Monthly Archives: July 2009

Citation Visualizations

By IRIS Posted on by

A couple of people here on campus asked if there were any tools out there that would allow them to visualize the relationships between citations that they gathered over time in the course of a research project. Turns out, the options are limited and not at all user friendly. Here they are (thanks to Christina!):

  • There is CiteSpace. The demo video that you get when you click “webstart” and then go to “help” and “demo video” makes the whole thing look rather intimidating. It seems to run off of the same exports that we’d use to get information out of databases and into EndNote. The trick is, it appears to only work if you import stuff from ISI. I don’t see any way to manually enter a citation, though I’m certainly no expert on the software yet, so it may be there, just hidden. Here’s the User Guide (you may have to click through some server security stuff to see it).
  • The other option is Sitkis. This involves downloading ISI citations (again) and importing them into MS Access. I’m on a Mac at work, so I’ll have to see how this works when I get home to a PC with Access on it. Anyway, here’s Christina’s blog post about it.

Pretty limited options, eh? I sure hope there are more out there, but the People Who Should Know generally agree that there aren’t, at least, not yet. You know what I’d really love? If Zotero would take this project on.

Midsummer

By IRIS Posted on by

I know it’s not technically midsummer. We passed that a while back. But here at work, it’s the middle of our institution’s summer. Whole weeks can pass with only one or two meetings scheduled. Whole days can pass without any student asking me anything (we don’t have summer sessions for our students, though we do have summer programs for other people’s students). Whole hours can pass while I concentrate on one project without interruption. Everything feels different.

One thing I’ve enjoyed about this summer at the library is that the various research assistants on campus seem to have decided to congregate every day and work side-by-side in the main computer area of the reference room. Each student works on his or her assigned projects, chatting occasionally with whomever is sitting at the next computer, and generally keeping each other company through the long hours of research. This may have happened in previous years, but I don’t remember it, and it warms my heart every time I see the group hard at work together.

People always ask me what I do all summer without students, and I rarely have a good answer. In fact, I usually just pick whichever project I’m working on at the moment and say, “well, right now I’m working on [whatever it is]” and hope they don’t say “but that won’t take all summer, will it?” Because it won’t. There are a million other projects to do, but very little that can be synthesized down to “in the summer I work on this kind of thing and that kind of thing” conversation snippet. For some reason, it’s rarely seems to be enough to say, like those students can say, that my colleagues and I gather every day to work in proximity on the various projects that can’t happen during the school year’s crush of interruptions, classes, consultations, and meetings.

So what am I working on during this week in the middle of our summer? Well, I need to get acquainted with our (brand new to us) instance of LibGuides (which we’ve been wanting for years and finally have). I’m putting together my piece of a presentation on learning-centric library instruction for a professional development day that’s coming up in a couple of weeks at Gustavus Adolphus. I’m figuring out what needs to change in EndNote to bring the MLA style up to date now that we have our 7th edition copies in hand (and I need to figure out how to handle their pesky restrictions surrounding the online version). I’m also trying to re-start the effort to make Metalib work the way we need it to work. And I’m drafting a proposal to assess our Research/IT service point.

Sometime soon (once I’ve figured out LibGuides) I need to embark on my summer schedule of updating all my departmental research guides. (This is when being the librarian for 10 departments becomes time consuming in the summer.) Then there are a couple of complicated course-specific guides I should start working on. I have some Moodle/eReserves documentation to overhaul, some instructional material to create and some projects to assess in my capacity as a member of the campus’ copyright committee, and some planning to do for a new project in which I will coordinate a continual environmental scan for our library.

At least, those are the bigger projects that I hope I’ll get to before the most active prepare-for-fall-term portion of summer arrives. I hope my brain and work life cooperate to make that possible.

Clinical Reader Train Wreck Just Keeps Going

By IRIS Posted on by

Some day I’ll get bored of watching this train wreck in progress. But not yet. If you are, you can skip right over this post and rest in the knowledge that you’re more mature than I am.

Remember last week when Clinical Reader had only threatened a blogger, been exposed as having made up endorsements, started making up bogus Retweets, deleted incriminating tweets from their account, fired the pesky Canadians, and generally convinced thousands of people that they weren’t trustworthy? Since then, thing haven’t improved. Since then:

  • Whoever is trying to sanitize Clinical Reader’s online reputation (I assume it’s co-founder Allan Marks, but who knows) has been switching the original twitter account’s name at the speed of light. This breaks links that people had used in blog posts, but it unfortunately doesn’t erase the history from the deep dark recesses of the Internet, or delete people’s screenshots from their hard drives. Most of the good stuff is still live on the links in my previous post, and even more lives in this post on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. (Moral of the story: Don’t be stupid online because the stupid never dies.) As of this writing the account has moved from @clinicalreader to @clinical_tweets to @amarks7 to @amarks14 to @amarks_ to @a_marks1 to @allan_marks (See below for explanation of the change in the first two names. And don’t expect @allan_marks to be valid for more than, say, an hour. As of 7pm, the name has changed 4 times since 9am today.)

