Brandymore Castle

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake. The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, ...

Tag clouds are dead. I don't want to mince words. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to say so, to let everyone see the elephant in the living room. What interests me is why tag clouds are dead. About ten years ago I was working on a prototype web application. It never saw the light of day. But it was called Strands and consisted of a wiki-like content management system that allowed anyone (it was based on SoftSecurity) to create pages, to post and edit content. Any author could include single keywords in the text. These would be automatically scooped up and entered into an index. You could display the posts associated with (containing) any keyword listed on a page like search results. The idea was that content could be navigated in any number of ways according to keywords added by users. It's wasn't social. It didn't know the user who contributed the keyword. The idea was to destroy hierarchy and create a user centered order to information, something clo...

One of my longtime interests has been how to create a system that captures the knowledge of experts and refines it into a single resource. I was attracted to wikis early on by their communal authorship, but found the lack of structure unsuitable for my needs. What I wanted, for two of my early efforts, one a site intended to help family photography historians answer questions about old photographs and the other a site for programmers to find help with coding questions, was a way to let users engage in a Q and A and then somehow capture and distill the expertise into a more traditional article format (like a wiki page), which could be maintained by everyone. I wanted to capture the expertise emerging from the group discussion through some mechanism. I ended up developing a content management system for the coding site, which had the ability to "fold" a comment thread attached to an article back into the article for editing. I also developed a tool, which could take a forum thr...

There has been a flurry recently inspired by Michael Pollan writing about a vision of people becoming producers and consumers in society. He argues that industrialization created a division in society between producer and consumer, with the consumer essentially at the mercy of producers. I've thought about how once there were many producers of food, but as agriculture industrialized, we began to call the things we did "industries," a hog farm became the hog industry, wheat farming became the grain industry, raising beef became the cattle industry. All the little myriad farms producing our food were replaced by large commodity farms based on economy of scale through centralization and industrialization (the use of petrochemical fertilizer, mechanized harvesting). Some of the changes introduced by industry have been useful, for example frozen peas are by and large much better quality than fresh or canned peas. Peas must be picked at the very peak of sweetness, which only la...

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view." I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths. Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online geneal...

I develop the platform for the folkstreams.net website, which is a non-profit archive for rare folklore documentary films. We transfer the films to video and then stream them to the web so they are not lost, molding in some archive never to be seen. Many of our films have not been seen for twenty years or more, one was rescued from a barn. As such, we are strong advocates of open access to archives (and I am happy to learn many other institutions in the folklore world also understand how important access is to a sustainable archive and are using the web in wonderful ways). To the point. It has always been important for our films to be presented in context. I have always believed that media without context is meaningless, whether that is a family photograph or a documentary film. A photographic image is merely an interesting composition without the information necessary to understand it, to interpret it. All images must be read...oddly enough, since they are the seeming opposite of text...