Omnia Mihi Lingua Graeca Sunt

Yesterday, in a fairly crowded Weldon, I found myself in the nice and ironic position of being stymied by the self-checkout system to the point where I gave up and resigned myself to being stuck in front of a line of people, each of whom was checking out an entire floor of the place. The fact that the books I was trying to check out were a Marshall McLuhan book and another book on using technology to facilitate learning, of course, helped the inherent awesomeness of the whole situation.

After I got bored of looking silly and checked the things out in the manner of the previous century, I got to thinking about the learning processes for various different things in general, and technology in particular. It’s been bouncing through my head a lot this semester, which is probably a good thing when one of my textbooks is on interaction design. Quite a bit lately, between my making heavy use of Blender for various personal and school projects, figuring out the foibles of the SMART Board software for another project, and considering seeing if I can pick up Python as well. Only one of the three really strikes me as especially esoteric at this point, though the two I’ve got some experience messing with these days have each routinely set me off on some proper rants.

I’ve been reading Raymond Siemens’ and David Moorman’s Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community for the last few days. It’s more or less what the title implies – a survey and discussion of the state of technology use in academia in the country, in the form of a series of essays or chapters by various scholars in different fields, discussing how they’re applying technologies to their various projects. One of the chapters was by John Bonnett, whose work I’ve written about here before. The chapter mainly discussed his Virtual Buildings Project, although the secondary focus of it was on, as he puts it, “how hieroglyphs get in the way.” Bonnett defines “hieroglyphs” in his chapter not as the pictographs used by Egyptians, Mayans, Mi’kmaq and so on used, but rather expanded the concept towards any sort of system which is unnecessarily complex or abstruse. When we encounter something we just can’t figure out ,either due to a lack of knowledge on our part or a lack of effective design on the part of what we’re trying to use, it might as well be in another language.

Part of learning these other “languages” is, to be fair, our own burden to deal with. There are very few things out there which one can’t figure out, but quite a few that they won’t figure out, due to frustration, a lack of time or energy, and so on. And the more “languages” one knows, the more they can pick up as time goes by. With too little background, just about anything can come across as Linear A, frustratingly indecipherable despite our wishes or efforts.

But that doesn’t excuse opaque interfaces or user-hostile design in the process of developing whatever you’re working on, be it a scanner, a piece of graphics software, a book, or a simple tool. Back in December, Carrie asked, “why can there not be more formulated programs for the not-so-computer-savvy historian?” (emphasis added.) It’s a good question, one which should be asked more often and more forcefully than is done these days. There’s a lot of incredibly powerful tools for any number of tasks just sitting out there – including the tools to, if need be, make additional ones – that are seeing very little use either because they’re hard to find or they’re difficult for the uninitiated to get their heads around. As I said above, part of the responsibility to deal with that falls on those of us who want to use these things: a certain minimum of effort is necessary to learn how to do anything, of course. At the same time, not everyone is going to have a background in computer science or the like, especially if they’re in the humanities.

Rather than use this lack of background as an excuse to avoid the entire field, we ought to be putting some effort into finding what’s out there that can be readily used and making it known to others. We could be finding tools that are out there and suffer from these learning curve programs and try to figure out how they can be improved through better interfaces, documentation, and so on. And probably most ambitiously – but most rewardingly – we could see what we can do about making, or at least planning or calling out for, some of those tools ourselves, as we (usually) know what we want in such things. Each of these is necessary for those of us wanting to incorporate new tools into our work as historians (whether public or academic), and aspects of each are at least feasible for any of us.

On Haystacks

(Reports of my death, etc. Let's try taking that post-turned-gigantic-monster and convert it into a series rather than a single Epic Tome of a post!)

“Oh, they just look things up online now,” people often say of students (or maybe just undergraduates) these days. As loaded statements go, it’s a pretty good one. The implications are manifold. It implies that Kids These Days lack the work ethic of us Real Scholars - people who, of course, never had to scramble to fill the necessary sources on a paper or started anything at the last minute. It implies that this will hasten the Imminent Death of the Library, or that it necessarily requires a decline in the quality of the students’ scholarship. The idea that electronic sources are intrinsically bad or unreliable notwithstanding – a concept, it should be obvious by now, which I reject out of hand – there’s another implication about the above quote which matters rather more to me. The fact that people are willing to look beyond the world of monographs and journal articles, provided they don’t leave those behind entirely, is a good thing in my opinion. What does worry me is not the fact that students will “just look things up online” as much as the question of whether they can.

