Is Information Literacy Possible? Part I

"The universe (which others call the Library)......." Borges

Who in the world was the "Underground Grammarian?" Who is S. Berliner III? What about "Radio Free Mike?" Dan Traister? The Dead City Library? Paul Bourke? David Chesler? Leif Parsons? The Underground Grammarian was Richard Mitchell, a professor, author, bibliophile and wit. Dan Traister is a scholar and rare books librarian - also a wit. David Chesler is (or was) a software engineer who lived in Coop City, in the Bronx. The others you can find on your own. Although it's easy enough to find them on the web - well, fairly easy - they share, except for Mitchell, one important characteristic: they and their information-rich web sites are not likely to be found on the "invisible web." Theirs are personal sites created by enthusiasts who know things, or think they do - people who like knowing them and sharing them, unlike organizations. I found their sites chiefly by browsing, word-of-mouth, or by linking to the "other links" pages of sites I visited and like.




Many believe that those who can't use the invisible web - that small group of specialized, membership- and fee-based databases and web sites - are at a great disadvantage in terms of the learning and scholarship they can achieve. These unfortunates are said to be "deprived" of a great resource. They're taught to believe that the "visible" web - the free World Wide Web we all know - limits investigation and represents only the tip of the iceberg of wisdom. Nearly the opposite is true. The carefully controlled databases and research protocols that dominate the invisible web and reach out to students, scholars and professionals do offer scientific solutions to specialized ignorance, and the information they offer is frequently presented as neatly packaged answers. But they have little truck with the arcane knowledge, the proud displays, experiments, claims, creations and discoveries of the obsessed and the fanatic, the auto-didact, the prophets, wizards, self-absorbed oddballs, and subterranean hobbyists possessed by their one- or three-track minds - the peerless folks who comprise most of the conscious seekers on the planet.

In academic libraries, nearly all librarians like to teach students and professors how to use the databases their library subscribes to. My library spends nearly a million dollars a year for the privilege of accessing them. Nearly all these databases have been created by academies - educational, governmental, professional, publishing, or some combination of these. The institutional sponsors of a database vouch for the peers who provide the "peer-reviewed" encomium that makes information on these databases acceptable to most serious students and researchers. Editors and information technologists gather, digitize, index and publish millions of articles and reports from thousands of journals by experts in a given field - chemistry, psychology, music. Sometimes they make up new fields, like cultural studies, or bionanotechnology. They know the terminology, the research protocols, the controversies, the latest developments and the names of the best and the brightest. But as good as they are these experts are still lucky, privileged, professional, proudly published universalists in a world of nominalists. In a world that's often looking for a particular something it can't quite describe - or maybe something else - universalists are frequently of little help. They find and name what we all suspect is there. But how do we know that's all? Discovery, exploration, accident, and mistakes uncover the unexpected, and are also leading generators of information. And nearly all databases created by committees point toward familiar, cited, hierarchic and respectably formatted information.

Such databases do not point to quirky information found on web pages and blogs maintained by individuals, enthusiasts and small unaffiliated special interest groups. They almost never include marginal newspapers and magazines, e-zines, local government or police reports, or service websites; nor private, political, religious and community organizations or foreign language sites; nor off-market digitized collections of maps, records, certificates, obituaries, archives or newsletters; nor posters, album covers, post cards or photographs, obscure and experimental works of literature, music and art or cyberculture; nor videos, podcasts, movie transfers, radio broadcasts, recipes, old recordings, web-based applications (such as calculators, games, webcams, Google apps, live air traffic maps); commercial sites (often loaded with valuable information); not Flickr, iTunes, YouTube, Wikipedia and other wikis; not the scholarship and thought of auto-didacts, not sexually graphic websites, nor websites that have simply no titles or metatags embedded that can be brought to light by search engines or conventional inquiries. And those are only some of the kinds of information packages that "scholarly databases" don't crawl. Students and non-specialists alike are often belittled for finding information any way they can on the web - "the easy way." But it is B.I. that teaches the easy way. Shouldn't educators and librarians be showing them how to find, choose and use these free sources, which constitute the vast majority of the web they'll be using anyway, especially once their free, institutionally-registered database subscriptions runs out? Is it even possible to teach people how to use the non-peer-reviewed web?

I maintain that bibliographic instruction bears almost no relation to information literacy. They are separate planets. You don't teach "information literacy" any more than you teach "linguistic literacy." Sure, it's possible; but what you teach is literacy in a particular language. Similarly, you can teach literacy in a particular type of information. Are there types of information other than false and correct? I think there is. Everything about the way something is expressed, perceived or made known is informational. You look for information, you recognize it, in its presentation, as much as by its content. Why else do you think everyone makes fun of PowerPoint? Because it can make anything look like information. If it's the concept of "information" you're teaching, you must make it clear that it speaks in many "languages." Both B.I. and information literacy are favorite terms of academic librarians everywhere. Both terms were invented to reinforce the myth that science actually deserves to be in library science. Though few librarians have ever bought into the concept, teaching pseudo-scientific approaches to information-seeking is now seen as a professional responsibility of librarians, with effective, proven pedagogies and outcomes. In a sense, it is the geek version of the old Reader's Advisory.

Much of B.I. instruction may be short-changing high school and college sudents everywhere, as well as selling the practise of librarianship short. For if anyone knows that information can be found in places far removed from peer-reviewed articles, reports, statistics and studies, most of which are closely bound to databases created by profit-seeking businessmen who charge people dearly to use it, it's librarians. Librarians know that information has a thousand shifting shapes, and is represented by irrational, sometimes invisible, unindexable, often nonverbal processes and patterns as much as by searchable ones. Real information is found everywhere and bears only a passing relation to truth. Indeed, it's much more interesting than truth. Teachers who accept and explore only peer-reviewed information are in effect telling their charges to look for a version of a recognizable truth that has passed muster - canonical truth, perhaps, but not the whole truth. But an education isn't worth very much if you learn nothing but the truth. Sure, there may be lots truth in the databases librarians promote. There's a lot to go around, and academics will fiercely cling to their share. But to live, truth needs room. It doesn't speak from a source code alone; it also speaks through a medium.

