J. D. Fielder

Digital Friction, Part II: To Tune in or Turn Off

I have a bizarre relationship with the analog and the digital.

I arise at 0445 sharp every workday so I have enough time to read the paper before going to work--yes, a real, ink-on-fingers newspaper--and a chapter or two of nonfiction brain food. I've practiced this ritual for so long that my grandmother coined a phrase for it: "time to find myself in the morning."

I repeat the ritual before bed, but with fiction. To hell with the people who say reading in bed before sleeping is bad for you--I can't sleep without it!

What do both rituals have in common? Hard copy. Physical pages. The smell of newsprint, used book, magazine gloss, and coffee all mixing together into a heady mix I wish I could bottle.

But, for good or ill, I spend the rest of my day like most other knowledge workers: eyes glued to screen, mouse and keyboard caressed like an old lover. An endless deluge of electronic news, military reports, scholarly articles, email, and the occasional click on the Wikipedia "random article" link.  For an information junkie, this should be paradise.

Then why am I so weary?

First, there's just. So. Much.

Being paid to read is fan-friggin'-tastic. That, and in my line of work there's nothing worse than answering "no" to the question, "did you read about...?" (my wife considers it a win when she outscoops me on the news).  Yet, reading isn't the same as producing. One the one hand, I must step back and write my own work products. On the other hand, there's always that nagging suspicion I forgot something. That I didn't read just one more article.  Alas, who really has time to read all day?

Second, I agree with the oft-cited Atlantic article that Google is making us stupid.

In Internet time, the article's a bit long in the tooth. However, it dovetails with the more recent publications The Tyranny of Email and The Shallows... which I read in hard copy, no less.  The gist is that electronic content discourages deep reading and fosters skimming. I'm also not a ran of reading long articles on a backlit screen. In the era of the paperless office, I long for a pile of printed PDFs. (Study Hacks also recently posted a great piece on deep work).

Third, my rituals and 24/7 connectivity don't mix.

Facebook, Twitter, reddit, RSS feeds... there's only so much time in a day.  Yet, Twitter appears to be some people's full time job. I can't imagine posting tweets all day and still having enough critical thinking reserves left over.

I've also no desire to spend all my free time in front of a screen. This, of course, is an ironic statement by a gentleman who claims to study how people use information technology to make political decisions. But when it comes down to it, when I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I'm not sure I want to see a lolcat or status update.

I'm posting a problem without a generalizable solution. I know that for me, I simply must disconnect on occasion, and that simply won't work for some people.  Given a choice between tweeting or reading a book in my favorite chair, the chair often wins.

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Digital Friction, Part I: A Crack in the Seamless Environment

Not a day went by in grad school where I didn't wonder how students finished PhD's without Goggle Scholar access.

For three years, my professional life existed on this very laptop I'm writing on. The world was my office, although I favored a handful coffee shops and bookstores strategically placed throughout Iowa City (I dare say I deserve honorary plaques at Capanna Coffee and Haunted Bookshop).

As this essay title suggests, it was a seamless experience. I'd exchange emails with professors on my iPhone, save files to Dropbox for easy multi-platform viewing, engage with like minded individuals on Twitter, coordinate with friends on Facebook, tap into the research paradise that is JSTOR, and ultimately share ideas using the ultimate social media platform: meeting colleagues and teachers for a few beers at Joe's.

Frictionless access to information, in my assessment, dramatically improved my work output. I could work anywhere at anytime, from reading PDFs during my bus commute to class to occasionally travelling "naked" to class with just my iPhone notepad function or a good old fashioned paper notebook.

Needless to say, my transition from academic savage back to military security and hierarchy was a painful experience.

Before I seemingly dog out my employer, keep in mind that I love my military job: I'm basically paid to read, write, drink coffee, and occasionally spout my mouth off, which is a gig that never gets old. Additionally, I'll forever praise the military for paying for almost my entire education, from BA through two MAs and a PhD. That, my friends, is priceless.

Finally, I'm theoretically cognizant of the military's network security requirements. I remember observing the first time I used a Top Secret system, "man, someone with a CD/RW and a grudge could really clean us out."

I present to you Exhibit A.

What does this mean for a secure military network user? Imagine a world without cloud storage, USB drives and unrestricted software availability. Imagine losing access to most social media sites and many research websites. Imagine being unable to take your cellphone or MP3 player to work. Theoretical understanding isn't the same as practical experiences.

Some decisions are for the best. Do we really need Twitter access? While I find it a useful tool, I really shouldn't waste my duty hours using it. Typepad service? Same thing. And there are compromises: Pandora is blocked, but Youtube and Live365 are not (I think because Live365 uses less bandwidth than Pandora. Doesn't explain why Youtube is allowed, though).

Still, my first day back on a military network sucked. No JSTOR access, no STATA, and no easy way to transfer three years of research to my work computer. Let alone my work was now divided between personal and government owned systems (that, and my colleagues rarely meet for a beer at the end of the week... but that's another topic).

