users – info-fetishist

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.

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.

When I saw the Matrix for the first time, I was enthusiastic about it, but I don’t remember thinking it was particularly special. We see almost a movie a week in the theater, and I had no expectation that this one was going to have any kind of intellectual staying power for me. But for the next few days, I would catch myself thinking about it in slow times. I didn’t think so much about the content of the movie – the matrix itself – but about the look and feel, the fight choreography, the art direction and the visuals.

And then later, when we saw the Phantom Menace, I disliked many, many things about it. I was surprised to realize that one of those things was — it just didn’t look very cool. As important as the original Star Wars films had been to me, movies that looked like that just didn’t do it for me any more. It wasn’t just The Matrix that led me to this, of course, and The Matrix itself references a bunch of other stuff that I also like, but something about it came together and pushed my thinking about what studio-produced action movies could be.

So I didn’t notice it until later, but I had taken the blue pill when I saw that movie. Seeing it affected how I saw things from that point on. This happens to me with other things too, especially things I read. I read a lot of things every day, and take a little bit from this and a little bit from that. But every once in a while I read something that really really changes the way I see almost everything else. And most of the time, I don’t realize that right away. I read it, think "that makes sense," and don’t really realize its impact until I notice that I’ve come back to it over and over again.

Lorcan Dempsey’s In the flow is one of those blue-pill readings.

When I first read it, I thought it was just a more nuanced and useful way of thinking about the idea that libraries need to "be where the users are" — a phrase that I have heard about one million times since becoming a librarian, but about which I am still ambivalent despite the repetition. And on one level, it is a more nuanced way of considering that concept. I pull it out frequently as a corrective when faced with a service idea that just doesn’t make sense to me — is doing reference via texting just being where they are? Or is it being in their flow? I think it might be the former.

Dempsey says there are two themes that recur in discussions about flow. The first emphasizes being where they are —

the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment

The second, though, goes beyond this —

integration of library resources should not be seen as an end in itself
but as a means to better integration with the user environment, with
workflow.

Being in the users’ flow isn’t an end in itself – it goes way beyond just being where they are. To do it, we need to understand what our users are doing when they are where they are. And to understand how they are doing it, what they are to do it, and what they would like to be using.

The first time I saw something that really illustrated the difference between being in the users flow and just being where they are was when I read about the University of Washington Libraries’ putting links to their collections in relevant Wikipedia articles. The other day, John Pollitz sent me a link to another. This is totally awesome — the University of Oregon has added a button to their library catalog records that allows users to text the call number information to their own cell phones. Jason Eiseman has a nice summary (with screenshots!) of it on his blog. We talk a lot in higher ed about how all of our students have cell phones, they’re addicted to their cell phones, they’re never without their cell phones. And that’s all true. But they don’t use them for everything. And this is a simple little thing that lets them use their cell phones in a way that they are already using them to do a thing that they’re already doing. That’s being in their workflow. That’s putting ourselves where they are in a way that makes sense. And that’s just awesome.