Performancing is a Firefox 2 add-on that allows you to post to your blog through a WSIWYG editor. 

Technorati Tags: meta

To all Chicagoans:

While a “Beef” and a Cheesesteak may look similar they are not, in fact, the same thing. It is inappropriate, if not downright evil, of you to classify a sandwich as a cheesesteak when it is not actually a cheesesteak. Yes, chopping up the stuff yous put in da beefs does make it look more like a cheesesteak, but a cheesesteak is made from fundamentally different stuff (that’s why we don’t call it a cheesebeef). Usually I can spot you a mile off, but today the Windy City Express in Champaign had me fooled until the first bite. All that anticipation only to be disappointed in the end.

Signed,
Homesick

P.S. if you have to call it “italian” water ice, it ain’t water ice.

See also: Recent Research, SIG-CON, Building an Accurate Sandwich Taxonomy for Shareable Meatadata, The Semantic Sandwich: Why What’s Between the Bread Matters, Tagging Quality in Folksandwiches.

Hi there. Yes I’m still alive, just being a busy PhuDdie. The brain2blog interface I requested is still on backorder.

I’m working on the draft of my History & Foundations paper which looks at the intellectual roots and branches of museum informatics. Essentially I’m trolling the citations of papers published during the early days of museum computing looking at what they are citing, where they are publishing, who pops up where and when.

One one of the nifty tools at our disposal is the ISI Web of Knowledge database, which includes many social science indexes. Among the things included are Museum News, Archeology, American Archivist and most of the LIS journals. The “web” part of this is the ability to analyze articles for their topic area, how often they’ve been cited, where the author has published. A quick any easy snapshot of a literature or an author and where they’ve made an impact.

Oddly nothing from Museum News popped up until I did a very broad search and then a very specific search to find an article that should have come up in my other analysis (Sarasan, L. (1981) ‘Why Museum Computer Projects Fail.’ Museum News 59(4), 40-49.).
Click.
“Subject Category: Art” WTF?
Back.
Cick. Click. Click.

Everything from MN is classified “Art” whether or not it’s actually a museum informatics article (only tangentially related to art) or on making accessibility ramps for a historic house. Somebody needs to hire a better indexer.

Not that the CS lit is any better – articles about computers in museums are not classified as art or museum..just computer science. So much for whipping together a quick Venn diagram using WoK. mmmm museum informatics stir fry…slightly aged computer science, a little humanities computing, a sprinkle of business practice and a dash of natural science, archeology or art history to taste. No LIS. ( LIS usually served with a Bearman/Trant platter).

Speaking of diagrams, I had Thanksgiving dinner with Yana and friends, including Brandy who is a “graphic facilitator.” Trying to make all these connections via outlines, text and a 12″ iBook screen wasn’t cutting it, so yesterday I fought my way through Black Friday traffic to Office Max for a gigantic pad of paper and pack of sharpies. Thus armed, I’ve been mapping my way through conversations about data banks, mainframe systems, punch cards, and yet another article identifying why a task-oriented museum computer project failed to live up to the over-hyped promises that this new system/format/approach/ black-box magic was sure to solve. ahem..more on that later. My sketches won’t be as fantastic at Brandy’s, but it certainly has cleared the mental logjam. This sums it up pretty well.

Technorati Tags: citation analysis, museum informatics, graphic facilitation, web of knowledge

This is a test of a little piece of software called Ecto that Seb Chan at Fresh + New mentioned in a post today. A few contributors on Musematic have been having trouble with the Rich Text editor, so I thought I’d give Ecto a whirl here to see how it works.

Just back from MCN 2006 and getting caught up. More to come soon.

Technorati Tags: blog, editor