Storage is cheap, why select?

Tomorrow I will be participating in the ASIST student chapter's panel discussion in Wilson Library. The topic is, "Storage is cheap. Why select?" Below are the general comments I plan to make in my 5-minute time slot.

Saying that because storage is cheap we should therefore save everything suggests that at its heart, the issue of selection is a technical question driven primarily by resource constraints. It suggests that we select because we know that we can’t save everything and we therefore need to privilege some records above others in order to create coherent collections. It also suggests that when we have reached a point where it is technically and economically possible to “save everything,” that it is good to do this because it allows us to avoid arbitrary selection decisions, and thereby create a world where information is free and people can pick and choose knowledge objects as they will. This is an attractive belief, but at its heart it’s false. First, the issue of selection is as much an ethical issue as it is a technical and economic issue; and second, selection is inevitable. So the important question related to selection is not how we can avoid it -- we can’t. The important question is two-fold: who will do the selection and how transparent are the selection rules to the people that use the information objects.

In his now-classic “The Documentation Strategy and Archival Appraisal Principles: A Different Perspective,” Richard Cox explicitly highlights twelve primary principles of an archival appraisal theory. Principle 1 is this: “All recorded information has some continuing value to the records creators and to society.” He then notes that this is an assumption held widely by archivists, probably because of the frequency with which they come from the humanities, in particular history. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to get rid of any information because its very existence implies that it holds some value. In our less than perfect world we have time and resource constraints and must engage in selection and appraisal to determine what will provide the most value.

Archivists, because of their training and expertise in making selection decisions, naturally believe that they are best qualified to make such decisions. Nonetheless, archivists in the digital age are facing selection decisions that they did not face prior to the 20th Century. The other day on O’Reilly Radar Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation Peter Brantley discussed a workshop he participated in at UC Berkeley in which a policy was being sought to determine how to preserve and publicly host incidental war footage from Iraq and other sites of armed conflicts. The Internet Archive took place in these conversations, and Brantley noted:

“of around 250 videos being posted daily at the Internet Archive, approximately 30-50 could potentially be called into a process of review. These include images of hate speech or obvious propaganda, guns, victims, or long distance violence (snipers, car bombs, etc.) Some of the videos are excruciatingly violent (Trust me: extremely graphic and intimate portrayals of war and harm). In some of these videos people are identifiable through the explicit use of names, passport photos, or through questioning that reveals personally-identifiable information.”

A number of questions arise with a situation like this, such as “can someone get killed using information in this video?,” or alternatively, “Could someone get killed because they are seen in this video?”, “Am I helping terrorists recruit or communicate?,” “Am I helping the public understand?”, and “What is the archive’s or curator’s personal responsibility?” for the consequences of this video being publicly viewable?

It seems that with potential information objects such as this, three primary possibilities with regards to the “save everything” approach exist; the first is to save everything and allow it all to be publicly searchable and viewable. I have problems with that – in a society, for example, where a woman’s life could potentially be ruined if not snuffed out because it becomes public knowledge that she was raped, I would hesitate to allow that kind of information to be either publicly searchable or viewable. The second possibility is that everything is saved, but access is restricted. It seems to me that this approach really doesn’t do anything more than push the selection decision to a different rung on the ladder. In other words, a repository could keep the information, but it would still require active data management to ensure that highly sensitive material doesn’t reach the wrong hands. This now implies that the economic constraint of selection still exists, it has simply been pushed to a different level. It also muddies the waters with potential censorship issues and concerns about what will happen if some other organization ends up owning or controlling a given repository? Can we still trust that this unknown “third party” will “do the right thing”? The third possibility is that we wait for some governmental restrictions to be put in place and then we can just pass the moral buck on to the government – a really reassuring thought.

