My apartment is covered in dry erase boards. I like to use them. Here are some examples:
This tendency has led to me using them for my slide presentations. I've had two in the hopper that I presented at the Michigan Library Association's Tech Escape workshop in May. As is always the case with my presos, be forewarned that they contain a lot of salty language:
If you have any dry erase board art requests, please leave them in the comments and I will try my best.
Chris Coyier posted a nice, working solution to a real problem over at CSS-Tricks. Basically, CSS lets you style your website to look and work well on mobile devices by over-writing the styles of your full-size website. There are performance drawbacks to this approach, but for the most part it's the best-of-all-possible-worlds solution.
One thorny problem, though, is over-riding the style of certain elements that use the width of the screen liberally by default. One such element is the venerable data table.
Coyier's solution is great in that each table cell is labeled. However, doing this requires either writing CSS manually for every data table on the site (which is near-impossible for large sites) or having the same thing done with scripting on either the server or client side:
I propose a generalized solution that requires no scripting whatsoever. The drawback of this method, though, is that the cells are not individually labeled. The example is also more compact, but this aspect can be tweaked by marrying the two methods:
@media screen and (max-width:720px){
table{display:block;}
td,thead th{border-color:#444;border-style:solid;border-width:0 2px 0 0;display:inline;float:left;}
td:last-child,th:last-child{border-right:0 none;}
thead th{background:transparent;font-size:1.1em;}
tr{display:block;float:left;clear:left;padding:6px 0;width:100%;}
thead tr{border-bottom:4px solid #444;margin:0 0 .3em 0;padding:0 0 .2em 0;}
tbody tr:nth-child(even){background:#ddd;}
td:nth-child(5n+1),th:nth-child(5n+1){background:#FFD8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+2),th:nth-child(5n+2){background:#FFE8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+3),th:nth-child(5n+3){background:#FFF8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+4),th:nth-child(5n+4){background:#D8FFD8;}
td:nth-child(5n+5),th:nth-child(5n+5){background:#D8D8FF;}
}
Open the working demo and resize your window to under 720 pixels wide to see the effect. I call this approach the "Rainbow Tables" method 
Thanks to Chris Coyier for posting a thoughtful working solution, and thereby motivating me to post about my approach after sitting on it (in production no less!) for almost a year.
For 2011, my New Year's resolution was three words: exploration, patience, transparency. It's been a goal of mine to assess the documents in my Google Docs, share as appropriate, and disseminate the information once available.
It's with that goal in mind that I'm releasing these 65+ documents. This release makes up only a fraction of the electronic documents that could tentatively be shared, but it's a start. There's some good stuff in there; also, some pretty useless stuff.
I look forward to continuing this exercise as the year goes on.
At the end of May I quoted Voltaire in my first transliteracy-related post: "Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another." It's been a long process, but I feel I've defined a language model of transliteracy to a satisfactory extent. So before I demolish IL in the Information Literacy vs. transliteracy debate, I figured it would be fun to offer a practical example of the language model.
One thing came to mind when thinking of examples: Brian Hulsey's Everyday Transliteracy video. It's known as the "blueberry smoothie" video to many; it shows how someone might communicate the same message (a blueberry smoothie recipe) using different websites and other forms of communication, and all in a concise, friendly manner.
Let's look at the examples through a linguistic lens.
Most examples involve some form of written language. In many cases, though, communication via a particular website or other form requires subtle changes of dialect or language variant.
In many ways, the language used in email is most like that of a written letter from perhaps a century ago. If a writer wished to ignore clear, concise business style, he or she could write an email of flowery prose or any other style you might otherwise encounter in written language. To me, the written language of an email is something of a baseline for comparison to other language usage.
Linguistically, twitter is an interesting variant. Where you might devote a whole paragraph in an email for a stand-alone idea, the standard on twitter is for one tweet (at 140 characters or fewer) to do the same. As such, someone familiar with the letter/email baseline might develop a workflow for converting their verbose ideas to tweet-appropriate length:
There's more to it, such as @replies, but the above workflow is the gist. It's interesting, anecdotally at least, that tweets and text messages diverge somewhat in linguistic usage, despite their similarity in imposed length restrictions. Whereas it's common to use instant message-type lingo (lol, brb, stfu, etc.) in an SMS message, it's at least somewhat less common on twitter. It's also more accepted to go over the character limit in text messaging, while quite impractical on twitter.