There is nothing wrong with using peer-reviewed sources of information. They are usually solid, authoritative, responsibly formatted, and morally unobjectionable. You can check their provenance, and find their proper bona fides in the "about us" links. Databases offered by First Search, Lexis-Nexis, Wilson, and Gale are often accompanied by complicated, ingenious search engines loaded with features and options that take time to learn and use. They can demand such a detailed inquiry that an undergraduate may become disgusted by his ignorance. He often flees to the free web, where his teacher says he shouldn't expect authoritative information. But does he know what to do there, besides Google? In a way, the professor is right. Authority is what most databases specialize in providing. They are often the only place to find reviews, criticism (that dreaded, overhyped, overestimated thought process), discussion, and analysis of issues that other authorities have agreed to take seriously. Professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, require students to rely on peer-reviewed authority because most of it is assertive by nature, not evidentiary. And whose assertions can we trust, after all? Professors know how hard it is to navigate among responsible and irresponsible assertions and opinions, to find the truth buried in the rhetoric. These databases try to put you (or your friendly librarian) in the driver's seat, presumably to save the enormous amount of time it takes to find your way on a sprawling roadmap of possible destinations.They try to establish and exemplify norms of evaluating information. Turn left here, and right there. But we are passenger-seated drivers on the information highway. Signs convince us we have arrived where we intended to go. Meanwhile, the hitchhikers get to explore all the little-known local attractions, eat the home-cooked meals and write the best guidebooks.By way of contrast, most science databases depend on the scientific inquiry process itself - "evidence-based, testable observation" - to act as the natural filter for distilling authority from information. Scientists are so certain of their authority they sometimes offer it for free - or for huge grant-eating fees paid by anonymous industrial donors. But though the observable, testable world is considered the "peer" that validates the observations, all observations aren't explained by science. One must still have a kind of faith to believe anything is true. For many, only the use of the entire Web can affirm that Faith. -PW

That ol' Search Engine, Time

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past"


- T.S. Eliot (Burnt Norton)

How much time does it take to think of something new - a poem, a scientific theory, a song, a conspiracy? Can we watch it happen? Is the time it takes to think of something preserved in the product? What is it about Time - the most unsolvable puzzle life offers - that makes us want to "save" it so much - librarians in particular? Countless songs, books, poems, symphonies, theories, myths and scientific studies have been devoted to preserving time, or lamenting its loss - and yet no one is willing to accept the obvious: that it can't be saved. This is a fact of death, more than a fact of life. Time is the cost of living; the more you invest in life, the more you spend of it. We all have only the time given us, but we always want more. This is one reason I remain perpetually skeptical about the need for - or value of - speeding up research and research tools.

Many information professionals believe that productivity is victimized by time, as if we'll miss learning something important if it takes too long. Yet nothing that we want to keep has ever been produced quickly. Information competes with pleasure, biology, habit, fear, family and purpose for our attention, and all must be given their due. It might be fun to dramatize time here a little, make it more visible, if not controllable. Our blogging software doesn't allow me to embed a stopwatch, but you can get to one easily enough. Firefox offers a good one as an extension, which you can download at Stopwatch . If you can't do that, you can find a java-based stopwatch application at Web-clock ; it counts in milliseconds. The Firefox stopwatch doesn't take up much room on a desktop, and a web-based stopwatch page can be minimized so that it can be used with other pages. If you resize your webpage you'll be able to keep the stopwatch visible next to it. You can also download stopwatches, both as free or fee-based software. These will give you much more flexibility in placing them and using them.

Do we know how long it took for Einstein to formulate his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, e=mc2? Those who knew him or have written biographies might say it took him 2 months, or perhaps two years, of really intense thinking. Some say it took eight years. Thinking isn't research, exactly, but we know Einstein was aware of his predecessors in theoretical physics - Mach, Maxwell, Lorentz, Poincare.....Newton. He must have studied them somewhere, at some point. Did he think of that as "research?" Or, since the Theory evolved from his SpecialTheory of Relativity, developed 1905, maybe the General Theory of Relativity took at least 10 years to think through. Though he wasn't exactly ignorant of physics before 1905..... Well, since Einstein was born in 1879, perhaps it really took 36 years for the thought to develop, though the theory wasn't accepted as proven until 1919. So maybe it took 40 years for the Theory to become a fact, at least a temporary one, given the strange behavior of time. No doubt Einstein wasn't aware of all the thinking his brain was doing. But if Einstein's thinking developed from Newton's - some say replaced it - and Newton died in 1727, then maybe it took 188 years for him to develop his Theory, though for much of that time the theory was being processed - slowly, speedily, inevitably? - in other people's brains. And why stop there? We know Kepler (d.1630) and Copernicus (d. 1543) influenced Newton, and so did Archimedes (d. 212 B.C.) So it's possible that it took Einstein at least 2127 years to develop his Theory of General Relativity. Or for the glimmering intuition to emerge as a theory from the human mind. Though in 100 years it might be proven wrong. If his theory is really true, was it there before Einstein? And does it have to survive?

There's another way of looking at it. Maybe it took Einstein only 3 billionths of a second to think of the Theory. How would we know? Where and when does a thought begin, or end? Has anyone figured out how to measure the speed of the thought process yet? Many think they have. Numbers can be so convincing, and there are more numbers than facts. Does consciousness even exist in time? Some neurobiologists insist it should be treated as a new branch of physics. We know the brain has trillions of neurons, which are powered by chemicals, atoms, forces, electrons..... Physicists agree that the fastest speed known is the "speed of light" - 186,000 miles per second (the cin Einstein's famous formula). How fast is that? Haven't you ever wondered how the speed of light could be squared? Squared, it's 34, 459,610,000 units. What is that a measurement of? It couldn't be a measurement of speed any faster than light, could it? It's a measurement of space or energy or mass. We already know that light establishes the ultimate measurable speed. Not very coincidentally, the speed of light is also the highest speed that the "movement" of electrons can be measured. Keep that fact on hold. Multiplied by matter, c2 is said to be measuring an equivalent of energy: e=mc2. In miles crepresents a "distance" of 186,000 seconds, or 51.67 hours, and c2 takes 1097 years. Of energy divided by mass? What is that? I don't know: I'm no Einstein. A light-year is said to be the distance light can travel in a year: 5,865,696,000,000 miles. But are hours, days or years energy? Can time energize? Does a mile exist outside time, or time outside of space?

