Category Archives: academia

The Library of Congress Pilot Project on the Photographic Commons

Since I seem to be posting a lot about flickr these days, I thought I’d make a plug for The Commons:

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

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.

This project has actually been evolving for a long time. I used to hear a lot of negative opinions from independent researchers about the Library of Congress in general and specific doubts about whether the [tag]Prints and Photographs Online Catalog[/tag] would ever reach it’s full potential. It always seemed to me that what these individuals were really saying was, “this is going to be a lot of hard work and I want other people to do it for me and then let me use the results for free in the public domain.” Plus, none of them seemed to have a definition of full potential that was particularly broad in scope.

Although I am at times vocal in my critique of [tag]Wikipedia[/tag] and other communally produced information sources, I don’t see them as the end of civilization nor as the end for the need for experts, scientists or researchers. On the other hand, I don’t see them as the harbingers of a utopian tomorrow free of class and oppression and inequalities in access to information.

This particular Library of Congress undertaking was already envisioned as a highly sophisticated project when I first began following it’s development while I was in graduate school over ten years ago. Obviously, technologies like [tag]flickr[/tag] and concepts like [tag]folksonomic tagging[/tag] have radically altered the intellectual landscape for archivists of image collections and I believe those alterations will pose many challenges, but the results promise to be spectacular.

Sally Smith

Yesterday the Washington Post had a pair of articles about a longtime colleague who passed away over the weekend.

Ellen Edwards, writing for the Washington Post Style section, summed up a first (second, third and fourth) encounter with Sally Smith perfectly:

“At first glance you might have thought you had come upon some improbable tropical bird, full of color and feathers, dressed in layers of patterns on patterns, a pile of rolling blond curls on her head.”

[read the whole piece]

The obituary in the Metro section had a more serious in tone:

Sally L. Smith, 78, founder of the Lab School in Washington, a school widely known for its innovative curriculum and its uncommon success in unlocking the mysteries of learning for those who learn differently from others, died Dec. 1 of complications of myeloma at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

[read the entire obituary]

Sadly, I was highly sensitive to Sally’s perfume and so most of our interactions were by phone, so I missed many of her more spectacular ensembles. I certainly experienced her boundless energy and enthusiasm, though.

ringtones and false dichotomies

Recently I’ve been involved in a fair number of conversations with musicians and band managers where the topic of downloads – complete songs versus ringtones – comes up. Much marvelling then ensues about why consumers are perfectly content to “steal” musical content in the form of entire songs but pay real money for ringtones.

Now, the issue they don’t understand isn’t monetizing their work. They get that selling ringtones is a nice way to make money. They just can’t get beyond the creator’s perspective that the work only has value to the listener in it’s entirety.

The working assumption is that a ringtone is merely a small piece of a larger work, not it’s own entity. The 3 minute pop song has more value because it is “complete,” a supposition that misses some of the psychological and anthropological implications of cellphone ownership and identity-building entirely. I’ve been digging around in The Literature a bit because I’m sure there’s loads of theories about why people choose certain ringtones. I haven’t come up with any great summaries yet, as it’s slow going and I have other things on my mind.

I don’t know why it’s hard to understand that ringtones aren’t really for the phone’s owner. One exception being when someone chooses ringtones that differentiate one caller from another for convenience of amusement, rather than to tell others something about themself as the owner of the phone. Family members calling my phone are signified by the Addams Family theme song, for instance. Jim Dornan, Katherine Harris’s former campaign manager apparently programmed his phone to play the theme from the Exorcist when she called.

Your ringtone sets your phone apart from others in the crowd. Or, paradoxically, in the case of people who load the latest hit, it can help you fit in with the crowd.

Ringtone selection broadcasts information about the individual who owns the phone and it’s information that individual chooses to try and shape the way they are perceived by their peers. Ringtones are not privately consumed like tunes on an ipod, they’re broadcast into the public sphere and they’re loaded with layers of cultural meaning due to the fact that they are also musical.

If you want to focus on the issues relating to cognition, there’s loads of scholarly blahblahblah on the psychology of ringtones over on google scholar. Personally, I’d suggest ambling over to the site of the RutgersCenter for Mobile Communication Studies – they have enough information to keep you busy for a long, long time.