Thursday, June 24, 2010

EBLIP online journal... sigh

Loving the online journal Evidence Based Library and Information Practice because: Interesting, Chock-full of interesting; Free. Makes me want an e-reader of some sort so I can more easily take it somewhere more comfortable for reading.

Really annoyed by the journal because: For *&^%$#@! - it is freely available online - why on earth is it being published with those -------! columns?  In fact, wouldn't those columns be even more of a nuisance on an e-reader?

I guess I'd understand if the journal was being issued principally as a print journal and the online version is merely for accessibility - is it?  This journal is so interesting I'd consider paying a fair amount for a print subscription just so I can read it somewhere comfortable, but I can't find any information pointing to that as an option.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Thinking happy

At first, I ignored the topic because it was a meme, but then of course it appeared again, and by then I was feeling a little frustrated that I've been so busy I've not kept on target for 30 posts in 30 days. 

Not that I shall let such a minor issue bother me... at least that is something I have learned over the years: a little cognitive control of my emotions, and thanks to neuroplasticity (and making sure my son saw a documentary about it on SBS) I needn't worry if the relevant parts of my brain (the full-text of that article in pdf) are damaged. 

And that is what makes me happy: my thoughts.  When I remember - I choose to be happy: I think through the current situation until I find a perspective that feels positive - and it is rarely difficult. After all, I'm fortunate that much of the time a good proportion of my needs are easily met.  If there are any not being met I can enjoy the process of planning, imagining, pondering how to meet them - or I can focus on the joys of one of the many that are already.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

More on citing board games: Scruples

How delightful: Having decided that a comment I was writing had developed beyond a simple example to append to my post about citing board games in APA style: as I entered a title for this new post it occurred to me that the theme of Scruples is what earned this blather its own space.

MyBlogLog shared another curiosity when I scanned its statistics for me today... Someone searched my blog for cite the board game scruples.

Unless the querant was pondering the ethics of citing board games, I'm guessing the curiosity was how to cite that particular game Scruples. I do have a copy of the game, and this is how I would cite the copy I have. As the game is revised and updated every five years (High Game Enterprises, 2008), you might have a different copy.

Depending whether my text refers to the game as a whole or a specific part of it, in-text citations might be:
(A Question of Scruples, 1986)
(A Question of Scruples, 1986, q178)
(A Question of Scruples, 1986, rules p.6)
(A Question of Scruples, 1986, base of box)

A Question of Scruples [Board game]. (1986). Sydney, N.S.W. : Milton Bradley

So, why would I not cite the publisher as corporate author? Because I am not sure that Milton Bradley are responsible for the design of the game. Although I would not rely* on the source regarding this particular information (Wikipedia and BoardGameGeek) to insert [Surname, I. (Designer)] in author place, it may be the game was designed by an individual who sold it to a game company who may have shared rights to publish it with companies in other countries.

*The claim of designership maybe false. Or overstated, perhaps the claimant merely created and sold the concept of the game.

It is sad for historians, and board game appreciators, that game publishers have not been in the habit of acknowledging the provenance of the games they publish.

Considering the claim (unverified, but uncontested) of a designer outside the publishing company, the claim on my box of copyright by MB "under Berne and Universal copyright conventions" and the absence of any information acknowledging designers or design teams (would that be too hard?), seems they may simply have bought the right to publish, and that the designer did not retain any right to acknowledgement for design.

I have seen a game in which the publisher did acknowledge the source of the concept, and the company personnel who then developed it into a game. I'd like to see more of that. Just like my uncle likes to read the credits rolling at the end of a film.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

HTML code for hanging indents for APA style reference list

REFERENCES
<div style="padding-left: 4em; text-indent: -4em;">

<p>...first reference...</p>
<p>...second reference...</p>
<p>...etc...</p>
</div>


Note: don't rely on your blogging tool to use paragraph codes automatically, Blogger doesn't.

I've written from time to time about how to cite electronic sources for APA style reference lists, yet it took me a while to discover a way to achieve online the appearance of hanging indents required in APA style for papers in print.

Students. BEFORE you freak - you might not need to use that code at all.


I think educators who are encouraging students to write online, if they require students to include proper APA style in-text citations and reference lists at all, possibly wouldn't be insisting on the hanging indents.  This could be because many such educators (who may be but a few online experiments ahead of their students) may not yet themselves have discovered html code that will work. Or more likely because the priority reasons that educators want their students writing online do not (and shouldn't necessarily) include in-depth familiarity with html code.

