This paper discusses the three guiding principles of the report of the LC Working Group and discusses some of the contradictions and problems with the recommendations. The Report focuses entirely on technical systems and does not deal at all with problems of human communication. The Report urges reuse of metadata but legacy data is a continuing problem rather than a solution. The report urges cooperation but offers a model of exploitation and reliance. The report assumes that all differences in information creation and use will be no problem for if we demand that everyone accept our (?) standards we can accept metadata as is. The report denies that service to sophisticated users is of value to the larger community.

Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He has also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

His books on integrationism, theory of communication, semiology and the history of linguistic thought include The Language Myth, Rethinking Writing, Saussure and his Interpreters,The Necessity of Artspeak, The Semantics of Science, Mindboggling, Rationality and the Literate Mind and After Epistemology.

This essay and bibliography will focus on the connections and possible overlap between, primarily, two prolific scholars, Roy Harris, emeritus professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford, founder of Integrationism, and Birger Hjørland, proponent of the socio-cognitive paradigm and domain analysis in Information Science (IS).

I'm ungluing Two Kinds of Power at @unglueit. Join me!

RT @jackshaw: 3M and Polaris Spearhead eLibrary-of-Future // cc @jpom

A storage agnostic resource-oriented ODM for building prototypical models with validation and sanitization.

Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction. The Fake Workflows you create can be saved, reopened, and shared.

haibu is the open-source node.js project used at Nodejitsu's for spawning and managing several node.js applications on a single server.

AppJS allows you to use HTML 5 APIs to create attractive applications from Word Processors to 3D Games.

Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications.

Topic models have great potential for helping users understand document corpora. This potential is stymied by their purely un-supervised nature, which often leads to topics that are neither entirely meaningful nor effective in extrinsic tasks (Chang et al., 2009). We propose a simple and effective way to guide topic models to learn topics of specific interest to a user. We achieve this by providing sets of seed words that a user believes are representative of the underlying topics in a corpus. Our model uses these seeds to improve both topicword distributions (by biasing topics to produce appropriate seed words) and to improve document-topic distributions (by biasing documents to select topics related to the seed words they contain). Extrinsic evaluation on a document clustering task reveals a significant improvement when using seed information, even over other models that use seed information naively.

The Document Availability Information API (DAIA) defines a data model with serializations in JSON and XML to encode information about the current availability of documents. This document defines the serialization formats DAIA/JSON and DAIA/XML and a HTTP query API to query DAIA information.

“Red Clay” by Charles Earland is my new jam. ♫

Some good advice here.

Today, I'd like to write about some of my ideas for the Black Freedom Movement course, particularly my idea to structure the course according to historiographical debates rather than primarily chronologically. There are so many historiographical choices I need to make, in addition to pedagogical ones. When do I start the course? If it is a Civil Rights Course, then maybe WWII (or if it is the Long Civil Rights Movement, 1930s-1970s). If it is a true Black Freedom Movement course, then I could start way back with abolitionists, slave revolts, the Haitian Revolution, or on-ship rebellions. The newly adopted course description helps me make some of these decisions (This year represents the first year that it will be called the Black Freedom Movement rather than the Civil Rights Movement).

Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.

Nohm is an object relational mapper (ORM) written for node.js and redis.

Redis helpers for pub/sub and queue processing in Clojure apps. Great for prototyping stuff quickly.

Wrapper library with common interface for different Message Queue implementations.

Node.js bindings to the zeromq library.

Swank Clojure is a server that allows SLIME (the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) to connect to Clojure projects.

Clojure wrapper for Stanford CoreNLP tools.

Leiningen offers the easiest way to get started with Clojure. With a focus on project automation and straightforward configuration, it gets out of your way and lets you focus on your code.

Leiningen is for automating Clojure projects without setting your hair on fire.

Clojure library interface to OpenNLP.

Hitler, l’auteur:

The Future of Writing was a design project commisioned by Microsoft Research Cambridge and the Microsoft Office team from the Royal College of Art in London. In this project five teams of design alumni from the college took a speculative approach to looking at the way in which authorship may change in the future. The result was five very diverse directions, described using video, text, images and interactive prototypes. This document describes the ideas, research and output of this project in detail.

