I’m not sure if anyone’s still checking this blog, given the infrequency of my posting, but if you are, you might be interested in knowing that I’ve finally gotten my own space and have a new blog url.
Category: meta
about (1)
It is difficult to write a good short bio; it can be difficult to share a good detailed one. I doubt this will turn out to be either, but I feel like I should write one anyway. To put it euphemistically, I am currently “between things”; to put it more literally, I am currently on the job market. So I can’t yet rely on a job title to carry information about myself. Instead, I’ll say something about my background and my interests.
I have graduate training and experience (and masters degrees, even) in history, archives, and library and information studies. I also have work experience in journalism (I was an intern at Talking Points Memo) and open government/transparency (through an internship at the Sunlight Foundation). I’m interested in pretty much everything that goes with that background: history, archives, libraries, information and especially access to information, journalism, politics, government. I’d even say I’m interested in bureaucracy but I don’t want to sound boring.
In the last few years, I’ve also become really interested in computers and technology. I’m not going to chase every subject that has the word “digital” in it, but I’m certainly interested in digital preservation, digital archives, digital libraries, digital history and the digital humanities – you get the point. I’m learning to code and getting more and more comfortable with Linux (Ubuntu) and free and open source software every day. As someone who did a bit of programming in junior high and high school (Logo and Pascal, those were the days), but then spent years using computers mainly for word processing and web browsing, it’s been an interesting experience.
Anyway, this is my personal website and personal blog, and even though I could probably assign it a call number, give it a few subject headings, and place it in a taxonomy somewhere, I’m not going to classify it. The odds are pretty high that what I’ll write about will be consistent with the interests I’ve just talked about.
Since there’s not a lot of content here yet, you might want to check out these posts if you’re curious about my writing:
A post I wrote for my old blog reacting to Nicholas Carr’s original “Is Google Making Us Stupid” article. This is the only post from the old blog that I’ve copied over onto this blog. I just like it for some reason.
A “this day in history” post I wrote about the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution during World War II that appeared as a guest post at The Edge of the Aemrican West.
Something I wrote about Brandeis and the history of transparency at the end of my internship at the Sunlight Foundation a few years back.
And for the library crowd, something I wrote on my old blog about subject headings. This one might not sound the most exciting, but it was once called “high-quality library nerdery” on twitter, so there’s that.
Finally, a meta note: You may have noticed that this is an “about” post rather than an “about” page. I’m going to try a bit of an experiment. As time passes I’m likely to want to update my bio. Rather than keep changing the page, I’m going to write new “about” posts each time and then keep the old ones. This might not happen often, but it could be interesting. Four years ago I would not have even thought to mention computers and technology.
owned content
Generally, I wouldn’t consider a return to posting on my blog something worthy of announcement, but then I never expected to stop posting for over a year.* During that time I have gotten both busier academically and more involved in the world(s) of platform-based social media – specifically, facebook and twitter – and that’s taken away much of the time I would have had for the blog.
Since my growing dissatisfaction with those social media platforms (facebook in particular) is a big part of why I’m going to start blogging again, I’ll start this post with that.
I’ve been on both facebook and twitter since 2009, but never really made much use of them until last year. I was a late adopter on facebook; for various reasons, I had been actively not signing up. When I finally gave in, my first facebook update read:
“Am no longer completely avoiding facebook. Now I’m incompletely avoiding it.”
I did not post again for over a year. As for twitter, I’d read and posted sporadically from the time I signed up, but in the past six months I’ve finally started checking in and posting a bit more consistently.
In both cases, my increased usage came not from spending more time online, but from the growth of my own in-person social networks. I simply had met and gotten to know more people who were on twitter and facebook; it began to seem natural to spend more time there. Especially if I wanted to participate in some of the conversations that I knew were going on.
This is not to say that I’ve been using both services in the same way. Facebook for me tends to be more about literal “friend” relationships: I don’t run the apps that interact with other sites, don’t “like” or become a “fan” of organizations, and as a result pretty much everything I see comes from my friends – and most of that is simply stuff from everyday life. I also manage my privacy in ways that are more or less consistent with talking with groups of in-person friends.
I have some of that on twitter, but partly because of its public nature, and partly because of the asymmetry of follow/follower relationships I tend to use it more as a professional/academic/informational service. In fact, I originally signed up just because having an account made it easier to manage the “following” I was already doing via RSS (which I don’t think twitter supports anymore). Even though getting to know more people who happen to have twitter accounts was the big change that’s gotten me to use twitter more, the environment has always seemed a bit more distant to me, more like a public square. (I should add: I don’t see this as a bad thing.) This doesn’t mean I avoid all mentions of lunch or sandwiches, but it’s just never been a big part of how I tweet.
