Month: April 2010

You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken… Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

We cannot. … Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts…

Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from the earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.

There can be no nobler training than that.

– Plato, the Republic

His fingers clutched to fine dust. A panicked spasming as if a hundred bare knuckles had struck his spine. He pressed his fingers into the dust until they met rocks which cut like razors. An abyssal black engulfed him, but not as anything known to him. A foul but intoxicating wind howled through the deep. Like the last breath from the agape mouth of a long lost love, wanting to be kept. Cato rose on bloodied fingertips and pressed into the current. His toes sandwiched cold ash and bits of something else.

The knight trudged on into the dark and soon reasoned that he was in a crater or depression of some sort. At the peak of an incline his garments began to glow with a dull light and his spirits were elevated from terror to courage. Endless hordes of stumbling naked humanity were now seen. They were both repelled and agitated by the emanating light, swatting at the fringe of the aura with frenzied fists. Here was a great host of shades, now naught but a faint glimmer of what once was. Endless mobs swarming the glitter in that pitch and then being repulsed by it. Cato recognized some from life, despite the apparent ravages of disease and murder. Some from his homeland. Great princes, virtuous matrons, criminals, all shifting lethargic in this blind sea of ash and rock. Cato reasoned then, that he would follow the wind.

The issue of finding the manpower, time and resources to catalog documents was brought up in the readings as a hurdle to overcome. A solution to cataloging the influx of data may not be found in librarians, or other professionals, but instead in gamers and voluntary user collaboration. Take the GWAP/ESP game, pet project of computer scientist Luis von Ahn, a simple multiplayer experience in which players have to describe an image using metadata (descriptors) while also matching what the other player picks. This game is behind the recent vast improvement in Google Image Search queries (which, as you may have noticed, now allows you to do all sorts of advanced searches), as the logoi derived from the game play has been imported into the search engine. The task of cataloging millions of images based on verbose descriptors would have proved impossible for a professional team, not to mention economically impractical. Yet, give the users of the internet a fun game where they have to guess what other people are thinking in describing an image, and you can catalog vast amounts of information for free.

In the web 2.0 the administrator takes a horizontally creative rather than vertically supervisory role – it is fundamentally different than the old system, in which top down procedures and content-creation dominates. So yes, old traditions should be abandoned, they have no place in this new environment. The user should be able to interact in order to have a rich user experience, customizing and creating content at will. The archivist/librarian can help maintain the systems that facilitate this collaborative process, as well as ensure that no out of place or unwholesome content pops up.

When the user feels he/she is contributing something or engaging in an experience, traffic increases. When the user visits a sterile and uninteractive website, traffic stagnates. And by interactive I do not mean the web 1.0 notion of “interactivity” – aka gaudy “tours” and games, but multi-user collaborative proccesses. Twitter/flickr/wiki/blogs etc.