if:book

MacLuhan analyzes the presidential debates of 1976

2008-09-04T15:19:15Z

One of our terrific summer interns, Rick Williamson, just sent a link to this 1976 TV interview of Marshall McLuhan in which he skewers the presidential debates for being completely the wrong form for the medium of television. It's interesting to note that it's hard to imagine an interview like on the Today show of 2008. It goes on for ten uninterrupted minutes; there are no cut-aways to video footage or text crawls at the bottom of the screen; and most significantly McLuhan speaks his mind, critical of the mechanisms of political discourse to an extent unimaginable in today's sanitized mass media landscape.

Remediating Orwell's Diaries

2008-08-14T16:45:17Z

The Orwell Prize has recently unfurled their project to post George Orwell's personal diaries online, in blog form, and in real time, seventy years after each entry was originally written.

Why they've elected the blog format and the seventy-year anniversary is left unsaid, but they're questions that I think are not only interesting but important to consider for a project of this kind. There's little discussion of the motivations behind the project and readers are asked only to "gather [their] own impression[s] of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries."

But what happens when (a famous author's) personal diaries get remediated in blog form?

In the case of Orwell's diary, it walks and talks like a blog, but it isn't quite a blog. The site uses a standard template from Wordpress, with a double banner-- one for the Orwell Prize and the other announcing the site as the "Orwell Diaries" in a sans serif font above an image of a few lines from the diaries. (Speaking of which, I'm curious as to the singularizing of what, in its original form, is plural-- will each new diary be presented in a different format or be somehow marked? Or will the blog unify several diaries into one, continuous format?) To the right of the title banners is an image of the author at work at his desk. And running down the far right of the page are links to the about page, archives, categories, and a series of media pieces on the project. The first two posts announce the arrival of the blog, and it is not until the third post that Orwell's writing begins.

In that post, the diary entry has been transposed almost exactly from Peter Davison's edition of Orwell's Complete Works, footnotes included. What's different is the addition of tags (in this case, "animal" and "snake") as well as a category ("domestic"), a link to Richard II in Sparknotes, and a place for reader comments. I think, from this and the following few posts currently online, it's safe to say that the blog format is being used here to replicate the printed book, with a few bonus add-ons.

But because the publishers have decided to release the entries in real-time, I have to think that the intentions for the blog may have been more than just that. By publishing the entries in correlation with the days in which they were written, the blog brings the writer's thoughts into our time. These aren't a fossilized and completed set of prestigious memoirs, but rather quotidian reflections just like our own (an impression assisted by the sometimes-banality of Orwell's entries).

My question is what can be done to enhance the present-ness of Orwell without altering the entries themselves? What font choice would you select? Different fonts to reflect different moods? Would you find a self-reflexive piece of his writing and stick that on the "about" page? What about the banner? Would you include links to the day's weather forecast in Morocco? What about links to current or contemporary news articles for the more political entries to come? Despite 70 being a nice, round year, I've never ceased to be astonished by the prescience of Orwell's political insights, and how much more relevant this project might be if we brought the author further into our time by associating his personal thoughts with current events--in this case, via links to those events.

Above all, if one is going to remediate Orwell's work, why not translate it creatively instead of using the web as a book with heightened intelligence?

That said, I think it's an interesting way to bring Orwell's diaries to a larger audience, and I'm certainly glad to get a daily fill of his thoughts and observations.

"I heard words and words full of holes."

2008-08-12T23:01:05Z

I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings.” After glimpsing into BBC’s giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums:

Why are so many of these priceless documents out of print? Because the market for spoken-word recordings is too small for them to be worth reissuing on CD. So why don't the BBC, HarperCollins and Sony BMG (which now owns the Columbia Masterworks and RCA catalogs) make their spoken-word archives available for digital downloading via iTunes? Imagine being able to click a few keys on your laptop and listen to, say, Truman Capote reading excerpts from "In Cold Blood" or Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Jessica Tandy and David Wayne performing Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie." Wouldn't you pay 10 bucks for that privilege? I sure would.

But what about poets.org and Penn Sound? Both websites host catalogs of sound clips and boast thousands of mp3s, for free nonetheless. In fact, archived audio exists across the internet, in fabulous--even if sometimes hidden--pockets. Over at Slate, all weekly poems are accompanied by author readings. On Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, you can listen to Ezra Pound reading at the Harvard Vocarium, experience Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and even enjoy a rare 1929 recording of James Joyce.

