The keynote by Axel Roesler was excellent. Of his many good points, one of his sidenotes was that he had been a designer, then an engineer, and was now back to a designer. It was at this point that I started thinking about how management is at least partially about designing an experience for the employees that allows them to be as productive as possible, in both directions — I want the folks above and below on the org chart to be happy and productive. How can I facilitate a work experience for them that will set them up for success? With that in mind, I thought about why I’d been hired again and what sorts of things I would be able to find at this conference that would aid & abet me in meeting some of those larger scheme goals.

To that end, the first presentation I went to was Designing Experiences Beyond the Screen (Ariel van Spronsen) — services design. It was during this that I jokingly told one of my former co-workers that for the weekend I should change my title to Employee Productivity Designer. She laughed at me and said, “It sounds like you’re a manager that doesn’t want to say you’re a manager!” Totally. She then said, ‘and you’d have to work with a lot of people to design that experience, facilities to set up desks, IT to set up computers, HR arranging onboarding…” Um, yeah, I’m a manager, what do you think managers do? Heh.

Then it was lunch. Yay lunch. Met up with P who went to WikiLeaks: Information Between Legal Borders (Brian Rowe), which was the other one that looked interesting to me, but not as likely to provide the lateral ‘I Can Use This’ sort of thing. After lunch we both went to Intro to Sharepoint (Quentin, Greg) — it was *way* intro for us, but as we both have staff we’d like to pull over to SharePoint, it seemed like an optimal time to step back and see what other folks were telling noobs about SharePoint. I also got some good ideas of things I can tweak SharePoint to do, helloooo key performance indicators. I’d love to figure out a way to ping off the incident management stuff to SharePoint to track my team specific metrics there, but have yet to figure out a way that won’t just add a zillion additional steps to the workflow. Still, in time…

The third session of the day, we went to Google Book Settlement (Brian Rowe) — it was good. Kind of a coaster session with fairly minimal cross-over immediate ‘can use’ stuff, but interesting from a copyright and intellectual property standpoint. The final session of the day was Discussion/Idea Generation: Next Gen Internet-making taxonomies & social media work (Pam Green). We didn’t actually get around to the social media aspect of the session, but there were a lot of my peeps there, and Pam is awesome. Looking at how to organize a massive intranet effectively is an interesting exercise. There were a lot of assumptions that had been passed on to Pam by people who tend to make the decisions, and there were a lot of assumptions by people in the room who lacked background and context (not the least, how long Pam had been doing work along these lines). But there was some good signal in the noise.

We went down to the info parties — I had a tasty Manhattan, although the bartender asked me a question a couple times and I just couldn’t hear her, or rather I could hear her, but not distinguish quite what she was saying, to her annoyance. It got made sweet, which is fine. It was tasty. We stood around and talked about random things, then headed to a place down the street with the claim that they had better beers (plus you didn’t have to order food at the bar). That was fun. Would like to do that more often with those folks. I really miss working with them, though I think ultimately I’m in a much, much better place, that’s a much better fit for me.

This morning the presentation was a presentation on search engines, search & the like by Vanessa Fox. It was also a great presentation. She in relation to tracking real time search trends based on tv advertising, she asked how many of us watched the Super Bowl last February. In an audience of around 300, only four people raised their hands. This reminds me of the PM that started out using sports metaphors in a meeting I was in where there were a couple of librarians, a nice content lady, and an Israeli database guy. We all gave him blank stares. He shifted to military metaphors and the database guy got what he was saying and started laughing… I can’t remember if he ever came around to a metaphor that the rest of us would actually get. But Earnest Tom was so earnest that we didn’t really mind. We kinda got it, the metaphors were just really not well thought out for the audience… ANYWAY (it’s my blog, I can go on a tangent if I want to). Apparently 50% of people are on both the computer and tv at the same time (I don’t know where the statistic comes from or the full context, I’m just sayin’ that’s what I heard). I leaned over to P & whispered, “That’s because we only have one computer in the same room as the tv right now…” But search trends and information seeking behaviors are an interesting thing to take a look at, I find my interest drops fairly quickly when the only interest in them becomes focused down to “how do we use this to push traffic to sites”, but that’s not what this presentation was about.

The first, and only session I attended today, was Using Humor to Convey Information (Jess Hagy & friends). It was put on by Jess of Indexed, a site I’ve been following for about three years now. One of the things I need to do is present information about what my team is doing. While at the moment, I need to present my information seriously and get taken seriously, I think that using humor and the unexpected in other areas helps engage people and bring stuff home that would be otherwise much less accessible. For instance, this example of what’s changing in a MARC record is completely amusing to me & made much more of an impression than it would have had the example been, for example Lawrence Whelk.

