Interarchive currently consists of two working groups:
- Interarchive general
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This group focuses on a model for distributed publication, including the XML structure required for this paradigm.
- Recognition Metrics
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This group focuses on devising innovative methods to visualize and assess the search returns resulting from the distributed publication paradigm.
An online essay by Interarchive member Jon Ippolito on the mismatch between traditional approaches to preservation, property, and professorship. The discussion of "artists versus academics" lays out a number of the flaws inherent in the current system of academic recognition that Interarchive hopes to overcome. The site includes numerous links to examples and resources, including tools for creating Web pages for academics willing to wean themselves from PowerPoint.
Maine Intellectual Commons
An initiative by the University of Maine to establish open standards for creative and scholarly access. The site features archived audio, video, and slides from the November 2004 "Conference on the Intellectual Commons," which includes presentations on the value of open access publication and new models for supercharging online creativity via open licenses and networks.
New Standards for New Media
A collaborative Web site (wiki) that invites contributions from all stakeholders in the debate over academic criteria for recognizing new media research. The results are released under a Creative Commons license for re-editing and re-publication.
REFRESH! summit on media art databases
Notes from the archiving and database session of the REFRESH! post-conference summit.
The Interarchive distributed publication working group is exploring an exciting paradigm that would let individual artists archive rich citations for their work on their own Web sites, and then those data could be harvested by museums and search engines after the fact. There aren't enough professional archivists to answer the growing need voiced by artists and writers in the new media community, so such a system would help distribute the work to those with the most incentive to do it. And it would be a "point-to-point" recognition metric, sidestepping middlemen like journals and museums--thus avoiding the positive feedback loop created when credibility comes from affiliation with an established institution.
This system would:
- Scale with the number of users.
- Distribute the workload to those with the most incentive.
- Result in productive redundancy between self-archived citations and copies in open repositories.
- Permit multiple metrics developed by third parties.
- Encourage metrics to be emergent from the community rather than imposed in a top-down fashion.
The artists, musicians, and writers who navigate through Creative Commons' "choose a license" interface are rewarded with a pretty icon and a snippet of XML they can paste into their own Web page. Meanwhile, in the background, an automated harvester indexes occurrences of the Creative-Commons flavor of XML on Web pages throughout the Internet. Finally, someone who wants to find Creative Commons-licensed material can use the Creative Commons search engine (now Yahoo) to find any of these pages that match a certain criterion.
The distributed publication scheme is an extrapolation of this technology, but instead of a choose-your-license interface, this system might generate and harvest "rich links"--that is, citations of online art or scholarship with more metadata than your average hyperlink. Such metadata might address content (eg, via a folksonomy) and/or value (eg, by rating the link 1 to 10). For example, you might score low an article or artwork you are citing merely to review the literature, but highly a work you are citing because all of your research is based on that precedent. The links might refer to specialized data relations (such as the link between an artwork and the corresponding entry in the variable media database) or more generic associations (one artwork could link to another as precedent).
The link generator interface would facilitate the embedding of these rich links in online publications (perhaps by adding metadata to a link via a bookmarklet). The real benefit would become visible (quite literally) through a variety of recognition metrics that can be applied to the search returns. Proposing these metrics is the job of the job of the Recognition Metrics group.
This diagram shows the cycle of auto-archiving, harvesting, and searching, as well as the interrelation of individual users and official archivists.
Motivation
This diagram suggests the incentives driving the Interarchive cycle.
The Recognition Metric working group is charged with proposing more nuanced measures of online influence. This can be seen as adding the last piece to the Distributed Publication puzzle: how are search returns configured in response to a researcher's query? Can we use the data from a distributed publication scheme to draw contextual "influence clouds" that visualize the vectors of influence online better than a list of names with numbers next to them?
- contextual (relative to the subculture being measured).
- multiple (applicable to more than one subculture).
- variable (reflecting changes over shorter timescales than a global metric).
