You know who else puts paper books in front of readers? Libraries.

We don’t just put them out there, either; we recommend them and we pick a few to showcase every year. ALA awards 38 book, print, & media awards — some for books, others for journal articles or other things not necessarily part of the library circulation picture — but two dwarf the rest: Newbery and Caldecott.

Toby Greenwalt’s done some interesting guerrilla research on the effects these awards have on book sales. By enlisting contacts in the awards committees, he was able to get snapshots of Amazon sales rank for the awardees before and after they were announced. In every case the immediate bump in sales rank was dramatic. This is especially true for the Newbery and Caldecott winners, which went from sales rankings in the 20,000s to #32 and #101, respectively.

Amazon sales rankings don’t give direct data on profits, of course; Amazon’s notoriously secretive about that sort of information and I don’t have access to, say, BookScan, but I’m willing to take this as evidence that the ALA’s blessing via these awards translates directly into profits for their rights holders. Makes them, even, into the big-win books that subsidize the rest.

The question that Shatzkin’s article brought to mind, then, is: how many of these books are available, as ebooks, to libraries?

So I did some research. I looked up the Caldecott and Newbery winners and honorees, 2010-2012, along with their publishers (both the imprint and the top-level publisher; the former tends to be listed with the book but it’s the latter whose policy governs library ebook lending), and the publisher’s stance toward library ebook lending at the time of the award. (I used availability in OverDrive as a proxy for library ebook lending policy in some cases.)

Here’s what I found. Of 23 honorees:

• 9 are from publishers that sold ebooks to libraries at the time of the award. (Not all exist in ebook format, using “availability for Kindle” as a proxy for “available in ebook format”, but if they were, their publishers make ebooks available to libraries. One is from HarperCollins before it announced its 26 checkout limit.)
• 1 is from HarperColins, after it announced its policy of selling to libraries with a 26 checkout restriction.
• 12 are from publishers which did not sell ebooks to libraries at the time of the award. (2 publishers, representing 3 books, have since partnered with OverDrive.)

One proved hard to track down. There’s nothing available by that publisher in my local OverDrive, but that doesn’t necessarily signify; the book is available in Kindle ebook.

So just to be clear: over half of the books that ALA has honored with its biggest awards since 2010 are books that the publishers would not at the time — and may not now — let libraries lend electronically. Over half.

Debates over library ebook access often descend into handwringing about access — we could back off from this, we could act on other principles, but patrons want these, we value access, these are the terms on which we can provide it. But this? This is not a question of access. This is a question of praise.

We are blessing these books, on our biggest stage.

We are handing their publishers money. Real, verifiable, money.

When they allow us, literally, nothing in return.

When is it okay to stop bringing hugs to a knife fight?

Today an old college friend pointed to a story on human time travelers.

No, really: people of such immense age that they lived through things that you would think lost to living memory. Civil War widows receiving their pensions in the 21st century. A man who saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and talked about it — on television. (Go. Watch.)

I find I react in much the same way. And it’s the same way I reacted, studying classics, when I read something like the letters of Cicero, and felt there, across a language and an ocean and two millennia, we were having a conversation. The same way I react to a really good book or an exceptionally good conversation and, perhaps, the single feeling I associate most with the best of libraries: the feeling that a barrier that separates me — from times or places or people — has grown tissue-thin, that light and sound can come across it as it shimmers, that I can put my hand right up to the thing that separates us and something else can touch me back.

I was just attending the ALA Midwinter tech wrap-up webinar, where bleeding-edge friend Jason Griffey was talking about makerbots and libraries, and fielded the inevitable question from people like me: why do we care? What would we do with this in our library lives?

Yesterday I was stomping around the forest with my husband and five-year-old daughter. I read Ken Jennings’ Maphead not so long ago and it reminded me I’ve always been curious about geocaching, and it was a nice sunny day and technology was an excuse to get outside in it, so I told Ms5, we’re going to look for a treasure in the woods! And we did, and it took a while — intermittent signal as we drifted below the ridge — and suddenly there it was, a taped-up little box under some shards of wood in a fallen-down tree. Right there on the line between metadata and magic.

