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Has_not_been_viewed_much

iamwillwang.com

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Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#91

Post by DoctorOetker »

xnorswap wrote: post #86
ggm wrote: post #16

I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit…

I had the exact same concern with the featured article: I hope they are keeping separate statistics for spontaneously browsed views vs views specifically through this page. If not, the less visited bins will rise and potentialy make all views uniform in the extreme... I also hope they keep dates for the views, with PCA you can still distinguish distinct distributions being weighted with coefficients changing over time (say because of this internal page, or any external page effectively providing the same service!)

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#92

Post by Paul_Clayton »

zem wrote: post #67
ramon156 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They meant that a more ergonomic name would be "has_been_viewed_much", so you can filter by the inverse and still get the same result, but with a better name

I know what they meant, I was saying that imo the ergonomic name is has_not_been_viewed_much. it's directly expressing the property you are interested in, as opposed to expressing the negative property and comparing it to false.

How about rarely_viewed? Such expresses the property of interest, avoids the double negative issue, and is shorter?

Of course rarely might imply a frequency much lower than the cutoff and infrequently has a bit of the double negative issue. Tradeoffs.

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#93

Post by w-m »

Klathmon wrote: post #2

How many of these images are there? I cycled through a few and ended up hitting at least one duplicate [1] that I do actually enjoy (but I can't find the name of it now that I refreshed the page, I know it had the verrazzano narrows bridge in the title) Is there a chance a site like this could ruin their metric by inflating all the views for these lowest viewed items? Or do these not count? [1] https://www.artic.edu/…

Querying the API, there seem to be 112998 artworks with this label as of this moment.

(I'm deliberately not posting the direct API call in case it's expensive for them to run. Documentation is found here: https://api.artic.edu/docs/#fields-collections-artworks)

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#94

Post by gcr »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #88
xnorswap wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit…

If the library wanted to get rid of them, they would've quietly removed the books; I suspect they want people to read them before they're removed, hence the "please give this book a chance" marker. A deprecation marker is a "this will be removed"; these markers are "this will be removed if nobody reads them even with this marker in them".

Reframing this point: Some good books aren’t borrowed because they’re not discoverable, not because they’re boring.

The library is highlighting a few titles for increased visibility to ask, “would this pique a reader’s interest if they knew about it, or is this generally bad?”

Without this stage, the library would expunge more genuinely interesting titles.

I’ve always kinda felt the role of a library is for recall rather than precision

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#95

Post by cloud8421 »

ggm wrote: post #87
cloud8421 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Struggling to find the carpenter’s story, do you remember the title by any chance? Thanks!

It was a hardback of early works and unfinished pieces. I can't find publication details but there have been some recent publications including "Slattery's Sago Saga" which is the other story I mentioned, so maybe it would be in them?

Thanks a lot, I'll check!

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#96

Post by wat10000 »

xnorswap wrote: post #86
ggm wrote: post #16

I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit…

They clearly did have a desire to borrow that book, as evidenced by the fact that they borrowed it of their own free will. You’ve just arbitrarily decided that their reason is unworthy.

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#97

Post by GuB-42 »

xnorswap wrote: post #86
ggm wrote: post #16

I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit…

I think the mission of libraries go beyond providing the most popular books. There is that, of course, a library that doesn't have the books people want is a bit pointless. But having a few titles that are not as popular help preserve something that may otherwise be lost.

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#98

Post by al_borland »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #91
xnorswap wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit…

I had the exact same concern with the featured article: I hope they are keeping separate statistics for spontaneously browsed views vs views specifically through this page. If not, the less visited bins will rise and potentialy make all views uniform in the extreme... I also hope they keep dates for the views, with PCA you can still distinguish distinct distributions being weighted with coefficients changing over tim…

I wonders this as well. The page mentions the stat is based on “whether an art piece hasn't been visited on their website very much.” I’m wondering if since this is not on their website if that stat isn’t impacted.

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#99

Post by coldpie »

ggm wrote: post #16

I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.

> Never regretted reading them

Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.

Re: Has_not_been_viewed_much

#100

Post by mhb »

ggm wrote: post #16

I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.

Sounds similar to the aspiration of randomly picking an out-of-the way restaurant in hopes that you are going to discover a great little hole-in-the-wall. Needless to say, I suspect any lack of regret in either case might be attributable to cognitive biases.
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