They say all measurements are relative to the measurer. Then isn't knowledge proof that time travel is possible? In 3 billionths of a second light - and electricity - travels about 2.95 feet. But electrons can cross the width of a normal human brain, assuming the brain occupies only that spongy mass in your skull - about 7 inches - in far less than 3 billionths of a second - in one 600,000,000th of a second in fact. So what does that tell us? That Einstein was a fast thinker, that computers by definition could never think? If a brain - or a computer - has a billion circuits going at once in all directions, what does that say about the relative measurement of light, or thought? After all, our capacity to measure is still limited to the three dimensions we know. Maybe all those other "directions" are actually dimensions. To me, these musings suggest that thinking may be faster than light, or slower than is measurable in a single lifetime. Or both. What does it mean when Google shows it found 108 million references to "Einstein" in .017 seconds? Or finds 14,900 references to "einstein (and) e=mc2" in .26 seconds? No human can do that. But who asked Google to search, and why? Can we know when a search engine actually finds something of value? Or does thinking, that endlessly instantaneous process, have to intervene somewhere? Will search engines ever be able to speed up thinking?

There are hundreds of
time measurements, and ways of measuring time, from the Planck moment (10 to the minus-44 power of a second), currently considered the shortest describable duration - the one (the only one?) which may have lasted long enough for the universe to form - to the speed of light, used to measure the real estate of universes. But wait. There is also quantum time, which doesn't really involve measurement (too primitive a concept) or linearity. There is the Eternal Present (which you just missed). There is generational time, geological time, historical time, warped time, sidereal time, millennial time, vacation time, lunch time, subatomic time, dog-years, cellular time, billable hours, time off, watched pots, stopped time, doing time, bed time, keeping time, making time, having a good time, time wasted, dream time, too little time, forever (and ever), the time it takes to live, write, read and study Proust's Remembrance of Things Past...and that disfiguring, untreatable but legal addiction affecting a small minority of privileged misfits (including this writer) - extra time.

Putting a stopwatch on your desktop changes your perspective on time and online searching, especially when you see hundredths of a second whiz by. Milliseconds can't truly be seen by the eye, though the eye is what sees the results of Google searches rounded off to milliseconds. What can you do in a hundredth of a second? Some studies show it takes at least 5 hundredths to blink an eye. In one hundredth, light in a vacuum can travel 1860 miles, a crow's flight from Stony Brook to Denver, if a skyscraper - or a screen - doesn't get in the light's way. Remember, in 17 hundredths of a second Google identified 108 million references to Einstein, depending on its last feeding. With a stopwatch on your desktop you can watch your awareness become animated and transformed - and lost: watching thousandths of a second rush by - can you make out the individual numbers? - you can just about keep track of photons ending a journey that were possibly 186 miles away in all directions before you blinked. Let's say you decide to search for "information" (aka: whatever is described by one sort of tag or another) about the impact of Einstein's discovery of the "theory of general relativity" on the outcome of World War II. And let's say you can do the research with one eye, while keeping the other one glued to the stopwatch. While you decide how to look up this information on the internet - Will you use a search engine - which one? Google? Ask? Vivisimo? Yahoo? A library catalog? An RSS feed? A podcast? How about a live chat answering service, e-mail, AIM? A database you have privileged access to through work or school? Or maybe you need to pay for access? Which one? Academic Search Premier? History of Science, Technology & Medicine? JSTOR? Web of Science? The New York Times Archives? Milliseconds quickly become seconds . You can't stop them, but deciding takes time. If you never tried it before, it takes even more time, probably longer than it took to read this paragraph! Maybe you'd better stop watching the clock: each passing millisecond may lose you much potential mileage.

All right. You have decided on how to search. You're going to go with the ever-reliable Academic Search Premier. Milliseconds continue to disappear while you manipulate your mouse or keyboard in a way that allows your browser to find the search screen when you touch something with your finger. Digital behavior. Or are you using a new voice-activated computer? You have a fast connection, and virus protection. Good. In only 2.12 seconds the website appears. If you're chatting a question, you'd better allow for time to pass on the other end, while your answering human becomes "live." By the time that happens, light could have made a trip to the moon and back hundreds of times. It could have been worse: the appearance e of the ASP database might have taken 3.4 seconds, or even - unthinkably - 6 seconds, if traffic was bad. Or maybe a better machine, better software, or a better connection would have made it faster - how about .074 seconds from click to screen! - even though the signals may traveled thousands of miles over 7 different relays. But a signal should be able to handle such small distances - however old your region's electrical grid is. After all, signals can travel 186,000 miles in a second. In a vacuum.

The basic
Academic Search Premier screen (members only!) - once you find it - is pretty easy to negotiate. As with most search screens, you have relatively few options to consider - only 3, or maybe 6. Maybe 11? Only the stopwatch knows. Your chief decision will be, what terms to search. That's easy. We can use "impact" (or is that the right word? What about "influence" or "effect" or "outcome"?) and "einstein" (does capital E matter?) and "War?" (which war? Two? 2? II? Japan? World?). What about using "nuclear" or "bomb"? Will that help or hurt? Did Einstein invent the atom bomb? I'm not sure.....What about "relativity" (does it matter if it's "general" or not?). Heck, maybe just "einstein and war" will work. For now. Forget about "impact:" if Einstein and war are mentioned in the same reference, surely it'll connect him to it in some way, won't it? In someone's opinion. Or is "impact" one of those slippery search words? All "impacts" aren't connections. Do people have an impact, or do bombs? Deciding this took only a few seconds: did you notice them? Oh, I almost forgot: should we search only for full-text references? Peer-reviewed references? What does the "references available" button mean? Is it explained in the "Help" section? (No, it's not. You can thank me later for saving your time). I think I can search without asking for help, thank you! How do I use the "Help" section anyway? One page of the Help section, shrunk 70% to save space, if not time, looks like this, sideways. You can read it in no time! Help yourself!

Never mind. It turns out that "einstein and war" (with no limits set) does produce at least 97 references. Should we go down the list and see which ones may interest us? How about New Details Emerge from the Einstein Files, by: Overbye, Dennis. New York Times, 5/7/2002, Vol. 151 Issue 52111, pD1, 0p, 1 chart, 16bw; (AN 6614828), reference number 38 on page four of the screen. I guess you had to be there. Well.... if we add "atomic" to the search, it narrows it down to only eleven. That may work better. "Relativity" instead of atomic" yields 6. Hmmmmmm. What if instead we want to see how this search displays in a colorful graphics mode, not a list? (Forget the stopwatch.) What a brilliant idea! Who thought of that? If you happen to look at the top of the basic Academic Search Premier search page, you'll see "Visual Search" on the middle tab. Click it, go ahead! Thanks to Grokker, a dynamic, hypermediated screen appears that puts information in a whole new light:

This certainly looks like more fun. The info is inside a "globe"! Plus: the globe already separates subtopics for you (based on what kind of tagging? Don't ask: somebody had to do it!) Click on one of the small circles, like "World War," or one of the small squares within them, and further refinements appear, until, at last, you are given specific references to articles like the ones we started with, though in a different order. Will the order we find them in really make a difference to our research? Maybe. Who Knows? The fact is, we will never know. Even if a study showed that it did, would a brilliant researcher tailor his search tactics to findings based on studying an experimental model (using inevitably outdated references)? He might if an articulate librarian showed him it was "advantageous," though the librarian researcher will need time (using who's time?) to explore all the ways she can refine a search using this one engine (not even Google does the Grok for you). But with that stopwatch going, how could anyone spare that much time?

