Minds and Spaces by Prof. Shalini R. Urs

PNM-PPM Library 3.0 Seminar June 29,2010 Shalini Urs

Prof. Shalini R. UrsInternational School of Information Management University of MysoreMysore

Agenda

• Theoretical Framework for the convergence of LAMs– Popper’s three worlds – Distributed Cognition

• User Empowerment• Web 2.0 paradigm• Changing Roles : Next Gen Information

Professionals


Stepping into the same river twice

Mind• Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness

experienced as combinations of though, perception, memory, emotion, will, and imagination including all unconscious cognitive processes. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness ( Wikipedia)

• It is a metaphor for our cognitive and intellectual processes

• Mind is abstract and boundless

Mind

Memory Institutions • It is a metaphor for public places that collect

artifacts of human minds.• According to Hjerppe (1994) memory

institutions include libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) and other cultural heritage institutions like monuments and places, botanical gardens, zoological gardens and all kinds of "collecting institutions."

Popperian Cosmology Public

MemoryPublic

MemoryBooks,

Works of Art,

Computers, LAMs

Books, Works of

Art,Computers,

LAMs

Personal Memory Personal Memory

Individual Cognition Individual Cognition

Karl Popper’s philosophical theory of reality

• Mind, is World 2 in the Popperian cosmology sense

• World 2 is the world of our perceptions, observations and individual knowledge.

• Personal knowledge and memory, which are based on cognition, consciousness, dispositions, and processes, form this world.

• This world comprises of our thoughts about reality as we try to map and represent them in order to maintain our existence in an ever-changing place.


• Social institutions such as LAMs, tools such as computers, artifacts such as works of art, and theories and models, belong to World 3

• World 3 is the sum total of the products of the mind and includes books, paintings, models, and theories.

• World 3 is public knowledge in the sense of John Ziman in his Public Knowledge: Social Dimensions of Science.


• It is the collective memory, which is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group, or modern society in the sense of philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs

• Historian Pierre Nora (1996) highlights the role of place and spaces of shared memories in his Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past.

• Public memories are enshrined in memorials, museums and such other spaces.


LAMs and World 3• LAMs which are products of our human minds,

and also house the products of minds.• The goals of LAMs is to collect and organize the

artifacts of the human minds to shape individual memories and learning by facilitating constant and continuous interactions between minds of users and the representation of minds of authors and creators of public memories.

• LAMs also connect the past, with the present and the future.

Minds and Spaces ( World 2 and 3)

• David Carr (2006) in his A place not a place: reflection and possibility in museums and libraries, originally published as “ Minds in Museums and Libraries:The Cognitive Management of Cultural Institutions” examines the shared cognitive dimensions of cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and parks, and suggests that they make similar situations for transmitting information.


• Libraries (archives , museums, parks ..) are places that offer cognitive experiences to people integrating the past with the present bringing a history of knowing, reflecting and understanding .

• The central metaphor is that a cultural institution such as a museum or a library is a "place not a place."


• When we enter museums and libraries, Carr contends, "we enter a place that is not a place, but a field of possibility. We are given an opportunity to explore and hypothesize, to imagine and to illuminate, and to trust ourselves as learners"

• LAMs inspire us to cross the limits of routine thought, into experiences of reflection and possibility.

Minds and LAMs ( World 2 and 3)

• Libraries (archives , museums, parks ..) are places that offer cognitive experiences to people integrating the past with the present bringing a history of knowing, reflecting and understanding

• They make us aware and influence us and strengthen our critical thinking and inquiry.

Understanding Places• Place is a space which is invested with

understanding of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth.

• The notion of place should be used to understand human behavior and to inform the design of interactive systems ( Harrison and Dourish, 1996)

• Attentiveness to ‘place’ leads to the design of technologies that ‘augment’ the qualities of environment and resonate with its meanings(Ciolfi and Bannon,2007)

Understanding Place• According to geographer Tuan (1977), there are

three dimensions of place ( apart from the physical) :

• Personal : related to feelings and emotons that we associate to a place, to the memories evoked by it, to the personal knowledge and background we invest the place with while making sense of it

• Social : related to social interaction and communication withing the place

• Cultural : realted to the rules, conventions and cultural identity of a place and of its inhabitants

Minds and Places• All of these dimensions are present at any point in

time and our experiences are shaped by the dynamic interconnections among those dimensions.

• Each experience of place is individual and unique, though it is influenced by the interaction with others. All four dimensions of place and their interplay is to be taken into account while designing LAMs

• Museums especially, are excellent settings for the introduction of installations that have explcit interactive value

ICLAM 2011 Shalini Urs Visiting the War Memorial Washington DC

ICLAM 2011 Shalini Urs Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Understanding ‘place’

• Places both constrain and enable us. They shape our senses and and help us construct meanings.