  • Somebody took over the name @clinicalreader and posted a brief history of the debacle there.

  • Somebody else took over @clinical_tweets (they claim to be the fired Canadians) and started cockily claiming that they’d done the job they were hired to do because just look at how many people now know about Clinical Reader. Their claim in a nutshell: “You’ve All Been Used. Bwahahahah.” They’ve now killed the account.
  • A new twitter account went live: @clinical_reader. This had all sorts of tweets about how the real Clinical Reader wasn’t yet “officially” on Twitter but will let us all know when they are (this screencast from the Google Cache shows that if you hovered over an older version of the Clinical Reader site, it clearly linked to the original @clinicalreader twitter account). Then tweeted several rather official looking tweets about what a great service they are. Then denounced the other now-bogus accounts. And all of this while not officially tweeting! This morning, all their tweets had disappeared except for the ones saying that the tweets from @cliniclareader are not coming from the Clinical Reader service (which even whoever-it-is at @clinicalreader says, quite plainly).

  • Another new twitter account went live: @clinical_tweet. This seems to be the new, new, new official twitter account. Or something. We’ll see how long it lasts.

  • And now, the sockpuppetry really gets started. “Sally Jones” started a twitter account as @kensingtonlib in order to alternately level accusations at @lukelibrarian and laud Clinical Reader. I wonder who could possibly be using the name Sally Jones??

This is just too much fun. I’ll update this post if necessary (and add screenshots that I have on a different computer, later).

[Edit: 7pm on July 20th. I think I'm done now. If you haven't had enough, search FriendFeed for "Clinical Reader" and see if more drama has surfaced. I'll just add that I've been almost equally fascinated by the complexity of piecing together a coherent story when that story is playing out in so many social networks, by the flailing about of Clinical Reader, by the lessons this teaches about marketing online, and by the implications of this story in my own teaching. I think I'll have to work some discussion of this parable into sessions I teach about evaluating web content.]

Best Bad Marketing EVER

By IRIS Posted on by

I thought I could resist jumping into the fray on this one, but this story just keeps getting better and better.

Have you ever heard of the service called Clinical Reader? Apparently it’s a new service that acts kind of like a feed reader, only they decide which feeds you read, and it’s aimed at the medical community. The salient facts here being: 1) it’s new, and 2) nobody had heard of it. Until this week.

This week they used twitter to threaten legal action against a blogger, explain that they’d overstepped and let some unknown junior colleague too close to the keyboard, argue with the blogger and her ever-growing posse, apologize to the blogger, and now send out bogus retweets.* (See the chronology below for the gory details.)

What fascinates me is how quickly (in the space of four days) hundreds of people have gone from knowing nothing about this service to being pretty sure that everyone at Clinical Reader is completely insane. The social web can be an incredibly rich marketing arena, but it has zero patience for companies that get stuff wrong, and it rather delights in calling out this kind of behavior. This is the flip-side of crowd-sourcing, and companies and libraries hoping to harness online social networks would do well to watch this real-life parable unfold.

Chronology:

The story is way more interesting if you see it unfolding, so here are the best places to get it in kind of chronological order. This blog-version of the summary is necessary because Twitter itself is kind of difficult to reconfigure in a way that makes sense after the fact, and because Clinical Reader has started deleting tweets. Oops.

  1. Nikki noticed some less than ethical aspects of Clinical Reader’s site (which now includes edits linking to the apology she received)
  2. Steve summarized day one of the saga
  3. Nikki gathered together links to a bunch of stuff that happened after Steve’s post.
  4. The RT shenanigans begin, but these need more space, and screenshots, so here we go…

Clinical Reader went wrong in two completely wrong ways with the retweeting. (By the way, read each of the screenshots from the bottom up, because I forgot I should reverse the order and don’t feel like fixing it now.)


First, they thanked people for retweets even if the people had never retweeted them.


Then they seem to have completely made up tweets to retweet.

Amazing. Pardon me while I go pop some popcorn and settle in for the amusing ride. You can follow along on FriendFeed if you want.

