I don’t think this is working out.

I also don’t see any alternatives.

Damn.

We are launching our implementation of some new software on Friday.

Our hand-holder from the software provider told us that typical implementations run at least 3 months from initial meeting to launch.

We got ours done in a hair under six weeks.

Three of us, basically, have worked on the implementation. All of us are competent, maybe even good, but none is a superstar.

I think there are some dots to be connected here.

Last month, I was asked to speak at the weekly math grad students’ informal seminar series club thingy. Today my number came up and I gave my lunchtime presentation.

The faculty member who runs the thing showed up, of course, and was accompanied by four students. At least three of them were undergraduates, and at least two of those were engineering students, so there was a maximum of one math grad student present at the math-grad-student brown-bagger today. Neat.

(No, seriously, I do think it’s neat. I love the way informal institutions grow away from their foundational purpose, serving an environmental need rather than forcing adherence to a perceived need. It’s pure evolution in action, baby.)

Toward the end of the presentation I showed off some of the things we’ve put together to help students in get to the information the need. One of the examples was the math subject guide I inherited from my predecessor and have been maintaining.

One section of the subject guide points toward indexing services (universally called “databases” in library-speak, but I maintain that’s sort of technically correct but ultimately misleading). The faculty member looked at what I had on offer and told me that only two of those were really useful to his colleagues and students here. I laughed, hemmed, blushed, hawed, and told him that he was right, but that it felt a little silly to put up a list with only two items. He gave me a non-condemning nod, which suggests that he likely knew what I really meant.

What I reallymeant, see, is that any piece of public-facing work created within a hierarchical organization actually has two audiences. There’s the audience meant to be aided or persuaded by the piece of work, and then there’s the audience made up of supervisors who use that work to judge the creator’s ability and usefulness. In terms of the organization’s mission, of course the former audience is more important; from the perspective of the employee who hopes to stay employed and perhaps get promoted, though, it is the latter folks who must be pleased.

In most cases outside of purely artistic works, I reckon, the bosses’ evaluation criteria differ from the users’ evaluation criteria. In this particular case, it’s likely that the typical user wouldn’t notice if only a small number of resources were recommended (although I suspect sie might balk if there weren’t at least three on offer); the bosses expect at least five resources, or else it looks like the selector isn’t doing hir job. It doesn’t matter that three of those resources aren’t very useful to the user, as the employment-side evaluators don’t have the background necessary to judge their quality or usability.

It’s an interesting tension, balancing the desires of the users and the employers. The users can’t be underserved, because A) that just wouldn’t be cool, and B) that might generate negative feedback, which would diminish the employer-side evaluation. The situation gets even more fraught in the library world, I think, because the maximum number of elements a user can take in before getting lost in info-blur is sometimes close to the minimum number of elements deemed acceptable by the bosses.

(In fact, sometimes the user maximum is less than the boss minimum, which after iterative cycles of natural selection–people who don’t satisfy the bosses’ requirements get fired or otherwise replaced eventually–results in a product that is guaranteed to fail. I suspect that this is a major factor contributing to low use of library-produced resources.

(Which sets the ground for another rant for another time: Studies of typical user behavior–and I don’t just mean newbies here, this applies to faculty researchers as much as to freshmen–show us that people A) are interested only in things they can search easily, B) will only try to process easily skimmable results, and C) are only willing to look at the first screen of those results.

Despite this, librarians on the whole persist in thinking that interfaces, guides, and instruction should be geared toward making users able to pull up the maximum number of relevant results possible; they further insist that those results be formatted in the most information-dense manner possible. This flies in the face of what our own research shows us are the three iron tendencies of those users, and yet.)

)

The above may sound negative, but it’s really not meant to be. It may be cynical, but not negative. It really does strike me as a problem both interesting and intractable. I imagine similar situations occur in every industry everywhere, and I’d be interested in examples. I’d also be interested in being told I’m full of it.

A coworker finished up an article for the next newsletter this morning and sent out a draft for evaluation. I began copy-editing, as I do, but realized just as I finished that the coworker had been soliciting corrections of factual errors, not evaluation of her prose. Unfortunately, by that point my red pen had reduced her article to just over half its original size. I weighed my options, decided that collegiality trumps clarity, and deleted my work.

The process fascinates me, though, because vanishingly few of my suggestions cleared up awkward construction or did anything else we typically associate with editing. Most of my work consisted of striking through text, excising clarifying detail in order to–ironically–clarify the text.

We all realize that explanations reach a point of diminishing return. It’s easy to imagine the inevitable situation in which adding one more detail fails to make the work noticeably more understandable than it already is without that detail. What had never occurred to me, though, is that at some point additional information actually begins making the work less informative.

The counterintuitive situation arises from the way people approach text. We don’t take a set of paragraphs, boil them down into constituent sentences, pare those sentences down into independent phrases, and then parse out the information contained within each phrase. We approach the page as something of a whole, we skim for keywords and pull out what look like major points. We don’t read deeply because A) we’re just not built that way, and B) we’ve frankly learned that, outside of high-level textbooks and such, deep reading is rarely worth the effort. Again, diminishing returns.

