Obviously, it's a stretch to claim that American politics became more polarized and civics died a death because internet conversations moved from newsgroups to blogs. But it's clear from these diagrams that the way in which different forms of online reading take place (and the communities that are formed by this online reading) has political ramifications of which we need to be conscious.

Posted by dan visel at 02:33 PM | Comments (1)

serendipity   06.18.2005, 1:16 PM

the pinpoint accuracy of computer-searches, leaves those of us lucky enough to have spent time in library stacks, nostalgic for the unexpected discovery of something we didn't know we were looking for but which just happened, serendipitously, to be on a nearby shelf. George Legrady, artist and prof at UC Santa Barbara, just showed a project he is working on for the new public library in Seattle that gave the first glimpse of serendipity in online library searching which lets you see all the books that have recently been checked out on a particular subject. Beautiful and Exciting.

Posted by bob stein at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

blog reading: what's left behind   06.17.2005, 5:29 PM

The basement of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge sells used books. There's an enormous market for used books in Cambridge, and anything interesting that winds up there tends to be immediately snapped up. The past few times I've gone to look at the fiction shelves, I've been struck by a big color-coded section in the middle that doesn't change - a dozen or so books from Jerry Jenkins &Tim LaHaye's phenomenally popular Left Behind series, a shotgun wedding of Tom Clancy and the Book of Revelation carried out over thirteen volumes (so far). About half the books on the shelf are the first volume. None of them look like they've been read. They're quite cheap.

Since the books started coming out (in 1996), there's been an almost complete absence of discussion of the books in the mainstream media, save the occasional outburst about this lack of discussion ("These books have sold 60,000,000 copies! And nobody we know reads them!"). I suspect my attitude towards the books is similar to that of many blue-state readers: we know these books are enormously popular in the middle of the country, and it's clearly our cultural/political duty to find out why . . . but flipping through the first one in the basement of the Harvard Bookstore, I'm stricken by the wooden prose. I can't read this. Also, there's the matter of time: I still haven't finished Proust. The same sort of thing seems to happen to other civic-minded would-be readers.

And then, on the Internet, Fred Clark's blog Slacktivist gallops in to save the day. For the past year and a half, Mr. Clark has been engaged in a close reading of the series, explicating the text and the issues it raises in an increasingly fundamentalist America. This project isn't a full-time project; his blog has other commentary, but once a week, he stops to analyze a few pages of Left Behind. It helps that Mr. Clark is a fine writer; his commentary is funny, personal - recollections from a Christian childhood pop up from time to time - and he has enough of a theological background to elucidate telling details and the history behind Jenkins & LaHaye's particular brand of end-times fever.

It's an admirable project as well because of the shear magnitude of it. In his first year and a half, he's made it through 105 pages, working at the rate of roughly six days a page. By my calculations, it will take him eighty more years to finish the 4900 pages of the series, though additional prequels have been declared, which will take the total up somewhere over a century. Lengthwise, he seems to be running about neck-and-neck, though it's hard to tell on the screen. This can't help but remind one of "On Exactitude in Science", the parable by Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares about the map that became the size of the territory it set out to survey. And of course, when a map gets this big, you're going to have issues with organization.

How do we start reading something like this? I was forwarded a link to the blog itself - http://slacktivist.typepad.com - and found the top entry dealing with Left Behind. Not all of Slacktivist deals with Left Behind - but enough of it does that Mr. Clark has made a separate category for it, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind. Clicking on that gets you a single page with all of the Left Behind posts, from newest to oldest. Being interested (and a fast reader) I decided to read the whole thing. To do this, you have to start at the bottom, scroll down a little bit (these are long posts), and then scroll up to get to the next chronological post. This does become, at length, tiring.

One point that's important to remember here: the Left Behind component of Slacktivist differs from the majority of blogs in that its information is not especially time-sensitive. While there are references to ongoing current events (the Iraq war, for example, not without relevance to the text under discussion), these references don't need to be read in real time. A reader could start reading his close reading at any time without much loss. (Granted, there is the question of relevance: it would be nice if in ten years nobody remembered Left Behind, but that probably won't be the case: Clark points out Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth from the 1970s as prefiguring the series - and, it's worth noting, it still sells frighteningly well.)