P.S. The founder of Clinical Reader now says: “I have taken control of this account & parted company with former acquaintances in Canada whose behaviour I can only describe as schoolboy” (cite), and he is now apologizing to people. [The following sentence is apparently no longer true... which is ironic, since I was poking fun at Clinical Reader for misunderstanding how it works: "The problem is, he doesn't realize that if he starts with one person's name, there's no guarantee that everyone else will be able to see what he writes, since Twitter only lets you see messages directed at mutual friends." Further testing reveals that the other people would be able to see this message if they clicked on their @[username] page but not in their main Twitter feed. So, still weird, but not as egregious.]

* For those who don’t use Twitter, RT means “retweet” and is a way to redistribute something somebody else said, complete with attribution. It’s very much like a cited quote in a paper, only with links. So if I say “Something Clever” on Twitter, somebody else could say “RT @ijastram – Something Clever” which means “retweeting Iris Jastram who said ‘Something Clever,’” and the “@ijastram” part automatically turns into a link to my tweets. Quotation and citation in 140 characters or less. Pretty slick.

An Interesting Thing Happened on the Internet

By IRIS Posted on by

Yesterday, somebody pointed me to a FriendFeed thread in which an artist and a FriendFeed user were working through issues of intellectual property and Internet etiquette.

The FriendFeed user, Kol, had bookmarked an image that he found on a site that allows artists to share their work with each other. In typical FriendFeed fashion, this bookmark appeared in FriendFeed with a thumbnail of the image he had bookmarked and with places for other FriendFeed users to comment on, “like,” or re-share the bookmark and its related thumbnail image with their own sets of FriendFeed friends. The artist objected strenuously (and not at all politely) to the fact that this thumbnail appeared on FriendFeed. Kol and other FriendFeed users tried explaining that Kol had not, in fact, infringed on the artist’s rights by bookmarking her image since thumbnails do not violate copyright and since the image was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (though the artist has since removed that license). In short, the artist was well within her rights to ask (politely) to have her image removed from FriendFeed as a matter of courtesy, but she was probably not within her rights to accuse the original poster of wrong-doing. That’s the sanitized version, at least, which I reproduced here at some length because of difficulties with the original material.*

So, except for the attendant drama, the issues seem to be garden-variety intellectual property confusion. But all the drama involved in this particular exchange was actually kind of illuminating.

First, it reminded me that as an information consumer, I’m used to the feelings of frustration involved in finding out that I can’t freely use other people’s stuff however I want to even if I cite my sources. I run up against the flip-side of these frustrations only very rarely, however, and they’re good to bear in mind. I happily slap Creative Commons licenses on lots of the stuff I produce, but I remember all too well the first time I found my work being reproduced and shared in a way that I didn’t particularly appreciate but that fell squarely within the parameters of the license I’d chosen. There’s nothing like working up a good head of righteous indignation only to remember that they’re doing exactly what I said they could do and no more.

This particular discussion might also be less straight-forward than it at first appeared. Licenses always trump copyright, and the original image** has license-like language attached to it that prohibits “use” of the work outside of a specific community. The artist clearly thought that this applied to bookmarking and sharing via FriendFeed, though that’s not at all clear from the term “use.” Kol either didn’t read those instructions, or read them but didn’t think they applied to bookmarking, or read them but didn’t think they constituted a license. (To be fair, I’m not completely sure they are a license, either, but I think good etiquette would be to assume that they do.) And where does all of this leave the artist’s fans? If they want to share bookmarks with other fans or potential fans, they can’t turn off the “suck in a thumbnail” feature of these social networks. The only way that gets turned off is if the originating site has lock-down features like Flickr does for the images its users make private.

Little did Kol know when he bookmarked this image that he’d bring down the wrath of the artist, spark a huge debate on FriendFeed (and a ton of re-shares of Kol’s post), and set this librarian to musing about the incredibly intertangled worlds of intellectual property, etiquette, and the Internet.

* I don’t like talking about things without linking to them, but this one has me on the fence for two reason: 1) the link may die suddenly since there was a promise to delete the thread as soon as someone from FriendFeed had seen and responded to the original poster, and 2) the language in this thread is decidedly not safe for work, or for kids, or for me. Still want to see it? Here you go. [Edit: yep, the original post is gone now.] I may or may not screen-grab the post for posterity. I haven’t decided yet if that’s fair to all involved, or if I want to have that kind of language saved anywhere associated with me. Call me a prude, if you want, but them’s my boundaries and it’s up to me if I want to cross them.

** I’m aware that by linking to that image, the artist may find my post, so I’ll just say right up front that while I welcome constructive comments and discussion, I reserve the right to delete any crude or abusive comments. And I get to decide what constitutes “crude” or “abusive.”