Tag Archives: Technology

Communication Technologies Old and New

Tony Salvador and John Sherry, ethnographers for Intel Corporation’s People and Practices Group, spent four years traveling the world to see how computers are used. In a recent article the document some of their findings:

In fact, only about 10 percent of the people on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do. Most of them live in industrialized countries, or if they live in developing countries, they are part of the well-off, well-educated, and often English-speaking minority that resides in urban areas. Few come from the poor and sometimes illiterate masses.

The split between those with and those without access to digital technologies is referred to as the digital divide. But that phrase hides the complexity of the problem, because it focuses on the “having” and the “not having” of technology. Instead, what really matters is the ability to benefit from technology, whether or not that technology is personally owned.

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Forecast: Media Cloudy over Spanish Harlem

Although a tireless advocate of using new technologies in Anthropology, I’m careful to encourage those technologies which employ open standards and avoid requiring proprietary technologies. That way you can be reasonably sure that your information won’t be tied up in some technology that will eventually be defunct. This is why I am rather critical of a project I discovered browsing the schedule of the 2005 Margaret Mead Festival which starts today. (The festival site itself uses an annoying Flash interface. Ugh!)

The project is DIALelebarrrio, which describes itself as an effort to “create an ’embedded’ documentary in the streets of Spanish Harlem” by “creating a ‘media cloud’ over the neighborhood.” What is a “media cloud“?

[It] is a metatphor for a specific location-based source of digital information. DIALelbarrio wanted to create the image of a cloud full of stories, music, images and video, unique to the culture of Spanish Harlem, that hovers over the neighborhood and can only be accessed when physically in the area.

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Anthropology Job Search Via RSS!

Stop the presses! The AAA web site has discovered RSS feeds! And they’ve implemented them in a very useful place: job search results.

To get the RSS feeds you have to first go to the AAA Job Control Center, perform a search, then click on the RSS icon at the bottom. If you do an advanced search you need to create a “search agent” which will ask for an e-mail address (if you don’t want e-mail enter a dummy address). However, after creating the agent you have the option to “run agent” and the resulting search results will show the RSS link.

Two notes: The RSS icon is not, itself, an RSS link – but it takes you to a page which will provide you one for that search. Also, the resulting feeds all have the exact same title, so you will need to rename them in your feed reader. Still, this is a great quality of life improvement for me.

Social Anthropology Playlist

Michael Herzfeld, at Harvard University, has put his syllabus for Introduction to Social Anthropology online as an H2O Playlist.

What is an H2O playlist? Here is how H2O (a project of the Berkman Center) describes it:

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology — they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

H2O Playlists make it easy to:

  • transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools
  • share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders
  • let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields
  • promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers
  • communicate and aggregate knowledge — online and offline.

So, go on … check out existing playlists or create your own. You can also read our philosophy behind building this technology.

Sort of like a wiki or CiteULike, but somehow different. I’ll have to play with it some more before figuring out if it is truly “not suck,” but if it is easier for people to use than CiteULike and wikis it could be a good thing.

Found via Phil Bradley’s amazing “I want to …” list, which I discovered via Ishbaddidle.

UPDATE: Very strange, there doesn’t seem to be any interface to import/export from standard bibliographic formats. So, thumbs down for now. But it is still in beta so hopefully this is on their list of things to add before the final release.

Don’t be afraid of the Wiki!

There was some discussion, following Rex’s post on Wikipedia, as to whether or not people were ignorant or lazy in failing to edit Wikipedia articles. Since the examples Rex gave were of people who actually figured out enough of the technology to edit the “Talk” page, laziness seemed like the more likely option. However, I do think that learning a new user interface (and sub-culture) can be very intimidating. So I was very glad to see this excellent tutorial: How to contribute to Wikipedia.

