Information Research Weblog

Chasing down a reference recently, I happened upon the 'Language Corner' of the Columbia Journalism Review. Back entries are available in two printable lists. Here's a sample:

Unlike the distinctly unlovely use of 'reference' as a verb (CJR, July/August 2006), the figurative use of 'resonate' is effective and apt. But it became painfully popular as the century rolled over; a nice metaphor has been cheapened.
'Resonate' means to sound strongly and deeply, or to echo, pleasingly or otherwise. And our word makes for a fine, versatile metaphor, meaning ring a bell, strike a chord, make a strong impression, have a lasting impact, be memorable, and so on.
And on:

'But it takes a Byrne, Rushdie or Fellini or Dali to make the details resonate'.
'What is important is that the Teen-age Mutants resonate so strongly with the kids'.
'The songs resonate to her own experience'.
'When people see the big company letterhead, it resonates well'.

But enough — and that’s the point. 'Resonate' is trite. We should let it rest awhile.

and

Some distinctions between similar words need to be maintained because they’re useful; examples abound in the archives of this font of wisdom. Here’s another: the distinction between 'historic' and 'historical.' In the phrase 'Chile, Bolivia’s historic enemy,' the choice was unfortunate. By hoary consensus, 'historic' has been reserved for events of great moment, like the Battle of Yorktown or the Emancipation Proclamation. To describe a longtime pattern, like Chilean-Bolivian enmity, or for any variation on the broad notion 'relating to history,' the job is best done by 'historical.' Different words for different meanings. Useful. (CJR September/October 2004)

Not at all useful is the insistence among the finicky (including this traveler at one time) that 'advisor' is a misspelling, an ignorant back-formation from 'advisory,' and that only 'adviser' is correct. 'Advisor' is ubiquitous, and it was not surprising to find 'became a valued advisor' in a historical (not historic) work of impeccable pedigree. So we should pick a spelling (CJR prefers 'adviser'), stay with it, and relax.

It's good to know that there's a small voice of reason in journalism in the USA, although the battle against the linguistic barbarism of current academic writing will probably be a long one

Political correcness seems to me a blunderbuss term of abuse which we need to rescue for a real political argument.

The dominant force is the historic structure of society, which includes language, words, libraries, classification schemes, controlled vocabularies and taxonomies (though a remarkable number of commentators stop at words :)).

This force oppressed women, etc. etc therefore when the oppressed attempt their own liberation this includes the language, words, libraries, and their instruments of knowledge organisation.

The dark forces attempting to prevent this liberation then defend their social constructions as "human nature", "free will", "natural language" and attempt to regain territory by the abuse of assertions of difference. Political correctness is one such term. Gender and sex, sexuality, female, feminine, femininity is one such thread.

Not for a moment am I suggesting Tom Wilson, Edward Dudley, Blaise Cronin or any other of the valient strugglers for free speech, the right to know, access to information or freedom of expression are falling into political uncorrectedness or unpolitical (therefore can be neither correct nor incorrect); but that we shouldn't give an inch.

It is politically correct to assert the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary are institutionally sexist, as I think an entertaining article in a recent Archivist did and it is not political correctness to object. Sex and gender are endlessby bending terms and I think the argument depends on the context?

But we did cover all this thirty years ago.

Thanks to John Lindsay for drawing my attention to a Web site about words, The Phrontistery - a guide to all kinds of information about words, including obscure and 'lost' words, and to other Web sites, including curiosities like the satirical Landover Baptist Church site. I liked one item especially on the top page:

Vice-President Cheney to Visit Church this Weekend. Bulletproof Vests Half Off in Gift Shop.

Now is also a good time to go ahead and install that armor plating, originally earmarked for our troops in Iraq, that many of you picked up for your Hummers from entrepreneurial government contractors on eBay last year. Furthermore, we are asking that everyone planning to attend the service and subsequent "Hillary Effigy Shooting, Dismembering and Mauling Morning Hootenanny Extravaganza" with the vice-president now submit a "Waiver of Liability for Death or Injury Resulting from Gross Negligence or Drunken Anger" form in triplicate before you will be allowed to participate in these joyous events.

