What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever received?

“Ask the librarian”, because even when they don’t know the answer they’re pretty good at pointing you in the right direction. It’d be that or “Knowledge is power, arm yourself”.

Who or what inspires you?

Evolution! I have a tree of life poster attached to my fridge to study whenever I’m bored waiting for my dinner to cook. I’m also really into sharks. They’re pretty inspiring given they’ve roamed the oceans for over 420 million years. When people get all manic about how scary sharks are I like to point out that more people die from falling vending machines than they do from shark attacks.

What makes you get out of bed in the morning?

Usually Bella. She’s a cat that squawks like a crying baby.

What’s your favourite comfort food?

Salt and chilli tofu usually does the trick or chana masala with an onion uttapam. Before a month-long trip to India I famously uttered the words ‘I’ll never get sick of chana masala’ – I did and am yet to live it down.

What do you do to unwind or relax?

Well, I like reading – mainly fantasy/science fiction, or graphic novels. But to really relax I make things. I enjoy knitting and crochet. This week I even dusted off my sewing machine and made a new bag.

What was the last thing that made you laugh?

A YouTube video from Jerkbeast. It was basically this horrible paper maché head abusing people on Chat Roulette (a website that randomly connects its users via webcams). I was laughing so hard I couldn’t speak.

What was the last thing that made you swear?

It’s usually Chris Moyles. He really annoys me, to put it mildly, but I still insist on listening to him every morning, we seem to disagree on just about everything.

What would you never eat or drink?

Animals. I’m vegan so there are a great many things I won’t eat or drink. If you take meat, dairy, eggs and honey out of the equation I pretty much eat everything. Oh and I don’t drink alcohol either… get your head round that crazy idea.

Who would you invite to a fantasy dinner party?

David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Shirin Ebadi, Hayden Panettiere (not just because she’s awesome in Heroes but also because I’d be interested in hearing about her free diving and campaign awareness activities for the Whaleman Foundation) and probably Zoli Téglás (singer of Ignite and long-time supporter of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society).

What would you never be without?

My iPhone. That’s really sad isn’t it? It fell out of my pocket once in the staff room and was hiding under a chair. I broke out in an awful sweat for about ten minutes whilst I thought I’d lost it.

Favourite song or piece of music?

Anything by Propagandhi, they’re my favourite band of all time. I couldn’t pick just one song but if forced it’d be a toss up between Purina Hall of Fame, Without Love, Mate Ka Moris Ukun Rasik An, Night Letters or The Bringer of Greater Things or… see what I mean?

Where’s been your best holiday destination?

Iran, it’s incredibly beautiful and unrecognisable in real life to that place we read about in the news. The people were welcoming, the food was amazing (apart from the falafel, that was really bad) and the sightseeing totally breath-taking. I like scuba diving too so anywhere involving a warm ocean is good fun.

What’s your party trick?

I’m a dance mat extraordinaire. Seriously, I challenge you to a dance off. When hogging the limelight in a games arcade once my audience refused to believe a librarian could kick all their butts on Dance Dance Revolution – I did though.

What information about Sheffield would you want to tell a visitor?

I always tell them to invest in a good coat if they plan on staying for long. It was also the first thing I was told before moving here.

What’s been your biggest fashion mistake?

Possibly the brown flares I wore in my teens. I thought they were so cool… I should look up whoever it was that put the cigarette burn in them. They did me a favour.

If you had absolute power, what would you change?

I’d just like to suggest that people think a little more about what’s on their plate and how its production impacts our planet. I’m not interested in ramming veganism down people’s throats but if you ask for the truth about your food I’ll tell you.

I’d also totally abolish whaling. Current loopholes continue to permit the Institute of Cetacean Research to harvest up to 1000 whales from the Southern Ocean each year, which inevitably end up on the meat market. The annual whaling season costs the Japanese taxpayers an estimated 1.2 billion yen – think what else could be done with that money!

What irritates you?