I especially like this quote from Wikipedia’s own introduction:

Don’t be afraid to edit pages on Wikipedia—anyone can edit, and we encourage users to be bold…but don’t be reckless! Find something that can be improved, either in content, grammar or formatting, then fix it. Worried about breaking Wikipedia? Don’t be: it can always be fixed or improved later. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best source of information on the Internet!

One criticism, however: I think that one of the major hurdles people have with using Wikipedia is that they don’t realize that there is a built-in “undo” function, or that you can even compare edits over time to see what has changed. A really good tutorial should explain how this works as well, since I think it would make people feel more comfortable contributing.

Link Rot

Books go out of print, although you can usually find them in some library or used book store if you are desperate enough. Soon more publishers will be offering print on demand for rare and out of print books, which is great. And when books go in the public domain you can sometimes find them on Project Gutenberg. Music CDs go out of print, as do DVDs. That’s even harder to deal with, although there is a big second-hand market online you can explore.

But what to do when a URL goes dead? If it is recent you might be able to simply find it in the cached search results for Google or Yahoo!, but after a while I’ve found those caches are updated to show the error message on those pages. Well, there is the Internet Archive, which has the WayBackMachine, but that is not very good either. It sometimes works, but many sites block web engine robots from crawling their site. Other sites are simply difficult for the WayBackMachine to crawl, so you can find the front page, but then the links are all dead.

This is a serious problem for scholars and teachers. A study done in 2002 found that links for some courses in biochemistry decayed at the same rate as radioactive isotopes:

The links in the three courses had a half-life of 55 months: Half of the links would be expected to have died in 55 months, half of the remaining links would be expected to have died in another 55 months, and so forth.

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Is Wikipedia being destroyed by its own success?

A lot of people have argued that the Wikipedia suffers from credibility problems, will never be taken as seriously as a closed encyclopedia, and so on and so forth. As an enthusiastic participant with 107 pages on my watchlist I’ve always considered this sort of talk based either on ignorance or envy, but recently I’ve noticed a trend on wikipedia’s anthropology-related pages which indicates that the Wikipedia does face a challenge to its legitimacy — albeit not the ones that the critics might imagine.

One of the many pages that I watch is the entry on “Julian Steward”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Steward — in fact, I wrote most of the current entry. Recently someone left this comment on the “talk page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Julian_Steward for the entry:

According to what can only be called as the authoritative biography of Steward by Virginia Kerns (2003 University of Illinois Press), much of the information in this entry is incorrect. Please remove it until a new one can be added. It does no service to anyone to promote incorrect information. For example, beginning with the first sentence, Steward was not born into a family of devote Christian Scientists. His mother converted to Christian Science when Steward was 9 years old. This event seemed to precipitate his parents’ divorce and motivated much of his work against religion (Kerns 2003: 19-26). Kerns’ book corrects many inconsistencies, errors, and impossibilities in Shimkin (1964), Manners (1973), and Murphy (1977, 1981).

I’ve known for some time Kerns’s biography of Steward (I mentioned it “here”:/2005/05/26/evolutionary-biographies/) but I haven’t read it because there isn’t a copy on O’ahu, its too expensive for me to buy, and I haven’t gotten around to ILLing it yet. Sp I do agree with the anonymous commentor — if Kerns says I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. The problem is that this person complained about the content of this article as if it wasn’t in their power to change the contents of the wikipedia. It is one thing to bitch and moan about the low quality of the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s articles (compare Sol Tax’s entry on Boas in the EB to the “wikipedia version”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas) — you can’t do anything about what’s in that book. But not the Wikipedia — if you don’t like what you read, you should edit the page yourself!

This isn’t an isolated incident. At one point I attempted to make the entry on the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis be less suck. This involved doing some historical background on the way Boas’s research paradigm emerged out of a Neokantian background. The result was the following anonymous note in the talk page:

“Sensuous intuition” is not noumenal reality. The very fact that pure sensation constitutes intuitions indicates for Kant that for reality even to be perceived, it must be filtered through the pure intutions of space and time. Whatever “reality is in flux” means, if anything, intuition is not entirely in flux because it’s already been converted into empirical intuition by the mind. The application of the categories is not the first instance of synthesis. Second, the categories are universal to anything possessing reason. The application of space, time, and the categories to raw sense data does not make a subjective experience but an objective one, with patterns that can be recognized by anyone. Someone needs to read his Kant.