It’s what hits me, over and over, as I look at location-based services and augmented reality — geocaching, Layar, Foursquare, Scan Jose, name what you will — the world is full of secrets hiding in plain sight, simply there waiting for us to look at them. The world is full of mysteries and wonders we don’t need an invitation to see, merely the willingness to look. Jamie Larue said that in the past libraries were about bringing the world to the community, and now they’ll be about bringing communities to the world — I wonder where the desire lines are running through reality, waiting for us to tumble upon them, insinuate information and make a thing of wonder.

Isn’t that what libraries were always for? Secrets in the world, hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to stumble upon them and have your world opened with one heartstopping lightning bolt, look around in new ways?

I pledged to a Kickstarter project a few months ago — it was already past its funding threshold, staggeringly so, one of those magic moments when the internet descends on someone full force and long-tail rivulets snake down into a flood — but he was selling skulls. The most lovely filigreed skulls, arabesques and curlicues, a romantic steampunk memento mori. I needed one for my office. I ordered one.

I didn’t realize, somehow, how small it would be. It fits in my palm just right and stares back at me staring at it. Nor how fragile — less than plastic, more than paper, it is like a butterfly — in the old sense, both “butterfly” and “soul” — a whisper, a breath, a fragile thing landed here from the future. A moment of pulling back the curtain between now and what could be.

I work for a startup now. My whole life is what-could-be, stepping into the space filled with nothing and making a something be there. I am easily transfixed by possibility these days.

So this is how I’d answer that question, the question of why. Because discovery is wonder. Because possibility is love. Because, amid the stacks and silent places, the forests and convention centers, there are secrets whispering to us, licking at the edges of our minds and asking to transform us. Because information and imagination were ever thus, and associating that with books was a wonderful historical coincidence: not a shackle.

This uses a Google map as previously described (updated with today’s data — it’s slow and mysteriously twitchy about displaying properly, so if you don’t see it, try again later or try the Google link; haven’t figured that out yet — but I did fix the iframe issue via finding a WordPress plugin allowing me to do iframes). I’m also:

• pulling in the Flickr libday8 tag via RSS, with the WordPress RSS in Page plugin. (Also libday7, just to fill out that space while we wait for libday8 to have much content).
• using the standard Twitter widget (with a customized color scheme) to pull in the #libday8 hashtag.
• pulling in the libday8 tag from WordPress.com, also via RSS, though via some other strategy I have apparently already completely forgotten. This is by no means all the blogs involved in Library Day in the Life, but it’s a lot easier to pull in the wordpress.com tag via RSS than it is to use some actual Python or something to munge the social media field from pbworks, and I’m feeling lazy.

How I’d make it better (because it’s always good to reflect & learn!):

• Figure out what the deal is with the map not reliably displaying.
• Spend some more time on the Flickr custom CSS to deal more intelligently with the range of image aspect ratios.
• Figure out why my data-munging didn’t preserve links to people’s social media, so I could display it properly in placemarks.
• Do the data-munging to break out everyone’s blogs, and figure out how to turn that into an RSS aggregator searching those blogs for the libday8 tag. (Or perhaps short-circuit this step by figuring out what table structure would remove most of the munging overhead, and ask Bobbi pretty please to structure the libday9 table for my personal convenience.
• Figure out how to munge the data about library type/employer so as to provide some sort of faceting on all this.

Anyway, I had fun doing this and I’m hoping it will be a fun way for me, and you, to experience libday8.

Behold, a map!

(The iframe embed Google generated didn’t seem to be working, but you can click through the image to play with the interactive Google map.)

How I did this

I thought I was going to have to write some code, screen-scrape the HTML wiki into CSV, learn a Google maps API, blah blah blah. It turns out I did not! As with so many tech problems, this reduced to “beat it with rocks until it works”. Unlike many tech problems, no actual code was required; it was mostly copy-paste. To wit:

Step 1: =ImportHTML is your friend. Google Docs will automagically import tables from web pages as spreadsheet data. I followed these instructions; just a matter of changing the number N until the right table materialized. (Note that =ImportHTML is case-sensitive; =importHTML won’t work.)

Step 2: Copy-paste as values. The automagic import is a whole bunch of spreadsheet functions, so it can’t be imported into the tools I needed later in the process. However, this can be fixed. Create a second sheet for the spreadsheet. Copy the first one and paste as values into the second; this will keep the parts you can see (turning them into static values) and throw out the functions generating them.