• Today with obitquitous computing and always netwoked world, it is time to explore how to programme spatiality into virtual environments

• There has been a resurgence of interest in understanding apsects of space and place in the devlopment of technologically enhanced physical environments

Distributed Cognition • Distributed cognition is a psychological theory,

which emphasizes the social aspects of cognition.

• It is a framework that involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment. It has several key components:– Embodiment of information that is embedded in

representations of interaction– Coordination of enaction among embodied agents – Ecological contributions to a cognitive ecosystem

Crossing over Cognition and places• With ubiquitous networked devices, information

is flowing through the “distributed cognition,” the new hypothetical “ether”

• The human mind is now constantly and continuously wired to the world brain ( H.G. Wells’s vision and now a reality) through the “distributed cognition”

• In a sense the boundaries of personal knowledge/memory and public/memories are crossing over

Sixth Sense (Pranav Mistry) ( MIT Media Labs• 'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that

augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

• When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it

• That information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take.

• http://

Sixth Sense (Pranav Mistry) ( MIT Media Labs

• The most useful information though available is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world.

• SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures.

• ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

User Empowerment• Designing systems and places that engage and

empower users increase their enjoyment and encourage them to explore and experience information.

• User-empowerment relates to any form of communication in which the user is more than just a consumer.

• This user-empowerment perspective lead to the Web2.0 revolution with a new way of viewing the Internet with applications in the field of social networking, from YouTube to Facebook.

Web 2.0 ( Spirit of Time) • .

Web 2.0• The transition of the web

from its original avatar has stemmed from the smart use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)

• The essential ingredients :• Enhanced responsiveness• Interactivity• User experience

• The web experience has changed from user-browser interaction to immersive rich social media experience.

Web 2.0 – Features

Information Services in the New Paradigm


• Shift from from evaluation to “Usability” and user experience. While the IR field evolved from the well known Cranfield Evaluation studies, today the focus is ( or should be) on usability and user experience

• Move from Control and Top Down approach to mass collaboration and crowd sourcing strategies and participatory approach of the Web 2.0.

Participation and Collaboration • Some examples to highlight :

– reCAPTCHA - a system, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books

– reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read.

– The system is reported to solve over 100 million captchas every day (as of October 2010)*

Participation and Collaboration – Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is using

reCAPTCHA for digitizing the archives of the New York Times.

– Twenty years of The New York Times have been digitized and the project hopes to have the 110 other years done by the end of 2010

– Collaboration between Library of Congress and Flickr, which could lead to a enmeshing of Web 2.0 with Ontolgies and leading to Library 3.0

ICLAM 2011 Shalini Urs

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are :1. show the treasures in the world's public photography archives,2.show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

Flickr and LC - The Commons• Flickr members can browse and tag photos from

Library of Congress archives. The goal is to create what Flickr likes to call an “organic information system,” in other words, a searchable database of tags that makes it easier for researchers to find images.

• The pilot project features a small sampling of the Library of Congress’ some 14 million images.

• Presently two collections. The first is called “American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression”

• The second collection is the The George Grantham Bain Collection -1900-1920


Increase access to publicly-held photography collections, andTo provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

University of Michigan Website


Growth of Social Media in India

Future Users ???


• The next generation users are digital natives and their cognition is a connected one constantly interacting with devices that are distrubted and connected.

• It is time the we reinvent ourselves to a dynamic space facilitating interaction, building systems through mass collaboration and crowd sourcing as they are not only usable but also scalable.

• Co-Creation through participation and collaboration is the key

Future Aspirations ???

Co Creation model (C.K.Prahalad) • Knowledgeable, web-empowered

consumers will usher in "a new industrial system" characterized by "co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer."

• Under the new regime, consumers will "seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system," and companies will accommodate them by allowing them to design their own individualized products

LAMs – New Paradigm

• They are NOT collections, they are information spaces for interaction and information experiences.

• The places may be places created digitally to provide the experience of the space and interaction with artifacts of the human mind

• Users co create content, participate in the tagging and adding their comments and create their own narratives and personalize their information experiences and enrich others experiences too.

Next Gen Information Services

The distributed cognition of the cyberspace offers a distinctive opportunity to transform LAMs by blending the physical places and cyberspaces and moving Information services from delivery to interaction and turn places into spaces for informational experience – rich, immersive, and personal


Education

Minds and Spaces by Prof. Shalini R. Urs