A further complication for the would-be reader: Mr. Clark's posts, while they form the spine of his creation, are not the whole of it: his writing has attracted an enormous number of comments from his readers - somewhere over thirty comments for each of his recent posts, occasionally more than sixty. These comments, as you might expect, are all over the place - some are brilliant glosses, some are from confused Left Behind followers who have stumbled in, some declare the confused Left Behind followers to be idiots, and there's the inevitable comment-spam, scourge of the blog-age. Some have fantastic archived conversations of their own. Some are referenced in later posts by Mr. Clark, and become part of the main text. It's almost impossible to read all the comments because there are so many of them; it's hard to tell from the "Comments (33)" link if the thirty-three comments are worth reading. It's also much more difficult to read the comments chronologically: some older posts are still, a year later, generating comments, becoming weird zombie conversations.

What can be done to make this a more pleasant reading experience? Because blogs keep their entries in a database, it shouldn't be that hard to make a front end webpage that displays the entries in chronological order. It also wouldn't be hard to paginate the entries so that Mr. Clark's more than 50,000 words are in more digestible chunks. I'm not sure what could be done about the comments, though. Seventy-five posts have generated 1738 comments, scattered in time. Here's a rough diagram of how everything is connected:

The bottom row of blue dots represent Mr. Clark's posts over time (from earliest to most recent). One post leads linearly to the next. The rows above represent comments: the first red row are comments on the first post (an arrow which leads to the first), which are frequent at first and then tail off. This pattern is followed by all the other comments on posts. Comments tend to influence following comments (although this isn't necessarily true). But, unless you have eagle-eyed commentators who make sure to click on every comment link every day, different comment streams will probably not be influencing each other over time. The conversation has forked, and will continue forking.

A recent study seems to indicate that the success of a blog (as measured by advertising) is directly related to the feeling of community engendered, in no small part, by the ability to comment and discuss. But that ability to comment and discuss seems to get lost with time. What's happening here might be an inherent limitation in the form of the blog: while they're not strictly time-sensitive, they end up being that way. This could perhaps be changed if there were better ways into the archives, or if notifications were sent to the author and commentators on posts as new comments were posted. But: especially when dealing with an enormous volume of comments, as is the case at Slacktivist, the dialogue becomes increasingly asynchronous as time goes on.

We don't think of physical books as having this problem because we assume that we can't directly interact with the author and don't expect to be able to do so. With electronic media, the boundaries are still unclear: we expect more.

Posted by dan visel at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

the cramped root: worshipping the artifact   06.17.2005, 2:08 PM

A plant in a container grows differently than a plant in open soil. The roots conform to the shape of the pot. Similarly, our very notions of reading, of books, of knowledge classification are defined by the pot in which they grew. The texture of paper, the topography of the library, the entire university system - these were defined by restraints. Physical, economic, etc. And to a significant extent they are artifacts of their times. An example: the act of reading in bed, as Dan mentions, is frequently invoked as the ideal, as the supreme pleasure of reading, something that computers could never match. But this supine, passive reading stance is not pre-ordained. It is in many ways an artifact of the growth of the novel - a grand, fictional creation to be read in leisure settings. Lying down works well. It's pleasurable. You get lost in rich, immersive worlds. But there are immersive worlds that require a different posture. And there are kinds of reading that are more active.

The computer, too, in its current stage of development, is an artifact of the paper book, the typewriter, and the supercomputer terminal. These define the "pot" in which the computer has grown. And so far, the questions about online "reading" are defined by this cramped root structure. Even though the pot has shattered, we continue to grow as though the walls were there.

Another analogy: the horseless carriage. For years after its invention, the automobile was known as "the horseless carriage." People could define it only in terms of what had come before. You could say that online reading is the territory of "the horseless book."

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:08 PM | Comments (1)

transliteracies: the pleasure of the text   06.17.2005, 2:07 PM

Two books on my bookshelf: the first, a Penguin paperback of The Recognitions by William Gaddis, the spine reinforced with tape, almost every one of the 976 pages covered with annotations in several different colors of ink, some pages torn, many dogeared, some obvious coffee stains. It's a survivor of a misbegotten thesis project. The second, an old copy of Grace Metalious's soapy Peyton Place which I found on 6th Avenue two years ago & read cover to cover over the course of six delirious hours when I had taken more DayQuil than I should have. It's a cheap paperback from the late 1950s, and its yellow pages have clearly passed through any number of hands, but they're almost entirely unmarked. (God only knows why I decided that I needed to read Peyton Place. I can't recommend it.)

