Technology and the Easy Life

In this day and age, it’s something most of us have paused to think about. Is life really easier with technology? Well... maybe. It all depends on how you use it.

There's been such a push in technology for the last few decades, it's easy to overreach. There are all sorts of gadgets out there these days promising to streamline your life. Sync your palmpilot up with your computer and automatically copy over your work files, emails, schedule, shopping list, etc. etc. Everything you could dream of and more can now be synced up, integrated, and digitized. But do you really need that? Maybe some people do but I sure don’t. It would be vaguely nice and come in handy every now and then… perhaps. And then you factor in how much work and money it would take to get those gizmos to sync up and share data properly. Don’t forget to figure out exactly what data you want to sync and how to get just that data. And are you really going to blindly trust everything worked okay before you head off each day? No, you’re going to sit down and make sure the important stuff is still there. Is any of it even worth it?

That’s a bit of gadget-nut scenario but the same thing can happen to anyone using technology. Is it worth the time to learn this program? Will it really help your work? Sadly, it’s hard to know until you try. Luckily for me, I love playing around with all this tech junk in my spare time so I tend to know what I need.

The other problem is it’s not always up to you to choose your own technology. At school, work, and sometimes even at home, you have to take what you are given and just do the best you can. Hopefully you don’t end up fighting a computer all day when you could just take out a pencil and paper and be done in 10 minutes.

But is technology to blame for all these headaches? In part, yes. But I think the lion’s share of the blame falls on our own expectations. Think how hard life was 100 years ago and how slow things moved. Now imagine having the same timeframe for deadlines as back then, but with today’s technology. Talk about the easy life! I can see myself napping in my hammock already. But in reality, we have to compete -- faster, better, harder, stronger. Still, it’s worth thinking about. It could do us all good to use technology more sparingly yet deliberately. Make things easier, not just fancier.

So Easy It's Hard

Ah Wikispaces, how I liked you once. Well, I suppose that’s a bit harsh. It is still the best of the wiki services I’ve seen. But shortly after my first foray into structuring a nice page a steady series of frustrations cropped up.

My group (Mooresville) decided each member would create his or her own layout for the home page of the wiki. Diane mentioned that she really liked the St. Joseph Subject Guide Wiki, so my thought was to emulate their layout for the Mooresville Wiki's homepage. In an attempt accommodate people with monitors set to 800x600, switched the layout from three columns to two. A few minutes later, I had a nice enough looking page.

Well, kind of. The table tool in the Wikispaces editor lacks a lot of the options one would have with standard HTML code. The text was slammed a bit too close to the borders for my taste. More troubling, the shorter column was vertically aligned to the center of the table, instead of starting flush to the top, which looked rather bad. Eventually, I created a new theme for the wiki, copying the old one and adding in a bit of CSS code to fix up the table so it looked as pictured above. A bit annoying, but no big deal. However, as I turned my attention to the rest of the page, a rather troubling bug popped up. After saving any changes to the page, though I didn't edit the table any more, the result was this:

My headers and lists in the table had lost their formatting. Somehow a few line breaks in the code were deleted inside the table. I fixed it and tried again... and again... and again. But no matter what I did, the table format was always ruined the next time it was saved. Looking into the help section, I found the problem listed in their bug list along with a host of others.

Alright. No problem. I could insert my own HTML and make the table from scratch. This worked splendidly... until I tried to edit it. I couldn't. No one can. The table appeared as a little gray block in the editor. I could resize the block (fat lot of good that does anyone) and delete it, but that was it. Switching to the text editor was even less helpful. I could make a nice table for the front page, but no one would ever be able edit it, defeating the point of the wiki entirely.

Between the bugs and streamlined editors designed to help the non-programmer types out there, I couldn't get through to fix the problem. Of course, you can layout a nice page without tables or columns, but it sure doesn't help matters.

-Joe

P.S. Come to think of it, this makes wonder how the Butler group is going to handle making the new-fangled hybrid wiki Butler is requesting.


UPDATE (10/10/07) : After doing some more digging, I found a wiki that explains how to create your own wiki themes. Turns out it shows the correct way to make columns too (avoiding the table tool). I'll add the link to the classwork wiki too.

http://themes.wikispaces.com/

Forecast: Cloudy

Tag clouds are perhaps one of the more interesting developments in Web 2.0 technology. Users assign their own labels (tags) to items in a database. These are used as keywords when searching and browsing. Browsing is done not through a simple list of tags, but rather through what at first seems to be a massive jumble of words. The more a specific tag is used, the larger that word will appear in the tag cloud. For an example, check out LibraryThing.com.