Step 3: Geocode the data. To get good mapping, you’ll need your address data to be geocoded — latitude/longitude rather than just text. Luckily, the robot servants can do that for you. It turns out there are roughly a bajillion gadgets you can stick into your Docs spreadsheet to make it do awesome stuff — lots provided by Google, plus you can invoke arbitrary custom gadgets if you know their URL. Pamela Fox has a geocoding gadget for you, so I could turn the human-readable address data into lat/lng coding with a few clicks, following the instructions at her site.

Here’s the spreadsheet I ended up with after that munging. I used several sheets as intermediate copy-paste steps so you can trace some of my thought process there.

Step 4: Google’s Spreadsheet Mapper tool. Make a copy of their default spreadsheet, according to these instructions, and customize it with your data. To wit:

• Pick a template — doesn’t matter which as you’ll be overwriting most of it
• Alter the static variables to what you want (in my case, just a “Library Day in the Life” title)
• Alter the KML style variables, if you care (totally optional; just lets you change color schemes and so forth)
• Change the Unique Variables to be the column headers you will be using for your data (in my case, the same columns as in the #libday8 wiki) — same order as on your spreadsheet for ease of copy/paste (see, I told you this is mostly a copy-paste problem!)
• Change the HTML layout (scroll down to the bottom of the template sheet — easy to miss). You’ll definitely need to remove references to any static variables you deleted, and add references to your unique variables (it gives you special variable names in curly braces to use). You’ll have to copy-paste to a text editor as you can’t edit the cell in place (make sure to use a text editor, not a word processor — nothing that’ll insert weird invisible characters!). You may want to prettify it.
• In the Placemark Data sheet, copy-paste the data from the final version of your spreadsheet.
• Make sure that “Template #” is filled in with the template you just modified for all the columns, and that your spreadsheet data is filled in to the correct columns (in particular, note that the lat/lng data has a special place). Delete any rows without lat/lng data as they will throw an error and you can’t map them anyway.
• On the “start here” sheet, there’s a Google Maps link. Tada! Make sure to change the visibility on your map to something that other people can see.

Here’s the spreadsheet mapper stuff I ended up with.

Still some things I’d like to improve — I’ll need to re-import & re-munge the data when all the participants have signed up; I don’t love the HTML format I ended up with for the placemarks (would welcome others’ design work here — see that spreadsheet mapper for the format, which is a little wacky); and the import didn’t preserve the links to people’s blogs, twitter accounts, etc. (or the line breaks between them), so I’d like to figure out how to make them live. But as a first pass, I’ll take it.

So: yeah. Lots of beating things with rocks and googling for documentation and a TON of copy-pasting. Not a single actual line of code. Thank you to all the people who did write the code that does the automagical steps, and put it out there for free. And to Bobbi and everyone who signed up for providing data. (Data! Yum.)

That is not what this post is about.

I put the code for the bot up on github. That’s what this post is about.

It’s all there if you want to learn how I wrote it, or if you want to modify it to write your own twitterbot. The code, and also a README where I tried to extensively document the things I needed to do to make the code work: setting up the development environment, obstacles I encountered along the way, et cetera.

But you’re here through the blog, which means you may want the English, not the Python, explanation, so here is how I made my twitterbot work:

I was extremely bullheaded.

My approach with technology is always: Assume it’s possible. I ran into obstacles — things like “I don’t actually have any idea how to write a twitterbot” or “I don’t know how to make Python talk to MySQL” or “I don’t know how to use OAuth to let my bot post to an account” or “I have no idea what a cursor is in this context” or “what in the name of all that is concise or clear am I supposed to make of this launchd documentation” — and I just assumed there was an answer out there, somewhere, and if I googled my error messages, and altered my code and reran it to see what changed, and read the documentation even if it made limited sense, and just generally beat it with rocks long enough, my code would work. With code, nearly everything’s possible. I just have to figure out how.

That isn’t really what this post is about, either.

Then I put my code on github. That was scary. This is what this post is about.