Earlier in the summer, I raided Penn Sound’s archives for Robert Creeley audio files. I adore Creeley’s readings—how he ascended each stanza, how he stumbled through an enjambed line. In his voice, you can hear when his poetry is downright mean, irresistibly tender, and forever hesitant. Having listened repeatedly to Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” I was disappointed in Teachout’s treatment of what author readings tell the audience. Tsk, Teachout writes to all literary critics that picked up that popular “unfortunate habit” of using “voice” when they mean “style.” Teachout’s lead forgets that poetry began as an oral/aural tradition, a tradition which PennSound is looking to revive. Director Al Filreis hopes that the project “has already had an impact on the way poets, critics, teachers, and students talk about the sound of poetry, which is, after all, its most fundamental quality.”

Is there scholarship on how poets read their work? The space between how a reader interprets the text and how an audience hears the words is often vast—a canyon of blank page and intentional pauses. Shouldn’t we consider the poet’s performance? When I listen to Creeley read, the way he forfeited line breaks and rushed toward conclusions frequently changes my sense of the poem. On poets.org, John Berryman starts The Dream Songs, introducing his Huffy Henry, grumbling and gruff. Berryman takes a sharp breath, and his voice goes staccato, “It was the thought that they thought/they could do it.” Then, there is a pause and he proceeds, “made Henry wicked & away.” In Berryman’s vocal staggering, you can almost hear the departure from when the world was once like a woolen lover...

How can we use our listening experiences with our readings of texts? Or, maybe the more practical question: what should these hybrids look like? In the end, I do agree with Teachout; I want more. After hearing "Dream Songs 1," I am greedy to hear Berryman tackle "Dream Songs 4."

twittering from the past

2008-08-11T17:18:21Z

A couple of weeks ago, Sebastian Mary posted about experiments with sending out literature via Twitter. She found herself disappointed that DailyLit was neither "abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at a time"; instead, texts not built for Twitter were being shoehorned into the Twitter form. Twitter might be the electronic form du jour, but this is a problem as old as electronic writing: the presumption that texts are form-agnostic.

An interesting approach to the problem comes from an unexpected source: the New York Review of Books has begun serializing Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines via Twitter in Luc Sante's translation. Fénéon was a fin-de-siècle French writer who's best known as the art critic who coined the term "pointillism". (Paul Signac's portrait of him, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of Felix Feneon in 1890, is below.) Fénéon was a man of many talents; while publicly known as an anarchist and the first French publisher of James Joyce, he was secretly a master of miniaturized text. His anonymous feuilletonage in Le Matin in 1906 condensed the news of the day to masterpieces of phrasing:

In a café on Rue Fontaine, Vautour, Lenoir, and Atanis exchanged a few bullets regarding their wives, who were not present.

Fénéon's hypercompression lends itself to Twitter. In a book, these pieces don't quite have space to breathe; they're crowded by each other, and it's more difficult for the reader to savor them individually. As Twitter posts, they're perfectly self-contained, as they would have been when they appeared as feuilleton.

A quotation from Buckminster Fuller (from Synergetics 529.10) seems apropos for thinking about why Fénéon seems so suited to Twitter:

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

Emily Dickinson in Sophie

2008-08-06T23:23:19Z

Emily Dickinson's poems weren't published during her lifetime- it was only after her death that her sister found Emily's manuscripts, tucked at the bottom of a trunk, and decided to publish them. In the translation from manuscript to printed page, many aspects of her poems were lost. In editor’s notes, scholars admit to getting snagged on her unusual punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks. The biggest stumbling block comes with Dickinson’s endnotes. For many poems in her manuscripts, Dickinson provided alternate lines. Sometimes only an adjective changed but at other times entire stanzas morphed. In “How the Old Mountains drip with Sunset” (291), Dickinson couldn’t decide upon a single preposition, so there became six ways that one could be in relation to Solitude.

