i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

All,

The link had expired but it's live again. Grab all the searchable lecture slides here...

Enjoy,
Dan

Addendum: electronic version of most of the reader content is here. Please don't distribute that of course as most of it is only licensed for use within the UC system.

Turns out this quote seems to have been misquoted all along. It's a couple thousand years older than that...

"For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth." —Plutarch, "On Listening to Lectures". (link)

And a closer translation from Penguin Classics:

Just announced: speedi.ly, a real-time text/URL classifier. The API isn't available yet, but you can play with it via the web site. It looks like it's based on vector analysis against a set of generic topic documents, and could be handy for spring semester projects. I just threw the first page of the 202 blog at it with the following result:

And now, a word about DEVONthink. They describe it as a "smart information assistant", although you could think of it as a sort of MyResearchBits.

The University of South Carolina's library is launching a "year-long series of events honoring the card catalog, its use in the transformation of knowledge, and the people who created and used it". Events include:

• a catalog card boat race
• a catalog card design contest

Perhaps the coolest bit is the widget celebrating different cards:

A number of the slides have been posted as non-searchable PDFs. Since I find it useful to be able to search/highlight/annotate PDFs, I've been running them through an OCR tool for my own use. With Bob's permission, I've uploaded the OCR'd versions, in case this would be useful for others:

http://drop.io/202slides
password='meaningisuse'

Sites like Isohunt and The Pirate Bay serve as search engines wherin dispersed users can search for and share .torrent pointer files. These, in turn, are used to orchestrate distributed filesharing. Much of the content distribution facilitated by these sites occurs in violation of copyright.