So, if you are really required to be writing academically in a blog or otherwise online, and are required to include references in APA style, you might like to check first whether your assessor wants the references hanging.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Graffiti illiteracy


Mindless
Originally uploaded by Constance Wiebrands

As a post that began as a very simple idea has become mired in associated discoveries of others' interesting perspectives, I went looking for a quicker topic.

How quick can I make this yet still be rational and constructive?

(and will this attempt to post from Flickr succeed considering my supposedly 80G (35G peak) has been throttled?)

Constance described graffiti on a tree in Hyde Park as "mindless, stupid behaviour". Those are strong words, so I'm guessing that she felt angry because the graffiti interfered with her enjoyment of the natural beauty of the tree/park/day.

Quite aside from the opportunity the post presented for me to practice empathy, the photo and the blogger's emotional reaction to the graffiti got me thinking about:

Literacy: The ability to read and write - a term which has been modified to encompass a broad range of communication and thinking skills in multiple media. I not only can't read that tag (and I'm diverted by the fact that it is a tag and a photo of that tag gets tagged at Flickr), I have no understanding of its subcultural context - but I'm sure that it is an expression with meaning amongst graffitists and possibly a wider subculture.

Illiteracy: How it feels. In this case I am the illiterate one and the fact that right there is an expression I do not understand frustrates me. Also, because of the circumstance in which I am illiterate in such forms of expression, I have limited knowledge of the people who do understand it - and when one has limited knowledge, self-protection endeavours to make do, at the risk of prejudice.

Mindlessness, Minding, Mind: There a number of things one might mean by "mindless":
# lacking conscious thought, intelligence or reason;
# requiring little mental effort;
# unattentive
# Heedless, imprudent, rash, showing no regard for meaning or consequence
In relation to the practice of tagging (from a mere distant awareness that there is a range of expression in the form of graffiti beyond the smallest (but even in itself not meaningless) "I was here") - the only way I could label it as mindless would be if it had become habitual for the tagger and I just cannot imagine that to be the case. Disregard for the preference of others for natural beauty is not necessarily mindless. Rebellion against social mores or law is not necessarily mindless.

And I'm going to stop myself before I contemplate "notart" or begin to research graffiti and its cultures.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

About webbing: hyperlinking in blogs etcetera

At work this afternoon I overheard Haze chatting with a patron about the library course, and when it seemed they were chatting about web2.0 technologies I looked up. 

It was Di-Dee!  Naturally I had to pin her, to personally introduce some of my favourite web2.0 technologies.

But at this early stage in explorations, the most immediate item I hope Di-Dee took away was how to enhance her posts with hyperlinks.  If possible, I will insert a quick little video on creating hyperlinks in Blogger, for the students and colleagues newly lured into web2.0



Over a week later, after CaptureFox shut down Firefox dozens of times, and after I couldn't access any video I created with CamStudio, I've finally tried Jing to get the above, please tell me if it doesn't work for you.

Before I could make the video, I was distracted by pondering the thought that once one knows HOW to, there is still the questions of why: whether, when, where.

Immediately I began pondering that question I remembered a book I enjoyed recently. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters - it took me ages to rediscover the title of that book as it was not in my reading history at CHRLC or UB, because I had borrowed it through BONUS from UTS or Massey (interesting aside, I will be wanting to look up Dewey again because these libraries chose slightly different numbers: 303.4833 .v. 302.231). Say Everything... was immensely readable. Maybe because the interesting societal perspective was balanced with personal, intimate stories of some of the people who are the history of blogging.

Just because hyperlinks = the web and blogging began as regular sharing of hyperlinks, doesn't mean that every blogging purpose is served by hyperlinks. There are plenty of writers about the value of hyperlinks to blogs whose goal is moneymaking and that's why I'm not linking to them. Others like Julie Schopick express their value to expertise sharing, and reputation building. One might see few to no hyperlinks in news blogs (as long as they are truly first with the news) or maybe opinion blogs (although we still expect to see links to online sources that trigger the development of opinion, and the quality of the opinion might be enhanced by quality hyperlinks) or even fiction writers' blogs.