This may be why I’m generally more satisfied at the moment with twitter than with facebook, even though facebook is the more “social” (in the sense of socializing) place for me, as well as the service I’ve spent more time on. To lapse into cliche for a moment, I feel like I have a sense of what twitter is, and it is what it is. Twitter has stayed remarkably consistent over the years I’ve been on it, even down to the interface (for better or for worse). There have been a bunch of updates, but most of them have been aimed at making it easier to do the same things, or to pull some of those activities, like link shortening and photo posting, under twitter’s own umbrella, rather than leaving them to third party applications. But like the old twitter web interface, the new twitter has at its core a box at the top of the page for writing your tweets and a stream of posts below it.
After being a bit overwhelmed at first by the sheer volume of tweets, I’ve gotten used to just dipping into the stream when I get the chance, or checking at the end of the day and scrolling down for a bit, looking for interesting links and conversations. Sure, sometimes I wish there were better ways to follow threads of conversation that span more than two or three people, or I want to have a bit of extra space for a few more characters in my posts, but if I really want to write at length, there are other places for that.**
Facebook, on the other hand, I find both appealing and maddening; recent changes have tipped the scale towards maddening. On the plus side, it’s proven surprisingly effective as a place simply to “hang out” (even despite not being a google plus-style “hangout”), and it’s been great for maintaining contact with people I don’t see much in person anymore. The posts are capped at just enough characters (420) to make me feel like I can express something on many (but not all) occasions when I feel expressive, and they’ve done a good job integrating photos with the text boxes and links.
In fact, the photo handling, while not at the level of flickr or other photo-specific sites, is better than anything I’ve found on the (free) blogger and wordpress services. And the reciprocal nature of my “friend” relationships means I’m not just interacting with real people, but I can actually see that happening – whereas blogging sometimes has the feel of posting bills on a wall along a crowded street, even when I know people are reading (silently).
So what’s the problem? It’s not the advertising, which I actually don’t see a lot of. I don’t begrudge facebook the need to make money. It’s also not really the proprietary nature of the system: twitter has the same issue with respect to the underlying platform, though of course most tweets are publicly viewable to anyone. It’s not even the privacy issues; I’m not happy with the ways facebook has rolled out new features, but I recognize that the settings have gotten more precise and fine-grained over time. They’re probably more complicated than they need to be, so there’s a learning curve, but they seem to work for me.
No, the big issue for me is the lack of control you’re given over what you contribute to the site. (Again, twitter has this same issue, but the ways I limit my usage there mean I run into these frustrations less often.) This runs all the way from the initial composition of an update to the management of what’s already been posted.
I get that facebook has broken down many of the barriers that may have been keeping people off of the interactive web: anyone can post a link there and not have to worry about those “<a href>” tags or even the location of the “embed link” button in an editor. But sometimes I just want some fully-enabled html. Sure, there are some unicode workarounds for things like strikethrough, but it’s not easy to format text. Or say I want to post two links in one update: only one will be given facebook’s automatically-generated “preview” link. Sure, I can post the second link as a comment on the first, but that seems silly, and anyway, if more than a few comments get posted on that thread, facebook will automatically hide the one with link under a “see more” tag once it’s considered an “old” comment. And don’t even bother trying to post a link to match a particular word in an update: the lack of enabled html rules that out as well.
The result is that facebook (and again, twitter) is, from a page design perspective, pretty much a monotonous, homogeneous stream, with only the particulars of links, photos, and raw text changing among the mass of pre-set elements. Unlike blogs, or even e-mail, there is no title or header or subject line: there’s just a text box. I’m a fan of the bloggy rhetorical style that involves juxtaposing a title with a short bit of text in the body of the post (often containing a link); this is impossible on a platform like facebook. Long posts are possible, but only if they’re formed as so-called “notes,” which aren’t well-integrated with the rest of the system. And forget about using categories or tags.*** Bulk management of previous updates is essentially impossible: want to change the settings on a bunch of posts, or maybe delete them? You can do it, but you have to do it one at a time. Your best bet for searching for content is to scroll down a bunch of times to extend the page and then use ctrl-f (or its equivalents).
The recent changes are the last straw for me. As John Battelle writes, facebook is positioning itself to be even more of a storyteller: the words may be the users’ own, but the structure of the narrative and to a very real extent its main content will be up to the platform. This has long been true of the mysteriously-generated “top news” viewing option available on user’s facebook page, but until the re-design users had the alternative of selecting a “recent changes” option that provided, in reverse chronological order, everything they wanted to see from their friends. I never really understood how the top news worked: occasionally it would highlight for me some conversation I had missed on an older post on some friend’s wall, but most of the time it pushed to the top updates that the facebook algorithms must have deemed popular (whether or not they interested me) while burying other updates I wanted to see. I used the chronological option almost exclusively.