At their heart, selection decisions are decisions that reflect the ethical and culturally ingrained assumptions and values of the people in control of the knowledge objects. To pretend that just allowing a free-for-all will allow us to avoid these types of decisions is somewhat akin to believing that if we just line up all those in power and shoot them, that we will have inevitably changed the moral structures of our society. If not during this revolution, then maybe during the one next decade.

Art That Bombed

My own random musings on the Star Simpson "art that bombed" story can be found at the other blog to which I contribute: JOMC 490: Social Networks, Blogs & Citizen Media.

Yes, I have gone from blog-virgin to blog-whore in only three short weeks.

My recent absence

Well, I am just (barely) recovering from a bad flu, and haven't had much inspiration in the past week to write anything. I should be back up and around within a day or two, though.

if you want to predict conservative behavior...use the dehumanizing approach???

Several days ago I posted a link into my Facebook account regarding an article about the use of largescale datasets to predict everything from wine prices to Supreme Court decisions.

I was rereading the article today and noticed this:

But evidence is mounting in favour of a different and much more "dehumanising" mechanism for combining human and super-crunching expertise. Several studies have shown that the most accurate way to exploit traditional expertise is merely to add the expert evaluation as an additional factor in the statistical algorithm. Ruger’s Supreme Court study, for example, suggested that a computer that had access to human predictions would rely on the experts to determine the votes of the more liberal members of the court (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens, in this case) – because the unaided experts outperformed the super-crunching algorithm in predicting the votes of these justices.

So if I am reading this correctly the implication is that the more dehumanising mechanism (i.e., pure number crunching without expert opinion) is more accurate for predicting the conservative court members, while the more human-oriented approach of adding expert opinion as a variable to the equation allows one greater performance in predicting the votes of the liberal justices.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that using the word "dehumanising" in this article is a little ethically weighted and politically biased?

Dearth of Data

OK, let's step back away from my temporary leap into fantasy and get back to REALITY. Let's talk about STATISTICS.

I've been reading Lorcan Dempsey's recent blog article on the uses of "Super Crunching" to enable a better understanding of users. He notes that libraries have been rather uninterested over all in this type of large scale usage and user analysis and suggests in several articles the potential value of understanding aggregated use and usage statistics.

I was fascinated enough that I went out and bought Ian Ayres' book Super-Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It makes for a fascinating read and I am also left with the question of why we don't use a more data-oriented approach to understand exactly what is happening in our field. Rather, we prefer to go with our own conventional wisdom about what users want and what they do (or should) value. This is probably a mistake. At the very least, we have no way truly to justify our decisions in any testable manner.

I also had a number of thoughts about potential research projects looking into sustainability of digital archives and repositories that could be conducted if data about repository characteristics, longevity, death, collections, and usage were available. I did a search and was able to find some library-related statistics sites, such as the site put out by Library Research Services, that maintained by the Library Resource Center, and Robert Molyneux's US Library Data Sources and Analyses, but not a single digital archiving or digital repository-oriented data set. Are there truly no such animals?

Sarn Ellen

I started in my meditation spot in the backyard. I faced west, toward the forest. After stretching a bit, I saw a path I had never noticed before, leading into the wood. I set off, and walked for awhile along this path, seeing a spot in the distance where the forest opened into a large field. When I finally got to the edge of the forest, I stopped and looked at the field. The grasses were very tall, waist-high, but someone had maintained the path, and it meandered through the field in a westerly direction. I continued walking. It was quiet, and the sun gave the landscape a bright clarity that spoke of childhood summers. I could hear birds in the distance, whistling. Occasionally a bee flew around my head or nearby. Otherwise, it was quiet. I could see mist in the distance, across the field.

After walking for some undefined period of time, I realized it was late afternoon. It was still sunny, but was also raining slightly, and an amazing rainbow decorated the sky.

I kept moving until the sun was very low on the horizon, when I finally reached the mist. By now I had realized this was not just mist; it was fog, so heavy that I could see no farther than my next step, and occasionally not even that. I began walking with my head down, peering intently at the path, steering myself back onto it when I accidentally strayed. The rain had stopped, and the moist air was warm, pleasantly so. I could sense that it was getting dark and by the time the ground began to slope upward, it was definitely nighttime. Somehow, however, I could still see each step in front of me.