Most librarians and search engine developers take pride in the time they claim they can save people who are looking for information - whether it's the best price for a pair of Guess jeans, a new Thai restaurant on the North End, 5 articles on teenage gangs in Singapore, or the latest treatment for pancreatic cancer. We - and our users - continue to promote speedy searching - by teaching users how to search and research, by using different engines and strategies, by designing new search engines. Our users expect us to, and get darned impatient if we take too long. And we do save time. The problem with this outcome is that the only time we save is human time, and neither searching nor faith nor scientific knowledge is measurable in human time. Internet search engines can improve searches for specific information, information that is embedded, in a sense, in descriptive tags (even a title is a tag), though nearly every search engine will link to "related search terms". Librarians re-shape "why" questions from users (even Jeeves got tired of being Asked "why?") because such questions can go in so many directions. It may take lots of time to find the end of "why." "Why does time sometimes go slowly and sometimes quickly?" "Why are artists so crazy?" "Why is the sky blue?" Ignorance can't be squashed by generalization. Its coin is time and education costs a lot of coins.

Then perhaps we should use a different kind of stopwatch. One that measures time lapses in fractions of a year would show that a successful 20-minute search, using several strategies, back-tracking, and sampling, takes only 38 ten-thousandths of a year to accomplish. How incredibly fast is that? How quickly we learn! Would you really need to cut down your search time to a speedier 11 ten-thousandths of a year by eliminating one of the steps in the thought process? What would you do with those extra 27 ten-thousandths of a year? On your millisecond stopwatch, it'll go by before you can think of a good answer. There's never enough time to learn: a puzzlement, a paradox, a false dichotomy? Or am I just spinning an issue out of too much time?

Consider the time it takes to learn, to think. Has anyone really studied the connection between research and thinking? That they are connected is usually an a priori assumption. Many people have measured the time it takes to learn, but all they have come up with are numbers telling us who (or what animal) learned what was already known, or knowable, and under what circumstances. Which is fine: all most of us need to learn are the facts of life and the right way to the dead end of the maze. Education and research, however,deal with how people think. There are ways to re-define thinking, but the measurement of it is always surprisingly different from the size of the thought. Intellectual history traces the origins and development of ideas, and often assigns dates to them, but it measures outcome, not process. Are the origins of ideas separate from the process of thinking? When it comes to thinking, all time is equal - or irrelevant. Why spend time trying to save seconds, minutes, hours or even days from the search for knowledge when we don't even know how long thinking takes to become knowledge? A bad habit, I suppose, akin to human error. Forgivable when inconsequential or productive. After all, saving time can be profitable, even fun! Sesame Street proved it, and so does NASCAR. And look how much time we spend in thinking why we didn't get the terrorists in time to prevent their acts of violence! The Report of the 9-11 Commission made findings out of unanswerable questions that had to be asked about the day that time stopped, then, infuriatingly, just kept on coming. And a good algorithm will turn these findings inside out.

Paul B. Wiener

Sept. 11, 2006

Freaks from Brooklyn

Let’s go on a little fishing trip. There’s nothing else I can call it: you’re at a website you wanted to be at, you start exploring it, and then….maybe that site’s URL is intriguing. Or maybe you see all those tempting topical links that the page’s author felt just had to be there. One of them looks sort of promising. You click on it, and …..oops! You’re hooked! Suddenly you’re on a very different page. Who’s doing the fishing?

A couple of weeks ago I went to an art exhibit in an old converted warehouse on the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I saw many works I liked, but one in particular struck me, and I thought I’d check the artist out later. I liked his ultra-realistic display of a creepy, deadly animal, mocked up as a commercial marketing label. Why did this attract me? I can think of reasons, as I’m sure you can. But there are no reasons. It just did. It was easy enough to remember the artist’s name: Takeshi Yamada. But what about him?



Later that night I Googled him, and quickly found him, among other places, at http://sideshowworld.com/SSA-15.html. A biography there told me the usual things that made someone artistic and unique, nothing very personal or exact, like his age or what his life in Japan was like before he moved to the USA at the age of 23. He described himself as a creator of Superrealist art, among other things - one of my favorite genres, and right there was a large array of thumbnail photos of his work, including the very one that had caught my attention!

The URL for this website – the part before the backslash - suggested that there might be more where this came from. Don’t you ever play around with URLs, especially long ones that attach jpegs or pdfs, wmvs or lengthy proprietary extensions? You wonder what came before the backslash, especially when there are 3 or 4 compound addresses in the URL. The address before this backslash was http://sideshowworld.com/, and it turned out to be a gigantic website containing hundreds of links about every aspect of sideshows you never knew existed, as well as dozens of on- and offline exhibitions, many of which were sideshows in their own right.



It didn’t take me long to select a link from the dozens. I chose The Barnyard Freak Show – don’t ask me why – where I came upon images like these:



But the appeal of historic freakish animals only went so far. There was also a link to the Live Deformed Frog Cam that a Minnesota State Agency had had the foresight to mount. It sounded promising, but it took too long for the frog to show any signs of life. You try living in front of a webcam! Anyway, anyone can be deformed. Another link to Fairly Freaky Animals yielded a purple bear, albeit one whose color had limited tenure. Below these were thumbnail links to images of posters advertising these shows, such as the tempting “Ducks with Four Wings,” very sociable birds, evidently, that won’t be found in any Peterson’s Guide, or works of imagination depicting freaks still unborn.

