Friday, 28 January 2011

Data or Information? Sorting or piling?

Just have my room tidied up and cleared out a great pile of cassette tapes. In my age studying interpretation, I wondered to study translation and interpretation again in future time, so I kept all of them. But finally such piles of "data" are still disposed.

Yes, they're only "DATA". Almost all of them are not sorted properly, just a mixture of my work; and the relationship between my memory and the content in the tapes have been disappeared. They, are no longer "INFORMATION" I need, nor I can apply them to my study and work now.



For the past 5 years I always get the definition of DATA and INFORMATION messed up. My "Mount of Information" grows up in these just 3 years. For the young time, all the data I received is retrieved by myself. For example, recording live radio programme and having them edited.


As seen in this list of MP3 files, I have piles of raw MP3 (named by date and time) that are not edited yet; and another pile of edited MP3, recording some of my favourite radio programme (named by station, programme name and date). But when will the raw MP3 data be edited, and given an identity or relationship to the sound clip? I don't know. I have no time.


 
Yeah. Rodney has the same action with me, just don't know how to sort out the information and data. Me too. I used to put different kinds of files on a single area like the Desktop. See? Plain text notes, powerpoint, word files, also zipped files, all are located on the Desktop.

But how when your files get piles? Simple, just transfer to My Documents / _ \. When I backup the data, I always do one time of sorting first, for burning into DVDs (so out-of-date physical product isn't it?) For the ones cannot be sorted, they are put in a folder call "Floated DATA".



 
Tagging can be a good idea for sorting, just ease more effort for searching. I like to search everything: DATA, INFORMATION, etc. But the intelligence of some search sites needs improvement. For searching some video clips in Youtube, I always get a great pile of irrelevent results. For instance, I can only try to search by sorting in upload dates. Some engines are actually awesome, like Wikipedia and google, I just type one word and they just like a worm in my body, show me what I want. GOOGLE ROCKS!!!!!


 
Yeah it is true for a good sorting system and tagging technique,
it can help for searching in the ocean of information.
I previously sort my music files in different folders.
But I found it is meaningless. For the less amount of files,
after sorting, I got only 2 to 3 files in each folder.
It sucks my time that I need more time to open more folders to access.






Although the "Information Mount" growed up rapidly, I still need not a big hand. But actually I have to manage a new way to organise my "DATA" to necessary "INFORMATION". The traditional sorting function in Windows can help, but not long.




However, KNOWLEDGE can be no longer be applied, and the INFORMATION themselves can also no longer having relations. Then where should the DATA go? Well, just burn into DVDs, and LET IT OUT~~




How do you organise your data / information?

Wednesday, 19 January 2011

My Digital Life

Hi this is Pauly.

Since my home introduced a computer at 1998, I entered the new era in the after decade.
Over this decade, the digital world boomed much faster than I expected.
However, my digital footprint always slower than people running after the new.

When the IT fever was splashed over in 1999, I started to use internet before the end of 20th Century.

When the city entered to the broadband transferring, I was still using 56Kbps modem till 2005.

When people taking millions of photos using DCs, I was still using a second-hand camera.
When people going mad with iPhone and iPad, I still using Nokia 5130 for low quality photo and MP3

Not running after the new, but I get addict to the internet, looping in different platforms like MSN, Facebook, Twitter. Each day I spend about four to five hours in internet, surfing aroung various forums, chatrooms, weblogs. Although the number of websites is not so much, I surf them in a cycle, this forum, that chatroom, those blog, forum again, blog again, chatroom......and looping around.

As the generation X a lot of information booming around us, and the world tends to multi-modal. You can get news animation from Apple Action News, visiting latest music video from Youtube, replaying yesterday's drama from Tudou etc......

Although I am not going so deep in this digital world, the change in the reality actually raised different questions about the relationship between human and technology, also for the identity.

Throughout this course "Language in digital media", I can understand myself again, from surviving in this digital era to the new literacy of learning online discourse.

Looking forward to the future topics!!