Fruit salad. Caterers generally fail at producing any decent alternative desserts to the usual non-vegan rubbish served up at Christmas parties, weddings and other such special occasions. It’s so depressing. Be inspired and challenge yourself to create something other than a fruit salad that’s delicious and diary/egg free.

What qualities do you admire in others?

During the initial aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January I tuned into an interview with Wyclef Jean. He was discussing the relief effort and how he’d spent his day moving dead bodies with his bare hands. Such selflessness to help others going through unimaginable pain and suffering, whether that be people coping with disaster or animals enduring horrific cruelty it doesn’t matter, it’s highly admirable in my opinion. I admire any human/animal rights activist that puts others before themselves and non-violently stands up for what they believe in.

What was your favourite childhood programme?

Round the Twist or Byker Grove.

Tell us something that not many people know about you.

As a kid I auditioned for the Royal Ballet. In another life (had I of taken it more seriously) I may have been a prima ballerina.

Who would you least like to be stuck on the Arts Tower paternoster with?

I’ve thought long and hard about this one and I honestly think I’d rather be stuck in there with anyone rather than no-one. I bore of my own company very easily so solitary confinement would be pure torture for me. If I had my phone though that’s another story.

In general:

9/11?
The ‘War on Terror’ (i.e. two unjustified unending wars)?
America’s first black President?
Iran’s disputed elections?
The Large Hadron Collider?
The horrific Mumbai terror attacks?
The death of Michael Jackson?
Global warming?
Google?
The Indian Ocean tsunami?
Swine flu?

(notice a theme?)

Personally:

A whole load a shit and not so much shit.

It was during the run up to dissertation proposals that I was becoming increasingly aware of Internet censorship in Iran and the growth of the Iranian blogosphere and decided that I’d like to explore this academically with the hope of encouraging further research or laying the foundations for a PhD later in life. I don’t necessarily think I ever achieved that or ever will, purely because I ran out of steam. It was my own doing. You know when you wrap yourself up in something so intensely for a long period of time that once it’s done you never want to look at it again? It was like that. I got my distinction and that was enough. But I’m beginning to realise that it wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning. The story continues and maybe I should be trying to tell it, in my own words?

I started with the concept of Internet censorship – how it was being censored, who was censoring it and why – and wanted to explore strategies being developed to smash down the system, to stick it to the man, to carry on regardless. But this was before Google Translate (although limited it seems to be serving a basic purpose right now) and with no Persian translator I was forced to restrict my exploration to a minority of weblogs written by Iranians in English. I specifically looked at weblogs because they were accessible and easy to document and analyse. All the data collection would be my own doing and analysed with my own criteria. But what exactly was I trying to find out? How would I use weblogs as an example of anti-censorship or more over a strategy to bypass censorship?

Having an idea about what you want your outcome to be always seems to cloud what you need to do to get there, to prove it let’s say. I wanted to look at the writing styles across a sample of Iranian weblogs to assess how people were saying things without really saying them – to look at the poetic metaphors Iranians so often use to describe all manners of life, love, feelings and even politics. To see whether the deep-rooted cultural norm of separating the private and public spheres applied to anonymous weblogs. But what would I compare these writing styles to? I decided that in order to assess how Internet filtering effects Iranian weblogs written inside Iran I’d need to sample Iranian weblogs written in the diaspora. Those written by the displaced, the deposed or even the die-hards who might be more likely to evade self-censorship given the lack of Internet filtering in the more moderate west.

And so I did and if you’re interested in actually reading the thing it’s available online. It’s called Looking for Freedom: An Exploration of the Iranian Blogosphere (and it’s also available in Google Scholar with a couple of spelling errors – doh). I also kept a wiki going whilst doing my research but I’m afraid my updates have lapsed a little. Some of the work I did here has come spilling back to me this week and become ever more relevant. given how Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, proxy services and weblogs are currently being used in the aftermath of Iran’s distuted election.

Remember Ahmad Batebi?

