I was one of the authors of  http://innovateblog.wordpress.com, which was the blog  of the Innovate Journal of Online Education from November 3, 2008 to February 28, 2009. This blog has now disappeared, but several copies of it have been saved in the Internet Archive: the latest of these copies is http://web.archive.org/web/20091117142808/http://innovateblog.wordpress.com (November 17, 2009), from which former ones can be accessed.

In March 2009, James N. Shimabukuro, the editor  of  http://innovateblog.wordpress.com to http://etcjournal.wordpress.com, and I became an author of this new blog too. On April 20, 2010, James N. Shimabukuro redirected the http://etcjournal.wordpress.com URL to the shorter one, http://etcjournal.com. In February, 2011, he changed my status to associate administrator of the blog.

In this capacity, I oversaw the accessibility of posts (adding alternative descriptions to pictures, for instance) and created and/or co-monitored external apps connected to the blog, like its twitter account, its wiki and the diigo group for gathering the blog authors’ bookmarks.

At the end of September 2011, James N. Shimabukuro removed me from the users of the  http://etcjournal.com blog.

This meant that I had no control anymore on my posts in it: neither on the ones written directly for that blog, not on the ones republished in it that I had originally written for the blog of Innovate. I was wary of that, due to a former unpalatable experience when my collaboration with another project was similarly abruptly interrupted, and  texts I had written for it were tampered with. So I decided to archive the ones present in the  http://etcjournal.com blog.

Archiving procedure

I began to archive these posts with Webcite®, starting from the most  recent ones, and bookmarking the archived pages with Diigo. But the Webcite® server went slow, so I also began to repost them here, this time starting from the oldest ones. This is how I found that copies of most of them had been saved in the Internet Archive. As reposting posts is rather boring, I moved on to bookmarking with Diigo these Internet Archive copies or – when there wasn’t one -  again, the WebCite® archived version.

Granted, this is not a systematic procedure. However, now, the archived versions of all these posts can be retrieved either on this blog, or in my Diigo bookmarks tagged etcj CA archived.

This post was first posted by me on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on October 7, 2009
. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/10/07/prix-moebius-suisse-rewards-inaccessibility and the version saved on the Internet Archive on October 15, 2009. The H3 styles for titles of the original have been changed to H4.

Post

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Last Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009, the awards ceremony of  Premio Möbius took place in Lugano (CH). There were two categories: Premio Möbius Multimedia, for cultural CDs and DVDs in Italian, and Grand Prix Möbius Suisse, for Swiss websites about cultural heritage.

Prix Möbius candidates

In the Prix Möbius category, the candidates were:

• m.a.x museo Chiasso;
• Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel;
• Kunsthaus Zurigo;
• Fotomuseum Winterthur;
• Museum Franz Gertsch;
• Site Archéologique de la Cathédrale Saint-Pierre.

Accessibility and ease of navigation

As for accessibility and ease of navigation,  the Zurich Kunsthaus and Centre Dürrenmatt sites are the best: they read well in linear version (as spoken by screen readers) and have hierarchical headers, which allow people using a screen reader to quickly navigate from section to section (unfortunately, the Centre Dürrenmatt, being a national museum, has to use the drab template of all Swiss federal and cantonal sites).

Next best is the site of Museum Franz Gertsch; “next” because in order to enter the otherwise accessible and easily navigable rest of the site, you have to click on the word “mehr” (more) in the home page – not a very intuitive process.

Then, on a par, there are  the websites of Fotomuseum Winterthur and Site Archéologique de la Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, which don’t use hierarchical headers, hence are not easily navigable with a screen reader.

The worst by far is the site of the m.a.x. museo:

The site is entirely in Flash. What a screen reader would voice is “Page has three frames and no linksm.a.x.museo colon plus forty-one left paren zero right paren ninety-one six hundred eighty-two fifty-six fifty-six dash Internet ExplorerFrameFrame end.FrameFrame end.FrameFrame end.”

Actually, in spite of the “no links,” there are two links: to the Italian and the English version, but as they are within the Flash movie, the screen-reader cannot identify them. And these two don’t even show on a laptop with 1280×800 screen, using Firefox (see screenshot above).

And the winner of Prix Möbius Suisse . . .

. . . is the site of the m.a.x. museo, www.maxmuseo.ch. Leaving aside its violation of accessibility norms, the motivation for awarding it the Prix Moebius is rather odd: “It achieves an immediate, natural and linguistically coherent synthesis of the museum’s identity and of Max Huber’s world” (my translation). Now all the site says about the museum’s identity and Max Huber’s world is:

. . . the m.a.x. museo was established on the 12th of November 2006 by the wife of leading Swiss graphic designer, the late Max Huber, Aoi Huber-Kono, with the aim of disseminating design culture and leaving his work to posterity.
It is the aspiration of this museum that it will serve as a bridge towards young designers and artists of future generations through various exhibitions, while conveying the message of Max Huber who dedicated his life to design.
We plan to organize exhibitions primarily on graphic design in order to present “design” in general to the world.

Very synthetic indeed – not even a single link to other information about Max Huber in the links section.

Granted, the flash movie is pretty. But is this enough to decree that a site is “the best site for cultural heritage,” as the description of Prix Moebius Suisse maintains?

