Jon Udell

Here’s the blurb for a lunchtime talk I’m giving next Tuesday, December 7, 12:30 pm, at Harvard’s Berkman Center. Update: Slides here.

The elmcity project invites everyone who publishes community calendar events to:

• Realize that event data published in a structured format, unlike data published as HTML or PDF, can be routed through pub/sub syndication networks.
• Make public calendars available in the appropriate structured format: iCalendar (RFC 5545), the venerable Internet standard supported by all major calendar applications and services.
• Recognize that iCalendar is the RSS of calendars. It can enable a calendar-sphere in which, as in the blogosphere, everyone can publish their own feeds and also subscribe to feeds from other people or from network services.
• Help build the data web by owning the parts of it for which we ourselves are the authoritative sources.

The elmcity project delivers enabling technical infrastructure for this new approach to the community calendar. The project’s calendar syndication service is free; it runs open source code on the Microsoft Azure platform; it provides all of its syndicated data in open formats.

The real challenge isn’t technical, though, it’s conceptual. Most people don’t know how they could (or why they should) be the authoritative publishers of their own data. Missing concepts include:

• The pub/sub communication pattern
• Indirection (“pass-by-reference” vs “pass-by-value”)
• Structured versus unstructured data
• Data provenance
• Service composition

Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, these Fourth R principles will empower an informed and engaged 21st-century citizenry. As Jeannette Wing argues in her computational thinking manifesto, computer and information scientists are no longer the only ones who need to understand and apply these principles. Now we all do.

Drawing from the experience of the elmcity case study, this talk will explore what these Fourth R principles are, why they’re hard for most people to understand, how we can teach them, and why we should.

When a curator starts up an elmcity hub, one of the outputs is an HTML view of the hub’s aggregated events. It’s just a scrolling list of H3 elements, augmented with a datepicker. In its first incarnation the datepicker was based on the Yahoo datepicker widget. Later I switched to the jQuery UI datepicker, and used it to:

• Highlight the current date

• Scroll the page to a selected date

• Adjust the current date when the users scrolls the page

There was a lot more mileage I could have been getting out of the jQuery widget, though. This weekend I added the following behaviors:

• Display only those sources — from the list [Eventful,Upcoming,EventBrite,Facebook] — that the curator has included

• Display the count of iCalendar feeds the curator has included

• Use hanging indentation to make the list of events more easily scannable

• Enhance the highlighting of the current date

• Dim the days that have no events

• Scroll the page to a selected month when the user clicks the widget’s buttons

• Disable the widget’s buttons at the beginning and end of the range of available dates

• Search within the page for the first occurrence of an event matching the search term

One of the places where you can see the new widget in action is at Berkeleyside, the independent local news site for Berkeley, California.

Of course there are many ways to skin the cat. At another California-based hyperlocal site, Menlo Park’s InMenlo, the aggregated iCalendar feed (another of the elmcity service’s outputs) is displayed in an instance of Google Calendar. Note that in this scenario the only view that makes sense is the list (agenda) view, since a hub with any kind of flow will quickly overwhelm the other views.

Not long ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible to make a credible alternative to Google Calendar’s display widget. But with libraries like jQuery UI, along with tools like Firebug and the formidable debugger that’s available in the IE9 preview, I’m able to stretch my modest skills farther than I once could. I’m fairly happy with the current version of the viewer, and now that I’ve started to really get the hang of jQuery I’m looking forward to improving it.

I’d like to thank Caleb Clark for recording and posting a video of the talk I gave last month at the Marlboro College Graduate School. I watched it the other night and I think it’s my best explanation of a cluster of things I’ve been thinking about and working toward for a long time. The list includes:

• the local web
• LibraryLookup
• webscale identifiers
• REST
• public data
• loosely-coupled cloud services
• lightweight service composition
• structure and transformation of data
• the elmcity project
• the pub/sub pattern
• feed syndication
• personally authoritative data publishing
• social and decentralized information management

When I look at that list, and realize that I’m always trying to do (and describe) all of these things at the same time — because they’re all deeply intertwingled — I can see why it’s been so hard to tell the story. Apparently, given an hour, I can now tell it reasonably well. But I’ll rarely get that hour. So I also need to condense it into a five-minute Common Craft-style summary. A hard challenge, but a good one!