However, I think it’s important to say that this is a machine translation and of course it’s not perfect. But it’s a start and it means it can be developed and evolve into a practical solution for the spread of information. And, with respect to the theme of my dissertation it may in fact be used as another strategy to overcome online censorship, through enabling Iranians to translate English into Persian.

Facebook are also in on the action and the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone software has introduced support for the Persian script – Read more about this on Is This Ta’arof?.

Twitter has in fact been so useful to Iranians tweeting the ‘revolution’ that scheduled maintenance was put back a day to keep communication open. My only criticism over the last couple of days is the difficulty to sieve through the millions of uninformative re-tweets and misinformation to actually get to the heart of what I want to know – what is happening right now!

Below are some links I’ve found useful over the last couple of days:

• For some great Twitter feeds see: persiankiwi/StopAhmadi/mousavi1388 and Change for Iran;
• For good Twitter round-up tools see: Twazzup and PicFog for images;
• For a round up of the larger context of the Iranian elections see: Revolutionary Flowerpot;
• For a collection of some amazing photographs see: Mousavi1388/TheStyx/Boston’s Big Picture and The Guardian;
• For some general Fisking see: Iran Erupts/Ahamdinejad whips crowd/Iran’s day of destiny and Fear has gone;
• For a bit about elections and democracy see: Christopher Hitchens;
• For some rally footage the best place was always going to be YouTube: BBC Persian/a brave female Iranian kicks police and 15th June crowds;
• For some Guardian Analysis see: election statistics and shots fired;
• For some live tweeting I kept up with Andrew Sullivan’s commentary at: The Daily Dish;
• For some expert analysis from Gary Sick and Karim Sadjadpour see: PBS;
• As always Channel 4 News have been right on! See: Lindsey Hilsum’s blog (she is the international editor for Channel 4 News and is currently reporting from Iran) esp. ‘A day in Iran.‘;
• Good blogs include: For a democratic secular Iran (he was also on Channel 4 News and the BBC)/The Huffington Post and The Lede blog;
• And also see the Channel 4 news broadcasts including nation in turmoil and violence at protest.

But I don’t want to use Twitter, I’m not interested in what people are having for their lunch.

Firstly, how can you not be interested in what people are having for lunch? I actually find this fascinating and often recommend good places for people to get their chips and falafel from. But I understand that there are people out there not as nosey as I am or generally interested in what people do.

So, instead of arguing about why I think Twitter is the best thing ever I thought I’d put my energy into thinking about things you can do with Twitter (other than telling people how good your falafel wrap was). I know there is already a wealth of information for the Twitter user out there but you know, I wanted to throw my two cents in as well.

Who do you follow?

Well, generally I follow people who match one of this criteria:

• people from real life – friends, family (although my Dad hasn’t discovered Twitter yet – shame it’s the perfect way to spy on me) and work colleagues;
• librarians or information specialists posting interesting links to current issues or discussing new technologies etc;
• news services – including The Guardian Tech, New Scientist, Hollyoaks and Heatworld (obviously);
• whale defenders and marine conservationists – because we’ve got to save the whale to save ourselves;
• vegans – I like stealing recipes and looking at pictures of cake;
• and crafters – it’s a good way of finding free patterns etc.

The problem I have then is keeping the personal and the professional separate, particularly as I worry about being too personal in the professional. For example I’m majorly opposed to whaling (as you probably know) but as this has no relevance to my work do colleagues really need to know it? And should I be telling people about long line fishing in the Galapagos whilst having a break from my book orders? Plus there are those examples of how not to use Twitter. Yet given I actually love my job, my boss is really cool (seriously) and I don’t moan about being bored (usually because when times are quiet I get on the look out for new blog material or ways to improve services for students) then I don’t really see this being an issue for me. I did bad mouth Bloglines once though after a frustrating morning and got caught out by their auto searching, but they were actually more helpful than anything else.