Two paradoxes

The first paradox is that the jury of Prix Moebius Suisse is chaired by Professor Paolo Paolini, who is in charge of a Master’s course in Design of Interactive Applications for Cultural Heritage. Does he really think the purely-flash site of the m.a.x museo is an example his students should follow?

The second paradox is that Professor Paolo Paolini is co-author, with his colleagues of the Lugano Università della Svizzera Italiana, Elisa Rubegni, Alberto Terragni and Stefano Vaghi, of “Accessibility for Blind Users: An Innovative Framework” (Springer Verlag, 2008), whose abstract says:

. . . The main thesis of this paper, which focuses on blind users, is that technical recommendations (as those of the W3C) are not sufficient to guarantee actual accessibility, that we define as the possibility for the users of “reading” the website and “navigating through it” in an effective manner. A consequence of our approach is the emphasis on design, as a way to achieve actual accessibility, and on usability (by blind users,) as the main evaluation criterion. . . .

Actually, Making Content Understandable and Navigable was already one of the two main themes of the first WC3′s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0). And WCAG 2.0 has a whole section entitled Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.

If more websites – including the site of the Moebius Awards, www.moebiuslugano.ch, which presently conveys textual info in the .jpg image reproduced at the top of this post without an alternative description and violates accessibility commonsense in too many further ways to list here – at least applied these existing guidelines, people with disabilities would have an easier time reading and navigating them.

So Professor Paolini and his colleagues want to go further than these WCAG, apparently. That’s great. But then, why did he, as chairman of the Prix Möbius jury, allow the award to go to a site that is fully inaccessible to blind people?

Political poisoned gift?

Could there be a political agenda behind the selection of the m.a.x museo site? A kind of “cultural exception” protectionist policy à la French? An unwritten rule to favor local sites [1], no matter how unusable and inaccessible?

If so, this is a very short-sighted and harmful policy, particularly for such flash-only sites:

• The content of  sites made entirely in flash does not get indexed by search engines, which cannot parse text inserted in a movie anymore than in a .jpg picture. When I tried to find info about a very beautiful exposition of Bruno Munari‘s work the Museum had in 2008 by googling “max museo Chiasso” (without quotes), the first hit was indeed to section www.maxmuseo.ch/en/museo.html of the museum’s site, but that page says nothing about the Munari.
  And if you try the Google cache link for this hit, a message says: “This is Google’s cache of http://www.maxmuseo.ch/en/museo.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 16 Jul 2009 22:32:17 GMT. (…) These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: max museo munari.”

• Sites made entirely in flash do not open at all in cell phones, and that again is paradoxical, considering that the Möbius Awards ceremony on Oct. 3, 2009, started with a round table about digital natives, where speakers underline the present evolution towards cell phones rather than computers for internet use.

Hence awarding the Prix Möbius to such a site lulls the site owner into thinking they have a good thing, whereas they only have a pretty gimmick that cuts them off from search engine results and from cell phone users. Above all, the award is an insult to blind people – and in the case of m.a.x museo Chiasso, to low-sighted people as well, as the navigation links in the flash movie are in very pale grey on white.

__________

[1] Re this possible political bias for Ticinese websites: in 2008, the Prix Moebius for cultural heritage went to kunstpanorama.ch, the sanely textual site of the Luzern Kunsthalle, though they also gave a special mention for cacticino.net,  yet another Ticinese flash website (of the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino). This is proven by web.archive.org/web/20080511213956/http://www.moebiuslugano.ch/annun.html, i.e., the version of the awards announcement saved on May 11, 2009, by the Internet Archive and by the entries about this 2008 Möbius award in Kultpavillon.ch, the blog of Kunstpanorama.ch. However, the page for the 2008 awards of the Premio Moebius website strangely lists cacticino.net for the Cultural Heritage award and kunstpanorama.ch for the special mention.

Meta

This post was first posted by James N. Shimabukuro on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on October 4, 2009. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/10/04/2468 and the version saved on the Internet Archive on October 9, 2009. The centered H3 style for the intermediary title is his.

Post

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

[Note: This article was first posted as a comment to Lynn Zimmerman's "Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo" (1 Oct. 2009).]

At first, Dr. Alloway’s criticism of Twitter may seem part of a long line that includes Rousseau’s of La Fontaine’s fables in L’Emile, Flaubert’s of novels in Madame Bovary, Orwell’s of Boys’ Weeklies, and further educational damnings of TV, transistor radio, the internet, blogs, Facebook itself. Education pundits tend to damn new things until they become familiar enough to pundit about them.

But Dr. Alloway is not an education pundit. She is an educator concretely helping a group of slow-learning 11-14 year olds to improve their short term memory and reporting what she has seen in this group. Hence the unfairness of Malcolm Parks’s comment to the Higher Ed Morning article about the fact she has no research paper about new media use and short term memory: one doesn’t write a research paper on such a statistical basis.

Some other comments are more constructive, suggesting the exploration of more active and learning-enhancing uses of Twitter. Also possibly relevant: Danah Boyd’s Twitter: “Pointless Babble” or Peripheral Awareness + Social Grooming? (16 August 2009) on the importance of socializing and on the fact that socializing communication – in real life too – contains a lot of phatic roughage, i.e., utterances only aimed at indicating readiness to interact with others. If you have a bad short term memory, telling this “roughage” apart from content communication might be difficult.