Facebook doesn't formally impose stringent length limits like twitter. A savvy facebook user, however, knows that a long status update will get cut off at a certain length; and the cut off text is only viewable after clicking a "read more" link. This leads to a subtly different usage than twitter. Facebook users are more likely to use full words in full sentences.
The combination of "read more" links and quoting the first three or so words of comments on profile pages means that effective facebook users avoid "burying the lead." Such users communicate in pithy, concise posts, with their thesis statement within the first few words.
Facebook users may sometimes forgo leading personal pronouns since their name is displayed before their status. This is a less-likely occurrence on twitter, where users are represented by short usernames rather than their actual names.
Blogs are similar to emails from a written language perspective. There are nuances, of course, but it's long-form writing with the optional addition of hypertext elements, just like rich email.
Talking on the phone obviously isn't written language. However, I think it's a great basic example of transliteracy. Brian, in the video, reads the necessary amount of orange juice aloud off the screen. This is him reading (decoding) written language and speaking (writing, encoding) the same message into oral language. This is a basic transliteracy that many of us possess that we often take for granted.
Similar to long-form written language. For a message longer than originally intended, someone writing a post-it message might employ chat lingo and abbreviations, or might start writing smaller near the end of the message.
URLs are a written language construct all their own. I learned what URLs looked like, how they worked, and the intricacies of their syntax and semantics from using them, rather than by any formal instruction. However, an internet user can gain a lot from being instructed in URLs.
For instance, Brian was 100% correct to shorten the URL for the recipe before posting it to twitter, as that's common practice. On the other hand, he didn't show how he used the full URL for the resource in facebook. It's knowing usage rules like these that make URLs an important language literacy.
Written language is a special subset of visual language. Hypertext is where, on the web, written language and what we usually consider visual language intersect. Hypertext elements have default styles per user agent stylesheets in the browser, making them visual elements. They are also semantically-defined markup elements per their SGML syntax. So bold text or italic text or a link or a heading appear different from text not wrapped with any markup; the elements' semantics precede their appearance.
A web user who doesn't know how to identify the common appearance and function of hypertext elements would be at a great disadvantage. Often the appearance of form elements, for instance, are derived from similar UI elements from the base operating system's toolkit. However, sites will often style or re-implement elements like buttons, so the essence of button-like symbols is a useful and transferable visual language skill.
Note that in the video, Gmail, twitter, facebook, and WordPress all have similar, but at least somewhat-different, representations of buttons, text fields, text areas, rich text boxes, etc. I think it's in the subtleties of hypertext visual language that it's most practical to use the language model instead of the platforms/tools/media model.
Each site uses layout conventions involving columns, proportion, color, contrast, and other precepts of visual language. How they are similar and different is a teachable thing for those we might instruct. Knowing basic visual language of websites is a transferable skill.
Besides site layout, another interesting form of visual language are symbols, often used as icons. The Noun Project is a cool resource for exploring this aspect of visual language.
I've written a lot about a little, and have still managed to leave out a lot! The literacies at play when doing seemingly-simple things are often complex and varied.
What I wanted to demonstrate more than anything else is that the language model allows us to talk about all the same transliteracy things, but in a way that actually gets to the core literacies.
I think these language literacies allow us to work from a common set of terminology. They let us proceed quicker to developing more-universal and more useful curricula for instruction.
A point to ponder: Brian's video, many (myself included) contend, is a wonderful example of transliteracy. It does not, however, focus in any way on the critical abilities normally associated with Information Literacy.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my former classmate Lane Wilkinson for the discussion about transliteracy we shared via email. More importantly for you, dear reader, is that Lane writes a blog called Sense and Reference with some of the best and most thought-provoking posts in the library world.
If you've followed the series of posts about transliteracy on this blog, perhaps you'd agree that I've approached the topic somewhat backwards:
In this post I'd like to illustrate that the issues with the definition are causing problems: namely inconsistent communication among transliteracy researchers.
In his post, On defining transliteracy, Lane asserts that since transliteracy is a young term, it may not be appropriate now (or ever) to define transliteracy intensionally. I would absolutely agree with this notion if transliteracy were defined extensionally.
