.

Our vice-chancellor is known for his great intelligence and his willing to listen to a variety of ideas and opinions. He’s also good at conveying in writing the sincerity that’s obvious when you see him in person.

Here’s an example of an email sent by the vice-chancellor to all staff this week. It could have been simply a yawn-inducing list of names with a brief “thanks everyone” to close. Instead, here are the final few sentences:

“We can all recall the lecturers we found inspiring, and a new generation is about to discover the exaltation created by teachers who bring a story to life, make clear a difficult concept, get to know their students and share their passion for ideas.

“Such students will remember the start of semester in 2010 as that hidden gate in a low wall that leads to a life barely glimpsed until now. Thank you to the staff who have worked so hard to make the campus ready for the influx, to the professional staff and student volunteers who have done so much already to make students welcome through activities and student centres, and to the academics about to begin again the great adventure of learning.”

Enthusiasm, generosity and a reminder of why we’re here. That’s a good way to start the year.

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The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre

Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:

• corporate logo features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (and was created long before the sports-shoe company)
• HR/finance enterprise system is called Themis, after the Greek goddess associated with good counsel, proper custom, procedure and social order
• new CRM(ish) enterprise system is named for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, motherhood, magic and simplicity

Can you see a theme there?

Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.

For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)

Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.

Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.

We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.

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Suggested further reading:

• Indi Young’s how-t0 book: Mental Models: aligning design strategy with human behavior
• Donna Maurer’s presentation at Oz-IA (slides and audio) about George Lakoff’s work on categorisation — and how we regularly blur the boundaries between the categories we create
• Wikipedia article about cognitive linguist George Lakoff; his ideas about the relationship between the physical brain and the language of our metaphors are particularly relevant here

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Yippee!

The 30-minute session is called “Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma” and it’s about the different perspectives of project and operational teams.

Here’s the pitch:

It was a good project, well planned and managed, and you did your best to idiot-proof the redeveloped site and the technology that supports it. The wrap party was a blast and the project team has split up, moved on.

A year later you visit the redeveloped web site – only to find that the CMS rollout has stalled and your elegant IA and sleek interface design are being whittled away by dozens of tiny, clunky changes made by the client’s permanent staff.

Would the client be willing to engage you again, to set the staff back on the path of Usability Gorgeousness™? After all, you can’t be blamed for what went wrong after the last project – or can you?

Part confessional, part observational, this session looks at web redevelopment projects from both sides: the independent consultant brought in to “just fix it, OK?” and the in-house wage-slave who seems to want nothing to change, ever, at all. Is it possible for them to move from “loathe at first sight” to “happily ever after”?

And the take-aways (that is, what you can expect to learn from the session):

• Improved understanding of how organisational politics can affect a project’s outcomes (and possibly your reputation), no matter how well you plan ahead
• Tips for bridging the cultural divide between the project team and the company staff responsible for day-to-day web site management

I’m not saying I know everything about this topic, but I’ve worked on both sides of the project/operational divide — so you can at least expect to hear an anecdote or two that you’ll identify with.

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The 2009 call for participation went out this week.

I gave a short presentation last year, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Highly recommended, even if it’s your first time as a presenter — the Oz-IA crowd is friendly, supportive and interested in just about anything you have to say.

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The second headline reads: Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery. Easily misunderstood!

This image (right) is a snippet from my RSS feedreader. It shows three headlines from the Boston Globe’s education section. Because the feedreader appears in a small ‘portlet’ within my web browser, space for headlines is limited — anything more than 45 characters gets automatically truncated.

Thus the second headline in the image reads:

“Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery”

Hmm. Probably not quite the image Brown University wants to convey about itself. In fact, it’s better known as a leader in liberal arts and humanities education.

It’s ony when you click the headline and read the entire article that things become clear — Brown University is building a museum to collect and exhibit items relating to the history of slavery. So the headline in my feedreader should have said:

“Brown U plans slavery museum”

This version of the headline clarifies that “Brown” is the university, not some random person named Brown, and conveys the idea that the museum about slavery does not yet exist, but that the university is actively working to create it.