One way of overcoming these problems are to make your updates private, but seen as Googling ‘lex rigby’ fills out the first however many pages of my stuff (although I was never a Communist Student and have nothing to apologise for) then it seems odd to try and make my tweets private. I’m quite an easy person to find out information about. I’m a science and engineering librarian particularly interested in new technologies, I’m insanely fond of whales and cats, I craft, I read stuff about Iran (mainly involving women and human rights) and I’m vegan. Simple eh. And I guess that if people didn’t want to know what Bella’s up to they wouldn’t follow me anyway.

What do you use it for?

The most useful thing I have found to do with Twitter is to do with #tags or hashtags. Hashtags are assigned to subjects/people/categories/conferences/companies/hobbies/films or whatever and are a great way to find out what people are saying about them. In putting a hash sign in front of a word you’re essentially creating a link to a stream involving everyone talking about that particular subject. And the great thing is is that it’s all in real time! A real-time search engine, now that is amazing.

OK, so say I attended the 2009 Lilac conference (I didn’t but some of my colleagues did) and I wanted to say something about what I was hearing alls I need to do is say it (or rather type it) and put a #lilac09 tag in. Voi la. But then say I wanted to know what other people were saying alls I’d have to do is go to Twitter Search (or one of the other many search sites) and put in #lilac09 and start eavesdropping. It truly is a fantastic way of searching – built for the people, by the people.

I discovered this during the Mumbai attacks last year. I wanted to know what was happening before the news stories told me and stumbled upon Mumbai attacks coverage powered by a service called Monitter. Brilliant, now I was getting real time updates from the people there on location, as well as others reporting on events as the news unfolded.

But what could I use it for?

Well, other than using #tags to keep on top of your interests there are a vast number of other things to use Twitter for:

• Use Twitpic to share your photos;
• use Tiny URL to shorten links into your 140 character limit;
• use @ signs to reply to tweets and engage in conversation e.g. ‘@lexrigby that was really funny’ (or direct messages to make your responses private);
• use Tweetworks to start discussions or join groups;
• use Twittangle to filter your timeline by rating users and tagging favourites (very useful if you follow people like Stephen Fry and get sick of his updates);
• use Twtpoll to create a survey;
• use Trackthis to track a package from UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL etc;
• use direct messages to update your LibraryThing book shelf;
• use Twittercal to update your Google calendar;
• use Tweetbeep for a bit of vanity searching;
• use Fuelfrog to track your gas mileage;
• use Botanicalls to get your plants to tweet you when it’s hungry;
• use a Greasemonkey user script (a Firefox add-on) to get Twitter updates in your Google results page;
• or use RFID chips, computers and cameras to keep track of your cats.

See, it’s not just good for finding out what people had for lunch! It’s so much more than that.

After nine years he escaped from Iran, following a seizure leaving the right side of his body without feeling, smuggled by car then donkey through Iraq. On June 24th 2008 he arrived in America and later released his ordeal to CBS News:

Asked if he feels free now, he told Cooper, “No, I don’t feel free. I have a responsibility to the people imprisoned in Iran whose human rights are being violated. I have to get their message out. And it’s a big responsibility that doesn’t leave one free. But to an extent I do feel free. I live in a free country and I’ve left prison.”

But how does he feel about the image itself?

Looking at the picture that sparked his ordeal, he says that another man in his place might be angry, but he is not. Mr Batebi is a photographer himself. He says he understands what journalism involves. Had we not published the picture, he says, another paper might have. Looking at the same picture, his lawyer, interpreter and friend Lily Mazahery says she is close to tears: in it, the young Mr Batebi’s pale arms are as yet unscarred by torture.

How would you feel? Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Happy Nowruz everyone!

• An Iranian threat (the mention of not an actual threat);
• Guantanamo Bay style kidnap;
• A tough-ass secret service and crazy government leader;
• Amazing super powers;
• etc etc.

It could almost be real life! I ♥ Peter Petrelli.

You’ve four days left to catch it on the iPlayer.