In the literature, the PART working definition is not only the current definition of record, but the basis for a functioning intensional unit. If we acknowledge that transliteracy is trans- plus literacy without making the necessary pre-assumptions of my previous posts, people still naturally use the word to mean "An ability to [do something] across [something]."
The first blank, "the ability to [do something]" is much less contentious among transliteracy writers. The PART definition fills the blank with "read, write, and interact" while my suggestion instead goes for "encode and decode information." I think in both instances the intent is largely the same:
My review of the literature confirms the agreement on these conditions of the first blank, despite the difference in wording I suggest.
A review of the literature (which you're free to contribute to) shows us what transliterate entities are purportedly doing something across:
The agreement isn't total, but the clear majority of those discussing transliteracy have latched onto 'medium' as the unit that transliterate people are literate across. As such, the "precise necessary and sufficient conditions for being an instance of transliteracy" are asserted overwhelmingly by writers in the field to be met by being able to read, write, and interact across media.
But medium is used inconsistently with regard to scope, and often outside of the usage of any other field. As such, the condition-facilitating uncertainty that would otherwise be attached to an extensional 'transliteracy' is instead confusing the word 'medium'.
For instance, is facebook a medium? What about twitter? Is there a single "facebook literacy" or "twitteracy"? Is medium intended as it is in the field of Communications? Of Art? In a McLuhan sense of the word?
There is no agreement in the literature.
The word 'medium' is being used as a placeholder for an ill-defined unit of literacy. This placeholder isn't serving anyone because of the stark variation in usage.
I've made a case for language to be the unit instead, clarified what language means, and showed that it can function across all contemporary literacies. What else is necessary to get the discussion away from medium and toward language?
I made this for my Dad for Father's Day, but figured other people might like it, too.
When used as a home screen wallpaper, it looks like this:
Dad, I hope you like it.
I appreciate Sue Thomas, the preeminent scholar of transliteracy, taking the time to read and respond to my recent post. Her insight, and especially her question, made me realize that I had fallen into the curse of knowledge and had perhaps sacrificed effective communication for the sake of rigor.
So, I'd like to be a bit less formal and start from the top.
The Universe is made up of information. This is particularly interesting in the context of concepts like simulated reality. A computer simulating a Universe to as detailed an extent as the Universe we inhabit would have to account for expressing physical information via digital physics and perhaps would require artificial intelligences for simulated inhabitants.
What's important here is that the universe is made up of information. That information can then be expressed in ways beyond the literals of existence.
Information wouldn't matter much without senses. We as living beings have an ability to perceive reality via our senses. We then do various stuff with this information.
Communication is "...a process of transferring information from one entity to another." While it's interesting to think of objects like stars communicating with us their message of very bright light from very far away, I think communication requires intention on the sender's part.
A plant of a certain color or emitting a certain scent may be communicating to animals that they do or do not wish to be eaten, but a rock of a certain color probably didn't go through any sort of process to convey a message to any recipient.
When I think of "raw data," I visually see a wall of numbers in Notepad on my computer. This, however, is far from raw data (data being used interchangeably with information here). How do we fathom what the pure state of information really is? It's always expressed in some manner.
The method of expression is language. Languages are systems for encoding and decoding information.
As Sue points out, I made no mention of body language in my previous post. She is absolutely correct, and has provided an excellent example of how to effectively wrestle with my proposed redefinition of transliteracy.
Two people engaging in a face-to-face conversation may use three or more different languages. They'd speak verbally, they may gesture or use other body language, and may have intentionally-or-not decided to express information through scent.
What if this face-to-face conversation was flirtatious? The information expressed verbally might be playful and flattering. The body language could be expressed as a visual language of lines, shapes, colors, etc. The olfactory language could be pleasing found scents applied to the body or pheromones secreted involuntarily. There could even be touching. But I'm not writing a romance novel here, so let's leave this example and move elsewhere.
Someone transliterate in the languages of a face-to-face conversation is able to decode the information encoded and expressed by the sender, then encode and express that information via language (though not necessarily the same language[s] used by the other party). Since the information from one language may conflict with another, it's important to be able to encode and decode the information in order to interpret it. If I say 'yes' verbally but shake my head to indicate 'no,' what am I really communicating? This is a basic example of transliteracy.