Until a few days ago I never owned, carried, or used a smartphone. That made me an anomaly not only in geek circles but, increasingly, among civilians too. I had always been the pioneer adopter. Now I found myself at dinner parties watching friends do the kinds of things that they always used to watch me do: Drift away from the conversation, engage with unseen interlocutors, jack into the planetary dataspace.

The experiment was less inconvenient for me that it would be for many others. I work from home, I’m rarely offline, and I could use my feature phone’s primitive data services in a pinch. Still, why? Because, as William Powers says in Hamlet’s BlackBerry, “The air is full of people.”

Someone you know has just seen a great movie. Someone else had an idle thought. There’s been a suicide bombing in South Asia. Stocks soared today. Pop star has a painful secret. Someone has a new opinion. Please support this worthy cause. He needs that report from you — where is it? Someone wants you to join the discussion…

The subtitle of Powers’ book is A practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age. He wants us to question our “digital maximalism” — that is, our uncritical embrace of connectivity for its own sake. But he frames the question using a series of historical examples. Technology, he argues, has always played a complex dual role as a mediator between our inner lives and the crowd.

In the first example, from Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus leave the connectivity-amplifying city for a walk in the countryside, so they can enjoy a deep private discussion about a lecture that Lysias had given. But first Socrates wants Phaedrus to recite the lecture, and expects him to do so from memory. Phaedrus says he can’t, and produces a written copy. This was “the very latest communications technology” — one that Socrates was wary of, but that here enables an experience that combines withdrawal from the hive and engagement with it.

I’ve been reflecting on continuous partial attention, and the shallowing effects of cyber-augmentation, for a while now. It’s why I took a break from this blog, put my podcast on pause, and sat out the early phase of the smartphone era. But it was inevitable that I’d get a smartphone someday, and when Microsoft made an offer I couldn’t refuse, I did.

As it turned out, this past Friday was the day. On Saturday, driving down to Boston with the family for an outing, I rode shotgun so I could explore the new thing. But I was determined to use it in a balanced and appropriate way. Since we were headed to Cambridge, and since there’s an elmcity hub for Cambridge, I checked it and found out about the Horns and Antlers exhibit at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. That’s right up Luann’s alley so we decided to go.

Then, feeling slightly conflicted, I dipped into the Twitter stream and read this:

@gardnercampbell: Just found & bought new poems by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Harvard Bookstore makes my day.

Really? One of my favorite people is visiting Cambridge the same day? Shades of manufactured serendipity. And lo, Gardner and I were able to continue a dialogue we’ve been having for years, but rarely face to face.

So what do I think of Windows Phone 7? I love it and I fear it. Now admittedly, I would love an iPhone or an Android too. So if you know these devices you’ll need to look elsewhere for a comparative review.

Then there’s the fear. During the relatively few periods when I could have been connected to the crowded cloud but wasn’t, I’ve reflected on my own uncritical embrace of digital maximalism. So I do worry about carrying the crowd in my pocket. But I hope I’ll figure out how to strike the proper balance. One thing I’m pretty sure of: you won’t find me electing myself mayor of a coffee shop.

Sometime in the latter 1990s I was looking for a passage in a book that I owned. It was a revelation to discover that I could find the passage online more easily than I could by first locating my copy of the book, then scanning it and using its index. I’ve since re-enacted that scenario many times, most recently the other day when I was looking for the Diane Deutsch quotation about perfect pitch that appears in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. In this case I had a library copy of the book on my desk. The text I was looking for is on page 125 of the library’s edition. As I like to do now and then, I made notes on the search strategy that got me to that page.

What I remembered of the passage was the analogy between pitch discrimination and color discrimination, so I began by searching the book using, somewhat arbitrarily, Google Books. My search term was simply color. The outcome of this naive attempt was both lucky and unlucky. Luckily it produced the most memorable part of the passage:

Suppose you showed someone a red object and asked him to name the color … Then you juxtaposed a blue object and named its color, and he responded, “OK,

Unluckily there was no preview available for the page. And the number of the found page was given as 134, which didn’t match the library edition I had on my desk. So I switched to Amazon. But the trip through Google Books was not useless. I came away with a much more discriminating phrase with which to search Amazon: red object.