"free" markets:

Writing begins as tedious cataloguing, as a listing of who is where, who traded what with whom, and so on. In the Icelandic case, the most important thing to register was the correspondence between a given family name and a given plot of land. This project eventually issued in the famous Landnámabók or Book of Settlements, an early-11th-century text outlining the claims of the original settler families to their parcels of land.

But lists of names, at least potentially, are the tables-of-contents of stories about the people behind the names, and in the case of Iceland there seems to have been a sort of gradual evolution of these stories out of the original list: an inheritance feud among the descendants of Egill Skalagrímmson; Gunar Hámundarson attends the Alþing; etc. In a sense, Icelandic history continues to be perceived by Icelanders, or at least packaged by them for outsiders, as a sort of continual unfolding from these registries of settlements.

Nice hype-free analysis of Google's "knowledge graph":

RT @willystaley: Data Patter: The Web's Dumbest Impulse? - I’m not sure if what I’m identifying here has a name or not.... ...

@TheAtlantic Value of Google's search engine has EVERYTHING to do with how many people are using it. #badtechreporting

RT @JoeBeOne: NYU's Privacy Research Group releases Cryptogram, provides photo privacy on social media

@ibogost @mcburton four great tastes that taste great together

This page provides quick links for the Registered RDA Element Sets and Value Vocabularies.
Each set of elements or vocabulary concepts has a link to the general description as well as a link to a list of elements or concepts.

Publish beautiful full-screen websites that show off your maps fast and for free with the Map Site templates.

This site defines a collection of schemas (applied in the form of HTML tags) that webmasters can use to markup their historical and genealogical information in a consistent way.

This specification defines features to be supported in a date/time string, features considered useful for a wide variety of applications. It takes the form of a profile of / extension to ISO 8601, the International Standard for the representation of dates and times. ISO 8601 describes a large number of date/time formats. On one hand some of these formats are redundant and/or not very useful; to reduce the scope for error and the complexity of software, it seems worthwhile to restrict the supported formats to a smaller set. On the other hand, there are a number of date and time format conventions in common use that are not included in ISO 8601; it seems worthwhile to normalize these.

This paper discusses the idea of “progressive bibliography,” or proceeding from minimal to fuller descriptions, as an intellectually valid and pragmatically essential methodology. It examines some already existing approaches and discusses a few of the challenges and further areas of research. While the idea of positive accumulation of knowledge is old, computerized tools and modern information theories enables us to streamline this process to the benefit of patrons and scholars, and so managers of these collections have new tools to tackle ever-increasing backlogs of underprocessed materials.

Let’s re-imagine how we can better build digital systems to support narratives that can be used to teach, instruct, and begin discussions.

The authors argue that finding aids present only singular perspectives of the collections they describe and fail to represent the impact of archivists' work on records and subsequentreinterpretations of collections by archivists and researchers. The authors place these criticisms within the burgeoning postmodern discourse in archival studies and make two concrete suggestions for finding aids that would allow practicing archivists to acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of archival work and to incorporate multiple perspectives into the description of records.

Timeline shows a series of events in a vertically time-sorted structure.

Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance.

This essay—part of a series of OCLC Research projects to mobilize unique materials synthesizes evidence of what descriptive information people say they need for research.

The video “How Natural Language Processing is Changing Research” provides a more extended look at WordSeer’s usefulness for analyzing slave narratives, but its purpose is also to underscore how such a tool can benefit humanities scholars. In this video the discussion veers toward presenting reading as a chore from which humanities scholars seek relief. On that note, a student in Dr. Michael Ullyot’s undergraduate ENG 203 course, “Hamlet in the Humanities Lab” at the University of Calgary offers some pertinent comments. In her penultimate blog post for the course, Stephanie Vandework devotes a section to “The Pros and Cons of Exploratory Analysis” and examines more closely the claims in the WordSeer Shakespeare demo, finding some to suffer from overgeneralization. (For a view of the course from the instructor’s perspective, see Dr. Ullyot’s presentation, Teaching Hamlet in the Humanities Lab, for the Renaissance Society of America conference this past March 2012.)

NEH DH Lightning Round on Wordseer.

This wiki on geo-standards is an initiative of the Dutch national stimulation program on SDI (in Dutch Ruimte voor Geo-Informatie, RGI). One of the projects within this stimulation program, RGI-116, had the task to explore innovations in geo-standards. Within this initiative a world-wide survey was made to appraise the need and wishes of the geo-community to have an active forum of participants that can contribute to sharing a broad spectrum of knowhow concerning the developments related to geo-standards. As a result of the overwhelming positive response by the geo-community, this wiki was developed as a kick-off to host these needs and wishes. Many thanks goes out to the pioneer participants who have come from a number of educational, public and commercial GIS oriented working bodies.