I put it on github because I want you to use it. I put it on github because the library world is full of amazing, creative people doing amazing, creative things with technology, alone and in their basements, and if you know them and ask them maybe you can get it, and it shouldn’t be that way. It should be somewhere you can just…get it. And use it. And make it better. Even if you don’t know the right people. Even if asking is scary.

I put it on github because I know it’s deeply flawed. I know just enough about code to know an inkling of how very many things there are that I do not know about code. To know that I’m tripping over aesthetic standards I don’t even realize are there, that there are performance and etiquette issues I am utterly blind to. And as an introvert I have a reflexive, nearly hardwired, inclination to not share an idea before it’s burnished and glowing and perfect.

And one of the great lessons of 2011 was that if I push myself to share those half-formed ideas earlier, before it’s comfortable, they run up against other people’s half-formed ideas which, together, turn out to be ten times better than either alone. Things I thought were daunting obstacles turn out to be trivial, in the face of resources or connections or skills someone else has.

We here in librarianship tend to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I am giving you this flawed thing because I believe that the world is better if we are open with our ideas. I believe that our technology will be better if we share. And yes, we are nearly all self-taught and yes, as such we see the myriad of ways our code is not production code and we know there are many myriads more we do not see, and if we share it will still be better.

So I am going to take that step. Even while I — not characteristically daunted — am shaking inside over this. Even if I feel like I’m running into heavy crossfire, shouting encouragingly about how great the weather is up here.

I made a Connect group for people doing Code Year. I made a Libraryland github organization I want to add you to, so we can find each other. I made a bot for you.

It’s made of duct tape and wire, and people will see. I know only that I know nothing. I plant my flag upon this hilltop nonetheless.

In 2010 we saw Wikileaks pose a fundamental challenge to government. In everyday life, here in the US, we live with the poles of government defined by two parties and pretend they etch the entire space. They, of course, do not. There are vast possibilities of government not encompassed there — not just other parties, the Greens or Libertarians or what-have-you, but fundamentally different ways to do government — parliamentary systems, dictatorships, anarchism, seasteading, et cetera — so far outside the everyday scope we treat them as if they do not exist. (Though they do.)

Wikileaks wasn’t just cowboy journalism and bomb-throwing, though it can be appreciated on that level. Assange has a philosophy (long; worth reading) here: a mental model of government as information flow. He theorizes that secrecy and authoritarianism are intertwined, and governments enable their authoritarian elements by metering information flow. Therefore, government’s authoritarian tendencies can be undermined by altering the network structure of government itself through forcing change in information flows. Prevent secrecy, and you prevent the structure which allows authoritarianism to emerge.

What got Assange pursued by international law enforcement, what got Wikileaks’ DNS and funding service cut off without due process or any particular outcry about due process, wasn’t bomb-throwing, or even the genuine charges outstanding against him for other reasons. It was the fact that he challenged something fundamental about how government worked.

We’re seeing this again in 2011 with the Occupy movement. I’ve never been clear on what they’re for but I’m clear on this: they too are posing, through action, questions about the nature of government. Both their use of public space and their consensus structure model alternatives to the status quo. And they, too, have been opposed by a government that’s gotten tired of countenancing that, and hasn’t reliably felt the need to engage in due process about that.

I found the unifying principle for these in Brooke Gladstone’s wonderful graphic novel on the nature of media, The Influencing Machine. In this she introduced me to the concept of Hallin’s Spheres. There are three: the spheres of consensus, legitimate contention, and deviance.

We don’t talk about things in the sphere of consensus because everyone is publicly presumed to agree. (If you don’t, you both know this acutely, and know that you can’t talk about it without facing social backlash.) Things in the sphere of legitimate contention are things that get discussed in the news and in the Senate. You may have strong feelings on abortion or health care or religion — you may think people with different views than your own are profoundly wrong — but you almost certainly recognize that these are topics where dissent exists and can be aired in public without violating social norms.

And then there is the sphere of deviance. Everyone is also presumed to agree on all of these topics, or perhaps presumed not to think about them at all. They’re settled. They’re not up for debate. And if you hold one of these views, you are, well, deviant. Again, you know that your view is in this sphere because you feel gnawing fear or anger whenever you contemplate discussing it in public, and the near-certainty that no one in your immediate environment will agree with you. You may have chosen where you live and who you term family today because they agree with you on crucial boundaries of this sphere, and the place you grew up did not.

