Author: Kristina

more music for writing, or, netlabels are a grad student’s best friend

I downloaded a bunch of stuff recently and have been slowly working through it while working on my dissproposal. I recommend:

ROZA – GLitch ov Batumi

What we really like about the album is that it’s almost impossible to characterize it in a matter of specific musical genre or style. This is the music which can be depicted in such terms as “good” or “attractive”, or “visionary” or “surreal” but not “rock”, “hip-hop”, “glitch”, “negerpunk” or whatever is usually on your iPod/Winamp.

The album starts with a deep, vibrant sound which reminds me the final dark electronic period of Coil magiciansmusicians. But soon the music turns into some sort of Tribal-Folk with a heartbreaking chorals, freakish oriental drum patterns, and blurred sitar/string melodies which flows in an endless ocean of acoustical noises. The more you listen to this epic ballade-intro, the more you realize that “GLitch ov Batumi” will settle down in your mp3-player for a long time. On the “Irenashvili djan” song you’ll have to deal with catchy overdriven acid flavored oriental broken beats a-la Muslimgauze. And on the “Mountings” you’ll be drowned in a deepest lake of abstract ambient. And the comprehensive title of “Drummers ov God” song needs no additional comments, I believe.

Also enjoyed today: Kittenhead, by Djinnestan, but I don’t know how much it would pull me in if it weren’t called KITTENHEAD:

In many ways, it defies easy categorization. It is very ambient, but contains rhythms. It is dark, yet at the same time whimsical. It includes acoustic instruments and vocals, but they have been processed virtually beyond recognition.

And finally, last night, I described the songs Inland and Track 2 by Cisfinitum to Will as “magnificently creepy.” More about Cisfinitum, via Wikipedia:

Cisfinitum’s leader and inspirer Eugene Voronovsky has graduated from the Moscow State Conservatory as a professional violinist. In his music he uses classical instruments such as violin, piano and percussion along with the sounds traditionally considered “non-musical”, like sound of mechanical coffee grinder or dying man’s breath, all of this subjected to thorough processing, in which both Soviet analog tools and modern digital processing technologies are used. That’s why Cisfinitum can be called the industrial-ambient reading of academic music.

“Cisfinitum is the sound of eternity. I’ve always wanted to create the music of Russian cosmos, music capable of expressing information about Russia that is impossible to reveal by means of words. They call this ‘drone’ overseas, but I prefer to define it ‘metaphysical ambient'”, claims Eugene.

And I called “magnificently creepy.” That’s a good thing.

ppm?

How interesting. Lifehacker, den of PIM hobbyists, links to a Fleshbot post asking: How do you organize your porn?. The post currently has 49 comments. Personal Porn Management, a subactivity of PIM.

Don’t click on that last link if you are in a place where it is inappropriate to view porn. Or if you just think porn is inappropriate in general. There are some photos and ads. Of course, given the topic, one of the photos just had to be “a librarian.”

Observations:

  1. Here is another example of people who are enthusiastic about a topic and/or activity engaging in meta-level information processes: stepping back and thinking about managing the information related to said topic/activity. It is clear from the comments that some people have thought a whole lot about organizing and managing their collections.
  2. Unsurprisingly, you see the same patterns you see in other PIM. You have the save nothing people who delete anything they download after a week. You have the save everything people who build collections.
  3. And when I say they build collections, I mean some really big collections. Several people have collections of hundreds of gigabytes. One person reports a 9 terabyte collection!
  4. You have pilers (I dump it all in a folder) and you have filers (all arranged or accessible by categories).
  5. You see the same kinds of fragmentation problems as in PIM in general: fragmentation by format (image, video, etc) and location (on hard drive, on remote server, on dvds, on hosted photo sharing service, on web and I keep a bookmark to it).
  6. Some of the people who are into organizing their collections are really into organizing their collections. Someone posted their classification scheme. My favorite is the 9TB person, who concludes the description of the elaborate organization system and custom built search apps used (emphasis mine):

    I actually don’t have much difficulty remembering where I’ve put things, even through 9TB of data (that’s 150x more stuff than the guy with 60GB) and even without my little search tool. The whole project of constructing this system has really been an ongoing project to teach myself about Enterprise-level data storage and information retrieval. There’s a whole system of failsafes and backups that I’m not even talking about.

