Posts Tagged ‘ information ’
From: Fictional Character Interactions Over Time | FlowingData.
This is pretty neat. My favorites are 12 Angry Men and Primer. Nothing like a time machine movie to screw with your straight lines, eh?
I can grasp that organizing information can bring about hidden connections between things, but at the same time can organization of materials also hide information? For example for a long time LC hid nuances of gender and race (it probably still does… ). I wonder if the pre-organization of information ala a library has become to some degree obsolete. With tagging and sorting features of most search engines / databases now the user selects how they would like the material organized. Yes, there still needs to be a framework of organization and meta-data in order to retrieve the information but the final context as to how the organization of the information makes sense is defined by the user.
Do users subconsciously expect this reordering of information to suit their needs, and thus have trouble using a library and its static organization of materials? I wonder…
Tags: context, discovery, information, libraries, organization, searching, usersI have heard about the slow food movement… I didn’t quite realize that it extended to other things such as travel and design (see here).
I wonder if there needs to be a movement for slow research? Currently it seems a lot of student research is whipped off the night before (we are all guilty of that…) I wonder if there is a way to instill a slow research process. One that allows from the serendipitous discovery of related materials either through the internet or browsing of books. I enjoy cruising the shelves for ideas… I am not sure students do. Have you ever used the search engine Banana Slug which throws a random word into the mix to help bring back serendipitous results? I have actually found related research materials for some of my projects using this. Perhaps slow writing would be a part of it. I guess ultimately it involves thinking and slowing down might allow people to think better and also the time to create and experiment.
Libraries are more and more trying to incorporate patron convenience and this might be analogous to the fast food conveniences that the slow food movement is reacting against… so do we need to be doing something different?
Tags: information, libraries, metaphors, philosophyA recent article in the Economist magazine points how Chinese scientists were able to discover the main biochemical pathways related to drug addiction without having to step in a lab or do an experiment. How did they do this? They data-mined the literature that already existed on the subject and identified the biochemical pathways from the fragmented info contained in research papers already published on the topic.
This type of research points out the value of open content as well as libraries, since libraries are places where access to multiple databases and materials are available on the same subject all in one place. No fuss, no muss.
Librarians once added content to research and scholarship through indexing, creating bibliographies, and maintaining clip files on topics. Much of that work has been replaced by search engines and databases. Perhaps data-mining might fill this void?
More info:
Going by the Book – The Economist (1/12/08): http://tinyurl.com/24eu5s
Tags: data mining, information, internet, libraries, service
Here is another library-related poster from the Advice to Sink in Slowly poster series I somehow missed.
Tags: foto, information, Pictureaccess art authors blog books coherence collections conferences context convenience design DIY education foto games information internet language layout librarians libraries metaphors music mystery names OnlineNW openworklibrary outreach philosophy Picture poems re-purpose reading searching service smart mobs social networks spaces technical technology Uncategorized video visual information Web2.0/Library2.0 words
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