Inbetween eBaying, I actually do some research. Yesterday headed over to Oxford for a meeting at the e-Science Research Centre about our “e-Science, Text and Technology” project, which just officially kicked off in January, so the new members of staff are hitting their stride now. Its a good team, and things are starting to move along now – hope to have something interesting to share at some point soon. The project runs for the next 3 years. No website yet – its on the to do list over the next few months.

The aim of the project is to provide computational tools to aid those in reading ancient texts, which are often damaged, abraded, and very difficult to read. We’re developing image processing tools to aid in cleaning up “dirty” images, and to detect candidate handwriting strokes on difficult text, etc. We’re also looking at decision maintenance systems, and how we can build a computational environment which will facilitate the reading of a document, and the documentation of that reading, so that those who come up with a reading can do so integrating the different linguistic and palaeographic datasets available, and keep a note of how and why they reached a certain interpretation. This is something which is crucially missing from the documentation of most readings of difficult texts.

Exciting stuff, huh? I’m now going to start looking at different palaeographic annotation tools which are available, so we can design our own with the best bits incorporated. (If anyone has any ideas regarding image markup tools for letter forms, or can point me to existing systems I dont know about already, do give me a shout).

…as an addendum to the post, below, about the change in feedback on ebay. I’ve just “sold” 50 things on ebay. It looks like 48 transactions are going fine. One person has already emailed to say “sorry, I just wanted to see how high the bidding went, and I dont have any money to pay for the item”. The other is quibbling about how much it costs to send a (rare, collectable) vinyl record to Finland. Both wasting my time (charges were clearly stated). And guess which ones are getting negative feedback from me?

Now imagine a world where people are able to bid up your items just for fun – and you cant say anything when they dont pay up…

On another note, I took 20 albums to the post office today. Had an interesting conversation with Joan Behind the Counter about how eBay really was the saviour of the Post Office in the UK.

I’m seriously hoping that this BBC tech story is not something that will actually happen:

Online auction site eBay has said it plans to overhaul its feedback system and will ban sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers.

EBay said problems were occurring, and slowing down trade, when buyers left negative comments about sellers who then retaliated with their own views.

Yuhuh. Thats the whole point. Its not just sellers who can be difficult – buyers can renege, refuse to pay, claim items are damaged when they are not, and generally behave like rude, thoughtless people. When you come across a buyer like this, you want to warn the rest of those trading on ebay.

I’m mostly a buyer rather than a seller, and can count on one hand the amount of difficult purchases I have made over the past 5 years, but the feedback mechanism has ensured, until now, that both sides have a fair point. At present, I’m selling almost 50 items on ebay (what a fun weekend of sitting in front of a computer): as a seller I have the right to not sell to someone with poor, low, or negative feedback. I’m selling some rare and valuable things. From now on, should I just trust the market forces to protect me (I’m not a “trader” in the market sense)? Sometimes trade needs to be slowed, and for good reason.

End Of Rant.

Having trouble communicating with the youth of today? Any webpage translated into LOLspeak at the touch of a button. For example:

digitisation= process uv creatin digital filez by scannin or otherwise convertin analogue materialz. resultin digital copy… or digital surrogate… would then b classed as digital material n then subject 2 same broad challengez involved in preservin access 2 it… as “born digital” materialz.

See this blog lolinated here. As I said, pointless, but cheery.

One of my students (thanks, Carly) just sent me an interesting link to an article/interactive illustration in Wired which plots what happens to blog posts, and how they find people:
“The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You“.

Has anyone else noticed the trend for people to talk about “Digitalisation” rather than “Digitisation”? Over the past year, student essays, newspaper reports, and various websites have started using “Digitalisation” to mean the process of creating digital representation of analogue objects and media. Now, I know language shifts and changes, and to some extent, “Digitalisation” makes kinda sense – you are making something digital, right? And there is the whole digitisation/digitization argument, but lets not get into that. Instead, lets have a look at some definitions:

Digitisation: The process of creating digital files by scanning or otherwise converting analogue materials.The resulting digital copy, or digital surrogate, would then be classed as digital material and then subject to the same broad challenges involved in preserving access to it, as “born digital” materials. (From the Digital Preservation Coalition website).

Digitalisation: The administration of digitalis or one of its active constituents to a patient or an animal so that the required physiological changes occur in the body; also, the state of the body resulting from this. (From the Oxford English Dictionary).

So now you know. Spell carefully, my friends….

ps. Yes I know in the early 1960s digitalisation was also used to mean digitisation. But it settled down pretty quickly into digitisation.

pps. Yes, I know policing the interweb for spelling mistakes is a pointless task. I was only pointing out an observation…

Something that’s been intriguing me for a while is the encouragement from traditional news outlets, such as the BBC, CNN, ITV, etc for the general public to submit pictures of newsworthy items to them, via mobile phone or email.

News agencies actively solicit user generated content. You can find out how to submit your prize winning photo journalism, or just-happened-to-be-there shots, to the BBC, here. The short version is, email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk, although beware, by submitting them you grant the BBC:

There are other ways to make money of Britney Spears shaving her head, should that be your want, if you find the stalking of innocent celebrities acceptable. But lets suppose that you just want to submit them to the BBC for all to see for free.

How popular is this service?

I wondered. So I asked the BBC (well, filed a Freedom of Information enquiry to their FOI office), and it goes something like this.

They dont keep stats on individual submitters, in case of data protection issues. But in general, on routine days, between 100 and 150 users will email or message in 150 to 250 images from around the globe. On days when something UK-wide happens, such as the snow flurries which covered the country on the 8^th February 2007, thousands of users can contribute: in this case, the BBC received 7316 images in 24 hours.

Other peaks in contributions came with the summer floods, the Glasgow Airport terrorist attack, etc. They keep a decent archive of the yourpics contributions that are used.

(The BBC had previously reported submission of over 1000 images and 20 videos from the July 7th 2005 bombs in London, and 6500 images of the fire at the Buncefield Oil Depot, in December 2005, which was one of the largest fires in Europe since the Second World War.)

There, dont say I dont tell you anything.

IMG_0314
Originally uploaded by National Library of New Zealand

Sometimes, when marking essays, you come across things noted by students that have completely passed you by (but shhhh, dont tell them that). An essay on the paperless office points me to a campaign run by the National Library of New Zealand at LIANZA Conference 2007: TRANZFORM – Te Tīnihanga (9-12 September) where they placed catalogue cardswhich said “In 2017 libraries will be….” in conference packs, and asked for responses from attendees. An interesting flickr set to explore. [link]

Flickr have just announced a project called The Commons, which they describe as

Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections

A pilot project with the Library of Congress,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments

There are already some interesting collections up there, like News in the 1910s and 1930s-40s in Color.

It will be interesting to see the range of tags and comments people take the time to put forward (but I’m not sure that comments like “neat train picture 🙂” are doing much for our understanding of LOC image collections!)

I’m writing a book chapter just now about personal digital image collections, and the rapidly changing (changed?) imaging environment we now utilise. I was reminded of this article by Tom Ang (a photographer and presenter who writes some very accessible introductory books to digital imaging) which featured in the guardian a couple of years ago, but still packs a punch.

In 1998, 67bn images were made worldwide. We know that because 3bn rolls of film were sold. It is impossible to be accurate, but with a world population of digital cameras exceeding a third of a billion on top of millions of film-using cameras still in use, it is likely that more pictures are taken every year than in the previous 160 years of photography put together. In addition to the other pollutions we have unleashed on ourselves, we may well have to thank digital photography for giving us image pollution.
[link]