Author Archives: admin

DVD Dilemmas

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Last summer we boxed up our DVDs when we had our lounge redecorated, and there they have remained because we no longer have a video recorder to play them on. The box is taking up space in my study so the time has come when I need to something with them.


Of course, I could just take the whole lot down to a local charity shop – but it’s not going to be as easy as that. You see, mixed in among the movies that we just bought and enjoyed (like the Bourne series) are long time favourites that I’ve collected on VHF Video Tapes and then replaced with DVDs (like 2001); and some event DVDS that I’ve promised myself an enjoyable reliving at some unspecified time in the future (like the 2012 Olympics). I do want to keep some of these to enjoy them in the future, so I guess I’m going to have to go through the whole collection to choose which ones to keep a copy of and which ones to get rid of; and then I’ll have to figure out how to convert the ones I’m keeping to a more long-lived format. I’m anticipating that these decisions may also be affected by the sizes of the files that the conversions will produce: I’m not used to handling loads of gigabit-sized files.

The Spreadsheet – an OFC Superstar

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Since my last post here, over 7 months ago, we’ve completed first substantial drafts of all 10 chapters of the book on Collecting in the IT era. The literature survey has made a substantial contribution to the material; and the use of an Excel spreadsheet enabled the process. This is just another example of the massive contribution that the humble spreadsheet has made to modern life since its inception in 1979. Designed ostensibly for manipulating numbers, it has proved equally useful for organising text.

In my first foray into writing books at the National Computing Centre in the 1980s, I tried recording key points that I read or discovered about a subject, in a Word document, and then rearranging them into separate chapters. It was a pretty effective method – but only worked for fairly concise units of text and relatively few of them. For this book I have used a spreadsheet to assemble more than 3,400 chunks of relevant points from over 300 books, papers and other sources; many of the chunks consisting of part-paragraphs of over 80 words of text either copied from digital texts or hand-typed-in. Against each chunk are columns of reference details and allocations to particular chapters. The ability to apply consistent organisation over such a large volume of material, and to be able to search and filter every column, provides a huge advancement in capability over my 1980’s efforts; a capability to identify key points, to assess differing views, and to construct new thoughts and ideas around a particular topic.

The simplicity and power of its structures across both numbers and text, makes the spreadsheet a premier performer in creating order from chaos; it is the hammer and wheel for 21st century individuals.

Deep Roots for Modern Britain

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Mentions about the Viking, Roman or Norman invasions of Britain make me wonder if my family or any of my friends originate from those peoples. I’m also intrigued by the way recent work using DNA analysis can build up an overall lineage of modern people which originates in a small group of individuals in Africa around 200,000 years ago. So, I got to thinking that it would be an interesting TV programme to track down the origins of a whole bunch of our very diverse British population using modern DNA analysis. We might all be surprised about how foreign we all are and yet how closely we are all related.

Evolving Suspicions

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I’ve become intrigued by how we’ve managed to evolve the complexity of the human being, particularly after reading the following: “The inner ear is where the receptors for hearing (and balance) are contained. Specifically, the cochlea is a liquid filled (snail-like) spiral structure that internally widens in the middle such that different vibration frequencies will have heightened energy at different (specific) locations along the structure that cause the membranes to be displaced. Inside the cochlea, liquid filled tubes (scala) are separated by membranes, one of which (the basilar membrane) contains rows of hairs (the stereocilia) that cause neural activity when the membrane is displaced nearby.”

I thought it would be interesting to do a rough calculation of how long it would take for us to get from our originating bacteria to where we are today based on my top-of-the-head estimates of the number of mutations required and how many entities were contributing to them.

W: Number of mutations required: 10 million – 610 million: average 310,000,000

X: Number of generations required for a successful mutation on top of a previously successful mutation: 10,000 – 210,000: average 110,000

Y: Number of entities/couples contributing to generations: 1 – 100,000,000: average 50,000,000

Z: Number of years between generations: 0.01 – 20: average 10

Using the averages:

For W mutations to occur, taking X generations for each one, would take 310,000,000 x 110,000 generations

If there were Y contributing entities/couples, this would take (310,000,000 x 110,000)/50,000,000 generations

If there were an average of Z number of years per generation, the overall process would take     [(310,000,000 x 110,000)/50,000,000)] x 10 years = 6,820,000 years

Despite this being a possible result (considering the earth is apparently 4.5 billion years old), it is clearly wrong since the earliest microbes found in rocks are estimated to be 3.7 billion years old. Anyway, I’m feeling distinctly uncomfortable about all the assumptions I’ve made in the above calculations – essentially every element is totally flawed and the whole calculation is worthless. In any case, I’m still left with the feeling that, to have evolved such a huge set of such very highly complex and interworking physical mechanisms, completely by chance, seems to be highly unlikely. So, I’m left with a lurking suspicion that somewhere in the originating DNA, or early equivalent, was a programme of instructions….

