I had to miss the first day because of another commitment, but today i’m here at BibleTech:2011 and looking forward to a great day of talks. Hopefully mine will be one of them: here’s my abstract.

Using the Bible Knowledgebase for Information Integration

In 2009 I reported on the Bible Knowledgebase (BK), a machine-readable collection of semantically-organized data about people, places, and things in the Bible. This talk will describe how the BK now functions as an essential information resource for Logos, tying together information across the software. In addition, I’ll discuss the continued work on the data over the last two years, including:

• building a database of Biblical Events
• adding unnamed entities to the database
• coordinating information about these entities with the Logos Controlled Vocabulary

I’ll also present prototypes for visualizing BK data to enhance discovery and exploration in the Biblical text.

I’ll be live-blogging a few talks during the day to give a quick-take on the subject for those who can’t be here. You can also follow on Twitter via #BibleTech.

I know, i know … all the Cool Kids(tm) were using Twitter way back in, like, 2008, so i’m very late to the table (and therefore not very cool). But at long last, i’ve decided to take the Twitter plunge and try it out.

Why did i hold out so long? I’ve long been convinced that attention is one of my most precious possessions: it’s one of the few things that’s uniquely under my control. I’m already highly prone to distraction, so it’s not like i need any help in that department. I’ve been afraid Twitter might prove endlessly distracting without providing enough value in return. The danger of continuous partial attention is being perpetually shallow (and there’s plenty of science to suggest that multitasking is just a myth: our brains don’t work that way).

So what pushed me over the brink? Well, @TimOReilly did. I went to the Strata conference last month (still hoping to blog a summary at some point), and they were giving away his book on Twitter (#TwitterBook, @TwitrBook: he was co-author with Sarah Milstein). It’s a very practical, easy read, and they made a convincing case that Twitter is really a new communications medium with a lot of advantages: those don’t come along too often. They also described a three-week Twitter test-drive:

• follow a few promising accounts and check into Twitter at least once daily for 5-10 minutes
• check trending topics every couple of days
• spend 30 minutes one day running a few searches

After three weeks, you’ve only spent a couple of hours, but you’ve given it a fair try. So i figured that’s a reasonable experiment (and that’s basically the approach i plan to take).

Other motivations:

• I enjoyed blogging, and still hope to get back to doing that more consistently. But there are too many things for which i want just a quick capture-and-spray, even if i don’t have the time for my usual full, clever write-up. Twitter makes that possible by forcing the length constraint: say it in 160 characters, or don’t say it  at all.
• One of our sons-in-law has started  a new business called Social Synergists which helps companies with their social media marketing  (hi Jordan!). I want to have a better feel for Twitter culture so i understand his challenges, and you have to be on the inside to get that. (I’d encourage you to follow and like them on Twitter and Facebook)

I still view this as an experiment: i may decide it’s just not worth the effort, and i don’t expect to go hog-wild (particularly since, in another display of non-coolness, i don’t have a web-enabled phone, so i can’t easily tweet-out-and-about).

So if you’re a Twitternaut, feel free to follow me (@SeanBoisen), and suggest the people you think are most worth following: with @TimOReilly’s tutelage, i’ll try to make it worth your attention.

This is a great grab-bag of detailed tips (“Mechanics”) and general approaches/philosophies (“Practice”) for helping serious programmers be more productive (this isn’t a book for the average user). Most programmers know that the difference between an okay developer and a great one isn’t fractional, it’s an order of magnitude or more. The ideas here are part of that body of knowledge that makes for great programmers.

Many readers will find sections where they say “yeah, I know this stuff”: if so, pat yourself on the back as a seasoned developer. But more likely you’ll find at least a few tips worth trying, or be reminded of something you never took the time to try out (but should have: how did I miss multiple desktops for Windows?). Those little gems are worth the price of this book, and you can easily skip the rest. The key to books like this is to set aside a little time each day for improving your craft.

Along the way, Ford’s notes supply zen-like snippets of programmer wisdom:

• “Search is faster than navigation”
• “Don’t spend time doing by hand what you can automate”.

and dozens of others. You’ll even learn a little history about Aristotle, Occam, and other subjects. Definitely recommended (if taken as directed).

[Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. But i would have read it anyway. ]

A few years back i blogged about links into Logos software as a kind of knowledge resource. This style of richly-hyperlinked information is increasingly becoming the standard way i try to communicate: it couples the basic textual content with doors that open into related areas.

With the release of Logos 4 (now a year ago!), there have been some significant changes both to how those links get expressed, and what kind of information can be linked to. So i recently wrote a post for the Logos Blog explaining how this works and why Logos users might care:  Logos 4 Information Has an Address. If you’re a Logos user, i encourage you to check it out!

From time-to-time i find things of interest: blogging them here helps me hang on to the data and conclusions, and might be of interest to others too.

“… the  death of the printed book, at least on campus, has been greatly exaggerated …”

According to a study from the National Association of College Stores (not necessarily an unbiased source):

• only 13% of college students purchased an electronic book of any kind during July-Sept
• just over half of those were primarily for required class materials
• 92% of students indicate they don’t own an e-reader
• of those who had purchased an e-book, 3/4s used it on a laptop or netbook

Google Books “About this book” Feature

This post about the Books in Browsers conference pointed out a feature of Google Books that apparently many folks, including me, haven’t paid much attention to: the “About this book” page. That page for DeSilva’ “An Introduction to the New Testament” includes, in addition to the reviews and related books links (which are also on the main page):

• a (noisy) contents list with hyperlinks
• a word cloud of common terms and phrases, which link to full-text search
• popular passages that appear in other books (here they’re all quotations from the Bible!)
• References to this book from other books and Google Scholar
• A Google Map of places mentioned in the book. It clearly has some smarts, but placename extraction and normalization is a very hard problem: for example, “Emmaus” is linked to a city in Pennsylvania, not the appropriate place in Palestine.
• Links to other books by this author, and with the same subject index terms (e.g. “Religion/Biblical Criticism & Interpretation/New Testament”)
• Buttons to export the citation in several formats

That’s quite a wealth of information! (Apparently you only get it for books with previews?)

I admit it: i’m a junkie when it comes to information about leadership and influence. Ultimately, my life’s productivity comes down to

• what i can accomplish all by myself: that can be substantial, but there are always limits
• what i can accomplish through others, which is effectively unlimited

So if you care at all about getting things done, i’d argue you need to learn everything you can about how to lead and influence others (along with motivating them, training them, equipping them, etc.).

With this background, i’m looking forward to the Leadership & Influence Summit. Rather than requiring the time and expense of traveling to a conference, this is a free virtual event. They’ve captured brief videos (6-20 minutes) from about 30 leading authors and speakers, several of whom i recognize as having material i’ve heard or read, or have been interested in.  From now through Nov. 15 you can access the videos at your leisure, and get a quick-take on this speaker’s message. This seems like a very useful way to overview a lot of speakers and materials, with links to more.

Disclaimer: you have to register, so they get your email address, and i expect they’ll use that to offer you other material and opportunities. I don’t know anything about the organization behind it. But this seems like an innovative approach to bringing together a great collection of material in bite-sized pieces.

If you revel in data (and who doesn’t! , check out Technology Review’s article on How to Use Twitter for Personal Data Mining. Even if (like me) you’re not a twitterer (or do you call that a twit?), this is a nice introduction to data mining using nothing more complex than text editing and a simple visualization tool.

The techniques described here are applicable to lots of other data sets too (including perhaps the promised history of your Facebook wall posts: my account doesn’t have this feature yet, so i don’t know what this will look like).

Even if it seems silly to analyze what you yourself have said, it’s worth thinking about the data tracks we all leave around now, and what we (and others!) might do with them.

Great piece from Michael Schrage at the Harvard Business Review blog: Higher Education is Overrated. Skills Aren’t. I’m no basher of formal credentials: i’ve even got a couple myself. But i too have been frustrated (multiple times) by computer science majors who aren’t effective programmers, to take one example.

His bottom line is that skills and accomplishment are really the coinage of business, and there’s no guarantee they follow directly from  formal education (valuable though it might be).