Now, in my defense the entry tried to summarize important aspects of Neokantianism in a few sentences intended to be intelligible to people interested in Sapir and Whorf, and this comment seems to miss this fact. However, it is clear that whoever wrote this is more familiar with Kant then I am, and I wish that they had actually edited the entry. Instead, they merely complained on the talk page and didn’t change a word.

People with expertise, in other words, are reading the wikipedia but are not contributing to it. Why? It’s hard to say — after all, how far can you get with a sample size of 2? However, there is another (completely anecdotal) trend that I’ve noticed as well. Have you checked out the talk pages for “anthropology”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Anthropology or “culture”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture? The discussions stretch on about the legitimacy of anthropology as a discipline, the coherence of the culture concept, and include lots of reuqests for information. What they rarely result in is any actual change to the article — indeed, a lot of the time the topic isn’t even about how the page might be improved.

While this is all very anecdotal, I’ll take a completely unsubstantiated stab at predicting what it might augur for the Wikipedia’s future: these two things suggest to me that Wikipedia is facing a challenge that results not from its lack of legitimacy, but from the fact that it is being taken too seriously. More and more people read and rely on the wikipedia, and the flip side of this growing authoritativeness is that people do not feel they can mess with it themselves. It seems to me that talk pages are beginning to become places where virtual communities are sprining up to discuss the article, not to help write it.

The solution? Why not head on over to the Wikipedia today and search for your favorite anthropologist — write a quick entry about them, or improve the entry that already exists. The best way to keep them from taking punk rock away from the kids is to keep on playing it, loud.

Karl Popper and the McDonald’s Chair of Anthropology

In Rex’s post about FLOSS he argues that Open Source is so popular among academics because it is, in fact, modeled on the ideal of academic discourse. Of course, academics rarely achieves its own ideals. I still smart at the memory of my lowest grade in grad school (a B!) – when a physical anthropology professor marked me down for suggesting that Karl Popper’s theory of scientific knowledge was based on an idealized notion of how scientific institutions actually work. His theories, I argued, require a kind of idealized speech community, not unlike what we find in Habermas. In actual fact, scientists often work for companies or institutions which seek numerous ways to restrict the flow of knowledge through copyright (i.e. AIDS drugs), secrecy (i.e. corporate secrets), and even misinformation (i.e. the tobacco companies).

Fortunately, academics has often remained much closer to the ideal. This is why, I believe, most major pharmaceutical innovations still come out of universities rather than from drug company labs. But as universities and corporations get into bed with each other, I think FLOSS will be more and more important to defend the academic ideal against further encroachment from attempts to restrict speech. (See this 2002 article by Nathan Newman in The Nation.)

My example is not, in fact, one of corporate encroachment, but it does show one example of universities attempting to restrict speech. It comes from my father’s university, Stevens Institute of Technology, where my dad has been at the forefront of a battle to make the school’s fiscal practices more transparent. Some alumni set up a web site to give greater attention to the issue, called UnEvenStevens.
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Roll your own Anthropology Search Engine

Today I tried out a new search engine that lets you list up to 25 sites and then search just those sites using Yahoo! search. It is called Rollyo.com, and you can search a whole bunch of anthropology related web sites by going to this link.

I really like the idea. The site, however, has some limitations. For instance, you can’t only search a specific portion of a site, you have to search the entire domain. That means if someone has a blog hosted on their university web servers, you have to include the entire university in your search. Still, I think we will soon see more of this kind of thing. Some sites already let you search your blogroll, but those tend to only search the most recent posts – sites like this let you search everything that has been indexed in a large search engine over the years. I can also imagine setting up custom searches that just look at sites related to your research topic, or a class you are teaching. It is important to remember that not everyone has the same skills when it comes to finding information on the web, and this will enable the more sophisticated web-researchers help those who are less adept.

