Ruminate

[Please note that the text links in this piece lead to the live visualizations which are both larger and interactive]

I’ve been playing around with Many Eyes (if you are not familiar with it, it is an easy-to-use data visualization suite; you might call it the flickr of data sets and visualizations) steadily since early January when I attended an interesting HICSS session on how much “unintended” use the system was seeing. I’d originally tried it out almost exactly a year ago, but the service has grown by leaps and bounds. It certainly has great potential for educators and teaching, and is already seeing some use there.

I don’t work with a lot of numeric data and most of that is not something I can make public (a good decision on the part of Many Eyes is that all data sets– as well as the visualizations– are completely public and open for others to build visualizations on), though I have tested various sets to try out the wide array of visualization types. So I have focused primarily on the free text visualizations: tag clouds and word trees.

As an example, here are the one- and two- word tag clouds I made of all my blog posts from my Cosmopoetica Blog:

And some stills of working down a word tree based on the same data:

It’s interesting to compare those to the same visualizations for this blog…

The process of creating a data set is simple: you simply upload the data through a web form through copy and paste from a text file or a spreadsheet. The text area is pretty smart about interpreting the data and doing the right thing and the text filters take out common stop words (articles and many prepositions). The only thing I did to all of these text files was a simple search and replace to delete all numbers and a couple of meaningless stop words like the title of the blog.

Following up on a good idea by George Siemens relayed through a Tweet by Alan Levine I also did some visualizations of the last five years of Horizon reports. I did each individually (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) and then one for the combined texts of all years. Here is a still of the combined cloud for all reports, single and double:

It’s really quite illuminating to compare the years. Note how objects disappear in favor of social and social networks and then data and information come in late (no doubt the Web 2.0 meme). And is there any better sign that the NMC report is on the right track than the two-word tag cloud? Augmented reality, creative expression, collective intelligence, social networking, virtual worlds– it’s the bingo card we all want to fill out.

[Incidentally, it took far longer to click around to each set and create the visualizations than it did to create the data sets... all I had to do for those was save the PDF files as text and again, replace numbers and three common words: horizon, report and reports, and upload.]

Another interesting feature of the Many Eyes system is that any particular view of a visualization that has been manipulated can be integrated as a snapshot with comments. For instance, there is a visualization of book publishing trends, below which are comments, many linked to specific views of the data. Good stuff.

It looks like Jim Groom and Alan Levine need to put their heads together and release Conferencing 2.0 or 3.0 or wherever we are now.

As an outsider, I appreciated the ELI conference Twittering– it reminded me a lot of the Emerging Technology Conference’s IRC channel (that’s what you get in a geek audience, even though Twitter was on everyone’s tongue at last year’s event) without anywhere near as much snark… though clearly sometimes snark is the only respondsThat makes sense, though, because (unless you delete constantly) Tweets are out there on the record after the event… IRC chat (including all the insights, links, and hijinx) is generally lost when the event is over, or certainly not readily indexed and available high in Google search returns.

I still missed the traditional liveblogging, though with more podcasts being made available every day that desire will probably fade. I’m not sure what the answers are, but I’ve talked about remaking conferences (in a different context) before. It’s frustrating as a speaker, too, where even small deviations from the established format are rarely accepted and difficult to implement.

Some days I feel like the old man of the web… not the crotchety, complaining one mumbling about how USENET, IRC and Gopher did everything the web does now only better, but the dazed and confused one, pointing his palsied finger at all the moving, shiny things he doesn’t understand. It started with class last night, which I thought went pretty well except a fair suspicion that I managed to unintentionally frustrate and annoy one of the younger students in trying to explain some of the history of social software and traditional social networking applications. I’m the kind of person who needs a narrative, and I have a particular narrative about the way MySpace and LinkedIn and Facebook have evolved from the roots of YASNSs that, in my (unnecessary) haste probably makes me less appreciative of the power those networks can have for their users.

My internet dog-years continue when I log into Twitter to find a stream of ranting about the flakiness of Twitter, which has not quite recovered from its downtime upgrades last night. Twitter has only been around for what– 18 months? Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the particular services I’ve stuck with in the past, but not being rock-solid during immense times of growth while only 18 months old (and only perhaps 6-9 months into a serious period of heavy adoption) doesn’t strike me as a horrible, time-to-switch-to-Jaiku problem. Del.icio.us went through this kind of thing, but worse, for years. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo but it still went down during MacWorld. Blogger was going down for 6-12 hours at a stretch for years. People griped, but the vitriol and the tendency to abandon ship sure seemed less than we see now. Now expectations are that a company will figure out how to provide a near real-time service with multiple paths for input and output that scales to accommodate exponential growth and has a full-featured API right out of the box. For free.