I’ve been building a Sophie book, which pulls Dickinson’s alternate lines into the body of the poem. I’ve been trying to make the lines no longer seem like potential-yet-never-permanent afterthoughts. When the line is presented within the text of the poem, I find it receives more consideration (if not equal weight, at least more screen time). Plus, in most publications, editors make the decision which lines to incorporate and which ones to discard. With this version, the reader gets pulled into that discussion, closer to Dickinson’s original work. When there is an alternate line, the reader can press on a black button and scroll through Dickinson’s suggested changes:

Now, when reading “When we stand on the tops of Things” (242), the reader can see what effect it has when “they bear their dauntless/fearful/tranquil heads.” In the book, the reader begins to encounter questions that surface frequently in literary translation, the question of “what is best in context of the poem." However, I think that another type of issue is happening here with Dickinson’s work. In “Many a phrase has the English Language” (276), Dickinson waits, tucked in her bedroom in Amherst, for a phrase to arrive with its thundering prospective. The line can read: a) till I grope, and weep; b) till I stir, and weep; or c) till I start, and weep. Each single phrase is fine. But I prefer to think of Emily Dickinson thrashing in her sleigh bed, groping, stirring, and starting all at once. A certain open playfulness becomes built into the framework of the poem once you can let all the possibilities toggle by in one reading experience.

In terms of timing, it pleased me to see Judith Thurman’s recent New Yorker article “Her Own Society.” Thurman describes Dickinson’s dashes as moments in which she “evaded the necessity of putting a period to their mystery—or to her own.” And, earlier this summer, Dan gave me Susan Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson” to read. At one point, Howe argues that Dickinson built a new poetic form grounded in hesitation. I liked that idea of hesitation, circling back and reconsidering what you might say, what you could possibly. For “I prayed at first, a little Girl” (576), Dickinson gives two final stanzas. The two aren’t that unlike. However, looping back, you notice that they accomplish markedly unique things.

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent now,
It takes me all the while to poise –
And then ¬– it does’nt stay –

Till I could catch my Balance
That slips so easy, now,
It takes me all the while to poise –
It isn’t steady tho’.

At this point in the project, I’m afraid I’ve sunken too deep into semi-obsessive adoration to begin to see how this Sophie book could be useful. With this blog post, I’d like to open up the concept for discussion. How do you think a collection like this could be used? Is it ultimately helpful?

Download it here
Right click to download the file. Unzip the file to open the folder. Open "ED Ten" in Sophie Reader.

do you remember the first time?

2008-07-24T16:20:50Z

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Institute's fellow, is busy writing a book about Google, to be titled The Googlization of Everything. He's working in public, and right now, he's interested in hearing stories about how people – that means you! – began to use Google:

Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression?

Please use the comments over on The Googlization of Everything to tell me stories.

As Mudbone (Richard Pryor's character) used to say, "you only remember two times, your first and your last."

There are a lot of interesting comments there already . . .

kerfluffle at britannica.com

2008-07-23T15:07:44Z

I got a note from someone at Britannica online telling me about a discussion prompted by Clay Shirky's riposte to Nicolas Carr's Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The conversation on the Britannica site, and the related posts on John Brockman's EDGE, remind me as much as anything of the conversational swordplay typical of TV pundits, who are so enamored of their own words that they can barely be bothered to listen to or read each other's ideas, much less respond sincerely.

(Can it possibly be a coincidence that all the players in this drama are male? Get a grip guys! This is not about scoring points. You're dealing with issues central to the future of the species and the planet.)

And as long as we're dealing with missing persons, i was stunned to realize that not one of these media gurus references McLuhan, who as far as i'm concerned, not only asked more profound questions about the effect of media on humans and their society, but provided first-pass answers which we would still do well to heed.

Of the myriad posts and pages that now comprise the Britannica Carr/Shirky discussion, three posts are particular interest.

The first is from the critic Sven Birkerts, whom many people consider conservative. I don't. Rather, I see Birkerts as the most eloquent voice on behalf of what we are losing as we shed the culture of the Gutenberg age. Birkerts doesn't entreat us to stop time or throw wrenches in the wheels of change. He's just asking us to be conscious of what's good about the present.

Another is from George Dyson who writes in a way that in my worst nightmares i fear is prescient:

Nicholas Carr asks a question that all of us should be asking ourselves:
"What if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?"

It's a risk. "The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence," warned J. B. S. Haldane in 1928.

The third is a comment by Blair Boland, which appears as a comment to Nicolas Carr's response to Shirky. Not only does Boland provide a taut history lesson, setting the record straight on the Luddites, but he states a fundamental issue of our time more clearly than anyone else: "who controls technology and for what ends?"