The phrase “moves ahead with” is the culprit here. It’s an example of sloppy writing, adding nothing substantial to the meaning of the headline. Worse, it takes up unnecessary space and prevents the important, meaningful word “museum” from appearing in the feedreader display. A similar effect would occur in search results for this article, or if I were reading the Boston Globe online via my mobile phone or PDA.

Online communication uses lots of microcontent, small chunks of information that can be automatically identified and re-used by multiple applications.

Common examples of microcontent:

Headlines, captions on images, subheadings, link text, the text in a web page’s <title> tag, and an email subject line

To write great headlines, you need to master three things:

1. an understanding of the rules of grammar
2. a grasp of how web applications use microcontent (I’d suggest starting with content management systems, blog publishing software, search engines and RSS feedreaders)
3. regular practice and feedback

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References

William Strunk Jr (1918): The Elements of Style. See especially the section titled “Omit needless words”

Jakob Nielsen: Write for reuse (article 2 March 2009), Microcontent: headlines, page titles, and subject lines (article 6 September 1998) and list of articles about writing for the web

Wikipedia articles about microcontent and the related concept of microformats

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Portrait of Violet McKenzie in military uniform (Australian War Memorial, collection record PO1262.001)

The program is about Florence Violet McKenzie (nee Wallace), Australia’s first female electrical engineer and a driving force in establishing the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (WRANS).

Violet had a particular interest in signalling, and in the 1930s and during World War II her training school taught thousands of women — and Australian and US servicemen — how to use Morse code for emergency and routine communications. In the radio program, a couple of her former students recall Violet’s teaching method: the students learned by rhythmically chanting the da-da-dits of Morse code. Almost a modern version of Gregorian chant!

The radio program’s synopsis says:

“Florence Violet McKenzie was born in the years which gave rise to the first wave of feminism, apt timing for a woman who, during her long life, distinguished herself in technical fields and opened doors for countless other women to join her.

“But Florence Violet McKenzie’s quiet and independent manner has meant that her remarkable story has slipped through the cracks of history. Apart from a couple of brief biographical references, the name Florence Violet McKenzie is hardly familiar in Australia. This program pays some overdue historical attention to a pioneer in technical education for women.

“Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (nee Wallace), aka ‘Mrs Mac’ (1890-1982) was Australia’s first female electrical engineer, first female amateur radio operator, and founder of the Electrical Association for Women. She is best known for her work during the Second World War. Having founded the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in 1939, she campaigned successfully to have some of her female trainees accepted into the Royal Australian Navy, thereby originating the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service.

“During the war some 12,000 servicemen passed through her Morse code training school, and after the war her school was a major civilian airline and nautical signal instructional centre. The armed forces and civilian airlines relied on her services right up to the mid-50s. Apart from her successful electrical contracting and wireless supplies business between 1918 and 1934, all her work was voluntary.”

Not mentioned in the synopsis:

• she corresponded with Albert Einstein
• her free school trained more than 10,000 military personnel and civilians
• to become eligible to study electrical engineering, she needed to have a job in a relevant industry — so she set up her own business and got a contract to rewire an acquaintance’s house

My mother’s family probably owes an indirect debt of gratitude to Violet. My aunt Shirley served as a signaller in the Royal Australian Navy during the 1950s, and her brother Keith is a Colonel Commandant in the Australian Army’s Signals Corps.

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References

“Signals, Currents and Wires: the untold story of Florence Violet McKenzie”. This program in the Hindsight series was researched, produced and presented by Catherine Freyne. First broadcast by ABC Radio National on 16 March 2008. When I drafted this post in late January 2009, the program’s web page had a downloadable MP3 audio file. It also provides three photos and a short list of reference books about the WRANS, women and technology.

Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (1892-1982): biography in the Australian Women’s Register, with links and bibliography.

Peter Dunn (2006): Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in Australia During WWII. Article on Oz At War web site, describing Mrs McKenzie’s involvement in the WESC and the WRANS.

