Saturday, March 27, 2004
Slave-Master Data
And now we come to it. It’s Friday, and I’ve got no great revelations, epiphanies, or even fleeting musings. I’ve been working too hard. It’s days like this which will ultimate determine the shape of this log. Will it be anything more than an elaborate record of fragments of my life, the boring ephemera of my day-to-day activities? Or will it be a forum for something actually thought provoking? I am faced with coming up with a new entry topic. I could talk about yesterday’s activities, but do I want to?
Well, for the past two days I have been occupied with formatting a massive report on the effectiveness of the English major based on survey materials collected by the Assessment Committee. My role is simply to make it look like it was put together by someone who actually knows how to produce documents on a computer. I’m also integrating graphic pie charts because the report is filled with mind-numbing statistics. The task is so repetitive and detail-centred, that I haven’t even had a chance to take in the implications of the report. Perhaps that will be a topic for a future entry.
For now, I’ll simply ask the question that often comes to my mind when faced with such documents. How can we find ways to present data in a form where it will be easy to manipulate by many different hands in many different media? On the Web XML is the answer, but what happens when you are given a text that has to be converted into such a flexible medium? This is precisely what is happening in a number of projects in the literary world. For instance, medieval texts are being marked up with tags to help in Boolean searches for online access; they can then be printed out with the tags stripped away in forms that look much like the original print editions. But who is doing the tagging? Mostly graduate student slaves, I gather. Doing this kind of work requires intelligence, and I wonder if it can ever be automated. As our society comes to rely more and more on flexible forms of data, the type of clerical work that these graduate students do, or that I have been doing, will become a perpetual need. I suppose the factory-line workers of the industrial revolution will become the data management slaves of the information revolution. The tasks may be just as laborious. But will they be more intelligent?
Well, for the past two days I have been occupied with formatting a massive report on the effectiveness of the English major based on survey materials collected by the Assessment Committee. My role is simply to make it look like it was put together by someone who actually knows how to produce documents on a computer. I’m also integrating graphic pie charts because the report is filled with mind-numbing statistics. The task is so repetitive and detail-centred, that I haven’t even had a chance to take in the implications of the report. Perhaps that will be a topic for a future entry.
For now, I’ll simply ask the question that often comes to my mind when faced with such documents. How can we find ways to present data in a form where it will be easy to manipulate by many different hands in many different media? On the Web XML is the answer, but what happens when you are given a text that has to be converted into such a flexible medium? This is precisely what is happening in a number of projects in the literary world. For instance, medieval texts are being marked up with tags to help in Boolean searches for online access; they can then be printed out with the tags stripped away in forms that look much like the original print editions. But who is doing the tagging? Mostly graduate student slaves, I gather. Doing this kind of work requires intelligence, and I wonder if it can ever be automated. As our society comes to rely more and more on flexible forms of data, the type of clerical work that these graduate students do, or that I have been doing, will become a perpetual need. I suppose the factory-line workers of the industrial revolution will become the data management slaves of the information revolution. The tasks may be just as laborious. But will they be more intelligent?
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