Hmm, if it weren’t in the middle of the second or third week of Spring, this would be freaking awesome. Registration would be fairly cheap, since I happen to have recently become a student member of The Information Architecture Institute.
Something quite interesting popped into my head, and thus prompted this post. As most know, I do a lot of reading as a part of my masters studies, and have done a lot of reading in the past regarding a host of different topics, particularly during my undergraduate work at Evergreen. Oddly, when I’m doing academic work, I almost never like to read anything else, since my energies tend to get a bit drained from having to keep up with the academic stuff in the first place — there’s residual effect as well in that I seem to not like reading much for time periods after the academic year has ended. Regardless, I find myself in a bit of a quandary; I’ve done a lot of reading on the subjects of sustainability and information management, but I really have no method as it stands of referencing all of that information or even recalling where something in particular cropped up.
This is a big problem, and spans a lot of different resources: textbooks, class notes, handouts, technical articles, magazine articles, programming code snippets, old web site designs, even in-line notations on whatever I’m reading. I come up with ideas for projects that (no pun intended) peter out (cough) after a while, either for lack of motivation or for lack of appropriate reference material – in general, it tends to be more the former than the latter, but lack of reference material also rears its ugly head occasionally. This isn’t because I lack the information; it’s because I’ve seen it somewhere but can’t find it again!
I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot. Everyone faces this. I have a slight advantage in that I’m beginning to recognize some of the ways that this is solvable, but at a slight disadvantage in that I am not quite as involved with stuff like social tagging or folksonomies — though I should note that Wikipedia has it wrong; folksonomies and social tagging are not the same thing, and saying they are is misleading. Anyway, the main reason I have a problem is that I don’t have a quick way of finding any annotations or relevant readings for a particular topic. If I wanted to remember a bit about economics, for instance (a highly relevant subject for me at the moment because of PB AF 594), I don’t have any way of knowing what articles I’ve read related to the subject or where my books are that cover that subject or what I might’ve taken as notes in classes three or four years ago that talked about the subject. This is partly lack of time to look all this crap up. This is also partly because that requires locating things – like my ink in my last blog post, I may not know it’s already around or may think I loaned the book on the subject to someone else. I actually thought I had loaned one of my economics books to my mother (don’t ask me why I thought this) until I spotted it going to bed one night on a bookshelf directly across from the bed!
I’ve tried recently to reduce the amount of stuff I hang on to that makes it harder to find things. I’ve started a “clippings binder”, where I rip out magazine articles that I think might be useful for future reference and recycle the rest of the magazine. I can’t bring myself to do this for my copies of eco-structure, since those are just pure gold, but most of the other magazines I have floating around succumb to this sooner or later. I can’t do this to books (and won’t – my father, who is doubtlessly reading this, would about have a conniption and ban me to the seventh or eighth layer of hell). Last year before moving to Seattle, I donated a bunch of (admittedly mostly fiction) books to Olympia’s Goodwill branch to reduce the number of books I had sitting around. But really, this hasn’t done much – I still have a lot of books I want to be able to reference.
There’s an extra dimension here – not only is there stuff I have read, but there’s stuff that looks relevant that I want to read, but can’t find the time.
It seems like the only really good way of doing this would be to start creating additional notes on every single book I read that might be relevant to future work, but that in and of itself is a lot of additional work. Would it increase my ability to look for and find information? Probably, especially if it were implemented correctly (I’d guess a wiki system with some sort of tagging grafted on would work quite well for this). Perhaps I’ll take a sabbatical in 2009 after I graduate and spend the summer reading and making notes and putting them into some coherent system. Yeah, right. So how do we organize all these resources that we personally find relevant? There are answers — maybe — and those answers are (fairly) likely to be relevant. But in the meantime, if I want to remember all I’ve seen on sustainability, I’ll have to read it all over again, or at least spend a copious amount of time reading over whatever notes I made in the margins of books or on paper somewhere in a binder buried in my closet.
That’s assuming those notes existed at all, and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.
I’ve been thinking I needed printer ink for the last several weeks, since my printer is reporting that several of the cartridges are getting quite low. I had intended to order some tonight, and nearly did until I opened my filing cabinet and found refills for every single ink cartridge I have.
Well, at least I found the cartridges before I ordered new ones…
Note – I use a business-level printer that does duplexing and provides an insane amount of paper storage capacity (and it’s got a wireless connection built in to boot) – why do I use something with that much power? Home-use printers seem to fall a bit short in the areas of networking and duplexing, thus I went to business models. This is an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dwtn (actually, it’s a K550dtwn), and thus far has served me quite well. It helps that I keep my need for ink down by forcing all printouts to only use black ink and to use the “Fast/Economical Printing” setting (which is essentially draft printing). There is no visually appreciable difference between draft printing and normal printing speeds, except that draft printing uses a lot less ink.
information professional: someone who has the ability to make decisions with regards to information.
— Joseph Tennis, IMT530, January 31, 2008
Even though this is posted on my internal wiki, I figured I’d post it here for posterity.
This document outlines my personal career goals as they currently stand, as well as related academic goals that inform these goals.
General Goals
Academic Goals
Topic-Specific Goals: Information Management
Topic-Specific Goals: Environmental Sustainability
“I never saw a Democratic mountain or a Republican glacier.” – Daniel J. Evans
People may or may not be aware that my work at Evergreen made one thing abundantly obvious: everything is interconnected. I’ve been living by this mantra for quite some time (indeed, since somewhere around my freshman year at Evergreen), but lately, I’ve come to realize that, while it’s certainly sufficient to recognize this, there’s an extra layer to this idea that I hadn’t quite recognized. There are two ways that I can state this, and I haven’t quite decided which one I prefer yet, since they are two distinct expressions of the same set of ideas:
Everything is interconnected, given a particular context.
Or:
Everything is interconnected; context is king.
The word “context” is something that is repeated almost ad nauseam in a lot of the work that I’ve done so far in the MSIM program. A lot of user interaction design work depends on the context in which a solution will be used. How things are categorized depends on the context of that information in relation to other facets. The context in which a question is asked can affect the results of that question. Management styles differ depending upon how managers choose to contextualize different information in their environments.
There is one major thing missing at this point as well that I’ve actually chosen not to attempt to integrate: the centrality of the user (or, less technically, of people) in information management. The reason for this is that it’s already recognized in my personal statement of my career goals (which has not been posted to this blog – it exists on my personal wiki).
So what’s the difference between these two potential statements? “given a particular context” implies restrictions or limitations on what connections can be formed, and suggests to me that those limitations may not be surmountable. On the other hand, “context is king” recognizes the original spirit of the mantra of “everything is interconnected” – that everything, somehow, connects to something else, context or not. It also recognizes that context plays a central role in our accumulation of knowledge and information.
Which one I end up choosing will depend heavily on which of these interpretations I feel is more central to my work.
I’ve been perusing real estate brokers for rentals for the last few hours just to stay abreast of some of the pricing. Ones that I’m using include:
In the past I’ve also used:
Photos of the IMT540 final presentations are now posted to my Flickr account.
Somehow, the last update to my résumé omitted my ACM membership details, which I’ve now rectified. As always, the most recent version is available from this site’s navigation bar.