But there might be a very concrete usability factor in the different impacts Facebook and Twitter have on Dr. Alloway’s students. For someone who has short-time memory problems, Facebook is easier to use because Facebook messages stay put, whereas they slide away very fast in Twitter. So her students are more likely to be paralyzed into passivity by this rapid flow than their peers who have a better short-term memory and can use the Twitter search engine or a remembered hashtag to participate in a conversation about a given theme.

_____________________________

Education pundits tend to damn new things until they become familiar enough to pundit about them.

_____________________________

To overcome this issue, she might show her students how they can limit the number of people they are following until they get more familiar with Twitter so that their homepage is less crowded and does not move so fast; how to bookmark the RSS feeds of hashtags for conversation topics they’d like to participate in; how to mark a given tweet as favorite and, in general, explore with them the Getting Started topics of Twitter’s help forum – help forum topics don’t glide away, and they can be bookmarked in a browser.

Another possible factor might be young slow-learners’ fear of seeming dumb in a whirl of fast moving Twitter conversations, just as in real-life fast moving ones: people tend to equate quick-wittedness with intelligence and slower thinking with stupidity, and this is possibly even more true for pre-teens and teens.

Here, an educator might show people who need more time both to understand and to utter how to use twitter to bring people to other modes of conversation, for instance, by tweeting links to blog or forum discussions where they can have enough time. This can even be automated: new posts and comments on ETC are automatically announced at http://twitter.com/etcjournal via twitterfeed.com, which translates the entries RSS feed and the comments RSS feed into tweets. Same with many other twitter accounts.

The twitter whirlwind might drive some people cuckoo if they enter it unprepared. But they can be shown how to use its power to steer themselves and others towards quieter conversation venues.

Meta

Original category: Uncategorized

Original tags:  Alloway, “Pointless Babble” or Peripheral Awareness + Social Grooming?, Boys’ Weeklies, Danah Boyd, Facebook, Flaubert, hashtag, Higher Ed Morning, La Fontaine, L’Emile, Lynn Zimmerman, Madame Bovary, Malcolm Parks, Orwell, phatic, readiness to interact, Rousseau, RSS feeds, short term memory, Twitter, Twitter Could Drive You Cuckoo, usability factor

This post was first posted by me on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on July 12, 2009. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/07/12/google-book-search-settlement-unfair-to-non-us-authors and the version saved on the Internet Archive on November 24, 2009. The H4 styles for titles are in the original.

Post

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Of Books and Vegetables

I first thought of calling this post “Of Books and Vegetables” because, when I half woke up the morning after I sent a letter of objection to the Google Book Search Settlement, I remembered Ms B. and the building site for a middle school in Cortona. The building activity had stopped just after the ground had been cleared, due to blocked funds. So for two years,  Ms B., who lived on the other side of the street, used it  to grow very tasty tomatoes and zucchini No one objected to this private exploitation of  the site: it would have been silly to waste its potential, and Ms B. generously shared her vegetables with friends and neighbours. When the funding issue was solved, the building started again and her vegetable patch was bulldozed.

I chose a more conservative title because the analogy with Google scanning out-of-print works in libraries is imperfect: if a big canning industry, instead of Ms B., had started to grow vegetables on the building site,  the borough of Cortona would probably have tried to levy a rental for this use. But the principle remains: it is silly, even immoral, to waste potential revenue – especially if its exploitation will serve the public.

Challenging or objecting?

So I did not object to the Google Book Search Settlement for the same proprietary reasons as the eminent cultural personalities who signed the Heidelberg Appeal (English text – German text with signatures):

Actually, I did not mean to object: at first I only challenged the Settlement Registry’s classifying as  “not commercially available” the Google scan of  Theatre of Sleep, an anthology my late husband Guido Almansi and I had edited and published with Pan Books in 1986 – and for which, after his death in 2001, I was the remaining mentioned copyright holder.

The physical book has indeed been out of print for years, but it contains many excerpts from in-copyright and commercially available works, which we had obtained permission to use in – and only in – the Pan Book version. Even if the Settlement foresees the possibility for right holders on such excerpts to claim them and forbid Google to display them, some right holders might not know about the Settlement, or not remember exclusive permissions granted decades ago; besides, the search engine of the Settlement registry often does not find the authors of such excerpts. Under our initial transactions for Theatre of Sleep, I am answerable to these right holders – no pact between parties who had nothing to do with these transactions can change this.

Another reason not to allow Google to display even the rest of the anthology under the Settlement’s conditions was the absolutely unacceptable digital restriction of what – paying – users would be able to print or copypaste from Google books. Such digital restriction measures just don’t work: in Copying from a Google Book, I show how easy it is to do so even with theoretically thus restricted works. And if users pay for an e-book, they should be able to do what they want with it for personal use. So I made an unprotected e-version of what was legally offerable in Theatre of Sleep, and uploaded it  in archive.org/details/TheatreOfSleep, an in-progress version because I will re-add in-copyright texts when I get permission again.

