Object/Gateway Paper

In this paper we're transitioning away from personal narrative to writing about something outside our personal experience, which is what most academic and professional writing is. It will also give use chance to use the research skills we get in the orientation at McHenry Library. All professionals need to be good researchers; if not, they are not able to give their clients the full range of ways to solve their problem. Moreover, every important decision you make in your life should be an informed one, otherwise you're just guessing and hoping for the best. It doesn't take much skill or intelligence to type some words into a search engine of course, but different search engines work differently and will give different results. Some even take bribes to put a site on top, and may or may not tell you. Moreover, the World Wide Web has good about information about topics in terms of making money (though that can often be misleading, like the spam about Nigerian dictators or a stock tip scam), but if you're looking for unbiased information about topics that truly matter, your best bet is academic sources because they have little incentive to lie, ask and answer the same kinds of questions we care about, and are nearly always double-checked by experts ("peer reviewed”). A considerable chunk of the money you pay to go here pays for these high quality sources, so why would you wade through low quality free WWW stuff hoping to find reliable, well-written and useful information? Being able to intelligently search a database (such as our library has, e.g., Melvyl/CDL) is a crucial skill in the information age/economy.

For this paper, you can choose an object related to your Insanely Great Project, one related to any interest of yours that you'd like included in the Knowledge Web, or just pick an object from the to do list ( http://k-web.org/public_html/content/welcome.htm ).  It's best to pick one that no one has signed up for or it's been a year or more if you want to have a better shot of getting it published on K-Web, but they're all up for grabs).  For all three options, use the Tagmemic questions (full version here) to make sure you have a thorough understanding of the object, and they may well provide an interesting and creative “angle.”

Gateway How to:

You may recall from the video about the Knowledge Web the first week that its basic design is the nested sphere concept, with our world on the outside and the ancient past at the center. (You can look at a simple live two-dimensional version of the Gateways at the Touchgraph beta  login =beta, pzwrd = slug.  You can do a very basic search by typing the last name of a person into the location box--overwrite whatever is already there). The user can fly through these spheres, and choose to see the nodes and links of the people, events and things of, say the 1800's, as an abstract spider web, or they can change the sphere into a geo-globe and see where these things were. Thus all human knowledge becomes a navigable time-space construct.

The outside sphere (There's a demo with spheres (no content, but fun to play with, especially if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse) at http://www.zaun.com/kweb/ ), our world, will be populated by concepts called Gateways, since they are entry points into the system. In this way, we can see how our world evolved out of the past, sometimes through seemingly random events (James Watt meets a guy who is trying to figure out how to make whiskey cheaper and gets a tip on how to make steam power work, a composer meets Sikorsky at a party and gives him seed money for the helicopter). Thus the Gateways are really important, because they are the first content most users will see; if they are not well done, people may just lose interest before they have gotten a sense of what the K-Web does (no pressure! ;)

Burke has selected all the Gateways so far, but we're open to suggestion. Most if not all of them tie into a "predesignated journey," for example corn flakes to Communist Manifesto in 10 steps. These are like the crazy pinball guided tours the Burke takes us on in his books and television programs (you can watch the videos downstairs in McHenry library).

Gateways can attract users in one of two ways, which is why we are writing a short and longer version. The short (200-250 words) version is very factual and objective. It relies on user curiousity and perhaps patience to launch out into the K-Web to explore. The longer version (400-600 words) attempts to persuade the user that a familiar item is worth paying attention to (poets often do this of course).

In fact your mission is to figure out how to make the thing ATTRACTive to a high school student, since they are a prime audience for the K-Web. You can do this by showing the unappreciated importance the object has or had, perhaps some little known use, or by doing what Burke does, finding some strange link to something else that Burke hasn't found yet. That'll take creativity and strong research skills, but you have the advantages of a different point of view, different research sources, and a much keener insight into what high school kids would find compelling.

We're just now experimenting with the longer version, and we're still figuring out which users and gateways might need which kind (or both). We also have to find a balance between enticing users users into the K-Web and spoiling the suprise, but the only way to do that is to have a variety passages to test, so don't worry and feel free to experiment. Here's an example of a very short and to the point Gateway (already accepted), a medium (creative) and long (this particular example is pretty factual) version, just to give you some ideas. In the long version, you get to do what Burke does, look for the intersting unknown "angles" on your topic. The Tagmemic questions will help you look at your topic in many different ways, and is an excellent way to find a creative approach (example).

Remember, you need to work the links (the words in parenthesis on the signup sheet) into your passage, though you do not have to go into any detail, since your passage will link to them). The template for your gateway is here: Don't worry if you don't understand the format for bibiography or links, as we can fix them later. We are looking for material to link to, especially cool multimedia, so please give complete info on where to access.  General instruction on how to create K-Web content, particularly the biographies we will do next, is here

If you have any questions, let me know