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)

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 remember, 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)

web marginalia   05.23.2005, 7:09 AM

About a week ago, I attended a fascinating workshop at USC on Social Software in the Academy - a gathering of some of the most interesting thinkers, teachers and innovators at the intersection of technology and education. I learned a great deal, much of which I'm still processing and will be posting about this week. I also found out about some exciting new tools. One of them is Wikalong, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Wikalong makes it possible to write notes in the margin of a web page (something we take for granted in paper books). Reviews, rebuttals, conversations, subversive commentary, a "roving weblog," or just plain old notes - all of these are possible in the little sidebar wiki notebook that Wikalong places to the left of any web page you go to. Online reading enhanced.

A great part of history is written in the marginalia, and I suspect that networked marginalia is territory worth exploring. Wikalong might be just a literal-minded stepping stone to more interesting forms, but the profundity of the margin (which lies in its spacial relationship to the primary text) shouldn't be underestimated. Sparks fly between juxtaposed texts. While hyperlinks enable the reader to leap between textual worlds, they suck you down a wormhole to a distant place. Sometimes it's better to be in both spaces at the same time (like keeping two browser windows open at once). Think of the Talmud, the great Jewish compendium of law and exegesis. On each page, commentaries are arrayed around a core text. Wikalong may seem insignificant next to this ancient hypertext system, but it points to a related sort of spatial intertextuality that should theoretically be possible in the new medium. If a flat page can be so multi-dimensional, think of how far we might be able to go in a virtual space.

Another handy tool is PurpleSlurple, which provides granular addressability for any existing web page. In other words, it inserts links for paragraphs and headers, allowing you to reference specific sections of text on a given page. Each "slurped" page gets its own URL, as does each individual element that has been anchored with a reference number. It's primitive, but could come in extremely handy. For bloggers, this provides another way to reference a particular passage in a long web document. Just slurp the page, then link to the specific section.

Nils Peterson, of Washington State University, presented these tools, along with del.icio.us and a visualization application from Tufts called VUE, as a "juxtaposition of technologies" - a toolkit enabling a web reader or writer to more effectively annotate, reference and quote within the web.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:09 AM | Comments (2)

"transliteracies" conference   05.18.2005, 10:48 AM

"How are people today “reading” in digital, networked environments? For example, what is the relation between reading and browsing, or searching? Or between reading and multimedia? Can innovations in technologies or interfaces increase the productivity, variety, and pleasure of these new kinds of reading? How can the historical diversity of human reading practices help us gauge the robustness of the new digital practices; and, inversely, how can contemporary practices provide new ways to understand the technical, social, and cultural dimensions of historical reading?"

June 17-18 at UC Santa Barbara, kicking off the Transliteracies Project: "Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading".

(thanks, Grand Text Auto)

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:48 AM | Comments (1)

abandon all hope, ye who enter here   04.16.2005, 1:23 PM

Silly-sounding business jargon and corporate pep talk abounded at the eBooks in Education Conference at McGraw-Hill in New York. The kind of stuff that makes the eyes and mind glaze over. "Fluidity of work flow." "Content creation." "Course-centric versus learner-centric." The "three-legged stool," of digital publishing... Books are "learning objects." A teacher is just a "sage on the stage," as though teaching were an antiquated idea. Youth is a marketing problem to be solved, the latest batch of young professionals in the making, rolling along the conveyor belt. Tim Magner, a stuffed shirt from our dear own Department of Ed., talked about priming kids for the new global economy (he also took the opportunity to mention that we're doing the same for Iraq). But nothing about the issues at the heart of education. Nothing about a civil society, an educated citizenry, etc. About nurturing critical faculties in an age of information blitz. About advancing the light against darkness. I don't doubt the good intentions of many of the speakers and attendees (though I do doubt some) but to someone outside the industry, the conference was plainly nothing more than a congregation of hucksters and homogenizers. Only the accessibility folks (the ones concerned with opening up digital media to people with disabilities), and one soft-spoken tech development manager from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, seemed to exhibit any kind of public spiritedness, or a belief that technology should be made to serve human beings and not companies.

