Dabbling in the Digital Age

Photography is one of those activities that I can lose myself completely in. The hours I spend on it is time freely given (and hardly felt). Although I’ve been lucky enough to capture a few photographs that I’m pleased with (including the one above, which was modestly granted an honorable mention in the Geography Department’s fundraising contest for United Way), I’ve always considered myself just a tinkerer of sorts. A dabbler, if you will, whose yearning to be “artistic” has been mostly helped by technology. (I credit my Nikon camera completely for taking good shots.)

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As it turns out, the digital age is apparently very amenable to those with tinkering and dabbling tendencies.

That, at least, was the (hopeful) sense that I got from reading Jeff Howe’s article on “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” In it, Howe traces the ways in which companies are tapping into “the latent talent of the crowd.” He brings up the example of iStockphoto, a company that sells images shot by amateur photographers – those who do not mind (who, in fact, I’m guessing, would be thrilled about) making a little bit of money doing what they already do in their spare time: take pictures.

According to Howe, the increasing affordability of professional-grade cameras and the assistance of powerful editing software like Photoshop means that the line between professional and amateur work is no longer so clear-cut. Add to that the sharing mechanisms of the Internet, and the fact that photographs taken by amateurs sell for a much lower price than those of professionals, and it seems inevitable that some ingenious person would have thought up a way to apply crowdsourcing to stock photography sooner or later.

Howe provides an even more striking example of how the expertise of the crowd is being plumbed these days. Corporations like Procter and Gamble are turning to science-minded hobbyists and tinkerers to help them solve problems that are stumping their R&D departments. Howe mentions the website InnoCentive as one example of the ways in which companies with a problem and potential problem-solvers are finding each other on the web: the former post their most perplexing scientific hurdles on the site and anyone who is part of the network can then take a stab at solving the problem. If they do, they are finely compensated. And a good number, in fact, do. According to InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer, Jill Panetta, 30% of all problems posted on their website have been solved. That is, to quote Panetta’s words, “30 percent more than would have been solved using a traditional, in-house approach.”

What’s intriguing about all of this is the fact that the solvers, as Howe says, “are not who you might expect.” They may not necessarily have formal training in the particular field in which the problem arises; their specialty may lie in another area altogether. Yet, it is this very diversity of expertise within the crowd of hobbyists that contributes to the success of such networks as InnoCentive. As Howe puts it, “the most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.” The more disparate the crowd, in other words, the stronger the network. [1] I love the ironies of the digital age.

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I’ve been wondering lately about whether history could benefit at all from the diverse knowledge and background of the crowd, whether crowdsourcing – posting a problem or request out in the virtual world in the hopes that someone might have the expertise to be able to fulfill it – could apply to a non-scientific discipline.

In other words, would a History version of InnoCentive work? A network where historical researchers could poll the crowd for information or materials or insight to help fill research gaps…where they could tap into the memories, artifacts, anecdotes, records, ephemera, (and even the ways people understand the past) of a diverse group and thereby possibly access information that might have never made it into the archives for formal preservation? How would the writing and construction of history change if, instead of primarily drawing upon the 5 to 10% of all records that ever make their way into an archives, researchers could tap into the personal archives of a disparate crowd made up of the “broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience”? (Let us put aside, for the moment, the issues of the integrity of the record and its provenance when we talk about “personal archives.” I realize that the shoebox in the attic is not nearly as reassuring a sight as the Hollinger box of the archives.) It seems probable to me that some of the 90 to 95% of records that never make their way into an archival institution are still extant, not destroyed, and that there could be valuable research material in them that could very well change one’s argument about the past. Would crowdsourcing be one way to get at that material?

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P.S. Of course, I just realized that I’m raising the above questions without considering a crucial aspect in all the examples of crowdsourcing that Howe mentioned: money. Those who answered the call – whether the amateur photographer or the scientific tinkerer – were paid for their services (ranging from a dollar all the way to an impressive $25,000). To pay someone for a piece of history raises a whole other set of questions…

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[1] Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html.