One purpose that probably applies to most blogs is Conversation - and that *is* served by hyperlinks - at least ... oops, I have absorbed that as a fact, without this moment being able to explain just how... can someone help me out with that?  Good, yes thanks Julien Frisch:
"If their only function would be to be the glue between those who are writing, a system of reference and reverence, they would already fulfil an important function, one that I consider to be one of the main elements of blogging.

But in fact, the use of hyperlinks is not only a way to create connections to others. Hyperlinking allows completely new forms of writing about ... [fill in your sphere here]...

If hyperlinks become an active part of the language we speak when we write online, we can help to build bridges between those who are already inside the debate and those who want to join. ...

Links are used both as reverence mechanism between peers but also as cognitive bridges for those who would not understand the full extend of an article without this relational guidance by the author, without forcing the latter to (re)write what has already been written before." (Frisch, 2009, ¶8)
Do read Julien's whole article, his example is excellent and the comments interesting.

Darn it, this is turning into another long post I shouldn't be spending time on with all the shopping, booking and packing I still need to do... but having found such interesting articles I do want to share them....

Julien's inspiration: Venkatesh Rao's The Rhetoric of The Hyperlink is another must-read and I recommend it also to my writer friends. I will only quote one of his interesting comments, which happens to sum up the point of hyperlinking shared by for-money, for-giving-expertise, for-conversation and for-the-writing blogs: becoming reliable:
"Real hyperlink artists know that paradoxically, the more people are tempted to click away from your content, the more they want to keep coming back.  There is a set of tradeoffs involving compactness, temptation to click, foreshadowing to eliminate surprise (and retain the reader), and altruism in passing on the reader. But the medium is friendlier to generosity in yielding the stage." (Rao, 2009, ¶8) 
Actually that conversation probably gives me a partial answer to my question: when?  

I had sought to find ready-made advice on when and when not to hyperlink...unsuccessfully.

However I did find: Penny Coutas with the same question amongst others in her mind when puzzling over a style for hyperlinking in her online academic writing.  In fact, fellow CULLB602C students may find it useful to consider Penny's thoughts when preparing their own assignments online.

http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2010/06/wikipedia-as-style-guide/

I am glad Penny mentioned her discovery that online academic journals do not optimise the use of hyperlinks but rather use print-based referencing styles.  I have found the same. Penny also has an answer (no) for morgan who once asked if I knew whether APA allow a different rule for online publications.

Personally I recommend when writing for academic purpose online, do both.  As Felix Salmon (2010) concluded in his opinion piece Why links belong in text "Someone writing online should no more put their links at the end of their essay than a university professor should first give the lecture and then run through the slides." When the medium is online, optimise for online reading.  If the purpose is academic and if there is either academic requirement or the possibility of print publication, then use print referencing style too. (If you're writing in html spaces rather than pdf or other web-accessible docs you might seek clarification on whether you need hanging indented paragraphs in the reference list.).

Felix wrote Why links belong in text in response to Nicholas Carr's complaints about how distracting hyperlinks can be. Felix dismisses nick's point about the big distraction - being drawn away from the original article: "In these days of tabbed browsing, there’s a difference between clicking and clicking away: most of us, I’m sure, control-click many times per day while reading something interesting, letting tabs accumulate in the background as we find interesting citations we want to read later." (Salmon, 2010, ¶6) That's certainly how I avoid losing my place.

However I would sometimes (particularly when there are 'too many' links) relate to nick's second point: "Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters." (Carr, 2010, 2010, ¶3). I also relate completely to Felix's response that in certain situations (particularly when author's cite someone else) " I expect a link and there’s much more cognitive load placed on my brain — there’s much more buzzing in my frontal cortex — if there isn’t a link there than if there is." (Salmon, 2010, ¶1)

Pursuing the notion of "too many hyperlinks" for advice from a different perspective. I found that Torley (yes of Second Life video tutorial fame) advises to hyperlink sparingly, and shares his approach (2008, ¶7) "I'll hyperlink to shed light on inspirations + influences behind a post. I'll hyperlink to provide contact info, and "further details" too onerous, too rich to cram onto a single page."


To other bloggers: how do you decide what to hyperlink?

For me, the hyperlinks I create are for a reader like me, they offer links I think I'd find potentially useful:
  • explaining an idea better than I have
  • providing a reference or credit for material I quote (or further reading)
  • backtracing my stimuli
To avoid an excess of hyperlinks:
  • If you're using Zemanta don't link every word in your post for which Wikipedia has an article.
  • Remember that readers can select words or phrases we need clarified and right click for a google search. (for that fact I appreciate the reminder from Jack, one of Venkat's readers).