The distortions wrought on language by political correctness are well known: people fear to use certain common formulations these days, lest they be thought of as biased in one direction or another. For example, consider 'gender': this grammatical term meaning, according to the OED

'Each of the three (or in some languages two) grammatical 'kinds', corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (and absence of sex) in the objects denoted, into which substantives are discriminated according to the nature of the modification they require in words syntactically associated with them...'

was seized upon by certain interest groups in society (American society, originally) as an alternative to 'sex'. Curious, since a direct translation of the term would mean that one wished to distinguish between persons who had sexual attributes and those that had none - the 'sexed' and the 'sexless'. 'Sex', it was claimed had connotations (undeniably!) of the biological difference between male and female, thereby excluding from classification those who did not fit comfortably into these categories. Fine—no problem with that: if we seek to use in our research, categories that express the full range of sexual variation, then 'gender' is a useful term to employ, and we would probably have categories such as 'heterosexual', 'homosexual', 'lesbian', 'trans-sexual', etc. However, I receive papers for the journal where the only distinction made in analysis is between 'male' and 'female', which are the fundamental sexual categories and, yet, the author talks about 'gender'. So I change all the occurrences of the word to 'sex', in the interest of clarity and accuracy.

The Style Manual for the journal has the following entry:

gender

use sex when referring to male/female categories in data analysis. 'Gender identifies the relations between women and men. Gender relations vary from place to place and over time; they often change in response to altering circumstances. (Sex, by contrast, identifies the biological difference between women and men, which does not change.)' http://www.dfid.gov.uk/aboutdfid/files/glossary_g.htm

I wish that I could persuade all journal editors to adopt this stance, perhaps the poor old English language would then not need to suffer quite so much.

Garth Buchholz raises some interesting points and, by coincidence, they are things I've been thinking about myself for some time and, as a result, the April issue of the journal will contain a paper by Terry Brooks which adopts a novel format for the paper. When Terry's paper was accepted I suggested that he might like to look at the idea of 'screen rhetoric' and prepare a special version of his paper that reflected these ideas. Since then, he has been working away on several versions and the latest looks, to my mind, very good.

Whether we can adopt the style for all papers in the journal is debateable, since the mode of presentation would require more work of either the author or the editor. However, we can make the template available and those who wish to use the different style could do so. Watch out for the paper in April.

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

Thinking further about it; perhaps they mean something like:

'Analytics' are measurements of value in decision making derived from data on business processes or applications.

Thanks to Charles Knight for drawing my attention to an article in InfoWorld on 'analytics'. It refers to a survey by the Gartner Group which has resulted in what they think of as a standardised defintion of this woolly term:

Gartner has created its own definition: "Analytics leverage data in a particular functional process (or application) to enable context-specific insight that is actionable". It can be used in many industries in real-time data processing situations to allow for faster business decisions, he said.

What on earth this consultancy-speak jargon actually means is anyone's guess. I suppose it is a ploy from Gartner to get clients to pay them to explain it! Something is said to be 'actionable' when it is open to judicidal process - perhaps Gartner should be taken to court for this one!

An offline message from John Lindsay, which he has given me permission to repeat here.

Tom, like the idea of the society for the restoration of archaic useful words. Would like to apply for membership, but perhaps we can have reciprocal membership with the Hyphen-Society?

The Hyphen-Society was set up to promote the smallest atomic unit of distortion in digital machines when searching, for example Anglo Saxon, Anglosaxon, Anglo-Saxon. Encyclopedia Britannica does a boolean or on the first :).

It might be true that the [space] is even smaller but one sometimes can't see it, and if you don't know whether the [space] is there or not, you can't tell whether it has distorted. I thought the "," might be smaller, but we have had comma delimited files for more than twenty years with books on databases telling you how to build a library catalogue and not noticing that cdf won't work on title, so nothing much has been learned there. I thought perhaps the "." might be more simple, but we already have that in what appears to be a very simple point, Dewey and UDC, so I came back to the Hyphen-Society.