POSTSCRIPT: Quite by chance I watched part of “Attenborough: 60 years in the wild” on the BBC this morning – the day after I posted the above material. The programme is highly relevant and I recommend it.

Google Scholaring

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The book on Collecting in the IT era, is coming on; we now have rough drafts for all the chapters. So, over the last couple of months I’ve been doing a literature survey – and discovered that things are a bit different from when I last did something like this about 40 years ago. If I remember rightly, I got the corporate library to interrogate some online databases for me, selected various items from the resulting printouts, and requested the papers and books that I wanted through the inter-library loan system.

These days it’s a little simpler: you do a search of Google Scholar which produces loads of hits presented as a series of abstracts. You click on the items you’re interested in, and, if you’re lucky, the paper will appear either in your PDF reader or in a web page. If the full version isn’t immediately available, a further search of the net may turn up a copy. Failing that, if you have institutional membership of a publisher’s archive, that may give you access; or else you may be able to pay a fee to get a copy. For books, and for papers which you cannot obtain by any of these options, then it’s back to the inter-library loan system (well that’s what it’s called here in the UK – I assume other countries have similar services). In this case, I found versions of all but 8 papers, on the net; and my co-author was able to obtain 7 of the remainder through his institutional memberships. Of the 22 books I needed, I already had 3, I bought 7 on eBay for less than £5 each (and free postage), and I ordered the remainder through inter-library loans via my local library in Bedford.

Now, I don’t know what percentage of the overall canon of human scientific works is included in Google Scholar’s database; but my initial searches gave me some confidence that it was enough to be very useful. For example, a search for the word ‘Collecting’ in the title, identified 80,900 results. I duly conducted a variety of searches and identified some 270 papers and books, of which about 130 proved useful enough to include in the literature survey. From those items, I identified about a further 15 or 20 papers and books to add to the list.

The process of actually reading and assessing the material, was, of course, hard work; but the mechanics of actually conducting the searches and getting the material was extremely quick and easy – much, much easier than I experienced 40 years ago. And, while Google Scholar may not include everything, it’s likely that any key material missing from Google Scholar will be referenced in the material initially identified. I haven’t spoken to anyone other than my co-author about Google Scholar, so this short overview cannot be considered in any way a thorough assessment. However, for what it’s worth, I think it’s been very effective for my purposes, and I’d certainly use it again.

Some final notes

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As our investigations relating to collecting practices in the Icon Age have taken a somewhat different turn since we first undertook this work, we have decided to terminate work on this Knowledge Development journey. As noted in the previous post, a wide variety of issues were revealed by the study. It made it clear that the texts selected for mark-up in the present day were often, but not always, distinct from those that had been selected many years before. This was not, in itself, surprising, but we wanted to understand what trajectories of reasoning had changed the most and this was not so easy to pinpoint. We were interested in whether things like the type of document marked up, when it was originally marked up, the place of work at the time, and the interest in the topic would make a difference to the degree of contiguity between the original markup and the new markup. However, none of these seemed to have a consistent effect. More than anything, we have concluded that understanding the nature and relevance of document markup practices for knowledge development is something that would require significant further investigation in its own right.

The story of storyboards

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It’s been well over a year and a half that I displayed the second set of storyboards on the side of my bookcase – plenty of time to experience what its like to live with them. However, I can’t say I’ve given them a great deal of use. Every now and then I’ve selected another sheet, hung it on the display, and had a glance at its contents – but perhaps only a dozen times across the period. That’s not to say I didn’t find the contents interesting. On the contrary, I found I was coming across points I’d already forgotten about, or wouldn’t ordinarily connect directly with the main topic of the storyboard – a finding which I also experienced in the first trial (see the heading facts/Discovered/Re-discovered in the ESB Evaluation Results post). Other members of my family were also interested when I showed them the display and explained what it was all about – but not enough to spend any further time exploring, even when some of the topics were things they were familiar with. The fact that this set of storyboards included several other types of items other than books (which the first set was limited to), seemed to make no difference to myself or to family members. Perhaps this overall reaction is understandable since viewers have no real reason to examine the installation in more detail. Like a picture on a wall, it provides an interest for the eye but demands no closer inspection. People need to have a reason, an incentive, to do more.