One of the themes that arose in the first session of Transliteracies was that there are several different types of reading. When academics talk about reading, they tend to mean an intensive activity; there's typically a lot of writing involved. A great deal of reading, however, isn't anywhere near as intensive: like my copy of Peyton Place, the text escapes unmarked by the pen. When we talk about moving reading from the printed page to the screen, this is an important consideration: the screen needs to accommodate both of these. Why can't we curl up with an electronic book? has been a persistent question since electronic reading became a possibility, but it misses the important point that we don't want to curl up with every book we read. We can only curl up with something if we're reading it - to some degree - passively.

Posted by dan visel at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

transliteracies begins.. reading is complex   06.17.2005, 11:57 AM

Over the next couple of days, we'll be posting live from the Transliteracies conference..

The conference kicked off with a rich historical lecture by Adrian Johns, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of The Nature of the Book. Johns examined three revolutionary moments in the development of scientific knowledge - Galileo, Newton, and James Clark Maxwell - and their relationship to the evolving print medium and the social practices of interpretation and transmission that were then developing. Beginning with the iconoclastic moment of Galileo's theological collision with the Catholic church, moving through Newton and the incipient system of journal production - "philosophical transaction" - in authoritative matrices like the Royal Society, up to Maxwell at Cambridge University, his breakthroughs on electricity and magnetism, and the development of written examinations. The overriding lesson: reading is complex. We should not overestimate the power of the book purely as the "container of meaning." The surrounding social reading practices, the charismatic human deliverers of certain texts, are no less important. Each book has a sort of periodical system that follows from it - its ideas move through local systems of perusal, reinterpretation and dissemination. It gets continually "re-published" through this human ecology.

Then there is the scientific revolution going on today: information technology and medical information. Medical error - diagnostic and prescriptive - kills thousands each year, largely due to interruptions in information flow. Info tech could create seamless systems that greatly reduce error. But Johns points out that a good half of the systems implemented so far fail to solve the problems. In fact, all of them create new kinds of errors - confusions between the different groups in the massive medical tangle. So here we have a kind of online reading that has been tested in a highly consequential setting. Johns suggests that medical reading is more like literary reading than we think. For instance, physicians and pharmacists read differently. They have differences in training, worldview, sense of self. Seemingly cosmetic features of the text - fonts, color, layout - are of great consequence.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

transliteracies: research in the technological, social, & cultural practices of online reading   06.16.2005, 10:06 AM

Bob's post last week about changing patterns of media consumption kicked off an interesting discussion, one that leads up perfectly to the "Transliteracies" conference we are attending this weekend at UC Santa Barbara.
Alan Liu, director of the Transliteracies project, posted this response, which very elegantly lays out some of the important questions. He's allowed me to re-post it here..

BEGIN: The relationship between "browsing" and the "sheer volume" of information is complicated. To start with, I think there is much to be gained in complicating our usually uniform concepts of "browsing" (all shallow, fragmented, attention-deficient) and "volume" ("sheer," as in a towering, monolithic cliff).

We get a sense of the hidden complexity I indicate if we think historically. Below is a passage from Roger Chartier -- the leading scholar in the "history of the book" field -- that should give us pause about making any quick associations between browsing and today's information glut:

"Does this reaction toward the end of the [18th] century indicate a consciousness that reading styles had changed, that the elites in western Europe had passed from intensive and reverent reading to a more extensive, nonchalant reading style, and that such a change called for correction? . . . In the older style: (1) Readers had the choice of only a few books, which perpetuated texts of great longevity. (2) Reading was not separated from other cultural activities such as listening to books read aloud time and again in the bosom of the family, the memorization of such texts . . . , or the recitation of texts read aloud and learned by heart. (3) The relation of reader to book was marked by a weighty respect and charged with a strong sense of the sacred character of printed matter. (4) The intense reading and rereading of the same texts shaped minds that were habituated to a particular set of references and inhabited by the same quotations. It was not until the second half of the eighteen century in Germany and the beginning of the nineteenth century in New England that this style of reading yielded to another style, based on the proliferation of accessible books, on the individualization of the act of reading, on its separation from other cultural activities, and on the descralization of the book. Book reading habits became freer, enabling the reader to pass from one text to another and to have a less attentive attitude toward the printed word, which was less concentrated in a few privileged books." -- Roger Chartier, "Urban Reading Practices, 1660-1770," in his The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 222-24

