i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Our class discussion about language translation last week reminded me of the book "English as She is Spoke."  It is a Portuguese-English phrasebook created by first going from Portuguese to French, and then from French to English, the latter step purportedly using dictionaries (literal translation).  The outcome was bad, and funny. 

Google completely revolutionized the way search was performed when it brought out the concept of Page Rank in webpages. Pages which were "legitimate" so to speak were given more weight as compared to the others and this started the prolific trend of SEO companies that we see today. Trying to make your website more "friendly" for the spider to take notice of you and increase the number of back links to your websites using numerous link building measures only seemed to add to the choreographed process of Search Engine Optimization.

I recently wrote (with Karen Nomorosa, Ischool 2010 grad) a  paper called "Substituting Information for Interaction" that some of you have talked to me about so I thought I'd share it with everyone.  (The paper has some relevance to the "tradeoffs" we've talked about a lot in 202 but is more relevant to the other course I teach this semester on "Information Systems and Service Design.")  The big idea in the paper is to reframe a lot of design decisions in information systems and services as tradeoffs between interacting with a user/customer to obtain needed information or us

Did you enjoy working with the text tools?