Attention, not quality

A Wordle word cloud from the article below

Things come and go so quickly online, and it is still hard to keep up. Reading something interesting on a blog, article or tweet that soon after becomes so vital that I have to retrace my steps to unearth it to ensure it isn't lost to me forever is a familiar one. There are still times when it feels like sand slipping through the fingers. We rate as we read, but as the most recent sessions in the #citylis DITA module have shown, there are ways to find out which research is getting the most attention.

Altmetrics picks up on the impact of scholarly communication through social media and blogs long before citation counts take effect, perhaps years later. Altmetrics is, perhaps, like the thermometer in the mouth of research, picking up on just how hot (or not) open-source published material is. But altmetrics is an indication of attention, not quality, as I seem to have written in my notes more than once. Attention, not quality.

With the rise of digital come opportunities to analyse and explore, to corral datasets into useful ways of finding insights and unearthing what has been overlooked or unrecognised. Coding with Python is an area for me yet to explore fully. Word clouds, while simple and engaging to experiment with, do not analyse text in a way that is particularly revealing. (The one above has been created from this blog post, and reflects the way that I keep repeating the words attention, not quality.) Digital humanities, although typically unwilling to be precisely defined, is an interesting arena where digital media and scholarly research meet.

And should we be afraid of AI? Am I a Singularatarian or AItheist? It is hard to come to a categorical decision with Floridi's argument without oversimplifying the argument. Much of AI seems to me to be promising and romanticised, or as prosaic as Amazon's recommendations and fraud detection. Useful and largely unrecognised by most of perhaps, but yet to really find its greatest moments.

The hunt for data

Our most recent sessions in the always intriguing Digital Information and Technologies (DITA) module have continued our study of how the outpouring of digital information in our society today is stored, described, structured, managed and shared. What is usually the natural, unthinking act of hunting for that simple something online – presidential election coverage, latest cricket scores, the location of that particular book – has been taken apart piece by piece.

Our look under the bonnet of information retrieval is taking us places one step (or more) back from what the average user in the modern digital environment would confront. Even this simple blog post, as I write it now, has a different interface from the one in which you are reading it. I can add the metadata through labels (listed below), see the coding around italicised fonts, and add details about location. In DITA we have looked at the ways data can be organised and made accessible online, and the rise of linked data and the semantic web through RDF, the resource description framework.

It is, it must be said, a world of many initialisms. The data file formats CSV (comma separated value) and TSV (tab separated value), DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a vocabulary of terms used to describe web resources making them easier to find), URIs (unique resource identifiers, which identify the name of a web resource), SQL (Structured Query Language, the standard language for relational database management systems), and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which hide the complexities of a system so that third parties can build on and develop applications). QEI: quite enough initialisms.

In the circular way that this course often throws up (the problems of getting information about getting information, to put it crudely), the session Searching for the Data was of immediate practical interest. Instead of the default course of action of resorting immediately to a simple Google search, it armed us with more focused and nuanced ways of revealing the data that we are looking for, and even what we didn't know we were looking for. With December approaching and four assessments to be completed by early in the new year, these are practical information retrieval skills that will be tried and tested in the weeks to come as we hunt for the books and journal articles that will help us on our way.

Left in Sehgal's darkness

When the Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has a new exhibition, it can be hard to find out what is going to take place. He forbids any of the normal digital or paper trails of exhibition marketing and publicity: there are no videos of the work, no catalogues or wall texts. Even contracts with the exhibition organisers are verbal only.

Sehgal's name came was mentioned in The Future of Documents: Documenting Performance, a symposium at City, University of London on 31 October 2016. Yaron Shyldkrot, who is working on a PhD at the University of Surrey, was talking about documenting darkness in theatre and dance, and the disorientation and uncertainty it creates for viewers. "You can't be in the same picture as the dark," as the writer and performer Chris Goode puts it. Sehgal has used darkness in some past works, which usually involve performers interacting spontaneously with spectators, leaving no physical residue once they are finished.

The darkness of Sehgal's non-documentary approach shone out for me during the day. It is an approach that "minimises discourse to maximise the experience", the curator of his new show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris says. The question of just who performances are being documented for was a recurring question through the day of the symposium. While many performers, choreographers and archivists recognise the importance of retaining at least some tangible form of memory of a fleeting moment, Sehgal turns that on its head, leaving us, metaphorically and sometimes literally, in the dark.

This way of working, it seems to me, is less about the artist leaving documented legacy (his approach is very well documented, if not his work), and more about his anti-market views and myth constructing. (Would he be as well known if he did allow his work to be documented?) But even in our age of the ubiquitous camera, he encourages us to focus on the moment of the performance rather than see it through a lens or discuss it to oblivion. And it certainly frees up time for archivists to get on with other things.

It was a great thought-provoking day – thanks to Lyn Robinson and Joseph Dunne for organising it.

The first weeks of DITA

"I am aware that my efforts to capture the profound intellectual novelties that we are facing remain inadequate," writes Luciano Floridi in the preface to his book The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Humanity (2014). It is strangely comforting to know that if Floridi, who is immediately conspicuous as a central philosophical presence in information science within days of our course starting, struggles to keep up, then those for whom it is new territory may need a bit more time.

I have no difficulty at all in remembering a time when a computer was something worth travelling to see. My school mate Richard would get the bus to Exeter University to find out more about the room-sized computer there in the late 1970s. And now, a few decades on, we talk in Digital Information and Technologies and Architectures (DITA) sessions about exabytes of data being generated every day, while smartphones sit on the desks next to us. My own small contribution to this digital outpouring has been through blogs, tweets and other assorted social media, along with the data trail we naturally leave without even trying. The first sessions of this module have highlighted for me how we ride (or try to ride) the crest of this informational wave, informing and being informed in as coherent a way as we can manage.

Although we are engulfed with this deluge of information, much of it arrives in small chunks, and it is tempting to consume a lot of those chunks rather than tackle the larger view by reading to the bottom of fewer articles or chapters. (Perhaps you've even stopped reading this post before you reach this sentence.) Just setting up this new blog to reflect on the DITA module over the coming months is an exercise in looking closely at how I present myself online, and how information architecture can be best used so that people are more likely to read right to the bottom of what I write.

And it makes me consider how honest I am about myself in my online presence. We refine our channels of interest by choosing what we "follow" or "like", but that also has the inevitable effect of cutting off a stream of information that we could have found unexpectedly relevant and revealing to our own situation. Putting it another way, if we just turn on a radio, we may find ourselves interested and enlightened by something that happens to be on that we would never otherwise have heard. But if we only tune in to things we carefully select through the listen-again iPlayer, that element of chance and surprise is absent.

So what sticks with me for now, at least, is another line from Floridi: "The risk is that our digital technologies may easily become defining technologies rather than identifying ones" (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Schirn Mag, 24 April 2016).

Follow me @jameshobbsart.

A bit about me...

I don't think I ever expected to find myself studying information and library science at university, but as our recent induction and introductions to our modules have made all too clear, events in the world of information are moving at such a rapid pace it is hard to make firm predictions for even next week.

My journey to #citylis has been via a first degree in fine art, a career in arts journalism and publishing – magazines, newspapers and books – while selling the odd painting and drawing along the way. I have been volunteering at St Bride Library, just off Fleet Street, which is home to a collection covering printing, typography and graphic design, and more recently at the Stuart Hall Library at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) in Shoreditch, which focuses on contemporary art from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the work of British artists from diverse cultural backgrounds.

I am, I'm sure, the oldest in our cohort (I have a daughter at university, for goodness sake), so it's great to be part of such a diverse and inclusive group. I'm looking forward to working with you all for the next year.