Here’s a key thing about the spheres: they change. At various times in history, the sphere of consensus has contained “slavery is OK” and “women shouldn’t vote or sign contracts” (in fact, there are places in the world where these views still hold). The sphere of deviance has contained their negations and plenty of other things that are now consensus or at least legitimate controversy. A huge amount of the power of the It Gets Better project is its implicit statement that, if you’re a kid who lives in a place where being who you are puts you in the sphere of deviance, there’s a world waiting for you where you’re not.

The government quashes Wikileaks and Occupy, and debates SOPA with a straight face, because threats to its fundamental structure are — at least as far as the government’s concerned — within the sphere of deviance. Rights to due process and free speech can be suspended for actions within the sphere of deviance with little to none of the objection you would expect to find accompanying such suspensions. (At least, little to no objection on the part of the government, whose assessment of the sphere of deviance is not necessarily the same as the broader society’s; government has its own set of incentives to take into account.)

But I promised you a plank in the philosophy of librarianship. To wit:

Society needs safe spaces for views in the sphere of deviance to be floated, or the boundaries of those spheres can never change. We need to be able to raise questions like “is government an authoritarian conspiracy?” and “can we do things better by radical consensus?” We needed, in American history, to be able to raise questions like “is it really okay to own people as slaves and profit from their labor?” and “can women go to university without their migratory uteri unhinging them?” We need to be able to tell kids whose communities tell them they’re unholy that, yes, it gets better.

Libraries are one of the great safe spaces of history.

Libraries. Paper books, public domain and open-licensed electronic content (that is, free of both locking and tracking), and an open internet. Access to ideas beyond your doorstep, in a place where no one looks (even virtually) over your shoulder.

Many of the views within the sphere of deviance are there for good reason but here’s the nature of the thing: we, from our limited cultural perspective, can’t reliably tell which. Only by having unfettered access to information and safe, however quiet, spaces to pose provocative questions can we discover where, in a great and historic way, we have been wrong.

“Libraries: they facilitate deviance!” isn’t going to be on an ALA poster any time soon. But please believe me when I say there’s nothing flippant here: the right to interrogate that sphere is something I believe in fiercely, with a passion that lives in quiet spaces but is connected to all the warmth and hope I feel for humanity.

When individuals who have high discount rates and little mutual trust act independently, without the capacity to communicate, to enter into binding agreements, and to arrange for monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, they are not likely to choose jointly beneficial strategies.

This. This is what we’ve been saying about pseudonymity — both I, and people who disagree with me.

Internet civility is a shared resource: a backdrop against which we couch our online cultures that can be easily run to tatters by selfish actors.

And that blockquote is the concern about anonymity, isn’t it? The anonymous have the ultimately high discount rate: their fragment of identity does not persist beyond the moment of the quote, so they need bear no future costs at all. There’s no reason to trust the truly anonymous and no way to communicate with them. Moderation provides monitoring and enforcement, but that’s about it. So it’s easy for true anonymity to result in social strategies which are not jointly beneficial.

So that’s what people are attacking with things like real name policies or its computational proxy, sign in with Facebook. By affixing public identity they’re decreasing the discount rate, adding back-channel communication possibilities, and increasing enforcement options.

But the thing is, it’s the lazy option. Because if you’re doing this by affixing real names without having put any time into building community norms, what you’re doing is importing wholesale the most, well, normative norms: the idea we all have in our head of how we are expected to act in the most mainstream possible version of society.

And those of us who crusade against real name policies do so, I think, because we fear the strictures of that normativity. There are lots of interactions you can’t have if you have imported that set of norms. You cannot have any conversations from Hallin’s sphere of deviance — you cannot even have any conversations which intimate that you might hold views within that sphere — even if they are not deviant within some subculture. You cannot safely interact with modes of discourse or cultural touchstones that are normal and safe in some subculture, but are not so in the mainstream.

Real name policies reaffirm the power of those already in power, and re-silence those already wary of voice, by lazily and unquestioningly handing power to a particular set of social norms in a space — the internet — where it did not inherently have such power.