The Age of the (Aggravatingly) Smart Machine

(Or: One Disgruntled User's Frustrations with Printers)



From the moment that I laid eyes on it, I should have known that I was in for trouble. After all, as the old saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

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Here is how the story goes.

Back in September, I decided to purchase a printer. I’m the kind of person who finds reading on the computer for extended periods of time difficult. Despite numerous attempts to read on-screen, I still prefer the physicality of text. My eyes find pleasure and relief in the printed word. (You’ll not, in other words, find me curling up with a Kindle any time soon.)

Anyways, back in September, after a great deal of difficulty that involved no less than lugging a large demo Epson printer on the bus and accidentally denting it a few times during my trip home (it was box-less, carried in two plastic bags, and ridiculously heavy), I managed to transport and set up this beast of a printer in my apartment. It was an all-in-one contraption, able to scan, fax, print, and copy in colour. And it was, amazingly, only $34.99 at Best Buy. A veritable deal.

Within a few weeks, I had used up the complementary black ink and had to purchase a new cartridge, which ran out in a ridiculously short amount of time (even though I bought the “heavy usage,” i.e. more costly, one). In mid-November, the black ink had run out again. After dishing out yet another $25 and installing the new cartridge, I discovered that the complementary colour ink – which I had used to print, perhaps, five documents all term – had somehow run out as well. That’s when I realized that the Age of the New Printers means that everything shuts down when the colour ink is deemed to be empty. The machine’s printing capabilities simply cease to function. All the amount of black ink in the world will not get it to print a single page.

As it was near the end of the term, I simply decided to print all documents at school rather than deal with the fuss – and cost – of getting new ink. In hindsight, a perspective which all historians will always have at their disposal, that was a mistake.

* * * * *

About a week ago, I finally had a chance to pick up some colour ink cartridges (the kind for “moderate usage” only), installed them eagerly into my dusted-off printer, and looked forward to the convenience that modern technology would again afford. (I would not have to go to the computer lab at all hours now just to print readings.)

That’s when I realized that modern technology does not always work in one’s favour. The document I printed, which was simply set in black, came out starkly, aggravatingly, white. The black ink cartridge must have dried out over Christmas break. So, it appeared that I had just shelled out $35 for colour ink in order to be able to access black ink that was no longer operative.

This evening, however, I tried to print a document again, in black, just to see if something miraculous might ensue. And it did. The machine managed to cough out a document in black ink. The printout was extremely irregular in quality - numerous lines were missing - but at least the page was no longer blank. Eager (and slightly foolish), I printed the document several more times, thinking perhaps that persistence would pay off. Although the quality did improve, the document was still quite spotty in areas. That’s when (again, eager and foolish), I decided to clean the print heads, despite the warning that this function would consume ink. I then printed a sample document. The result was much better, but still not perfect. However, I discovered with shock that running the cleaning function used up half of the new colour ink cartridges, according to the meter.

I now had two choices:

1) Run another print head cleaning (which would probably use up the rest of the colour ink – of which I had not, in any real sense, used), or

2) Give up on the black ink cartridge completely (which was also unused, except for the test printouts), and shell out more money for black ink.

(Why I didn’t decide to unplug the printer then and there, affix a sign on it that said “Free – completely, utterly free”, and put it out in the hallway of my apartment, is still something I have not answered satisfactorily yet.)

Instead, I had a flash of inspiration. History came to my rescue: I remembered that I had owned an Epson printer before. It had run out of colour ink before. And I had “fooled” it before - by going through all the on-screen steps of installing a new colour cartridge and “charging” the ink, without actually doing so. With the colour ink meter subsequently indicating that it was “full”, I could then finish troubleshooting the problem that I was dealing with at the time, which required, finicky machine that it was, colour ink.