Some other quotable quotes:

• “Knowledge may be power, but “knowledge from college” is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. “
• “Treating education as the best proxy for human capital is like using patents as your proxy for measuring innovation”
• “Academic and classroom markets are profoundly different than business and workplace markets. Why should anyone be surprised that serious knowledge/skill gaps dominate those differences?”

We all know there’s a massive shift of information onto the Internet, with Google Books scanning whole libraries, more content being born digital, the transformation of digital libraries, and tera-peta-exa-zeta-yotta-yadayadayada-bytes of data going online. But somehow, those abstract notions don’t have quite the same tangible impact as actual physical artifacts (like books) with their connections to our personal histories. Here’s how this hit home for me today.

I first got interested in computational linguistics around 1979, when i was finishing up my degree at Occidental College (an independent major combining linguistics and anthropology) and playing around with computers. Later, as a graduate student in linguistics at UCLA, i attended my first academic conference in the field: COLING 84 at Stanford, a combined gathering of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It was a pretty heady experience for this young man: i still remember playing with the bit-mapped graphics on what i think was a Xerox Star, one of the earliest commercial systems with many of the display and interface innovations that are commonplace today.

I brought back the proceedings, a hefty volume about 3cm thick. Later i joined the Association for Computational Linguistics, which included getting the journal Computational Linguistics, and over the course of my 19 years with BBN Technologies i attended many annual meetings and other workshops, collecting proceedings all the time (they started distributing them on CDs around 2000). I have close to a complete collection of the journal for many years (dozens of volumes). I count 16 proceedings volumes, typically several cm each. All told. these were taking up about a meter of shelf space in my office, as they have for the last 10 years or so (the last one i have is from 2000, which is about when i got more involved in management and had a harder time justifying these kinds of technical conferences).

Today, casting about for a place to put some new books i’d acquired, i looked at these journals and proceedings, and had an epiphany. I googled a few articles: sure enough, they were all on-line. In fact, the journal became open access in 2009, and they’ve put all the back issues on the web as well. The ACL Anthology hosts thousands of computational linguistics papers, and they’ve provided digital versions of all the proceedings i have (and many many others). So all of a sudden, i realized i had a meter of useless paper volumes on my bookshelf.

You might wonder what took me so long. I do too: I guess one answer is simply inertia. I’ve had these volumes on my shelves for so long i hadn’t gotten around to reconsidering whether i really needed them. I’m also an information omnivore, so i’ve always been reluctant to just give them up (though i couldn’t tell you the last time i actually cracked the cover on one). In part, I suppose another reason is that having a shelf of professional journals and proceedings makes me feel smarter (silly though that sounds when said out loud): it’s evidence of many years of commitment to the field. In the digital age, these markers of industriousness are becoming as scarce as the artifacts themselves.

Some of these volumes have moved with me many times, from Los Angeles to Massachusetts when i took my first research position with BBN (1987), through various office moves there, when we moved to Maryland in 2000 (and more internal moves there), and when we moved to the northwest to work for Logos in 2007. That first COLING volume has been on my office bookshelf as long as i’ve had an office with bookshelves! But, with ever more information on-line (and much more findable and useful there), new books that need to find a home, and doubtless other office moves ahead … it’s time to let go and continue the march into the digital future.

A colleague recently described to me a professional meeting he attended for an industry that’s experiencing tremendous market pressures due to changes in technology. He characterized the attitudes of many old-school, late-career executives (who have been living in denial of the fundamental challenges) as “I just hope I can prop things up and keep them running for another 5 years so I can retire.”

Using retirement as an excuse for ignoring a challenge to your business is bad stewardship. If you’re in that kind of industry, you ought to either work to revive and/or redirect it (until the day you retire for the right reasons), or just be honest and quit now. It’s one thing to come to the end of your working career and retire because it’s time for you personally to do so. Industries change and die, and those kinds of transitions are normal too (though traumatic): maybe you need to acknowledge that and start moving your company to whatever comes next. But if you work for a company with customers, assets, and shareholders, you owe it to them to do the best you can with what’s been entrusted to you. Riding the train up to a washed out bridge, knowing that you can jump off at the last minute (even though all the other passengers are going down) is just plain irresponsible.