Then there were the numbing waves of PowerPoint, PowerPoint, PowerPoint! Nothing more perfectly exemplifies the muddled thinking, ignorance of design, and all-around mediocrity of the so-called "ebook industry." Each presenter - with the exception of George Kerscher of the Daisy Consortium (who is blind) - supplemented their talk with the obligatory PowerPoint presentation, which, after a while, becomes a kind of torture. The slides flip one after the other after the other, the bullet points rattle like hail. Incomprehensible charts and graphs slouch across backgrounds of pastel or mock-marble. There's a lot of teal. A lot of magenta. The slick veneer of the corporate board room washes over you like microwaved cheese, but the occasional tell-tale typo betrays the obvious haste and lack of consideration with which the things are made. In most cases the presenter abdicates entirely and plays human accompaniment to the PowerPoint show, lamely reading aloud as the panels slide past, sort of like the airline stewardess doing her bit with the oxygen mask while the safety film plays behind. After sitting through a few of these, your brain feels like it's been flattened out with a rolling pin. I kept thinking of Hart Crane's lines:

"The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes."

I also thought of Edward Tufte's wonderful monograph, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (encapsulated here), a shrewd critique of sandblasted thinking in Microsoft-era America. It's a little frightening to hear adults talk about the future of education in the scrubbed, frictionless language of the corporate slideshow. If they are teaching by example, then it is a sorry example indeed.

From Tufte:
"Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

I couldn't resist including the cover illustration of Tufte's piece. which gloriously sends up the totalitarianism of PowerPoint..

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:23 PM | Comments (2)

the dinosaurs are myopic: publishing industry clueless about the future of textbooks   04.15.2005, 3:37 PM

I spent yesterday in the McGraw-Hill building listening to the textbook publishing industry's ideas about the future of the book. It was grim. The abysmal lack of creativity and insight, the singular focus on "revenue models," and the utter disregard for the needs of students and teachers, made for a dull, and sometimes disturbing, day.

The ebook offerings ranged from plain old PDFs, to web-based books, to jury-rigged versions of Microsoft office. The only panel that offered a forward-looking vision of the future and interesting ebook software to go with it was the accessibility panel, moderated by George Kerscher—Secretary General, Daisy consortium—who is blind. This panel included a demo of Dolphin Audio Publishing’s EasePublisher a tool that facilitates the creation of multimedia content that unites text, audio and images. Dolphin and Elsevier were the only companies that addressed multimedia and its role in the future book. While McGraw-Hill is offering PDF textbooks because they are, “the easiest, fastest, cheapest solution.” Dolphin is thinking about how to enrich the learning experience for everyone. They found that when students with no disabilities used their multimedia books, they learned more. Apparently the combination of text (reading), audio (hearing the text read by a human), and image (photos, videos or illustrations that illuminate the material) enhances learning. Designing electronic textbooks that exploit this opportunity seems like a no-brainer. Teachers I’ve spoken to and my own experience with students in the classroom suggests that multi-media ignites student enthusiasm. Making PDF textbooks is like driving a Jaguar in first gear. But after 10 years of experience in the field, McGraw-Hill’s Ginny Moffet believes that: “students only care about the grade,” and “the biggest challenge to the [electronic textbook] industry is the high cost of content creation.” Hmmm, what about making a high quality product that everyone wants to buy, isn’t that the problem they should be trying to solve? It’s clear that the job of making an interesting electronic textbook is not being taken up by any of the old giants. Our prediction (and our hope) is that the future of the electronic textbook will not be directed by corporations, but by small start-ups, or non-profit consortiums of schools and academics. Efforts like the non-profit, Virtual High School, are an interesting beginning.

Posted by Kim White at 03:37 PM | Comments (2)

6th avenue agriculture   04.15.2005, 10:15 AM

Even before the head of the University of Nebraska library began bemoaning how the pictures had fallen out of their collection of vintage agronomy ebooks, the Open eBook Forum conference on ebooks in education felt a great deal like a convention of cattlemen gathered to discuss the latest advances in treating animal ailments and increasing their milkfat percentages. The cattle, of course, are the hapless students, handily divided into K-12 & college lots. The publishing industry, with the help of the software industry, is doing their best to milk them for all they can.

The major image that came to my mind, however, was genetically modified corn. Genetically modified corn is theoretically a good thing: you get a bigger harvest of better corn. But! for the good of the masses - so it doesn't get loose in the wild - Monsanto's made their GM corn sterile. What this means for their bottom line: the farmers have to buy new seeds every single year. In short, what should be a renewable resource has become corporate property. And this strategy, more or less, is what the people at the Open Ebook Forum were most delighted about having hit upon. They're selling coursepacks to college kids which expire at the end of the term, ebooks to libraries which only one user can check out at once, and more software to parents so their kids can do their schoolwork. Hopefully, this technology will let you, the efficient new school administrator, get those pesky teachers out of your payroll. Then: profit!

