Posted: May 29

Creativity is complex, statistically speaking

Blame it on Father General. At one of his regular meetings with those of us who serve as his assistants for apostolic areas (such as communication), he said that he wanted statistics from each of us concerning his area for the meeting of major superiors to be held at Loyola, Spain next December. Statistics does not sound so difficult, until you start figuring out how to compile them. How do you count Jesuits who work in communication? Once you get beyond the obvious group of men working full-time in TV or radio, for example, how do you account for the incredible diversity that characterizes creative Jesuits?

When I was in Venezuela in March, Father Jesús Maria Aguirre helped me with some good ideas that I have developed into a scheme that I hope is complex enough to describe adequately our diverse reality. Instead of just listing everyone by a single characteristic, this new scheme looks at each person in terms of three categories: the context in which he works, the medium he uses and the role he plays within that medium. Of course, to manage all information you need a database which allows you to massage it to find out what people are doing. As a matter of fact, we have been developing just such a database for over a year. It is almost ready to use except for figuring out the interface so that different offices in the Jesuit Curia here can manage their own data but also allow others to use it. This goal of sharing information complicates the design a lot. The answer is moving to a web-based interface with the database. We already have that with the sjweb web site and with our in-house intranet.

What this means is that for the last two weeks I have been burrowed deep into the details of programming Cold Fusion pages. Cold Fusion is software that allows a user to interact with a database through a web page. Although I am a photographer and graphic designer, and now a painter, I have also had to learn how to do this kind of programming in order to make web sites that do what we want. To my surprise I find that I enjoy figuring out how to write queries and do the coding that makes the whole thing work. At times it is very frustrating—especially when you get the dreaded error message and have to find the one comma or pound sign that is missing or out of place.

My goal is to publish an online directory of Jesuit communication works once this is all done. Among other things this will allow people to send in corrections and updates so that the information is accurate. I also hope that it helps give people a better sense of just how we are making use of media in our apostolic work.