Month: August 2007

in which I ask for your advice

Dear Blog Readers,

Most of you are far, far cleverer than I am in many ways, not the least of which is your knowledge of all things technological. It dawned on me just recently that instead of muddling around on my own, I might get some advice from the biblioblogosphere. And so, dear bibliobloggers, I have two questions for you–a hardware question and a software/reader’s advisory question. I’ll put them briefly first and then expand.

Short Version

  1. What kind of new computer should I buy?
  2. What books or other things should I recommend to a potential budding computer program programmer? [thanks, Greg]

Long Version

  1. I have an iBook that I got in 2003. I like it (though I curse myself on a regular basis for getting just the CD-ROM drive and not the combo one), but the battery is dead, and it currently runs at the speed of frozen molasses, especially if you want to do something really crazy, like run more than one program. I have deleted extraneous programs and done other things that people have suggested. Lately, though, people have suggested “Get a new computer.” I am trying to talk myself out of the idea that I need to have a Mac, but as I’ve been using Macs since 1986, I’m not having much luck. From what I’ve seen of Windows Vista, I do not like it, although I guess I’ve gotten used to XP. There is the whole open source operating system option, which could be good, but realisitically, I am not going to buy an old computer and install Ubuntu myself, so if I went that route, I’d either have to buy it already installed or find someone to do it for me. And finally, although there are many nice ergonomic aspects to having a desktop, I’ve had a laptop for ten years now, and I think I’d like to continue with them. So, any suggestions?
  2. There’s a kid in town who seems like a budding geek, or at any rate a potential budding geek. He said to me one day, “I’ve learned more from 15 minutes of talking to our sys admin than I have in 5 years of computer classes.” Earlier this summer I showed him Jessamyn’s Ubuntu video, and he got interested, so I downloaded it for him and he brought in a CD so he could burn a copy and play around with it on one of his old PCs. He now routinely comes in and talks to me about partitions and other stuff about which I am totally clueless. Awhile ago he asked for “some books about computers.” I couldn’t determine from the reference interview exactly what that meant, so I got him one about website building, one reference book, and one copy of Beginning Programming for Dummies (translation: the three books in the system that were less than five years old–I admit that we have no books on Ruby on Rails–but we also don’t have much demand). He’s gotten very interested in the programming book. I’m going to recommend The Cuckoo’s Egg for one of the books he has to read for English this year, and perhaps some Neal Stephenson. What else should I point him to, either educationally or recreationally?

Thank you all in advance for whatever advice you may have–you can leave it here in the comments, e-mail it to newrambler at gmail, or catch me on IM sometime. I am happy to return the favor should you ever have any questions about chronological order vs. publishing order in The Chronicles of Narnia (though actually Wikipedia has that covered) or how to translate things into Latin (though mine is kind of rusty) or recommendations for serial killer murder mysteries (I don’t read them, but my coworkers do).

information labels

I said something to this effect last week on Uncontrolled Vocabulary, but it bears repeating.

ACRLog discusses algorithmic attempts to authenticate online information, touching on, among other things, the recent Wired story about the Wikipedia Scanner, which mines IP addresses from Wikipedia edits to find out just who’s saying that Diebold never makes mistakes or what have you.

It strikes me that all these efforts are related to the seemingly unending desire that people have for a quick and dirty route to authoritative information. What they’re looking for, I suspect, is a label (a metaphor that, as a former anti-sweatshop activist, holds a good deal of meaning for me). People like labels, and I am no exception. “Oh, okay, it’s fair trade coffee, so I’ll get that.” “Oh, this is free range chicken.” “Oh, this won the National Book Critics Circle Award.” But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t say, “Oh, I believe everything in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” and leave it at that.

There’s no such label for information, not in any grand sense. An algorithm might help you trace an IP address and learn the probably identity of a contributor to a wiki, but you’ll still need to know somthing about who that person or entity is and what their biases are before you can know whether their statements are trustworthy. I won’t even get into the profound political implications of slapping an “authoritative” label on information, as I trust you’ve all read Orwell and school history textbooks and so on. But there are days when I think that’s what Google is trying to do–not organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, but organize and filter and, in doing so, suggest an authority to those first ten search results that they may or may not possess. It’s almost as if the purpose of organizing all that information is to prohibit critical thinking, not to promote it.

That’s hardly a new practice, of course–but the tools used to do it now are much bigger, much broader, and much more pervasive.