The “links” link from any website is always a tantalizing fishing hole, and the catch is never predictable. Sideshow’s is no exception, and it leads away from the pages Sideshow maintains. For example, from “General Sideshow Links” you will find The Human Marvels, a blog published by a Gothic-looking gentleman named J. Tithonus Pednaud that’s dedicated to unique individuals like the ones below:













It looked like Tithonus, who has a large presence on MySpace, needed to be reassured about something, and I e-mailed him, telling him I too was a freak, though it wasn’t very obvious from my appearance. But he never answered back. On the inevitable blogroll list of The Human Marvels were links to similar blogs, including boingboing, a popular site that calls itself “a directory of wonderful things,” implying that things needn’t be freakish or odd to be weirdly fascinating. Another link from Sideshow’s “links” page went to House of Deception, a similar site that features links to other carnivalesque phenomena, like the “deceptive” world of wrestling. Did you know there was a sports subculture devoted to midget wrestlers like Cowboy Bradley and Little Darling Dagmar? What is the point of this information? I haven’t a clue.

But let’s take linking a step further, into the world of social software. Let’s say you’re already a member of the well-known del.icio.us community – a wiki-type place that allows members to post and store their favorite links, as well as tag them, share them, search them, cross-link them, and retrieve them from anywhere. Finding users with compatible informational interests and tagging tendencies is easy and can lead to serendipitous or ingenious ways of finding new sources – of arcana, if nothing else. Let’s say del.icio.us user “Manofletters” decides to add House of Deception to the del.icio.us bookmark database, and he tags it with “odd”, “freaks”, and “performance.” Any words can be used to tag it, and other members can add their own tags.

Once House of Deception is entered into the del.icio.us database, the number of times anyone else has entered or copied it will be displayed. Sometimes no one has, and sometimes no one ever will copy your bookmark. But usually, someone has or will. Their tags and mine will be displayed. True, “odd” is pretty vague - maybe I should have chosen “weird” - but it’ll have to do for now. The screen names of everyone who has copied House of Deception will also be displayed. If you click on a screenname, his or her other bookmarks and favorite tags will be displayed. And on and on… All these things will be hyperlinked, networked and searchable. You users of MySpace, Flickr, YouTube or LastFM will be familiar with the pleasures of networking your preferences. It’s addictive. If you search the “odd” tag on del.icio.us (del.icio.us/tag/odd) you will find such oddities as The Blue Ball Machine, Strange Statues around the World, and Strange Attractor, a terrific British zine “celebrating unpopular culture” - but few, if any, links to “freaks.” If you search del.icio.us/tag/freaks you’ll have better luck, but don’t blame me for what you might find.

(PBW 07/31/06)

A Thousand Words or So

by Paul B. Wiener

All definitions of information may have only one thing in common: they assume it is recognizable. One definition I especially like says: it is a measure of how surprising something is. True, that comes from a protein engineering glossary at the Biomedical Centre in Uppsala, Sweden, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I have a special affection for surprising information because most of it can’t be searched for, and when it’s found, much of it can’t be described. Often it’s not even recognized until its effects are felt, like childhood. This makes someone like me, a librarian with a limited memory and a healthy skepticism about truth, feel a little less guilty for not always being able to answer the questions people ask me. Oh, I can find answers easily enough. Answers are the easy part of information. I just have to rephrase their questions sometimes, to make the answers work. How do you teach people to enjoy being surprised: by giving them what they expect?

One way is by visiting web sites with names that provide no clues about their content. And when the site appears, what’s visible also isn’t much of a clue. Not right away.

One such site is Dredge, produced by a group of electronic media students in our own Department of Art. (And fittingly, you won’t find it listed anywhere by using the anemic search engine on Stony Brook’s Home Page either, though I’m sure that wasn’t the students’ intention.) Virtually nothing on Dredge’s front page tells you what it is – a display site for artistic productions and experiments. Instead, you have to look for the hyperlinks across a large dark, teasing space until you decide that those things down there must be the links. The search process is prompted by the page design. Your “visual brain” is forced to overrule your “textual brain.” Many clueless sites are like Dredge, visually stunning, often textless pages made by people in the arts - photographers, cartoonists, graphics freaks, website designers, Adobe acrobats, hashers, neo-cartographers, poets, topologists - even scientists and farsighted young entrepreneurs like Alex Tew, who invented the Million Dollar Home Page. These people love the challenge of picturing those famous thousand words before you can even think of them. Think of the information gained as similar to what we learn from our dreams, even though they don’t have subtitles.

Another quirky graphic artist’s page that lets you decide how to find its informational content is Leif Parsons’ Page. And another is Ian Timourian’s Mandalabrot.net, which focuses on fractals, visual remixes, generative design, and many of the other new forms of art made possible by computer technology. The site Visual Complexity studies the visual display of information by, well, showing it off. It stuns you with its opening page that presents hundreds of unexplained proprietary information design templates. Bit offers some verbal encouragement too: “Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.”

Even political forums on the web can score points without using words, animating information to appeal to the newer kinds of “information literacy”. Many web sites and blogs, like GPrime.net, Molecular Expressions, and An Atlas of Cyberspaces, use text to introduce links to the latest text-free games, special effects photography, cartography, optical illusions, digital video and flash animations. And let’s not forget the latest craze, the ever-teasing YouTube. These sites offer learning experiences that can be visually instructive far more quickly than they can be explained – or justified - in words.

Information as most librarians and scholars know it uses symbols – not only words, but numbers, formulae, marks – as well as color and sound, to communicate and document experience. More importantly, most librarians use language to describe the symbols. Symbols called “words” tag ideas, facts, events, people, experiences, memories, feelings, observations. We use them to organize various attributes and similarities. The world thus described is sometimes called “recorded history,” sometimes “science,” and sometimes “reality,” and sometimes “searchable.” What do we do about the information that cannot be so described - the recorded stuff that can only be perceived non-verbally? Do we translate it into words? How many translations (copies, messengers, media, generations, reproductions) will records survive before they lose “authenticity”, whatever that is? This problem long intrigued the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who applied it to works of art. But he wrote it before the internet existed. One answer seems to be: some records survive translation better than other records, and better than most works of art.

There’s a fascinating website that draws attention to the paradoxical fact that art reproduced on the web, because it is “lighted from within,” is sometimes more beautiful than the original thing. Before you leave, take a look at Bibliodyssey, a blog about the beauty of book illustration, old and new. Strange concept - book illustration - isn’t it? Who needs it, especially today, when screens illuminate words everywhere? Illustrating books seemed normal enough once, but here you realize that you are celebrating “books” by reading a blog, (there were no “blogs” three years ago), on a computer screen no doubt using a Windows-based GUI (coded in letters, numbers and signals), and looking at a digital image – one which presumably can never degrade, (since a digital fact weighs no more than an idea and can be dog-eared indefinitely) unless electrons themselves disappear into time….Here’s a lovely image of a drawing (click!) that someone scanned from a 500-year-old manuscript, whose maker once had it painted there by an artist – at this moment the “real one” probably sits unknown and untouchable on a shelf in an ancient library in Rouen, a library morphing into a museum. If most information isn’t art, is it still subject to the kind of degradation that copying and translating from any medium produces? And if the image (or the book, or the movie: remember Fahrenheit 451?) remains in my memory long after the printed and digitized one disappears, will it still be authentic?