It's pretty certain that browsing in the face of sheer volume were deep habits of literacy (specifically, of high print literacy). By contrast, one might ask: who read so intensely and deeply -- to instance the extreme -- that they only really read one book? There were probably just three classes of such people: the very poor (I remembe r, but can't find at present, an essay by Chartier about people in the past who owned just one book, which was found on their body after a coach accident in Paris), the extremely pious (who read the Bible), or the "genius" author. (Think of Blake, for example: no matter how many books he read, he really only had one or two books on his mental bookshelf: the Bible and Milton.) By contrast, everyone else browsed.

Mass literacy in the twentieth century, perhaps, may be a phenomenon of browsing. Think of Reader's Digest. After my family immigrated to the U.S. in my childhood, we were a kind of microcosm of assimilation (into English literacy) in this regard. There were two major investments in books in my household: the Reader's Digest series of condensed books (a kind of packaged browsing) and The World Book encyclopedia (a veritable lesson in reading as browsing-cum-volume). I drank deeply from both founts as a child, since these were the main books in the house. I was intense in my browsing.

So now let's snap back to the present and the act of browsing cyber- or multi-media volumes of information. I've started a project (combining humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists) called Transliteracies to look into "online reading." It's my hypothesis that there are hidden complexities and intelligences in low-attention modes of browsing/surfing that we don't yet know how to chart. Google, after all, is making a fortune for algorithms enacting this hypothesis. Or to cite a historical googler: Dr. Johnson, sage of the Age of Reason, was famous for "devouring" books just by browsing them instead of reading "cover to cover." (To allude to the titles of the two serial magazines he was involved with, he would have called browsing Rambling or Idling [The Rambler, The Idler.)

Just as "browsing" is complex, so I think that there are hidden complexities in the notion of "sheer volume." Some of the digital artists I know -- e.g., George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories -- are "database artists" whose work asks the question, in essence: what happens to the notion of art when we gaze not at one work in rapt wonder but several thousand works -- when, in other words, the "work" is "volume"? What if quantity, in other words, was a matter of quality? Aren't there different kinds of "volume," some more intelligent, beautiful, kinder, humane (not to mention efficient and flexible, the usual postindustrial desiderata) than others?

I'd better stop, since this comment is too long. As Blake said about volume: "Enough! or too much."

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:06 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

reading over your shoulder   06.16.2005, 9:09 AM

A particularly offensive section of the Patriot Act was slapped down yesterday in Congress. From Reuters:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday defied President Bush by approving a measure making it harder for federal agents to secretly gather information on people's library reading habits and bookstore purchases.

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

pay for the service, not the copy   06.14.2005, 12:51 PM

The other day, I came across an interesting experiment with a new model of distribution and ownership on the web, something that writers, publishers and journalists should pay attention to. KeepMedia charges $4.95 a month for unlimited access to 200 mainstream periodicals (see list) spanning the last 12 years up to the present day. That's significantly less than what I pay annually for my handful of print periodical subscriptions, and gives me access to much more material (kind of like LexisNexis for the masses). Plus, you do get to "keep" - that's part of how it works (indeed, their logo is a kangaroo with a stack of magazines stuffed in her pouch). KeepMedia allows you to attach notes to articles and to store away "clippings." It also makes it easy to track subjects across publications, and has automated recommendations for related stories. I assume that stored articles will get caged off if you stop subscribing. That's what makes me nervous about the pay-for-the-service model. You don't actually get to keep anything for the long haul, unless you print it out. But KeepMedia suggests one way that newspapers and publishers might adapt to the digital age.

Right now, publishers are still stuck on the idea of individual "copies." The web - an enormous, interconnected copying machine - is inherently hostile to this idea. So publishers generally insist on digital rights management (DRM) - coded controls that restrict what you can do with a piece of media. This, almost invariably, is infuriating, and ends up unfairly punishing people who have willingly paid a fair price for an item. Pay-for-the-service models won't solve the problem entirely, but they do get away from the idea of "copies." On the web, copies are cheap, or free. But access to a library or database is valuable. It's not about how many copies are sold, it's about how many people are reading. So charge at the gate. Once people are inside, it's all you can eat. This is nothing new. People play a flat rate for cable television, which is essentially a list of publications. You pay extra for premium channels, or pay-per-view special features, but your basic access is assured. What and how much you watch is up to you. Yahoo! is trying this right now for music. Why not do the same for newspapers, or for books? The web is combining publishing with broadcasting. Publishers and broadcasters need to adapt.