- net-native (emergent from the Internet rather than predetermined by affiliations with brick-and-mortar institutions).
- Alain Depocas
- Jon Ippolito
- Caitlin Jones
- Roger Malina
- Richard Rinehart
- Christian Berndt
- Sylvia Borda
- Annick Bureaud
- Wendy Coones
- Sean Cubitt
- Marcus Cuzziol
- Dieter Daniels
- Rudolf Frieling
- Oliver Grau
- Genco Gulan
- Ryszard Kluszcynski
- Gunalan Nadarajan
- Minna Tarkka
- Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology
- Database of Virtual Art
- Media Art Net
- MIT Press
- Still Water at the University of Maine
- UC Berkeley Center for New Media
To join the Recognition Metrics email list, send an email to ude.yelekreb.stsil@omodrojaM with the message, "subscribe recognition-metrics YourEmailAddressHere". After subscribing, post email to this list at: ude.yelekreb.stsil@scirtem-noitingocer.
To leave either list, follow the instructions above, but change "subscribe" to "unsubscribe".
Interarchive
How ThoughtMesh distributes and connectsThe response to ThoughtMesh has been great so far, so I thought I would flesh out a bit more of the underlying architecture that makes ThoughtMesh tick. It's a model that might be useful for other applications in distributed publication.
As this workflow indicates, authors do not need to archive their essays on the ThoughtMesh server to be accessible by the mesh. While the ThoughtMesh server, operated by USC's Vectors program, does store the contents of the essays, what's more important is that it stores the metadata associated with them. In this case, the critical metadata are tags for essay excerpts and urls that point to those essay excerpts.
This means that you can upload your meshed essay to your university account, at a free Web host like Geocities, or even run it off your hard-drive--and ThoughtMesh will still connect it to other essays in the mesh on the fly.
To do this ThoughtMesh requires a form of cross-site scripting not normally available to AJaX. Fortunately, Still Water Research Fellow John Bell contributed a program called Telamon--known in Greek mythology as the "Lesser Ajax"--that cleverly permits metadata from one site to be available behind the scenes to another.
ThoughtMesh's tag lookup server avoids the problem of silo'd essay repositories because it is less a database than a metadatabase. I believe this architecture--which is mirrored in version-tracking community registries like The Pool--offers a practical approach to distributed publication that solves many of the problems plaguing the rollout of the "Semantic Web," including the potential for unintended or intentional metadata corruption. With a metadatabase, you don't have to worry about newbies botching handwritten metadata tags, and you can build in trust metrics to thwart Viagra salesmen. (Did I mention that a future release of ThoughtMesh will incorporate John Bell's RePoste trust metric?)
jon
XML-Sitemaps helps Google crawl your Web site
Apart from making it easier to map the entire structure of a complex site, I'm wondering if the tool could be leveraged to expose the "dark Web" of database-driven pages--eg, pages of the form index.php?id=234, which Google normally can't find.
jon
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ThoughtMesh Helps Writers Connect Ideas
Last week saw the launch of the first public release to emerge from research by the Interarchive working group. ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.Use ThoughtMesh to post your essay online, and you get a traditional left-hand navigation menu plus a tag cloud that enables nonlinear access to text excerpts. You can navigate through excerpts both within the original essay and from related essays across the mesh.
Unlike the Google hack previously investigated by the Interarchive group (and described in this blog), ThoughtMesh offers an alternative to depending on commercial search engines. To be sure, researchers can still use Google to find essays meshed with this new software--unlike Flash-based or database-driven article repositories. But ThoughtMesh also offers a completely independent, tag-based discovery system: search for "media" + "installation" and you'll see the relevant excerpts in the current essay as well as any others meshed to date.
One other handy feature is ThoughtMesh's automatic tag generation, based on Chirag Mehta's spiffy Tagline software. Authors who want to customize their tags can, but those short on time can let the software do it for them.For more on ThoughtMesh features, see the essay "New Media Scholar? Distribute and Connect!"