Truth without Consequences

Google has introduced one of those new search applications that’s just the kind of thing that makes many librarians distrust Googled information. It’s called Google Trends and it provides context-free information that seems to have no bearing outside the arcane world of search itself. But no one ever accused Google of humility. This new engine is a seductive toy that at this stage promises much more than it delivers. Here’s how it works: you searcha word or short (parenthesized) phrase, put a comma after it, then select another (and another three, if you like) to compare it to. Google Trends then tells you how relatively frequently those terms were searched over a few years (on a graph with no scales), as well as what countries or cities it was searched in, and in what language (based on the web version of Google). Some frequency highlights are correlated to currents events, but other than that no explanations are provided, or even suggested, as to why something is trending in any direction. Or on how many searches the trend is based on – 866 or 435,205. Some students may welcome this, for who can doubt that a reason exists for a trend? And a halfway decent student can find reasons much faster than he can find facts.

What are the reasons for interesting trends? A search comparing the terms “stony brook,” “sunysb,” “stonybrook” and “stony brook university” shows us that the single word stonybrook is the second search term of choice used in the US, and that mostly English speakers use it, that India is by far the place where the second highest number of searches came from, that Chinese was easily the second most used Google site for this search, that the phrase Stony Brook is used everywhere much more than the other terms seeking “Stonybrookness”, and that outside the campus community, almost no one ever searches with the term sunysb. You can spend hours discovering similar fascinating, puzzling and potentially meaningless trends by comparing all kind of things, places, names, even numbers. For example, try comparing “0, zero and nothing.” Or “da Vinci, da Vinci Code, Dan Brown and Leonardo.” Which of these five concepts do you think is most searched: “truth, fact, fiction, information and myth?”

۞ I forget just how I came upon this next site, The Athanasius Kircher Image Gallery, at the Stanford University Library. Probably it was randomly from a blog listing. Here are some literally fabulous rarely-seen illustrations of rarely-seen phenomena created by the great, albeit unknown, 17^th century German Jesuit polymath. What, you never heard of him? You’ll need to download the DjVu plug-in to see his work. But why were they digitized? The site has impeccable bona fides and links to some fascinating pages about the man, like The Athanasius Kircher Project at Stanford University, The Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher, The Societa Italiana di Storia della Scienza in Florence, Project Director Michael John Gorman, a lecturer in the history of science (at one time) at Stanford

and now a scholar living in Dublin, Ireland, the program of a 2001 Colloquium on Kircher, a gloss on an Exhibition of his Baroque Encyclopedia, an article about Kircher scholarship from the Chronicle, and Wikipedia’s inevitable page on the man. And of course there’s The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society , which renders the obscurity behind Kircher’s genius into blog-like clarity.

About the only thing I haven’t been able to find is something that explains how his genius impacted the world - though he did make an appearance in an Umberto Eco novel and corresponded with over 750 people. Most of the web sites about Kircher seem full of superficial details. I suppose it takes a certain kind of genius to publish and illustrate dozens of books on many major and arcane subjects in his lifetime, but where’s the rest of him? I haven’t been able to see any of his actual correspondence online (server problems), but there’s no doubt that the images displayed in the Gallery are exotic, deliberately impossible, funny, skillfully drawn and suggestive. It is good to know that we can find images of his Musurgical Ark or his Tarantula and the Musical Antidote to its Poison, even if we aren’t told what they mean. Much of Kircher’s quoted text is either untranslated, is vague, is given no context, is written in strange symbols, or refers to sources that only a grant could verify. In fact, it all would make more sense if we knew it was a hoax, but it isn’t. Still, you won’t find these images on a proprietary database. Who would expect you to pay to see his works? No one. Kircher’s fascinating inaccessability is being paradoxically extended by something libraries will always do well: preserving the virginity of information for its marriage to scholarship.

۞ Statistics don’t lie, they just never tell the whole truth. What reference librarian hasn’t had a student come up and say something like “I need statistics on how many unmarried Japanese men under 40, over 5’8” and under 150 pounds, living abroad and earning less than $50,000 a year missed the train to work because they were shaving on Tuesday?” While there are librarians who attempt to look for answers to such questions, using the usual resources, I rarely do. Instead of telling them the correct answer - 7,387 (J. Ethnic Shaving Sociometrics) - which they never believe, I try to explain that there simply can’t be statistics for such fact . What I can’t say is that I refuse to spend months of searching, analyzing, computing, cross-linking, interpreting and translating to find out that there is no answer. But they wouldn’t accept that either. Why should they, when everyone knows there are fantastic sites offering statistics about baseball, the census, libraries, pregnancy, literacy, jobs, mortality rates, crime, food and movies? Many excellent sites gather tens of thousands of statistical studies and let you believe you can search them. Go ahead, make their day. Have you ever looked at StateMaster or Statistical Universe? If the numbers are there, someone has probably crunched them. But that’s the catch: where do the numbers come from?

It simply doesn’t occur to most people that no one sits around at a desk all day at the center of the world, keeps statistical track of everything happening in the universe at a given moment and relates it to everything else that happens. Only one being does that. For the rest of us, there’s not enough time to track what occurs in time. Maybe Google is working on it. One of the strange lessons of information science is that there are statistics for everything under the sun but what you are looking for. Absorb this lesson, and statistics become less intimidating, almost recreational. Hank Aaron has the all-time home run record? Yes, and he also grounded into double plays – 328 – more than any other player in history – except Cal Ripken, Jr. We know this because there is such a thing as a double play, innings, outs, and rules in a game called baseball. When consequences rule life, statistics will always come to bat. There is such a thing as an infant death, as box office receipts, as employment rates, as book circulation, as starvation. And then there’s everything else. But what about those expatriated Japanese men who shave every Tuesday? Surely they exist, surely they matter. But where are the statistics? Wasn’t anybody watching these guys? When all the information in the world in all languages – from books, articles, indexes, statistics, reports, libraries, institutes, laboratories and think tanks - is linked, will librarians be able to answer such questions? Of course not.

