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Communication Breakdown: Nerds, Geeks, and Dweebs
Last week the DCXL crew worked on finishing up the metadata schema that we will implement in the DCXL project. WAIT! Keep reading! I know the phrase “metadata schema” doesn’t necessarily excite folks – especially science folks. I have a theory for why this might be, and it can be boiled down to a systemic problem I’ve encountered ever since becoming deeply entrenched in all things related to data stewardship: communication breakdown.
I began working with the DataONE group in 2010, and I was quickly overwhelmed by the rather steep learning curve I encountered related to data topics. There was a whole vocabulary set I had to learn, an entire ecosphere of software and hardware, and a hugely complex web of computer science-y, database-y, programming-y concepts to unpack. I persevered because the topics were interesting to me, but I often found myself spending time on websites that were indecipherable to the average intelligent person, or reading 50 page “quick start guides”, or getting entangled in a rabbit hole of wikipedia entries for new concepts related to data.
I love learning, so I am not one to complain about spending time exploring new concepts. However I would argue that my difficulties represent a much bigger issue plaguing advances in data stewardship: communication issues. It’s actually quite obvious why these communication problems exist. There are a lot of smart people involved in data, all of whom have very divergent backgrounds. I suggest that the smart people can be broken down into three camps: the nerds, the geeks, and the dweebs. These stereotypes should not be considered insults; rather they are an easy way to refer to scientists, librarians, and computer types. Check out the full venn diagram of nerds here.
The Nerds. This is the group to which I belong. We are specially trained in a field and have in-depth knowledge of our pet projects, but general education about computers, digital data, and data preservation are not part of our education. Certainly that might change in the near future, but in general we avoid the command line like the plague, prefer user-friendly GUIs, and resist any learning of new software, tools, etc. that might take away from learning about our pet projects.
The geeks. Also known as computer folks. These folks might be developers, computer scientists, information technology specialists, database managers, etc. They are uber-smart, but from what I can tell their uber-smart brains do not work like mine. From what I can tell, geeks can explain things to me in one of two ways:
- “To turn your computing machine on, you need to first plug it in. Then push the big button.”
- “First go to bluberdyblabla and enter c>*#&$) at the prompt. Make sure the juberdystuff is installed in the right directory, though. Otherwise you need to enter #($&%@> first and check the shumptybla before proceeding.”
In all fairness, (1) occurs far less than (2). But often you get (1) after trying to get clarification on (2). How to remedy this? First, geeks should realize that our brains don’t think in terms of directories and command line prompts. We are more comfortable with folders we can color code and GUIs that allow us to use the mouse for making things happen. That said, we aren’t completely clueless. Just remember that our vocabularies are often quite different from yours. Often I’ve found myself writing down terms in a meeting so I can go look them up later. Things like “elements” and “terminal” are not unfamiliar words in and of themselves. However the contexts in which they are used are completely new to me. That doesn’t even count the unfamiliar words and acronyms, like APIs, github, Python, and XML.
The dweebs. Also known as librarians. These folks are more often being called “information professionals”, but the gist is the same – they are all about understanding how to deal with information in all its forms. There’s certainly a bit of crossover with the computer types, especially when it comes to data. However librarian types are fundamentelly different in that they are often concerned with information generated by other people: put simply they want to help, or at least interact with, data producers. There are certainly a host of terms that are used more often by librarian types: “indexing” and “curation” come to mind. Check out the DCXL post on libraries from January.
Many of the projects in which I am currently involved require all three of these groups: nerds, geeks, and dweebs. I watch each group struggle to communicate their points to the others, and too often decide that it’s not worth the effort. How can we solve this communication impasse? I have a few ideas:
- Nerds: open your minds to the possibility that computer types and librarian types might know about better ways of doing what you are doing. Tap the resources that these groups have to offer. Stop being scared of the unknown. You love learning or you wouldn’t be a scientist; devote some of that love in the direction of improving your computer savvy.
- Geeks: dumb it down, but not too much. Recognize that scientists and librarians are smart, but potentially in very different ways than you. Also, please recognize that change will be incremental, and we will not universally adopt whatever you think is the best possible set of tools or strategies and how “totally stupid” or current workflow seems.
