America's Next Top Information Professional

On the recommendation of my buddy Kathryn, I’ve been reading Michel Gondry’s odd little book, You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It: The Be Kind, Rewind Protocol. Gondry is a filmmaker, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind and others. I say it’s an odd book because he writes things like this:

And my utopia was once again tickling my brain. Utopian Tourette’s: That is my precise condition – utopias burst out of my imagination without warning. (14)

The book is, among other things, a guide to a particular approach to community engagement and collaboration. Gondry organized a gallery space into a set of film sets, and brought individuals and groups in to create films using the protocol laid out in the book. These guidelines are intended to maximize collaborative creativity:

I believe in systems. Well, not the big and vague entity that seems to run the world against everyone. The system to which I am referring is more like an ensemble of imagined rules that allow a participant to achieve a certain outcome. The rules let people focus on a single moment, while simultaneously ensuring that all the efforts produced add up to the desired result. (15)

and

When people are given a chance to achieve something fun, they don’t need the hassle of authority to stay focused. They always rise to the occasion, which is the easiest way to get the best of people: no management required. (59)

Gondry is particularly interested in how people create together, and ensuring participation and equality between contributors. He describes with great detail some of the specific groups he observes going through the process. His distress when teachers interfere with their students’ collaborations, or when professional filmmakers attempt to circumvent the protocol are tender and authentic. He also acknowledges the ambiguous value of the products of the — these films are not great art, and may be limited to the enjoyment of the persons who worked on them. He alludes to individuals who have since gone on to other projects, but the goal is not . The goal is to make and watch a movie with a group that then becomes a community.

This sort of meaningful collaboration can develop through all kinds of activities, not just film. The creative problem solving that Gondry describes reminds me of my own dorkalicious time on Odyssey of the Mind teams as a teenager. In this creative problem-solving competition, a team works together to write and perform a skit that incorporates certain requirements. Though I doubt I’ll ever have to make another apron out of paper bags, OM taught me team work and brainstorming skills that I use on a daily basis. These kinds of skills are at least a bonus effect of projects like the films Gondry is proposing.

My post yesterday mentioned my love for my Google Reader, but I didn’t mention that I have been avoiding a particular folder in my Reader for the last two weeks or so. I haven’t been ready to read through all my Books feeds just because I know there will be a bucketload of postings in response to the passing of J.D. Salinger. I’ll admit: I was one of those kids who loved Catcher in the Rye. It was my favorite book for a long time after I first read it, in seventh grade. I used to read it at least once a year, although it has been at least five since I last picked it up. (More recently, I also love Frank Portman’s book King Dork, which laments Catcher’s role in the development of angsty, pretentious teenagers.)

I still have a lot of feelings and thoughts to sort out about Salinger, and I think I’ll probably pick up Catcher again sometime soon. However, his passing has raised some interest in certain archival issues. This brief article from the New York Times article has the provocative teaser “J.D. Salinger’s death could be archivist’s trove” but it at least raises some important questions. Salinger was famously private and effectively squelched attempts at biography, including a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (This hinged on the “fair use” of Salinger’s unpublished letters by biographer Ian Hamilton. Quick note being: the copyright of correspondence belongs to the writer, even if the ownership of the physical object belongs to the receiver.) The NYT piece speaks with “veteran archivist” Stephen Ennis from Emory University about the possibility that Salinger’s personal papers will appear.

I groaned a few times while reading this article, because it certainly reinforces some misconceptions:

a) Archivists are vultures, waiting to swoop in and take records wherever we can. This always creeps me out, although perhaps it is sort of true in the cutthroat world of literary papers. All your fonds are belong to us!

b) Archivists = librarians. To quote the article, Archivists don’t usually enjoy public acclaim, but they are indispensable to anyone who delves into the lives of the great, the near-great and the not-so-great. Librarians “know how to keep the goods,” said Nancy Milford, the discussion’s moderator. Sigh. Another lost opportunity for distinguishing between two intertwined but separate professions.

c) Digital is forever.While it is true that many writers have purposefully destroyed their paper documents, it is completely misleading to imply that email is a more permanent medium. You don’t have to burn email to get rid of it. I would love to see more media representation of the contradictions of digital preservation, the complexity of how fragile digital objects are, even while they are easily replicated and distributed. Is that so much to ask?