Of course, the fact that this is a static, paper-based, display conceals its hidden content: it does not connect with a modern person’s notion of interactivity. A screen-based display, as originally envisaged for the storyboards, might perhaps inspire a greater curiosity; though, beyond an initial inspection, I suspect there would still have to be a rationale for exploring. Maybe such displays are, in fact, just pictures on a wall – but with an additional dimension of background links which have to be displayed automatically, in turn or in other configurations, to enable its viewers to experience its complete composition. Would that inspire people to interact with the display, or would they simply stand and watch? Well, perhaps a bit of both: at least one doesn’t preclude the other – though probably best not at the same time unless by picture-in-picture.

As with the first trial, I had created PDFs of the storyboards for display in the Sidebooks app in my iPad. In addition, I created an equivalent display in my laptop. The latter was able to link out directly to associated items held elsewhere on the laptop (as opposed to including all the material in a single PDF for the Sidebooks display). I did look at the Sidebooks storyboards occassionally in order to follow a particular link. However, I rarely, if ever looked at the laptop version. I guess the iPad was simply closer to hand and provided more immediate access. The laptop version is certainly a powerful beast providing access to the complete version of the books, for example, which were not included in their totality in the Sidebooks PDF. However, on trying it out while writing this post, I found that it annoyingly shuts down the master front-end index PDF when a link is selected and another file is opened. No doubt this will fixable somehow or other, but it’s another example of how there will always be glitches when trying to interlink systems and files.

Inspiring viewers to access storyboards may be a little difficult, but that is the least of the challenges associated with such displays. Their production demands some creative energy and is extremely time-consuming: individuals would need a huge incentive to undertake the work for rewards which are way in the future. Perhaps, it would be easier to undertake the analysis as each item is acquired, instead of trying to produce a whole set in one go. However, people have difficulty in just labelling and placing newly acquired items in an organised store, let alone going through such a rigorous analysis process as well. In discussing this with my son, he pointed out that, in any case, one’s feelings about an object may be very different at the point of acquisition from those several years later. This thought prompted him to develop the notion of revisiting an object periodically to build up a picture of how one’s feelings for an object were changing over time – a development that could be displayed graphically on a screen. However, this would demand yet more work from innocent owners who just want to add something to their collections. There is one piece of information which would not require any work to generate and which could be used by a system to generate a timeline display, and that is the date of creation of the digital object. That might be interesting – but would only be factually correct if all the items were born digital; the date of items which were acquired in physical form and digitised later would bear an incorrect acquisition date.

Summing up my experiences with my two sets of storyboards, I have to conclude that, while the results are very interesting, the work to produce them is probably going to be too great for most collectors. Perhaps the circumstance which would provide the greatest incentive to undertake such work is when a collection is to be digitised prior to the disposing of the physical items – as was the case in my first storyboard trial when I digitised 36 books to remove them from my book shelves and destroyed them in the process. The heartache an owner might feel in undertaking such a final no-going-back act, might inspire the production of a set of storyboards in memoriam.

Practice Hierarchy writings

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About a year ago I reported that my colleague, Peter Tolmie, and I were working on a book about digitisation’s impact on collecting, based upon all the investigations and writings already described in this blog, as well as auto-ethnographic investigations of a variety of collections that Peter and myself have been associated with. The book will expand many of the notions put forward in the OFC tutorial, and therefore I shall continue to provide updates on our progress on the book, within this Order From Chaos journey.

Since my last report, we have moved on from the auto-ethnographic investigations and derived a draft Practice Hierarchy for collecting, which has eight upper levels – Initiating, Equipping, Acquiring, Depositing, Using, Revealing, Maintaining, and Disposing. We are now in the process of fully verifying, describing and illustrating all the elements. Having done that we plan to analyse and describe how digitisation has affected all these practices – though it may take us several months to get to that next stage.

Placing PAWDOC

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Construction of the book on collecting that I’m writing with Peter Tolmie, is now well underway. However, this Personal Document Management section of the OFC website doesn’t seem an appropriate place to report on the development of such a wide-ranging text. Instead, I shall record details of our progress in the Order from Chaos section of this blog.