The application for libraries is immediately obvious. Using tag clouds in our library databases would have a number of positive effects. The community involvement with the library collection would be increased. Not only would patrons be able to interact with the collection in a new way, but they would be more directly involved in its development. Why have catalogers or the Library of Congress decide what search terms are relevant when the community can develop its own terms which are uniquely suited to it? Properly cultivated, this could evolve into a more robust search system than any library staff could dream of creating on its own. Tag clouds could also prove useful for collection development. Not only would staff members have a visual guide to various areas of their collection but would have a unique window into how the community views the collection as well.

Of course, there would be drawbacks too. As with many Web 2.0 technologies, the tag clouds would need to be moderated in order to ensure no malicious tampering is done. There is also the usual knowledge gap. Just imagine a new computer user sitting down to browse the catalog and having a chaotic jumble of various sized words fill the computer screen. I certainly don’t think this should be the new replacement to our current search engines, but it could certainly prove to be a powerful supplement.

- Joe

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Are Signs... except here.

This week, let’s roll back the clock to an earlier form of technology. Let’s go way, way back. Because it seems to me that by and large, libraries missed the boat on one of our oldest pieces of tech: signs.

When I walk into my local public library, there’s a noticeable lack of direction given to me. There’s a sign pointing out the circulation desk, another for the reference desk, and well… that’s about it. If I want to just browse the shelves, I better know my Dewey system. And honestly, how many of us library students even know Dewey? I have a fair grasp on the major numbers, the hundreds… maybe. No doubt when I start working in a library that knowledge will be fleshed out more. But how many patrons can we expect to know Dewey? No where near the majority. And yet I glance around my library shelves and see nothing but small plagues with numbers on the ends. Is there a reason there are no signs with subjects spelled out in plain English? Why not advertise our books? Place a nice big sign over the mystery novels. Point out the medical information books. Looking for history books? Follow the big arrow over here.

I know I’m not the first to say this, but it seems like there’s a lot we could learn from our biggest competitors: the bookstores. If I walk into Barnes & Noble, I can find the types of books I’m looking for with a quick glance around the store. In a typical library, I have to wander among the shelves to even find a sign for a Dewey range most people don’t even know. It’s no wonder my friends would rather kill time browsing in a bookstore than the local library.

And I’m sure the coffee and muffins don’t hurt either.

A Follow-up on eAudiobooks

Having received a record two comments, I thought I would continue my thoughts on merging eBook and Text-to-Speech technology. (Rest assured this has nothing to do with my inability to think of a new topic at the moment.)

After a little more searching, I’ve found what I consider to be the best Text-to-Speech voice engine: Neospeech. It only barely edges out Apple’s Alex from my previous post, but I believe the Neospeech voices sound a bit less robotic. Better yet, these voices aren’t exclusive to Mac users. Go ahead and paste part of this blog entry into the free online demo. (IE only.) Also of note, and perhaps amusement, are the foreign language voices. I know a bit of Japanese and those voices sound just as good as the English ones. What’s fun though, is having it read English text in another language. While a few words are unintelligible, the majority of them sound as if they’re spoken by someone with a heavy accent. To me, this speaks volumes on how sophisticated and flexible the technology is becoming.

Bonnie mentioned how boring it would be to listen to a single droning voice read a work of fiction. I do agree it rather unpleasant with the current technology. I've been using it a bit when reading articles online and multitasking, and it's serviceable for that. It's especially nice for more snooze-worthy readings. I find I can absorb more of the article than I would if I attempted to just plow through the reading.

As for fiction, it would be possible to have different voices for a Text-to-Speech audiobook, but the text file would need to be tagged to indicate when different characters are talking. While this would be a simple solution, it would also greatly hinder the flexibly of generating an audiobook automatically from any text file. Of course, it might be possible for the software to detect different characters automatically one day, but this seems unlikely to me. One mistake would be quite distracting, or even confusing, to the listener. Not to mention having to assign the appropriate gender to each character. How much can we really trust a program to figure out if “Alex” is a man or woman?