While I’m at it, I should also mention that Savage Minds is at the top of the Technorati list of anthropology related blogs! We are also near the top when using Google’s new blogsearch engine to look for “anthropology.”

PS: The sites I added to the current Rollyo search are just for testing, as the site improves I will try to create more focused lists – perhaps for each subfield. Or you could do that yourself and post the link to the comments!

group research + digital collaboration != FLOSS

It’s difficult to talk about ‘open source’ as if it were a unitary phenomenon. It’s telling, for instance, that one way of referring to it these days is F/LOSS (for ‘free/libre open source software’) an orally hygenic acronym which captures the ‘free as in speech’ meaning of ‘free’ by glossing it into its less ambiguous generic romance-language equivalent (“biella”:http://www.healthhacker.org/satoroams/ is really the expert on this sort of thing). The term is meant to knit together an ‘open source’ approach (think Eric Raymond and Bruce Pehrens) with a ‘free software’ approach (think Richard Stallman) which diverge on several key issues. But open source’s cup runneth over and has spilled out into our culture more generally. Academics, for instance, have developed the concept of ‘open access’ publications, while Lawrence Lessig has been just one of the many voices who have argued for ‘free culture’ as a model of and for the natural history of pretty much any kind of creative activity.

Both internal diversity and external diffusion, then, make nailing down open source’s ‘brand’ difficult. In recent comments Judd Antin “argued”:/2005/09/25/is-anthropology-averse-to-open-source/#comment-1633 argued that the heart of what it means to ‘open source’ is to engage in a collaborative ‘process’ of scholarly research, and that simply releasing a finished ‘product’ such as an article that can be freely circulated is secondary this more central meaning of ‘open source.’ John McCreery “argues”:/2005/09/25/is-anthropology-averse-to-open-source/#comment-1644 argues that Linux coders have “a shared project” and are “opposed to the notion that knowledge is private property” — a position which encourage cooperation while Anthropologists undertake “a jumble of private projects” under the influence of “an insistence on personal ownership of intellectual property” which discourage cooperation. Both contrast with my position about the role of ‘open source’ in anthropology not because we disagree about the importance of ‘open source’ as a cultural idea or movement, but because of our fundamentally different approaches to intellectual and creative production.

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Is anthropology averse to open source?

Several of our “sister websites”:http://antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/index.php?p=1347&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 have been commenting on a “recent article”:http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0905/Lathrop_Bakke.htm in Anthropology News which seemingly sounds some gloomy news for open access scholarship in anthropology. Indeed, Judd Antin goes so far as to ask whether “there something fundamental about anthropology that makes the discipline averse to an open model”:http://www.technotaste.com/blog/no-open-source-anthropology-at-least-not-anytime-soon/. The short answer is: no. The long answer is: yes, if by ‘open source’ you mean ‘AnthroCommons’.

What did this article actually find? The authors wanted to understand how people use digital genres to organize scholarly meetings. They concluded that people used email and face-to-face interaction. No surprise there. Although many people liked the idea of posting conference papers on the internet, in practice very few were willing to do so themselves, and most people thought it would be better to make abstracts easily available online.

So: people like to use email to send papers to each other. Why? Because it’s private, they already know how to use it, they use email as a file system to store, index, and retrieve attachments, they’re not actively interested in adopting new technology for its own sake (if it’s not broken, don’t fix it), and new genres are not obviously sufficiently better than existing onces to induce a switch. In other words, we use email because it is a good tool for the job we want to do.