Had a really good example yesterday of what we have to deal with. Went to Borders to buy a cd, and they have J.S. in one sequence and Js in another, but no J S or JS.

John Lindsay

'Sans ambage' as we would say in French! Direct, if I well remember. A touch old fashioned in French also.

Francoise Barr
e-mail: francoise.barr@nt.gov.au

Words fall out of use all the time - partly a matter of fashion, partly, perhaps, because the sound is difficult or the etymology not obvious. My thoughts on this were occasioned by the discovery in Trollope's, The Belton Estate, of the word "ambage" meaning a roundabout way of doing something or saying something, a circumloctution. On the basis of its meaning, 'ambage' seems worth restoring to use, it seems to me, so I'm forming the Society for the Restoration of Useful Archaic Words, members of which pledge themselves to use words agreed by the Society as useful, as often as appropriate in their speech and writing. You will notice that I am direct in my language, no ambage here!

• Teramica: Ceramic Solutions - Tiles
• Siemens Transportation: Efficient Rail Solutions - Trains
• Brainlab: Neurosurgery Solutions, Orthopedics Solutions, Radiotherapy Solutions and Spine and Trauma Solutions - Medical equipment
• Marks and Spencers' new autograph collection offers you a total wardrobe solution - Clothes
• Axiom Worksurface Solutions - Counter tops
• Hilton Meeting Menu Solutions - Tea and biscuits
• Pinnacle Chauffeurs: a one stop transport solution provider - Taxis
• Here at RAC we have vision to beome the UK's first choice for motoring and vehicle solutions - Breakdown trucks
• Aquatec's range of Quik-Clip attachment solutions are designed to satisfy all your attachment requirements - Clips
• Canape Solutions - Catering
• Watermark is a travel sector solutions company - Sick bag manufacturers
• Linda Horler, Solutions Manager, Yorkshire Water - Sewage boss
• Integrated Solutions: oiling the wheels of industry with the knowledge to care for the environment - Consultants
• Inspired Solutions Consultancy Limited: expert advice covering all aspects of the leisure retailing business - Consultants
• Intelligent Solutions: a complete IT solution, including hardware, networking, and e-commerce - Consultants
• Inbound Solutions guarantee to take the poain away from all telephony and application-related aspects of your organization - Consultants
• Adsoft Solutions: are you in need of a solution that we haven't talked about? Perhaps one of our friendly and over-qualified experts can help. - Consultants.

There's some free stuff available at the Private Eye site, but for the full experience you'll need to subscribe - worth every penny!

Last year I posted a message about a book on the decline of 'public language' by Don Watson - Death Sentence. Well, Don now has another one out: 'Watson's dictionary of weasel words, contemporary clichés, can and management jargon', now available from Knopf (Australia). You can read the introduction here.

I hope to have a review ready for the October issue of the journal, but, in the meantime, you might appreciate one or two of the definitions:

circle of strength

A management term. It might derive from the ancient Druids. If not the Druids, the Elizabethans. If not the Elizabethans, possibly Tibetan Buddhism.

'The Circle... reveals the dynamic pattern various behaviours seem to invite within an interaction.'
Circles of Influence, Building Capacity Through Partnerships and Collaboration Conference, Canada

 

fast track

Short cut to achievement of agreed outcomes

 

networking

To exchange business cards, glances, etc. Have a drink, take tea, dine with. Do what's necessary. (More if it's agreeable.)

'I networked my arse off.'
Participant in governance seminar

Got this in my e-mail today - thought it was worth sharing. Anyone else got good examples?

A magazine recently ran a 'Dilbert Quotes' contest. They were looking for people to submit quotes from their real-life Dilbert-type managers. Here are the top ten:

1. "As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks."
(This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, WA)

2. "What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter."
(Lykes Lines Shipping)

3. "E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business."
(Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

4. "This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it."
(Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)

5. "Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule."
(Plant manager, Delco Corporation)

6. "No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them."
(R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)

7. Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

8. My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said, "That would be better for me ."
(Shipping executive, FTD Florists)

9. "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees."
(Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)

10. One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"
(Hallmark Cards Executive)

Last month I put out a message about 'Introducing Information Management', edited by Macevičiūtė and Wilson - which has now been issued, so I trust that your orders are in :-)

Yesterday brought another new book in the mail, 'Theories of Information Behavior', edited by Fisher, Erdelez and McKechnie, which has a contribution from me - along with more than 80 others. This is another 'good cause' book, with the proceeds going to support SIG/USE and to provide grants for conference attendance, etc. So your hard-earned cash will be put to good use!