- Dweebs: spend some time getting to know the disciplines you want to help. Toot your own horn– you know A LOT of stuff that nerds and geeks don’t, and you are all so darn shy! Make sure both geeks and nerds know of your capacity to help, and your ability to lend important information to the discussion.
And now a special message to nerds (please see the comment string below about this message and its potential misinterpretation). I plead with you to stop reinventing the wheel. As scientists have begun thinking about their digital data, I’ve seen a scary trend of them taking the initiative to invent standards, start databases, or create software. It’s frustrating to see since there are a whole set of folks out there who have been working on databases, standards, vocabularies, and software: librarians and computer types. Consult with them rather than starting from scratch.
In the case of dweebs, nerds, and geeks, working together as a whole is much much better than summing up our parts.
The Digital Dark Age, Part 1
This will be known as the Digital Dark Age. The first time I heard this statement was at Internet Archive, during the PDA 2012 Meeting (read my blog post about it here). What did this mean? What is a Digital Dark Age? Read on.
While serving in Vietnam, my father wrote letters to my grandparents about his life fighting a war in a foreign country. One of his letters was sent to arrive in time for my grandfather’s birthday, and it contained a lovely poem that articulated my father’s warm feelings about his childhood, his parents, and his upbringing. My grandparents kept the poem framed in a prominent spot in their home. When I visited them as a child, I would read the poem written in my young dad’s handwriting, stare at the yellowed paper, and think about how far that poem had to travel to relay its greetings to my grandparents. It was special– for its history, the people involved, and the fact that these people were intimately connected to me.
Now fast forward to 2012. Imagine modern-day soldiers all over the world, emailing, making satellite phone calls, and chatting with their families via video conferencing. When compared to snail mail, these modern communication methods are likely a much preferred way of staying in touch for those families. But how likely is it that future grandchildren will be able to listen those the conversations, read those emails, or watch those video calls? The answer is extremely unlikely.
These two scenarios sum up the concept of a Digital Dark Age: compared to 40 years ago, we are doing a terrible job of ensuring that future generations will be able to read our letters, look at our pictures, or use our scientific data.
The Digital Dark Age “refers to a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical digital documents and multimedia, because they have been stored in an obsolete and obscure digital format.” The phrase “Dark Age” is a reference to The Dark Ages, a period in history around the beginning of the Middle Ages characterized by a scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians. Sounds scary, no?
How can we remedy this situation? What are people doing about it? Most importantly, what does this mean for scientific advancement? Check out my next post to find out.
Archiving Your Life: PDA 2012 Meeting
I’m currently sitting in a church. No, I’m not being disrespectful and blogging while at church. Technically, I’m in a former church, in the Richmond District of San Francisco. The Internet Archive bought an old church and turned it into an amazing space for their operation, as well as for meetings like the 2012 Personal Digital Archiving Meeting I’m currently attending.
I wasn’t sure what “personal digital archiving” meant, exactly, before I heard about this conference. It turns out the concept is very familiar to me. It’s basically thinking about how to preserve your life’s digital content – photos, emails, writings, files, scanned images, etc. etc. The concept of archiving personal materials is a very hot topic right now. Think about Facebook, Storify, iCloud, WordPress, and Flickr, to name a few. As a scientist, I actually think my of my data as personal digital files: they represent a very long period of my life, after all. So I’m at this meeting talking a bit about DCXL, and also learning a lot about some amazing new stuff. Here’s a few interesting tidbits:
Cowbird: This is a place to tell stories, rather than just archive their lives. According to the founder (who is attending this conference), Cowbird is about the experience of life, as opposed to merely curating life. For an amazing, moving example of how Cowbird works, check this out: First Love
The Brain: Very cool, free software that helps you organize links, definitions, notes, etc. The idea is that it works just like your brain: it makes connections and creates networks to provide meaning to each link. Play with it a bit and you will be hooked.
Pinboard: Technically, I already knew about Pinboard. But the founder of the bookmarking system gave a great talk, so I’m including it here. Pinboard has been described as how the bookmarking service Delicious used to work, before it stopped working well. For a very small fee (~$10) you can store your bookmarks, tag them, and even save copies of the web pages as they were when you viewed them- this comes in particularly handy if you use a website for research and it might mysteriously disappear without warning. My favorite thing about Pinboard is it isn’t mucked up with ads and other visual distractions.