Implementation Standards are different from the Abstract Specification. They are written for a more technical audience and detail the interface structure between software components. An interface specification is considered to be at the implementation level of detail if, when implemented by two different software engineers in ignorance of each other, the resulting components plug and play with each other at that interface.

MARC formatting conventions and US practice put romanized forms in the ”regular” MARC fields, with parallel fields for the original scripts to support systems with the capability to handle one or both scripts. However, most library systems still cannot accept the entire Unicode “repertoire” of characters for all scripts and some still cannot accept any non-Latin scripts.

From this review, Merchants of Culture seems an important book for anyone pondering the role of libraries: #artworlds

I'm convinced that kids have more fun in natural history museums that don't pander to them.

“Rise in Love (Guardian Angel riddim)” by Alaine is my new jam. ♫

This document specifies an abstract model for Dublin Core metadata. The primary purpose of this document is to specify the components and constructs used in Dublin Core metadata. It defines the nature of the components used and describes how those components are combined to create information structures. It provides an information model which is independent of any particular encoding syntax. Such an information model allows us to gain a better understanding of the kinds of descriptions that we are encoding and facilitates the development of better mappings and cross-syntax translations.

Identifying and labeling things is what we all do every day; it is how we communicate about the things in the world around us, e.g. “please pass the salt” or “my ticket is for seat D3”. Identifying things and assigning identifiers to them is also a fundamental part of working in the digital realm. We need to identify resources, concepts, agents, relationships, mappings, properties, namespaces, schemas, profiles, etc. Many of these have confusing subtleties of meaning, so it may help to deconstruct the identification processes we perform intuitively so we can reconstruct a sensible approach to designing our identifiers. This paper looks at how we identify things by comparing the sameness of their characteristics, how we associate symbols with things to simplify identifying them, and concludes there are six aspects that make up an identifier: a thing, a symbol, an association, a context, an agent, and a remembrance. It then considers some of the qualities of identifiers in more detail: scope, uniqueness, granularity, intelligence, actionability, persistence, extensibility, and context. It finally provides a simple checklist for designing identifiers.

What we need are collections in the 5,000 – 500,000 volume range, cleaned up to at least (say) 95% recall and 99% precision. Precision is more important than recall, because false negatives drop out of many kinds of analysis — as long as they’re randomly distributed (i.e. you can’t just ignore the f/s problem in the 18c). Collections of that kind are going to generate insights that we can’t glimpse as individual readers. They’ll be especially valuable once we enrich the metadata with information about (for instance) genre, gender, and nationality. I’m not confident that we can crowdsource OCR correction (it’s an awful lot of work), but I am confident that we could crowdsource some light enrichment of metadata.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML), which just celebrated its 10th birthday 4, is one of the big success stories of the Web. Apart from basic Web technologies (URIs, HTTP, and HTML) and the advanced scripting driving the Web 2.0 wave, XML is by far the most successful and ubiquitous Web technology. With great power, however, comes great responsibility, so while XML's success is well earned as the first truly universal standard for structured data, it must now deal with numerous problems that have grown up around it. These are not entirely the fault of XML itself, but instead can be attributed to exaggerated claims and ideas of what XML is and what it can do.

We present a probabilistic approach for learning to interpret temporal phrases given only a corpus of utterances and the times they reference. While most approaches to the task have used regular expressions and similar linear pattern interpretation rules, the possibility of phrasal embedding and modification in time expressions motivates our use of a compositional grammar of time expressions. This grammar is used to construct a latent parse which evaluates to the time the phrase would represent, as a logical parse might evaluate to a concrete entity. In this way, we can employ a loosely supervised EM-style bootstrapping approach to learn these latent parses while capturing both syntactic uncertainty and pragmatic ambiguity in a probabilistic framework. We achieve an accuracy of 72% on an adapted TempEval-2 task – comparable to state of the art systems.