I can think of a couple of obvious ways in which piling on the details lessens the usefulness of a descriptive work. With each added detail, at least one keyword or key phrase is repeated, creating confusion on the page for the scanning eye. Think Where’s Waldo. More subtle and insidious, I think, is the sort of thing that almost caused me to fail Calculus I.

In Calculus I, at least three quarters of the information presented in lectures was stuff I already knew. The new stuff–the important stuff–was scattered in among the familiar. This led to a false self-evaluation of progress: The abundance of familiar stuff left me feeling pretty comfortable with the material, so I was pretty comfortable with the idea that I was picking up on what I needed.

I was very, very wrong.

If you load up a page with things people already know, the typical reader is going to slip into “yeah, yeah, tell me something new” mode. The more familiar stuff you put in, the more quickly they reach that point. If you keep pushing them past that point, they assume you don’t have anything worthwhile to say and stop reading. The more detail you put into a work, the more likely you are to be presenting a reader with stuff sie already knows. By trying to communicate everything perfectly clearly, then, you can end up not communicating anything at all.

Now, I could just be doing a lot of projecting with the above. I certainly don’t have any peer-reviewed studies backing me up, but it feels about right. Thoughts, and examples?

I think this is the fourth time in the last three weeks that half our office has been out due to weather. This interests me, in that one would think people living in a climate with regular winter snowfalls would be accustomed to driving in such weather. But no.

A writer at the National Review, the house organ of the intellectual Right in the US, has penned an article arguing just barely between the lines that Barak Obama’s candidacy is the result of a Jewish-Negro-Communist conspiracy.

No. Really.

I’m not linking directly to the article. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Here, lap it up through Belle Waring’s citation-packed response instead.

Remember, this isn’t a streetcorner crackpot writing. This is a crackpot with the full support and backing of her movement’s most prestigious, best-respected publication.

I was interested this morning in how the viewing figures gathered by TiVo (population statistics) compare to those compiled by Nielsen (semi-random sample statistics). I didn’t find what I wanted, but I did find something of interest.

First, there’s this article telling how CBS has appealed to fans of marginal shows to watch the program live instead of recording it. Advertisers, quite reasonably, are not willing to pay for viewers who aren’t watching their commercials, so from their perspective only live viewers count.

Then I clicked through and read the discussion associated with the article, and I found it depressingly familiar. The pro-new-media Linux-heads got their communal panties in a bunch, alternately raging against and ridiculing the network for its dependence on live viewers. It amazes me how such clever people, for I imagine they mostly are pretty bright, can have so few bruises from the Clue Stick.

This has puzzled me since my first real-life encounter with a future-media booster, a guy who maintained that the revolutionary new medium of podcasts (the genuine newness or revolutionariness of which he never could justify) heralded the death of all traditional media production. My puzzlement arose, and is maintained, by the simple fact that–and apologies if this comes as a dreadful shock to any of you–production ain’t free. Acceptable, and occasionally amazing, niche material for niche viewers can be made for cheap, but the idea that such material could ever satisfy an entire society’s media desires is plain silly.

Now, I have to admit that John Rogers, who is both cleverer than me and actually involved in traditional media production, is a big booster of decentralized media. He is of the belief that purchased downloads and DVD sales will inevitably lead to a future in which all media productions are created on spec. His vision is appealing, but I’m still skeptical about the likelihood of a significant amount of stuff being bankrolled. Even his cheerier vision, though, is far from the “free media for everyone” ideal treated as an iron fact by the commenters linked above.

So, seriously, do these people think the writers, actors, directors, and post-production people are going to be willing to work, and work hard, for free in exchange for, what, making a bunch of fanboys happy? Or maybe they just don’t consider the fact that these things we call “shows” have to be created, that they don’t spring forth fully formed from some guy’s PowerMac.

Hmm. I wonder if it might have something to do with the fact that the information-management industry has blown up huge in just a couple of decades, allowing people to turn their passionate hobbies into really good jobs. That is to say, there was a (relatively) small group of people who did computery stuff for fun, and as they came of age a whole lot of really nice computery jobs appeared from pretty much nowhere, and so they assume, consciously or un-, that money just tends to follow pleasure when in fact they are benefiting from an accident of history.

Not for any particular reason, that’s just how I ended up. Some people are filled with blood and bones, some with blackcurrant jam, and some of us find our skin-bags stuffed with angriness.

Apparently there’s a trend of Chinese parents pushing their children to learn English. Among the products abetting this effort is a set of wooden blocks with colorful illustrations, the name of the thing pictured in Chinese, and an alleged English translation. Check out this sample of the blocks and feel yourself becoming pleasantly woozy.

Seriously, it’s almost as good as drugs and twice as legal. Check it.

Grr. Think I have no choice at this point but to shell out the dough for a proper psychiatrist. I need someone who can get me on an antidepressant that works for me, ’cause this one sure isn’t.