I will hold Twitter accountable for one regrettable decision: building a service that they had to hope would scale on Ruby on Rails, which seems to be the Achilles heel of a number of sites. And that stupid cat-with-screwdriver picture that was only remotely funny the first time.

Thanks to this article by George Packer (which is evenly critical and positive about both candidates) and my friend Sage’s crazy “Go-bama, Go” love, I realized this weekend what it is about Obama that bugs me. It isn’t his political positions, because I agree with what firm details I can glean, as I do Clinton’s. It’s his rhetoric. I don’t trust it and I don’t believe in it. As Packer puts it, Obama sees the Presidency as position of transformation; Clinton sees it as a positions of achieving political objectives. The former lends itself to high-flying rhetoric and beautiful speeches, but the latter is the reality of American politics.

The primary problem I have with Obama is that I don’t share his belief that transformation of the broken American system is possible, much less that it can be done from the position of president. That approach, I fear, leads to a decision-making process based on an idea of ‘vision’ that isn’t wholly based in the world of political machinations that we live in, where choosing lesser evils is often the only possibility available.

The rhetoric is attractive. I don’t blame people for being attracted by Obama’s charismatic speeches and his ability to turn a phrase and deliver a masterful speech. but I don’t know that the ability to move a crowd with beautiful words has much to do with good governing. Creating a ‘movement’ is an accomplishment in itself, but it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with practical abilities to govern. I don’t think Obama would be a bad President– though I do remain convinced that Clinton would have a better chance in a general election– but I do think Hillary would be better because I think she has a more realistic conception of what is possible for the President. Even if Clinton were a better speaker and performer, her fundamental pragmatism doesn’t lend itself to the kind of oratory that Obama utilizes.

But the rhetoric of transformation has a fatal flaw for me– it embraces a fundamental and inescapable contradiction related to the issue of transformation and pragmatism. That contradiction was perfectly encapsulated by Obama a few days ago when he said:

That’s how change has always happened – not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up.

Implicit in this kind of statement is a recognition that transformation doesn’t happen from high political office… being employed in the service of getting himself elevated to the highest political office there is. If Obama really believed this– as I do– then he wouldn’t be running for President and would refuse calls to do so. It’s much like a person pushing to be made CEO of a large company on a platform that innovation happens from the edge. It does not compute except as a bald-faced rhetorical ploy to engage the heart rather than the mind.

Seeing as how I love the most narcissistic of the arts– poetry– the use of words aimed at overcoming or bypassing the rational mind in favor of the heart shouldn’t bother me. But then I wouldn’t support even my favorite poet for President…

It also irritates me that Clinton doesn’t get the credit she deserves. Clinton’s history– her belief in working for change and doing so for her entire life, the way she has almost completely silenced her congressional critics through hard work and being a good Senator (consider, given her ‘provenance,’ what that says about her accomplishments as a Senator)– is forgotten in favor of a shallow rhetoric that invokes her husband at every turn. If Hillary had made every political move exactly the same way, but wasn’t Bill Clinton’s wife, she would be rolling to an 85% plus Democratic victory. No one could come close. I resent that. Nor does Clinton get recognized for the powerful symbolism that she provides for young women who are considering politics as Obama automatically gets for his symbolism to African Americans– particularly since it took a harsh loss early in his career for him to decide to actually become concerned with the group that rains adulation down upon him now.

At any rate, I’ve made my prediction about what I suspect will happen in the coming election, regardless of which candidate runs. In a strange way, a win by Obama would be the most satisfying because it would restore a lot of faith I’ve lost in middle-America, not only going a long way to disproving my cynicism about the potential for latent racism, but proving a large part of the populace capable of the valuable folly of idealism and able to be, if only for a short while, inspired by a vision of the better parts of who we are.

In Half an Hour: The Failure of Completely Open Networks?, Stephen Downes writes:

What this proves is something that has been known (and resolutely ignored by pundits) for quite some time: that the network effect is not cumulative.

I don’t quite get it. What Stephen seems to be saying isn’t that the network effect isn’t cumulative, it’s that the quality depends on the diversity of the group whose accumulated attention is in question. Undoubtedly true. Isn’t the real question what is meant by the word “diversity” in this context? Is it simply diversity of any kind (i.e. negating significantly repetitive groups) or is it really a kind of quality selection in disguise.