I'm using language explicitly here as systems of encoding and decoding information. Dr. Thomas mentioned other types of languages as examples that aren't included in that sense. Cultural Language and Sensory Language as I'm interpreting them (though, to be honest, I don't really understand them) are sets of terminology within a language. This would be like the 6th definition in Princeton's wordnet listing for language.
If we operate from different definitions of language this communication falls apart, so I'd like to emphasize that I don't mean language in the sense of terminology.
I contend language is the right unit to use for literacy because it plays well with original definitions of literacy and transliteracy. Since the terminological taxonomy of language is ironically poorly-defined, this is not as of yet an ideal solution.
However, it has an advantage over the current working definition of transliteracy that the base unit of language can be compared and contrasted. Since media, tools, and platforms are disparate things, you cannot express insights across them, which is the entire point of the trans- prefix attached to the word. By having one unit, whether you choose to call it language or 'medium' or 'channel' or 'kwyjibo,' you can then make comparisons.
You can see the comparative ability in the face-to-face conversation example. Different languages are used to express information; sometimes different information in different ways. One person, instead of blushing, could just say "I'm embarrassed." What strengths and weaknesses do these languages have over one another for expressing information?
More importantly for the sake of argument - how would you comparatively express face-to-face conversation in the context of media, tools, and platforms?
By using language as the base unit, we are also afforded the terminology and theory of linguistics to express and grapple with the communicative concepts. This provides us with an interdisciplinary framework for discussing the implications of transliteracy.
It's also useful for applying transliteracy in a pedagogical sense. If we want to ensure a learner is equipped to use flickr, we just need to teach them the necessary underlying languages - be they written, visual, interface, or otherwise.
I encourage you to look at some of the great examples of transliteracy on the transliteracy.com site and consider which languages are at work in each communication. Moreover, consider how you would then teach the necessary literacies such that others could communicate in the same manner.
I hope this post provides a little more clarity into what I mean by language and why it's a good choice for a base unit of transliteracy. Thank you.
Are you interested in mobile devices and how libraries can leverage the mobile surge? You may be interested in the presentation I did on May 20th for MCLS, entitled "Practically Mobile."
Hello. Thank you for sticking around to see me!
I'm Brad Czerniak, the Digital Resources Developer at Canton Public Library in Canton, MI. They let me hack and play with cool technology all day. It's a pretty sweet gig.
Today I'll be talking about some common-sense ways to enter the mobile arena.
I'd also like to reassure you that if you're not doing anything mobile yet that you're probably doing just fine.
First, a little activity:
Now this is totally optional, but I encourage you to do it. Get out your phone
Add me to your address book. Put me under "Brad Czerniak" or "Brad Library" or whatever.
Feel free to call or text me with your mobile and library-related questions.
Like, for instance, if you're about to go into a meeting with your boss and you need a bleeding-edge new idea and some encouragement. That would be a good time to call me.
If you want to text me questions during this presentation, that's cool too.
So this is a pretty broad question.
Many of us here spent years in classrooms just trying to skim the surface of this question.
Luckily that's not really what I'm asking
When you're watching TV and there's a song you like in a commercial, where do you go to look it up?
Of course Google, but how do go about actually doing the search?
Where specifically do you enter the search terms?
For me, the answer is the browser search bar
I love the browser search bar
Every major browser has some type of search bar. Even Chrome.
Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Youtube are all a click and typing your query away.
So
Take a look at your website analytics. If your library is like mine, people use your catalog a lot.
So your catalog - it's basically the search engine for things in your collection, right?
Can your patrons search your catalog from the browser search bar?
If not, why not?
Let's take the obligatory code peek at what's necessary to make this happen.
An OpenSearch description is a tiny XML file. All you have to do is link to it in the head of your web pages.
Autosuggest is trickier, but definitely possible. In the description file it's just these two lines at the bottom.
Is OpenSearch just a minor detail?
Or does the fact that so few libraries offer it speak to something?
Is there a gap between what we offer and how our users interact with information?
Are our users searching Amazon when a splash of XML and a pinch of psychology could change their behavior?
Getting patrons to think of the library when they have an information need isn't easy.
So where do we start?