Related posts:
"web news as gated community"
"self-destructing books"

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

reading manga on Sony Librie   06.13.2005, 12:57 PM

Came across this Flickr photoset of Japanese comics on a Librie - Sony's electric ink ebook reader. Even in a photo, the reflective, print-like quality of the screen is striking. People have generally raved about the Librie's display, but are outraged by its senseless DRM policies: books self-destruct after 60 days. (discussed here and here)

Once E ink enters the mainstream, people might flock to electronic books as rapidly and enthusiastically as they did to digital photography. Screen display technology will undoubtedly advance. The DRM problem is trickier.

(Incidentally, I found this image while browsing recent blog posts under the "ebook" tag on Technorati. Flickr images tagged with "ebook" are placed alongside. An example of how these social tagging systems are becoming interconnected.)

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

LA Times to run "wikatorials"   06.13.2005, 10:52 AM

Next week, as part of a general reworking of its editorial page, the LA Times is staring "wikatorials" - "an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials."

(via Dan Gillmor)

UPDATE: "Upheaval on Los Angeles Time Editorial Pages" in NY Times.

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

web news as gated community   06.10.2005, 10:25 AM

Just found out about this on diglet.. Launched in April, The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a joint effort of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment of the Humanities to create a comprehensive web archive of the nation's public domain newspapers.

Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.

(A similar project is getting underway in France.)

It's frustrating that this online collection will stop at 1922. Ordinary libraries maintain up-to-date periodical archives and make them available to anyone if they're willing to make the trip. But if they put those collections on the web, they'll be sued. Archives are one of the few ways newspapers have figured out to make money on the web, so they're not about to let libraries put their microfilm and periodical reading rooms online. The paradigm has flipped.. in print, you pay for the current day's edition, but the following day it ends up in the trash, or wrapping a fish. The passage of 24 hours makes it worthless. On the web, most news is free. It's the fish wrap that costs you.

The web has utterly changed what things are worth. For most people, when a news site asks them to pay, they high tail it out of there and never look back. Even being asked to register is enough to deter many readers. But come September, the New York Times will start charging a $50 annual fee for what it considers its most unique commodities - editorials, op-eds, and selected other features. Is a full subscription site not far off? With their prestige and vast readership, the Times might be able to pull it off. But smaller papers are afraid to start charging, even as they watch their print circulation numbers plummet. If one paper puts up a tollbooth, they instantly become irrelevant to millions of readers. There will always be a public highway somewhere nearby.

A friend at the Columbia School of Journalism told me that the only way newspapers can be profitable on the web is if they all join together in some sort of league and charge bulk subscription fees for universal access. If there's a wholesale move to the pay model, then readers will have no choice but to shell out. It will be like paying for cable service, where each newspaper is a separate channel. The only time you register is when you pay the initial fee. From then on, it's clear sailing.

It's a compelling idea, but could just be collective suicide for the newspapers. There will always be free news on offer somewhere. Indian and Chinese wire services might claim the market while the prestigious western press withers away. Or people will turn to state-funded media like the BBC or Xinhua. Then again, people might be willing to pay if it means unfettered access to high quality, independent journalism. And with newspapers finally making money on web subscriptions, maybe they'd start loosening up about their archives.

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

uncyclopedia: the inevitable wikipedia parody   06.09.2005, 5:02 PM

Uncyclopedia is "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Its definition of "book" is actually kind of interesting: "Bound Offline Organized Knowledge."

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)

"an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating"   06.09.2005, 2:11 PM

Good piece today in Wired on the transformation of scientific journals. There's a general feeling that commercial publishers like Reed Elsevier enjoy unreasonable control over an evolving body of research that should be freely available to the public. With exorbitant subscription fees, affordable only for large institutions, most journals are effectively inaccessible, and the authors retain few or no reproduction rights. Recently, however, free article databases have sprung up on the web - The Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and NIH's PubMed - some of which, like PLoS, have begun publishing their own journals. It's a welcome change, considering how much labor and treasure is poured into scientific publications (from funders, private and public, and from the scientists themselves), and yet how little is gotten in return. Shifting to a non-profit model, as PLoS has done, preserves much of the financial architecture that supports the production of journals, but totally revolutionizes the distribution.

PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally). They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published. These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return? Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.

"It's ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating," Eisen said (Eisen teaches genetics and is a founder of PLoS).

But what is in many ways the tougher question is how to shift the architecture of prestige - peer review - to these new kinds of journals.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:11 PM | Comments (1)

Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
— me either for that matter.   06.08.2005, 11:18 AM

Came across this on a web-site i'd never heard of while searching for audio samples of a sound artist i'd never heard of (Todd Dockstader) that was referenced in a copy of magazine called The Wire that i purchased for the first time.

Stacked in almost innumerable dusty piles around my room are the incoming CDs of many a publicist’s hardwork & toil. And for reasons that have more to do with esoteric alignments of the stars than any particular dislike, they often remain untouched & unheard for far, far too long. This very column is somewhat of an attempt to remedy this situation while also commenting on the sheer volume of music, especially electronic music, that continues to be released. It’s a deluge of expression via our machines, which has resulted in an inverse response of criticism, a lack of perspective, an inability to perfect the zoom-out on the overall picture of what is being produced by this wired and wireless culture. . .
— tobias c. van veen in cut-up

reminded me for the 323rd time in the past several months that something profound is happening relative to the "sheer volume" of media being produced and new (online) distribution patterns. would love to start to understand the ramifications. here's one i see in my own behavior -- and you can't imagine how painful it is to own up to this:

in 2001, 2 and 3 i made a scrapbook of things i collected on the web. i included in the scrapbook a record of all the books i read cover-to-cover. each year the number was at least 24. suddenly in 2004 the number went to ONE, and that was a graphic novel that i read in a few hours.

i'm still reading quite a bit but most of it is online and in much smaller chunks than books or even long articles. but also, with the advent of big notebook computers with dvd drives and large screens, some of my reading time has been supplanted by watching time as i've begun to absorb TV series (sopranos, 24, Six Feet Under) — viewing all the segments in as few sittings as possible, much like the experience of a page-turner novel.

i'm also browsing quite a bit more. when i was a teenager i went to the record store (yes, i'm that old) and would spend quite a long time choosing one or maybe two to buy. then i would bring those home and listen to them over and over and over. now i find i hardly ever have to come out of browsing mode. between othermusic.com, earplug, etc. etc. a scary amount of my conscious music listening can be subsumed by surfing for new sounds.

i'd like to find a way to get people to talk about their media consumption so that we can begin to understand what actually is happening, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively.

any suggestions?

(image by Gregory Vershbow)

Posted by bob stein at 11:18 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

multimedia promo or prose poem?   06.07.2005, 9:35 AM

Novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom has created a website that presents brief excerpts from her novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, as audio flash drawings that combine animated text, audio and illustration. The illustration, a red line that scribbles randomly on the screen, subtly alludes to the violence in the text, and the voice-overs add depth to an already intense story. Although this site was only intended as a promotional piece for Marcom's first two novels, the excerpts she chose and the impact of the sound and illustration makes them feel more like prose poems.

Posted by Kim White at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

the 2005 computers and writing online conference   06.06.2005, 3:30 PM

The Institute for the Future of the Book is presenting a paper at the 2005 Computers and Writing Online Conference. Our presentation, entitled "Sorting the Pile: Making Sense of A Networked Archive," discusses our experience building a networked archive for our Gates Memory Project and the insights it provided regarding the evolution of books in the networked environment.

The conference began on Tuesday, May 31, and runs through Monday, June 13. It is an online conference that is open-access, Creative Commons-licensed, and hosted on a weblog. Drawing upon the conference's theme of exploring the increasing value of the network and collaborative practices within it, presenters examine the role(s) played by social networking applications and other technologies that are intended to foster social interaction, community, and collaboration. Alongside studying the technologies themselves, presenters will observe and describe the ways that writers and users are engaging the technologies and how such engagement is changing our ideas about writing and teaching writing, and, more broadly, the concepts of rhetoric and composition themselves. We very much hope you'll get involved by leaving your comments, or, if you prefer, respond on your own weblog and leave a trackback! Or write a response on your wiki! Or tag presentations on your del.icio.us or de.lirio.us list! You get the idea. This conference is meant to be networked.