Paul B. Wiener

1 June 2006

Reality Checks

Reality can be an interesting source of information. Or is it the other way round? I use the web all the time to find out about the real world. Don’t you? And what I find is “information.” If it isn’t, what is it? I use reality all the time too (in the form of a computer, a chair and the electrical grid) to find ------information. Defining information can seem like a silly word game, self-indulgent, like defining reality or god or love. It’s what undergrads do late at night after smoking a few beers. Well, call me sophomoric, but I’ve always wondered: how do you separate information from reality? Should you? Perhaps reality is to information what god is to religion.

Baba Ram Dass’ famous book title gave us a clue about how people can be real: Be Here Now. Reality, he means, is the attention we paid to what exists where we are in the present moment. Is that clear? It sounded pretty good in 1971, when LSD was still a major search engine. But what kind of criteria are these now for evaluating the “reality” of information on a website? Can information be as real as a person? Does a website have to refer to information that is “present,” or is being generated while you’re looking for it? Does it need to be verifiable or observable in an independent source, or can it be real simply because it was generated by a clever algorithm, and turned by software into a graphic display archived on the web? Is there such a thing as good information? When is information a “primary source” and when is it the content contained in that source? It might be interesting to examine a few websites with these questions in mind. Have you ever played “Where’s Waldo?” Find the reality in these websites.

The Voynich Manuscript site provides a great deal of information about this famous artifact, which currently resides at Yale. The images abound, along with the history. The manuscript is distinguished by the fact that no one understands a word of it, or can trace its complete provenance. All agree it is strikingly beautiful. Its language resembles a few other alphabets and some of its drawings resemble real plants from real places. The Voynich Manuscript, named after the antiquarian dealer who acquired it in 1912 from an undisclosed location in Europe, practically shouts for attention. It looks well put together. Possibly it was composed in an artificial language that had a meaning. It may be an herbal and cosmological codex. Its mystery has outlasted several deciphering hoaxes and well-reasoned attribution of authorship to Roger Bacon, the medieval scientist. But really, no one knows what it is. It is a real artifact with a real history. It has attracted real scholarship, and there is little doubt that it’s been around at least since the 15^th century. But it may be meaningless all the same, or permanently unknowable. The web may extend its life forever. Observe a bibliographic freak: a famous, historical primary source waiting for its first citation.

But anyone can create a manuscript. Try creating a person who’s still alive after more than five human lifespans, yet who doesn’t even exist: Hamlet, the most celebrated literary nonentity of modern times. HamletWorks is a site devoted to this young man, about whom as much has been written as about his creator. Hamletworks uses a deliberately textual approach rather than a performance-oriented one, but then, Hamlet always was a man who needed to explain things. In addition to a line-by-line hyperlinked analysis of the play, Hamletworks, largely the outgrowth of work done by Professor Bernice W. Kliman, contains the full text of many different editions of the play, a link to the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, the complete run of Hamlet Studies, several concordances, critical and historical essays, illustrated versions of the play, The Enfolded Hamlet, and an extensive bibliography. All this for someone who didn’t exist. Do literary critics extract reality from textual information, or just use it as a gateway?

Making of America Chopin Early Editions African American Sheet Music

Information doesn’t begin as information. Thought has to be expressed, then formatted and recorded. If information is a recipe for action and discovery, its ingredients can be words, numbers, images, sounds, formulae, signals, the medium itself. Doesn’t all information come formatted? Sometimes information first appears as a primary source: being in the presence of the medium that first represented it lends it a special authority. It’s still quite thrilling to see actual words penned by Jane Austen in the original notebook in a display case at the Morgan Library; or to see Chopin’s notation; or the old illustrated song sheets written by the children of slaves – a century-old equivalent of a music download. Presumably, it will be just as thrilling for your child to see the same thing in a digitized version. And in 200 years? Maybe one of your teeth will contain the Library of Congress.

Librarians and researchers alike need to remember that many digitized documents are not available in proprietary databases, yet most library or catalog search engines don’t enable you to search among all available digitized resources at once, whether they were produced as marketable database, or produced as a labor of love. How many proprietary databases are put together with the imagination and painstaking care shown in the sites above, or in Library of Congress’ free American Memory collection? Libraries are starting to put websites in their catalog, but the descriptive terms are still problematic, and until it becomes routine, you’ll have to be resourceful.

What a welcome contrast to the Voynich Manuscript: digitized primary documents with origins no one doubts. They look so authentic, even though it’s now easy to create your own electronic documents – letters, news reports, handwriting, photos - in formats that look 100 or 300 years old. What reference librarian has not been tormented by an innocent request for primary source material? It should be easy to supply a patron with many, and the sites above make it so, for certain students. But wait. Isn’t most of what’s in a library a secondary source? Should a professor, or her students, ever settle for a digital version of a primary source? I’m not sure. Isn’t history authentic even if we didn’t witness it? Or are the physical qualities of the documentation as important as memory in verifying that what was recorded actually happened? In academia scholarship is meant to trump digitized evidence, but it’s still allowed to use it. If you treat a document like a photograph, and retouch the image of its text, who’s to say that that new Constitutional Amendment they’re talking about won’t be Photoshopped overnight! People love to manipulate images: it’s fun, and usually legal. Visit this site and see for yourself..

All the labor and love that go into most digitizing projects are wasted, however, if a teacher insists that a primary source for research can never be retrieved from digital holdings. Recently, I was told of a professor who insisted that her student photocopy an article from a journal, rather than download a simple text version. If the student had made copies from an online source of the same article, but digitized in its original format, the joke would have been on the professor. But then, can we be certain a manufactured image couldn’t be reproduced as a full page of text in a print journal? As usual, Walter Benjamin had it all figured out 70 years ago, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Today, the ALA has a useful website that tries to make this all much clearer than I can, Using Primary Sources on the Web.

And now let’s change directions again. Here are two sites that let you create your own information, and then find a reality that matches it. That’s easy enough to do with a normal text-based search engine, where you can put in any text or number or string and fish for matches, but here it’s a little different. With Retrievr you can create shapes and images in different colors, using your mouse, within a small blank white rectangle, and then ask the search engine to match the general pattern and color against Flickr’s huge databank of photos. Admittedly, compared to an infinity of possible designs it’s a small database to choose from, but it’s a start. What’s worth pondering is this: what possible use could finding this information serve? It’s easy to sense that there must be one. Tunespotting lets you do a very similar thing with sounds, using note and rhythmic patterns, and matches your input to a large but also limited database. Using your keyboard or mouse you can enter approximate musical note, phrase and rhythm sequences and the program matches it against similar general patterns of known compositions (like “Happy Birthday” or “The Moonlight Sonata”) that have already been encoded. It’s not terribly accurate at present, but think of the possibilities! Using very fuzzy search terms, both programs provide excellent examples of how fine and subtle are the elements that constitute an individual composition. And both allow you to see if reality measures up to information.

