31 January 2009 – 2:11 pm
Nick Cohen in Standpoint (via):
a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the [...]
David introduces a new feature at Librarything:
“tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at [...]
Stephen Lewis (via Dave) has a good and troubling post about the limits of the Web as a repository of knowledge.
while the web might theoretically have the potential of providing more shelf space than all libraries combined, in reality it is quite far from being as well stocked. Indeed, only a small portion of the [...]
31 October 2006 – 10:42 am
I attended part of a very interesting conference on terrorism last week. The organisers intend to launch a network and a journal devoted to ‘critical terrorism studies’, a project which I strongly support. As the previous blog entry suggests, I’ve studied a bit of terrorism in my time – and I’m very much in favour [...]
18 September 2006 – 10:40 am
Nick:
Larry Sanger, the controversial online encyclopedia’s cofounder and leading apostate, announced yesterday, at a conference in Berlin, that he is spearheading the launch of a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as “an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.”The Citizendium will begin as a “fork” of [...]
Alex points to this piece by Rashmi Sinha on ‘Findability with tags’: the vexed question of using tags to find the material that you’ve tagged, rather than as an elaborate way of building a mind-map.
I should stress, parenthetically, that that last bit wasn’t meant as a putdown – it actually describes my own use of [...]
Chris and Rob have been finding different kinds of fault in the classic left/right political spectrum: Chris prefers two criteria which (he argues) are more or less orthogonal (pro- and anti-state, pro- and anti-poor people), while Rob opts for ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ as fundamental alternatives.
The trouble with all these discussions is that so many different [...]
By way of background to this post – and because I think it’s quite interesting in itself – here’s a short paper I gave last year at this conference (great company, shame about the catering). It was co-written with my colleagues Judith Aldridge and Karen Clarke. I don’t stand by everything in it – as [...]
Here’s a problem I ran into, halfway through building my first ontology, and some thoughts on what the solution might be.
Question 47 of the Mixmag survey reads:
Have you ever had an instance[sic] where your drug use caused you to:
Get arrested?
Lose a job?
Fail an exam?
Crash a car/bike?
Be kicked out of a club?
What this tells us is [...]
This one’s about work.
I’m currently documenting the concepts underlying the 2005 Mixmag Drug Survey using Protege. Here’s why:
The documentation of social science datasets on a conceptual level, so as to make multiple datasets comprehensible within a shared conceptual framework, is inherently problematic: the concepts on which the data of the social sciences are constructed are [...]
13 February 2006 – 11:21 am
I don’t trust Yahoo!, for reasons which have nothing to do with my dislike of misused punctuation marks (although the bang certainly doesn’t help); I don’t trust Google either. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember when MicroSoft [sic] were new and exciting and a major attractor of geek goodwill; maybe it’s just because [...]
30 January 2006 – 11:25 am
So, I’m a researcher. (At least until the money runs out next year; hopefully I’ll have something similar lined up by then.) Before I was a researcher I was a freelance journalist for about six years, while I did my doctorate; before that I was a full-time journalist for three years; and before that I [...]
21 January 2006 – 9:13 pm
The other day my son asked to borrow the booklet from my CD of Smile, because he wanted to check the lyrics of “Good Vibrations”; I’d burned it to a CD that I’d given him for Christmas, along with a bunch of other stuff (Oasis, the Shins, Iggy Pop…) I told him the lyrics of [...]
21 October 2005 – 9:41 am
OK, let’s talk about the Long Tail.
I’ve been promising a series of posts on the Long Tail myth for, um, quite a while. (What’s a month in blog time? A few of those.) The Long Tail posts begin here.
Here’s what we’re talking about, courtesy of our man Shirky:
We are all so used to bell curve [...]
22 September 2005 – 12:42 pm
Or: what ethnoclassification is, and what folksonomy isn’t.
When it comes to tagging, I’m facing both ways. I think it’s fascinating and powerful and new – qualitatively new, that is: it’s worth writing about not just because it’s shiny, but because there’s still work to be done on understanding it. At the same time, I think [...]
Thanks to a couple of links posted by Thomas, I’ve just read Bryan Boyer’s Correspondance Romano (Corriere Romano, surely? never mind) closely followed by this post from February by Tom Evslin. Tom:
People don’t think hierarchically – at least most people don’t. We think in terms of associations. Our dreams give this away as they hyperlink [...]
Tom Coates’ interesting post Two cultures of fauxonomies collide has been getting a lot of attention lately, mainly thanks to Dave. There’s a particularly interesting discussion running at Many-to-Many. The discussion has progressed quite rapidly, with several bright and articulate people pitching in to illustrate how Tom’s original insight can be developed. My [...]
Mike Harper:
Semiotics, which is clearly older than the semantic web, tells us you can’t always map signs to real world objects. You can do it for things like, say, the Taj Mahal, but not for things like democracy, justice etc. So they map to concepts. Trouble is, you’re talking really about what’s inside someone else’s [...]
I’ve started this blog as a place to collect my thoughts on user-centred ontologies, ethnoclassification, folksonomies, emergent semantics and so on. I’m looking at this area as part of a project for a repository of social science data sources at Manchester University. In my spare time I run another blog, Actually Existing; Chris at qwghlm [...]