There's a great discussion going on at C|Net about whether or not local municipalities should be offering "free" wi-fi coverage. If you want to understand the loony, neo-con, extremist rightwingers, take a look. In particular, one 'GraysonBuzz' is so far to the right that he makes George Bush look like a liberal.

Curious how in the USA, 'liberal' has become a term of abuse: just look at some of the OED meanings of the word:

• Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted
• Free from restraint; free in speech or action.
• Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid.
• Free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favour of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform.
• Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.

Apparently, these are now qualities that threaten "the American way of life" — well, they'd certainly threaten the neo-fascist state that Georgie would like to have!

If anyone has had a word with the Editor by now, I imagine that the Financial Times will be a little embarrassed as a result of a slip by one Ben Hunt, writing on ‘Rivals seek clearer line on BT’s future’. He writes:

After a week of running a fine tooth-comb through BT’s proposals for a new regulatory structure for the industry, the group’s rivals have concluded that the plans do not represent the basis for a fair settlement.

Of course, the emphasis there is mine: there is no such thing as a ‘tooth-comb’ and I wonder what Mr. Hunt imagined its purpose might be? The correct phrase is, ‘a fine-toothed comb’ – the kind of thing that mothers used to (perhaps still do in some places) run through their kids’ hair, searching for hair lice. In spoken English it is often carelessly mis-pronounced to sound like ‘fine tooth-comb’, but surely when written down it is an obvious nonsense?

I thought you might like this wonderfully ambiguous abstract on ambiguity and gray areas in information systems resarch. The source is not given, in order to spare blushes :-)

In this paper we argue that a large gray area of information systems research exists, whose relevance to the information technology artifact is subject to significant debate even among IS scholars who support the essential role of the IT artifact. As we explain, not explicitly addressing this gray area can have negative, although often inadvertent, effects on the innovative nature of IS research; we explore this danger through three pitfalls. We then propose a stance of strategic ambiguity to deal with the gray area. Strategic ambiguity calls for deliberately withholding judgment on the relevance of research in the gray area and acceptance of gray-area research provided it meets the excellence required by professional journals. We believe that strategic ambiguity benefits innovative IS research without harming the essential role of the IT artifact.

Private Eye for 7th January had a nice set of examples of the way 'solutions' is used as a padding word - totally devoid of meaning but implying that something significant is involved:

• 'Lowepro Vision: Carrying solutions for the imagining world' - camera bags
• 'Cell Pack Solutions' - batteries
• 'Sustainable Drainage Solutions' - drains
• 'BT voice solutions' - phone lines
• 'Total document solutions' - paper and ink for computer printers
• 'Featherweight solutions for dark places' - torches
• 'Magnet Kitchens' Smart Space Solutions' - cupboards
• 'Pirtek Fluid Transfer Solutions' - hoses
• 'The TMK Motorized impeller, another Air Moving Solution - fan

Remember this, if you ever feel impelled to use the word, other than in contexts such as, 'The solution to the problem was...'

The online newsletter, the Weblog, the press release, the discussion forum are all prone to use the English language in curious ways (it's probably just the same for French, German and any other language, of course!), but this little gem takes the biscuit:

A survey has found that while users are satisfied with the e-government services they have tried, but that it can be hard to find the service you need

Wonderful, eh? Does no one edit this stuff? You'll find it at ZDNet UK site.

Two current pet hates:

"around" - it must be idleness that causes people to use "around" so frequently in their texts - and idleness on the part of editors and publishers that allows them do so so. How anything, for example, can be "centred around", or "based around", I do not know. Surely a moment's reflection would reveal the idiocy of these usages?

