Folksonomies

The folksonomy meme is well underway, with a well timed announcement from Technorati feeding the frenzy. I think that one thing that needs to be addressed, though, is the sense of triumphalism—folksonomy over all organized taxonomies—that I hear in some of the posts.

Clay Shirky starts to address this issue in his excellent post about the economic costs of controlled vocabularies. He points out correctly that for systems at the scale of the Internet there is just no way to control and manage tagging information in a centralized way that is even remotely economically feasible.

This is fine, but it’s not the whole story. There are plenty of systems at smaller scales than the Internet where some combination of controlled and uncontrolled tagging is necessary. Put it another way, you don’t really want your users generating all your metadata in an uncontrolled fashion. Examples: accounting codes for general ledger systems; country codes; languages; lists of employees; and so on. On the flip side, as Scott Rosenberg points out, often user-generated metadata is a lot more tractable and ultimately more useful than trying to cook up “official” lists in a clean room.

There is also discussion about issues of synonym control, browseability, and so forth. Yep. Actually, I’m not convinced about synonym control. If the system offers a way to browse by frequency, it’s likely that users will find the tag that the majority of users are using and want to be a part of it—this happened on Orkut with a number of groups, including the Mac and Macintosh groups. Of course, one of the issues there is that changing groups on Orkut was fairly frictionless, whereas changing tags (categories) on one’s blog is quite a bit stickier as a problem. Where in the infrastructure might one want to see synonyms established?

Incidentally, this is one online topic where the discussion at Slashdot, even at the Score:4 level, was completely unhelpful.

Update: Forgot to blog this even as I was commenting on it; Jeff Jarvis talks about folksonomies for people (thanks to Doc for the reminder).

Worshipping librarians

I found myself in Via Valverde on Friday with the head librarian of Goucher College, explaining the concept of folksonomies over a glass of wine. Lisa became friends with Nancy when they were on a curriculum committee together when Lisa was an undergrad, and Nancy pinged her when she was coming up here for the ALA conference. I was amazed as we talked to her to realize how many of the things I’ve become really interested in on line—such as online communication, information taxonomy and classification, RSS, and so on—are also issues of deep interest in library science, and not just to blogging librarians like Jenny and Jessamyn.

Virginia: for lovers after all

Washington Post: Singles’ Sex No Longer a Va. Crime. What a tangled web we weave, when jurisprudence we upheave. Or something. The upshot is that, now that normal sexual relations conducted in private between consenting adults have been decriminalized, the way is clear for an examination of other Virginia laws pertaining to sexual acts. Such as sodomy, for instance.

Maybe my home state isn’t quite so red, after all.

Suspicious Cheese Lords: Once more, with mustard

It is hard to remember sometimes, from the perspective of early 2005, that many choral masterworks whose existence we take for granted are relatively new to the recorded repertoire. Bach’s B Minor Mass and Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem were first recorded in their entirety by Robert Shaw for RCA Victor in 1947, nearly a full half-century after sound recordings became commercially available, and works like Berlioz’s Messe Solenelle were available only as imported recordings until the Washington Cathedral Choral Society’s North American premiere recording of the work in the early 1990s. But many more composers are mostly or entirely unrecorded, particularly the numerous choral composers of the Renaissance.

This rich unrecorded choral world is rapidly becoming the specialty of Washington, DC’s resident male early music a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords. Following their first CD, which featured unrecorded works of Elzear Genet (aka Carpentras), the Cheese Lords return with Missa L’homme armé, an ambitious program of premiere recordings from the works of Ludwig Senfl (whose name means mustard in German).

Senfl, who was a musical contemporary of Carpentras, Juan del Encina, and other better known Renaissance composers, was the court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, but faded into relative obscurity following Maximilian’s death, and remained in the employ of Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria until his own death in 1543. He left behind an enormous amount of music, including over 100 mass settings. For this recording, the Cheese Lords selected Senfl’s parody mass on the popular tune L’homme armé, several motets, and Senfl’s vast (and incomplete) Te Deum, which Cheese Lord collaborator and Library of Congress researcher Michael Donaldson completed by adding an altus line in accordance with known performance practices of the time.

The performances this time around are stellar. The ensemble has grown in sonority and maturity since their debut release, and the blend and solo lines are superb. This is a highly recommended recording from an even more highly recommended live ensemble.

(And it’s been almost five years since I sang with them, so you can take that as a reasonably objective opinion.)

Meme of the day: Bookshelf

Tony Pierce: bookshelf meme. Normally I don’t play these games, but I can’t resist one that allows me to plug low-tech word distribution mechanisms like books. Instructions: ”Copy the list from the last person in the chain, delete the names of the authors you don’t have on your home library shelves and replace them with names of authors you do have. Bold the replacements.”

The list, as received from Tony and updated by me:

  1. Charles Bukowski
  2. Umberto Eco
  3. William Gibson
  4. J.R.R. Tolkien
  5. Mark Twain
  6. James Joyce
  7. Anne Sexton
  8. Doc Searls
  9. William Shakespeare
  10. George Herriman

Old North Church and Natural History

behind old north church: a tree, a wall, a gate

New photos from our tour of Old North Church on Tuesday and from yesterday’s visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History have been posted and are available from the gallery. We had a good talk with the sexton at the Old North Church, and he let us know that the belfry is opened for visitors once a year, in December. I’ll have to look for that opportunity. With an elevation like that I can imagine the view must be superb.

