what i talked about in 2008

December 31st, 2008 § 5 Comments

tag cloud - top 500 words of 2008

I started this blog at the very end of last year because – well, I’m not sure why. I think maybe I was annoyed with Sandra Lee? But what that means is that the end of this calendar year is also almost exactly the end of the blogging year as well. I thought I’d take advantage of that.

And my most common word is…. think. Not too surprising, really. I’d like to think that it is because I talk a lot about thinking, but I suspect many, many uses of the phrase “I think” are at least as responsible. At least “thinking” appears with a fair degree of regularity as well.

more end-of-year stuff – data visualizations

December 29th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

You all know how much I love me some good information visualizations.  Here’s a pointer to a year’s end top five for 2008 from FlowingData.  Two of the five have been highlighted here over the past year – the New York Times, and Wordle.

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year

personal, idiosyncratic best movies of 2008 list

December 28th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

We could end up fitting one more movie in this year, but we probably won’t so Shaun and I did our annual sitting in a pub making our best-five-movies-of-the-year lists last weekend.

So again, the rules are these: the movie had to be seen, by me, in the theater during the calendar year in question to be considered. It looks like we did a pretty good job of seeing most of the 2007 movies in 2007, so unlike previous years we don’t have a ton of last year’s Oscar movies on this year’s list.

So here they are – links are to the Movie Review Query Engine.

No-brainer choices that would be on my list every time I made it:

There Will be Blood

Iron Man

My Blueberry Nights

The rest. These might change from day-to-day. There were a number of contenders – many of which ended up on Shaun’s list (ETA: Shaun’s list):

Man on Wire

Be Kind Rewind

The thing is this – this list is seriously idiosyncratic. The movies that make the list tend to be movies that stick with me. They may not be the movies I recommend most frequently to other people, they may not be the movies I can make the best arguments for why they are good or even exceptional. They may not even be the movies I feel the best about at the moment when I leave the theater. But when at the end of the year I have found myself revisiting a particular movie, performance or even movie moment more than once – that is the kind of film that tends to make this list.

This year, the movie that was probably most affected by this quirk was Rachel Getting Married. I really liked that movie, but we just saw it a couple of days ago. My brain wasn’t able to put it on the list that soon because I can’t separate out if it is near the top because it is the most recent good movie I have seen or because it will still be in that number six months from now.

The full list – WAY down from last year. This is mostly because puppy-having and movie-going do not mix well.

Charlie Wilson’s War

Juno

The Savages

There Will be Blood

Definitely, Maybe

Be Kind Rewind

The Bank Job

Girls Rock!

The Tracey Fragments

Iron Man

RedBelt

Outsourced

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The Incredible Hulk

My Blueberry Nights

Wall-E

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

The Dark Knight

Gonzo

American Teen

Burn After Reading

Man on Wire

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

Bottle Shock

Synecdoche, New York

Rachel Getting Married

the founding fathers are on LibraryThing!

December 17th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

Those historians – they get described as  all curmudgeonly and books yay and it’s better if you can touch the paper journals but seriously, they are technological pragmatists.  If it works they’ll use it.  Today’s example is on LibraryThing.

Go here for the project announcement.

There’s a whole field of inquiry in history that focuses on the book collections/ libraries of the colonial and early national periods – with the best-known subject of this field of study being Thomas Jefferson, of course.  And it is really fascinating – the things he (or others) chose to collect say a lot about him, about knowledge at that time, and about a lot of other aspects of the world at that time.

So – why not put those collections on LibraryThingJefferson is there (though all of his collections aren’t yet – dude initially collected the Library of Congress after all).  But so is John Adams there and Benjamin Franklin.  But the project is open to include any American living before 1825.  Check out Mary Hartford, who I didn’t know about before but who is clearly a fascinating subject.

I love examples like this where the tool is cool, the subject is cool and the connection between them is uber-cool.   And where there is room for many, many institutions, archivists and librarians to participate.

words that mean pretty

December 16th, 2008 § 5 Comments

This blog will never die.  It will never die because of this post.  Written in, I think, in about 15 minutes this post was just a quick thing to share a new tool that I was (and still am) really excited about.  And I’m not the only one.

So I never expected that this post would have more legs than any other post I’ve ever made – it doesn’t have the highest hit count, but of all of the posts on this blog it is the tortoise-est one.  Every day it picks up one or two or three views.

Unfortunately, those views come from people who are looking for something else.  Well, I shouldn’t say “unfortunately.”  I suspect a decent number of those people have never seen Wordle, and think it’s pretty cool.  So it’s cool by extension that they see that post here.  But they come here looking for (and this is almost always the exact wording of the search, it’s weird) – “words that mean pretty.” So, they want synonyms for the word pretty.  I’m thinking that they know what pretty means, and that they want some other words that mean that same thing.

So there are a couple of information literacy issues here, right?  The first, and probably most obvious, is that entering keywords into a search engine is not the best way to answer this particular question.  There are better tools out there.

Information Literacy issue #1

Using Google, the Wordle post comes up #8 on the result list for the words that mean pretty search right now.  So I assume that this is where most of the hits are coming from.  It doesn’t appear on Yahoo  (though there is a result about “how do I increase my dog’s understanding of words” which I find really intriguing).  Anyway, sometimes it’s a little higher on the Google list, sometimes a little lower.  Always on the first page.  The reason why people click on it is clear – most of the other results are obviously not relevant.  We have:

#1 – this one seems like it might be relevant, but it is actually a dictionary page for the word perhaps, not the word pretty.

