#Journalism future? ‘It’s in the data.’ #Metadata, that is – makes the #news last, rather than a perishable commodity http://tr.im/lmetadata
9:52 PM Jul 22nd from web

Montgomery brings an interesting perspective, with feet in the world of librarianship, where metadata has been a focus for a long time, and in journalism, which has only more recently begun to awaken to the value of metadata. Montgomery’s tweet links to a blog article (The Future, it’s in the Data) by journalist Carrie Brown-Smith (@Brizzyc), who interviewed Montgomery. Here’s an excerpt …

(quoting Montgomery) Librarians are precisely who have been leading in adding value and context to information … In all the ink and pixels spilled over the future of journalism I have not heard one mention of this … Information is valuable, and it needs structure, ­ keywording, and taxonomy added so it can be accessed, and repurposed.  All this is then repackaged and sold …

Brown-Smith also reports on a recent provocative article by journalist Dan Conover (@xarker) about the importance of adding data to news stories which could provide “a rich trove that could be mined to discover new connections and relationships.” (quote from Brown-Smith)

Conover’s article is a long and chatty discussion of metadata in journalism, and why news reporters resist adding it. He tells an interesting story of reporting on a house fire with and without metadata, and how coding can increase the future value of the work of reporting. He says that “the structure of [metadata] information is [now] the news organization’s primary product.” Unfortunately, though, he says, journalists hate the idea of adding this structured metadata — Why? …

Metadata coding is viewed as a library (or, in newsroom jargon, “morgue”) function … Journalism is a profession for storytellers, and our newsroom culture celebrates romantic myths that are generally hostile to structure. So I understand my curmudgeonly colleagues when they scoff behind my back at the word “metadata.”

I suspect that journalism is not the only profession that “celebrates romantic myths that are hostile to structure” … In journalism, as in publishing and libraries, discussed in my previous article, we’ve come to the interesting point when it’s the computer-library-coding geeks who will be, in Mike Cane’s words “the new publishers for a new age” … the ones who “make information do things.”

Eric Rumsey is @ericrumsey

Once again I come back to the theme of this blog — Pictures are just different — They don’t fit neatly into our categories. Pictures are an important part of several different media — books, magazines, newspapers, and (of course) art — So what slot do we put them in?

Even before the recent questions arose with Life Magazine pictures, Google Magazines, Google Newspapers, and Prado paintings, there’s the ongoing, but little-noted question of pictures in the growing collection of public domain books in Google Books. In my experience, these are completely absent from Google Image Search — When will Google make this connection?

Figuring out what category to put them into, of course, is a relatively minor problem compared to the BIG PROBLEM with pictures, which is making them searchable! If there was one category to put them into that was searchable, then of course that would be the place for Google to put them!

zKimmer.com has recently implemented Google Maps technology for viewing non-map text and picture resources, such as magazines and newspapers, which are converted from PDF format. This is an exciting development especially because it holds promise that the same sort of technology could also be used for books.

With Google’s great success using a zooming-panning interface in Google Maps, and having recently launched Google Newspapers which also uses it, the question naturally occurs — Will Google developers sooner or later also use it for Google Books?

The zKimmer screen-shots above are from a magazine (though they could easily be from a book) and those below are from a newspaper. They both show how this interface facilitates navigating a resource that includes extensive pictures as well as text.

zKimmer lacks a good search capability (it has a search box, but it doesn’t seem to work) — So it’s not ready for heavy-duty enterprise use — It’s exciting, though, because it shows the potential value of a zooming-panning interface for books. Google Books already uses panning and zooming in a limited way, for navigating between pages, but a multi-page pan and zoom, as in zKimmer, would greatly simplify picture and text navigation.

Other implementations of the Google Maps API for non-map graphic resources are a desktop collection of elegant books by the reclusive German techno-artist Markus Dressen, and a card set from the World Of Warcraft.

What caught my attention here is the ability to pan — to move around on the large newspaper page with the mouse by dragging the hand pointer. Use of mouse panning was introduced with Google Maps, and likely played a large part in its becoming so popular. Like a map, a newspaper page poses the same kind of challenge — How to design user navigation for information covering a large surface. As with Google Maps, here also it looks like Google Newspapers has set the standard for navigation of a large-paged information source, especially one with pictures.

Panning (and zooming, which is often discussed together with it) provide an interesting and challenging concept to search, because the words are in prominent use in other contexts, especially photography and video. Surprisingly, there’s no article in Wikipedia for the concept of panning as used for computer information navigation.

An elegant demonstration of panning is at the Hubble pan and zoom gallery.

Google: “pan around” google newspapers