Peter Organisciak
PhD Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois
orga...@illinois.edu
What do I do?
My research interests lie at the intersection of online systems and users. How do users self-organize within the constraints of a system and how can systems adapt to these needs. This juncture between the humanistic look at users and the technical considerations of systems design characterizes most of my research, which includes sociological looks at online crowds, the communication of data through visualization, and online communication data mining.
Ph.D.
Advisor:
Miles Efron
Education:
MA, Humanities Computing – Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, 2010
Honours BA, Communications and Multimedia, McMaster University, 2008
Selected Publications, Papers and Presentations
See my Curriculum Vitae!
Honors and Awards
Ian Lancashire Graduate Award (Best student paper, SDH-SEMI 2011)
Blog
More Incremental Design Tweaks
April 10th, 2011
Good designers know that it’s better to improve a website than to rebuild it.
I’m not a good designer. I have many experimental weekend project redesigns from over the years. Yet, there’s never time to finish it to a satisfactory state. 90% of the work is in the last 10% of the project.
With that in mind, I’ve been giving this site incremental updates this year. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s certainly empowering to be able to actually exact some change. Today’s update includes some visible stylistic changes and some underlying template tweaks. Find them all!
Ubiquitous Text Analysis
April 9th, 2011
I have an paper on Ubiquitous Text Analysis in the recent issue of the Poetess Archive Journal with Geoffrey Rockwell, Stéfan Sinclair, and Stan Ruecker.
The paper appears in a special issue, “Visualizing the Archive,” which includes a papers by a notable roster, including Drucker, Kirschenbaum, Manovich, Schriebman, and Nowviskie.
Incidentally, I began a new HTML+JS version of TAToo last month, tentatively title TAToo JS. It’s coming together nicely, and I look forward to sharing an initial release. I love coding in something more familiar, not to mention something interpreted. The original TAToo actually interacted with pages through Javascript hooks, so this is a natural progression. As a sneak peak, here’s what the embed code looks like:
<tatoo:widget width="210" height="410"></tatoo:widget>
Interview on planning crowd projects
April 4th, 2011
A few weeks ago, Rodney Echols interviewed me about my thesis work for a Ahm Sayin‘. Check it out.
Rediscovering Structure Synth
March 6th, 2011
270-Unit Sonobe Ball
January 24th, 2011
I wanted to work on my attention span over winter break, I started (and finished) a 270-unit Sonobe ball.
Android dress-up
January 2nd, 2011
Our pixel wedding
January 2nd, 2011
Where I make a rare pop culture reference
November 26th, 2010
I can’t be the first one to have thought of this. Some context. And more context.
Frames of Reference
October 18th, 2010
An enjoyable film on frames of reference from 1960, with Donald Ivey – for the Canadians, he was the original Nature of Things host – and Patterson Hume. Internet archive says it well:
The fine cinematography by Abraham Morochnik, and funny narration by University of Toronto professors Donald Ivey and Patterson Hume is a wonderful example of the fun a creative team of filmmakers can have with a subject that other, less imaginative types might find pedestrian.
0Boxer and other stats for your online life
October 9th, 2010
I came across a neat browser plugin recently called 0Boxer. Available for Firefox or Chrome, the plugin adds game mechanics to one’s Gmail inbox. It’s a little bit of fun that assigns points and awards badges for dealing with your email. There’s even leaderboards, but good luck getting on them. At the very least, though, the leaderboards show what you already knew about battling email: we’re all in this together.
One feature that I’d love to see is some sort of relative statistics, rather than a constantly rising point count. In my spare time, I’ve been creating a Remember the Milk based to-do list app that shows you a progress bar of your completed tasks relative to all your tasks for the day. It strikes me that something like that might motivate people to clear more emails than they receive.
On the topic of neat Gmail plugins, Graph Your Inbox is a Chrome plug-in that provides inbox statistics. The screenshot above explains it best: it shows a graph of my mailing list emails, which peak each year in March. This is the sort of functionality that I wish services had built in, that offer insights into your habits. Currently, the only case of built-in usage stats that comes to mind is Google Reader’s metrics, for other site you need to find external services like TweetStats or LastGraph.