Why would people be averse to publishing their papers online before the AAA meetings? Two things occur to me here. Come on, folks: we write our papers the night before we give them. Let’s just come clean about that, ok? Our aversion to choosing a Creative Commons license has less to do with concerns about intellectual property, and more to do with the fact that we don’t want to admit to our session organizer that we haven’t finished our paper. Second (and more importantly), conference papers are some of the worst work we produce — they are poorly edited, the citations are often incomplete or wrong, and the arguments we make in them may change over time. There is nothing wrong with this — it is just another way of saying that conference papers are the first step to a final polished document that we do want to make available to the world. David Weinberger once glorified the Internet as a form the raised the first draft to the level of art, and I don’t have any problem posting my informal work on the internet (hence this blog) — but why in the world would we as scholars want these hesitant, initial steps of our thoughts to appear at the top of a Google search for our name?

Much of the article’s discussion of open source and anthropology came in the context of evaluating AnthroCommons, a ‘virtual community’ (i.e. bulletin board) for anthropologists. They found that people didn’t like AnthroCommons. But just because people don’t like AnthroCommons doesn’t mean that they don’t like open source. It means they didn’t like AnthroCommons. Duh.

And people really don’t like AnthroCommons — only five of the 619 people surveyed said they’d actually posted anything. Now admittedly, I’ve not read the full report — while the news article states that “the full report is available through the AAA website” there is no clue on the website as to where it is. There isn’t even a link to the report in the article! This is an egregious flaw for which the gods of useability (or any webdesign 101 teacher) ought strike them down. Regardless, five out of 619 does not bode well.

It’s easy to see why people don’t like AnthroCommons. First, the site is graphics heavy (the text in the ‘about’ page is actually an image of text, not CSS styled text). Second, it is hard to use (if you want to get at the content of the website, you must click the ‘browse’ link, not the ‘content’ link). Third — what is the point? To repeat, email is easier to use than AnthroCommons. There is no real reason to make conference papers public, much less open source their contents. And believe it or not, despite my own enthusiasm for open source models, I would argue that there is no point in releasing your forum comments under an open source model. I mean, thank god: finally, someone can mix, rip, and burn such earth shaking creative works as “what time is the conference again?” Let the revolution begin!

People clearly want AnthroCommons to be a place where they can quickly and easily browse through session abstracts and — after the session — make papers available to fellow participants and selected others (but not everyone). We desperately need this because those little catalogs we all have to carry around are a pain, and I can think of ways of adding value to these catalogs when we digitalize them. What if you could login (easily) and search (easily) for sessions (and topics, and people), and then save the ones you were interested in on a personalized schedule page? You could even rate them so you could figure out which ones to skip once Conference Fatigue set in. And then you could print up a little schedule, map, and room guide and carry it around with you. If the site was well designed and standards compliant, you could even browse it on your cellphone as you were walking around the hotel trying to decide what to do next. And none of this, of course, has anything to do with open source.

Open source is a superb way for us to share the information with the world that we want to share — the polished scholarly work on which we stake our reputations and careers. But it is not a magic sugar shaker which can be sprinkled over any project with the word ‘community’ in it in order to make it even better. Similarly, technologies are not necessarily better because they are newer. Poorly designed technology designed to do something users have no interest in is not going to be successful. This does not mean that anthropologists hate open source, it means that we need it to be applied where it counts — in the distribution of our journals, magazines, and other scholarly products, not in forum postings or incomplete rough drafts. Is it really a surprise that anthropologists are averse to the use of open source when it is done poorly? No. Can we imagine a way to do it well that anthropologists might love? Yes. Does such a thing exist now? No. Should we create one in the future? Obviously.

Google Archaeology

Via a newly-discovered blog at Anthropology.net, a newly discovered Roman ruin which was found using Google Earth.

050912-6

From the Nature.com article:

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.

His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.

Community Express 2.0

Anthropologists and software is a big problem. N6 and SPSS are more program than we need. Hobbyist genealogy programs don’t handle polygamy well and have never heard of matrilineal descent. In my experience, anthropology’s general ghettoness when it comes to quantitative rigor tend to be reflected in hacked-together databases (sometimes even using suck programs like FileMaker), interviews recorded on iPods and dumped into iTunes, and so forth. When will someone develop a decent piece of software that will just let us do a decent census of our village?