Foreign authors and the Settlement

I could have left things at that, without objecting to the Settlement. But Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive pointed out in an e-mail that many people who are hit by the Settlement and utterly dislike it do not object because it is too complex and they have no legal training. This is my situation too, so I included the excessive complexity of the Settlement in my objections.

Then there was another reason for objecting. Guido and I also did an adaptation of Theatre of Sleep for the Italian readership – Teatro del Sonno – which was published by Garzanti in 1988, is out of print, and has been scanned by Google. For that one we had ceded the copyright to Garzanti, mainly because we did not want to send the permission requests all over again and Garzanti could do that more easily.

But Garzanti has not yet claimed Teatro del Sonno under the Settlement. Its editorial director explained to me that Italian publishers have chosen to wait for the result of the Final Fairness Hearing about it, in case it results in its invalidation: due to the imprecision of the Registry’s search engine, checking what Google has and has not scanned is very time-consuming. Though they are very displeased with the Settlement, Italian publishers are not objecting either, apparently. Above all, they are not systematically informing their authors about the Settlement.

Considering what little info non-US media gave about the Settlement, we are left with the impression that it was a US-only affair. However, this lack of information puts non-US authors at risk. As Mary Minow explained in Google Book Settlement, orphan works, and foreign works (LibraryLaw Blog, April 21, 2009):

The largest group of non-active rights holders are likely to be foreign authors. In spite of Google’s efforts to publicize the settlement abroad, I suspect that most foreign rights owners of out-of-print books will fail to register with the Registry.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  For one, they may not know that their book is still protected by copyright in the US.  In addition, they may assume that international network of reproduction rights organizations would manage their royalties, and not understand the need to register separately. . . .

If there is an injustice being done in the settlement, it is with foreign authors.

Also, if foreign right-holders do not object to the Settlement, how is the US Court to know that they disapprove of it?

Letter of objections

Hence my letter of objections, below. Not because I think they are representative of non-US objections, but because I believe it is important that non-US right-holders object to the Settlement if they disapprove of it, even if their reasons are very different. The deadline for doing so is Sept. 4, 2009, and for the modalities, see 24. How can I object to the Settlement? in the Settlement’s FAQs.

Direct download links: PDF – ODT

Links

I have gathered / am gathering some bookmarks about the Settlement in diigo.com/user/calmansi/googlesettlement. Several of those, in particular about its repercussions outside US, come from the very useful Google Settlement Information, Documents, News &  Links page in Michael W. Perry’s Inkling Books.

Credits

By order of appearance:

• Tomato: from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomato-cut_vertical.png, under a creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0 license.
• Book: from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dubbel2.jpg , under a creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0 license.
• Cattle Rustlers!: Uploaded to Flickr  by Divine Harvester ™ NOW DISHWASHER SAFE!!!, under a creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en license.

Meta

Original categories and tags: same as here.

This post was first posted by me on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on June 12, 2009. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/06/12/accessibility-and-common-sense and the version saved on the Internet Archive on June 14, 2009. The H4 styles for titles are in the original.

Post

This post was first posted by me on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on April 5, 2009. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/04/05/collaborative-text-translation-with-dotsub and the version saved on the Internet Archive on April 20, 2009. In titles, the original bold is replaced with H4 styles

Post

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

In a discussion about Uwe Müller’s dissertation regarding open access journals (see abstract with download link) on the A2k (access to knowledge) mailing-list, Arif Jinha wrote that it would be great to translate it collaboratively into English. Great idea, especially for a  269-page long  dissertation.

The way Arif Jinha intends to  collaboratively translate scholarly texts is based on the hypothesis that if two specialists thoroughly know each other’s subject, specialist B, even if he does not know specialist A’s language, is able to better understand – and render in own his language – specialist A’s work on the basis of even a dubious computer translation than would a generic translator who masters both languages. However, generic bilingual translators could be of use for checking possible mistakes in details.

This is very true. For instance, the best translation of a poem by Seferis into French was done by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy – who didn’t know Greek – on the basis of several English translations, in collaboration with Seferis who told him what he liked and disliked in these translations. And the same possibly extends to other fields of specialisation.

Collaborative Text Translation Tools

However, being just a generic translator, I have to  translate the other way round, from the small end as it were. So Arif Jinha’s suggestion got me thinking about collaborative translation tools. There are such tools for software, like Pootle, for instance, which split the interface into short strings presented in a table: a volunteer starts translating some, then another volunteer goes on. You can navigate by untranslated and “fuzzy” strings.

• Problem 1: the strings are presented by alphabetical order, with only some coded indications of where the strings come from, and it takes some time to start understanding them. And one-word strings can be tricky: is “post” a noun or a verb, and if a verb, should we use the infinitive or the imperative, and if the imperative, the polite or the familiar form (in languages where both exist)?
• Problem 2, you need a server on which to install this kind of tool.

