Edward Tufte

I was lucky enough to attend an Edward Tufte workshop last month,and had a meeting today with one of the archivists at my library to discuss it. It reminded me about several things that were great about it.

• Sparklines  are probably the number one best takeaway. They are basically graphic images that get embedded into the text. You have probably seen more of these than you think–for example, they are used in this financial report from Yahoo. So, instead of having one data point, you basically have a whole lot of information coming to you at once, so you can put one data point into context. Apparently, there is now a TrueType font available, but I haven’t tried it. Doing a Google Image search for sparklines yields a lot of interesting examples.
• One of the most beautiful examples of design dates way back to Saturn images in Galileo’s text .
• The books! Edward Tufte’s books are beautiful.
• Never do powerpoint again. Do written reports that get handed out ahead of time. Tufte has an interesting article on Lousy PowerPoint presentations. Also, he has done work on conveying technical information in powerpoints, and how NASA had relied heavily on powerpoints during the Challenger days. This is fascinating, and sad days in scientific communication.
• Tufte has an amazing book collection. At one point he pulled out a personal copy of Euclid’s Geometry (1570) He noted that his copy was previously owned by Shakespeare’s contemporaneous playwright, Ben Jonson. This is the oldest pop-up book I have ever seen: three flaps of triangular paper come together in a 3-D point, to form a tiny pyramid. Tufte reprints an identical pop-up over 400 years later in Envisioning Information, on page 16. 

It has been a beautiful data kind of day!  I just ran across a story in Computerworld that has a great listing of 22 free tools for data visualization. And, Lauren Meyers, in our archive, just sent me this cool link to Victorian Infographics!

So, we are brainstorming around the library about how to make beautiful data, and mining the archives for some lovely examples of 3-D design in Euclid books, and old maps. We’ll let you know what we find!

Additonal note 5/5/2011: I had forgotten to mention anything about the Galileo sunspot animation. Tufte showed a film that one of his students had produced. In a similar effort, Rice’s Galileo Project had done short animations of the daily sunspot observations that Galileo had done in 1612. Really brilliant.

Science + Ethnology

I am currently in the middle of a small-scale ethnographic study to find information that will inform a discovery tool purchasing decision committee. Additionally, I just held the first team meeting of a group of librarians that will do a study of how researchers find, manage, cite, and publish their research this summer.

So, I was very lucky when I happened to read a tweet written by an anthopology graduate student last week talking about Sharon Traweek. Gosh, I wish I would have discovered her 10 years ago! Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists, written in 1988, captures the world of SLAC, and their labs, and really kind of reads like history of science now. Another book, Doing Science + Culture, edited by Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek is a series of essays about how “cultural and interdisciplinary studies are changing the way we look at science and medicine.”

The discovery of these two books has me on a great literature search to discovery more ethnography of the discliplines that academic libraries support–these should be required reading in library school! Even if you are not doing a research project where you need to understand your subjects a bit more, it provides a powerful context for what your users experience in the lab and their world; this understanding can lead to better service design.

As We May Evolve, Backstory

Thanks to the wonderful folks over at ACRL; they published my short post today: As We May Evolve. This is the backstory. Last year, in the Spring, I got to take a great History of Science class from Dr. Cyrus Mody. His class was fantastic, and introduced me to several great history of science writers, including David Kaiser. We had to write a 15 page paper, and I found myself wanting to do a history of science librarianship, focusing on the importance of physics librarians. But, that wasn’t what happened. Early on in the process, I found the great paper by Mark Bowles, and David Kaiser sent me a chapter of his forthcoming book: American Physics and the Cold War Bubble. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) And, I learned about the chemists. Also, I learned about Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He had issued a report in 1945 to President Roosevelt, entitled “Science – The Endless Frontier.” His views also appeared in a paper called “As We May Think” in the July 1945 Atlantic Monthly. He called for scientists to make more accessible the vast store of knowledge and thus extend man’s physical and mental powers. Reading between the lines, you can hear his call: libraries, and librarianship, is overwhelmed; scientists, move to action! From his experience working with some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare, he observed their information and communication needs. He saw great potential for focusing their knowledge in a new direction and developing instruments to give command over information. Dr. Bush called for a new relationship between thinking man and our knowledge.

The legacy of Bush lingered in the air for many years. In 1965, J.C.R. Linklider had been sponsored by the Council on Library Resources, Inc to write a book, Libraries of the Future.  He admits in his forward that he had hoped that this book would be a small step in the direction to which Bush had pointed in his pioneer article, but that he had not actually read the article until he finished the book. His omission of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” from his bibliography was noticed, and when he was advised to read it, he added to the forward, “Now that I have read it, I should like to dedicate this book, however unworthy it may be, to Dr. Bush.   (Linklider, viii).  Future Libraries details much about a future of libraries where access is easy, and computer systems enable greater information storage, organization and retrieval.  In the years after World War II, science and technology prospered, and the era of big science grew exponentially.