The future of the book looked incredibly bleak from the McGraw-Hill auditorium. One bright spot of enthusiasm: a few groups of people (including Geoff Freed from the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media and John Worsfeld from Dolphin Computer Access) working on making media more accessible to people with disabilities. Not coincidentally, they were the only people there not primarily concerned with making money off the students.

Posted by dan visel at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

ebooks in education   04.14.2005, 8:10 AM

if:book will be spending the day at the Open eBook Forum's eBooks in Education Conference at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York.

In the spirit of the conference, here's an AP article from last week that gives a good overview of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop project for developing countries.

"Details are still being worked out, but here's the MIT team's current recipe: Put the laptop on a software diet; use the freely distributed Linux operating system; design a battery capable of being recharged with a hand crank; and use newly developed 'electronic ink' or a novel rear-projected image display with a 12-inch screen. Then, give it Wi-Fi access, and add USB ports to hook up peripheral devices. Most importantly, take profits, sales costs and marketing expenses out of the picture."

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)

nothing has changed in 3,000 years   04.01.2005, 11:18 AM

Our exploration of digital technology and the revolution it has provoked in our reading and writing practice, tends to focus on the latest gadget and the newest software, but we are also concerned with the things that don't change and the aspects of human communication that are so deeply a part of our nature that they can not be removed from our reading and writing systems. The first "Information Esthetics" lecture at the Chelsea Museum brought this to the fore last night. Robert Bringhurst spoke about hand-lettered manuscripts, and about typography that respects and preserves the texture and uniqueness of the hand-made mark. He argued for the humanity of fine craftsmanship. He even managed to convince me that slight variations in the shape of letterforms can serve as metaphors for our own individuality.

He also made the point that the devices in our writing/reading systems are physiologically based. The average page is a size that can be held easily in our hands and read at arm's length. Bringhurst showed a slide of an Egyptian manuscript. The size of the papyrus was very similar to page we use today, and the text was composed in blocks around images. Very much like magazine layouts. As I was admiring the beauty of the manuscript, Bringhurst said, “as you can see, nothing has changed in 3,000 years.” That shouldn't shock me, but it did. I've been so absorbed in thinking about the next new thing, I'd forgotten that reading and writing is a very very old thing.

Interesting to think that whether we are reading something written on stone, papyrus, paper, or a computer screen, we need the same things we've aways needed: legibility, context, and "texture." I'm radically summarizing Bringhurst's lecture (hope I'm doing it justice). The way I understand it, texture is Bringhurst's way of describing the particular kind of beauty we look for in cultural artifacts. Texture, is evidence of complexity, information, meaning and the imperfect human hand at work.

So, I'm thinking about how this "texture" manifests in digital manuscripts and it seems to me that it does so in several ways including: the craftsmanship of the digital document itself (which includes the code, the interface, and the composition), the richness of information/meaning that resides in virtual layers or as "links" within the text, and the way beauty can be crafted out of the physical material itself--light emitted by a computer screen.

(photo by Alex Itin)

Posted by Kim White at 11:18 AM | Comments (3)

Information Esthetics lecture series   03.23.2005, 2:46 PM

Brad Paley, creator of Text Arc and many other gorgeous data visualizations popular here at if:book, has put together a fascinating lecture series running March through July in New York. The series starts next Thursday in Chelsea with renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. From Brad:

"I'm excited to have put together something that seems tailor-made for the interests of Institute for the Future of the Book participants and on-lookers."

Information Esthetics: Lecture Series One starts March 31 in Chelsea

People who value clarity and engagement is visual displays, whether as fine art or on Wall Street, are invited to seven evenings with some of the field's deepest thinkers and finest practitioners. The series opens with distinguished typographer Robert Bringhurst at 6:00 pm, March 31 at the Chelsea Art Museum. Fine spirits and snacks will be served. It's free with the $3 discounted museum admission.

A little more about Information Esthetics..

Making data meaningful—this phrase could describe what dozens of professions strive for: Wall Street systems designers, fine artists, advertising creatives, computer interface researchers, and many others. Occasionally something important happens in these practices: a data representation is created that reveals the subject’s nature with such clarity and grace that it both informs and moves the viewer. We both understand and care. This is the focus of Information Esthetics.

