A two-month trial of the Pending Changes feature on the English Wikipedia is scheduled to begin on June 14. This will mean that for a small subset of problematic pages (i.e., biographies) edits by unregistered or newly-registered users will first have to be reviewed by an experienced editor to be seen by the "public" (i.e., those not logged in to Wikipedia).

I fully expect this will prompt much attention on whether Wikipedia is now more closed, open, or has even "failed."

With the end of the semester comes the opportunity to review what students think of my teaching. As a (relatively) new teacher I take the reviews seriously. However, with four years of practice and data I do struggle with how to interpret the reviews and use them as constructive feedback that yields measurable improvements in subsequent evaluations.

This is not to say that I have not attempted to improve my teaching. For example, I believe I'm much more consistent in reviewing the concepts encountered in a session at its end -- and the students seem to appreciate this. However, when I plot the trend for the overall ratings from those four years I hoped there'd be a strong uptick with time, but there's no consistent trend.

Also, confoundingly, there is the disparity of opinion. For some things people naturally have different preferences: more or less outside readings, lecturing, student discussion, etc. (Students do seem to universally love watching video clips.) However on other things, like the completeness of the syllabus or the clarity of the grading system, I am confused.

As a follow-up to my experiment to quiz the students on the content of the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, students did surprisingly poorly. So I know some of them are not paying attention to the syllabus while rating the syllabus as less than complete. I feel similarly about the grading system as it is clearly described in the syllabus and I do four detailed grade reports throughout the semester, each time saying I would be happy to discuss their performance so far, but some students still occasionally fill-in the bubble suggesting that their grade is an opaque mystery. Also, while one evaluation rated me as a poor instructor overall, the vast majority rate me as very good or better. In fact two wrote in the comments that this was the best class they've taken at Steinhardt and NYU respectively. How to reconcile these disparate evaluations?

I conclude that there will be a student or two that, for whatever reason, doesn't like me or the class. (Most characterize me as nice, friendly, and sometimes even funny, but one noted I was intimidating...?) Yet, since my school finally provided departmental wide statistics last semester, I know I am right in the middle of the distribution. I rate higher than half of the faculty, but also lower than the other half. So I know there is room for improvement. However, given it only takes one disenchanted student to skew the averages and that I've not yet been able to implement changes that clearly manifest in the evaluations, I'm not sure how, or if I should be overly concerned? But I am very curious as to how the instructors in the top quartile manage it.

As a PhD student, one of the first bibliographic annoyances I encountered was when I had to format a paper using the APA system, which requires titles to be in sentence-case. This means only the first word of a phrase and proper nouns are capitalized. Previously, I had kept the titles of my citations in title-case. The consequence of having to use the APA format was the need to then go in and manually lower case all words that were not proper-nouns in my bibliographic database. However, once this work was done, I realized keeping my data in sentence-case was preferable, as title-case essentially loses information. Yet, this still requires me to manually lowercase some words for automatically captured sources. I am not aware of any bibliographic software that handles this issue well, and the good folks at Zotero have an interesting bug ticket open on the issue.

On Friday, while I was doing my weekly fixes to the automatically captured sources in my field notes/mindmap/bibliography, I thought to myself that there are plenty of word lists around, such as those used by spellcheckers, and couldn't I finally automate this menial task? However, I knew that I use lots of proper nouns that probably do not appear in common dictionaries. Therefore, I applied Python's Natural Language Toolkit tokenizer and parts of speech tagger to the text of my dissertation to create a custom word list of proper-nouns that I use. These are used with the dictionary found on my system at /usr/share/dict/american-english to transform a title-cased sentence into a sentence-cased sentence. Basically, if the word is in my custom list, is in the word list only as a capitalized word, or not in the word list at all, it merits capitalization, else lower-case it. The code is available as a module to the Busy Sponge component of the Thunderdell bibliographic tools. It works fairly well and will certainly make that end of the week menial task all the more easier.

I recently read Jaron Lanier's manifesto: You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier's critique of Wikipedia and digital Maoism plays an important role in my discussion of Wikipedia's reception. Hence, I was surprised to find the tone of Lanier's book to be more muted than I expected. While he does make an argument against "cybernetic totalism," it reads like learned musings that lead to intriguing pet-theories rather than a diatribe about Web 2.0. Jon Dron has written an informative review.

I did specifically wish to comment on something that makes me uncomfortable with a lot of cultural criticism: the critic's POV. (I use Wikipedia's acronym for "point of view" tongue-in-cheek in that critique is quite contrary to Neutral Point of View (NPOV).) In my exposure to cultural criticism, including Theodor Adorno's seminal 1936 critique On Jazz, I've had the uncomfortable sense that much of this is simply the subjective, disenchanted complaints of a grouch who attempts to convince us that his or her opinions are anything more than his or her opinions. Actually, it's not even that they are trying to convince us, but that anyone who does not agree with their subjective opinion is obviously part of the problem that they are railing against in the first place. I think it is important to be skeptical, to be critical, and to have personal opinions. (Despite the provocative title, Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is an excellent example of persuasive criticism beyond opinion.) But sometimes the critic's statements seem over "totalizing." In Lanier's case, consider his distinction between first- and second-order expression -- using terms that have an authoritative mathematical/logical sort of feel:

First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher's favorite song is not in the same league. (p. 122)

Now, I love Blade Runner; I think it is genius. And of course, a YouTube mashup is not in the same league as the complete film. But, it is something, and maybe something people value, even if lightly. I laughed at some of the recent Hitler parodies from Downfall and was sad to see them removed. But video mashups in no way diminish the value of the original film. And in the case of Blade Runner, it is a second-order expression of a written book, and one that is famous for its cyber-noir aesthetic that so famously synthesized so many existing elements of visual culture. Later, Lanier writes without qualification or caveat: "The web should have developed along the ThinkQuest model instead of the wiki model -- and would have, were it not for hive ideology" (p. 146). Well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and the subjectivity and ahistorical conceit in such a statement simply boggles the mind.

