The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”
I don’t usually announce new blogs here but Ideas for Development is a new groupblog with a worthy goal and unusually high profile participants:
- Kemal Dervis, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme,
- Abdou Diouf, Secretary-General of La Francophonie,
- Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank,
- Pascal Lamy Director general of the World Trade Organization,
- Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
- Jean-Michel Severino, Managing Director of the Agence Française de Développement,
- Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme.
And guest contributions from several leading NGOs and academic instutitions.
If you are writing with a word count in mind you should know about something which I just discovered - the word count in Word seems to consistently count more words in your document when it has field codes in than when you strip them out. I just tested this on a document which (according to Word) contained 7179 words before field codes were stripped, 6,473 without (the document had 690 words of bibliography in it). I assume that the latter figure is the correct one. (Note: I am using Endnote 10 on a Mac with Office 2004 - different versions of either application might give different results). It’s worth checking with your own documents before sending them to an editor!
The invaluable Pew Internet & American Life Project has just completed some more research trying to come up with a typology of American Internet use. You can fill out your own David Brake
I have mixed feelings about writing this but it is dawning on me that LibriVox - a group of public-spirited people making out of copyright texts into public domain audiobooks by reading them - could be one example of a problematic trend enabled by the Internet. That trend is - as the subject line suggests - the manner in which the Internet enables the free distribution of ‘good enough’ products at the expense of paid-for content.
In this case it concerns me that the existence and growth of free public domain audiobooks read aloud by members of the public could make it increasingly unprofitable to put out paid-for audiobooks of public domain material. This would be a shame because the quality of the readings is so variable. I find myself listening along happily to a work like F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin only to be brought up short by a weird mis-pronounciation by one of the volunteer readers.
In principle there is no problem here - if listeners find such a problem they might complain and someone from the Librivox community might volunteer to re-read the offending chapters. Unfortunately the work of reading audiobooks isn’t easily editable once complete as a textual composition is, which means to fix even a simple problem (like someone persistently mispronouncing the hero’s name) you would have to ask someone to spend at least a half an hour re-recording a whole section (or would have to do it yourself). Unfortunately also I imagine volunteer readers would not take kindly to having their public-spirited work criticised - everyone thinks they can read aloud. So it seems likely such problems will go largely unremarked and un-addressed.
I wouldn’t want to put you off trying out Librivox - their hearts are definitely in the right place, the results are mostly at least adequate and if you want something a little different to listen to on your iPod it would be well worth checking out their growing catalogue for yourself. But if you have the cash and want to listen to something public domain that you really expect to enjoy and attend to, I encourage you to check out commercial sites like Audible and keep the professional audiobook industry in business.
As you will see in our link sidebar at R there are two new blogs - Media Policy and Law@LSE and Virtual Law@LSE. So if you have been mainly reading our postings about media regulation or politics or privacy you should definitely be bookmarking these two newcomers (both of which feature postings by Damien Tambini, a lecturer here in the media department).
I have just learned that those with valid university email addresses (not just US ones, UK ones seem to work too!) can get free access to the New York Times’ TimesSelect service (which allows you to read the columnists which are normally password protected and lets you look at articles from their online archives). Handy! Thanks Kathleen and Chuck…
So far there are just four public lectures available (most on foreign affairs) but more are promised. See this page about podcasts.
PS While on the subject of podcasting I recently came across an extensive podcast archive of audio and video lectures from Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science.
My first degree back in the 80s was in English so from time to time I enjoy dipping back into literature. In this case I combined my interest in social Internet applications with literature by listening to Conrad’s Lord Jim as an audiobook thanks to a reading by a volunteer at Librivox (which recruits volunteers to read public domain books).
I am obviously moving away from the literary criticism of my first degree towards a more sociological mindset - I found myself thinking “Conrad’s minute observation of the way people interact and behave is so impressive. It reminds me of Erving Goffman“. I wonder what my favourite English prof Sandy Leggatt would think of me now…
David Brake
I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.
For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.
I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases – the Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).
Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.
Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).
It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed – Web of Knowledge’s can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations don’t give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.
Is there a trick I have missed?
A while back I wrote about Questionpro as part of a posting about tools academics might find useful and (on my personal blog) as part of a roundup of online questionnaire tools. They do indeed have lots of features and a free academic trial but be warned - if you need to go back to the survey you used after the six month trial is over - even just to get at your existing data - you’ll have to pay. Not only that but you’ll have to give them your credit card details and agree to monthly payments (at least $15) which you will then have to remember to cancel when you’ve got what you need.
Admittedly all of this is documented on their site but it’s still annoying that they couldn’t cut me some slack to get at my data.