Now, apparently, everything a user sees on the front page is going to be like “top news” and it drives me crazy. On the reading side, I often have no idea why something has been pushed to the top of my page, and I end up missing things I want to see. Facebook offers a new option to mark stories in such a way that supposedly indicates that you want to see more like them, but there’s no explanation for how it determines similarity: if I mark something because it’s well-written, will it get filed as “about music” instead? Who knows?
I’ve noticed that facebook won’t even put some things I post on my own front page. (That is, I log in and go to facebook.com and I don’t see them, no matter how far I scroll down.) They do get posted to my profile (technically, my “wall”) in the same way as before, and some friends have reported seeing some of them on their front pages. But why should I share something if I don’t know that it will reach the people I’d like to share it with? How can I refer to the chronology of what I post if the lack of chronology in subsequent presentation means that my posts will appear out of order, if they appear at all for some friends? By taking control of the content this way, facebook has both weakened the bonds of reciprocity that have kept me on the site and stripped the platform of some of the few ways a user could express individuality through narrative. The system has inched towards the model of posting bills along a crowded street – and the users can use only one type of printing press.
In claiming that this new Facebook will tell the “story of your life”, it’s like they took this passage from Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (hey, it’s an embedded link) as a model, not a warning (hey, it’s an enabled blockquote):
It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all–though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage–may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves!
So I’ve decided to re-exercise just a little bit of the control I used to have over my own personally-generated content and bring back this blog. It’s still on the wordpress.com free platform, which may make it a part of what Battelle is calling the dependent web, but it still offers far more flexibility than I’ve found on a micro-blogging platform. Maybe some day I’ll be ready to move onto my own domain. I’ve been considering it.
In the meantime, after thinking about it for a while, I just can’t delete my facebook account outright: I still like the in-the-moment social aspect, and I want to keep my network. But I’m reducing my own personal footprint: pulling photos and old posts, not signing up for any services that will share things that I don’t explicitly choose to share. Some of that data will no doubt live on behind the scenes, but I just don’t trust them enough to keep sharing more.
Anyway, I’ve gone on far too long here, probably as a reaction to being cooped up for so long in walled worlds with strict character limits. So I’ll just say that the “gotten busier” part of my year away from this blog to which I briefly referred above largely comes down to this: I’ve decided to revive my history phd. I still have a couple of terms left on my archives and library degrees, which means that for the time being I’m working on three degrees at once. More on that later.
*If you’re looking at your RSS feeds and wondering where this post came from, hi! I hope this blog will continue to provide whatever it was that led you to subscribe in the first place, if you can remember that.
**In fact, I’m usually in danger of writing too much when given the chance. This post is probably a good example of that.
***You can “tag” people, but that’s more like identifying or notifying them; it’s not a subject system or taxonomy or anything like that.
levels of knowledge
Being in school again has me thinking about what it means to know something. Not because of anything covered in any one course, but because of the fact of the courses themselves. When you’re out of school, if you read something, and you have reason to believe you understand what you’ve learned from it, you can act as if you know that information without too much hesitation. Of course that knowledge, like most knowledge, is provisional: you could be misunderstanding it, or the source itself could be wrong. Just because you believe you know something doesn’t mean you’re beyond correction. You might qualify your statement when you present that knowledge – “I remember reading a study” – and you might ask someone with more expertise if what you know is true, but you generally don’t feel as if you need some sort of external approval to demonstrate that you really know it.
It’s different in school, where there are systems of evaluation set up to periodically evaluate your knowledge. Read a book about subject A outside of work and there’s not much you have to do aside from finish the book to believe that you’ve learned and now know something additional about A. Read the same book for class and you might have the same belief about your knowledge – but until you’ve finished the coursework evaluation process, it will seem less settled.
Why am I bringing this up now? Aside from the fact that I’ve been struck by how differently I approach what I know depending on whether it’s part of an education program or not and simply think that is interesting, I am also going to be writing a bit about subjects related to my program. So I want to emphasize that this blog reflects the fact that I am in the process of learning. There are certain risks involved in showing one’s learning process in a public forum, but I hope that in writing about what I am learning, I’ll be able to give others at least a partial idea of what the library and archives fields are about. You can learn along with me.
For example, if I don’t have time to get into details, I tell people I’m in library school. People usually know libraries and they have some understanding of what librarians do, so library school doesn’t sound like anything that out of the ordinary. But I’m not just in library school; I’m also in an archives program (it’s a joint degree, so I’m in both). And people are less familiar with archives and what archivists do. I plan to write a post about the difference between the two – that is, between libraries and archives – but it turns out that the definition of an archive is quite particular – as is the definition of a record – and something that you have to learn carefully, even if you know, under general knowledge, what archives are, have done historical research in them, and don’t find the idea of “archives school” completely foreign to you.