The magic of the internet for some of us has lain in large part in its ability to create safe spaces for new norms. It can get better because online we can have a space where elements of our identity are no longer deviant — but only if we can wall them off from places where they are — which means: only if we can avoid using the name attached to us in those normative spaces.

Social norms are important. We can, indeed, not generally function without them, and I have common ground with the anti-pseudonymity crowd there. But there are many sets of social norms, inhering to many subcultures (online and off), and I strongly condemn the inclination to privilege only one of them in all milieus. And social norms are a brake on innovation, because precisely of Hallin’s spheres — because they circumscribe what it is allowable to say and, therefore, restrict what it is allowable to think, and make it difficult and dangerous to form communities which could advance certain lines of thought. There are social norms littered throughout human cultures which would have me be illiterate, or unable to form contracts, or subservient to my husband or my womb. I do not feel any great need to bow down to mainstream norms simply because they are, for now, mainstream.

So: pseudonyms. Real names are the lazy way to get Ostrom’s criteria because persistent pseudonymous spaces can, and do, meet those criteria. Persistent identity of any form decreases the discount rate because it creates an emotional and practical bond with the future self and thereby increases the perceived costs of punishments it may bear. Persistent identity is required (though not sufficient) for communication, agreement, and monitoring. Pseudonymity isn’t enough for productive spaces — maybe or maybe not civil, mind you, but productive — you still need community-building. (Just as you do by importing real names, in fact! You get the illusion of a functioning space by early wholesale import of norms, but it doesn’t save you the need to do work to cultivate that space.)

I believe in spaces with cultures and norms. I believe in the power of the internet to create spaces with their own norms, with unique power to welcome and inspire and innovate and challenge and unite in ways the offline world cannot. A real-names internet, an internet that imports wholesale normativity and makes it into a stick to beat away the unusual in the name of civility, is an internet that leaches away nearly everything I have found beautiful and transformative.

A more open internet will show us seamy underbellies that humanity had anyway and feared to express, yes. But it will also show us more beauty. A more open internet is the one that welcomes the disaffected and the dissident. A real-names policy is a cheap, cargo-cult imitation of Ostrom’s criteria.

One of the things past years’ ELs told me when I was researching the program, and that proved to be true, is that the networking will be great no matter what, but the project experience varies wildly. ELs who were dissatisfied with the program generally cited a bad project or poor mentoring. I took this very much to heart when selecting my project and was extremely happy with our result, my team, our sponsoring unit (ITTS), and our completely amazing mentors Aaron Dobbs and Jenny Levine.

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than about thirty seconds, you know I have Opinions on this, so here is my advice on project selection:

Look for real deliverables. Yeah, this is ALA, which as we all know stands for “let’s join committees and do lots of navel-gazing”, which means a lot of the projects are just that — do some research and come up with a report that will be presented to another committee and filed away and never acted upon — and this is super lame. You’ll do lots of work and have no impact. Look for a project whose deliverable is more than a report; whose audience is larger than its sponsor; and whose mandate includes the power not merely to recommend, but to act on your recommendations.

A major reason I picked my project was that the deliverable could be a real, useful site on the web that anyone could see and use. We could build a thing. Our audience could be the entire membership. This is way more fun than writing a report. (Even if you like to write.)

Look for committed sponsors. Another major reason I picked my project was that ITTS had been an EL sponsor before, and in fact the 2011 project was designed based on the recommendations of the previous year’s team. This meant that I could ask prior years’ ELs how ITTS was as a sponsor (I heard great things). I could also see from the project design that ITTS listened to their teams and was invested in their success and wanted their work to have meaning. Excellent.

Look for the mentors you want to work with. The big win of EL is the networking and that doesn’t just mean your teammates — it also means your mentors and sponsors. You know: the people with loads of experience in ALA that now you get to just…hang out with…even though you’re pretty new. Win! And their names are right there in the project descriptions! If they’re people you’ve heard of and know you want to know better, that’s a good thing, but don’t just limit yourself to the people you’ve heard of. Ask around; see if they’ve worked with previous years’ ELs or what sorts of things they’re involved in with ALA. Look for people who do interesting work, who care about your success, and who will be involved if you need them to be. Our mentors were tremendously useful for helping us define the scope and structure of our project (which could have been impossibly unwieldy otherwise) and for helping us navigate ALA and find the information we needed. Mentors can also be useful for helping you navigate the conflict that (naturally and healthily!) arises in many teams.