I didn’t learn any library history in grad school, so I have to say I am forever grateful to Dr. Mody. I still am looking for stories about early physics library history too!

Citing Abstracts and reprints!

This doesn’t happen very often, but as it came up again this week, thought I would post!

Every now and then I will get a researcher that is looking for a paper that has a citation for The Bulletin of the American Physical Society. The Bulletin contains the technical programs of APS general meetings and various unit meetings of the Society. But, the researcher is expecting a PAPER, not an abstract.

If you are citing from an abstract use the same style format you are using, but please  add the word [Abstract] in front of the word retrieved.

A sample citation using the APA style:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year).
Title of article. Title of Periodical, xx, xxx-xxx.
Abstract retrieved month day, year, from source.

CBE style:

Swanson TA, Blair P, Madigan L. 2004. Reduction in medication errors through redesign of the medication use system [abstract]. In: American Society of Health-system Pharmacists 39^th midyear meeting; 2004 Dec5-9; Orlando. Bethesda (MD): American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. MCS-28

Somewhat related, I had a researcher that had what he thought was a reprint of an early Scientific American article. The article itself says, “Reprinted by permission from Scientific American of March, 1922.”  The researcher just needed to find the article, and get the page numbers.  The researcher then learned, from another source, that the paper was  a modified reprint of an article from Scientific American, March 1921, which was used as a fundraising document-it was never actually PUBLISHED in Scientific American–it just had gotten permission from the author to be used, and I suppose it was a part of a package of handouts that donors received.

It doesn’t help matters that there currently exists a huge gap in the digitization of Scientific American. It is available online from the publisher from 1993-forward, and available from 1845-1908 from Proquest.

These are somewhat strange bibliographic cases, to be sure, but the bottom line is the accurate citing of material solves mysteries across time.

List of Bibliographic Style Manuals from Diana Hacker.

Research A to Z libguide resource.

Copenhagen and books scientists read

I have been watching the 2002 film Copenhagen, based on the 1998 play by Michael Frayn. Because, I am also currently reading the very indepth book, The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo, I find my mind putting these two things together. The book is amazing. It is a bit hard reading at times, but really is so rich. From the very beginning of Paul Dirac’s life, there are records of what he read, and when. We know that after being inspired by a series of lectures, that he “found a copy of Eddington’s book Space, Time and Gravitation, and he taught himself the special and general theories.” Likewise, after thinking he had come across a Poisson bracket, he waited till the next day to get into the library, and read A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies by Edmund Whittaker.
It is, of course, fascinating, to see where our ideas come from–who has inspired whom. Even more so, for these champions of physics.
There is often an argument about which is better–the movie or the book? In this instance, I would highly recommend watching Copenhagen to get the atmosphere of the times, and read The Strangest Man to delve deeply into the mind of a scientist.

History of Science Sources

I am thrilled to be taking a History of Science class this semester. Yesterday was our first class–mostly discussed the article by Daniel Kevles, “Foundations, Universities, and Trends in Support for the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1900-1992.” Daniel Kevles is currently at Yale, and is the author of a very good book on the history of physicists: The Physicists (1978) He also has an archived NPR podcast on Scientific Misconduct.

I had never really thought about life without, or before, the National Science Foundation. There is a great online history at: http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/ NSF was founded in 1950.

The girl who named Pluto

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/world/europe/11phair.html?_r=1&hpw

From the NY Times: Venetia Burney was just 11 years old when she heard of the news of the new "planet" protographed by astronomers at the Lowell Observatory. She suggested to her grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired head of the Bodleian Library, that it be named Pluto; Madan passed on the "excellent suggestion" to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, an Oxford astronomer, who telegraphed the idea to the astronomers at Flagstaff, and they liked it. Venetia Phair (her married name) died April 30th in banstead, Surrey, England.

2009 Events

2009 will be a busy year! In the year 2009, the world will celebrate the International Year of Astronomy as it commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of a telescope to study the skies, and Kepler’s publication of Astronomia Nova. 2009 is also the anniversary of many other historic events in science, including Huygen’s 1659 publication of Systema Saturnium. http://astronomy2009.us/

2009 is also the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary
of the publication of his seminal work, ‘On the Origin of Species’. Cambridge is having the biggest celebration: http://www.darwin2009.cam.ac.uk/  This is what we are doing locally: http://www.darwin2009houston.org/