ThoughtMesh is a collaborative project by Vector's Craig Dietrich and Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito, with help from John Bell, Still Water Research Fellow and developer of the Telamon remote scripting software.
Transclusion: lightweight cross-references among sites
Ajaxian ยป Purple Include: Transclusions, you know you want them!
"A transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference".
This means that you can include and display fragments of one HTML page in another without copying and pasting any content. For example, you could quote the second paragraph from another person's blog entry by embedding something like:
< hx :include src="http://foo.com/bar.html#xpath!/p[2]" />
Next browsers to support microformats
(Posted to this blog on 5/3/07)
Remember Interarchive's distributed publication Google hack?
http://interarchive.blogspot.com/2006/04/primitive-distributed-publication-via.html
Well, maybe in the future it won't be a hack. Ars Technica is reporting that both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 will support microformats:
"It is also widely speculated that IE 8 will include support for microformats, small tags embedded in HTML code that can be interpreted in various ways by software, such as calendar events or contact information. Microformat support is scheduled for
Firefox 3, so IE 8 will have to include them in order to keep up."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070502-microsoft-drops-hints-about-internet-explorer-8.html
jon
Recognition Metrics
Re: Exclusivity and Heresy | Alternative academic criteriaMy take on parallels between control over curatorial and academic contexts--
Danny Butt wrote [New Media Curating list]:
>
>I can't help but think of homologies back to the idea of net.art as an
>attack on the gallery system. What I think has become clearer is that
>the role of curatorial practice, or the museum, or the publisher, is
>not merely that of gatekeeper as it is often conceived in the net.art
>imagination. It is also about the provision of context that is a
>critical aspect of the entire ecosystems of disciplines and practices.
I agree that curators provide context as well as gatekeeping, but if my fifteen years as a curator in a major museum is any indication, the ability to control the context is even more powerful than the ability to control who gets in the door.
Sure, there are some artists and curators mounting risky shows in alternative spaces. But as long as these efforts are evaluated according to the art market's prevailing hierarchy of value, they don't have much effect on the top of the pyramid.
This was precisely the value of Internet art--not just to produce and distribute art outside the museum, but to establish a different context that wasn't under the thumb of blue-chip gallerists and auctioneers.
Similarly, as Sean Cubitt mentioned, university research is increasingly evaluated according to a monolithic hierarchy that reduces each researcher to a numerical standing calculated from the number of refereed articles times the "rank" of each
journal. This rankism is a pitifully shallow view of the ecosystem required for critical or creative thought, and is one of the "impediments to new ideas and expression" that Roger Malina described crippling the contemporary university.
So how can academics nourish the ecosystem for new media research?
1. Publish early and often. The scientists are doing it (see Mitchell Waldrop's article in this month's Scientific American at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&print=true). Some folks on this list have already published on ThoughtMesh (http://thoughtmesh.net), which will soon launch a "submesh" feature that emulates journal selections.
2. Negotiate each publication with your press. If the contract your press sends you doesn't explicitly allow you to self-archive your work, write it on the contract and fax or email it back. You'll be surprised at how flexible publishers can be.
3. Lobby your university to upgrade its promotion and tenure criteria for the 21st century. As mentioned elsewhere on this list, Leonardo has been quick to see the need to expand publication opportunities for scholars in the networked age; Leonardo
magazine will soon be publishing the guidelines for new media academics produced by Still Water at the University of Maine:
"New Criteria for New Media" (white paper)
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html
"Promotion and Tenure Guidelines" (sample redefined criteria)
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/promotion_tenure_redefinitions.html
I've already received a half-dozen emails from folks hoping the publication of criteria like these will force their institutions to recognize the new forms of research birthed by digital media. If you have your own guidelines or want to contribute
to the conversation, please join the Leonardo Education Forum discussion at http://artsci.ucla.edu/LEF/node/104.