The presentations are accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and anyone with an account at Kairosnews (registration is free) can leave comments. For more information, visit the CW Online 2005 weblog.

Posted by Kim White at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)

book DJs: hear penguin, sample penguin, remix penguin   06.06.2005, 2:57 PM

First there was the DJ, then the VJ, now Penguin audio books is sponsoring "penguin remixed" a contest that might spawn a whole new genre--are you ready for the BJ ?

According to the website, "thirty of the best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around." are available for remix. "Download the samples, use them in your music, submit your tracks. The ten top tracks, as voted by you, will be turned into a Penguin digital audiobook, which will be available through the Audible.co.uk store and via iTunes UK."

Just to get your creative juices flowing, here is one of the samples available for remix. It's from Lewis Carroll's, "Alice in Wonderland," read by Susan Jameson.

Posted by Kim White at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

building frontier networks   06.06.2005, 2:17 PM

The $100 laptop project - the MIT-led initiative to distribute cheap, network-enabled computers to schools throughout the developing world - is moving ahead, but it's far from clear whether it will succeed. Today Wired discusses some of the daunting physical challenges of deploying technology in places where there isn't even electricity, let alone a wireless broadband network. As far as energy is concerned, the MIT team is trying to make the computers as self-sustaining as possible, experimenting with hand cranks (like a wind-up watch) and "parasitic power," where the user's typing constantly charges the battery. Then there is the problem of networks. The vision driving the project is one of delivering the resources of the web to communities that are cut off from libraries and the general flow of information. But extending the gossamer strands of the web requires robust architecture. Dumping cheap laptops in village schools won't achieve much if you can't connect the dots.

Wired mentions geekcorps, a group that coordinates skilled technology volunteers around the world "to teach communities how use innovative and affordable information and communication technologies to solve development problems." One of their trademark innovations is the "BottleNet" - a method for setting up improvised Wi-Fi relay networks with "do-it-yourself antennas," first employed in geekcorp's Mali project:

The do-it-yourself (DIY) antenna designs were based on information gathered from numerous sources, including standard ham radio operator reference manuals, books on building wireless community networks, numerous DIY wireless sites on the Internet, and from the past experiences of GCM volunteers with wireless antennas. Changes to the designs were made to incorporate materials that are easily available in Mali (plastic water bottles, used valve stems from motorbikes, window screen mesh, television and low cost coaxial cables, etc.) to minimize the technical skills needed to build an antenna and to reduce costs.

Something about these ad hoc creations, patched together with junk - the scraps of western industry - speaks eloquently of the fragility of our grand networked enterprise.

images: (left) kids with Panasonic Toughbooks at the Nicholas and Elaine Negroponte School in Cambodia (from Wired); (right) BottleNet antenna in Mali

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bayesian news by email   06.06.2005, 10:42 AM

Another interesting prototype from BBC Backstage: news feeds delivered by email with Bayesian filtering. In other words, you can flag the kind of messages you want to receive more of, and the kind you want to receive less of, purifying the signal, as it were. This kind of filtering was first developed to deal with spam. Here's what it looks like in your mail viewer:

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

a literary map of manhattan   06.04.2005, 5:04 PM

Maps maps maps. Everyone's playing with maps as interface (see here and here). Check out this multimedia feature at the NY Times. Doesn't go very deep, but fun all the same. Each item was reader-submitted over the past month - a collective effort to map the rich fictional life of Manhattan. They should do one of these for Brooklyn.

Reminds me of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. Each of the red dots below links to a story or article set in that location.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:04 PM | Comments (1)

remixing the news   06.03.2005, 5:07 PM

There's been an explosion of creative tinkering since the BBC opened up its API (applications programming interface) last month. An API is a window into a site's code and content allowing techie types to build new applications with BBC material. It's really worth going over to the BBC Backstage blog to take a look at the first batch of prototypes and demos. The majority are clever splicings of BBC data - news, traffic reports, images etc. - with Google Maps (everyone's favorite lately), not unlike chicagocrime.org. Other notable examples: an RSS feed of BBC complaints; a feature that allows you to tag articles and read tags left by other readers; and a nice "tag soup" visualization of financial news.

Correction: A reader kindly pointed out that BBC Backstage hasn't actually released APIs yet (though they intend to soon). The projects I've referenced use BBC feeds, or have scraped content directly from the BBC site. APIs are to follow soon (more info