The Black Pearl

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian
A 1962 Schwinn Traveler. Critical Mass here I come!

Oldenburg has also left wondering about what other places are out there.  Recently I’ve been thinking about “professional” third places – mostly in the form of professional associations and conferences.   They have many of the same features of third places -  neutral ground, “a home away from home,” leveling,  conversation, and the “regulars.”  Really, where else could I go and expect to get drunk under the table by a Scotsman in a kilt, let alone know with precision where to find said Scotsman in an unfamiliar city?

In the July 2007 issue of Wired, Clive Thompson talks about Twitter and other microblogging apps as “proprioception.”  I finally drank the Twitter kool-aide a few weeks back, but the concept isn’t new.  For a few years I was the publicity chair for MCN and had an account subscribed to several dozen professional listservs.  And then blogs came along.   I didn’t stop to read each and every message or post (I really would be crazy by now), but just seeing the subject lines whiz by gave me a pretty good sense of where different professional sectors were at.   Some energetic coder should come up with a listserv barometer and trend-o-meter, or convo-cloud.

So how do you translate that sense of “third place” from the conference to a professional community.  Listservs don’t quite get it, they are still kinda flat because you only see only a few dimensions of the person posting.  Linked In feels like the BYOF* bars that Oldenburg mentions.   Recently  Facebook has surged to the head of the line among my peers and an ever increasing number of professional contacts.   I’m still a little wary of this, as Facebook had been a place for friends, inside jokes and playfulness.  Do I really want to turn a senior colleague into a zombie…I’m not really sure.    At the same time I’m noticing my sense of proprioception professional fBookers has gone up.  I know who’s spoken where and when, I can see their recent presentations,  sometimes I know more about what projects they are working on.  And sometimes I even get a peek at their playful sides, which starts making it all feel like that bar at the end of a conference day.  What will be interesting to see is whether some real professional growth comes out of these informal connections as much as it does in f2f spaces.

*(Bring Your Own Friends)

I’ve just finished reading Ray Oldenburg’s Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.  I’ve used Oldenburg’s idea of “third places” in my research on Second Life – partly adopted from Constance Steinkuehler’s work in game studies.  Mostly I’ve looked at some brief outlines of what Third Places are and they seem to fit pretty well with things I see in Second Life.   Even Oldenburg’s characterizations of Third Places seems to fit.

But I find myself disappointed after reading the whole thing. It is  hmmm…conservative….in the original sense of that word.  There is a great litany of things we have lost or are losing.   But I’m not sure what exactly we’re hoping to preserve?  The pre-industrial tavern? Pre-suburbia hangouts? Snooker? Male space in the basement?  Or just “third places” in whatever form they come in

At the gut level I’m with him.  I’ve mostly avoided life in the suburbs; have preferred living in walkable communities; have practically lived in “classic coffeehouses” (Daily Grind, Brewed Awakenings,  Brew Ha-ha, Cafe Netherworld, St. Marks, Paris on the Platte {amazing how much metadata you can crosswalk with a pitcher of coffee in front of you…}, Espresso Royale, Cafe Kopi..just to name a few).  Of course much of this was possible after Oldenburg was writing, after downtown renovations, after tangible results of new urbanism.  But let’s agree that the vomitous sprawl that happened at the same time is evidence that I’m not average (statistically speaking).

I’m not convinced that Ray would be all that happy about applying his idea to virtual spaces, as apt a description as it may be on the surface.  They seem to fly in the face of the core plea for the conservation of the precious resource of public third places.   I can even picture him spewing coffee/beer/whiskey (with chaser)  at the suggestion of it.

I now feel compelled to read Bowling Alone.  And too look a little more closely at what I’m seeing.  Maybe it’s a nice shortcut to slot it into a pre-existing account of what’s happening, or maybe it’s just obscuring a better explanation.

Steinkuehler, C. & Williams, D. (2006). Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1. (Link)

If you’re a longtime reader, you know that last year I moved into the former Battle Creek Sanitarium.  It was long ago split into apartments and mine takes up half of the first floor.   The main living area is split by a set of pocket doors that have been stuck in place….from what I can tell for a long long time.   Other than putting a curtain across the opening there was no way to shut off the bedroom from the living room.

While there’s some information out on the Interwebz, most of it wasn’t helpful.   Bust a hole in the plaster to get the door out! (I don’t think my landlord would appreciate that).   So this is for everyone who might be living in an older house with stuck pocket doors.

My doors are the type that rolls along an over head track.*  Note the braces that connect the track to the wall.  They’ll be helpful later.  My doors were stuck because the rear rollers had jumped the track.  Here, the front rollers are pictured, the rear rolles had conveniently let the track slip between the roller and the support that connects it to the door.   I wasn’t able to get enough leverage off the front wheels to get the rear wheels back on track.  So here’s how I finally got my doors back.

1. Remove any small trim around the door frame to give you more access to track and rollers.
2. Using a small wedge I took most of the weight off the rollers.
3.   Get a 1″ x 1/4″ piece of steel bar from the hardware store.  Mine was about 36″ long, but they come in different sizes.
4. Slip the bar over one of the braces that holds the track to the wall.   If you can, slip it under the nut holding the roller in place.  (mine was about the same width as the steel bar, perfect!)
5. Lifting up, maneuver the wheel back onto the track.
6. This should be enough to get the door moving, but since the house had settled some since the last time the door saw the light of day it took some pulling.
7. When the door is almost out of the pocket you may need to sweep your steel bar along the back of the door.  Many pocket doors have a little spinner at the back that keeps the door from coming too far out of the pocket.  Push it out of the way to get the door all the way out.
8. The roller connects to the door with a threaded bolt that uses two nuts to sandwich the door bracket.  To move the door up (or down) you have to move both nuts.  Loosen one, then tighten the second one.   If your doors are like mine this might require liberal application of WD-40.   Using your wedge to take the weight off also makes adjustments easier.
9. Make sure the door stays level by adjusting both front and rear rollers, otherwise it won’t spoon nicely with its mate when closed.
10. Ta da!   Pocket doors!