We have to find the points of entry.
The browser search bar is a good example of a point of entry.
Once we find one, we need to set a path for the user
So let's say you add an OpenSearch XML file to your site.
The next step is to advertise your new Browser Search Bar plugin along with installation instructions
In this case: "if the arrow is glowing blue or orange, click it" You can also make a JavaScript button to do it from a blog post
Then add some search behavior examples to the mix
"Instead of searching Amazon for that new movie, search our catalog and put it on hold. It might take a little longer, but you'll save $20"
and you've injected your services at the patrons' point of need.
But what about people on the go?
What's the starting point for information needs on a mobile device?
Well -- It depends.
You can't rely on a patron to have a smartphone.
It's a safer assumption that your patron has a phone, mobile or otherwise.
When a user has a mobile phone you can be almost sure that the device can send and receive text messages, even if its user can't.
Mobile sites and apps are a few strategic steps ahead. Step 1 in mobile is having a phone number folks can call.
So you have this phone number - are as many people calling as you'd think?
The worldwide trend is more people with more phones. Are you getting more questions?
If people knew they could get questions answered by Master's Degree-holding local experts via phone (or text message, or chat, or email, or in person), would 3-1-1, 4-1-1, KGB, ChaCha, and other services be able to stay in business?
Do patrons know what they should be asking?
A good way to increase calls is to make sure your users have your number handy.
You can do this by:
Then you have to sell it. Demonstrate the product, like Ron Popeil or Billy Mays. Your product is free, so all you have to do is provide the why and how of using it:
Ever since reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
(I'll give you a second to write that down)
Ever since reading it I've been obliged to mention it in every PowerPoint presentation.
The book teaches that ideas with staying power tend to be one or more of the following:
So give tangible use case examples that the patron can relate to and be reminded of when a similar situation arises
Like, when you need a bleeding edge idea to give your boss.
So we've got the telephone part down. Now let's look at other ways patrons can ask you things.
There are a bunch of solutions out there:
Library Success Wiki Online Reference Page
Here's what we're doing at Canton:
For the last 2 years we've been using a Gmail for IM reference. You can sign into AIM from Gmail too, so it's really 2 accounts.
On our site we have heavily modified Google Talk chatback badges. After picking a Kids or Adult librarian, it pops out a new little window, so the patron can switch pages while continuing to chat.
Here's what our Gmail account looks like:
We use Multiple Inboxes, plus filters, plus labels to make everything easier.
The second inbox down here is for bibliography requests, which we label "May We Suggest." By setting up filters looking for forwards and replies and applying labels accordingly, we can automatically track the status of the bib being assigned and created
This Gmail account is also a Google Voice account. Text messages sent to a local number Google provided show up in the inbox.
You can reply to them just like emails, except 160 characters or less.
When you call the Google Voice number it forwards the call to the library's main line, so patrons can text and call a single number.
For the price tag of $0 and the ease and convenience of it all, it's a good investment.
If you're moving toward cloud-based infrastructure to save on IT costs, this is a great test suite for Google Apps. [wink. wink]
I heartily suggest a presentation by David Woodbury and Jason Casden at North Carolina State University Libraries entitled "Library in Your Pocket". They give some really good advice. I do take issue with one of their slides, though - it says "'Mobile' is not just shrinking the page"
Somebody should tell that to the iPhone's Safari browser!
When I first got my iPhone 2 years ago, I had the choice of starting up my slow, loud, hot 6-year-old desktop computer or surfing the net on my phone.
So, by surfing the web on an iPhone exclusively for 6 months, I learned a thing or two about how the mobile web works.
My conclusion: The mobile web is a lot like the regular web, but smaller.
Fast forward to now: In the last month, approximately 1% of Canton Public Library's website visits came from mobile devices, with iPhones, iPods, and iPads making up the majority of those visits.
Android is catching up quickly, too.
There are two important things to note about this 1% stat:
If you haven't visited your website on an iPhone, catch me sometime today. I'm confident that a quick demo will make you think "that's not so bad!"
That's the same thing iPhone owners think. And they're the ones doing nearly all the mobile web surfing.
This slide is intentionally crammed with words.
I'm going to quickly touch on each of these points, but here's the gist
there are a lot of things you can do when making a "mobile site" that can be worse than not making a mobile site at all.