To say there’s a lot of material out there is something of an understatement on the order of saying “setting yourself on fire is often counterproductive.” A lot of this material is nothing short of fantastic for casual, professional or academic reference, and really ought to be more obvious or widely-used than it is, either for the purposes of casual browsing or for actual study. (This isn't even taking amateur culture into account, something I want to address in a future post.)

The difficulty arises from actually finding the stuff. A given resource, once found, may be laid out in an intuitive, accessible manner (or not), but getting there in the first place can often prove difficult. The Net as a whole is anarchic, indexed mainly in an ad-hoc manner when it is indexed at all, with the indices themselves usually hidden under the hoods of search engines (Google Directory and similar sites notwithstanding). The visible indices that do actually exist are often obscure, arcane or both. Much like another arcane system of managing information many of us use as scholars often without a second thought, these systems can be adjusted to and eventually mastered.

In searching for materials online, there’s usually a lot more involved than simply plugging a word or three into Google. This can often work – searching for Dalhousie University is not likely to be a challenge, and the first page of searches for nearly anything is going to bring up a Wikipedia article or two (although that does bother me, and I'll rant on it later). On the other hand, ambiguity or obscurity can cause otherwise simple searches to become annoyances – the first five hits when searching for Saint Mary’s University point to five separate universities. (Of course, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the One True SMU is the first hit.) Context makes it obvious which is which in cases like these, but that is not always going to be the case.

As part of a project I’m working on – actually, a piece I intended to write here but which has spiraled out of proportion like some kind of even-more-nightmarish katamari – I’ve got a small pile of books sitting on a shelf at home (or in my spine-ending backpack here). One of them is Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks, part of the vast horde of O’Reilly reference books. A lot of it is more or less what it sounds like – a series of ways to game Google’s search engine and its other applications to do various useful, entertaining, or malign things – but the main thing which interested me about it is the fact that it’s a 330-page book on the detailed use of an online tool which is so utterly ubiquitous at this point as to either be invisible or supposedly simple. Recognizing even a handful of the points raised by the book turn a “simple” search engine into a fairly complex and powerful tool whose capabilities aren’t recognized by the majority of people which use it on a day to day basis. Now, I believe that just about anything can be used in a variety of different, useful and creative ways, but as aware as I thought I was about what you could do with Google, quite a few things in this book managed to surprise me. It leaves me wondering what else is out there, either useful for its own sake or for direct application into my own fields of interest.

I don’t think the problem is the fact that people are simply looking things up online at all, but I do think a lot of them are probably doing so poorly, and lack the basic knowledge to fix that. Tempting as the “I feel lucky” button may be, a search for anything moderately obscure or ambiguous is going to have little success or yield problematic results unless the searcher knows how the game is supposed to work. Having an idea of what you’re looking for is by far the most important aspect of looking for anything, whether online or off. If that condition is satisfied, however, the next step of knowing how to find information can often be a challenge as well. People might scoff, but using something like Google is a skill, and not simply a form with a button attached, and I think it should be taken less for granted than it currently is. Despite the intimidating nature of books like Google Hacks, the basic gist of how to use it, or other forms of computer-assisted searching in general, is something that can be taught or learned readily enough. A little bit of getting one's head under the hood of how these engines operate, and a little bit of understanding about how the system they are meant to navigate works, can go a huge way.

I don’t see it as the Internet’s fault whenever someone uses it to receive shoddy information, any more than I believe a library is at fault when someone checks out a book by Erich von Daniken or Anatoly Fomenko and uncritically takes them at face value. Rather than dismiss the utility of using these kinds of resources at all – something which I consider futile at the very best – we really need to pay more attention to them, learn how they work (for Google at least, this is far easier than many may think), and teach others how to manage and interpret the results they find.