A Few Michigan Daily Notes

Longtime readers of this blog will know that although I had a somewhat tumultuous history with the institution on the whole I enjoyed my time at the Univeristy of Michigan’s student newspaper the Michigan Daily. One of the people I met there was Nick Woomer, whom I had the opportunity to catch up with briefly this weekend, which got me thinking about things Daily.

In Ann Arbor this weekend the newspaper was holding their last reunion at the newspaper’s building before it undergoes a major renovation, and I stumbled across this set of photos on Flickr from the weekend if anyone unable to attend wants to take a peek at what they missed. Although I’ve already posted a link to it, my friend and former news and opinion editor at the paper (And Express editor and DCist co-founder) Mike Grass wrote an interesting post about some of the building’s secrets titled “Maynard Street’s Living Tomb.” Lastly, I think this editorial board photo from 2002 may be of interest to anyone around the newspaper at the time.

‘Tent State University’

First time I’ve heard about this:

Tent State University is a campaign that started in 2003 at Rutgers University and has been taken on by about 10 other schools so far. It is the realization of an alternative university in the midst of the old university. It symbolizes our dissatisfaction with the direction of the education system in the United States. With tents, workshops, alternative classes, open assemblies, and free art and music, we will build parallel democratic institutions to challenge the undemocratic control of our education. With your help, Tent State will take over the Diag this Spring, 2006!

Google’s Digitization Project

I began thinking about digitization recently after hearing a presentation recently about the National Archives and Records Administration’s Electronic Records Archives, their huge project to design a system to capture and retain digital records produced by the federal government. While the initiative (referred to as ERA, apparently the acronym is back up for grabs in this post-feminist world) is very interesting and has archivists worrying about what the essential characteristics of each record type are, and how the system can be both massively scalable and simple enough to be easily reverse-engineered if found in some distant future.

Of course, the flip side of retaining and preserving documents which originated in digital formats is the ongoing effort to digitize existing print material. Google is one of the leaders in this area with the project they announced in 2004 to scan the contents of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library. I began to wonder where the project stood today, as I hadn’t heard much about it since 2004. Since the project announcement the University of Michigan has set up this webpage with plenty of information about the project, and in recent months President Coleman has been vocal defending the project’s merits, presumably as a reaction to the hostile reaction it has found by the big publishing houses. I thought it cast the University in a familiar role — it famously and stubbornly took the Affirmative Action issue to the Supreme Court, so I can see them taking quite a stubborn line on the issue when they’ve decided it is the Right Thing. After all, how far can you really stick your neck out with a multi-billion dollar endowment and plenty of free PR to gain?

The politics of the University’s principled positions aside, I wondered exactly what’s going on in Ann Arbor with the project. This article, published in something called the Book Standard, describes some of the machines Google might be using to scan the U-M library. The company announced they intend to scan the library’s approximately 7,000 volumes in just six years. Imagining a secret warehouse of exotic scanning machines manned by dozens of workers sworn to secrecy, I set out to calculate just how many machines Google might be operating in some Ann Arbor warehouse (or to speculate, the Buhr Shelving Facility)

Here’s the numbers: if there are 7 million records and each book contained on average 250 pages, that would mean about 1,750,000,000 pages. To finish in six years, Google would have to scan 799,087 pages each day, or 33,295 each hour around the clock. According to the Book Standard, the fastest scanning machine in the world can do 3,000 pages an hour, meaning Google would only have to own 11 machines. If they ran them 12 hours a day they’d need 22. At $225,000 each 22 machines comes to around $5 million. Although not an insignificant number of machines, it’s certainly a far cry from the vast warehouse of my imagination.

Here’s where you come in, fine readers: who can send me some smuggled photos (or observations) of the Google machines at work?

Michigamua Re-Named?

Sources say they’ll simply refer to themselves as “The Pride of 2007″ for the time being, and there is talk of a new name. The final turnover to the new class is tonight.

Daily Posts U-M Employee Earnings

I was recently emailed by someone looking for the newest University of Michigan employee salary data, as this website was the first place to post the data in an electronic format. (The Michigan Daily has for years published a special print “supplement” at the end of the school year.) I noticed the Daily has posted the data for 2005-2006, but unfortunately they’ve just uploaded the huge, 8 megabyte spreadsheet in apparently the same format it was provided them by the university. I remember seeing a website somewhere where someone had made this data searchable, but don’t have the link handy - if someone else does please leave a comment.

Here’s the data:

• 2005-2006 Employee Salaries (.xls, 8 mb)
• 2004-2005 earnings (my link to the Daily’s server is broken, I am not sure if the data is still available somewhere over there)
• 2003 earnings
• 2002 earnings data

links for 2006-03-19

• Michigamua Documentary Trailer (.mov)
  Jamie Shenk has released a new trailer for a short documentary on Michigamua. He’s unearthed some great archival footage of the group’s induction ceremony, and the trailer includes a short piece of his interview of me.
• So, what’s the point of SWSX?
  My friend Michael ponders the meaning of the recently concluded internet conference. Maybe I’ll go next year.

Michigamua’s Broken 1989 Promise

Much of the talk about Michigamua, and the crux of the lawsuit filed last week in Washtenaw County Court, is a 1989 agreement between the university, Michigamua, and Native American students, that the organization would abandon all references to Native American Culture. In 2000, 11 years after that agreement was signed, the Student of Color Coalition discovered that the organization’s “Wigwam” in the Michigan Union still held many authentic and imitation Native American artifacts in violation of their agreement to abandoned this part of their identity.

Before now, I have only read about this agreement, and never seen a copy for myself. Yet a copy of the lawsuit sent to me contained it as an addendum. I’ve already run the text of the complaint, but here’s an image of the 1989 agreement in question. (Or click on the image to the right.) It’s quite straight forward, with the organization promising to eliminate “all references to Native American culture and pseudo-culture and extensions and parodies thereof, with the one exception being the name, Michigamua, for now and forever.”

The Daily has recently published some commentary about the meaning of this document, their editorial board weighing in on the side of activists in January. Here are a couple opposing op-eds which ran in response:
> ” Michigamua has troubled past”
> “Looking to the future by learning from the past”