Then to lunch, where we met a nice library student from PDX, and a SharePoint widget designer & a SharePoint dev, all of whom we had good discussions with. Then when we were done eating, we wandered over to KW and talked to him and I got from him what I was hoping to hear someone at the conference talk about — namely, storytelling and creating compelling narratives. Got some book recommendations, or rather, re-recommendations because he’s talked about them before (and that’s why I asked him, I knew he’d have some good resources). His opinion was also ‘maybe not so much employee productivity designer, but productivity engineer.’ Which lead to an entertaining, brief discussion on design v. engineering. “Don’t call me an engineer! I’m an artist!”

And with that, we went home a little early. It was good, but we needed an infonap & at least a *little* bit of a “weekend”. Also a chance to recover from being around that many people. Introvert much?

Kind of general stuff, we saw more whale tails & ass cracks than we really needed to. Pull those pants up or wear longer shirts, yo. All in all, it was good. From an lateral usability perspective, I got what I needed. Networking and keeping in touch too.

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Why does she get her own day & what’s this all about?

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Until just a few weeks ago, I knew who Ada Lovelace was, or thought I did… and then I found out she’s also Lord Byron’s daughter. Poetry & computers. Code has its own rhyme & reason, poetry like a puzzle to put together, it makes sense, in a funny sort of way.

Wikipedia’s article says of her, “She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built.” Funny, as a taxonomist, I sometimes feel like I’m manipulating symbols according to rules for machines not yet built too… Or for machines built, but not configured, or for machines that are built, but there’s no code interface to use the work I do. Or for machines built & programs owned… but not by us… But then again, despite the potential missed, my work is used & valued, just not always very efficiently or elegantly. You win some, you lose some, you draw some.

There’s Grace Hopper too. Her wikipedia entry says, “A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.” Woo, compiling! It’s the moment that always makes me fret while I wait to see if I did the install right… Computers are like knitting though. I can always tear it out & start over if I have to. Well, maybe I can’t always, but I certainly have often enough to know these things are possible.

Then there are the six women who programmed ENIAC in 1943-1945: Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, & Frances “Fran” Bilas Spence. From the article:

“Because the ENIAC project was classified, the programmers were denied access to the machine they were supposed to tame into usefulness until they received their security clearances. As the first programmers, they had no programming manuals or courses, only the logical diagrams to help them figure out how to make the ENIAC work.

They had none of the programming tools of today. Instead, the programmers had to physically program the ballistics program by using the 3000 switches and dozens of cables and digit trays to physically route the data and program pulses through the machine.”

In 1995, my best friend from college sat me down and showed me the minimal basics of html. Up until then, it was Word, solitaire, & tetris. Then came M1, Bee Lavender & HipMama.com & Mamaphonic. I hand-coded all but the board at Mamaphonic until 2004 when we switched to the Drupal CMS. I did some things here & there on HipMama.com before the CMS, but that was largely coded by Bee and various other people. Not long after I started doing stuff with the mamas, I landed myself pregnant with my second & in library school. Now I know whole bundles of women doing amazing things with technology. Phoebe and her really neato stuff with wikipedia, Darci and her completely amazing stuff with Plone & Plinkit, Lynn to whom we are ever thankful for helping us with Drupal at the HipMama.com sites, and hordes & hordes of other women doing awesome, amazing, excellent work as well.

Ada & Grace & all the rest of you, so many that I missed, thanks for blazing a trail for us!

Today, with the help of google maps, M1, M2, my Dad & I went geocaching & found our first geocache at a long-time favorite park. It was most excellent. We left a santa eraser & got a magic card (I really tried to convince M1 to take the studded leather bracelet, but she insisted on the creepiest magic card possible. Heh). M1 nearly alerted the entire park (fortunately empty because everyone was at the beach) when she made her discovery, shrieking, I FOUUUUND IT! Pretty dang adorable. Then we logged everything, took victory pix, restashed & were on our way. I also discovered the concept of letterboxing. Who knew all these funny little stashed things are hiding out there? Well, I guess I did, since I know geeklibrarian has been doing it for ages & my sis-in-law & her family have been doing it for at least two years, but still. Until you start looking, you don’t realize how many of them are stashed away out there! So that was extraordinarily entertaining.

Then we went swimming in the lake. Oof. Holy cow, I am out of shape for lake swimming. There were lots of waves today, big waves which added to the difficulty level of swimming out there too, no doubt. Lots of milfoil. The alarming milfoil. It wasn’t so bad out where I was swimming (except I worked my way out from the beach instead of hitting it from the dock, since until my parents came over to watch The Ms, I had to watch them), but the amount of gnarly slimy green strands & clumps I picked off my chilluns was pretty… gnarly. But they had a ridiculously good time. We got home well after their bedtime & now they’re Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast asleep & should sleep well. Yay for well sleeping children! And me, I think it’s now bath time. When I get around to bed, I think after the swimming today, I’ll sleep well too. And no doubt feel it tomorrow. Oh, bath… and sleeeep…

ZOMG! < runs around the house fanning my my face >< settles down momentarily >

Of course, he points out what I left palely implied rather than said directly, which is that this is why taxonomy governance is very, very important & the implications of structure & restructure can have far reaching affects & need to be considered in the process of re/structuring & developing taxonomies. I tend to push for more than one taxonomist to work on a project, just because we do bring our own biases to the table, but no one ever wants to pay for that. Meh to them. I will continue to push for it because I think it’s a really important point.