Cheered by this memory of the not-quite-so-smart-nor-sharp-machine, I decided to run another print head cleaning tonight. Sure enough, this nearly “used” up all the remaining colour ink. I printed a few more test documents in black; their quality was improved somewhat, but it was still blanking out at certain lines. I then tried to run one more cleaning function, but the printer told me that I couldn’t – there was not enough colour ink to support it. In fact, the warning of low ink was now replaced with the message that there was no more colour ink. (Apparently, just even attempting to run a print head cleaning uses up the ink, by the printer’s standards.)

Confident, however, that I could fool the machine, I then proceeded to go through the cartridge-replacement steps, clicking the “Finish” button at the end with a flourish. The printer responded by humming and telling me that “ink charging” was occurring. I smiled - and then, I frowned. A box had popped up indicating that the replaced cartridges were, in techno-lingo, “expended.”

In other words – the machine knew. It was telling me that I could not fool it. It could detect that I had not actually fed it anything new, despite my subsequent actions of physically removing and re-inserting the colour ink cartridges, which, I have to add again, were not really used, but were indelibly (and one might even say ingeniously) branded so by the machine. Such crafty labelling had made the colour ink inoperative.

Welcome, friends, to the Age of the (Aggravatingly) Smart Machine.

* * * * *

P.S. Sixty dollars invested into printer cartridges since mid-November and I have still not been able to print one actual document since then for any useful purpose.

If it were still in vogue to be a Marxist historian, I would seriously point to the ridiculously profitable economics underlying printer design as the source of all our (or at least my) present-day ills!

On Writing

I like words. I like their abundance. Their variety. The different nuances that they contain. I like how a word like “melancholy,” for example, has a slightly different flavour than “forlorn,” or how the word “myth” conveys something deeper - more emotional, more enduring, more fluid - than its neutral variant, “story.”

Now, most of my Public History peers would probably say that I don’t just like words – I like polysyllabic words. I’ll be the first to admit that long-ish and rather atypical words have a tendency to come to me, unbidden, and that I have an equal tendency to utter them aloud, without thinking. This penchant for the polysyllabic has sometimes even gotten me into trouble, won me unintended notoriety among my peers. ;)

As someone studying in the field of Public History, I realize that I have to think especially carefully about the words that I use, not only because using the “wrong” word can alienate a general audience but also because choosing the “right” word involves weighing various needs, such as those of the client and of the audience, as well as my own for precise language and "good" history. So, while I might immediately prefer the word “auspicious” over “lucky” or feel that “appropriated” explains a situation more clearly than “took,” I’m learning to pause and reconsider the effects of my instinctive word choices, and I’m learning to negotiate the sometimes conflicting needs and desires that exist at the micro-level of diction.

What I didn’t expect was to have to consider the machine as an audience as well. And yet that is what Dan Cohen’s blog post has drawn to my attention. In “When Machines are the Audience,” Cohen suggests that the age of machine-readable text means that we’ll need to write a little differently – or at least with the awareness that what we write can be more, or less, visible in a digital environment depending on the words that we use. The implication is that because text can be read by machines and mined using keyword searches, it is better to use precise and even unique terms or tags in related documents, so that the writing can be more easily searched, grouped, or retrieved. Cohen mentions, for example, how coming up with a unique string of words to identify related history websites can facilitate the process of narrowing searches to these sites only, so that relevant research information can be found. He also cites the example of a legitimate, history-related email being marked as spam, because of its unfortunate use of certain words that are high on the list of favorites for spammers. [1]

Looking over the words I used in a recent email to a friend, I’ll confess that terms ranging from “usurp” and “misnomer” to “vignette” and “quadratic” (yes, as in the quadratic equation) made their way in. (You are probably feeling some pity for my friend right now.) However, I’m consoled, and slightly amused, by the fact that what stands out as atypical word usage is precisely what spam filters ignore. At least, in this area, my penchant for the polysyllabic - for what’s seen as the atypical - has some redemptive purpose. :)
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[1] Daniel J. Cohen, “When Machines are the Audience,” Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog, http://www.dancohen.org/blog/posts/when_machines_are_the_audience.