Amsterdam Adventures

The readings from the Geert Mak book Amsterdam are pretty interesting. A couple of things struck me. The first is this notion of pride or lack of pride that the Dutch have. Mak says, “The lack of pride of modern Amsterdammers goes further, however. It is not only a character trait, it is a social norm.” I’ve heard that there is some common Dutch proverb about how your head will get chopped off if you stick it above the crowd. These seem to go hand in hand. Don’t be proud or try to do anything to distinguish yourself or you will be punished for it. There are numerous examples of Dutch government employees and citizens doing what they’re told to do by the Germans and who “made the wheels of this gigantic death-machine go round” - people running the trains, identifying Jews, police officers arresting Jews. None of the civil servants resisted doing this work. When the Jews were dismissed from Universities, there were no demonstrations in Amsterdam.

And the second thing is that struck me is the systematic isolation of the Jews leading up WWII. The isolation started years and years before the Occupation. While there is some mention of Jewish integration with the workers’ movement, it sounds like the Jewish population was still really isolated and especially in the ghetto, Jews depended on each other for survival. This segregation made the pogroms easier for the Germans.

Questions?

How big a part did the notion of pride play in the lack of widespread Resistance in Amsterdam during WWII? Were there other ethnic communities isolated like the Jews? What was the source of this segregation and isolation and is it being repeated with the modern day Dutch immigrants from Suriname, Morocco, Turkey and other immigrant countries?

There are a couple of other interesting things from the IA Summit that I thought of. The first is that I went to a session presented by Peter Morville who wrote Ambient Findability, which is an O'Reilly book all about informatin interaction. He mentioned this website called podzinger.com that is creating new ways of searching podcats. It allows you search not just on the metadata of podcasts but on the actual data within the podcasts. It allows full text searching, presents results and allows you to click on a word or phrase in the results. Then it plays the podcast from where you clicked. Cool, huh? I haven't played with it much yet but it looks interesting.

I went to the IA Summit this weekend with a couple other MLISers including Aaron. I saw a great presentation there called Architecting self-organizing learning communities presented by Bud Faison who is a professor at Michigan's Ross School of Business. For the last few years, he has been trying to create a online learning communities with some of his classes. The students are required to read and post to the blogs he sets up and then the information is aggregated to the website for everyone to read and comment on. You can see the latest round of the site here. It was cool to hear how this community has changed the students' experiences, performance in his classes and the way he teaches the class. It's all really interesting and gave me lots of good ideas for my research.

I'm a first-year MLIS student in the residence program. I am very excited for the Amsterdam program because it brings together the things I am really interested in: research, technology and systems development. My plan (right now, anyway) is to work on a research project related to how students and scholars research, especially how they use social software and collaborative technologies to do their research. And how those technologies change how people research. So hopefully plenty of people in the program will be using both collaborative and social software so I can study you!

As for something about myself, I live in Ballard with my husband, Scott, and our lab, Hank. We've lived in Seattle about ten years with a two year hiatus when we lived in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 2001 to 2003. I worked for a long time as a test engineer for a Seattle software company called WRQ. WRQ doesn't really exist anymore, as it was merged with another company, but it was a great place while it lasted.

Scott and I started snowboarding about nine years ago and we both love it. Our favorite spot around here is Mt. Baker. We try to get to Whistler at least once a year, too.

And to wrap up, here's a picture of Hank after a muddy evening at the park.

I hope my Dutch comes back...