The Australian War Memorial has two photographs:

• Portrait of Violet McKenzie in WESC uniform, undated (1940s or 1950s?) (AWM collection record P01262.001)
• Violet McKenzie aged nearly 90, at a plaque dedication ceremony in her honour, circa 1980 (AWM collection record P02722.003)

Violet is mentioned in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in an entry about Frances Betty Provan, the first enlisted member of the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. However, there is no ADB entry for Violet McKenzie herself.

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[This post is written especially for Ada Lovelace Day, a PledgeBank initiative by Suw Charman-Anderson. Tip o' the hat to David Weinberger for mentioning the pledge in his JOHO blog.]

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There have been many, many web pages, articles, tweets, blog posts, sites, images, soundbites and videos about the Victorian bushfires and their aftermath. Aid agencies and others are creating databases to track displaced persons, donations, available resources for the relief effort.

We are awash in digital records of the event — but for how long? Any archivist will tell you that digital records  are the most fragile, susceptible to the lightest touch on the DEL key and frequently rendered unreadable or inaccessible by the relentless march of technological innovation.

Perhaps someone at the National Library of Australia or another ‘collecting’ institution has already thought of it. I hope so. The 2009 bushfires have great cultural, historical and scientific significance. A well-filled archive of ditial source material would form a rich case study for sociologists, environmental scientists, urban planners, politicians, aid agencies and NGOs, emergency services coordinators and many others.

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“One Kilmore resident, whose home was spared in the blaze, said the ABC’s coverage had provided her not only with news throughout the ordeal but also company.

“‘Having you there has been sensational,’ she said.

“While less traditional than the trusty wireless, the internet, too, played a crucial role in the news process yesterday, with user-generated content featuring prominently on many news sites.

“As increasingly seems to happen during times of crisis and natural disaster, news outlets and the public came together, with the internet a nexus between the two. While the former provided the latter with news, the latter provided the former with content.

“The online versions of all major metropolitan newspapers, as well as The Australian, featured readers’ photographs prominently. But it was in helping to disseminate the news that the influence of the country’s netizens was most strongly felt. In using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the photo-sharing application Flickr, not only to keep loved ones reassured as to their whereabouts, but also to share links to news sites, hundreds helped generate massive web traffic for the country’s major news sites.

“On Twitter, a simple social messaging utility that allows users to keep abreast of what friends and family are doing, the bushfires were the single most ‘twittered’ about topic yesterday afternoon, peaking with an average of 51.5 mentions every 20 seconds by early evening.

…

“[TV Channel] Nine has also announced its commitment to holding a national appeal for victims of the fires, which is to be held during tomorrow’s Day-Night cricket match between Australia and New Zealand.

“Run in conjunction with Cricket Australia and the Commonwealth Bank, the appeal will run throughout Nine’s live telecast of the match from Adelaide Oval from 2pm.”

This is integrated communication at its best, providing multiple ways to access the news (depending on which technologies are available in your vicinity); immediacy and freshness of updates; a sense of personal contact for those in distress; for distant families worried about loved ones, an alternative to overloaded telephone helplines; and for the rest of the nation a mechanism for collecting donations to charity.

The curious thing is that the integration was not planned or managed: it was an emergent behavior that used the tools and communciation channels available at the time. Many indivduals are telling their own stories, seeking assistance and offering help to others — following that primal urge summarised by EM Forster’s famous phrase, “Only connect.”

We’ve seen this emergent behavior before, in September 2001 and during Hurricane Katrina and after the London Underground bombings. It also happened at a smaller scale during the shootings at Virginia Tech a few years ago.

Many of the messages we heard via mainstream media in the last few days have been carefully orchestrated by the various emergency authorities and public service agencies involved. Much of the communication, however, has been spontaneously generated by individuals not connected with those organisations. Mainstream media have integrated these ad hoc communications into their broader coverage, and vice versa, to a degee I don’t think we’ve seen before in Australia.

Each time this multi-channel communication happens, it seems to happen a bit more smoothly. Our old-school news media organisations are learning about the value of working with — not against — the social media outlets created elsewhere, and with the people who use those social media channels to make connections with each other.

What about your organisation? If you had to communicate about an emergency (or even just a bad quarterly profit report), would you be able to harness the power of the social web to do it well?

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