#2 – this is a Yelp San Francisco query looking for non-english words that mean pretty.

#3-5 are random blog posts that use phrases like ‘words fail me” coupled with “pretty boring,” or “pretty words mean nothing.”

#6 is a link to the lyrics to Dirty Pretty Words.

#7 – we finally get a result that might work.  It’s a WikiAnswers question that just says -  “words that have pretty much the same meaning.”  But the description says “other words for pretty, same meaning as pretty” and so forth.  But when you click through to the page, you don’t see those questions. Instead, you find out that the initial question was looking for a definition of the word “synonym.”  Still, asking the question on WikiAnswers would probably work.

And then my post at #8.  Not that I really have to convince anyone who reads this blog that a search engine isn’t the place to find synonyms and antonyms.  So the first information literacy issue is a tool issue – there are things called thesauri and they can be really useful!  Check them out.

Information Literacy issue the second

Which connects to the more subtle information literacy issue here.  Which goes beyond how search engines aren’t a great starting point when you’re trying to find or generate synonyms – to finding and generating synonyms is a pretty fundamental part of effective keyword searching in search engines.  If you understand how keyword searching works, you know that the search  words that mean pretty will bring back anything with the disconnected terms words, mean and pretty. Which as the result list above indicates, is a whole lot of stuff you’re not interested in, including a random blog post about Wordle.   So when you get that result list, if you know how keyword searching works, you can troubleshoot that search and say “hey, I think I need a more specific term to get at the concept words that mean.”  If you’re really savvy at that point you might get the word “synonyms” from the WikiAnswers result and re-search using the terms synonyms and pretty.  That search works – you get result after result listing other words that mean the same thing as “pretty” does.

But here’s the thing – a lot of people don’t know how keyword searching works, in search engines or elsewhere.  Or they maybe kind of know, but they don’t really think about it.  And they don’t know how to troubleshoot that first failed search, or to find synonyms that will work better.  So I went looking – what would work better?  Because, as it happens, I’m working on a new keyword assignment – that I started talking about a few days ago, and that Sara talked about here – for beginning composition that will try to get at some of these issues about keywords and how they connect to critical reading, writing, thinking, as well as searching.

So, if you are wondering where you can find some information about other words that mean pretty – check these out:

Lexipedia: Where Words Have Meaning:  This one is interesting – it is based on the WordNet project at Princeton, and it creates, fairly quickly, cool webs of related words –  synonyms, antonyms,  fuzzynyms and more.   The webs are color coded so that you can glance at them and know that synonyms are olive green and antonyms are dark red.   The site looks a little bit messy, and it is hard to find.  While it has the domain “lexipedia.com” – a search on “lexipedia” brings back a lot of references to another project, about Wikipedia and handhelds.  Still, this one works pretty fast, provides a lot of terms that might be useful, and I like the glanceability of it.

www.lexipedia.com

www.lexipedia.com

Similar to this is Visuwords – an online graphical dictionary.  This one is prettier, but the resulting display isn’t as complete, and I’m not sure as a tool for finding additional terms and synonyms it would be more useful

And for the more textually oriented, there’s Definr, that also uses the WordNet project data.  Interestingly, it’s main selling point seems to be speed.  And it does define words really, really fast.  Not surprisingly, given the source data, it also provides some synonyms and related terms.

Both definr and lexipedia are user interfaces on top of the data generated by WordNet at Princeton.  This project, which groups words into “sets of cognitive synonyms” has about a million related projects listed on its website.  And the idea of cognitive synonyms is interesting, right?  For thinking about connecting terms to concepts and troubleshooting searches?

And now, as a bonus librarian answer – according to the OED, the first definition of the word pretty (adj.) is “cunning,” “crafty” (originally), and “clever,” “skillful” or “able” (later).  It was first used in this way in 1450.  “Aesthetically pleasing” is the second meaning, and it was first used this way about 10 years earlier.

“Sitting pretty” dates back to 1915, in Lincoln, Nebraska and “pretty please” dates back to 1891.

happy birthday to me from delicious, kind of

December 10th, 2008 § 1 Comment

I don’t have an iPhone, so there are many web sites I’d like to use on my phone that just don’t look very good. Delicious has always been one of those middle-ground sites that looks okay because there just isn’t much to it, but that isn’t really optimal. There’s always been a lot of stuff to navigate through before you get to your bookmarks – like your list of tags. And if you have a crazy long tag list like I do, that’s a real hardship.

So I was pretty happy to see that there is a mobile delicious option now.

http://m.delicious.com

I’m not sure it’s 100% awesome. It’s basically, login, list of bookmarks, and the ability to filter by tag (if you know the tag you want). I think for most of what I want to do, this will do.

horrible mac photo booth photo of my non iPhone

horrible mac photo booth photo of my non iPhone

But I don’t see an option to search my bookmarks and as someone who frequently makes the case in presentations that the searchability delicious offers is one of its best features, that might be a problem. Still, as a friend of mine just said to me on another topic – “progress – yay!”

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