i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I know we’ll spend a lot of time talking about privacy next spring in INFO 205, but over the course of this semester I’ve been reminded several times of this piece from NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/12/18/06. Aired about a year ago, it does a nice job of addressing the personal implications of a world where the line between information organization and retrieval is continually blurring.

Maps. Most people think of them as a means of a getting us from Point A to Point B, but this article discusses how they have become more than a tool that keeps us from getting lost. In the not so distant past, we relied on paper maps that, for the most part, provided the user with a consistent visual vocabulary to determine exactly how to get from Point A to Point B.

I came across an article about the BIObus, which is currently travelling across North America collecting insects and other invertebrates. The BIObus supports the Barcode of Life Project, which is a collaborative effort among researchers to create a digital identification system for life on Earth. Scientists take tissue samples from each specimen, extract DNA and then register the sample into a global database.

Here's the current intro to chapter 9, all about the Mütter Museum and its very strange collections. If you're ever in Philly and have the chance to go, totally do it, it's amazing.

http://oberlin.edu/news-info/05sep/art.html

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Memorial_Art_Museum#Art_Rental

The methodical creation -- and subsequent illustration  -- of taxonomies can provide critical insight and analysis into both organizational and evolutionary qualities of a data set. Rap names lend themselves particularly well to taxonomical examination. Influenced by both strong community bonds (The Wu Tang Clan being the most prominent example) as well as fervent competition among peers, naming conventions in rap have further beneffitted from decades of rapid artistic evolution and cultural influence.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

Last week, NYT featured Julius Eulberg, a German who loves collecting antiques, especially porcelain birds. This piece made me think of Kimra's chapter-- especially the part about retrieving the chair. Can you imagine having to fetch one of his 300 + birds? How would he describe it in order for you know which porcelain bird he was talking about?

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.