Once a month, we get together to have drinks, chat, network, and geek out with fellow information architects, librarians, usability experts, user experience designers, and other like-minded user-centered professionals and students. It’s open to anyone, so bring a friend — especially those in other local organizations! The format will be casual, but all are encouraged to bring something to discuss — recent work, an interesting topic, or even your resume. This event is organized by the Pacific Northwest chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.

What: Seattle Monthly Information Architecture Meetup
http://ia.meetup.com/57
Where: Elysian Pub, 1221 E. Pike St., Seattle, WA
When: 7-10pm, May 13th (2nd Tuesday of every month)

This and the next several are when the students will come in a big drove most likely, so if you’re looking to hire new grads in the information professions, it’s a good bet.

Aaron and Kristen graciously cooked food for the lot of us, and we had a great initial planning meeting in which we identified roles and people responsible for roles, and then talked for a bit about the future of the ASIS&T PNW. I’m very much looking forward to doing another InfoCamp with this team, it should be a lot of fun.

We’re looking to have a much easier time this year since we have the experience of doing the conference last year, and are also starting much earlier in the year with our planning. It will continue to be an unconference serving (primarily) the PNW Information Science community.

My session was called “Thesaurus, Ontology, and Inference” and was about the benefits you get from having a minimal amount of semantic data associated with documents — mostly exposing metadata that’s already present in the system and some things you can do with it. I think my presentation confused a bunch of people because I had to cut so much information out (my session was compressed from 60 minutes to 10 for various reasons), but we’ll see how it plays in the long run. I think there’s a lot of difference in the assumptions that I make based on previous work experience and what the IAs/IxDs in the audience have from their work experience. At any rate, got some decent feedback for refining the presentation.

I made it to about half the sessions I wanted, keeping folks moving in the right direction was a time-consuming project. Low time between interrupts, but a lot of good fun. It was especially fun talking to an audience and getting people to introduce their sessions, and I also had a lot of valuable hallway conversations with people. One particular thing I found was a good venue for publishing professional work other than the one I have already, and the fact that there’s a difference in focus between the two helps, so what isn’t wanted by one may be by another.

All in all, I really enjoyed being one of five people running this conference, it was a great time with a great group of people… I look forward to this community growing.

There’s a relation, though, between the different terms in this sort of classification and the training data used to build the Bayesian Classifier. If the terms are arranged in a hierarchy (and certain assumptions are made about that hierarchy, like subterms encompassing part of the range of meaning of their parent term and nothing else)², then the training data used for classifying terms can be shared.

For example, all positive training data that belongs to the child terms can also be used for the parent. So, for (a constructed) example, positive training data for tamiflu also belongs in the positive data for bird flu vaccines. The reverse is true of negative training data. For negative data, the negative data for the parent can also be used for the child terms.

This is highly useful information when you’re making a large scale text classifier (and having it classify texts as belonging to categories or not, as opposed to just clustering texts into the categories that actually appear. It’s easier to use things like bayesian classifiers do to this if you’re looking for somewhat fine-grained detail.

Currently, I’ve been using Classifier4J for doing the classification and text summarization³. The text summarization is sort of annoying, though, because it’s based on a simple statistical choice of sentences which occasionally picks up date-lines and partial phrases because of what’s ‘important.’ I’m resorting the urge to go completely POS-tagging nuts on the whole thing and only selecting sentences of certain types or completeness because this is, after all, a side project. (The number of times I see things like ‘this sentence no verb.’ is astounding, though, and slowly driving me nuts.)

So, another day in the life.