This journey on Personal Document Management has nearly run it’s 40 year+ course. I summarised my findings on that extended trial in some entries a few years ago; and there is only one remaining aspect that I am actively investigating – to find a permanent repository for the PAWDOC collection. Its going to be challenging: despite contacting several possible institutions over the last seven years, and publicising my goal in various forums, I’ve had no success so far. Just to be clear, this is what I’m offering:

  1. The PAWDOC digital collection of 31,000 documents dating mainly from 1972 to the present day, fully labelled, and documented in 17,300 index entries; and all of them in Windows folders under the control of an established Digital Preservation maintenance regime.
  2. Two archive boxes of some 330 PAWDOC items that were judged worthy of keeping in hardcopy form, and for which the reasons for keeping were recorded in a spreadsheet and described in the unpublished journal paper ‘IV in PIM: The applicability of Intrinsic Value in Personal Information Management’.

  3. A few other associated documents that could be included with the collection, such as a leather-bound volume of 63 reports of visits to UK, European and US organisations during the period 1979 -1982;  a bound copy of the organisational documents, proceedings of, and delegates to, the first European CSCW conference in 1989; a bound copy of reports on, proceedings of, and delegates to, the first US CSCW conference in 1986; a signed and bound copy of ‘The Network Nation’ by Hiltz & Turoff annotated with notes for the 1983 book ‘Introducing the Electronic Mailbox’; and copies of the books ‘Sorties into the IT Hurricane’ and ‘Meteor: a story of stamp collecting in the eye of the IT hurricane’.

Anyone interested should get in touch with me.

Reflections on a visit to the Gallery

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It’s been nearly a year and a half since the simulated Electronic Trophy Gallery was completed and hung on my study wall. Since then, I may have looked at it seven or eight times – certainly not a great deal more: I’ve had no special need to consult it. Perhaps, the main prompt to inspect it has been to establish if a particular item has been included – and I’m pretty sure that there was one occasion in which I determined that a deserving candidate wasn’t there. Herein lies one of the shortcomings of the simulation: to include an extra item would require substantial effort to redesign the PowerPoint images; and to reprint the dual A3 pages, match them up, and get them into the frame so that they look a relatively seamless poster. A truly electronic system would be considerably easier to add in new items – which is certainly something I need to be able to do. For example, I self-published a book earlier this year entitled ‘Meteor – A story about stamp collecting in the eye of the IT Hurricane’, and that certainly deserves a place in the Gallery.

Despite this difficulty, the simulated Electronic Trophy Gallery has substantial advantages. For example, when I decided to write this evaluation piece, I stood in front of the frame and picked out an image of a rugby cap labelled A19. I picked up my iPad, opened SideBooks, found the section on ‘Paul’s Trophies & Certificates’ and selected A19. The cap appeared in full technicolour. Subsequent pages displayed it at different angles, followed by, to my surprise, some pages in The Mountaineer (the magazine of my school, Mt. St, Mary’s College) with descriptions of some of the games with my name mentioned twice, and the final page recording that Full Colours that year had been awarded to S.J.Bolger, P.A.Wilson, and A.Maggiore: that was what the cap was for. This was a most pleasing collection of goodies to find, particularly as it was so easy to get at. Had I really forgotten those pages were there? Well, yes. There are over 200 items represented in the Trophy Gallery and I can’t remember every page that I assembled as I constructed the iPad version of the Gallery a year and a half ago.

I looked up some of the other items in the Gallery. Some had just the images (like the front, spine and award plate of the Black Beauty book I got as a class prize at school); whereas another contained the text of a conference paper I gave together with the preface by the conference chairman and the contents of the whole book of proceedings.

It is the immediacy of being able to open up items on the iPad, and the ability to find more information about an item so quickly, that is the most striking aspect of this installation. If I had to choose between the physical artefacts and this simulation, I would say that you’re asking the wrong question: It would be totally impractical to assemble all this material and their adjuncts in the physical space in my study. This simulation is the only way it would work unless you had a very large house, lots of money, and access to presentation specialists. A more appropriate question would be whether I would be prepared to destroy all the physical artefacts and make do with just the digital versions? The answer to that is ‘yes’ for some things and ‘no’ for others. Some things, such as the trophy I won for winning a pool competition in a hotel while I was on holiday, was destroyed long ago; however, the physical books, journals and magazines in which my writings appear, are all stored away in a bag in the loft – relatively inaccessible but still in existence.

Am I likely to look at the Gallery very much in the future? Well, no, I don’t think so. But that’s not really the point. Having it there is the important thing. Knowing it’s there, containing a complete set of the things I regard as trophies of my achievements, and being available for access whenever I so desire, is the value afforded by this installation.