Jun
23
2009
Erica Firment
Librarian?
Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.
It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.
Drop me a note if you are going. :)
-Erica
2 comments | posted in Avenging, Cataloging, Digital Library, Freebase, Research Obsession, San Francisco, Wikipedia, Wordpress, information science
Mar
10
2009
Erica Firment
Someone asked me where I found the art for my nonexistent biopsy scar-covering tattoo, and I thought you guys might be interested…

This came from a series of 18th Century bookbindings. It’s too elaborate for reality, perhaps, but I liked the idea.
This was intended to cover a scar that I have grown rather fond of. The tattoo plan was scrapped, but the concept was good.
I sampled my skin color from a photo, isolated two different florets from book covers I found in a digital library collection, overlapped them, messed with transparency, did a color mask to match a brown ink, and then chickened out at the last minute.
For more on why I didn’t get a tattoo, please see this very special episode of Red vs. Blue.
2 comments | tags: bookbinding, tattoo | posted in Books, Digital Library, Favorite Posts
Feb
3
2009
Erica Firment
Happy news! I was invited to be a panelist at the South by Southwest Interactive conference next month, as part of their ScreenBurn track.
I’m on a panel called “Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research.”
I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.
There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.
The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.
There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.
2 comments | tags: erica linden, funologists, game research, Linden Lab, Second Life, sxsw09, sxswi, sxswi09, usability, user research | posted in Avenging, Career, Digital Library, Interface design, Librarianship, Linden Lab, Second Life, SxSw, Tech, User Interface Design, Video games, information science