¹ although i’m also using a vector space classifier for a related, larger project and it’s driving me less nuts training it.
² this is called a meronymous (’part-of’) relationship, and given that half the people who regularly read this blog were in LIS530 or its equivalent at some point, you should remember this.
³ and will probably eventually switch to jNBC http://jbnc.sourceforge.net/ before i go nuts

What: Seattle Monthly Meet-up, organized by the Pacific Northwest chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.
http://asistpnw.org
Where: Elysian Pub, 1221 E. Pike St., Seattle, WA
When: 7-10pm, 2nd Thursday of every month

Once a month, we’ll get together to have drinks, chat, network, and geek out with fellow information architects, librarians, usability experts, user experience designers, and other like-minded people. It’s open to anyone, so bring a friend — especially those in other local organizations! The format will be casual, but all are encouraged to bring something to discuss — recent work, an interesting topic, or even your resume.

See you there!
-Aaron

So, I’m not going to go into details yet — that would be jumping the gun, but I think that we’ve got something very exciting lined up. We’d talked previously about how we can best revitalize the chapter, which had been faltering somewhat in recent years. I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far — the ‘Information People Get-Together’ that we’ve had the last two months at the Elysian has been going well, and the way we’re planning to run this conference (unconference style, with ask later sessions similar to Ignite Seattle’s) will be fun, exciting, and informative for folks. We’re on target for our goals, consistent in message, and serving our identified audience.

About that last sentence. (One of) The real benefit(s) from being at the iSchool for me was getting more in line with the User Centered view of the universe. Before the school, I had been largely feature/product/use case oriented (largely as a result of many years of dev background with light project management), and I think the iSchool helped better my sense of the overall context — both social and technical — in which systems exist and are created.

The last several months have been integrative of all the different things I’ve learned in different periods of my life. Someone remarked to me the other day (@ the ASIST Info Social Hour) that I sound like a consultant, but it sounds to me like I’ve integrated all the different things I know.

Microsoft has made a kit available for Sharepoint that makes it easier to have taxonomy and tagging.  The tagging allows authors to tag items and to also have controlled vocabularies on particular multi-valued properties.  Users can incorporate the controlled vocabularies into searches and also search by tags. 

In the default configuration, users cannot tag items on the fly (although I suspect that they could change taxonomy values if they have permissions.)

I used to work (engineering) at an ECM company, so using the phrase ‘controlled vocabulary’ in place of taxonomy for this is somewhat second nature.  Since I took a lot of classification classes at the Information School, it’s interesting to see how companies implement these concepts.  It could be interesting if these features became widely available in Sharepoint.

Technorati Tags: msft, sharepoint, controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, tagging, ecm

So, the goal of the document is consistent subject indexing through making a guide to the document analysis and concept identification stages of the indexing process. To what degree is consistency possible, likely, or desirable?

Certainly some consistency is useful. As users of this index are (presumably) part of a domain or community of practice that actually exists out in the world somewhere, they probably have a common shared vocabulary that they use to describe things and the index should reflect that as much as possible. But, if you interchange between different groups of people, they will probably have different vocabularies for the same (or similar) things, and parts of documents analyzed may be more or less important, causing the subject of the document to change (with regard to the other groups.)

Depending on the type and scope of documents and the vocabulary used, indexer consistency may be quite low. In some ways, this mirrors the usual problems of recall versus precision when trying to retrieve information from a system. If the indexer has a relatively small set of terms that they’re choosing from, or is only trying to cover things in the broadest of terms, then it is easier to come up with common terms than if they’re creating their own terms on the fly or are trying to be very specific.

It isn’t clear, however, that lack of consistency between indexers is actually a bad thing. As long as the users are well-supported in their searches, which is the point of this exercise, why does it matter if the results are nonstandard. In section 1.4, they indicate that they’re specifically trying to standardize practice rather than results.

This entry is part of my ongoing blog entry series on specs and standards, done largely so I have reference to my thoughts later on. It’s also put up with the expectation that it will be helpful to other people. You’re welcome to comment on this, and I may make new versions of this document later that incorporate other remarks or just reflect my changing understanding. One particular note is that I won’t send you a copy of this spec — you should buy it or get it from your local (university) library.

To some extent, it was a marketingish presentation, although as you can see JW is particularly rife with geek cred.

