Wishing I was going to be in Cambridge tomorrow. The Signal/Noise conference at Harvard looks terrific: Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing) on musical creativity, Yochai Benkler on mashups, academic explorations of fan fiction, John Perry Barlow on John Perry Barlow… And it’s cheap – $10 for students, $20 for the rest of us.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah is a Ghanaian engineer working for Lotus at their facility in Cambridge, MA. His blog, Koranteng’s Toli, currently features one of the best essays I’ve ever read on cultural sensitivity and software localization. (Koranteng’s blog is so much fun because he’s a consistently strong commenter both on tech and African issues – his account of Ghanaian president Kufour’s second inauguration – through a filter of absurdist playwright Ionesco – is a great introduction to his Africa reporting.)

As a software designer, Koranteng understands how hard it is to get the details of localization right – full support for different character sets and text that reads right to left instead of left to right. But he’s also interested in the cultural details of software design, which can be so subtle that you’re unlikely to detect them unless you’re directly effected by them:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

Koranteng found similar problems with Flickr’s flash plug-in and slideshow feature, as well as with Adobe Photoshops “Quick Fix” and “Auto Correct” options:

the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it’s fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for “smarter” recognition by the software or for at least, a nice ‘dark skin’ option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

He points out that this is hardly a new problem – all technology needs to be able to adapt to the people who are using it. And technologies are more likely to succeed if they can be easily adapted to local needs.

…photographers in Africa over the past 150 years have had to deal with brighter sunshine, higher contrast as well as darker skintones when processing their photos as photography has gone through its various evolutions and has now moved into the digital realm. The people who install photo laboratory hardware in Ghana where I come from, always have to recalibrate their equipment to deal with the kind of skin tones that are present in the local market. The factory defaults simply won’t do. I’ve had better results developing film in Ghana than in the US because I often forget to tell the labs here that they should “watch for skintones”

(I can vouch for this – I look so pale in all the photos I’ve had developed in Ghana that I could pass for the undead. Or a goth who got really, really lost.)

It’s a must-read piece for anyone who develops technology for use in other countries and cultures.

Wishing I was going to be in Cambridge tomorrow. The Signal/Noise conference at Harvard looks terrific: Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing) on musical creativity, Yochai Benkler on mashups, academic explorations of fan fiction, John Perry Barlow on John Perry Barlow… And it’s cheap – $10 for students, $20 for the rest of us.

To: my four readers

From: your grateful correspondent

Re: new blog

Yes, after 18 months – that’s 11 years, in blog years – “…My Heart’s in Accra” will be moving from the cozy confines of Harvard’s servers out into the wide world. The new blog is a global affair (would you expect any less from me?) – it’s hosted by Rimu Hosting, an absurdly competent group of Kiwi geeks who run data centers in NYC and Austin, Texas. As a result, I no longer really know where my blog is, so I’m simply calling the new one “…My Heart’s in Accra”.

The new blog – not really all that different from the old blog – will be living at http://blog.ethanzuckerman.com. I’m planning on cross-posting to the Harvard site and the new site for the next few weeks, and then I’ll put redirect links on this site which push folks over to the new blog. In the near future, I’m hoping all four of you can visit the new site and help me test it – do comments work, for instance? Does the stylesheet break in your browser? I’d love to work all this out before forcing people over to the new site. Also, feel free to beat the rush and move your aggregator over to the new site feed, now available in RSS 2.0 and Atom.

A big thank you to Dave Winer, Jesse Ross, Hal Roberts, Wendy Koslow and John Palfrey for providing the space and support to get me blogging. I’m moving on not out of any problems with the Harvard blog server but because I find I’m teaching folks around the world how to blog using WordPress hosted on Blogsome, and I need to be using WordPress so I know what I’m talking about.

Thanks for reading, and look forward to seeing you on the new server.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah is a Ghanaian engineer working for Lotus at their facility in Cambridge, MA. His blog, Koranteng’s Toli, currently features one of the best essays I’ve ever read on cultural sensitivity and software localization. (Koranteng’s blog is so much fun because he’s a consistently strong commenter both on tech and African issues – his account of Ghanaian president Kufour’s second inauguration – through a filter of absurdist playwright Ionesco – is a great introduction to his Africa reporting.)

As a software designer, Koranteng understands how hard it is to get the details of localization right – full support for different character sets and text that reads right to left instead of left to right. But he’s also interested in the cultural details of software design, which can be so subtle that you’re unlikely to detect them unless you’re directly effected by them:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

Koranteng found similar problems with Flickr’s flash plug-in and slideshow feature, as well as with Adobe Photoshops “Quick Fix” and “Auto Correct” options:

the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it’s fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for “smarter” recognition by the software or for at least, a nice ‘dark skin’ option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

He points out that this is hardly a new problem – all technology needs to be able to adapt to the people who are using it. And technologies are more likely to succeed if they can be easily adapted to local needs.

…photographers in Africa over the past 150 years have had to deal with brighter sunshine, higher contrast as well as darker skintones when processing their photos as photography has gone through its various evolutions and has now moved into the digital realm. The people who install photo laboratory hardware in Ghana where I come from, always have to recalibrate their equipment to deal with the kind of skin tones that are present in the local market. The factory defaults simply won’t do. I’ve had better results developing film in Ghana than in the US because I often forget to tell the labs here that they should “watch for skintones”

(I can vouch for this – I look so pale in all the photos I’ve had developed in Ghana that I could pass for the undead. Or a goth who got really, really lost.)

It’s a must-read piece for anyone who develops technology for use in other countries and cultures.

Hi there, and welcome to the new, somewhat improved, and somewhat dysfunctional “…My Heart’s in Accra”. I’m just moving into the new place, and most of the boxes aren’t even unpacked yet. For one thing, very few of the posts from the Harvard-hosted blog have been moved over here yet – I’m going to work on moving those over in the next couple of weeks. By the end of April, I will stop posting on the Harvard site and redirect the RSS feed and homepage over to this site, though I suspect I’ll keep archived posts there for a while.

I would be very grateful for your help in testing the new blog. Does it render well in your browser, or does it break? Are you able to post comments? Are there features I should attempt to add or subtract? Help me out, folks!