Armed with that phrase, I found the page on Amazon right away, and the preview was available. But it wasn’t fully available: it ended in the middle of the passage I wanted. And again the page was given as 134, which differed from my edition.

Now, though, I had a partial page preview that showed me the layout of the page I was looking for. It was distinguished by a large indented block quote. I also had rough idea of where to look in the book: somewhere near page 134. Armed with these inputs I was able to scan the library book and zero in on page 125.

We don’t often enough name or describe the knowledge, the skills, and the techniques that enable successful search. To the extent that we do, we tend to suggest that there’s a best search engine, or a best search strategy, but the real story is subtler. Often, as in this case, the theme of the story is a pipeline of components. Here’s an illustration of the pipeline:

The mental model that drives this pipeline includes these assumptions:

• There are multiple components. In this case: Google Books, Amazon, and the library book.

• The components are differently searchable. Google Books and Amazon provide fulltext search; the book’s affordances are page-scanning and an index.

• Search results are differently viewable. Google Books and Amazon may or may not provide previews; the book in hand is fully viewable.

• The searchable components yield varying results depending on both input terms and available previews.

• It’s possible, maybe likely, that no single component will lead to the desired result

• A partial result from one search component can be piped into another search component.

I use the same approach when I search the web using Google and Bing in parallel. We have a cornucopia of tools at our disposal. We don’t expect to use the same screwdriver for every task; tools vary in their affordances and uses; we keep an evolving collection in our kits and combine them in novel ways to meet evolving challenges. To speak of a best search engine is as meaningless as to speak of a best screwdriver. When we teach “computer literacy” we need to develop the intuition that there’s no best information tool, but that there is a best model for using these tools.

I thought I’d read everything by Oliver Sacks but he is prolific and I’d fallen behind. So I had to catch up with Musicophilia before I proceed to The Mind’s Eye. One of the themes of Musicophilia is brainworms: catchy tunes that you can’t get out of your head. Another kind of brainworm, for me, is the phrase or quotation that sticks in my head after I finish a book. My Musicophilia brainworm is a quote from Diane Deutsch about perfect pitch, which is another major theme of the book:

To give you a sense of how strange a lack of absolute pitch appears to those of us who have it, take color naming as an analogy. Suppose you showed someone a red object and asked him to name the color. And suppose he answered: “I can recognize the color, and I can discriminate it from other colors, but I just can’t name it.” Then you juxtaposed a blue object and named its color, and he responded, “OK, since the second color is blue, the first one must be red.” I believe that most people would find this process rather bizarre. Yet from the perspective of someone with absolute pitch this is precisely how most people name pitches — they evaluate the relationship between the pitch to be named and another pitch whose name they already know.

…

When I hear a musical note and identify its pitch, much more happens than simply placing its pitch on a point (or in a region) along a continuum. Suppose I hear an F-sharp sounded on the piano. I obtain a strong sense of familiarity for “F-sharpness” — like the sense one gets when one recognizes a familiar face. The pitch is bundled in with other attributes of the note — its timber (very importantly), its loudness, and so on. I believe that, at least for some people with absolute pitch, notes are perceived and remembered in a way that is far more concrete than for those who do not possess this faculty.

I don’t have perfect pitch but I’m starting to wonder if I have something like it in the realm of networked information systems. This week’s essay in my Why and how series, entitled Heds, deks, and ledes, is a case in point. The essay recalls chapter 4 of Practical Internet Groupware, which I wrote over a decade ago, and have reformulated in various ways since. To me the principles are so evident that it’s hard to understand why I had to write them down in the first place, never mind continue to restate them over the years. But I do so because I keep realizing that the “F-sharpness” I perceive is not evident to most people. The qualities of this kind of “F-sharpness” include these awarenesses:

• of the layered structure of a package of information

• of which layers are active in different network contexts

• of how layers interconnect

• of how to compose each layer to maximize its visibility and connectivity

I’ve always believed that these are teachable principles, and I’m striving more than ever to find ways to teach them. But what if they aren’t? What if this kind of “F-sharpness” is wired into my brain in a way it can’t be in most brains? It would be a disappointment but also a relief to realize that what I’m trying to teach might not be broadly teachable. I’m still stuck with the brainworm, though.