Project Bamboo has been on my list of stuff to write about for a while. According to Project Bamboo website:

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

Not only is the project of intellectual interest to me (as someone deeply interested in the issues of “shared technology services”) but also of great personal interest (since I know quite a few of the personnel involved with the project, including one of the co-project directors, David Greenbaum, who used to be my boss.) One particular angle I hope to explore is answering the question of what are the implications of Project Bamboo on Zotero and vice-versa?

The immediate prompt for this post is Sorin Matei’s The Bamboo Digital Humanities Initiative: A Modest Proposal. Matei’s post has been of sufficient interest to me that I using it to prompt some discussion in a community of humanists and technologists. Matei makes a lot of useful points, but the segment that caught my attention is:

The role of the Bamboo platform would be to simplify this task by making access to tools, by enhancing our ability to connect digital objects and artifacts, our ability to connect with colleagues and students via simple, directly intuitive and universally available interfaces that all converge on the scholars’ desktop, preferably in the format of a word processor. [emphasis mine] Moreover, the platform should integrate in the most straightforward manner the learning and writing processes with those dedicated to publishing. This should be done in such a manner that dedicated genres and modus operandi (articles, book monographs, peer review, scientific validity checks, etc.) would survive, flourish even, under the new digital regime.

Amen. That’s an approach I’ve been pursuing for a while now (in the Scholar’s Box, for example)– and one I think that Zotero, as a desktop client, with some capacity for extensibility, can embody rather deeply.

Matei goes on:

I stop here, rather abruptly, waiting for reactions. I am planning, however, to release a sketch of such a platform, including essential services and affordances. It will also try to leverage the idea of the mashup editor as basic architecture strategy, which could be use to support the infrastructure of the system.

I’m naturally intrigued as someone focused on mashups and interested in developing “Zotero as a mashup platform”. Has Sorin Matei used Zotero? How would Zotero fit in with Matei’s sketch of such a platform?

In January, a correspondent, having heard that I was about to publish a book on mashups, wrote me, saying that he would “love to find out more what [I'm] thinking”. Flattered to be asked, I replied. Here I quote an edited version of what I wrote. (I tend to like what I write in email because my writing tends to be energetically conversational.)

Let me tell you a bit of what I’m thinking and where I’m coming from. Obviously, I think that the topic of mashups is a big deal given my willingness to write a whole book about it. The element that excites me most is the power that individuals and small groups of people now have to recombine data and services — to use mashups to make sense of the world — particularly in the corner of the world in which I’m immersed (teaching, learning, and research in the context of higher education, libraries, and museums). When I first learned about XML and web services, I thought — wow — this is going to change the way we do research and way we teach and learn. I spoke about this topic at the O’Reilly ETCon in 2003.

I’ve built a research prototype (called the Scholar’s Box) to enable scholars to gather data from different sources, create personal collections, and share them with others. (I’m an advisor to a project called Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) — which provides a Firefox plugin to enable people to manage bibliographic collections within the web browser — and ultimately to share their collections.)

I teach a course at the School of Information at UC Berkeley call “Mixing and Remixing Information“. This semester will be the third term I teach the course. It’s a project-based course, in which the focus is on helping students build their own mashups (see http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s08/class-projects/ for some mashups from [this] year’s class) . A good number of my students have next-to-no experience with web programming. I have found that showing students the power of mashups — to get people excited about the possibilities — and then teach them how to make mashups is an excellent way into web programming. I’ve taken this approach with teenagers with some success last summer — I taught a six week course on the Berkeley campus.

In addition to master’s students this semester, I’ll be teaching a six week hands-on course to campus IT staff about building next-generation campus IT services — again by studying things like Flickr and Google maps and Yahoo! Pipes, getting them to build mashups, and thinking about how we can do things like that on campus — for administration and for research.

Now that I’m finished writing my book, I’m thinking about other opportunities. Perhaps it’s just the geek in me, but I really do think that some combination of Web 2.0 mashups, a bit more rigor from SOA, imagination, and some understanding of real problems can transform the worlds of education and research (and other worlds too — but education and research are something I know about.) I’m setting out to build a small company whose goal is to help the educational community effectively use Web 2.0 ideas (with a specific emphasis on remixability) to change the way we do things in that community. I will confess that my business plan still needs to be written, however…. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with a mix of teaching, consulting, and building software. (Some collaborators and I have a grant proposal in to enhance the teaching and learning of art history by integrating Flickr into the computational fabric of the classroom.) Most of all, I believe in the power of ideas — hence, I wrote a book to teach others.

Lots of questions remain however. (Now that my teaching jobs have come to an end, I now have some serious amounts of time to plot out my next steps. Writing is a great help to me in sorting out my thoughts, especially when I’m writing for a public audience. I would like to build a business but am unclear on exactly what it should look like. Undoubtedly, there will be details that would be unwise for me to share publicly– but I believe that a lot of my thinking would benefit from putting my ideas out there.

Here’s an update on my current professional activities that I hope will give you, my readers, a sense of where this blog will be heading:

• My book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services was published by Apress on February 25, 2008.  It’s gotten some good reviews, and I’ve heard from some happy readers. It’s time, however, for some more intense promotion of my book to make sure it fully reaches the audience it is meant to serve. (Most of my book-related activities will be discussed at my MashupGuide blog.)

• In April, I finished teaching a six-week course (“Building Next-Generation Campus Information Services” for IT staff on the Berkeley campus. “The course designed to introduce campus professionals to the concepts of Web 2.0, XML, web services, and elements of web application development through the lens of mashups. While completing a six-week long project, participants will advance their knowledge and abilities, and gain insight into potential solutions to the information management needs they face on the job.” I plan to post more details about the course, including how it was structured, what projects came out of the class, and how I think this course can be improved.

