Berkman Buzz: May 4, 2012

Read Project Information Literacy's interview with David Weinberger about what the rise of networked knowledge means for educators, librarians, print publishing and the very act of knowing, itself. David says "students need help in gaining the skill to discern what’s worth believing and what’s hucksterism and wish fulfillment. This is an age-old need exacerbated by the Net’s eroding of homogenous authority (for better and for worse). But I think educators and librarians have an especially important role in not only steering students to authoritative sources. Given the human temptation to hang out with ideas that are familiar and unchallenging, Iibrarians have a special role to play as guides to sources that also disturb us, challenge our hidden assumptions that celebrate difference and disagreement."

Cohen connects cherished, yet somewhat contradictory, cyberlaw views on copyright, on privacy, and on the design of network architecture and their access points. She exposes those contradictions as stemming from limitations of underlying ideologies, namely liberal political theory and our technology projections. She explores these assumptions in rich detail and in a well-structured rhythm using concepts drawn from cultural studies, science, technology, and society research. She uses concepts more generally from what has become known as postmodernist approaches (although she keeps some distance to such labeling), emphasizing the importance of culture as a living amalgam of ideological, political, economic and technological interplays in which we experience and practice our material lives as “situated” and “embodied” individuals and communities.

Scoop Dog? In Mexico, visitors to parks encouraged to clean up after their perros in return for free wi-fi. http://t.co/ZrOdA7dd
—John Deighton (@HBSmktg)

In this time of many crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – large mobilizations are occurring in several places such as the Arab countries, Iceland, Greece and United States. Spain has also witnessed an emerging wave of social mobilization starting on 15M (May 15, 2011) with some of the largest demonstrations, since the country transitioned to democracy in the 70s, comprising large-scale occupations of public squares and attempts to prevent the functioning of parliament by many thousands of people. 15M – alternatively known as indignados mobilization –not only caused surprise because of the size of the protest, but also by its character. With new technologies in information and communication (ICTs) playing an important role in the mobilization process, the 15M movement has become the latest and greatest exponent of “self-mobilization” arranged through the Internet.

The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and most comprehensive such contribution. The metadata, in the standard MARC21 format, is available for bulk download from Harvard. The University also provided the data to the Digital Public Library of America’s prototype platform for programmatic access via an API. The aim is to make rich data about this cultural heritage openly available to the Web ecosystem so that developers can innovate, and so that other sites can draw upon it.

This is part of Harvard’s new Open Metadata policy which is VERY COOL.

At #roflcon double rainbow guy is asked what he thinks about his sudden fame. He pauses, then says he asked himself "what does it mean?"
—Christian Sandvig (@niftyc)

RuNet Echo continues its series examining the 200th anniversary of Tsarist Russia's Victory over Napoleon by examining Leo Tolstoy's novel 'War and Peace' and the role it plays today online. Although the book was initially published in 1869, its story begins in July 1805 and progresses through the 1812 French invasion, the Battle of Borodino, and the occupation of Moscow, all the way to the French retreat and rebuilding of Russia.

A recent survey of over 100 respected British and American authors revealed that ‘War and Peace' is considered to be one of the greatest works of the past two centuries. Russian blogger paradise-apple enthusiastically reported these results in a post titled, “Anna Karenina Won!”