I hope someone out there can tell me of a service which is web-based, hosted, reasonably powerful and free for unlimited academic use…
David Brake
I just read about a new program called Kip which lets Mac users easily add tags to their PDFs and enter them in an easily-scannable database. It’s still at a fairly early stage (it’s free to use now and will be commercial later) but it struck me this is the kind of thing any Mac-using academic might find really really handy…
A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:
I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…
Variation in English Words and Phrases (VIEW) is a search engine for the British National Corpus of words. Among its many functions it lets you find out the kinds of words that are frequently associated with other words. The adjective most commonly found with "nerd" is "computer", for example. Unfortunately, it is a corpus of late 20th century words and does not contain the words that would be most interesting to me - "blog" or "blogger". It also turns out if you go to Google.com and type "define:yourword" it will offer you "related phrases" (the related phrase for "blogger" was "Baghdad Blogger".
A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.
Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!
Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).
Danah alerted me to the fact that Stanford has its own spot in the iTunes music store. It features a small but growing series of lectures on US foreign policy, other public speeches and discussions of books among other things (all free). I wish that UK universities had the funding to play around with this kind of stuff. We certainly have enough public lectures here at the LSE to make a similar project worthwhile.
Update: Princeton also has a very similar offering (tilted more towards foreign policy). I couldn’t find anything similar by Harvard or Yale yet…
Neighbornode is an interesting new project that encourages neighborhood-based virtual communities by providing messageboards that are associated with local wireless networks. Nobody who is not actually connected to that wireless node can read what is on that bulletin board, but ‘nodes’ that are adjacent to each other are linked together.
I often thought that one of the things standing in the way of neighborhood-based virtual communities was simply the problem of 1) getting a "critical mass" of people in a neighborhood online and 2) making a space online where there was a reasonable likelihood that your neighbors would also hang out. This new scheme seems to neatly solve both problems…
Ten years ago in my earlier life as a tech journalist I remember visiting Microsoft Research and being told that they were investigating all kinds of alternative ways of visualising and navigating through your computer data, harnessing the increasing power of desktop computers. Why is it then that even when the next major Microsoft OS revision emerges we will still face the "venerable shell metaphor of a desktop with overlapping windows"? And why, more to the point - the original impetus to my post - does SPSS 11.0 for Mac OS X still limit variable names to eight characters??!! I mean when Apple launched the Mac more than 20 years ago it already supported file names longer than 8 characters. Even PCs allowed you a three character extension to eight chars!
Update: … and I just discovered you can’t start the variable with a number (like the question number, say).
I know the answer why of course - backwards compatibility - I didn’t spend a year doing the LSE’s MSc in New Media, Information and Society for nothing… Nonetheless… Aargh!
The American consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports recently published a online hazards survey which found:
- 33% of those surveyed said a virus or spyware caused serious problems with their computer systems and/or financial losses within the past two years.
- 50% reported a spyware infection in the past six months. Of those, 18% said the infection was so bad they had to erase their hard drives.
To avoid spyware, 51% of all online users reported being more careful visiting Web sites, and 38 % said they download free programs less frequently.
- 64% of survey respondents said they had detected viruses on their computer in the past two years. 4% found them at least 50 times.
- Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20% of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66% of Windows PC owners. Just 8% of Mac users reported a spyware infection in the last six months vs. 54% of Windows PC users.
To this I would add that my guess is that a fair amount of the virus reporting by Mac owners is probably "false positives" - people whose Macs stopped working for some unrelated reason and they blamed it on viruses. Ditto for spyware. I don’t think viruses or spyware aimed at current Macs are still around outside of the labs of anti-virus software companies.
There are some good recommendations linked alongside the report but interestingly it fails to mention one of the best ways to reduce the incidence of viruses and spyware - don’t use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. It’s not that they are bad in themselves (though I would argue the free alternatives like Eudora and Firefox are better) - it’s that virus and spyware writers tailor their programs to work with the most popular email and web browsing programs out there.
A note about computer literacy - 17% of respondents weren?t using antivirus software and 10% of those with high-speed broadband access–prime targets for hackers–said they didn?t have firewall protection.
Also see two recent reports from the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project:
Spam & Phishing (April)
Spyware (July)
The insularity of American web publishers has long been a pet peeve of mine so the launch of the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers with accompanying American-style logo struck a sore nerve. It’s true that in their overview of common issues FAQ they point out that laws vary between countries but several of the sub-FAQs fail to make this point and some of them could therefore actually mislead the unwary. Like their guide to defamation law which says, “If the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice” - not true in the UK, for example, I believe. I think in Europe people also have more rights to privacy than here (eg I think you in theory have to get permission from people you take pictures of if you want to publish them though I am not sure about this).
Simply calling it the Legal Guide for American Bloggers would help a lot here, and if they encouraged other major blogging countries’ policy wonks to produce similar guides (and linked to them) that would help a lot too. Meanwhile, serious UK and European bloggers might want to look at The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim which I picked up some time ago though it is now four years old (can anyone suggest anything more recent and/or cheaper?). Suggestions via comments of websites and other online resources relevant to other countries would be welcome.
Of course, I should add, the EFF’s publication of a guide like this is, on the whole, a Good Thing, they have produced lots of other good stuff both for Americans and for the wider Internet-using public and if you are in the US and a blogger (or just want to see how their law affects ordinary members of the American web publishing public) this guide is well worth reading. Also see their guide to How to Blog Anonymously…