Collaborative Text Translation with DotSUB

And then I remembered DotSUB. It is normally used for collaboratively captioning videos, but its  interface is very similar to one of the software translation tools that I covered in Three Video Captioning Tools. And you can have longer strings, in the order you decide – in the order of a text too…

But I needed a video pre-text first. So I made one, inserting a 4k black JPEG file in a video editor:

I timed it for 10 minutes and exported the video in the lowest possible resolution. Then I uploaded it into DotSUB and inserted some text from my blog post Making Web Multimedia Accessible Needn’t Be Boring, sentence by sentence:

Dotsub Transcription Tool:

I left the default 3-second timing for each string in the “Add a transcription line” box and paid no attention to the pre-text black video. Each transcribed string moves to the top-right table when you hit return and is automatically saved. When that was done, I clicked on “Mark this transcription complete” (bottom left) and moved to the DotSUB Translation Tool.

DotSUB Translation Tool

I clicked on the links to translate each string (actually,  I only translated the text into French, but I forgot to make a screenshot, first, so I made one of the interface for translating into Italian instead).

When you choose a language for the captions in the video player of the resulting Collaborative translation DotSUB page, you get the translation in the corresponding language as a drop-down list under Video Transcription. To get rid of the list markings, just copy-paste it into the “source” or “html view” of a web editor. Here is the almost unedited result (I just redid a separate paragraph for the subtitle and bolded it, and I put the rest in italics) :

Certains pensent que l’obligation légale de se conformer aux règles d’accessibilité des contenus Web – celles du W3C ou, aux USA, la “section 508″ mène forcément à des pages ennuyeuses, rien qu’en texte En fait, ces règles n’excluent pas l’utilisation du multimédia sur le web, mais imposent de le rendre accessible en “offrant des alternatives équivalentes pour des contenus auditifs ou visuels et en particulier: “Pour toute présentation multimédia à base temporelle (p. ex. film ou animation), il faut offrir des alternatives équivalentes (p.ex. sous-titres ou descriptions audios de la piste visuelle) avec la présentation [Priorité 1]” [1] Ce n’est pas une corvée aussi terrible qu’il ne semble, et elle peut être partagée entre plusieurs personnes, même si elles ne sont pas expertes en technologie et n’ont pas d’instruments perfectionnés.

Sous-titrage avec DotSUB.com

Exemple: Phishing Scams in Plain English de Lee LeFever, en http://dotsub.com/view/41ffcc22-6609-4780-bf9d-5bcf88d3197d  [2] Ici, la vidéo a été téléchargée dans DotSUB.com, et plusieurs volontaires l’ont sous-titrée en diverses langues. Le résultat peut être insérer dans un blog, un wiki ou une page web. Les sous-titres apparaissent aussi comme texte copiable sous “Video Transcription”: commode si des gens veulent citer des passages dans une discussion de la vidéo. En outre, une transcription d’une vidéo tend aussi à améliorer sa position dans les moteurs de recherche, qui indexent principalement les textes. Le seul problème est que les sous-titres couvrent une partie substantielle de la vidéo

Summing up so far:

Of course, I attempted this alone. But it would also work with several people collaborating in the translation. In theory, even the transcription, sentence by sentence, of the original text could be shared, but I haven’t checked yet if a collaborator could decree that a transcription is finished when it isn’t, thus blocking the transcription.

In case of a longish text that must be translated into several languages (hopefully in collaboration with many people), this way of using DotSUB might prove useful due to the ease of toggling between the different versions from the main page.

Meta

Original category: uncategorized

Original tags:

This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on March 9, 2009,  in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on March 15, 2009. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it. Later, some of the dead links to the Innovate blog were replaced by equivalent links in the etcjournal.com blog.  I am reposting it as it was in the etcjournal blog, except that missing pictures are deleted and James N. Shimabukuro’s bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles.

Post

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Has technology “reduced our social capital — the relationships that bind people together and create a sense of community,” as Dider Grossamy wrote in a comment to David G. Lebow’s Ten Dollar Computers and the Future of Learning in the Web Era [1]? Didier Grossamy himself adds: “Even though technological advances have contributed significantly to the problem of isolation, the emphasis on individualism in today’s society has compounded it.”

It might be the other way round: technology tools — the internet, computers, cell phones — are very powerful tools, but just tools. They can emphasize social trends, but they cannot create them. Read/Write tools like blogs, wikis, even Twitter — which might seem at first glance the epitome of self-absorption — can also be used very effectively for the defense of human and civic rights. See Don’t Block the Blog [2], Global Voices Online [3] and the Herdict [4] tool recently launched by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which allows users to report inaccessible sites and to see what site has been reported inaccessible in what countries, thus avoiding false censorship alarms.

Civic and Human Rights

[“November 8 [2007]: Karachi Rally – No military rule, imperialism war” by > ange <. Some rights reserved.]

These are great tools under dictatorships: when then President General Musharraf proclaimed the state of emergency in Pakistan in November 2007, the first sign was the blacking out of all independent televisions. Within a few hours, their political broadcasts were accessible again on the internet (with audio-only versions for people with low connectivity). Activists used twitter from their cell phones to let others know when they got arrested. And now that President Zardari is more and more emulating his predecessor’s autocratic behavior (look up Zardari in Google News), civil society is ready to use these tools again.