Enter “Community Express 2.0”:http://communityexpress.info/, written by my friend and colleague John Burton and available for free download for non-profit individual use. John is an academic/consultant type who works on land and social impact issues in Papua New Guinea and the Torres Straits. Ever since I started reading his work while I was in the field I have been blown away by how consistently insightful he has been about just about everything he’s written — his paper “C’est qui, le patron?”:http://eprints.anu.edu.au/archive/00002246/01/rmap_wp01.pdf is for some reason one of my favorite pieces of PNG ethnography ever although it is only 11 pages long and you will find it totally unremarkable. He is also one of the few people I trust to conduct rigorous and accurate social mapping in PNG (a land of poor censuses and weirdo consultancy reports). John has spent years trying to develop a piece of software that will do what many anthropologists want to do — get their village into a computer and munge up the data.

The program known more about demographics than I do (the intricacies of birth spacing, for instance) and, most critically for me, the program understands the distinction between residence and descent, so you can do genealogical work that integrates with a regular household census. Perfect those pesky societies – which is to say every society — where people move around and live in different places.

Now let’s be up front here: Community Express suffers from several problems, some serious. It was, for instance, written by John, who is remarkable for his curmudgeon contrariness. He has made the interface more intuitive than in pervious versions, but at some level it is designed by him for him and by god you will just have to learn how to use it. Additionally, the software is designed to integrate tightly with Microsoft Word (boo! hiss!) so if you want to print up the nifty automagic pivot chart of your data you’d better have excel installed and Community Express had better know where to find it. At least in this edition of the software you can print to a paper size other than A4 — the previous one was Commonwealth-centric.

I haven’t tried this latest version, but it shows great promise, and I encourage you all to try it out and give John feedback. In a perfect world he’s open source the project or at least let others tinker with the code (for instance, to port the program to something other than Windows). So please give it a shot and maybe we can evolve the perfect village census program.

AAA Responds to Katrina

The AAA has the following announcement:

The extraordinary tragedy that continues to unfold in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will remain an epochal event in the history of the United States. The immense scale of human suffering and destruction is difficult for most of us to comprehend, and the enormity of the reconstruction effort – rebuilding lives, livelihood, and communities – will challenge us for many years to come. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) expresses its deepest sympathy and unwavering support for the victims of this disaster. It is in this spirit that the AAA humbly offers a response.

The AAA response takes the form of an online communications clearinghouse. …

This “clearinghouse” is called a “forum” by the AAA, but is really just three blog posts on separate blogspot accounts, with open comments. This is an unfortunate decision, because comments feeds on blogspot do not have RSS feeds, as do WordPress blogs. The blogs are divided into one for offers of assistance, one for news and information, and one for assistance requests. There is one post on each blog, and the idea seems to be that people will leave comments on these posts.

I have to wonder how useful these “forums” will be at this point, given that most affected universities have already created similar information clearinghouses, but perhaps there will be some anthropology-specific requests that will get greater attention this way.

I have to say that I’m a little disappointed in the AAA response, but I’d be hard pressed to say what else the AAA should have been doing (other than having proper forums already in place before all this started). How did other associations respond? The ASA offered the press a list of experts ready to talk to the press. I didn’t see anything on the AHA web site. The MLA has a forum set up (it seems to be a real forum, although the URL says “weblog”), the forum topics are similar to that of the AAA. I did not see anything on the LSA web site. (Although there has been some Katrina discussion on Linguistlist.) So, it seems that the AAA response is about par for the course. Nothing exceptional, but better than average. Anyone know of any associations that did anything particularly notable?

Regarding the use of new technology in the face of disaster: Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the spectacular People Finder effort which coordinated thousands of internet volunteers to enter information from various forums into a centralized database.