Click album covers for more info.

Inspired by Nick Carr, I decided to compile a list of my favorite albums for each year of my life. The constraints are: only one album per year and no repeated artists. To make the task a bit easier, I also decided to restrict the list to albums I own, and to only consider studio albums: no compilations, live album, or DJ mixes.

Exercises like this are kind of pointless, but I found it interesting nonetheless. First of all, it drives home how unevenly distributed over time good music is. For some years, like 1981, I had a hard time recalling any albums I liked. Other years like 1984, or periods like 1991-1994 (high school!) made for some difficult choices. Purple Rain, The Pod, and Buhloone Mindstate should really be on this list, as should The Chronic.

The other interesting aspect of doing this is seeing at which point my musical taste formed: it isn’t until 1988 that this list reflects what I was actually listening to at the time (no, my parents didn’t play The Modern Lovers and Lust for Life for me in my crib). From that point on, my tastes have gone through various phases and changes (I like jazz a lot more now than I did back then), but I still like now what I liked then.

Finally, it makes me realize how the album is linked to certain genres and modes of consuming music. I had a hard time recalling albums from 1996-1998, because I was DJing at that time and mostly buying and listening to music in the form of 12-inch singles and DJ mixes. And for the last few years as well, a disproportionate amount of the music I listen to is singles downloaded from MP3 blogs and mixes posted to the web. In fact, I haven’t bought any 2008 studio albums yet, but decided to include I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind II because I love Killer Mike and it’s his best album. Which isn’t to say that I believe that the natural unit of music is the track. It’s just that the web allows me to more easily dig for forgotten older stuff, and so most of the albums I’m buying recently are not current releases but older things like Desire Develops an Edge, Joggers & Smoggers and Idiot O’Clock. It’s a great time to be a music maniac…

This should be running in prime time on every network in the country.

Daniel Tunkelang has a worthwhile set of posts [1, 2, 3] on whether Google is “good enough” for various kinds of tasks that involve document retrieval. The last one, on enterprise search, got me to thinking about what it is that interests me about scholarly information systems. Tunkelang, riffing on an article by Chris Sherman, argues that “enterprises, with all of their highly structured and carefully organized silos of information, require a very different and paradoxically more complex approach” to search than what Google does with Web documents.

Scholars too have existing “highly structured and carefully organized silos of information,” and I’m very interested in how to reconcile these, and the organizational processes that produce them, with the new tools that things like statistical machine learning make possible. Yet the scholarly domain is even more interesting than the enterprise domain, because its silos exist not only within enterprise-like organizations like universities, but also in the invisible colleges formed by colleagues who share a discipline but work within different organizations. Engineers have similar cross-cutting community affiliations: one might identify more strongly as a Python programmer and member of the Python community than as an employee of any particular tech company. Although the latter is the one paying the bills, the former is where questions are answered, contacts are made, and new jobs are found.

Anyway, the point is that while organizing information within a company or a university is an interesting problem, even more interesting is the problem of how to interweave these kinds of information systems with those of other, more fluid, disciplinary or interest-driven communities. Another way of thinking about it is: how can a complex organization not only articulate and fulfill its own information needs, but also be permeable enough to inter-operate with other kinds of organizations as needed in order to articulate and fulfill the needs of different trans-organizational configurations of users, as (for example) new disciplines are formed or strategic alliances made? Can we have the openness and flexibility of the Web without dismissing organizations or resigning ourselves to disorganization?