Of course, governments — and not only tyrannies — attempt to control these tools. In October 2004, at the request of the Swiss government, the FBI seized a server that hosted a page of Indymedia giving personal data of two plainclothes policemen who were inquiring about unrest episodes in Geneva during the Evian G8 Summit, with a not-too-veiled threat. The page was still retrievable through Google cache, and it was mirrored in a student’s page at the site of a US university. Indymedia responsibly deleted all attempts to link to that mirror, but it was very easy to find with a search engine (see, in Italian, L’FBI oscura vari siti Indymedia su richiesta della Svizzera e dell’Italia, ma…. [5]) – Oct. 10, 2004).

More dangerously, last fall, a Sicilian judge condemned historian Carlo Ruta for “stampa clandestina” (clandestine press) because he had published his research about the Mafia in his blog, using a 1948 Italian law that makes the official registration of press organs compulsory (see John Ozimek’s How an Italian judge made the internet illegal [6] – The Register, Sep. 26, 2008). As a result, many Italian bloggers now avoid this risk by adding a disclaimer saying that their blog is not a press organ.

Technology Education and Technology Scares

[Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Salvor. Wikimedia Commons. In the Public Domain.]

The point is, if these tools are to be used positively, people must learn how to use them, as with any other tool. Unfortunately, traditional media — from Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? [7] (The Atlantic, July/August 2008) to David Derbyshire’s Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist [8] (Daily Mail, Feb. 24, 2009) — feeling threatened by these tools, are all too ready to demonize them. And as a result, education authorities tend to block access to these tools rather than face the responsibilities involved in using them at school, where students could learn how to do so responsibly and efficiently.

Most such scare-mongerers’ arguments can be easily refuted, of course. Either they lack scientific evidence, or they quote it only partially, or they use fallacies: Derbyshire, for instance, suggests that the fact that autistic people can express themselves more easily with computers might imply that computers induce autism.

Constructive Criticism

However, we must also beware of the negative effect that an over-enthusiastic advocacy of these tools can have. In 1995, I attended a conference announcing the opening of the Università della Svizzera Italiana and its School of Communication Studies in Lugano (CH), pretentiously entitled “Oxford on the Lake.” I left midways: the zealot enthusiasm and sociological jargon of the “cybernaut” speakers put me off the internet for two solid years.

So it is important to pay necessary attention to serious criticism of these tools voiced by people really involved in using them for social and educational purposes. Two recent telling examples:

• In From Red Guards to Cyber-vigilantism to where next? [9] (Feb. 24. 2009): Rebecca MacKinnon reflects on the limitations of only exposing socially harmful behaviors and human right violations rather than acting to prevent them: “Just because people have an expanded ability to speak truth to power thanks to new technology, that doesn’t automatically lead to a more just society in the long run unless you have institutional change. I wonder whether people will be so distracted and excited about the ability to use the Internet to speak truth to power that they’ll have less interest in such institutional change.” As she is co-founder of the above-mentioned Global Voices Online [3], which aims at giving voice to people directly concerned by events that traditional media do not normally cover, her invitation to go beyond simple information is particularly interesting.
• In The use and misuse of computers in education: evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia [10] (Feb. 1, 2009 — with links to the full report as downloadable 3.01Mb PDF [11] or plain text [12] files): Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Leigh L. Linden analyze the results of scientifically conducted statistical surveys of a Colombian project in which more computers were offered to schools and teachers were provided training. In spite of this training, teachers made little use of the increased learning possibilities of computers, and as a result, the impact on students was minimal. Providing computers and training teachers in their use in education — even if this training follows a constructivist pedagogical approach, as in this Colombian case — is necessary, but it is not enough to make teachers effectively use the available computers with their students.

Motivation and Follow-Up

Citizens who struggle to defend their rights under a dictatorship are more likely to be motivated to master the use of information and collaboration tech tools than teachers who have to help their students pass national tests that bear only on memorized notions. Motivation is essential.

But training offered to motivated people cannot be limited to a single initial course because technology evolves and, more importantly, needs to evolve. Therefore people must have the opportunity to further explore these tools “in action.” This can be done online, provided they are initially trained to use online networks where they can find or ask others for reliable additional information and help.

Meta

Original category: Uncategorized

Original tags:  > ange, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, blogs, censorship, Claude Almansi, cybernaut, Daily Mail, David Derbyshire, David G. Lebow, Dider Grossamy, Don’t Block the Blog, Evian G8 summit, evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia, FBI, Felipe Barrera-Osorio, From Red Guards to Cyber-vigilantism to where next?, Geneva, Global Voices Online, Harvard, Herdict, How an Italian judge made the internet illegal, Indymedia, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Italian, John Ozimek, L’FBI oscura vari siti Indymedia su richiesta della Svizzera e dell’Italia, Leigh L. Linden, Lugano, Oxford on the Lake, Pakistan, President General Musharraf, President Zardari, Public Domain, Read/Write tools, Rebecca MacKinnon, Salvor, School of Communication Studies, Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist, Swiss, Tech Tools Are Just Tools, Ten Dollar Computers and the Future of Learning in the Web Era, The Atlantic, The Register, The use and misuse of computers in education, Twitter, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Wikimedia Commons, wikis

This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on February 25, 2009,  in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on February 27, 2009. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it.  I am reposting it as it was, except that James N. Shimabukuro’s bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles and the broken pictures have been removed and his italics  (for long citations), replaced by blockquotes.