shifting focus
For the first time in about three years, I have a fairly good idea of what I’ll be doing for the next three years: I’m going to be attending library school at the University of British Columbia in the joint masters program in library/archives. (I’ve actually known this for a few months, but never got around to mentioning it.) So to the extent that I’m still blogging, I’ll probably start discussing related topics in addition to whatever it is that I’ve been doing.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on shifting my reading habits: more history; more about information, broadly speaking, less day-to-day news. Over the last couple of years, I’ve become somewhat of a news junkie in my spare time – I even did an internship where I was supposed to be a sort of news junkie in my working time – but now that I have other reading projects to pursue, plus skills I’m trying to maintain or acquire, I’ve been slowly cutting back. I’m starting to feel so uninformed about topics over which I have no influence, like the details of legislative proposals on health care which will almost certainly be enacted, if they ever are, in a form different than whatever I could have read about today. I’m not dropping to a level of Yahoo headlines only, but I’ve reduced the number of blogs I read daily. On the other hand, I’m now reading many of the Vancouver Sun‘s feeds.
Oh, and while I’m mentioning things from a while back that I never got around to writing about here (but did mention on twitter), over at the Sunlight Foundation’s blog you can read something I wrote last month about Brandeis and the history of transparency. It was originally supposed to be the first of two or three posts but I simply ran out of time before my internship ended. I really got into the research – it was very kind of the people at Sunlight to allow me to indulge in my historical interests – and now that I’m taking a university class this summer here in California, I can get into an academic library again. So maybe I’ll pick up that thread over here. (I suppose I already have, in a way.)
not good
The sounds my laptop fan – I hope it’s just the fan – is making lead me to believe it’s nearing the point of unusability. On the other hand, the actual computer processing seems to be more or less that same (heat aside) so maybe it won’t be a problem when I’m at my apartment and can use the external fan I got last year when the internal fan was just becoming an issue. Even before today that annoyingness of the fan noise has been leading me to use my computer than I used to; I rarely take it with me outside of the apartment.
I’m going back to California in less than a month and I think I still have a month or two left on the warranty. Hopefully whatever it is that’s wrong can get fixed, because I haven’t been planning on buying a new laptop for a while.
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I started following blogs to read and comment. Then I started blogging. The same thing might happen with twitter, though I don’t know how often I plan to update. It certainly will make the small number of feeds I started following in the last few weeks a bit easier to read.
It’s funny, I signed up for Facebook a couple of months ago but don’t think I’ll ever do much with it (last sign-in: a couple of months ago) except accept the occasional friend request. But twitter is less demanding and has more of a public character; I’ll probably end up using it more than I expect.
design in darkness
Having started out, some time ago, as a Blogger blogger, I appreciate how much better – I’d say more intuitive, but I’m not sure whether blogs are intuitive at all – WordPress is for free blogging. I’m not sure what Blogger looks like now, but in those days there were no automatic options for categories/tags, everything had to be put into the template manually beyond the defaults, there were no comments feeds, you could upload/embed media but it took more than clicking a few buttons, etc. And the system wasn’t all that reliable.
All this is to say that I haven’t considered going to another platform for years, and since I’m not prepared to get my own domain and hosting – doesn’t seem worth it at my level of readership/posting frequency/use – I’m not going anywhere. But I’d really like some more flexibility with the theme. I know there are security reasons for disabling javascript, so while it’s frustrating not to be able to add some outside widgets, I’m ok with that. And I know you can edit the CSS if you buy an upgrade. WordPress helpfully provides themes where you can mess with the CSS and preview your designs, but you can’t save them without paying for the privilege. But I’m not looking to do anything that extensive.
I’ve been unhappy with my old theme for quite a while. The front page looked fine, but the archive and category pages didn’t display the full posts – just excerpts, ellipses, and links to the rest of the content. So last night I finally decided to mess around with the built-in themes.
All I want in a theme is the following:
- Customizable header for an image. A blog called “by the wayside” needs a picture of some kind of landscape, preferably with some kind of road in it.
- No italics for blockquotes. I know you can mess with the span style tags to do this manually, but it’s a pain to have to enter extra code each time you blockquote. You should be able to toggle the italics on or off and blockquote with the same one-click button every time – that’s what the button is there for.
- Full display of posts in the archive/category pages. As a bonus, “more” tags could be expanded automatically in the old pages, but it’s not a big deal.
That’s it. You’d be surprised how few themes satisfy these three requirements. But some do, so I don’t know what the excuse is for so many others not doing so. (They don’t all have to be this way.) There are quite a few themes with custom headers, but few of those made it past the blockquote/archive problems.
I think I’m ok with the new theme I’ve picked now. The header’s a bit thinner, so I found a new image. It’s a bit cluttered because of the cropping, but I think it works. I might pick something else later if it catches my eye.
I wonder if they mention RSS
From an article that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago:
In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
I’m posting this without having finished the article yet, so great is the need for immediacy.
about
I decided to put up an “about” page.