At the HMNH, in addition to revisiting the glass flowers, Esta, David and I checked out some of the other exhibits, including the vast gallery of whale skeletons, the slightly dusty cases of slightly cracking taxidermied specimens, and the ethnography exhibits. I was particularly impressed by the latter—I don’t think I’ve ever seen Aztec carvings in person, and the Mayan artifacts were also impressive.

Alternative no more

DCist: WHFS, R.I.P.. Infinity Broadcasting changed the format of the venerable “alternative rock” station (which had in recent years largely shifted focus, to what DCist appropriately calls “aggro rock”) to a Spanish language station. This leaves the DC area with no alternative rock stations at all.

I should be surprised but I’m not. First they came for the classical stations, then the jazz stations, then for the college indie stations…

Campania gets respect

lisa, antonio mastroberardino, and me

New York Times: Modern Love for Ancient Vines in Southern Italy. The article provides an outstanding introduction to the viticulture of Campania, including all the usual suspects: Feudi, Mastroberardino, even Riccardo Cotarella. The article talks about the growing recognition of the importance of wines made with the indigenous grapes: aglianico, fiano, falanghina, and greco.

Now seems an appropriate time to post the pictures from our 2000 visit to Mastroberardino, including our meeting the Marchese (right).

Weird Word tab behavior explained

Buggin’ My Life Away: The Case of the Missing Tab. Rick Schaut, an engineer on the Mac Word team at Microsoft, explains the logic that makes Word convert presses of the Tab key to special formatting (first-line indentations, indent the entire paragraph, or insert a Tab character). Basically the Auto Formatter engine figures out what to do based on where the user’s cursor is:

To summarize these rules, if the insertion point is:

  1. In an empty paragraph–always inserts a tab character;
  2. In the middle of a non-empty paragraph–always indents the whole paragraph; and
  3. In the first line of a paragraph:
    1. If there are no tab stops set, then indents the first line of the paragraph; or
    2. If there is a tab stop set, then inserts a tab character.

The most common case where Word is likely to be wrong is case #3, so the auto-recovery feature in Word 2003/2004 allows you to convert the auto-formatted indent back to a tab.

Key words being “most common.” I think this is the unavoidably maddening thing about all these autocorrect features—they apply the 80-20 rule. Nothing makes some people angrier than having their computer—where they’re supposed to be in control—make the wrong assumptions about what they’re trying to do based on what “most people” are doing.

On the Mac Mini: living room trojan horse

First impressions on the Mac Mini—brilliant. As others (including Glenn Fleishman) have noted, it’s essentially a slimmed down Cube, unapologetically at the bottom of the feature scale for a modern Mac but also at the rock bottom of the price scale.

Of course, the “bottom of the feature scale” for a modern Mac isn’t such a bad place to be. With a 1.25 or 1.42 GHz G4 it can run pretty much anything you can throw at it.

Limitations? Memory and disk space. The former may not be such a bad thing; the latter…

For PC switchers or someone looking to use this machine as a primary PC, I would definitely recommend upgrading the RAM to 512 MB. But for a lot of us, including me, the 256 that the base machine comes with would be just fine—to run iTunes and iPhoto as a headless appliance hooked into my network and my audiovisual system. And with that 6.5″ square footprint, it’s small enough to truly live in the living room.

What limits that scenario is hard disk space. If the disk maxes out at 80GB—and can’t be replaced—it’s too small to hold my music. And it looks like it does—check out the images on the Design page and the TidBITS note on the Mini. But, as Glenn points out, you can always plug in outboard storage.

Conclusion: Apple may have a winner here—not by addressing the spec heads but by paying attention to the Wife Acceptance Factor in the design of the product.

RIP, James Forman

New York Times: James Forman Dies at 76; Was Pioneer in Civil Rights. I read Forman’s book, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, during my History of the Civil Rights Movement class at UVA—taught by Julian Bond, Forman’s former SNCC comrade in arms, the class was easily one of the top three that I took there. And the book was a big part of the reason. Together with CORE’s Jim Farmer’s Lay Bare the Heart, Forman’s book planted a seed of radical liberalism in my heart—the sort of radical liberalism that says that you stand up to injustice wherever you see it, no matter how unpopular the stance may be. That you stand up for the rights of the oppressed especially when no one will let them stand up for themselves. That you speak out about civil liberties, because when you let them be infringed you destroy the premise and promise on which this country was founded.

Words of advice

When cooking pork tenderloins that have been brined, rinse the meat before cooking it, and don’t bother adding salt to the sauce.

That’s all, really.

Oh, I’ll have some words about the Mac Mini later, but I have to go drink a lot more water. Fortunately my guests are pretty understanding.

Light blog day

Esta and a friend of hers from seminary are coming up this afternoon to stay for a few days, so I’ll be offline much of the day getting ready. There are floors to vacuum, beds to make (this will be the first time we’ll use both guest bedrooms at once!), groceries to get… and, provided the weather stays above freezing, ice to remove from the driveway.

Oh yeah: I actually couldn’t get my car out yesterday afternoon. I had snow-blown the driveway clear Thursday at lunchtime to go to a job interview, and by the time I came back the weather had changed to “wintry mix.” Which I parked atop. Which subsequently froze to ice. Lisa’s car, which hadn’t been moved, had sufficient contact with the bare pavement to get out and about. Hopefully we can get my car moving today. Lesson: snowblower ≠ panacea.

Oh, and our neato upstairs guest bedroom is finally in shape and mostly decorated. It’s been christened the Virginia room, as it seemed a convenient place to hang all the framed Rotunda pictures. Maybe I’ll post a few snaps after we get the house ready.