Post

By Claude Almansi
Staff Writer

Thanks to Rafael Schwemmer, Project Manager/Web Developer of e-codices, and to Sylviane Messerli, scientific collaborator in charge of the library of the Bodmer Foundation, for their help and explanations.

[Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 78, p. 49r (www.e-codices.unifr.ch).]

Historia Destructionis Troiae

This manuscript page is from Guido de Columnis’ Historia Destructionis Troiae (or History of the Destruction of Troy). This text is an interesting knot in the rich tapestry of the Troy stories told and retold from Homer to our days. (This tapestry can be explored from Category:Trojan War literature – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [1], for instance.)

In fact, Historia Destructionis Troiae is an early 14^th century Latin translation of the late 13^th century French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, itself based on several classical sources. This Latin version led in turn to further translations – among these, John Lydgate’s Troy Book (downloadable in several formats from the Internet Archive: see the pages for volume 1 and volume 2), which was one of the sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseide (see Troilus and Cryseide – Wikisource [2]) and of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (see Troilus and Cressida – Wikisource [3]), among other works.

[“Chaucer reading from Troilus and Cryseide.” From Jane Zatta’s Chaucer The Canterbury Tales.]

Thus Historia Destructionis Troiae raises interesting questions: What was a “translation” back then? Is our “post-modern” mash up and remix culture as post-modern as is sometimes claimed? What are these Troy stories and these manuscripts to us?

E-codices Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

Before July 2007, when this manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae was digitized and put online within the e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland [5], non-scholars were only able to see it open at a given page by going to the Fondation Martin Bodmer’s Museum and Library [6] in Cologny (Geneva, CH). True, the Bodmer Foundation is one of the most interesting cultural venues of Geneva, with exciting temporary exhibitions alongside its ancient manuscript collections: presently, you can read there letters sent by some of the most important 20^th century French authors to Gaston Gallimard, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which crucially shaped French literature for a century.

Nevertheless, a story in a glass case is a dead story. But now, the manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae – together with 362 other manuscripts from 16 Swiss libraries gathered by e-codices – can be viewed in full facsimile. And from any page of the facsimile, with one single click, you can access a scholarly yet highly readable description of the manuscript, provided in turn with links to specific pages of the facsimile.

The description of the Historia Destructionis Troiae manuscript draws our attention, for instance, to f. 88, where a note in Hebrew tells us that it got pawned in 1646.

[Screenshot of the pawnbroker’s note on f. 88 of Historia Destructionis Troiae.]

And further down the page, someone, in the 17^th c., wrote a love declaration and a poem in Venitian dialect.

The description also points to the instructions for the illuminator scribbled by the editor on some pages, like the ones at the bottom of the page 49r at the beginning of this post:

[Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 78, p. 49r (www.e-codices.unifr.ch).]

Author’s note: Screenshot of the editors’ notes; the one I circled in red says: “fa qua de sovra Troia como lo re Priamo xe (?) in lo so palazo in una gran sala . . . et fa li con le gran barbe” (above, do [paint] Troy, how King Priamus is in his palace in a big room . . . and to them with long beards).

Moreover, from any page of an e-codices digital manuscript, with just one click, you can browse and search all the e-codices collections, or e-mail that page to yourself or others. The correct bibliographical reference gets added automatically to the e-mail.

Innovation and tradition

The e-codices project also highlights eerie similarities in how people dealt with “text objects” back when manuscripts were created and in our electronic era. Just as the editor, scribe, illustrator, and owners of the Historia Destructionis Troiae collaborated in the creation of the manuscript and added their notes to it, you can now add notes – as relevant or irrelevant as the original ones – to any part of a digitized page with tools like Diigo. You can keep these notes to yourself or share and discuss them further with a group or with all readers (see “Links” below).

One thing has changed, though: as we saw, the manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae was pawned by one of its owners. This cannot be done with its digital version.

Usability and durability through openness

Of course, this does not mean that digital content cannot be monetized. It can, but not by putting proprietary electronic barriers around it: as I showed in Unhide this Hidden Text, Please about the ActivePaper software and the archives of the Journal de Genève, such barriers only hamper study – and access by people with disabilities. But they are a totally ineffective “intellectual property protection.”

Conversely, the useful features of e-codices are made possible by a judicious combination of several OpenSource software programs, as explained in the New Web Application [7] page of e-codices. Moreover, this choice of OpenSource also ensures the durability of the e-codices archives because, even if the programs evolve, they will always be able to reconstruct them from their source. Whereas archives powered by proprietary software only last as long as the applications are supported by the firms that produce them.

Like the archives of the Journal de Genève, e-codices does not have a commercial aim. However, the absence of proprietary electronic barriers does not mean that others are free to exploit its material commercially. Instead, in its Terms of Use [8], the e-codices team explains very clearly what can be done under what conditions for noncommercial use; it also explains that permission must be requested for commercial use. This approach is also more effective in that users who benefit from it are more likely to defend it (see Wikipedia: Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-02/Reporter plagiarizes Wikipedia [9]) than if they are hampered by technological “protections” that are insultingly assuming their dishonesty.