"behaviours" - or, more usually, since this plague seems to infect the USA more than other parts of the world - "behaviors". Why turn what is generally a collective noun signifying a set of activities associated with a person, into a plural? What's the point of "information seeking behavio(ur)s" when it says nothing more than "information seeking behavio(u)r". It would be legitimate to refer to a person's "information seeking and searching behaviours" because one is then talking about two different sets of behaviour - but, usually, those using the plural form are only referring to one set.

End of grouse for today.

For a different perspective on information systems I recommend an article in this week's New Statesman (immediate access if you are a subscriber, otherwise £1.00 for 24 hours access). It's not about information systems directly, but about the problems of a shortly-tob-be-released prisoner. To get accommodation, he needs his National Insurance Number, but to get that - yes, you've guessed it - he needs an address. As he points out - he's in prison, under his real name, his fingerprints and DNA on file - why can't the prison authorities simply confirm his existence and allow his number to be delivered to the prison? The prisons are run by the Home Office, the National Insurance system by a branch of the Treasury - joined up government? Given the regular failure of IT projects in government, I guess we'll have to wait a long time before anything is joined up.

Of course, joined up action is problematical when we have politicians who can't do joined up thinking. Comedy show of the week was Tony Blair trying to justify his actions on Iraq - he seems to have a very selective memory. It seems that the famous "WMD" and the "immediate threat" to Britain that convinced the credulous MPs in the House of Commons (but no one else that I've ever met) were not the real cause - for Tony the real cause is now the removal of the oppressor. If this was his main attempt to regain voter trust, I don't think he's made it. It's positively embarassing to have such a hypocrite at the helm - and one who seems to think that the electorate is made up of unthinking idiots.

And now for something completely different: anyone interested in words will enjoy the Collect Britain site's feature on dialects. People are often astonished by the variation in accent in the UK, but remember the waves of invaders - Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Norman French - all leaving traces behind. Plus internal migration, of course - the Scots who moved to Ireland ended up with an accent that is neither Irish nor Scots, but Ulster!

Hi Tom,

Hear, hear.

As Richie Benaud might say "A good read, that". My son gave me a copy for Christmas and I read it gleefully in one day. Don Watson was Paul Keating's speech writer. Though I'm not sure we can blame KM for the entire decay of public language - bureaucracy, Hollywood and MTV have a lot to answer for too.

John

John Holgate
Director of Library Services
St. George Hospital

Tel: 0293502042
email: holgatej@sesahs.nsw.gov.au

Our mutual friend, Frank Miller, sent my a very good book recently: 'Death sentence', by Don Watson (Knopf, 2003). Not a mystery, in spite of the title, but, as the subtitle indicates, an essay on "the decay of public language".

Don's thesis is that encroachment of managerialist language upon the public sphere is leading to a numbing of the language. The managerialist jargon of 'enhancements', 'going forward', 'customer-orientation', etc., etc. has leaked from business into government, local government and academia, with dreadful results. A gem from the Victoria State Government in Australia:

In defining our values, we have formed a range of acceptable and non-acceptable behaviours, which contribute to the success of implementation. Behaviours which indicate that we are complying with values and contra which indicate that we are not. For example, a key contra behaviour, that we are currently focusing on that was identified through our values, is employees displaying disrespectful behaviour towards clients and/or other staff members.... etc., etc., etc. apparently interminably.

Instead of, simply, "All staff are asked to behave with appropriate respect towards clients and colleagues."

Consider also this from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia:

Funding for legal aid is increasingly meeting less of the demand, but allocating additional funds on a one-off basis without a specific reason may be seen as an admission by the Government that funding is insufficient.

What is it saying? "Funding for legal aid is insufficient, but we daren't admit it."

Watson calls this stuff, "turgid sludge" and he occasionally discovers examples from various documents on 'knowledge management' and notes:

Political correctness and its equally irritating twin, anti-political correctness; economic rationalism; dope-smoking; Knowledge Management - wherever cults exist the language inclines to the arcane or inscrutable.

Throughout the book there are examples in the page margin of the good and the bad, sometimes nicely contrasted:

From Penelope Lively we have:

"Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms"

and from the 2nd Annual Conference on Government Portals,

"Achieve a user-centric portal framework."