Automatic redirects - If someone clicks a link, like, to a blog post, the worst possible outcome is being redirected to a mobile homepage without any way to view the intended content.
If you can't get to your mobile site from your full site easily, or vice versa, you're setting users up for failure.
If your website is mobile-fied and perfect but your catalog isn't mobile and looks totally different, that's a failure. That's actually a failure no matter what size screen you use.
I'm using Progressive Enhancement as an umbrella term for:
High performance mobile sites cache files, reduce file size and compress, and stick to best practices.
Mouseover menus are frustrating, since they rely on mouse hovering. Touchscreen devices don't have hovering, just touching. This was one of Steve Jobs' cases against Flash, but it's not only a Flash problem.
A late-model device connected to fast wifi is just a computer with a small screen. A crippled mobile site doesn't match user expectations.
I'll talk about apps in the next slide
Nothing on the web is "set it and forget it." Once you make your mobile interface you have to test it with users and develop and design it and continuously improve
Don't make a mobile site just because everybody else is doing it (poorly).
Apps
Here's the deal with apps:
You most likely shouldn't make one.
Platform apps require a significant investment of learning, time, and money.
The two biggest platforms at present have totally different programming languages and APIs.
So, creating apps for both means keeping up with upgrades and bugs and general quirks across two platforms and two languages and multiple device versions.
Web apps, when properly designed OTOH, are cross-platform and standardized.
Platform apps allow for more hardware integration, like GPS, camera, and other features.
If you don't need to use those features, a platform app is probably a huge waste.
Platform apps do have the advantage, though, of being in an app store or marketplace, which is great for generalized apps, and was great for all apps when there were fewer competing, but is now rather crowded out.
I think many app developers hope that more people will use a platform app as opposed to a web app. There are certainly circumstances where this is true, but is it true for libraries? How do your users get to your site? How are they expected to know you have an app? iPhone owners: ever searched the app store for your city on a whim?
Keep in mind Apple's inconsistent and harsh app approval policies. You could spend months making an app and then have it get rejected.
Web apps, besides being cross-platform, can also mimic platform apps with a little ingenuity. Google Buzz has a little bubble that pops up when you first use it on an iPhone that prompts you to add it to your home screen. At this point it looks more or less like a platform app.
Here's what a home screen bookmark for CantonPL looks like on an iPhone. Do you have apple-touch-icon.png in your server root, along with your favicon?
What if --
You only had to maintain one site with one set of content
And
No matter which device accessed the site, the URLs were always the same
And
That site was optimized for whichever device was using it?
That would be ideal, right?
Well, that's the idea behind a general philosophy and a few technologies.
At first it was called "browser sniffing" and it didn't work where it counted.
It required JavaScript and the devices that could have benefited didn't HAVE JavaScript.
Nowadays, you can keep a separation of content, style, and behavior and pull off something similar. An emerging standard called CSS3 media queries along with similar JavaScript means that one site can look a bunch of different ways, depending on the size of the screen.
Yes, it still takes work, but the end result is consistent and more maintainable. If you have the ability to tweak the CSS and JavaScript of your catalog, you can have a unified interface!
Real quickly, I'd like to talk about vendor apps.
Why not (exclusively) use a vendor solution, like LibraryThing's upcoming Library Anywhere, or Boopsie, or any of the other cool stuff out there?
Customization.
Getting a generalized vendor solution to provide exactly what we provide but in their mobile app would end up costing as much or more as doing it in house. Vendors have the habit of charging you annually, and justifying new expenses is getting kinda hard.
That's not to say that the vendor products I've tested aren't good. Boopsie's app for Seattle Public Library is quite nice. Library Anywhere is a great multi-library catalog interface. It's still in beta, too, so it could get even better.
In my not so humble opinion, suiting one site to multiple devices is the best bet.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't reach out to other apps, though.
These three apps are used to a disturbing amount on mobile devices.
If you have a facebook page and push out updates, mobile users can see them.
If you tweet, mobile users might see it.
It your library is a foursqure venue, your patrons can check in. People might compete to be your mayor.
These tools let you promote services, give timely reminders of events, and generally foster good will.
So that's cool, right?