*  If you have a different kind of door, consider paying a visit to your local architectural salvage store.  They might have something that matches your doors, and out of the pocket it’s easier to figure out how they work.

Griphos

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian

ha ha! Now i can control all of your legacy museum mainframe applications!

It’s been a while since I’ve put a substantial post here, because my spring schedule was rather crazy (3 classes, 4 conferences, 1 paper, 1 poster, lions, tigers, bears, oh my). Mostly I continue to write regular posts over at Musematic.. After a few weeks of tying off the loose threads of the spring semester I’m settling into a fairly quiet academic summer. I thought it would be helpful (for me anyway) to reprise what I did during coursework this spring.

Doctoral Research Methods

The second required class for the PhD program here at GSLIS, it is the jack-of-all-trades, master of none course on research methods. For those of you unfamiliar with LIS, the field draws from an extremely interdisciplinary set of approaches to conducing research. Some see this as a weakness because it makes us scattered and unfocused, but I find that its one of the attractive things about being here. I’m not sure where else I might find a home for myself otherwise.

The class confirmed my preference for qualitative methods (interviews, “thick description,” ethnography) over quantitative methods (surveys, bibliometrics, statistical analysis). As something of an outsider to the social sciences (ok, ok, history is considered a social science in some circles) the debates between the two camps are interesting to observe. It essentially boils down to an ontological commitment of how you want to view the world. I don’t see that one or the other provides a “better” or more true understanding of the world, instead each reveals a particular kind of understanding of the world.
Being a glutton for punishment I decided to look at mixed methods for my final paper. These combine qualitative and quantitative methods within a particular study. For example, conducting qualitative interviews that inform the development of a quantitative survey. This seems obvious, but there are debates about how to do it right and how to blend the right mixture of different methods to answer the questions at hand.  This seems like it would work best as a collaborative method.  Take a quant person and a qual person and set them after the same research questions.   Trying to be good at both just seems like too hard a task.
Design of Information Use Studies

This class is a more focused methods class, looking at how one designs studies to increase our understanding of how people use information. I continued to dig into the question of of how information gets used in museum settings by looking at research on information use in museums, such as Starr & Greisemer’s study of the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (link) Of course if you are familiar with Paul Marty’s work, you will recognize this kind of research.

Again I’m trying to blend different kinds of methods here. Many information studies look at what people say about the here and now, maybe with a little background. However, distance choices made by our predecessors have framed the environments in which we are working and can influence what we see as our range of choices. I looked at a small body of literature on historic ethnography – which combines historic research methods with contemporary ethnographic interviews. Of course one of the problems here is that this sits squarely at the intersection of the the present and the past and raises some interesting questions.  We know that memory can be a slippery thing and historical methods can help to cross-check what informants report – if there is available documentation. Conversely, what gets documented may be the party line or an inaccurate or incomplete representation of events (I’m looking at you, grant report writers) and interviews can help reveal what went on between the lines.  Following on this theme I’ll be taking a course in the Anthropology department this fall called Anthropological Approaches to Memory.

I’m also extending this research method over the summer by doing a case study that combines historical research with interviews. More on that later.

Ontologies in the Humanities

This class continued my work with formal methods from applied philosophy. This semester extended our work on high-level approaches such as the FRBR and the CIDOC CRM and the harmonization of the two (FRBRoo).

Related to some of the work I was doing in Information Studies and an earlier Practicum I completed, I took a look at how collections are represented in the CRM. Currently the CRM treats collections as aggregates of physical objects and therefore they are modeled as physical things themselves. I’m exploring whether “collections” could be represented as conceptual objects that are related to a group of physical objects through the intentions of actors.   Extrinsic concepts are the glue that binds two or more objects together into a collection.  Further, it’s rarely any single well-defined concept, but rather a collection of concepts that together create a “collection.”  (if that’s not too circular).
Another intersection here is how these kinds of standards and ontologies get created in the first place. Often a group of smart and committed people sit down together and write them up. As a group they often have both a deep knowledge of the domain and a broad understanding of the context where it will be applied. On the whole then, standards usually come out looking like pretty good models of a particular area. What I find interesting is that I’ve come across very few papers that tie empirical studies of “ontologies” in the wild, with formalized expressions of them. I’m left with the question of whether formal ontologies can be improved through the application of quantitative or qualitative research methods.   At the same time qualitative data often gets marked up using a coding system (ala Strauss and Corbin).  I’m interested to see if this is a two way street – can formal methods inform the construction of qualitative coding systems? There’s a lot of literature out there to traverse, so if you know of something in this area, send it along.

I’m hoping this idea can also inform the independent study mentioned above.  Stephen Asma’s  Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads is a nice complement to this work, because he’s able to present the underlying philosophies (and ontologies) of natural history collections in an accessible form.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Second Life once in this post. That’s a whole other ball of prims that I’ll get caught up on in a future post.