My favourite quotations include:

"They risk-taked all day." (AFL Coach)

"They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
(Wallace Stevens)

"The trouble with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur." (attr. to G.W. Bush)

And from the author, paraphrased here, because I can't locate it readily in the text:

"Never in history have so many sensible human beings found it so difficult to say something simple."

Buy this book, read it carefully and you will understand, at least, the basis of some of my criticism of 'knowledge management' - the authors write in such appalling technological, turgid sludge. Pick the bones from the trash and you are left with very little that is worth bothering about. In addition, and more importantly, you will have more reasons for distrusting the language of politicians and organizational managers.

As a journal editor, one of my aims is that the papers in Information Research should be intelligible to all - that aim is not always achieved, but looking at the rest of the professional press I suspect I'm the last editor who actually edits :-) This book makes me even more determined to try to maintain standards.

As everyone knows, Information Research uses the Atomz.com search engine - which is made freely available. I've just been experimenting with restricting the pages that are scanned, but it didn't work out. However, in the process I had to ask for the site to be re-indexed (this normally happens automatically every Sunday night) and the log for the indexing tells me that 417 pages have been indexed containing 1,546,605 words.

Wow - 1.5 million words - I had no idea that we'd published as much as that. Now, that includes contents pages (which I was trying to mask) and the editorials but, nevertheless, that's a lot of words. And, given the volume of hits, it seems that people find them useful words.

While I was at it, I checked on the language used in the searching: here are the search strings used last month:

Frequency	Search string
18	knowledge management
12	information management
11	data mining
8	electronic resources
8	information conciousness
7	cko and failure
7	communication
7	digital library
7	information retrieval
7	management
6	cko
6	e publishing
6	information literacy
6	information seeking behaviour
6	online public access catalog
6	outsourcing
6	pattern of communication adopted by marketing department in industrial goods sec
6	search engine
5	company libraries

Some of this strikes me as odd and must be the result of some people clicking on the 'Go' button more than once.

A couple of items come to my notice today. The first is an item from the excellent Current Cites, on the use of RSS feeds by the Library of the National Cancer Institute to augment their catalogue and to provide services to members of the staff. It's published in the Library Journal, which is worth keeping an eye on. Here's a quotation to whet your appetite:

At the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, we have used RSS both to integrate Internet content into the NCI library system and to make content from the library system available on our intranet in the form of RSS news feeds. This new content makes our library system a more useful and timely resource, allowing us to better 'feed' the information appetites of our clients, whose jobs require that they keep up with cancer and healthcare news, events, research, and politics. After the initial investment of time and technology, the information flows without requiring hands-on staff effort.

The other is from the Internet Scout Report (which has been going for years), which directs us to the Peter Drucker archive. I think that Drucker was the first to talk about the 'knowledge society', in his book 'The age of discontinuity', back in 1968. I imagine that today's 'knowledge society' enthusiasts will be astonished by the date - 'You mean we've been living in the knowledge society for almost 45 years?' And they think they invented it a couple of years ago :-) Actually, Drucker believed that we'd already been in the 'knowledge society' for some years, even in 1969.

The site has quite a wealth of information on it but not much in the way of electronic documents - properly speaking it is a guide to the archives. However, can anyone tell me why a Web designer would choose to use a very small point-size, sans-serif fount on a grey background? It is desperate to read, so I recommend Opera's zoom feature, which allows me to blow it up to 150% to make it readable. Even then it is necessary to discover the source address of the pop-up articles so that you can load them separately into a new browser page - messy. In fact it was only in this way that I discovered that one of the buttons at the bottom of the page is a fount-enlargement button!

Does no one pay attention to the usability gurus? Here's one of Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.

Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.

