I approach a man sitting all by himself in a trendy coffee shop, cursing myself for having to conduct interviews for the ethnography class.
MR: “Excuse me, I’m a student here…and I’m conducting interviews about football violence”
Man: “You see, I study Egyptian hieroglyphics, so hieroglyphics – yes!, football – no!”
MR (slowly backing away): “Thanks…good luck with that”.
That’s the life of an amateur ethnographer. All of a sudden I’m completely overwhelmed with work. I realized from that start that all the classes here are very back-loaded. I guess it’s like my normal week at Stanford: every hour of every night is planned out. And if I don’t finish something when I have to, sleep just goes out the door. I’m also back in my “normal” 4am-11am sleep schedule. Oh well, I’ve done this all before. Easy.
We went to Windsor Castle on Friday. As the audio guide correctly summarized it “it looks exactly how you would expect a castle to look like”. The weather was nice, and beyond the castle, Windsor turned out to be a pretty hip touristy town. Tried Cornish pasties for the first time. Visited the state rooms in the castle. Not much else to report. Picture here:
On Sunday I completely my last photography assignment for the OxStu – the cricket semifinals. I still haven’t figured out what was happening, oh well I guess it’s just not meant to be. I do need to make a list of things to do here before I leave. Taking pictures should certainly on the list: Magdalen College with its tower, and its own Deer Park, as well as pictures of Oxford at night. This ride is going to be over in 12 days. And in 13 days, I’ll already be in San Diego starting my job. I should have made more time to travel around Europe, somehow. I feel like I’ve explored England pretty well, although trips to Dublin Edinburgh, York and Brighton are missing. Oh well, can’t do everything. I can take the pleasure in knowing someday I’m going to need to come back.
There are so novel ideas I have encountered in the past seven weeks, it’s probably going to take me the entire summer to analyze the experiences. One thing I can tell right now (and I never thought I’d say this), I miss Green Library. The search system, OLIS (the equivalent of Socrates) is terrible. You can’t sort results by anything. All libraries have short hours when they’re open and you can’t borrow books from most of them! I’ve been writing a paper in Pissarro for my Oxford as the City of Work of Art class, so I had to go to the library and stay there for hours and hours reading the appropriate books and making copies of the necessary pages. And they didn’t want to let me in because they were confused by my visiting student card.
After all, it’s all about how you organize information. The knowledge base is so vast. I believe the organization of currently information is as important as research and acquisition of new knowledge. What use is publishing a paper or a book if it’s going to be difficult for others to access? Until very recently, the organization methods have used classifications. Books were organized by subject, clothes by size, e-mail by folders. And while effective, the method has had a difficulty adjusting to the overabundance of available knowledge. When your subjects or folders become too bast, you need to create new subfolders with further subcategories. The process continues until you’re faced with an overwhelming hierarchical system, at which point it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for.
This is where the idea of search comes in. Google provides an amazing example of it with gmail. The e-mails are all stored in a giant box, and to retrieve a particular message you search for it. Yes, there are labels and filters, but all of those apply the same search-algorithm to the meta-data. this organizational method is become increasingly trendy: who needs folders when your every file is carefully tagged with searchable information. I, however, would like to provide a word of caution against this emerging method: to me there’s on serious disadvantage. With folders, you can quickly glance over the list to see what categories are available to choose from. With search, there’s no such option. In a sense, you have to know what you want to read before you can read it. You’ll never read an old e-mail you forgot about because there is no way for you to ever access it. You’ll never accidentally come across a useful article because by searching for something specific, you’re limiting yourself to what you already know exists.
