August '07 Newsletter

by Gordy Slack

 

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) may be physically housed in a small office at UC Berkeley, but its virtual distribution is vast due to the humanities scholars who are employing its groundbreaking application of map-based technologies and metadata practices to better communicate their work and coordinate it with that of others in numerous fields. ECAI projects span the ages, too, from the depiction of ancient Buddhist migration paths to the whereabouts of valuable cultural artifacts in modern Iraq. In addition its conferences—a total of 19 of them in the past ten years—span the globe as well, with the most recent, titled “Time & Space in Eurasia,” at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in June 2007.

The initiative’s ambition, says co-director Michael Buckland, emeritus professor from the UC Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies, is “to improve the world by making scholars—particularly those working in the humanities and quantitative social sciences—take time and place seriously.”

Professor Michael Buckland co-directs the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

 

Humanities scholars obviously know when and where they are talking about with their projects, Buckland says, but the place and time references that they use are often embedded in such highly contextualized texts that they are opaque to those working in different areas of expertise, let alone to computers trying to sort and classify data sets from different sources and disciplines.

“Every state in the union has a town called Springfield,” says Buckland. “That fact makes marketing The Simpsons easy. But it makes disambiguating a cultural reference to some Springfield or other in an author’s diary quite difficult.”

“[If you] listen to people talk or watch them write, they do not use calendar dates much,” says Buckland. Instead, they tend to use cultural events to denote time. “If I say, ‘I own a Civil War weapon,’ in London, it is a 17^th-century weapon. In Madrid, it would be a 20^th-century weapon. In the U.S., it would be a 19^th-century weapon,” Buckland explains.

“Latitude and longitude and chronological time are the lingua franca across all disciplines,” Buckland says. “If you use them, you can bring together resources from different disciplines that do not talk to each other in a way that would not otherwise be possible.”

By standardizing the ways of referring to place (latitude and longitude, for instance) and time (calendar dates rather than terms that indicate historical eras) Buckland and founding co-director Lewis Lancaster, Professor Emeritus from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, are helping scholars to digitally process and present their research in ways that not only make it easier to share with colleagues and students, but that also can reveal new patterns and relationships within the work itself.

Once events that occurred in clearly defined places and times are analyzed on a map-based GIS, hidden relationships may be revealed and be fruitful sources for research. For example, one scholar spent decades conducting a thorough study of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the German language areas of Europe before the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century. Each destination was dedicated to some religious figure or other; the Virgin Mary, say, or a major saint like St. Paul, or a lesser-known local saint. After cataloging those destinations, the scholar put them onto a map showing both spatial and temporal elements. The maps revealed a strong correlation between preferences for pilgrimage destinations before the Reformation and a region’s likelihood of becoming Protestant or Catholic after it. Whatever influence Luther had on codifying the religious division of these areas, it seems plausible now that those divisions reflected earlier cultural divisions and not Luther’s will alone.

“In 300 years of Reformation studies, that [idea] had not occurred to anyone,” says Buckland. “It is hard to imagine how that hypothesis would have occurred to anybody if it had not been displayed on a map.”

Three years ago, at a conference in Vienna, the President of Austria, Dr. Thomas Klestil, called on the participants to help protect and make known threats posed by the Iraq war to the important cultural sites distributed throughout that country. President Klestil suggested that ECAI make an interactive, map-based registry of Iraqi cultural artifacts that weaved existing Internet-based data sources into a single user interface.

Professor Lewis Lancaster works to help scholars digitally process and present their research in innovative ways.

 

Soon after, Lancaster won support from CITRIS and Hewlett-Packard to launch such a project. Using TimeMap software developed in Australia, the resulting site, ECAI Iraq, permits users to explore the history, cultural sites, archaeological excavations, and heritage preservation initiatives in any Iraqi region by choosing a time-range and place from the site’s map-based interface.

To accomplish this act of digital coordination, though, consensus had first to be reached on just how places and times would be referred to by all of the participating databases.

Lancaster has long studied Buddhism’s progress north out of India and into the Himalayas, where it encountered a Greek-influenced penchant for statuary that evolved as the religion migrated. He is currently working from a $300,000 Luce Foundation grant to bring together scholars who study the history of different religions in China.

 

Such researchers typically do not communicate much with one another; but through Lancaster’s project are now working together on a unified, dynamic, historical map that will eventually portray the evolving geography of China’s entire religious history.

While ECAI focuses on getting scholars to pay closer attention to place and time designations, the When and the Where, its ambitions extend beyond that as well, into the Who and the What, says Lancaster.

“And just occurred as with our [first two] ‘W’s , the search for solutions identified other issues,” he says. “In the case of “Who,” the matter of “Who else” comes into play. People do not exist in a vacuum; they have networks of relationships and the nature of these relationships helps to determine the catchment area for individuals.” It is possible for “who” and “who else” to be put into a GIS with temporal connections and therefore made part of an ever growing, stronger, subtler, widely-distributed, contextualized data base of cultural information that could include biography.

“Humanities computing is a vastly underdeveloped area,” says Buckland. “The humanities generally have not been funded or supported with the equipment they could use. But eventually computing will have at least as big an effect on the humanities as it did on the sciences.”