Another problem is the large storage requirement for a high-quality voice. It looks like the best voices currently take up about 200MB each. This definitely hurts the idea of producing full audiobooks from relatively small text files. Still, even with large voice files, the text itself would only take up a fraction of the disc space a full audio dictation would. An audio book of Alice in Wonderland weights in at 86MB, while an ebook is only 160KB. After the initial space investment with the voice file, it rapidly becomes much more efficient to use ebooks to generate the audio. And let’s not forget the huge saving in server costs this would be to libraries!

For now, it seems the practical applications are a bit limited, but my interest is certainly piqued. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe a friend of mine is about to receive a hilarious call from a confused Chinese man. ;-)

-Joe

eAudiobooks

I am a huge fan of audiobooks. I first tried them with the Harry Potter books about a year ago when I was taking the Greyhound to visit a friend in Virginia. (You may remember the more horrible part of that story from our first class.) Facing the prospect of an overnight bus trip will leave one searching for ways to fill the time and this seemed like a solid choice. By the end of the trip, I was completely solid on audiobooks. There are just a lot of little conveniences you get with them. Never having to find a comfortable position to hold the book open is just the beginning. I could enjoy the scenery as the bus sped across the country. Or why not kick back and relax with my eyes shut? I could even keep an eye on the crazy looking guy across the aisle from me. All while still enjoying my book and not missing a beat.

When I arrived back home, I found audiobooks to be even more useful. Cooking dinner? Well that’s the perfect time to play an audiobook. Working on my webste? Sure! Bring on the audiobook. Driving? Audiobook! Playing a video game? Audiobook! Doing laundry? Audiobook! It never ends.

The downside is, audiobooks are pretty expensive, and my local library’s collection is a bit lacking to boot. But that’s when an idea came to me. I used to play around with Text-to-Speech programs a few years back. They were okay, very robotic sounding but understandable enough. So I decided to check out what progress had been made since I last looked. I am very impressed with the level of quality in these new Text-to-Speech engines. They seem to be crossing a threshold from robotic sounding voices to human voices with some odd quirks. At this rate, I imagine extremely realistic voices will be widely available in 5 years. There’s already some buzz on the Internet about the possibilities here. But I think application in particular could have a huge impact on libraries. eBooks have long been scorned for the eye strain they cause. But why not marry eBooks with high quality Text-to-Speech software? The end result would be audiobooks with a much smaller filesize and no cost paying a professional to read the text aloud. In the future, we could just drop a nice small text file into our MP3 players and press play. Most Text-to-Speech programs already have an option to create an mp3 file from text. This could be just the boost the eBook format needed. And it could mark a whole world of change for librarians.

In the meantime, I’ll have to make due with my favorite free audiobook site, LibriVox.

From Complex To Simple

Continuing the same train of thought from last week, I’d like to look at my current pet project I’ve been pushing myself through.

I mentioned before that I first learned to use our old DOS computer so I could play games on it. Well, technology has come a long way but I still just love to play games. It can be frustrating at times being part of the first generation to grow up with a new form of media and having to deal with the stereotypes and scapegoating that are associated with it. But that’s a post for another time (and perhaps another blog).

A few years ago, exhibiting the librarian tendencies I hadn’t yet identified, I decided to catalog and display my video game collection online. It was just a simple HTML page I had to update by hand, but several people started complimenting me on it. Some even wanted a similar page for their own collection. Eventually the interest became so great that I decided to turn it into a full-fledged website. Fast-forward a year of tinkering in my spare time, and it was finally done… or at least done enough to launch. It seems there’s always a new bug that needs to be fixed, a new feature to be added, or a new usability issue to handle. This has probably been the most I’ve ever struggled with technology. It also has been one of the most satisfying projects I’ve done. I’ll say I’m much more sympathetic to web designers now!

And finally, a confession! I made (what I like to think is) a very professional website, coded in PHP with MySQL databases, user registration, page customization, a comments system and other bells and whistles. Yet two weeks ago when we started using the class wiki, I was completely lost! The organization of the system baffled me for a good half hour. Of course, once I grew accustomed to the layout, it became simple to use. Still, it was a swift reminder just how specialized our knowledge can be. Sometimes it takes a little bit for all the tumblers to fall in place so everything clicks. If you’re new to something, even the simple things can seem tricky at first.