After a short while, the fog stopped as quickly as it had started. The suddenness of its cessation gave me an eerie feeling that it had been a protective fence. A very large new moon lit the sky, shimmering with a luminescent, silvery glow. I could almost see individual moonbeams heading down to bathe the earth.

As I headed up the path I saw a cropping of rocks further ahead. I had to walk along several switchbacks before reaching it, though. Although my path was on the edge of a large hill or small mountain, I didn't feel frightened. The hill was steep enough for switchbacks, but with them, the path was actually very gentle and relatively smooth.

Finally I reached the cropping and surrounding the cropping lay a wide area, apparently designed for relaxing and enjoying the view. And what a view! It reminded me of a valley that once surprised me when I circled around a hill in Ireland, just before reaching Dingle. (Ireland taught me what the word ‘green’ really means.)  I could still see the path meandering through the valley, reaching off to the other side where an ancient-looking stone circle sat, gleaming phosphorescently in the moonlight.

At first I couldn't see how to get down to the lower path, and then gulped when I saw that the path I had been traversing went nearly straight down the side of the mountain, with no switchbacks this time. For the first 50 feet or so it was *incredibly* steep. I was worried whether I could make it down the narrow trail without falling. After that first 50 feet, though, I could see that the path down to the valley became very gentle.

As I began down that first, steep portion of the trail, I was pleased to find that there were handholds placed into the sides of the mountain. Some of them were large, longish rocks that appeared to have been shoved into pre-dug holes in the side of the mountain, which was more earthy than stony. Others were large branches that had also been shoved into similar pre-dug spots, each of which had a large eyelet carved in their outer edge and a rope tied through the eyelet. The rope was pulled down some feet to another such branch sticking out of the mountain, providing a bit of a "banister" on which to cling in spots of the trail that were less stable or a little too close to the edge for comfort. I wondered briefly how often they had to be replaced due to rotting.

I made it to the bottom and walked across to the valley. When I got to the stone circle, the stones were perhaps 12 to 15 feet tall. I walked through them and saw a large stone altar and just beyond the altar a large stone seat upon which a lady was seated. She had long, curly, reddish-blond hair flowing out over a shimmering blue, full-length cape. The cape was fastened at the top with an intricately engraved silvery clasp. Peaking out from the cape was a long red gown, and I was surprised that it didn’t clash with her strawberry hair.

When she saw that I had arrived she got up and walked around to the front of the altar. At that point all I could think of telling her was that I wanted to learn the secrets of the land. As I said this, I felt an immediate rush of sensation as if I had dived head-first into a fuzzy blackness. I also sensed her approval.

A deep feminine voice, full of grace and self-confident power, spoke inside my head. "Follow me." We walked for a short distance further to the west, until we reached the edge of a bluff, overlooking what seemed to be an immense expanse of land. I saw myriad valleys filled with trees, and off in the distance, more tree-filled mountains. I sensed light within and around many spots, lines radiating the land.

Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw the lady raise her arms and I felt the ball of light she created or conjured. It radiated through her and from her and rose into the air. At this point, the energy feeding this ball was emanating from me and pouring through me and I realized that I was a conduit, as were all living things around me. As the ball rose, the light poured over the entire landscape and what had been vaguely sensed lines and spots of light were now clearly recognized parallel manifestations of the marks within this ball of energy. Involuntarily I dropped to my knees but again heard the full, feminine voice in my head, "Get up. That's not necessary."

I stood up and it suddenly dawned on me as I looked at the patterns across the landscape that they had also been present back at the stone circle. I considered going back to investigate, when yet again I heard the voice, "You don't need to go back, you will always be there. It is who you are. If you want the patterns, look to yourself for they are written all over you, too." Then I glanced at the lady’s cloak clasp and saw that the patterns on the landscape were identical to the intricate patterns on her clasp, indeed were the same as those on the rocks, and all over me.

Eventually the lights faded and she was gone. The sun was rising behind me and when I turned, I was amazed to find myself back on the path just outside the forest. I walked back eastward, hardly noticing the forest this time, and ended up back in my backyard shrine.

Later that evening, for no reason whatsoever I broke out into tears, just crying full heartedly and wondering why I was crying, because I wasn't feeling sad, just very, very full. Odder still, I have cried a couple of times that way in the past few days and when I do, I get the strange feeling that I am feeding the earth.

Letting Go

Yesterday my 10-year-old daughter Jessica tried to call our black lab mix Jimoa into the house, but Jimoa and Matches, the Siamese cat, were arguing over something in the front yard. John came to use his “authoritarian” voice on Jimoa, but to no avail, so he went out to check what the two were fighting over.

“Jessica,” he called, “Please get some paper towels and bring them here. Matches has a mouse.” By then, Jimoa had stolen it from the cat, so he told Jimoa to leave it, which she did. She is a very obedient dog.

Jessica, being the not-always-so-obedient daughter she is, immediately ran out to see the mouse.

“That isn’t a mouse, Dad. It looks like a possum. Or maybe a squirrel.”

They inspected it more closely and with further urging from John regarding the paper towel, (“I told you to get a paper towel”), Jessica brought one. Intrigued by the only-slightly-more-than-normal chaos, I came to see what was going on.

We weren’t sure if it was an opossum or a squirrel, but it was obviously still alive, albeit injured. And it was newborn, or close to it – it’s little eyes still hadn’t opened yet.

The poor thing had a puncture wound in its chest, and a small tear to its lower abdomen, with what looked like a small loop of intestine slightly sticking out.

We had a choice. Put it to sleep right there (leaving the unpleasant decision of how uppermost in our minds) or try to save it. We opted for rescue and checked the Orange County Animal Services website to try to find referrals to wildlife agencies. We were in luck, and we discovered the phone number for the Piedmont Wildlife Center.

They verified that they would be willing to take the poor little thing, and off we went. I was concerned that the baby would get cold, and held it in my hand, with another hand covering it the entire 16 mile drive to the center. By the time we arrived, its breathing had quieted and it lay sleeping on my palm in a fetal position.

When we took the baby squirrel inside, it woke up and mewed a couple of times. The volunteer in the office brought a small box, layered with soft cloth and instructed that I place the animal in the box. This brought on a bit of heartache, because it turns out that during the drive over, the baby squirrel had bonded with me. It did not want me to put it down and clung fiercely to my index finger with its two front legs, crying very loudly in a high pitched voice over and over again.

I was finally able to extricate myself from the little thing, and went to wash the blood off of my palm. When I returned to the office, the volunteer worker gave us a paper with a case number on it, and told us we could call later to find out what was decided. We both agreed with each other on the way home that we were uncertain we wanted to know the disposition, preferring to believe that the baby had survived. (I wasn’t so sure this would be the case, however, because I had wet the corner of a cotton cloth with water and allowed it to suck on the cloth on the drive to Durham. When I removed the cloth from its mouth, there was blood on it – not a good sign, I thought, for an animal that didn’t apparently have any external facial injuries.)

About an hour after we got home, the phone rang. It was the Wildlife Center. They had called to let us know that they had had to put the baby to sleep. Although the intestines were fine, and the tear could have been repaired, the puncture wound to the chest was very deep and had perforated its lungs. The vet didn’t believe it could be repaired or healed, so they decided to put it down.

We thanked the center for updating us and for making an attempt to save the squirrel, and hung up. I still see the baby squirrel struggling desperately to hold onto my finger, crying not to be put down. I comfort myself by knowing that it would have died a much more painful death here at home, and at least it had pain killers and a quiet passing into eternal rest in the end.