• Last week marked the culminating open house of the Mixing and Remixing Information course I teach at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. I had a blast teaching the course for the third time though I wonder whether it’s time for a total (or at least substantial ) revamp of the course.

• I’ve started to contribute regularly to ProgrammableWeb, which I described in my book as “the most useful web site for keeping up with the world of mashups, specifically, the relationships between all the APIs and mashups out there.”  That was before I started writing for it!  See the posts I’ve written for PW so far.

• Finally, I’ve recently become the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project, working on developing developer documentation for them, thinking about how to integrate Zotero with other things (in a sense, Zotero as a client-side mashup platform) — specifically in the context of Zotero-Internet Archive alliance.  My work for Zotero will be a big part of what I’ll be discussing on this blog.

I wasn’t able to make it to the Open Library Developers Meeting 2008 (Open Library) because I was in Los Angeles but I look forward to catching up on what happened that day.   I’m excited to see how far the OpenLibrary project will get in terms of making data about books freely available to the world, not only in terms of a user interface but an API so that people can mashup the data.

MashupAwards - best mashups on the web is a good list of mashups.

As I learn Django, a Python web programming framework, I’m starting to think about alternative frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and Symfony (for PHP5). Is Symfony something to recommend to my students?

It’ll be fun to work through Visualizing Data — after I get through reading Programming Collective Intelligence . But instead of just reading books, I need to have some specific problems in mind — which I do. More soon on what those problems are.

I look forward to the starting up of the Buckland/Larson/Lynch seminar next week.

I’m pleased to see the word “mash-up” used in an article about a Berkeley website: 01.16.2008 - New life for the New Deal:

“I realized I couldn’t do it myself,” Brechin says. “It had to be people all over California working collaboratively,” in an echo of the New Deal itself. He turned to the campus’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the California Studies Center, which teamed up to take over the project’s website. Designed and managed by volunteers, the site had been built around a “mash-up” - a database-driven system that could display research on New Deal sites on a dynamically created map — created by Jay McCauley, a retired Silicon Valley software-engineering director.

Time to check out the mashup in question: Living New Deal Project

I’m excited that Aaron Schwarz has set up (theinfo):

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.

I’m going to work in materials from Flickr: The Commons when I come back to building the ScholarsBox. Such good news — having photos from the Library of Congress hosted at Flickr makes them much more reusable than when the photos sat at LC alone. Steve

Check out smARThistory.org — the multimedia art history book: Europe:

This web-booksite is being developed by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the static traditional art history textbook. By using the strengths of podcasting, video, and other web 2.o technologies, we think we can better meet the needs of students, faculty, and the interested public. Once this site is better established, we intend to invite the user community to add and edit content.

Experimenting with picnik

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee

Picnik, the web-based photo editor, encourages me to experiment with my Flickr photos by its tight integration with Flickr. I can view my Flickr photos, edit any given one, and then send it back to Flickr — all within Picnik. (Compare this photo to the original.)

I’m giving a talk on Wednesday at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh: SWeb Mashups, Recombinatory Data and the Academy:

Yee will examine how, with relatively little effort, individuals are recombining digital content from the Web to create sophisticated mashups. The mashups often provide entirely new understandings of that content. This talk will survey the world of mashups, how they are created, how people learn to make them — and specifically, the implications of recombinatory data and services for the university.

There’s a growing body of academic research around tagging. I’ll think more deeply about this research when I sit down to design software that makes use of tagging for discovery, etc.) For example, The Social Structure of Tagging Internet Video on del.icio.us:

Since the system:media:video tag is automatically attached to bookmarks, we are able to access a stream of content whose characteristics are relatively independent from the users’ tagging behavior. Otherwise it is very difficult to obtain a data sample that is not biased in some way toward particular users, tags or content. Consequently, we our focus is not on the behaviors of specific users. However, since we are interested describing large-scale effects we will not worry about this issue here.

When I get seriously into studying machine learning, I’ll consult the following resources:

• Computer Science 294: Practical Machine Learning

• UC Berkeley Webcasts Video and Podcasts: Machine Learning Workshop (2 days)

I wish I could attend the Educause Western Regional Conference happening the week after next in SF, whose speaker list includes a number of folks I know personally.

It’s great to see more library catalogs with APIs, such as those documented in REST output from Huddersfield’s catalogue.

Congratulations to Roy Tennant on his new position at OCLC:

With OCLC I have an incredible opportunity to be active on a broader stage. OCLC is big enough to put libraries on the Internet map in a way that none of us could achieve alone. Open WorldCat is but one example of many. I will be working as a Senior Program Manager with the RLG Programs unit of OCLC Research and Programs. I will report to Jim Michalko, who in turn reports to Lorcan Dempsey. I have met virtually all of the top management team at OCLC and I’ve been very impressed. They know where things are heading and they’re determined to position libraries in a way that will do us the most good.

It’s a big loss for CDL — but I’m looking forward to seeing Roy’s influence at work on the larger playing field of OCLC.

I unintentionally deleted all my cookies in Firefox Argh. The interface should have prompted me that I was deleting all my cookies and not just the one I had highlighted. and deleting cookies — should be prompted!

The Citizendium editorial council email list is archived on the web — e.g., The Cz-editcouncil April 2007 Archive by thread

Any reason to use Shelfari instead of LibraryThing?