Review: The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff

The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff by Ofer Bergman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not quite what I was expecting from a Gildan Media audiobook. The last twenty or so years I have worked in “content management” software, where storing and finding electronic files is required in order to create value from the content. I’ve read about the research into these issues over the years. This book is a survey of research on how people store files and the mental and technological processes people use to find files in a computer. I’ve always likened the two main ways to find information, browsing through a folder tree structure or searching, to the dichotomy between the sod-busters and the ranchers in the old west. The sod-busters were big on separating their fields, with barbed wire, in order to demark their territory. That is like folders – people use folders to mark, or categorize, their fields. Ranchers were used to the world with no fences and would run their cattle through whatever land was in the way going to high ground or market. This seems like searchers, those who disregard categorizations that have been put in place, writing a narrow or broad search term to find their quarry. The authors recognized these main classifications, but added additional classifications, such as tagging or group tagging. These different ways to categorize and/or search for content are described with seemingly endless academic studies. Who knew there were so many studies done? The compilation showed that every strategy had its place, but people tended toward hierarchy in order to better find their files.

The authors surprisingly disregarded some of the capabilities common in corporate content management software that could be used for personal information management. For one, tags can be displayed as folders, allowing for a broad hierarchy view of your content. Tags should be considered virtual folders. Also, I didn’t catch any mention of using what I’d call “virtual documents”, allowing a single document or file to appear in multiple places in a folder hierarchy. This feature of many content management systems (somewhat duplicated with Windows shortcuts) would solve many of the problems that were brought up, but I didn’t hear it mentioned. Being research-based, the book also underreported some of the newer capabilities in the market – think Google Photos autoclassification of pictures that creates folders of pictures by person in the photo (or even by pet).

I read this book hoping it would provide new perspective on retrieval that I could offer to the people and companies I work with, while also hoping I found a new “better way” to handle my own content management chores with personal photos, emails, documents, and the like. About 80% of the book was about studies that appeared to be very basic. The final 20% is where the authors got around to discussing some alternative strategies. While these were not groundbreaking, they weren’t commonplace in what I’ve seen in the market, and I found this last section of value.

The writing was very repetitive. This is not what you would call a business book. This is an academic book. I wasn’t expecting an academic audiobook from Gildan Media – Your Coach in a Box, who I thought only publishes business books. Had I realized that MIT Press published the hardcover, I’d have been more prepared for the possibility of it being academic. There is nothing practical about managing files in this book. This is not a how-to. If you are looking for methods to put into practice, look elsewhere. Best use of the book - if you are looking for ideas for creating new software to help people manage their personal information, you can find some ideas here, as well as explanations for why people use folders and search.

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Review: I Don't Know What I Want But I Know It's Not This: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work

I Don't Know What I Want But I Know It's Not This: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work by Julie Jansen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I laugh when I hear U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. Because I still haven’t figured out what I’m looking for, so I’m not sure whether I’ve found it already or not. This book takes the tact that you need to answer both of those questions in the correct order – what is it you want with a career, and how do you get there. I appreciated the broad brush used here. The author delves into a number of personality tests and includes many surveys and thought questions to help answer that first question. And she doesn’t narrow down the possible answers to just a new full-time career. The author talks about going part time, volunteering, owning your own business, and retiring. She covers all bases. The final chapter is typical of a book about job hunting. I found this was a different perspective than many books that focus on either “what should I do with my life” or “how do I start a business, retire, get a new job,…”. But that was also a weakness. There was quite a lot covered, so there didn’t seem to be as much depth as other similar books. Overall, I found it a reasonable overview of the topics discussed, with one or two new-to-me things to think about (in my case, about purchases of existing businesses). The title is golden.

I listened to this audiobook, mostly while driving or walking as is my habit. This contained a number of surveys, quizzes, and the like which required stopping the playback and writing down well-thought-thru answers. These interactions were key to getting something out of the book. If you want to play along, you should consider a paper copy of the book.


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Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eleanor Oliphant was a traumatized child, was traumatized as a young adult, but is now hitting 30. She has a job but no friends or family to support her. She is in a shell, conversing with herself using a classic literature vocabulary to express in specific detail what she wants to express. This story is about her coming out of her shell, lead in part by a co-worker who befriends her. At times, this sounded like it was turning itself into a Chuck Palahniuk novel (think “Invisible Monsters”), but ended up more along the lines of, as another reviewer mentioned, Forest Gump or Rainman. It’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, but instead of murder and hacking and revenge and Blomkvist, there’s accounting and a cat and a scraggly IT guy.

The story grew on me. I did not like it over the first 2/3 or so. Eleanor reminded me of someone I know, and the self-narration felt like an intrusion into what I saw as a daily struggle, but what Eleanor just mindlessly dealt with. We are meant to laugh at some of the predicaments, but again, this felt too close to home to wholly appreciate. As the story ended, though, you saw growth, and are left with a feeling that she will prevail over her situation given enough time, and perhaps even thrive. Can’t ask for much more than that.

