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By weird coincidence, my friend Peter Suber posted remarkably similar (but inarguably better) photos of a different lake on the same day.

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On Friday I was part of the This Week in Law vidcast, hosted by my it’s-been-too-long friend Denise Howell [twitter: dhowell], along with Nina Paley [twitter: gorgeous + righteous. You must see it. That is an order.) It was a non-lawyerly discussion, which I was relieved to find out not because I dislike lawyers but because I could not have participated except by intermittently interjecting, “I object! On the grounds of say what now?”

Anyway, I can’t remember everything we talked about, except I know there was stuff about the effficacy of online advertising, the emerging norms for privacy, Amazon’s weaponized drones, Google Real-Death Bumper Cars, and nude photos of Robert Scoble.

You can get the vidcast/audiocast here. It’s a 1:35 long, where the first digit represents HOURS.

A Nina sample:

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My wife and I just spent nineteen hours in Yeruham [flickr photos] in the Negev desert. We were visiting Avi Warshavsky and his family who I know through the Center for Educational Technology, an Israeli non-profit that encourages tech innovation (in Hebrew and Arabic) for schools. Avi is the head of MindCET, a remarkable ed tech incubator in Yeruham, and is a highly respected figure in the Israeli open tech field. (I was brought to Israel by Yad Hanadiv and the National Library of Israel to talk with the Library about its digital initiative. I also gave an informal talk to the Library staff, talked at a Wikimedia conference, and went to a meetup of Hasadna (a collective of open data activists), so it’s been a busy and ultra-stimulating week.)

Anyway, yesterday evening we went down to Yeruham, a town of 10,000 noted for its open-hearted culture. You come to Yeruham after a long drive through an increasingly barren landscape. Yeruham Lake announces the start of the town, which in the US might make it all the way to being a large pond, but which is the second largest lake in Israel. (I think I must have gotten that wrong since it doesn’t even make Wikipedia’s list of lakes in Israel, which is only three entries long.) The town itself is modest but full of the signs family life: playgrounds, small shops, cafes, a well-used cultural center.

That evening, Avi took us and two of his children to see "the crater" from atop Mt. Avnun. You drive up a two-way road about the width of 1.5 cars until you are on the top of a mountain. Then you walk for about two minutes to get to the edge of a cliff bounded by a trip wire pretending to be a fence. The crater is not a deep hole but more like an upside-down bottle cap, except the edges are mountains and the bottle cap would take a day of walking to cross. Also, if you or any of your loved ones get too close to the edge of this bottle cap, they will be pulled off by an invisible vortex which your host insists does not exist but you can sense through your X-Man power of Being Afraid.

It’s quite beautiful.

The next day, we started the morning by going to David Ben-Gurion‘s burial place, which is a park of green atop a bluff that looks out at a sea of bluffs. Magnificent. If only Charlton Heston were there to hold his arms out majestically.

In the park, if you go in the morning, you can see wild ibexes (ibixen?) chewing at the vegetation, birds of various sorts, and lizards scuttling about. The ibexes we saw were smaller than deer, and lovely. It was great to see the ibex outside of its usual habitat: the crossword puzzle.

Then we went to Avdat, a Unesco World Heritage site where you can wander through a mountaintop village built of stone inhabited by the Nabataeans, Romans, and Byzantines from third century BCE to the seventh century CE. It was one of 65 walled villages along the route incense caravans took to ships waiting in Gaza. It is a beautiful spot, and more of the old village remains than I’d expected. We were the only people there. (It was also the first time in my life I wished I were wearing sun glasses. After about half an hour, I had trouble seeing.)

In a total switch of context, we then went to the MindCET offices, which were closed for the Shavuos holiday. Avi and I were able to catch up on the 14 startups MindCET has worked with, the global Ed Tech competition MindCET is co-sponsoring, and more. MindCET is a great place for early stage startups, providing them with a place to co-work and mentoring. Yeruham would like to attract more tech companies, which I can see. It seems like a wonderful community.

Also, at night Yeruham has stars We should get some of those for Boston.

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At the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Center for Educational Technology, an NGO I’m very fond of because of its simultaneous dedication to improving education and its embrace of innovative technology, I got to try an Oculus Rift.

They put me on a virtual roller coaster. My real knees went weak.
antabuse

Holy smokes.

Earlier, I gave a talk at the Israeli Wikimedia conference. I was reminded — not that I actually need reminding — how much I like being around Wikipedians. And what an improbable work of art is Wikipedia.

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An article at How-To Geek explains how to create keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome. It explains the built-in way to assign a keystroke to an extension, and recommends the Shortcut Manager extension that lets you create shortcuts for much of Chrome’s built-in functionality.