Don’t just pick the sexy project. You know what I mean. Everyone will want to pick the sexy project. But having a good project experience isn’t so much about the topic; it’s about the support you get from your mentors and sponsors and the kind of deliverable you produce and the quality of your teammates. I may well have picked the project with the driest description of all — but it had a real deliverable, a top-notch sponsor, and hugely exciting mentors. In fact I think the dryness worked to my advantage, because the only people who were interested in this project were serious, drama-free people who wanted to work. I ended up with completely amazing teammates and now I look for excuses to work with them again.

Any other EL alumni have suggestions for this year’s class?

When you’re stuck, tell a story. I mentioned in the last post that finding a hook is the first important way to get un-stuck when you’re planning a talk. The second is to tell a story. Seriously, next time you’re feeling speaker’s block ask yourself: “What story can I tell here?” It will work.

It will work during the talk, too. People like stories. People relate to stories. People remember stories. Your audience is likely to be more engaged with a story-driven talk than a more abstract one.

It also works because you’re people too, which means that you probably like stories. You will probably be more comfortable and personable telling a story than in other modes of engagement.

Not all types of talks lend themselves well to storytelling — it may be that you really need to communicate about data or teach people an abstract concept — but even in those cases, you can frame, motivate, illustrate, or enliven the whole with a good story.

Corollary: when you’re stuck, use concrete details. Part of why stories work is narrative, but part of it is the concrete details: they’re more memorable and striking than abstract ideas. (“Social media, crystallization nuclei, and empowerment” vs. “Twitter, lightning rods, and spoons”? Seriously, no contest).

Sandwiches are tasty. I had the fortune to have exceptionally good professors in my undergraduate department. I mean, it was spooky: I could actually pick courses based on what I wanted to study rather than who was teaching, because I knew all the teaching would be solid. So one of the things I thought about when my mind was wandering (it does that) during class was, what exactly are these people doing that’s so effective? And I realized: it was sandwiches.

I think, broadly speaking, there are people who need to see concrete examples before theory makes sense, and there are people who crave theory and then can apply it to examples. Some people can play against type, but often it’s a struggle, and some just can’t. My professors were reaching both types by teaching new concepts either as theory-example-theory or example-theory-example. That is, explain the theory, illustrate with an example, and re-explain; or provide a motivating example, generalize to the theory behind it, and wrap up by showing an application. Doing this means some people may be confused for the first third (but they’ll hang with you because they know everything will make sense by the end) and others may find the last third extraneous (or maybe not; they might appreciate the review from a standpoint of greater understanding), but everyone will have received the concept in their preferred order.

So, particularly if you need to get across some kind of abstract or technical material, I recommend sandwiches.

Be a person. As noted above, you’re a person. So be one! Lots talks are painfully dry, as if people have confused “professionalism” with “leaching all the personality out of the room”. Against this backdrop, having any personality at all will make you stand out. Telling jokes, even if they are totally lame, will be funny, if only because it’s so unexpected. (Similarly — but only with the right audience, and in moderation — swearing.) It is fine if your personality is awkward or quirky or otherwise not what you think of when you think “polished public speaker”. Just have one.

The other great thing about this tactic is — if you’re nervous about public speaking or you haven’t found your voice yet — you can be someone else. This was my first effective tool against my formerly-crippling terror of public speaking; when I first had to present to a serious audience, I thought about all my favorite teachers, and I thought: which of those has a personality that I think I can emulate? And I copied his style for slide design and body language and vocal modulation as well as I could. Because excellent teachers can have a wide range of personalities, you have probably had an excellent teacher with a personality not unlike yours — or, at least, not unlike something you think you can fake on stage. Awesome. Just be them until you figure out how to be you.

For what it’s worth, my style on stage and (especially) my slide design have changed a ton since I started with this tool, since I now have my own voice. And I’m not going to claim I’ve ever been so excellent in front of an audience as he is, because Ran was one of the flat-out legends of my undergrad experience — people majored in CS so that they could major in Ran. Really what I’m saying is: thanks, professor. Debugging and infinite series were diverting, but this is the part where you really changed my life.

This is Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas and he is pretty much the man.