I'm authorized to pursue academic research at work, because A) that's why I was hired by my current unit, and B) because it reflects well on the Air Force. But my civilian data source access is dramatically reduced. My worst moment was spending three hours trying to cite a data point because every site I visited was blocked by the military network filter. I also had to look up a Google data scientist who happened to have the same name as a pr0n star... I'm still waiting for a visit by men in black suits and spats over that search.

In short, a switch from a seamless to a barricaded data environment. I wouldn't be so frustrated if it weren't for that fact I was hired to conduct PhD-level research!

How does this affect my work output? It's both demotivating and tiring. Demotivating in that I get frustrated at work for want of simple notes synchronization, and tiring in that my work life is segregated between systems (usually represented by disparate emails sent between work and home computers).  After working close to 12 hours in a data barricaded environment, I have little energy and will left to wrestle with my work at home. I recognize, however, that this is an excuse: I do need to overcome this if I want to finish personal academic projects.

All is not lost, thankfully. I've since learned that the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) website offers a secure (albeit clunky) cloud storage function accessible from both my home and work systems. STATA is on the USAF approved software list, so I *might* be able to source a copy. Finally, the AF Portal has a decent database section which the USAF regularly updates based on user requests. To that end, I'm petitioning the USAF to buy a JSTOR subscription. I certainly have nothing to lose by asking.

Additionally, I'm going to experiment with Blog posts by email. On one hand, I really should focus on work while at work; but on the other hand, I occasionally come across articles that I think my readers would find interesting (unclassified, of course).

My conclusion is this: if you find yourself suddenly in a data-rrestricted environment, be flexible. Rather than shaking my keyboard at the heavens, I squirreled out alternatives such as AKO and the AF Portal database section.  Now I just need to put my own advice into practice.

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Trendsmap Twitter Mapping Site

Ooh, shiny!

"You start with a view of your region where you can see the trending topics. You can scroll the maps by dragging to another area, or zoom in or out using the plus/minus icons. When you see something that looks interesting click on that topic for more information such as graphs of the volume of tweets locally vs. worldwide, what the topic is most likely about, images, links, and most recent tweets. You can also see where else this topic popular by clicking on the topic within the detail display, or what else are people tweeting about at this location by clicking on the location name."

http://trendsmap.com/

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Academic.edu Research Sharing Site

I admittedly have not signed up on this site yet, so I can't vouch for its rigour.  That said, I did find big names in the political science list (Christian Fuchs, Alexander Wendt and Carole Pateman, to name a few).  Figured I'd still pass it along for your evaluation:

"Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research.

Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 993,708 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 1,129,650 papers, and 377,595 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 3.1 million unique visitors a month."

http://www.academia.edu/

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Academic Earth: Curated Academic Lecture Site

As far as I can tell, Academic Earth is a free service (and "free" is one of my favorite words in the English language):

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.
 
We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

http://academicearth.org/

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Trendistic Twitter Trend Tracker

A professor who studies Twitter interaction passed this link on to me (also, say the post title fast five times):

"Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

 This way, it shows how the frequency of one, two, three and four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by the microblogosphere."

Trendistic.com

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The Netizen Report

First edition of The Netizen Report, a new series at Global Voices Advocacy:

"This is the first post in a new series on GVA called “The Netizen Report”: A regular overview of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet. I hope that these regular reports can provide netizens around the world with useful information about who is seeking to influence and shape the digital platforms and networks we increasingly depend upon, and how.

Armed with information, we are in a better position to defend our rights, and to make sure the Internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with free expression and dissent. The format and content of the report will evolve over the coming months based on reader feedback and author experimentation."

CONTINUED AT GLOBAL VOICES ADVOCACY

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Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

Nice site--I downloaded a few papers for my dissertation literature review (my APSA paper is uploaded there, as well). As far as I can tell, you don't need to register to search for and download works. I also haven't tried any of the additional research links on the left-hand frame:

"The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 356,400 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 290,700 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications.

The Networks encourage readers to communicate directly with authors and other subscribers concerning their own and others' research. To facilitate this we publish detailed author contact information including email addresses for authors of each paper. We also provide electronic delivery of the papers when authors wish us to do so from the SSRN eLibrary."

Continued at SSRN

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University of Wisconsin History of Cartography Project

Not IT-related... but may be of topical interest for some readers, and it's free:

"On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first two volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of all the PDFs that make up the first four books."

Continued at the University of Chicago Press

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Connexions: Website for Sharing Educational Material

For your reading pleasure! Assuming, of course, you're an information junkie like me:

"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology. Connexions delivers content for free over the Internet for schools, educators, students, and parents to access 24/7/365. Materials are easily downloadable to almost any mobile device for use anywhere, anytime. Schools can also order low cost hard copy sets of the materials (textbooks)."

CONTINUED AT CONNEXIONS.COM

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