Last week I traveled to Amsterdam to participate in an interesting conference on "Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge." Videos of the presentations and panel discussions are now available. The video of my talk and its description on Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Anxiety are below:

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Joseph Reagle (USA) Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety from network cultures on Vimeo.

The way in which Wikipedia is collaboratively produced has caught the attention of the world. Discourse about the efficacy and legitimacy of such a work abound, from the news pages of the New York Times to the satire of the Onion. Building on the literature around controversies surrounding other reference works, such as Harvey Einbinder’s The Myth of the Britannica and Herbert Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third, Joseph Reagle makes a broader argument that reference works can serve as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change. With this understanding in hand, he tries to make sense of the social unease embodied in and prompted by Wikipedia relative to technological inspiration in knowledge projects.

One of the last significant steps for an author is to compile an index, unless they opt to have someone else do it. Publishers often recommend authors create the index as they know the material best. However, while professionals have sophisticated -- but proprietary -- tools to help them, authors are offered only the techniques of using index cards or spreadsheets. Neither of these options is appealing to me.

I thought it would be nice to simply compile a list of entries in the form of topic (page#|see) (sub)topic and let a script do the rest. It's a bit of a hack but it does the job and can collapse all subentries below a particular threshold. I like having specified subentries, even if there is only one or two of them for a particular entry:

Apology
    and leadership, 124
    "Sorry but...," 54

But if the publisher says they want those collapsed, it is easy enough:

Apology, 54, 124

I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:

One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)

For the most part, I wrote my dissertation and book manuscript using a simplified version of markdown complemented with biblatex citations. Because it was a simple text file, it made managing the edits to the manuscript very easy. I could do global textual replacements trivially. Also, obviously, it was trivial to generate PDFs, HTML, etc. Using Mercurial, I could take advantage of some nice features like the "attic" extension which allows me to keep change sets on the side to be applied only when appropriate. So, for example, the changes necessary generate HTML were kept in the attic and would only be applied when I wanted that.

Unfortunately, once the manuscript went into the MIT Press system, I had to use Microsoft Word. As much as much as the Word document format annoys me, I understand it is widely used, and I can't think of an easy alternative that also provides the capability for editorial annotations. Nonetheless, I had a difficult time seeing changes in Microsoft Word, and want to backport the changes into my source files. And, there does not appear to be a nice textual difference tool for Word documents.

I have posted a small Python script that makes use of antiword and dwdiff but also gives me context on either side of the change. It, of course, doesn't work well with formatting, but is useful and will generate output like the following:

   reflects {-the-} [+a+] stabilization
   a {-number of pragmatic questions: it-} 
     [+project was conceived. It+] would
   there {-will-} [+would+] be
   article {-will-} [+would+] be
   linked {-to from-} [+via+] a

This week I've been reading the reports from camp KDE 2010 and looking forward to attending a few hours of Wikipedia Day NYC. So it was a great pleasure to read Biella Coleman's "The Hacker Conference: a Ritual Condensation and Celebration of the Lifeworld". I haven't seen anyone else address this issue, but as a sometimes participant and scholar of related communities, I think she is right to highlight the importance of this venue. In my forthcoming book I note that in addition to virtual spaces "there are the physical spaces in which some community members interact."

Through Wikipedia "meetups" I've attended in New York and annual Wikimania conferences I've met a couple dozen contributors. Many of these people I've spoken to more than once, and it's quite easy to speak to a newly met Wikipedian about issues of concern to the community. These conversations were informative, but casual.

So, while formal face-to-face interviews played a very small part in my work, the opportunity to meet with people, to participate in conversations, to see playfulness and laugh at jokes was essential to interpreting what I saw happening online. In Biella's work I particularly appreciated the inclusion of some history (though I wanted more detail, including whether fandom conferences might've had any influence), and how Debian women in part rose out of the opportunity of face-to-face interaction.

Coincidentally, in the last year I have been particularly interested in questions of gender representation and participation at geek conferences. There were a number of instances in which the "playful" discourse of men were said to be predicated on sexist assumptions, and at the least had an alienating effect (e.g., Stallman, Aimonetti, Mouette ). In fact, in a conversation with Biella this summer I noted that 2009 was probably the "Year of [Something]", where "something" connotes a greater gender consciousness or willingness to confront alienating discourse in open content communities -- but I couldn't come up with a good word!

One of my favorite blogs is MIT's Tomorrow's Professor, and I particularly appreciate the essay on Explaining the Reasons for Criticisms of Students’ Academic Performance. Barbara Walvoord spends some times discussing both student and (end of year) teacher assessment. It seems to me that the question of how to make feedback connect and count with the student is central to the exercise of teaching. In the past year, I have experimented with breaking my final assessment feedback on an assignment down into four categories: engagement, understanding, writing, and scholarly support.

I think this works well, though it can be difficult to ascertain in the course evaluations. While the majority of students assess the completeness of the syllabus and my feedback as relatively high (one student likened the point-based system and frequently e-mailed assessment reports as being "like a science") I still do have the infrequent evaluation where this is not the case. It is a puzzle to me how student could say my syllabus was not complete, or why after I give feedback on one assignment they repeat the same mistakes in the next assignment. So this semester I'm going to try two more experiments: a quiz and self-evaluation. I plan to give a quiz on the actual syllabus (e.g., how many freebie absences are students allowed, do medical notes count against those freebies?) and as part of the first assignment ask students to evaluate what they are submitting in term of the four categories. I'm very interested to see the results.