So, the notes:

ARGs tell stories interactively. The premise began for them, based on the Kubrick/Spielberg movie AI, because they’d been licensed to make a number of games based on the product, but the movie wasn’t particularly given to making games. Instead of making games based on the movie itself, they made it based on the universe that the movie took place in.

Their question was, how to tell that story. But they came up with an idea based on the narrative structure organic to the web.

I’m not sure I didn’t replace Jordan’s point with one of my own here: Different models of disseminating information have different methods of telling stories that are organic to them; bards, epic poetry (e.g. Iliad, Odyssey); books, novels; television, sitcoms; movies, summer blockbusters; What is the native activity of the internet at time circa now? JW says looking through a ton of crap looking for relevant partial pieces of information.

What if one were tell stories through scattered shards of information? Deconstruct a narrative, create all the evidence that the story had taken place, and then hide the evidence and throw away the story.

What is the device on which this story will be told? The ‘media sphere,’ which JW describes as ‘all devices with electricity and some without,’ but I think it’s easier to say all information-bearing objects, here, which is a metaphor from InfoSci that is similar in scope.

This is essentially a community effort, the people who take place in the exploration form a ‘hivemind‘ in response to finding shards, and tell stories to each other. The story goes from being the original narrative to being a consensus narrative that comes from the audience’s experience.

The community effect produced is that the hivemind has every skill on the planet, and it can go everywhere and do everything and anything. It has essentially any skill on the planet. It is also, by that same factor, smarter than the people writing the game.

Sample: Ilovebees

• Use life as a game board — it took place all over the world.
• radio drama told on payphones — fragments of the story were released as people talked
• Name of game… campaign for prerelease of Halo 2

This is, in its essence, pop culture hacking, it’s about about the audience crwating fiction and inseminating your references into their everyday consciousness. However, this is against the everyday experience of marketing staff — they want to put up as much collateral as possible and advertise it’s existence as widely as possible to get as many people to notice as possible. But that turns out to not work well with getting people to want to experience this, what you want to do is draw people down the rabbit hole.

How to get audience in? Spend time creating content, not telling them about it.
Allow communication about shards of content to draw people in… People will start looking with a few small clues.

highlights of their work
All of their big campaigns have led to marriages, because collaborate and share rahter than compete, story drives communities, competition drives individualism. This is, to a large extent, their goal — the building of a temporary community, possibly tied to awareness of some product or service that people make them make the game for. It’s an interesting balance between entertainment, advertising, and ‘using the real world as the gameboard.’

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

William Gibson’s Pattern recognition was a tip of the hat to I love bees. I’m wondering if WG’s perception of ARG makes this a must-read for anyone interested in ARGs. I’m probably going to pick up the book in the next couple of weeks to find out. If anyone has any opinions on that, please feel free to let me know via email or comment.

One thing that JW mentioned at the end of his talk, and I suspect that this was a deliberate seed effort of his, was to say that if you were in front of the Bellagio during CES on 1/6/2007, you might see something interesting in the fountains. Anyway, in the spirit of thanking him for coming to the event, I thought I’d pass this on.

Technorati Tags: alternaterealitygames, community, deconstructednarrative, dorkbotsea, ilovebees, rabbithole, socialengineering, storytelling

Certainly, there are some pretty good arguments for the unconscious mind affecting the conscious, but how far can you really take this sort of thing?

Neal Stephenson, who has used Bicameralism as a plot device, was the first person who came to mind, so I flipped through Cryptonomicon looking for stuff that met Scott Adams description of the techniques. A bunch of the lengthy digressions that sort of litter Cryptonomicon are full of the sort of appeal to the senses that Adams describes, which makes me wonder whether it was a deliberate technique for manipulation or just an accident of style. Some apparently would claim that Tolkein did something similar.

It makes me wonder how much of all this is tied to the overall topic of framing the message, though.

Technorati Tags: civilization, cryptonomicon, discontents, framingthemessage, hypnosis, lakoff, scottadams