That last point is also advice to readers... for whom I have more:

To online readers who may be stressed by "too many" hyperlinks - adapt the rules for crossing a road safely: Before you click: Stop Look Listen Think.

Stop: Don't click, just hover and;
Look: read the URL "where it goes" displayed in browser footer
Listen: listen to the article you're already reading
Think: do you really need or want to explore that link?
Then if you still want to check it out, use Right-Click, Open in New Tab

I will also be looking into the Readability plugin that apparently helps readers by removing all the extraneous stuff around the article we want to read.  It has recently been updated with an optional feature so that (if I understand it correctly) hyperlinks are made less visible (can still be seen on hover) but listed completely as footnotes.


And just for the practice...

References

Carr, N. (2010, May 31). Experiments in delinkification [Web log post]. Rough Type. Retrieved from http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/experiments_in.php

Coutas, P. (2010, June 7). Wikipedia as style guide? [Web log post]. Exploring the Hype(r) of Languages Learning and Teaching. Retrieved from http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2010/06/wikipedia-as-style-guide/

Frisch, J. (2009, July 7). Creating a European public sphere: the hyperlink story [Web log post]. Julien Frisch. Retrieved from http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/07/creating-european-public-sphere.html

Rao, V. (2009, July 1). The rhetoric of the hyperlink [Web log post]. ribbonfarm.com Retrieved from http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hyperlink/

Salmon, F. (2010, June 2). Why links belong in text [Web log post]. Reuters. Retrieved from http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/06/02/why-links-belong-in-text/

Torley. (2008, April 21). Hyperlink sparingly [Web log post]. Musical dream journal. Retrieved from http://torley.com/hyperlink-sparingly

Friday, June 11, 2010

Could Flickr's "Blog This" feature be improved?


Reflecting on signs of decay?
Originally uploaded by moonflowerdragon


Absolutely!

Where to start?
  1. Save to draft. I appreciate that Flickr might need to keep it simple so it remains cross-platform. We can style our post up according to our own blogging platform's editing methods. BUT, the way it is at the moment, blogging a photo directly from Flickr means a Publish without any polish, and that means autofeeds like Twitterfeed let people see a post in a state that we would probably *not* prefer, like this one was before I began this post-publication editing. 
  2. ALL proper attribution data.  As well as the image's title and uploader (which is all I get now) I need the date the image was published at Flickr and the licence by which I may publish it.  The description might also contain important information - unfortunately it might also contain too much information, so I'd at least like the option to include the description.
  3. Show me what will be sent.  When we set up our blog for Flickr we can choose a layout template for our posts - but unless we're blogging from Flickr often, who remembers how they chose?  And who remembers how to find the page that enables us to change the template, not that that page shows what our current choice is.  So, while composing my post (that I want to be able to send as draft) I want to see all the proper attribution (and optional) data laid out according to the Flickr-template I've chosen. Unfortunately this is what I was shown while composing, but not what was sent:

So are there alternatives?

AddThis enables save to draft, but doesn't grab code accessing the image - Perhaps there are other browser add-ons, or platform plug-ins & if so please tell me about them.

ImageCodr endeavours to provide what Flickr should in terms of proper attribution for Creative Commons licenses but doesn't, although as Flickr has not updated CC licences to 3.0, even ImageCodr cannot fix that fault with Flickr.

Unfortunately, for some reason the generated code only includes the image title on hover, not with the photo. And I still don't have the upload date or any relevant information that might have been provided in the description.

Use Embed code available from All sizes screen

Unfortunately this is what we get from that embed code:
Reflecting on signs of decay?

Just the photo and link, no attribution data at all.


kwout
If I kwout (with an image map) from the photostream I can select to show Title, licence, and date, and you can deduce uploader from automated title. However, description is missing, it is small, and it doesn't quite meet Flickr's terms because it doesn't directly to the photo's own page:

Alternatively, if I kwout (with image map) from the photo's page: the date, uploader and licence data are not within range of the image for kwout to grab, although you can see amongst the miscellanea in the description there is other relevant attribution information:

- = + = -

And because it was fun... the stimulus for this contemplation of problems blogging from Flickr ... was a post I created at Tumblr solving a puzzle for The Clueless Librarian:
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