Links

The links in this post and a few other pertinent ones have been gathered under http://www.diigo.com/user/calmansi/e-codices+innovate. Some of the links are to pages with annotations, as described in the “Innovation and tradition” section above. You can see the annotations either by clicking on “Expand” on the right of the link, or on “All Annotations” below – which also allows you to add your own comments.

Meta

Original category: Uncategorized

Original tags:  ActivePaper, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Bodmer Foundation, Chaucer, Chaucer Web Site, digital manuscript, Diigo, E-codices, Fondation Martin Bodmer’s Museum and Library, Gaston Gallimard, Guido de Columnis, Historia Destructionis Troiae, History of the Destruction of Troy, Homer, intellectual property, Jane Zatta, John Lydgate, Journal de Genève, King Priamus, New Web Application, Nouvelle Revue Française, OpenSource, pawnbroker, protection, Rafael Schwemmer, Roman de Troie, Shakespeare, Sylviane Messerli, Terms of Use, text objects, Troilus and Cressida, Troilus and Cryseide, Troy Book, Unhide this Hidden Text, Venitian, Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, Wikipedia

This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on February 13, 2009  in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on February 13, 2009. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it.  I am reposting it as it was, except  broken pictures have been removed or replaced

Post

By Claude Almansi
Staff Writer

Jim Shimabukuro’s India: $10 Notebooks for Students post (February 2, 2009, with several updates) well illustrates the misunderstandings caused by the misleading description of the Sakshat device as a “laptop.”

If a toddler expects savory rice and is served sweet rice pudding, chances are that s/he’ll spit the first spoonful. And that’s what most reviewers of the Sakshat device quoted by Jim Shimabukuro did when they found out it was not the laptop they expected, instead of discussing the actual potential of its several connection means (ethernet, wireless, USB) and its use in the context of the Sakshat program.

Something without a monitor and without a keyboard is not a laptop. However, a device that can work with a TV monitor and with a printer may well be a very interesting alternative to a laptop for distance education in places where internet connectivity and money are scarce. Moreover, as Harry Keller says in his comment to Jim Shimabukuro’s post, “It’s not the hardware; it’s the software” that counts, and Sakshat is first and foremost an education program, with a resource and interaction portal in http://www.sakshat.ac.in/ . The device is just one tool of this program but might be of crucial importance for students to be able to work at home, without an internet connection, on material either printed or saved in digital form.

The brouhaha about the Sakshat device reminds me of precedent misunderstandings due to misnomers, for instance:

In December 2006, a €50 package comprising a USB key with OpenOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox, plus a 5-year subscription to a storage site and web e-mail got touted as an “ecoPC,” with high-sounding arguments about ecology and free software ethics, though the USB key only worked with Windows computers and, of course, a USB key is not a PC by any stretch of imagination. Moreover anyone could install these software on a USB key, and there already were heaps of free and for-free online document storage and web e-mail options.

In fall 2007, the online “IT-Fitness” test, purporting to assess people’s competencies in the use of information technologies, was launched in great pomp: in Germany by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and in Switzerland by Minister of Economy Doris Leuthard. The idea of the test was first aired by Bill Gates in Ingolstadt (DE) in 2006, and therefore the criticism first centered on its Microsoft bias – staunchly denied by Ms. Leuthard in the same interview where she said she had not taken the test yet. While most questions do indeed bear on MS products, the main problems were elsewhere: the test only assesses knowledge about some IT features, but not people’s capacity to use them. Above all, there is no verification of the testee’s identity: this is stated in very small font at the end of the “certificate” one can download and print or add to an e-portfolio, but not in the assessment report. As I write this, 1,152,247 people have taken the test in Germany and 20,996 in Switzerland, “qualifying themselves for the future” as the respective www.it-fitness.de and www.it-fitness.ch sites misleadingly state (further links gathered in http://www.diigo.com/user/calmansi/itfitness).

Now there is a big difference between these last two misnomers and calling the Sakshat device a laptop. The “ecoPC” was just expensively redundant, the “IT-Fitness test” is useless at best, and maybe dangerously misleading if employers take its certificate seriously. But the Sakshat device, integrated in the Sakshat education program, does open new possibilities, even though, or rather precisely because, it is not a laptop.

Before the misunderstanding was cleared, Jim Shimabukuro asked in his India: $10 Notebooks for Students post: “What impact will the $10 notebooks have on education?” The question still obtains, with a slight rewording: “What impact will the $10 computing devices have on education?” Let us hope that the disappointed reviewers and the educational community will address it, bearing in mind the whole context of the Sakshat program. For instance, suggestions might be made about the http://www.sakshat.edu.in/ portal: there are far more usable and accessible Content Management Systems than the 2003 Visual Studio .NET 7.1 presently used: an inner search engine and the tagging and description of external links, for instance, would facilitate the search for specific resources.

Such small details could more easily be fixed if there is a discussion based on the real thing, instead of focusing on the hype “laptop” word. When toddlers get reconciled to the existence of sweet rice pudding, they sometimes come to appreciate the stuff for what it is instead of spitting it out. Let’s hope tech reviewers show the same learning curve.

Meta

Original category: Uncategorized

Original tags: none