What both critiques share in common and take for granted is a smugly false and typically misleading disparagement of so-called Luddism. The original, much maligned Luddites are commonly dismissed as cranks, or worse still, "murderous thugs" and the "essential fact" of Luddite "complaint" twisted to serve the ends of propagandists for capital. Ned Ludd and his followers were not necessarily opposed to technological 'change' or 'progress' per se but the social context in which it occurred and the economic consequences it presaged. As Ludd expressed it, "we will never lay down our arms…['til]the House of Commons passes an act to put down all machinery Hurtful to Commonality". They realized that these changes were being undertaken undemocratically for the benefit of a narrow class of economic elites. Luddite anxieties were well founded as was their understanding of the implications for the working class in general, even though they couldn't have foreseen all of the consequences fully. Their protests and resistance was met with the most aggressive and "murderous" suppression by the British government of the day. Thousands of troops were dispatched to put down the rebellion, not only succeeding in ruthlessly exterminating the Luddite uprising but also serving notice to workers in general of the close bonds between the state and industrialists; and the means that could be employed to discipline intractable workers. The dire conditions of the working class in the new "industrial age' that ensued proved Luddite premonitions largely prophetic. These conditions still exist in many parts of the world. So while it's fine to fret over the impact of the net on the reading habits of the affluent, the concerns of the Luddites still haven't gone away. The important principle then as now, is who controls technology and for what ends? Taylor's time/motion practices further tightened the hold of the owners of production technology over the wage serfs operating that technology, again in a very undemocratic and restrictive way, "hurtful to commonality". These, as noted, are the same principles that guide much technological development today and are among the most worrisome aspects of its ultimate applications. "And now we're facing a similar challenge", to see that the latent democratizing abundance of the net is not "shaped" into the greatest expansion of social control and commercial concentration of power the world has ever known.

now you can judge a virtual book by its cover too

2008-07-10T15:36:05Z

Zoomii, a new virtual bookstore that uses Amazon's prices and fulfilment, provides a nifty 'browse' interface that lets the viewer zoom in and out of 21,000 'books' - read cover thumbnails - arranged on 'shelves' according to category.

It's the most bookshop-like experience I've encountered online. Within seconds I'd been reminded of several books I've been meaning to read. And arguably the proximity of a diverse selection of titles could help strikes a blow for browsing and against the homophily that characterizes much Web browsing.

It's debatable, though, whether this kind of heavily-mediated pseudo-serendipity, while a pleasant change from the messy Amazon experience, isn't one metaphor too far. After all, how 'serendipitous' are the book thumbnails I find on its digitally-rendered 'shelves'?

What concerns me is that, while this site provides something of the feel of browsing a bookstore, this is not only a superficial impression but reproduces the worst of the industrialized mainstream bookstores. The buying practices necessitated in order to keep a large bookstore financially viable these days have skewed the kinds of books that are deemed saleable profoundly; the redemptive promise of the Web was that the magical long tail might create markets for even those niche publications that have been edged out of mainstream publishing and book sales.

And yet (as I understand it - corrections welcome) for a book to be sold in more than one place online it must be equipped with a set of tags (ISBN, summary, thumbnail image etc) according to a metadata standard. Without these, the multiplicity of bookselling affiliate schemes, APIs and so on will not be able to carry the title, and the book will not sell. And this additional informational labor is beyond the technical and time resources of many small publishers. So while a bookstore (in its ideal, pre-Scott Pack form at least) might be imagined to carry a genuinely serendipitous mix of local publications, the manager's choices, remainders, bestsellers and second-hand titles, this slick performance of serendipity relies on several intricate but invisible additional layers of technologization. Thus, while it gives the feeling of serendipity, the data architectures required to sustain the 'bookstore' metaphor push the available selection ever more towards a literary monoculture.

In an age where more books than ever are being published, perhaps this doesn't matter. But despite the attractiveness of Zoomii as a piece of data visualization, it seems to me to point towards a worst-case combination of manual, recommendation-free browsing and industrialized depletion of diversity.

dailylit experiments with public reading via twitter

2008-06-26T16:15:53Z

I made a passing mention of email-me-chunks-of-book-to-read service DailyLitin my recent-ish post on writing less. Though I've not tried it, it's been picking up some press lately as a way to get your reading done via the network.

The latest news is that DailyLit is experimenting with public and participative reading via Twitter. Texts on offer include Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

A little look around indicates that the Twitter element - slightly to my disappointment - neither involves abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at a time. Readers sign up for Twitter updates, which then alert them whenever a new instalment of the book goes up on DailyLit. This they can then discuss in related fora. So rather than proposing literature especially for Twitter, DailyLit is using Twitter much as many bloggers do: for status updates that drive readers to a webpage elsewhere.