Nonetheless, it’s always good to see archives mentioned in a major publication, especially associated with a famous person. It would be delightful if a collection of Salinger’s records appeared. Let’s hope they end up in a public institution, though, rather than getting snatched up by a private collector.

As a related note, I’ve been meaning to pick up Laura Millar’s new book, The Story Behind the Book: Preserving Author’s and Publisher’s Archives. Has anyone checked it out yet?

As you may know, I am not a fan of PowerPoint. I think it is rarely used well, and more commonly used as a crutch for poor presentations or teaching. Edward Tufte doesn’t like .ppt either, and is much more articulate about the reasons why. Tufte is a statistician and astute observer of information design, and I’ve been enjoying his book, Beautiful Evidence,  particularly the essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”

Tufte makes a strong case that PowerPoint funnels all kinds of presentations into a simplified business pitch. His specific charges include the low-resolution of information, the one-way sequencing of slides, the lack of listener participation, and fragmentation of content. As one example, he gives a case study of a presentation given to NASA officials prior to the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. In investigations after the explosion, it became clear that the threat had been recognized by some staff and consultants. However, decision was on information that filtered up a path of communication moved between siloed departments and multiple levels of authority. These barriers were only exacerbated by the form in which the crucial information was presented. He provides a disturbing two-page spread of one slide from this presentation, carefully annotated. The lack of concrete data is disturbing, as is the seemingly hierarchical display: presumably, the important stuff is big and at the top, right? It is a convincing argument that the content of technical reports does not fit into the flexible form of PowerPoint. As he writes, “formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation technology.”

It struck me that Tufte suggests the simple solution of bringing a short report or notes to a meeting. Not a printout of the information-impoverished slides, but a handout with relevant charts, graphs, or other information. That way, listeners can flip back and forth as they go, take notes, and really participate. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how interactive paper can be.

In another section, Tufte looks at the failure of .ppt when it comes to complex displays of information such as charts and tables. He gives the example of John Graunt’s early tables of life expectancy and mortality. These diagrams present thousands of items of information in a form that permits the reader to make comparisons between various causes of death and various years. As I was reading, I realized that you could call these tables a sort of aggregation, to put it into the lingo of our current module in LIBR 559M. I’ve been struggling with an adequate definition of aggregation as it applies to information, and Tufte certainly add some nuances. Effective aggregation does not mean simply dumping items together. Instead, it enables comparisons, brings items together without diminishing or distorting the content. Just as Google Wave permits greater contextualization of conversations, a proper table or diagram can give context for the information displayed. I’m curious what Tufte would think of some of the other tools we’ve looked at in this course. He has written about iPhone applications, but I want to know what he thinks of Google Wave. Certainly he’s gotten an invite, right?

In LIBR 559M, we’ve been discussing the permeable nature of personal and professional presentation online. It makes me think back to ARST 555, and the presentation we did about John McDonald’s article Managing Records in the Modern Office: Taming the Wild Frontier. Way back in 1995, McDonald wrote this excellent analysis of how the change to personal computers threw many kinds of traditional record-keeping. From the abstract:

From a record-keeping perspective, the modern office is like the wild frontier. Office workers can create and send electronic messages and documents to whomever they wish. They can store them according to their own individual needs and then delete them without turning to anyone else for approval. There are no rules of the road. The autonomy of the individual reigns supreme!

That is, as office hierarchy was changed by technology, traditional record-keeping strategies fell apart. As the personal computer became the location where records were made and kept, workers started thinking about those items as, well, personal. In a more general way, this happens to many people as we use new technologies. This applies to social media as well: for example, many professionals use Twitter for both personal and work-related information. Or, as Sarah Palin dealt with last year, we may use our personal email accounts for official business.

Anyway, I have been thinking about this in connection with Google Wave. I haven’t gotten to test it out yet, but I’ve been seeing interesting comments by archivists and records managers. As more and more functions can be incorporated into a single tool, it can really muddy the records being created. This is all the more true when creation can be done as a group, or individually but anonymously. My understanding is that Wave will permit more integration of the elements (IM, email, etc.) contributing to any activity. As Alan Bell notes, “Google seems to have created the first collaborative environment where context, conversation and object are captured together and can be rendered together as the record of any collaboration.” Wowza! Despite the challenges for actually figuring out what the record is, let alone how to preserve it long-term, that’s an exciting possibility. However, if folks are using their Google Wave accounts for both business and pleasure, the work of records managers and archivists becomes much, much messier.