John Bell, web developer, PhD student and lecturer at the University of Maine has published a useful cheat sheet synthesizing the best file formats to work with, provide access to, and to permanently archive digital artworks. The visual guide provides archival file format references for text, audio, video and image contents as well as suggestions for ideal formats to use also for both working and for providing accessing to such digital contents. Useful. Handy. Informative. 8/10 Original article: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/belljo/2013/10/28/digital-documentation-art-workshop-and-fighting-bit-rot Cheat Sheet (PDF): http://novomancy.org/john/digital_archiving_cheat_sheet_mica.pdf
According to Harold Jarche, knowledge is an emergent property of all sense-making activities.
Curation and PKM (personal knowledge management) have the same objective: helping oneself and others gain more understanding about whatever we are interested in. The only difference between the two is that curation devotes itself to satisfy the knowledge needs of an audience while the second addresses these at a personal level.
It is indeed around identifying and becoming aware of these specific aspects of our sense-making activities that we can improve and augment our capability to learn and to effectively curate information for others.
Seeing What Is in a Laundry List of Search Results
In late October I will be delivering a webinar version of my lecture “What to Do When Google Doesn’t Answer Your Question.” The webinar is at this time not open to the public. My topic is that free Web search engines offer useful information. Most people have neither the time nor tools to pinpoint the item which provides significant insight or a useful fact; for example, a relationship between two people or a phone number of a person associated with a subject like the Muslim Brotherhood.
You may be one of the hundreds of millions of Bing or Google searchers who uses the results lists as they are presented. I have no desire to argue with anyone about relevance, precision, and recall. The reason is that modern technology makes ad-supported search results the Great Destroyer of objective information retrieval measures. In short, precision and recall are dead. Too bad. I miss them. Nevertheless, useful information is in the public and open source indexes. The problem is finding useful information.
One of the topics in the 2.5 hour lecture at the ISS World Conference for intelligence and law enforcement professionals elicited quite a bit of post-presentation discussion. The interest in the topic fueled the upcoming webinar.
I want to highlight one service I described at ISS World and will touch upon in the webinar in late October 2013.
The system is Cluuz.com, a service of Sprylogics. Sprylogics is a Canadian outfit originally set up by a former military officer. To follow along with this example, point your browser to www.cluuz.com.
Here are the steps I followed on October 8, 2013. Because content in public Web indexes changes, your results will differ. Also, Cluuz.com is a metasearch engine. The system sends a query to a public Web index and then processes the results. The Sprylogics’ technology extracts entities, performs relationship analyses, and formats results in a laundry list and graphic reports. Remember, at this time Cluuz.com is available without charge.
Verification Junkie is an excellent free online resource curating the most relevant tools for fact-checking and verification of online content. “A growing directory of tools for verifying, fact checking and assessing the validity of social media and user generated content.” For each tool collected, Josh Stearns has provided a detailed description, and relevant links. My comment: Verification Junkie is a great resource I would recommend to anyone writing or publishing online as well as a great example of an effective curated tools collection. Excellent resource. A must go to for online journalists. 8/10
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Phi Beta Iota: This has huge potential for “just in time” education and for the advancement of Standard Operating Procedures and all forms of organizational handbooks, manuals, regulations, etcetera.