Doctorow's book at present has 300 followers (nearly double the following of Pride and Prejudice...). There's not much uptake in the fora at present. But overall it's a timely experiment in networked, cross-platform public reading, and will no doubt have much to teach us as we prepare for the Golden Notebook public reading project.

lulu for magazines?

2008-06-23T19:05:38Z

A new project by HP Labs aims to make print-on-demand magazine publishing available to everyone. MagCloud uses a similar model toLulu for books, or Moo for stickers and cards: upload your digital content here and we'll deal with fulfillment.

In his post introducing MagCloud, founder Derek Powazek makes the point that well over 50% of most magazines never make it to a buyer - that the distribution shelves are merely a rest-stop between the printer's warehouse and the recycling plant. Between sustainability concerns and economic ones, a print on demand model seems a logical step for the ever-more-fragmented magazine market.

So will the days of Xeroxed 'distros' soon be behind us forever? It's hard to tell - it's still in beta at the moment, and publisher accounts are invite-only. Key to success will be how slick, user-friendly, customizable and adaptable the publishing tools are - or whether it's a matter of getting a PDF designed somewhere else and treating MagCloud like a slightly complicated printer. Then the magazines on offer for purchase are fairly sparse, and the interface for browsing before you buy is unwieldy. I'd like to see ways of embedding a Cafepress-style link into other webspaces, so as to give ezines and small magazines an easy channel to retail a print version. I'd also like to see and also more tools for users/readers to review magazines published through the site.

But it seems churlish to snipe too much - it's very early days, and the idea has considerable potential as a tool for leveraging the Web to service very small interest groups.

(Link via Booktwo)

if:book review 3 - privacy and net neutrality

2008-06-23T09:50:21Z

My last review post covered the debates around digitization of public domain archives, especially with reference to Google. Key to these debates are questions of access: who gets how much, what to, how is this controlled, and who by? And who benefits? Though Google is mentioned with disturbing frequency any ttime someone worries about privacy and ownership of data, the debate is much wider. So this piece takes a look at some related issues.

If concerns for privacy and freedom of speech usually refer to state interference, net neutrality often points the other way: towards private corporations remaking the Web in their image. Clearly this is frequently (as recent coverage of the ongoing Viacom/Google spat points out) about attempts to ringfence pre-Web approaches to copyright. But space is limited, so I haven't tried to cover DRM and copyright in depth here.

Net neutrality: who owns the pipes?

Ben's November 2005 post about net neutrality was the first if:book article on the topic. It picked up an article by Doc Searls about the dangers of the Web being hijacked by major telcos, and explored some of the parallels between the failure of two-way radio and the potential erosion of a multidirectional Web. A second post on December looked at the possibility that redrafted telco regulations could help the creeping transformation of the Web from a read/write medium towards a broadcast-only model.

Reports of Google's decision to serve a neutered service in China in response to Chinese governmental restrictions prompted a remarkable January 2006 article from Benthat ranged across net neutrality, privacy, censorship, and the utopian ideals of the Web. Very much worth a look. Ray picked up the theme again in February. The same month, we reported on Lessig's gloomy prognostications for the read/write web, drawing out the relationship between net neutrality and copyright. And in May, a handful of people protested against the net neutrality bill; in June, Congress passed the amended telcos bill, roundly condemned by this blog. But net neutrality seems these days to be of more concern to telcos than to individuals: a recent IPDemocracy post gives an indication of the extent to which the issue is a hot topic to carriers (which have an economic interest) and states (which have a political one), but of little interest to everyday internet users.

Privacy: who owns your (meta)data?

Of all the past posts on privacy, the three strongest are arguably Ben's three posts on 'The book is reading you', parts 1, 2 and 3, published between January and March 2006 - especially the third.

The first looks at the privacy implications of technologies that track your clickstreams across digitized archives such as Google and Amazon.

The second discusses Google's acquisition of Writely: would web-based word processing extend Google's domain of searchable private material even beyond email inboxes to individuals' private documents? (I have to say, from the vantage point of 2008 it is not clear that adoption of web-based office tools has been as overwhelming as some anticipated in those heady years of web2.0 fever. The view from here is a little more measured; Google Docs, as Writely is now called, is one tool among many but has none of the uncontested dominance of the search engine. But the post marks a key moment in the imperial expansion of the Google machine into ever new territories.)