[PS: why am I using 'fount'? Because it has been that way in English since 1683. "fount A complete set or assortment of type of a particular face and size. Also fully, fount of letter or type. (OED)]

This is actually from Wido Bosch:

The difference in a knowledge worker and a traditional worker is the main resources he or she is using to perform his or her job. Toffler wrote in 1980 a book, called "the third wave", in which he argues that we moved from the agricultural age in the industrial age and that we now are moving from an industrial age into an information age. In the industrial age the main source for a worker was his labour skills, phisical work. Of course he had to use his knowledge to perform but the physical element of his work was larger than the knowledge part, which made him easier to replace (see for this the power industrial giants had in managing their human assets). In the third wave, information age (or knowledge society as you wish), for a lot of employees the main resources for their work is their knowledge, their brains. These so called knowledge workers form the largest part of the value of the organization nowadays. In defining the value of an organization we used to sum up the assets (capital, machines, physical assets, and so on) but nowadays the organizations value is much higher but with less physical assets. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young for example is an organisation which has a high value but they have no assets (they lease everything). When their employees walk out the door at five and don't come back there is no organization left. And unfortunately a traditional worker in the sence that I mean it is easier to replace than a knowledge worker.

Last example, industrial companies are outsourcing the work which has low knowledge intesivity to countries with lower costs on loans, but they leave the knowledge intensive work in the western world. Philips is stating that they trade knowledge and not goods. Knowledge intensivity is increasing enormously. For more informatoin on knowledge workers and the shift in thinking in this area I recommend the following books: "The knowledge creating company" by Nonaka and Takeuchi, "weightless wealth" "Value based knowledge management" and "Zero space" by Tissen and research performed by Gartner, Xerox and McKinsey. The book "weightless wealth" might be a good start since it is easy to read and provides a good profound insight in the evoluating economy/society.

I agree with you that for all work, no matter how mundane, some knowledge is required but I disagree with the statement that this obviates the term knowledge worker.

I also do not think that knowledge optimalisation (or the use and sharing of knowledge) should be narrowed down as a function for HR only. Since knowledge management is about creating a culture in which people act and behave based on the fact that they recognize that sharing knowledge implies increased value adding, because sharing does not mean dividing but multiplying. If I share 1 dollar with you, we both have 50 cents, if I share my knowledge with you we both have this knowledge and I don't lose 50%. So when we create and stimulate a culture in which knowledge sharing is common and accepted, organizations can create a differential advantage. But to achieve this, new ways of organizational structure is needed. To share knowledge people need to have trust, a common goal or shared ambition, high attraction to the company, and a fitting rewarding system (amongst others..), but they way we organizate now we lack all of these aspects (due to short sighted management, rewarding systems based on hours in the office, lack of trust due to reorganizations and so on). It is in this context that I mean that we don't structure our organizations well, or in other words, we don't structure our organizations to achieve sustainable advantages.

Focussing on only staff knowledge is too narrow, since (as you state) for all work knowledge is requires, so it would be a focus which is too limited. Secondly, focussing on HR implies that they are responsible for knowledge sharing, which will lead to institutionalisation (not invented here syndrome).

When I posted this issue I was concerned on two things, the place (is IR the right platform to talk about KM) and the form (these topics require face to face conversations since there is yet no consensus on knowledge managemement and the basic assumptions and paradigms). Seen the nature of the discussion now, I assume face to face conversation would increase the benefit and seen the number of reactions (1) I feel confirmed in the fact that this topic does not fit the nature of this platform, which is IR.

In sincerely apologize for the inconvenience I caused.

Many Regards, Wido Bosch

And was in reply to:

Hello Wido,

Firstly, I was wondering if you could clarify for me the difference between a knowledge worker and a traditional worker? It seems to me that most jobs, no matter how mundane, require some knowledge to perform them, obviating the need for the term 'knowledge worker'.

I don't think there is a need to restructure organisations to make knowledge management successful. Knowledge Management (or Knowledge Optimisation as I would prefer to call it) should just happen in organisations that that are committed to a particular governance model that includes optimising the knowledge held by their staff. Ideally it would happen through the HR area, just as training usually does,

Bob Jackman

It's interesting to see how, at the technology end of the 'km' spectrum, 'knowledge management' has seamlessly segued in 'content management' or, sometimes, 'enterprise content management'. What does this mean? Two things, probably - first, the tech boys have finally figured that, in their bailiwick, 'km' brings them more scorn than cash and, secondly, that it won't be too long before the money men are asking, 'What is 'content', other than data and information?' And, before you know where we are, the next big thing will be 'information retrieval' - what comes around, goes around :-)

Ever been totally turned off by the jargon of the management consultancy? And, worse, by those in your organization who have adopted that jargon and made it all their own?