Before closing (and going improv in the remaining time) I'd like to touch on other implications for the mobile device revolution. Here's one scary example:
Not too long ago, curious hackers would print out paper booklets full of barcodes called fuzzers.
They'd do this because barcode scanners are a lot like keyboards, except different.
When someone writing software expects input to come from a barcode scanner, they're less likely to 'validate' the input to make sure it's barcode-like.
So, someone with a lot of time on their hands and some custom-made barcodes could often do some damage.
Someone with an iPhone and basic web design skills can now do the same thing, but without having to print the barcodes. Oh, and much faster.
Are your self-check stations secure? How do you know?
Do they validate input to make sure they're getting numeric barcodes?
Do they only allow a few bad scans before timing out for a while?
Do they require a secondary piece of information, like a user's name?
For all you LOST fans. These have been around for a while, but I figured they were worth putting up:
Transliteracy defined as a cross-media ability misuses the word literacy, since the base competency of literacy is language rather than medium.
First - I regret my approach to the subject of transliteracy via twitter. As librarianbyday claimed, my initial criticisms were vague and perhaps unjust. Before proceeding I would first like to apologize if my meanings were unclear or personally hurtful. That was not my intention.
I insinuated transliteracy was “a bullshit made-up term for the same old stuff.“ This isn’t entirely or necessarily my stance, given that my qualms with transliteracy stem from a poor common definition of literacy. The application of the term literacy across media, as such, was hasty since I myself had not defined literacy as pertinent to my argument. I apologize for this basic error.
Before proceeding to the meat-and-potatoes of my argument I would like to take this opportunity to point any readers to two blogs which I quite admire:
You can view the twitter meta-discussion to see where such arguments began, though they are conveyed at basic level. What follows is more rigid in interpretation and as such the twitter discussion merely serves as metadata (ha!) to the real deconstruction of transliteracy as a term and definition.
Or more correctly, "Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another” as Voltaire wrote in Dictionnaire philosophique. It is in the transliteracy.com 'working' definition of transliteracy that vague terminology originates apropos to this discussion.
Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.
This definition is hasty because transliteracy is not an arbitrarily-coined word. As the authors of Transliteracy: Crossing Divides point out, transliteracy is an existing term stemming from the verb ‘to transliterate.’ Both they and Sue Thomas in her report on the Transliteracies conference quickly jump from talking about language to mentioning media, tools, and platforms.
Transliteracy in its original definition is well-defined and valid. It is the prefix trans- added to the word literacy, which has a strong denotation. Literacy here is the ability to read (and often write) in a given language. The test of whether one is literate as such is language-dependent. In practice, transliteracy would then be the ability to transliterate - commonly referring to a process by which one language with different character-to-phone rules is converted to another.
It's important to treat the "same language" with different sensory and communicative characteristics as a different language. For instance, the “English language” can be represented via touch in braille. Someone who can interpret input (interpret being defined loosely here) in the form of raised dots is said to be literate in that given language’s Braille. English in Braille and common written English are not a 1:1 comparison; since Braille characters are larger than written characters for tactile purposes, contractions unfamiliar to readers of written English are used. While fluency in ‘English’ is implicit to one literate in English Braille, the change of format necessitates many real differences and presents real barriers that make these different language literacies and fluencies.
You may have noticed that I’m playing faster and looser with the word language than you may be accustomed. Straight from Wikipedia:
A language is a system of signs (indices, icons, symbols) for encoding and decoding information.
In the introductory paragraphs of that same article, distinction is made between spoken language and written language. I think this distinction is necessary, and grant that a permeable umbrella term “language family” can be used to refer both to historically-linked different languages of written or verbal form, but also to contemporary languages that are closely related across those barriers. For the purposes of this article I’d like to grant that spoken English, written English, English Braille, American Sign Language (to a less-clear extent), and others are part of the English language family. As a further look at language families will attest, there is a certain lack of taxonomic clarity to how language families are described.
Now we’re getting somewhere! Visual language has structural units, like any other language. Via Wikipedia:
Its structural units include line, shape, color, form, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space and proportion.
I contend that medium, if not directly a part of this list, is at least strongly intertwined with the other structural units. As such, medium is most connected to the visual language of a piece compared to other languages.