Information Esthetics, a recently formed not-for-profit organization, has organized a lecture series dedicated to helping this happen more often.

For the full program, visit InformationEsthetics.org. Thanks, Brad! We'll definitely be there.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)

institute for the future of the book field trip to the recent past   03.10.2005, 11:18 AM

last night Printed Matter "the world's greatest source for artists' publications" threw open the doors to their storage space. my colleague, dan visel, and i couldn't resist the opportunity to rummage through the bins for hidden treasures dating from the late 70s. 2 thoughts: we're still a long way from the time when browsing an electronic archive will be anywhere near as pleasing, at least on the sensual plane; paper art may have hit it's height in that moment with the arrival of desktop publishing and cheap xeroxing; now a lot of the energy that people were putting into the creation of paper art is likely going into e-artifacts and e-zines.

Posted by bob stein at 11:18 AM | Comments (2)

building the cathedral: collaborative authorship and the internet   02.16.2005, 5:25 PM

The World Wide Web is, quite possibly, the most collaborative multi-cultural project in the history of mankind. Millions of people have contributed personal homepages, blogs, and other sites to the growing body of human expression available online. It is, one could say, the secular equivalent of the medieval cathedral, designed by a professional, but constructed by non-professionals, regular folk who are eager to participate in the construction of a legacy. Such is the context for projects like Wikimedia and the Semantic Web, designed by elite programmers, built by the masses.

One of the most pressing questions with regard to collaborative authorship is, can the content be trusted? Does the anonymous group author have the same authority as the credentialed single author? Is our belief in the quality of information inextricably connected to our belief in the authority of the writer? Wikimedia (the non-profit organization that initiated Wikipedia, Wikibooks,, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, and Wikiquote) addresses these concerns by offering a new model for collaborative authorship and peer review. Wikipedia's anonymously published articles undergo peer review via direct peer revision. All revisions are saved and linked; user actions are logged and reversible. “This type of constant editing,” Wikimedia co-director Angela Beesley alleges, “allows you to trust the content over time.” The ambition of Wikimedia is to create a neutral territory where, through open debate, consensus can be reached on even the most contentious topics. The Wikimedia authoring system sets up a democratic forum where contributors construct their own rulespace and policies emerge from consensus-based, rather than top-down, processes. So the authority of the Wikimedia collaborative book depends, in part, on a collective self-discipline that is defined by and enforced by the group.

The collaborative authoring environment engendered by the web will make even more ambitious and far-reaching projects possible. Projects like the Semantic Web, which aims to make all content searchable by allowing users to assign semantic meaning to their work, will organize the prodigious output of collaborative networks, and could, potentially, cast the entire web as a collaboratively authored “book.”

Posted by Kim White at 05:25 PM | Comments (3)

the web in the world   02.14.2005, 7:07 PM

In ten years, the world wide web has become an indispensable fact of life. Where do we take it next? At the conference's closing plenary session, Peter Lunenfeld asked a similar question: "What is the next big dream that will keep us going? Are we out of ideas?" He then offered something called "urban computing" as a possible answer.

Here is my attempt (rather long, I apologize) to jump on that dream...

I live in New York, and in the past few years I've observed a transformation. My neighborhood coffee shop looks like an advertisement for Apple. At any given time, no less than two thirds of the customers are glued to their laptops, with mugs of coffee steaming in perilous proximity. Power cords snake among the tables and plug into strips deployed around the cafe floor. Go to the counter and they'll be happy to give you a dog-eared business card bearing the password to their wireless network. Of course, people have been toting around notebook computers since they first became available in the mid-80s, and they've certainly been no stranger to coffee shops. But with the introduction of Wi-Fi people are flocking in droves. Some kind of exodus has begun.

It's a familiar sight throughout the more cosmopolitan neighborhoods of the city. Go to any Starbucks on the Upper West Side and you're competing with half a dozen other customers for a space on their too-few powerstrips. And their Wi-Fi service isn't even free. And come spring, I predict the same will occur in the city's parks, especially those downtown, which are rapidly being integrated into a massive wireless infrastructure. No single entity is responsible for this, rather a lattice of different initiatives working toward a common goal: free high speed Wi-Fi coverage across Manhattan.