I will take this occasion to recommend Tab Rocker, by Joel Weinberger [twitter:metromoxie]. It lets you toggle between two open tabs via a keystroke. Joel wrote the first draft of it in a Thanksgiving afternoon after I whined about not having that functionality. Shortly afterwards Joel began working at Google as a security genius (which is not his official title but should be). And, yes, he is related to me: he’s my nephew.

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To commemorate the old days of blogging, and because we still like one another, we’re going to have a bloggers’ dinner in London this Saturday (Jan. 18) at 7pm. We think we have room for another 8 or 9 people. (This will be a pay-for-what-you-consume affair.) So, if you’re interested, enter your details in the spreadsheet. First come, first served.

This came about because of some quick emails between Suw Charman-Anderson and me. Her husband Kevin Anderson will be there, as will my wife. And it looks like Euan Semple will also come, and possibly AKMA (plus maybe Margaret) as well.

See you in London?

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I’ve been spending TV time taking digital photographs of every page of our family photo albums. Sure, it’d be better to digitize each one individually, but it turns out that what I’m doing is way better than never getting around to doing it right.

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At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.

Anne Kenney is University Librarian at Cornell.

For the past six years, Cornell has been building a hiphop collection. It began as the private archive of Johan Kugelberg, who recognize the cultural importance of popular music. He went in search of recordings, posters, flyers, etc. Cornell acquired the collection 2007. Cornell acquired Joe Conzo’s photographs.

But you don’t usually think about hiphop in beautiful, rural upstate NY. “So the rest of the story is about engagement.” Cornell needed to show the community that it’s a responsible steward. So, they held an inaugural conference in Oct. 2008, which included music, talks about hiphop founders, roundtables, etc. Academics also came. It began a two year period of intensive engagement. Anne shows some great photos of the interactions.

Seeing their photos on the same shelves as the Gettysburg Address was (as Joe Conzo said) “priceless.” Many of the artists themselves have gone out to spread word about the collection.

She shows some classroom use of the materials, in multiple disciplines. The artists have been spreading word. Cornell is proud of the integration of the artists into the academic environment. E.g., Afrika Bambaataa is a 3-year visiting scholar. She points about many more events and classes, some in partnership with other institutions and cities. E.g., the Class of 1945 requested a workshop.

She ends by talking about engaging the public in crowd-archiving. A gallery in SOHO was turned over to cataloging the 40,000 record collection of Afrika Bambaataa.

Anne says: “The future of most large research libraries lies…with unique and special materials” (Rick Anderson, “Can’t buy Us Love” 2013).

See Preserving HipHop.

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Breaking Bad Finale SPOILERS

A number of plot weaknesses, if not exactly flaws, have been noticed by many people: It was too convenient that Walter found the car keys in the first scene, it was unlikely that he could have so casually evaded the police lookouts when visiting his wife, he couldn’t have counted on being allowed to position his car so perfectly for the last scene, it was lucky that all the bad guys (except one) were in just the right range for his bullet-sprinkler system.

But I haven’t seen one particular, and genuine, plot flaw mentioned anywhere. Probably because I’m wrong about it. Here goes:

Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz were next to each other facing forward when the red laser dots appeared on their chests. How did they see the dots? Did they see the laser sources and figure out that they were pointing at them? That’s probably it. Ok, so much for the plot flaw. Carry on.

Finally, yes, I know that picking plot flaws misses the point of the Breaking Bad finale. But I have to say that I was a little disappointed by episode. It wrapped up the plot points, but I didn’t think it advanced the series’ argument. And, no, I don’t claim to know exactly what that argument was; it was too wonderfully complex for that. Still, I didn’t think the finale deepened its themes.

I agree with how others have framed it: “Ozymandias” — the third-to-last episode — was the series’ climax. The rest was denouement.

Great, great series.

Freudian slip of the month. From E-Online’s coverage of the finale: “Walt (Bryan Cranston) got his revenge but succumbed to his wombs.”

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I’m at a Berkman lunchtime talk on crowdsourcing curation. Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Battles [twitter:matthewBattles] , and Pablo Barria Urenda are leading the discussion. They’re from the Harvard metaLab.

Matthew Battles begins by inviting us all to visit the Harvard center for Renaissance studies in Florence, Italy. [Don’t toy with us, Matthew!] There’s a collection there, curated by Bernard Berenson, of 16,000 photos documenting art that can’t be located, which Berenson called “Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance.” A few years ago, Mellon sponsored the digitization of this collection, to be made openly available. One young man, Chris Daley [sp?] has since found about 120 of the works. [This is blogged at the metaLab site.]

These 16,000 images are available at Harvard’s VIA image manager [I think]. VIA is showing its age. It doesn’t support annotation, etc. There are some cultural crowdsourcing projects already underway, e.g., Zooniverse’s Ancient Lives project for transcribing ancient manuscripts. metaLab is building a different platform: Curarium.com.

Matthew hands off to Jeffrey Schnapp. He says Curarium will allow a diverse set of communities (archivist, librarian, educator, the public, etc.) to animate digital collections by providing tools for doing a multiplicity things with those collections. We’re good at making collections, he says, but not as good at making those collections matter. Curarium should help take advantage of the expertise of distributed communities.

What sort of things will Curarium allow us to do? (A beta should be up in about a month.) Add metadata, add meaning to items…but also work with collections as aggregates. VIA doesn’t show relations among items. Curarium wants tomake collections visible and usable at the macro and micro levels, and to tell stories (“spotlights”).

Jeffrey hands off to Pablo, who walks us through the wireframes. Curarium will ingest records, and make them interoperable. They take in reords in JSON format, and extract the metadata they want. (They save the originals.) They’re working on how to give an overview of the collection; “When you have 11,000 records, thumbnails don’t help.” So, you’ll see a description and visualizations of the cloud of topic tags and items. (The “Homeless” collection has 2,000 tags.)

At the item level, you can annotate, create displays of selected content (“‘Spotlights’ are selections of records organized as thematized content”) in various formats (e.g., slideshow, more academic style, etc.). There will be a rich way of navigating and visualizing. There will be tools for the public, researchers, and teachers.

Q&A

Q: [me] How will you make the enhanced value available outside of Curarium? And, have you considered using Linked Data?

A: We’re looking into access. The data we have is coming from other places that have their own APIs, but we’re interested in this.

Q: You could take the Amazon route by having your own system use API’s, and then make those API’s open.

Q: How important is the community building? E.g., Zooniverse succeeds because people have incentives to participate.

A: Community-building is hugely important to us. We’ll be focusing on that over the next few months as we talk with people about what they want from this.

A: We want to expand the scope of conversation around cultural history. We’re just beginning. We’d love teachers in various areas — everything from art history to history of materials — to start experimenting with it as a teaching tool.

Q: The spotlight concept is powerful. Can it be used to tell the story of an individual object. E.g., suppose an object has been used in 200 different spotlights, and there might be a story in this fact.

A: Great question. Some of the richness of the prospect is perhap addressed by expectations we have for managing spotlights in the context of classrooms or networked teaching.

Q: To what extent are you thinking differently than a standard visual library?

A: On the design side, what’s crucial about our approach is the provision for a wide variety of activities, within the platform itself: curate, annotate, tell a story, present it… It’s a CMS or blogging platform as well. The annotation process includes bringing in content from outside of the environment. It’s a porous platform.

Q: To what extent can users suggest changes to the data model. E.g., Europeana has a very rigid data model.

A: We’d like a significant user contribution to metadata. [Linked Data!]

Q: Are we headed for a bifurcation of knowledge? Dedicated experts and episodic amateurs. Will there be a curator of curation? Am I unduly pessimistic?

A: I don’t know. If we can develop a system, maybe with Linked Data, we can have a more self-organizing space that is somewhere in between harmony and chaos. E.g., Wikimedia Loves Monuments is a wonderful crowd curatorial project.

Q: Is there anything this won’t do? What’s out of scope?

A: We’re not providing tools for creating animated gifs. We don’t want to become a platform for high-level presentations. [metaLab’s Zeega project does that.] And there’s a spectrum of media we’ll leave alone (e.g., audio) because integrating them with other media is difficult.

Q: How about shared search, i.e., searching other collections?

A: Great idea. We haven’t pursued this yet.

Q: Custodianship is not the same as meta-curation. Chris Daly could become a meta-curator. Also, there’s a lot of great art curation at Pinterist. Maybe you should be doing this on top of Pinterest? Maybe built spotlight tools for Pinteresters?

A: Great idea. We already do some work along those lines. This project happens to emerge from contact with a particular collection, one that doesn’t have an API.

Q: The fact that people are re-uploading the same images to Pinterest is due to the lack of standards.

Q: Are you going to be working on the vocabulary, or let someone else worry about that?

A: So far, we’re avoiding those questions…although it’s already a problem with the tags in this collection.

[Looks really interesting. I’d love to see it integrate with the work the Harvard Library Interoperability Initiative is doing.]

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