This is an important distinction because there is so much communicative variation within and across media. An LCD screen can be used for almost anything, and a huge range of information and emotion can be expressed as sound over air.
There is a dependency, as such, on the visual language for expressive purposes. Two artists could express the same concept with different visual languages in much the same way that a fluid column of text on a computer screen could communicate the same information as a fixed column on a printout. Visual literacy, then, is the ability to decode and encode information from visual language. Visual fluency is the ability to derive meaning from that visual information.
The signs, symbols, analogies, literals, and physical attributes of a given piece as they convey information pertaining to the usage of said piece.
In many instances the interface is rather passive. A painting on a wall is only interacted with in the sense that it is viewed. One could make the case that an ornate frame informs the user not to touch the piece. Not touching is an interaction vector.
A book’s binding, in conjunction with elements of written and visual language, inform the user on the method of turning pages. By interface convention, a book user may also naturally assume to find certain interface elements in commonly-found places: jacket, title page, verso, contents, index, etc.
A computer has a literal, physical interface language at the first layer. An ‘on’ button, a keyboard in a likely-familiar layout, a pointing device of some sort.
The on-screen interface prior to the GUI was essentially a programming language in the form of shell scripting.
Different GUIs have different interface languages. While Mac, Windows, and the common Linux windowing systems are the stand-out examples of this principle, it’s worth noting that different versions of an OS often contain striking differences in interface language.
Languages evolve.
The web is a curious sea of interface languages. At the very core, it’s a “frame story” of interfaces, in that the browser’s cues aren’t necessarily those of the base OS’s GUI (that was fun to write, btw). The ever-changing elements of hypertext are another layer on top of that. Then, site-and-or-page-specific styling via CSS enable a web designer (that designation used loosely here) to change the interface language much further.
I’ve already placed media in the spectrum of language scopes where I believe it fits - that of visual language (or perhaps aural). Platforms and tools can be found much higher up the chain.
A platform - let’s use Windows XP as an example - is a combination of many languages, some not elaborated upon in this article. A user of the platform must learn certain interface language elements, many of which are composed of visual language elements that the user should also likely know. The interface is loaded with written language and various sound-based languages. What’s so interesting about this from a ‘transliteracy’ perspective is that there are degrees of iteration, inclusivity, and exclusivity to the necessary competencies.
A tool could really be anything, but let’s use Facebook as an example. It fulfills the laughable “digital social network” component of the original re-definition, which is a plus in my book. Sure, Facebook has very much become a platform as of recent, but since tools and platforms fall out of what I’m asserting is the scope of transliteracy’s definition, let’s just move forward with Facebook as a tool. It’s part of the previously-explained frame story. It can use its own interface language and interchange written languages, but abides by common web interface language conventions in order to promote usability.
The important part here is that platforms and tools are combinations of languages, while a medium is only part of a language.
Transliteracy is the ability to encode and decode information between or across languages.
I believe this definition meshes well with the original definition and works with the contemporary work done under the umbrella of transliteracy. It is perhaps necessary to better define the different types of languages and create a more-holistic model for their interaction, though.
Sorry Andy, I’m going to pick on your latest post a little bit. On his blog, he wrote regarding the future of libraries:
Personally, in the future, I think that the main focus of librarianship will rest on two areas: transliteracy and customer service. For me, transliteracy is the best umbrella concept to the multi-disciplinary knowledges that the future of information will require. With information storage occurring in a multiple of mediums (audio, video, and written recordings, for example), the ability to navigate the formats will become a necessity.
Personally, in the present, this doesn’t mean much. It’s essentially saying “I think the main focus of librarianship in the future will be knowledge.”
Without specificity when using the term (ie. “This is apropos to transliteracy because the user must be able to go across these specific languages in order to interpret the end-goal information”), it could conceivably refer to the entirety of human perception. That’s a huge umbrella that contains the past, present, and future of libraries, as well as the rest of the perceived and readily-perceptible universe.
Great care should be taken to convey scope as it pertains to transliteracy.
I’m no linguist, psychologist, philosopher, or artist. I know I’ve left out certain context for brevity (ha!) and have undoubtedly made unintentional mistakes. There’s been a ton of work that applies to this one term, of which I personally have only skimmed the surface. Here is a list of Wikipedia articles that I think will be useful for yours and my further study: