Techfoot

Google Earth: Platform for Academic Scholarship?

This report was included in today’s Wired News from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, home of William and Mary’s own Rob Nelson, has produced a powerful tool to provide new insights into historical voting data.

Earlier this year scholars at the University of Richmond unveiled an innovative Web site that displays county-by-county election data from U.S. presidential elections since 1840. Now their project’s been Googled. In an effort to get more exposure for their data just in time for election day, the university’s Digital Scholarship Lab spent the past few months working with Google engineers to embed the data into Google Maps and Google Earth. The results are now part of Google’s election Web site. In a statement released today, Rick Klau, a manager on Google’s Elections team said, the company hoped other universities would use the Google Earth platform “to share information and make a complex collection of data structures more easily accessible.” The Richmond scholars had already developed maps with features similar to those of Google Earth, which lets users scroll around maps of the U.S., zooming in on any address to see relevant data about the locations. In fact, the Google version has less information for now, since researchers only had time to load in election data going back to 1980. But Andrew Torget, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab, said in an interview this week that the goal of the partnership was to get the information in front of a wider audience. “It was an opportunity to put out this digital scholarship on the biggest digital platform there is, Google.” As more scholars try similar map-based data projects, should they use Google as a platform? Or are there benefits to building home-grown interfaces instead? –Jeffrey R. Young

Technology Review: How Obama Really Did It

In 1992, Carville said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville. “This year, it was the network, stupid!

You have an entire generation of folks under age 25 no longer using
e-mails, not even using Facebook; a majority are using text messaging,”
All says. “I get Obama’s text messages, and every one is exactly what
it should be. It is never pointless, it is always worth reading, and it
has an action for you to take. You can have hundreds of recipients on a
text message. You have hundreds of people trying to change the world in
160 characters or less. What’s the SMS strategy for John McCain? None.”

One of the ongoing questions that I have about Web 2.0 applications is the extent to which they can contribute to solving real problems.   I wonder if our students understand that Facebook, mySpace, and the other sites that they use so effectively in their social lives have such enormous potential in the real world.  This article in the MIT Technology Review provides an extended treatment of how the basic tools of social networking can be tailored to meet the specific goals of a political campain–fundraising, canvassing, and communication.  “MyBo”, the Barack Obama networking site enrolled over a million members and is credited with raising record amounts of cash and delivering key primary wins that were essential to gaining the nomination.

MyBo offered a pretty amazing set of specific campaigning tools.  Powerful database queries allowed members to “slice and dice the geographic microdata” in ways that were previously only accessible to technically sophisticated political consultants.  The site, developed by Blue State Digital with the assistance of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, represented “the ultimate online political machine.”  The power of the site comes from the integration of a suite of individual tools that had been tested in the earlier campaign of Howard Dean, into a coherent whole.

It’s long article, but well worth reading.  Like so many of the others, it challenges us to wonder how we might tap into this same kind of communicative power in ways that quickly leave our bloated CMS software behind.  It also challenges us to rethink what it means to be liberally educated in the 21st century–can a person being truly literate without understanding the potential impact on our culture of these commuity building and activiation tools?

We’ve started a an impromptu experiment with a new application to foster additional communication and awareness within our group. During one of my Arc Trainer sessions last week, I was listening to a TWIT podcast and heard that a program called Yammer was the winner of the “Techcrunch 50″. Later that afternoon, I began my emerging technology class by asking folks what new technologies they had come upon in the last week, and Jon Messer mentioned that a few people at the University of Richmond were exploring Yammer, and Maria Elena signed up for an account and invited a few of us to join. For the past week, a number of the AIS group have been yammering about work. (About 10,000 companies began experimenting with Yammer in the first week after the TechCrunch award.)

Yammer is like a private Twitter. Instead of Twitter’s question, “What are you doing, Yammer asks “What are you working on?” As folks answer that question, a feed is produced provding a running list of ideas, news, questions, links and other information. (Unfortunately (IMHO) Yammer doesn’t enforce the 140 character limit on posts, so they have a tendency to go a little longer than the typical tweet.)

There are about 10 of us who are members, and, so far, I’m finding it to be an interesting application. The AIS group is so widely dispersed that we often miss out the opportunity to communicate informally. Yammer encourages quick, informal communications because it only takes a minute or two to raise a quick question about something that’s on your mind. The conversations are archived, so that the history can be captured if more substantial issues arise. For example, a discussion this morning about finding a specific piece of conferencing software for the Writing Resource Center clearly demonstrated that we need a more systematic strategy for responding to requests for applications sharing and conferencing.

However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use “hashtags” for tagging topics, and they can follow just those tags, which is useful in following a particular project rather than the people working on it.

According a recent article in the New York Times, “social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it ‘ambient awareness.’ It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does–body language, sighs, stray comments out of the corner of your eye”. Participants in ambient awareness networks develop a sense of the rhythms their fellow participants that they never had before:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update–each individual bit of social information–is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like a type of E.S.P, as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Yammer is a very low impact technology–much less cognitively demanding than email. All the posts are available in a single place where they”re “skimmable”. (I keep mine on my second monitor, just outside of my field of vision. (I’ve been using Twitter for a year or so now, so I’ve some time to practice my scanning skills.) If my experience with Twitter is any indication, Yammer be one of those pieces of technology that is almost impossible to explain, but that quickly becomes an integrated on-line presence.

Then, it may be just another thing we try that gets jettisoned because it takes more time than it’s worth.