Last week was the annual Lazerow lecture at the Information School. This year’s was given by Gary Marchionini on Human Computer Information Retrieval. It was an interesting talk, about building search engines and how people who are more involved in searching can get better results.
Leilani (the vice chair of UW ASIS&T) taped the lecture, and you can watch it here. Due to the way that the site pages are organized, you’ll have to scroll down to the lecture if you’re viewing this page in the future. It was given on 2005-10-16. The slide deck from Gary’s similar HCIR talk at MIT is online, in case you want to find out what the talk is about before jumping in.
There’s a fascimile edition of John Wilkin’s An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language available at Amazon.
Scans of the book’s content are available, as is a description at Wikipedia, but the best explanation of it is probably Borges’ The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. The most recent popularization of it was probably in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, where John Wilkins is a character.
The UW has a copy of the original in Special Collections, and an earlier fascimile edition from 1968. I’d recommend looking at the facsimile one if you have the time. I’m desirous of a fascimile copy of my own, because it’s fascinating and because I have this image of Wilkins as the ultimate erudite crank.
I’d read a bunch of people write in the past how ‘blogging’ a conference enriched their understanding of the material covered in the talks that they went to, so when I saw the ASIS&T conference make a call for bloggers, I signed up. During the conference, my posts will be visible here. After the conference, I’ll post here whether it changed my impressions. I really enjoyed last year’s conference, and I’m looking forward to it.
asist2005
Sosostris is a project taking place the day after thanksgiving in Seattle, WA
Sosostris, the wicked pack of cards, is a project taking place in Seattle the day after Thanksgiving. It ‘s an combination of Buy Nothing day, the derive of the situationalists, and a random factor introduced by having cards to interact. The cards were inspired by the Gyft project.
Sosostris will build an experiental map of Seattle’s downtown area on a single day. This map will be based on Psychogeography, which is the study of how places affect people’s minds. People will draw cards, and walk a block, enter a store, or interact with people around them on the basis of what it says on the card.
How to Participate
Make a team. The team is handy so that you can all talk about what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
Come to an undisclosed location on the day after Thanksgiving. The location will be disclosed later.
GET PACKED!. We’ll give you a pack of cards. These cards contain a series of instructions that you’re welcome to interpret however you like. You need to bring a pen so that you can mark up the cards on the fly.
GET OUT!. The next instruction is to GET OUT!, which means you should go into the Sosostris zone (zozone) at a location of your choice and start interacting with people and places.
GET BACK!. After you’ve gone out and interacted with people for a while. come back to the undisclosed location and turn in your cards. You can get more cards, you can hang out with us for a while and talk about what you’ve seen.
Sosotris will kick off at noon on the day after Thanksgiving.
Why The Day After Thanksgiving
For those of you who don’t know, one of the things that I’ve been doing outside of school these years is serving on the board of what’s currently unfortunately called the PNW LLC Thingie. This board was elected by a large community to form an LLC to do a number of things, potentially including arts grants, curating art events, building community centers, overseeing events, and other things.
It has meetings every other Thursday, and the various committees on topics like naming, board representation, and stuff like that. It’s an organic outgrowth of stuff that’s been going on for the last couple of years, and I think that it will grow to be useful and powerful over time. At the moment, the wheels are grinding exceedingly fine, though.
pnwllc
I’m going to ASIS&T‘s national conference this year. I really enjoyed it last year, and it changed my perceptions of the field a great deal — both what I was interested in and what I wanted to get out of school. I’m hoping that this conference is as interesting.
It has a upcoming reference here, for those of you who are fond of upcoming. If you’re going, feel free to drop me a line.
asist2005
This document is from the Renascence Texts collection at UOregon. It’s useful for a project that I’m working on (and hope to have time to get back to at some point in the future.) OTOH, imagine trying to retrieve this document through an information retrieval system.
By the Queene.
A Proclamation agaynst the maintenaunce of Pirates.
THE Queenes Maiestie vnderstandeth, that although by her former commaundementes notified by proclamation to all her subiectes, and namely to her officers in her Portes, for the staying, ceassing, and suppressing of all occasions of piracies: yet some numbers of vessels armed with certayne disordered persons mixt of sundry nations, do still haunt the narowe seas, and resort secretly into small Creekes and obscure places of this Realme for reliefe of vitayles, and suche lyke: And for their better defence to escape apprehension, do colourably pretende that they be licenced to serue on the seas, and are not to be accompted culpable as pirates. (more…)
I’ve added, with some reluctance, tagging to this journal. To commemorate this fact, I somewhat less than helpfully will tag this post with the tag tagging
Today, we were talking for a while about why Capitalization might be important in an information retrieval system. One reason is that for different words that are spelled the same (or the same word that has different definitions, depending on your dictionary), there can be different meanings depending on the Caps, and you might want to factor that in.
Here are some examples
china: In capitalized form, it refers to a country; in lowercase form, it refers to a form of porcelain or dishware made thereof.
aids: Aids are helpful, AIDS certainly is not.
ira: Ira is a male first name (as in Ira Glass), IRA is the Irish Republican Army.
it: ‘it’ is a pronoun in English and IT is an abbreviation for Information Technology.
lox: ‘Lox’ is smoked salmon, and LOX is liquid oxygen. Only one of these is at all good for bagels.
dos: DOS is a primordial operating system, and ‘dos’ is spanish for two.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that words are capitalized at the beginning on sentences, obviously. The customary solution is to search against lowercase but to display to the user the results as they exist in the original document.