Paul B. Wiener

1 May 06

SCREEN SAVERS

Where does information come from? From the world, from the senses, from the mind? If sometimes it's self-evident, at other times it has no fixed form. So how do we know it when we see it? There is a running debate among some physicists about whether information can escape from a black hole. Current opinion says that it can. As quoted in Wikipedia, "Quantum perturbations of the event horizon might allow information to escape from a black hole." I have no idea what this means, but it is a theoretical fact, and evidently it occupies a privileged place in the mind of Stephen Hawking. To me, most information is like this: always on the move and about to be true, shape shifting, something to be declared, compelling our attention as it barely escapes the black hole of reality. Information, when we can remember it, gives us a way to describe the black hole we can't see. Reality itself has no meaning: it just is. Information mediates between states of being. This little column will show you some of the sites that have changed the nature of attention. With consciousness our screen on the world, information is our screensaver.

How does information get on the web? Well, people usually put it there, of course. Providers of information to the academic community are usually responsible professionals - writers, professors, journalists, publishers, educators, statisticians, scientists, government workers and others whose business is displaying, marketing and distributing information to those who need to believe that it comes from official, scholarly, peer-reviewed, verifiable, secured sources.

But information isn't generated only by researchers, nor only by people. Habit and method puts information out there too. Time, history, inertia, software, algorithms, computers, and search engines do their share. So do faith, creativity, egomania. Some information seems simply to emerge, like fractals. What musicians, novelists, architects and photographers create - gods, heros and villains - also becomes information. The brilliant, twisted, or mute obsessions of pilgrims and hermits, victims, soldiers, and inmates also become information. Selves gather unto selves, electricity makes waves, voices chat from collective throats and sound like nothing heard before. Virtual reality becomes more than a metaphor. Sometimes whimsy, accident and fanaticism put information there. No one knows what it will lead to. What does it have to do with librarians?

A quiet battle rages among academic librarians between those who believe that the information needs of patrons should come from databases on the "invisible web" and those who believe that authority should be drawn from the entire web. Of course it's easier to use the invisible web: it's a much smaller part of the world wide web. The trick is in getting to know and trust it: it takes time and intelligence. Proprietary databases are excellent for those who have password or proxy access to them, and the good luck to know where to find them; the general web is what's left, and is created by and for the masses. The better we get to know it, the more we shall be amazed by it.

Most of a library's databases consist of copyrighted "articles" and reports that must be purchased or leased, and are written by credentialed experts. Composed of indexed research and data submitted by experts and scholars to editor-peers, the "information" is retrieved and displayed in formats modeled on the print publications they replace. You pay a database vendor for lending you its authority, not for its convenience or ingenuity. The long arm of print culture often drags them slowly across the landscape of proprietary protocols. The free web, on the other hand, can seem like a lawless, borderless place where anyone can stake his authority on format and rhetoric, Google is king, experts are self-described and keywords like photons illuminate cyberspace generating relevance.

Now let's look at some of the internet-based websites that contain the shapes information weaves across the web. In their creativity, subject matter, graphic design, user interface, and application, websites like these can often provide far more than is asked or expected of the conventional panoply of library databases. But they do little good if they languish in neglect. Take a moment and look at them. They are important, independent information sources with a life and a magic of their own. Some of them have taken light-years to reach us. To base information literacy solely on knowing proprietary databases is like learning only the nouns of a language. Such a tongue-tied approach to our search for knowledge is bound to be disappointing.

1. International Archives for the (Hammond B-3) Jazz Organ

Try to imagine anyone other than a music fanatic from Germany putting together a database like this, annotating over 10,000 recordings made by jazz organist on this famously definitive instrument, making it searchable by many parameters, and offering it as a downloadable archive. Links to everything else in the Hammond jazz world - concerts, videos, festivals, new recordings, polls, history, discussion forums - are also given. Why are these labors of love always free?

2. Whichbook.net

Having a hard time finding a good novel to read, and you don't like your husband's taste? Have a computer connected to 150 responsible human readers do it for you! This engine allows you to find new titles by selecting the degree of appeal in a book of such qualities as safety, violence, sex, seriousness, sadness, optimism, race, age, setting, and thematic description. Only books published after 1995 are listed, but the century's young. After you input your preferences, titles are summarized briefly. If you live in the UK, you can even find out where to borrow it.

3. Feature Films from the Internet Archive

Yes, at no cost you really can view or download over 640 full-length feature films on your computer, like Salt of the Earth, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Quiet One, Malice in the Palace, The Last Woman on Earth and New York City Ghetto Fish Market 1903. When you've seen them all, there are still another 30,000 unusual short films you can explore. Having a powerful computer and connection helps.

4. Speech Accent Archive

Ever wonder why American actors never speak with a foreign accent? Hear how the same paragraph in English sounds when spoken by hundreds of foreign-born speakers, including those whose first language is Punjabi, Hunanese, Afrikaans, French, Sindi, Dinka, Serbian, Pidgin English, Mortlockese, Tagalog, Swedish and Yoruba.

5. Avibase

Why spend weeks looking for an Adelaide's warbler, a three-toed jacamar or even an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker when a few mouse clicks will fill your virtual checklist? Here is a searchable metasite in 13 languages with links to every imaginable aspect of birds and birding worldwide: descriptions, maps, checklists, sounds, photos, videos, research centers, conservation, travel, trip reports, bird name etymology, books. But do birds fly in cyberspace?

6. Live Air Traffic Map from JFK

See a dynamic (if slightly time-delayed) map of flights departing from and arriving at JFK Airport. Gain new respect for air traffic controllers. Individual flights are marked, altitude and speed are given, aerial views and major roads are shown from a 5-to 80-mile radius. With this software, some other airports can be seen as well. Should this site exist?

7. Exploring The Wasteland

Where were you when you first heard the droning recital of T.S.Eliot's The Wasteland? In class, or asleep - or both? Future students never need lose sleep over this assignment again. This site provides a detailed, automated line-by-line critical, textual and historical commentary of the famous poem, and was created by a software engineer who, though he has no degree in English, didn't major in it, doesn't teach it, and took only one course in English Lit, has a thing for Eliot, and is proud of it. See under: labor of love.