If so - help, and a little humour, are to hand - just a click of the mouse will take you to The S.P.E.W. Factor, a labour of love from Frank Miller.

Read, enjoy and let Frank have the gems you have collected yourself.

This sounds very interesting. It certainly describes me.

I've mentioned Michael Quinion's site previously, World Wide Words. This is from a section of the site entitled Turns of Phrase and refers to recent terms, or at least they were recent when the article for the word was written. Some of the words are "ancient" (i.e. up to seven years old).

The one that caught my attention today was Technorealist, which our words guru describes as something along the lines of someone who doesn't believe in techno-utopianism (that technology is good and will solve all ills), nor are they a neo-luddite (one who sees all technology as retrograde and evil).

And there's a site for technorealism!

Moderates of the world rejoice (if you can be bothered). And that's one of the problems, isn't it? Being "balanced" is not exciting or sensational, and doesn't tend to attract those with an abundance of energy.

I think the problem with this much repeated, so-called hierarchy, is that no one can actually find anything to do with it. It is quoted time after time, often in ways that lead one to think that the writer assumes s/he has invented it, but, in the end, the only parts of the hierarchy that have any practical significance are 'data' and 'information' - in fact, since information is so difficult to define, one could probably remove that and claim that virtually all so-called information systems are simply data processing systems. And no matter who the writer may be, once the hierarchy has been quoted, s/he gets down to the practicalities of data processing or information systems.

Bellinger, et al., who wrote this piece are a prime example of the problem - where does it lead? Nowhere as far as I can see. Or am I being too unkind?

No, not the body part, the punctuation mark. It has always puzzled me why practice in the USA is to use a capital letter after the colon, which is not a full stop. British and, I think, International English, practice is to use a capital letter only after a full stop, although I believe that Oxford University Press also allow capitals if the colon introduces a list. Information Research (I say this for the benefit of future authors) allows a capital letter only after the full stop. One colleague told me that he had been told, in all seriousness, that it was because the colon was two full stops, one on top of the other, and therefore stronger!

Where did the US practice come from? My thoughts on this were prompted by a link from The Scout Report to Bartleby.com which is home to various editions of works on English usage.

So, I checked on US works, and we find that the Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) says:

This punctuation mark (:) can (1) signal a forthcoming list, as in He sold sundries: needles, thread, pins, buttons, and thimbles; (2) introduce a further amplification or a summary of what has just been said, as in After years of work, he finally had it: the championship; (3) let one clause explain another, as in He was late: his car had broken down; (4) lead into a long quotation, as in Jefferson wrote: When in the course of human events,…; and (5) do such separating tasks as these: Henry IV, Pt. I, II:iv:122; Dear Sir:; New York: Longman, 1987; and 11:15 A.M.

Only two of those use a following capital - introducing a quotation, which is fine, and introducing whatever follows 'Dear Sir:'

Strunk's 'Elements of style' (1918) says only that the colon is used to introduce a quotation

So, can anyone enlighten me as to where current practice comes from?

The BBC style guide style guide will interest those with a concern for the use of English.

Thanks to Lockergnome for this one.

See Dict.org, a site that provides definitions from a wide range of open access dictionary resources from Webster's Unabridged of 1913 to the Internet dictionary project.

A range of client software plugins for the project is also available.

An excellent website that I have been enjoying for some months now is produced by Michael Quinion.

If you want to know correct use of the English language (at least as the English speak it), then this is the place to look. If he doesn't have an answer to your question on his site, then send him an email.

But the site doesn't deal exclusively with British English usage. Mention is frequently made of American English usage and Australian and New Zealand English usage.

It's an excellent site on which to perform a search for a word or phrase, or perhaps enjoy the "surprise me" function (as I have been).