Palo Alto: Too Much Information
Action
While I was in the Bay Area of California, I spent a day in Palo Alto, learning how to use a software program called Martus. A former supervisor of mine when I worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program helped develop Martus. Using Martus Human rights organizations can securely document human rights violations. The user creates bulletins describing interviews, violations or other actions and then chooses what portion of the bulletin should be public and what should be private. Bulletins are backed up on secure servers. The public sections can be searched by anyone including, researchers, students, prosecutors and the press. The private sections are encrypted and only the user who created the bulletin may read them. The program has a user-friendly interface based upon e-mail programs. Martus is free and open source, so users can examine it to ensure that it is as secure as it claims to be. As part of my training I learned the very basics of tagging information using XML programming so that it can be searched easily.
After my software training, I had dinner with my friend Josephine. I hadn’t seen her in four years: since we met at a youth hostel in Athens and then spent a day together in Paris. Josephine is a librarian with a passion for fashion. She plans to combine her love of organizing information and dishing about fashion in a grand website. Josephine commented that learning XML is now a standard part of the library sciences curriculum.
Reflection
Whenever I go into large libraries and bookstores (or surf the web for that matter), I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. My day in Palo Alto reigned in some of that overwhelming feeling. While Martus is a program that adds more information to the Internet, I learned a little about how to organize and code that information so that it’s simple to pick out the relevant pieces that a researcher needs. The programmers who developed Martus are also working on developing a program to analyze the data. Once the data is analyzed, human rights activists have more empirical support in their claims of violations.
Talking with Josephine, an expert in information organization and retrieval, I felt like the mass of information out there is manageable. I don’t have to have read every book in the library, but I know there are resources available to me to find the books I do need. I also appreciated that trained librarians aren’t just masters of reference books, but also of electronic information.
Question
What difference does it make who produces the information and who creates the information retrieval methods?
While I was in the Bay Area of California, I spent a day in Palo Alto, learning how to use a software program called Martus. A former supervisor of mine when I worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program helped develop Martus. Using Martus Human rights organizations can securely document human rights violations. The user creates bulletins describing interviews, violations or other actions and then chooses what portion of the bulletin should be public and what should be private. Bulletins are backed up on secure servers. The public sections can be searched by anyone including, researchers, students, prosecutors and the press. The private sections are encrypted and only the user who created the bulletin may read them. The program has a user-friendly interface based upon e-mail programs. Martus is free and open source, so users can examine it to ensure that it is as secure as it claims to be. As part of my training I learned the very basics of tagging information using XML programming so that it can be searched easily.
After my software training, I had dinner with my friend Josephine. I hadn’t seen her in four years: since we met at a youth hostel in Athens and then spent a day together in Paris. Josephine is a librarian with a passion for fashion. She plans to combine her love of organizing information and dishing about fashion in a grand website. Josephine commented that learning XML is now a standard part of the library sciences curriculum.
Reflection
Whenever I go into large libraries and bookstores (or surf the web for that matter), I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. My day in Palo Alto reigned in some of that overwhelming feeling. While Martus is a program that adds more information to the Internet, I learned a little about how to organize and code that information so that it’s simple to pick out the relevant pieces that a researcher needs. The programmers who developed Martus are also working on developing a program to analyze the data. Once the data is analyzed, human rights activists have more empirical support in their claims of violations.
Talking with Josephine, an expert in information organization and retrieval, I felt like the mass of information out there is manageable. I don’t have to have read every book in the library, but I know there are resources available to me to find the books I do need. I also appreciated that trained librarians aren’t just masters of reference books, but also of electronic information.
Question
What difference does it make who produces the information and who creates the information retrieval methods?
1 Comments:
At 12:05 PM, Jen said…
I think you have to be critical of all information. At each level, information might be slightly changed. If someone is gathering information regarding a human rights topic, just the act of CHOOSING to gather that information might affect the data. Then, that data is added into a system - but that act my slightly change the data, and so on . . . all the way to the retrieval process. That's not saying that the information is false and can't be trusted - but it's something that the user needs to be aware of as they search for or read/use the information.
So it's a major element - who produces the info and who creates the retrieval process. It will always affect the information in some way - from the very basic level (connotations of words) to the more extreme, purposeful manipulation of data.
Since I know how to do some programming - I have to say from that standpoint - the way someone writes code can even say a lot about them as an individual. There are many ways to write code to create a program.
yes, I'm geeky - I've read some code before and really 'got it' and other times, I just don't see the programmers train of thought . . .
So even at that level, even if it's in a minor way, it all affects the information some amount.
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