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Review: The Monk of Mokha

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eggers tells another story of a normal guy facing long odds trying to do the right thing. I kept having flashbacks listening to this audiobook, and I realized I was constantly being reminded of Eggers’ book “Zeitoun”. Some of the anecdotes about an earnest individual being rousted by chaotic authority sounded very similar. In both books, the subject prevails in comparison to those around him. As I wrote in my review in “Zeitoun”, this non-fiction hero-making book has the feel of an advertisement for the subject, and in this case, Mokhtar’s coffee company does offer the book in a package with his coffee.

Despite my concerns about why this was written, I did enjoy the story to some extent. I love a good “new entrepreneur against the odds” story, and this fits the bill. You follow Mokhtar as he comes up with the idea, researches it, learns sales, lives a messy life, but figures it out, bit by bit. The culmination of the story in a chaotic attempt to leave Yemen for a coffee convention in Portland was a little too long. I was left wanting more on what happened after the realization of Mokhtar’s big break, but the book left that out, making me wonder if the story was over. You are not left with the feeling that Mokhtar has built a sustainable company. Hopefully, Eggers addresses this in future editions.


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Review: Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency

Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency by Dan Abrams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can see how this book was put together. The author did a prodigious amount of research to put this together. He had a good place to start. The trial in focus was one of the first in downstate Illinois that had a trial transcript. It wasn’t complete in our sense of modern court transcripts – the closing arguments weren’t captured – but the trial, with teams of lawyers on both sides, was captured in detail. The authors then researched the people involved in the trial, from the judge to the witnesses to the court crier, if I heard that right (sounded like a court bailiff to me). The author researched to a deep level. We learn that the crier used a different, somewhat unique call to order for court. We learn of some of the other travelers in town that could have met up with the principals in the story. We learn about the times – a townsman suggests a visitor tour Springfield’s top tourist attraction, the town stables, from where the Donner party departed. And you get Lincoln, a towering presence in the book, in the trial and in the many anecdotes that are included to give life to the story.

The author took this research and created a story that included the trial, but also included background and tangential anecdotes, all added to the story. It becomes a whole story, but with a few odd tangential bits that added to the flavor but detracted from the flow. You end up with a very readable book, cinematic in description. Lincoln really stands out. As presented, his character would make an excellent lawyer in a legal drama on TV. -smart and pithy. You get these interesting characters, but you also get the legal dual. At one point, you see Lincoln’s side pulls recent relevant case law, then you see the opposition finding older case law to cite. Quite a bit of the story turns on the ability of Lincoln to think ahead of his opponents and to use what we would now call “persuasion techniques” to sway the judge and jury.

I listened to this audiobook, and found it very easy to listen to and to follow. But given this was a history book with plenty of conjectured events and conversations, I would have appreciated the paper version if it had plentiful footnotes to call out those conjectures from the record. Given the base story and how the author made it interesting, I look forward to more by this author.


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Review: Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing by Ben Blatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I work in software, with systems created to manage electronic content and to handle eDiscovery and searches. One of the capabilities of these kinds of systems is the ability to make content available for analysis through analytics. I’ve seen users of these system do some interesting things in evaluating their content to, for example, find relationships between emails, but I hadn’t seen many good uses of text analytics for researching regular, old documents. That’s what this book does. There are dozens of examples described analyzing mostly books, comparing, for instance, uses of different words over time, and comparing different authors in word usage. The first example, analysis of the Federalist papers to determine the original author based on word usage, was a great introduction to how this kind of analysis can impact our understanding of history. Many of the other examples didn’t aim quite so high, providing ways to compare authors to others, or compare an author’s early work to their later work. There were also examples comparing the size of an author’s name on book covers compared to their co-writers or compared to their own books as the author became more popular. Along the way, you learn that Danielle Steele and James Patterson’s writing stands out for, to me, unexpected reasons. I found this an interesting book if you are interested in books and authors.

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Review: The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric R. Kandel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting book starting with a review of “the scene” in Vienna prior to WWI, describing the art scene and Freud and his research. After this overview, the book turns into a somewhat pop-science review of brain science and psychology. It concludes using the learnings of the Viennese to illustrate the science, and to further discuss creativity. I found the first part, the history, quite unexpected and interesting. The author described how artists discovered new ways to present their art using new thinking about human perception. These perceptual cues are then described from the perspective of brain science and psychology. Quite deep. There have been quite a few books that covered the science that this book covered in the past year, and it seems I’ve read more than a handful. This came across as a deeper technical discussion than those pop-science books, and it had a unique angle of relating it to art and early psychology. It was still quite readable.

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