Cheers,
jon
"internet too fast for academia"?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/feb08/thurman-ugc-study-is-flawed.htm
Does a two-and-a-half year publishing turnaround render studies of the Web dead on arrival? That's the claim argued in the following exchange over a study of the efficacy of reader comments in online journalism. Maybe Leonardo Transactions can help?
jon
* Posted by Shane Richmond on 28 Feb 2008 at 11:28
....Neil [Thurman] is an eminent academic and experienced in this field and I'm not suggesting that this study is without merit. However, many of the problems he highlights are not problems any more. Some of the problems we have now didn't exist
back then.
Does the internet move too fast for academia?
* seamusmccauley 28 Feb 2008 12:45
Shane - I emailed Neil about this, as I had the same concerns (our own cited interviewee likewise left the company more than two years ago). He was kind enough to share with me a far more up-to-date report. I've read it and it addresses some of the
issues you raise. Alas, I understand that academic publishing cycles mean the new report won't be out until September, when things will of course have moved on again.
Not Neil's fault, I hasten to add - he's doing some great work in this space, indeed some of the only really rigorous academic studies into the subject at all. But the academic publishing schedule he seems to be lumbered with does create these
considerable problems of relevance and timing. By the time his papers come out they are essentially recent histories of the web rather than investigations of the current state of the art.
* neilthurman 28 Feb 2008 14:26
As Seamus recognises, the "problem" you perceive regarding the length of time that has passed since the data was collected, is not of my making, but a result of the fact academics are leant on to publish in peer-reviewed journals (who demand
exclusivity) in order that they and their departments are rewarded--for example with income from the Research Assessment Exercise. Even though the journal that published this paper has recently increased its pagination and frequency, more than 17
months elapsed between acceptance and publication (and more than a year between submission and acceptance).
Some academic publishers are trying to speed up the publication cycle (via initiatives like Taylor and Francis' iFirst), although the promised improvements are "several weeks", rather than the months or even years required.
Web 2.0 means Recognition Metrics 2.0
Computerworld - New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube
In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies will no longer use page views as its primary metric for comparing sites.
Nielsen/NetRatings will announce Tuesday that it will immediately begin using total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric....the change was prompted by a continuing increase in the use of AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which allows a Web site to refresh content without reloading an entire page, and to the growing use of audio and video streaming.
"It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement," Ross said. "Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, 'How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'"
For example, he said, MySpace may have 10 to 11 times more page views than YouTube, but myspace.com users spend only three times more minutes on the site, Ross added. Therefore, measuring total time spent on a site will make it easier for advertisers to mold their ads to how users are actually accessing content, he said.
"On YouTube there will be more ads flowing in based on duration (on videos)," he said. "The more time I spend on YouTube ... [advertisers] will figure out a way to monetize that."
PowerPoint bad for brains
I couldn't resist sharing this link from Alain Depocas--jon.
Research at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia, claims the human brain processes & retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time. More of the passages would be understood &
retained if heard or read separately. "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."
"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand
what is being presented."
This new insight clearly puts the recent report about using Powerpoint in Parliament speeches in a new perspective.
[ http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/04/powerpoint_bad_for_brains.html ]http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/04/powerpoint_bad_for_brains.html
The h-index and its discontents
In a post to the OACI working group list, Peter Suber noted that the science index Scopus has begun to use Jorge Hirsch's "h-index" to supplement its other measurements of author impact. The h-index is a number calculated from the number of articles
an author has published at high citation levels.
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=35680&CategoryID=17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number
In a simple demonstration of the weakness of such all-in-one numerical metrics, Eberhard Hilf of the Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH pointed out that physicist PW Higgs has a miniscule Hirsch Index of only 9, despite his having
predicted the famous Higgs boson. The existence of this massive particle would resolve some of the deepest uncertainties associated with elementary particle physics, which is why the physics community has spent millions of dollars building and
designing particle accelerators to find it.
Yet another case for more nuanced recognition metrics than a list of names with numbers next to them.
jon