Shadowing objects

Speaking of interesting work, one of the previous links led me to a special issue of a journal about using non-human actors as ethnographic informants. Here's a particularly interesting item. Hmmm...perhaps like critical readings of maps ave been doing for a long time in geography.

Free ideas

Looking for a journal article to write? Need some promotion fodder? Just bored and finding yourself with some spare time? You can have these free:

• 
  How about some in-depth interviews with a small group of editorial board members: some from non-profit publishers, some from commercial publishers, talking about what they do, how they relate to the publisher, what they get out of it, what services
  publisher offer to them, their attitudes toward the publishing process. Sort of a 'current state of scholarly communication' from the production side of things. Too often we only hear the library's point of view on these issues.



• 
  Is scanning historic photographs a particularly post-modern excercise? It seems like such a weird thing to be doing: the projects don't seem to be engaging in any actual knowledge production. Sure, preservation re-formatting and wider audiences for specialized collections are valuable in and of themselves, but I'm wondering if someone can take a theoretical view of this whole enterprise.



• 
  Were serials exchange programs ever a big part of folks' collections? If we go back and examine them, will we find that they relate to institutional repositories? Are their lessons to be learned from this mostly abandoned library practice?



• Someone please study hegemony in LIS research: why are there so few really new entrants into the debate? There's so much interesting work going on that seems relevant to the LIS community (such as here and here). Why don't these memes get picked up in my community?

Cartoon or mars?

The landscape here makes me feel like I'm on mars. Except with lots of old people.

On our first walk in the neighborhood park, we saw a roadrunner and a coyote. It took us a few minutes to get the joke.

And in my never-ending quest to fit in, I played a round of golf. Yes, I still suck. But I did get to see a bobcat hunting rabbits. It must be very, very easy being a cat on that golf course.

Had a very, very nice visit with the map librarian and director of CASA, a GIS lab, on the UA campus earlier in the week as well.

Merry Christmas.

From the desert.

We've arrived in Tucson and are fully acclimating to the retirement community. I'm working on my old guy shuffle. L has dyed her hair blue. And the Sunday paper has already been read.

It's actually a really nice paper. One story revealed a drunken Santa rampage among the kiwis. Another reviewed a book about sprawl, which seems odd, as I am in the midst of it at the moment. A ride through town yesterday revealed a very un-dense town center (but that's just a first impression). The book (or maybe the review) seemed to rely heavily on a census analysis that reveals LA to be much more dense than NY or Chicago. I'm sure you can get that analysis, but knowing that just earlier this week I plugged my former address into this cool tool and found 555,000 people living within 3 miles, but only 87,000 near my parents, I want to take a closer look for myself. The LA MSA is really, really big. So is Chicago, but it also has fewer people overall I believe.

Anyway, the review did make one nice point: critics of sprawl often make moral arguments against people that choose to live on the edge. That's true to an extent. I get a little worked up about it sometimes myself. But then I thought of it another way: folks that choose to depend on a single family house and multiple cars per family have had the urban infrastructure designed for them around that choice. Because of that design, my preferred lifestyle is physically impossible in many, many areas.

So there.

Yet another cool mashup

This one comes compliments of Corey:

A ready-made Census-Map app.

Dead ALA projects?

So is the whole Information Commons project dead? Their blog certainly is. And at least one of the people on their advisory committee has long since changed jobs.

I hope none of the four people on the 'production staff' are actually getting paid.