Mobile web and messaging technologies have already created a new breed of roving web users. Cell phones, PDAs, text messaging, Blue Tooth, RSS, podcasting (the list goes on..) have swept into our daily life like a tidal wave. More and more, we're able to read, search, capture, edit, and send on the go, and with satellite-fed positioning technologies, we can pinpoint our location at any given time. What we have is the beginnings of a kind of "augmented reality" where information relates intimately to place, and vice versa. The world itself can now be as searchable, linkable, and informative as the web - a synthesis, or overlay, of real and virtual realities.

So the next big dream could be the evolution of the web into something more than a desktop system - into something that we can use while moving, and interact with anywhere.

Imagine an entire city redesigned as a communication platform. This has recently become a hot emerging field of research: "urban computing", or "locative media". It has also entered the choppy waters of urban planning. In his talk at the conference, New York sociologist and Silicon Alley chronicler Michael Indergaard, spoke of developers in lower Manhattan hoping to recast the hobbled financial district as a high-tech place "to work and play" - a weave of communications and public space. Given the tangle of ego, money and politics that has converged on Ground Zero, it's hard to predict how this will pan out.. (for examples of recent initiatives, Downtown Alliance, Spectropolis). Or witness the hotly debated proposal to make the entire city of Philadelphia into one giant Wi-Fi hotspot.

Ultimately, the idea is to overlay the complex of buildings, streets and public spaces - the entire fabric of urban life - with the interconnectivity of the web. The implications for culture are as enormous as they are for business. Cities have always been the most brilliant cultural dynamos. Take the simplest, most essential urban act - walking through town - and you will discover a rich attendant tradition: from the eternal stroller, the flaneur, to the urban dérive, or drift, "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances," as expostulated by the French Situationalists of the 1960s, most notably Guy-Ernest Debord. Or take the traditions of buskering, street photography, or the countless films that employ the city as canvas (take, for example, Woody Allen, who time and again has used the geography and rhythm of Manhattan in his neurotic self-portraits). And let's not forget what is probably the greatest literary treatment of consciousness in the modern city: Joyce's Ulysses. In each case, the city is interpreted as a matrix of "psychogeographies" (to borrow again from the Situationalists) for which the amble, the stroll, the idle on the stoop, are the most effective tools of discovery (see earlier post City Chromosomes - An SMS Chronicle). The city is also the realm of chance: a kind of particle accelerator of circumstance that whips up coincidences with adrenalizing rapidity. It's not hard to see how this is similar to our movements in virtual space - surfing, browsing, chatting, searching, stumbling upon newness - and how these two ways of movement could act in concert when computers are unmoored from desks.

The beginnings of this can be found at the intersection of photography and the web. Digital cameras and camera phones have become incredibly popular. People are snapping pictures everywhere they go, then sharing them through email, image messaging, or online image banking services like Ofoto or Flickr. New technologies are in the works that will allow people to plug in photos the same way they plug in keywords on a search engine, effectively asking "what am I looking at?" or "where have I seen this before?" (see earlier post, Hyperlinking the Eye of the Beholder). Amazon's new yellow pages service allows you to see photos of the business your are looking for, and to virtually stroll, or scroll, down the block to get a sense of the surrounding environment (see earlier post, From Apsen to A9). A student project called "Grafedia" was presented recently at the Tisch ITP winter show which allows people to put "hyperlinks" in any physical environment. As described by its inventor John Geraci:

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link."

I can imagine Grafedia as a fun urban diversion - a trail of crumbs, a flirtation, a new way of marking territory - or even as a kind of x-ray vision into closed spaces. A discrete little tag could alert a passerby to shady goings-on within. Though primitive, these new technologies represent the seeds for new social practices, new ways of creating and sharing meaning.

And locative media need not be restricted to cities. GPS technology presents new possibilities for tracing a meaningful path through the physical world - global hide-and-seek, or more frightening, a means of surveillance. A recreational pastime, "geocaching," has already sprung up around this technology. In the game, which resembles a kind of global scavenger hunt, participants identify "caches" on the web and track them down with their GPS device. Caches are used as a kind of exchange for anything people might like to share - books, software, recipes, jewelry, clothing, art (anything, really) - and as a stop along the trail to other caches. Clearly, the thrill of finding, of tracking, is the main attraction here.

Solitary roaming through nature could also, theoretically, be "plugged in" to the mobile web. One of the conference presenters, John Chris Jones, has for the past four years has been writing a peripatetic web journal beamed in from his Wordsworthian walks through the English countryside. I for one would find this to be a terrible intrusion into solitude, but I offer up the possibility without judgement, keeping in mind that Thoreau's "isolated" cabin on Walden Pond was less than a mile from the train tracks.

In the end, societies and cultures work through presence - through people, things, and ideas interacting in the same environment. Far from stripping individual locales of their unique qualities, the web in its infant decade has enabled people to explore and converse like never before about their particular place in the world, while simultaneously connecting every point on the map - the realization of McLuhan's "global village". The next step, it would seem, is to shed the physical restrictions of desktop computing so the village can be explored on foot.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)

collecting and archiving the future book   02.08.2005, 8:02 PM

The collection and preservation of digital artworks has been a significant issue for museum curators for many years now. The digital book will likely present librarians with similar challenges, so it seems useful to look briefly at what curators have been grappling with.

At the Decade of Web Design Conference hosted by the Institute for Networked Cultures. Franziska Nori spoke about her experience as researcher and curator of digital culture for digitalcraft at the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt am Main. The project set out to document digital craft as a cultural trend. Digital crafts were defined as “digital objects from everyday life,” mostly websites. Collecting and preserving these ephemeral, ever-changing objects was difficult, at best. A choice had to be made between manual selection, or automatic harvesting. Nori and her associates chose manual selection. The advantage of manual selection was that critical faculties could be employed. The disadvantage was that subjective evaluations regarding an object’s relevance were not always accurate, and important work might be left out. If we begin to treat blogs, websites, and other electronic ephemera as cultural output worthy of preservation and study (i.e. as books), we will have to find solutions to similar problems.

The pace at which technology renews and outdates presents a further obstacle. There are, currently, two ways to approach durability of access to content. The first, is to collect and preserve hardware and software platforms, but this is extremely expensive and difficult to manage. The second solution, is to emulate the project in updated software. In some cases, the artist must write specs for the project, so it can be recreated at a later date. Both these solutions are clearly impractical for digital librarians who must manage hundreds of thousand of objects. One possible solution for libraries, is to encourage proliferation of objects. Open source technology might make it possible for institutions to share data/objects, thus creating “back-up” systems for fragile digital archives.

Nori ended her presentation with two observations. "Most societies create their identity through an awareness of their history." This, she argues, compells us to find ways to preserve digital communications for posterity. She notes that cultural historians, artists, and researchers "are worried about a future where these artifacts will not be accessible."

Posted by Kim White at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

the tomorrow book   02.08.2005, 5:51 PM

"The Jan van Eyck Academie and the Charles Nypels Foundation invite designers, book critics, book theoreticians and book makers to submit project proposals in the context of the research project 'The tomorrow book. Navigating to, within and beyond the book'. 'The tomorrow book' intends to query the future of the book from a multi-disciplinary standpoint. In doing so, the following aspects will be treated: editing, typography, book design, publishing and distribution. The umbrella theme of the project is navigation towards, inside and outside of the book. Research candidates can submit project proposals for 'The tomorrow book' up to 15 April 2005."

More information on "the tomorrow book" research...

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

the book is doomed   01.22.2005, 12:04 PM

"The book is doomed." That was Steven Pemberton’s definitive answer to my musings about the future of the book in the digital age. It was the end of the first day of an international conference on web design, we were at the Friday night conference dinner, eating a crème brulee that had been set ablaze just minutes before, and I don’t mean the little blue acetylene flame that puffs out after a few seconds. The chef blasted our crème brulee for several minutes with a torch that looked like something a forest ranger would use to execute a controlled burn.

So, I’m eating my crème brulee, trying to understand this pronouncement; when someone like Steven Pemberton says that the book, in the digital age, is doomed, you have to take it seriously. He cites The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen. The thesis, Pemberton explains, has to do with the process of innovation and adoption. A new invention has to find a niche market that will allow it to improve and develop. Once the new invention advances enough to allow it to compete with the entrenched technology it is quickly adopted. This often radically changes an industry. Pemberton gives computer printers as an example. Anyone remember the old dot matrix printers? They had gears on the side that fit into corresponding holes in the paper. Remember how slow they were and how poor the quality was? The introduction of the laser printer made vast improvements in printer quality and as soon as printer technology improved, a revolution in desktop publishing was made possible.

The book, Pemberton contends, will experience a similar sea-change the moment screen technology improves enough to compete with the printed page.

Posted by Kim White at