  7. A major difference between PPM and PIM is, of course, some of the attributes of information used to organize collections.

I must admit that once upon a time this did briefly cross my mind as a dissertation topic. I knew what I wanted to study but hadn’t decided what context I wanted to study it in. I have an interest in the characteristics, organization, and availability of sex-related, sex education, and reproductive health information–information fraught with political and moral judgment. I also had a hunch that there was a lot of PIM stuff going on here, some of which is very different from other PIM and therefore interesting. There is a small number of studies around this topic already, but of course they focus on information seeking.

But then I thought about the reality of spending a year or more of my life thinking about people’s porn collections and it seemed rather depressing.

I’m glad to see there appears to be something to my hunches, though.

It took me forever to write this post because I was paranoid about making some horrid accidental double-entendre. I’m sure Simon will find at least one anyway.

And now I wonder what interesting searches will bring people to this post… I don’t think using “pr0n” instead really does anything to help.

good old academic snark.

From: Koschmann, Timothy, Kuutti, Kari and Hickman, Larry. (1998) The Concept of Breakdown in Heidegger, Leont’ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Education. Mind, Culture, and Activity 5:1, 25 — 41

Indeed, in some cases the authors themselves recognized such links. Leont’ev (1981), for example, made reference to the writings of both Heidegger and Dewey. Dewey also apparently perceived some parallels between his own work and that of Heidegger. When first hearing a description of Sein und Zeit (Heidegger, 1953), Dewey was quoted as observing that “it sounded as if a German peasant were trying to render parts of Experience and Nature into his daily idiom” (Hook, 1962, p. 6).

I figured I should read this recently found article tonight while eating dinner. I haven’t really accomplished anything else today since when I went out to run my early-afternoon errands, my car went “thunk” and quit working as I was driving 45 mph on a busy two lane country-esque road. I was able to get off to the side of the road safely, but had to do the whole tow truck and hang out at the garage thing. Still don’t know what happened with my poor dirty purple car.

But anyway… get it? Breakdown? Breakdown. Har.

web survey instrument design 101

1. Your web survey must allow respondents to go back to the previous answer or page of answers.
2. It must allow this without clearing all of the data they have already entered.

I am a researcher. I care about research in general. I care about the topic of the survey which prompted this post. It is important and also related to my own work. But when I tried to go back to change an answer on the previous page and all my responses were cleared, I just closed the browser tab containing the survey and do not plan to go back to it.

This makes me rather sad, because most people don’t have the time to deal with the consequences of someone else’s poor design decisions. Sigh.

resolution.

Comps defense: PASSED.

Not really surprising, but it feels great.

Had a lovely lunch with my advisor and a committee member, stopped by Weaver Street Market on the way home for a bottle of cava for later this evening, took a nap snuggled up with my cats, and am now ready to get back to work.

I don’t know what in the world my brain was doing while I was asleep, but I woke up feeling a little depressed and frustrated by this quote which I’m quoting from p. 1949 of: Cronin, Blaise and Lokman I. Meho. 2007. Timelines of creativity a study of intellectual innovators in information science . Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (13) 1948-59.

“scholars in information science tend not to have significant extrafield impact (Cronin & Pearson, 1990).”

Why is this, and how could it be changed? Guess I should read the Cronin and Pearson article and see what else they said…

The other thing in my head was “What exactly is ‘human geography’ and why do I find the papers from that field so intriguing?” Then I thought of the notion of information geography, what that might be, and whether anyone is doing anything they are calling by that name. The Gooracle brings up this from the Department of Geography at University of Washington, which isn’t exactly what I was thinking. But I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking. Not a trail to run down right now, though… I have a couple of other things to do. Just a few.

average age at receipt of phd=33

I’m going to be right on track…

One thing is clear from the data: This is not a field that produces Wunderkinder, bright young things who make their mark at a precocious age. In fact, some of our sample members have kept their best wine until last. Creativity in academic information science is clearly not the preserve of callow youth, and no one pattern of productivity characterizes the innovators in our sample. (p. 1954)

— Cronin, Blaise and Lokman I. Meho. 2007. Timelines of creativity: a study of intellectual innovators in information science . Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (13): 1948-59.