"a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants" Huey Newton on homosexuality, >40 years ago

"the more data we have, the more false confidence we will have" #bigdata #hype

by using multiple databases and keyword variants, the historian may gain confidence in a particular chronological intervention. Large databases, the result of scanned microfilm collections or mass digitization initiatives across multiple libraries, provide enough texts to bridge generation and genre, incorporating authors from a variety of backgrounds. Sheer number of texts is important here: ECCO indexes 200,000 works from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain with 33 million pages of text; Google Books Search has 42 million books from all periods. If the historian’s goal is to show a shift in common word usage, the size of a database is more important than its genre specificity; in the case examined in the present article, for instance, Google Book Search and ECCO were superior to the available poetry databases. Iterative visitation of multiple databases provided another potential source of richness for extracting meaning from these tools.

Deadweight is a CSS coverage tool. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.

The goal of TwUI is to build a high-quality UI framework designed specifically for the Mac.

This browseable 75-topic dynamic topic model of the Journal Science (1880-2002) is part of the on-line supplement to the submission "Modeling the Evolution of Science." This browser allows a user to visualize the dynamic topic model, and use the hidden topics that it has uncovered to guide an exploration of the original collection of documents.

As the amount of data and devices on the Web experiences exponential growth issues on how to integrate such hugely heterogeneous components into a scalable system become increasingly important. REST has proven to be a viable solution for such large-scale information systems. It provides a set of architectural constraints that, when applied as a whole, result in benefits in terms of loose coupling, maintainability, evolvability, and scalability. Unfortunately, some of REST’s constraints such as the ones that demand self-descriptive messages or require the use of hypermedia as the engine of application state are rarely implemented correctly. This results in tightly coupled and thus brittle systems. To solve these and other issues, we present JSON-LD, a community effort to standardize a media type targeted to machine-to-machine communication with inherent hypermedia support and rich semantics. Since JSON-LD is 100% compatible with traditional JSON, developers can continue to use their existing tools and libraries. As we show in the paper, JSON-LD can be used to build truly RESTful services that, at the same time, integrate the exposed data into the Semantic Web. The required additional design costs are significantly outweighed by the achievable benefits in terms of loose coupling, evolvability, scalability, self-descriptiveness, and maintainability.

In this paper we take a fresh approach to explaining the core principles of REST, by describing a World Wide Web that fails to meet these tenets. We look at each key element, resource orientation, the uniform interface, media types and hyperlinking, and imagine the consequences of not abiding by the REST architectural style on the end user or tools developer of the Web. We then do a similar analysis in the context of Web services and programmatic consumers, reexamining each REST characteristic, describing common mistakes and suggesting improvements. We have found that in discussions, the analogy of the World Wide Web has been very effective at explaining REST.

“Blackberry Molasses” by Mista is my new jam. ♫

A valuable resource for working programmers, as well as a fount of useful algorithmic tools for computer scientists, this new edition of the popular calendars book expands the treatment of the previous edition to new calendar variants: generic cyclical calendars and astronomical lunar calendars as well as the Korean, Vietnamese, Aztec, and Tibetan calendars. The authors frame the calendars of the world in a completely algorithmic form, allowing easy conversion among these calendars and the determination of secular and religious holidays. LISP code for all the algorithms are available on the Web.

Duke is preserving our D&D heritage:

Duke is preserving our D&D heritage:

In addition to using the maps we create, you can design your own maps with TileMill. Make custom maps or design data overlays with our free map design application.

Pac-Man is dead simple in any language that fits the same general model as C. There are a bunch of globals representing the position of Pac-Man, the score, the level, and so on. Ghost information is stored in a short array of structures. Then there's an array representing the maze, where each element is either a piece of the maze or a dot. If Pac-Man eats a dot, the maze array is updated. If Pac-Man hits a blue ghost, that ghost's structure is updated to reflect a new state. There were dozens and dozens of Pac-Man clones in the early 1980s, including tiny versions that you could type in from a magazine.

In a purely functional language, none of this works. If Pac-Man eats a dot, the maze can't be directly updated. If Pac-Man hits a blue ghost, there's no way to directly change the state of the ghost. How could this possibly work?

RT @mrteacup: Incredible essay! @whimsley on Open Data: "The transparency agenda as a camouflage for neoliberal goals"

CoffeeLint is a style checker that helps keep CoffeeScript code clean and consistent. CoffeeScript does a great job at insulating programmers from many of JavaScript's bad parts, but it won't help enforce a consistent style across a code base. CoffeeLint can help with that.