Professor Ram Akella from UC Santa Cruz leads the KSEM program.

 

by Gordy Slack

 

Ram Akella hates getting stuck in the maze of irrelevant choices on a telephone help line. “It drives me crazy,” he says. But unlike most of us, Akella, Professor of Information Systems and Technology Management (ISTM) at UC Santa Cruz, is doing something about it. He is trying to help businesses learn from their mistakes—like having a dead-end help line—as well as their successes, and to then put that knowledge back into their business in order to learn, improve, and grow. That action may require little more than a good motto and customer-first attitude if the business is a mom-and-pop operation. But when the company is a large enterprise, like a major airline or a top healthcare provider, continued learning can be challenging indeed.

Challenging, but well worth the trouble, says Akella. Transforming an information glut into an information goldmine is the aim of knowledge science, and doing so in the burgeoning area of knowledge services is the focus of a one-year-old program at UC Santa Cruz: Knowledge Services and Enterprise Management (KSEM), a CITRIS-supported program at UCSC’s Silicon Valley Center that is offered by the Baskin School of Engineering through UC Santa Cruz Extension.

There was a time when the MBAs defined the objectives and strategies of a business and computer scientists would simply implement the IT portion of that plan. But today technology is so powerful and complex, so essential to any large enterprise, that it can no longer be considered separate from the business model itself, says Akella. Hence the CEOs and COOs of tomorrow need to have a nuanced and sophisticated grasp of knowledge science and services.

“KSEM is giving students the skills to address challenges faced in high-tech enterprises that require an integrated understanding of both technology and business to solve complex problems,” says Patrick Mantey, Baskin Professor of Computer Engineering and director of the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) and CITRIS at UCSC.

“Services are those things you pay for that you cannot drop on your foot—from dental work to high-end problem-solving in technical areas of information management problems,” continues Mantey.

Economists estimate that services now account for between 50 and 80 percent of the US economy. The “knowledge services” that are the bailiwick of high-tech industries constitute a huge and growing portion of that.

Each time a service is delivered, whether the interaction is successful or not, the provider has a chance to learn something valuable from the encounter. The businesses that succeed in learning, and in plowing their new knowledge right back into their operations, will remain on top, says Akella. Those that do not will fall behind their competition or simply drown in their data.

KSEM is a hybrid program, the product of the marriage between business management studies and computer science and information technology, says Mantey, and it focuses these newly intertwined perspectives on forging the future of the global knowledge-based economy.

“Students learn some elements of marketing, sales, finance, product development, and about the supply chain,” says Akella. “They learn how to integrate all those in a universe where we are constantly getting information. How do you mine that information to come to the best possible business decisions? That is the question we ask,” he says.

Helping businesses gain the edge that comes from good information management, and teaching computer savvy engineers and business savvy managers how to do that, are two of KSEM’s principal aims. The program currently offers its graduates a certificate, but Masters and Ph.D. certification are in the works; those degree programs will likely be available by Fall 2008, says Mantey.

Professor Pat Mantey is the CITRIS Director at UC Santa Cruz.

Information management will be an essential part of every successful future enterprise, says Akella. Some of those enterprises will provide “knowledge services,” such as Google and Yahoo! do, but even those that sell hardware, or airplanes, or flights, will have to keep improving their knowledge management if they wish to stay afloat and prevail.

When an enterprise is small, it can maintain its learning curve naturally, says Akella. But in a large and fast-growing business like CISCO Systems, there may be a thousand engineers answering customers’ questions every day. The lessons learned from those encounters may not necessarily make their way to the institutional knowledge base, unless someone, or some system, is making sure they do.

“Cognitive overload is a common symptom for quickly growing businesses with tons of information,” says Akella. “Even if service knowledge makes its way into a business, getting it back out can be tricky. If an engineer working a help-line does a search on a question that turns up a thousand documents, what use will they be to him? He needs one or two bull’s-eyes, not a warehouse full of near misses.”

Often service providers are caught between ignoring the information they have access to and being overwhelmed by it. Unless you provide some guidance, the system cannot tell which document is closest to your need.

Akella and his colleagues and students at KSEM have been working with CISCO for nearly a year to do just that. The relationship has been fruitful for both the program and for CISCO, says Akella. Increasing the efficiency of CISCO’s help center by only a percentage point or two can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the company annually, says Akella. And being surrounded by the top high-tech companies in the world makes a great learning environment for his students, he says. “The enterprises themselves are the test beds for our research,” he says.

In the past year, as KSEM has grown, Mantey and Akella have also seen a national consensus growing around the importance of knowledge sciences and services, they say. The National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences have each stressed the importance of investing resources in knowledge sciences. And this year IBM, Oracle, and 15 other leading technology companies formed the Service Research and Innovation (SRI) Initiative, whose mission is to draw funding toward service research, development, and innovation in the technology industry.

“Knowledge science and knowledge services are here to stay,” says Mantey. “They are no more a fad than electrical engineering was a fad. They will be defining elements of the enterprises of the future.”