I saw a taxonomy yesterday that illustrates why these things need to be thought out… it was for a Christian organization & had a bunch of top level terms, among them “Programs”, “Products’, “Human Rights” & “Human Wrongs”, etc. Trying to recall this correctly, they had things like genocide under “human rights” & genital mutilation under “human wrongs”… Wha? I don’t necessarily consider a morality-based taxonomy necessarily wrong — taxonomy by it’s nature reflects a world/domain view. I do consider wrong arbitrary categorizations that are so murky that one would find genocide under human rights & genital mutilation under human wrongs. That’s just… it’s stupid. Someone thought they were being cute & clever & they’re so not. Then again, this is the same organization whose adopt-a-child uses the shopping basket metaphor. Pick a kid, put it in the basket, get some accessories. It’s just like a doll. Or, y’know, human slavery, speaking of human wrongs. I do believe we said, “Uh, not cool metaphor there” but they’re resisting, is the story coming back to me. Not my project though so I only get bits & pieces of it. The taxonomy containing human wrongs is an internal taxonomy used for tagging then directing content to a specific location, so it’s not displayed externally anywhere, but still. One of the things we think about both in “taxonomy” and information architecture/user experience is the story of the perspective/world view the organization of information is telling. I really think these people should take a good look at the stories they’re telling. Not just but especially because of their morality-based views.

In other work-related news, I think I’ve settled on a personal definition for ontology. There’s the formal definition of these things (which no one can agree on) & then there’s how everyone uses them. I’ve seen taxonomy used for a huge range of things & I’ve seen ontology used just as broadly. The general public doesn’t get as much exposure to the concept of thesaurus except as “that book with synonyms & antonyms that sits next to the dictionary” so I just don’t hear it used very often, except correctly. So ontology. I’ve been sitting in on ontology tool reviews for work in the last couple weeks. What I’m gathering from what I’m going to consider formal ontology tools (TopQuadrant’s TopBraid, Ontology Works, Protégé, Swoop, & the like) is that in addition to just the semantic relationships with named edges that a complex thesaurus can support, there’s a whole ‘nother layer of logic & inference that can be applied on top of the ontology that isn’t generally available in a thesaurus tool. So, I can call out in a complex thesaurus an “Bob’s yer uncle” associative relationship (Robert is your male or female parent’s brother), but I have to manually make that relationship, just like I’d have to make associative relationships to call out cousin relationships, etc. Very time consuming. In an ontology, I can write a rule or query that says, “[find * where] parent’s male sibling = uncle” and gather those inferences rather than having to explicitly call out those relationships. In addition, in a thesaurus, there’s a preferred term & then equivalent terms, authority control lists are good in that they can help diverse domains know what a preferred name (think legal or other authoritative/formal name) is, which works to varying degrees of success. In an ontology, there’s one concept which can be any number of data types, which can have associated term names associated with the concept, allowing more flexibility for multiple domains/systems to work together — as long as the concept is agreed on, they can pick the name they want to use, but it still ties into that central concept.

I know — so what. So, where this all comes into being very handy is for research, say, pharmaceutical research. Make a rule that goes across a series of drugs to find possible contraindications for use, or a query that finds possible new uses for drugs. The flexibility for complex querying of knowledge bases is an order of magnitude greater in ontologies than it is in thesauri & taxonomies. I don’t necessarily see the clients my company has using true ontology, but I have no doubt that some of them will come to us asking for “an ontology”, just like they come to us asking for “taxonomy” when they need a content audit. But it is good to be clear in one’s own head what each is, even if we smile & provide them with a complex thesaurus that has semantic relations/named edges.

I’m rambling — I’m not entirely clear on all this yet, but I think I’ve made great strides in the last week or so. Damn, I love what I do for a living. Taxonomy/Thesauri/Ontology is just about the best job ever. Anyway, I’m still sorting it out a little in my head & I logged on to write about the baking I did today… perhaps the baking is another post now though. :)

[earlier in the article]
SIMPLICIO: But not everyone is cut out to be an artist. What about the kids who aren’t “math people?” How would they fit into your scheme?

SALVIATI: If everyone were exposed to mathematics in its natural state, with all the challenging fun and surprises that that entails, I think we would see a dramatic change both in the attitude of students toward mathematics, and in our conception of what it means to be “good at math.” We are losing so many potentially gifted mathematicians — creative, intelligent people who rightly reject what appears to be a meaningless and sterile subject. They are simply too smart to waste their time on such piffle.

[somewhat later in the article]
A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds, a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.

Edited to add this quote because for some inexplicable reason I think I love it, “We’re killing people’s interest in circles for god’s sake!”