The third is a wide-ranging essay that covers net neutrality, copyright, software licensing and Google issues. One paragraph is worth quoting in full, as it's remained central to many of the Institute's concerns:

Though print will always offer inimitable pleasures, the social life of media is moving to the network. That's why we here at if:book care so much about issues, tangential as they may seem to the future of the book, like network neutrality, copyright and privacy. These issues are of great concern because they make up the environment for the future of reading and writing. We believe that a free, neutral network, a progressive intellectual property system, and robust safeguards for privacy are essential conditions for an enlightened digital age.

In the runup to these posts, we also covered Yahoo!'s purchase of del.icio.us, the launch of the Open Rights Group, Siva Vaidhyanathan's sobering thoughts on Google, privacy and privatization (still very much worth a read) - and amongst other things a string of digitization deals between Google and public archives (see my previous review post).

The issue of privacy is not just a narrative of one corporation's info-expansionism. The issue of freedom of expression around the world collided with that of Google when it was revealed in January 06 that Google had decided to comply with the Chinese government's insistence on restrictive search terms within China, somewhat dampening the cred Google received for saying no when Cheney requested government access to citizens' Google search records.

In March, Jesse wrote about identity management in the age of search engines. Though the app he mentioned does not seem to have gained much traction, the issues are still relevant. In April, Ben drew together a string of net neutrality and privacy posts for a hefty post about the disturbing confluence of deregulated Web infrastructures and privatised info-accumulation taking place online.

One final theme that deserves a mention is that of Flash and other read-only media. Where the 'View Source' command enables the curious to review the code behind any HTML site, Flash and its kin, while making the Web infinitely richer and in some ways more accessible, has also exacted a price in transparency and interoperability across platforms. This has been discussed periodically, as here in October 2006, and again in March 2008.

new ways with words

2008-06-23T09:43:24Z

I'm delighted to announce that we've received a grant of £93,000 from the Esmee Fairbairn Trust to help us "explore how new media can be used to generate active reading, creative writing and fresh enthusiasm for literature amongst young people". In collaboration with teachers and writers, we'll be creating a library of materials for schools made in CommentPress and Sophie, running workshops and building on the success of our recent project FOUND, funded by Booktrust. Actor and writer Toby Jones (currently playing Karl Rove in Oliver Stone's W), worked with me and a class of twelve year olds in inner city Birmingham who found themselves immersed in the story of a lost child whose personality was, unbeknownst to them, being created by themselves. You can read a full account on the bookfutures blog which if:book london is developing for its projects and work with literature organisations in the UK.

the long tale: another book metadata app

2008-06-20T16:00:39Z

More fun with book metadata. Hot on the heels of Bkkeepr comes Booklert, an app that lets you keep track of the Amazon rank of your (or anyone else's) book. Writer, thinker and social media maven Russell Davies speculated that he'd love to have such a thing for keeping track of his book. No sooner was this said than MCQN had built it; so far it has few users, but fairly well-connected ones.

Reading MCQN's explanation I get a picture of Booklert as a time-saving tool for hypercompetitive and stat-obsessed writers, or possibly as a kind of masochistic entertainment for publishers morbidly addicted to seeing their industry flounder. Then perhaps I'm being uncharitable: assuming you accept the (deeply dodgy) premise that the only meaningful book sales are those conducted through Amazon, Booklert - or something similar - could be used to create personalized bestseller lists, adding a layer of market data to the work of trusted reviewers and curators. I'd be interested to find out which were the top-selling titles in the rest of the Institute's personal favourites list; I'd also be interested to find out what effect a few weeks' endorsement by a high-flying member of the digerati might have on a handful of books.

But whether or not it is, as Davies asserts, "exactly the sort of thing a major book business could have thought of, should have thought of, but didn't", Booklert illustrates the extent to which, in the context of the Web, most of the key developments around the future of the book do not concern the form, purposes or delivery mechanism of the book. They concern metadata: how it is collected, who owns it, who can make use of it. Whether you're talking DRM, digitization, archiving, folksonomies or feeds, the Web brings a tendency - because an ability - to see the world less in terms of static content than in terms of dynamic patterns, flows and aggregated masses of user-generated behavior. When thus measured as units in a dynamic system, what the books themselves actually contain is only of secondary importance. What does this say about the future of serious culture in the world of information visualization?

The Golden Notebook — readers wanted

2008-06-18T09:50:39Z

if:book readers may remember my excited post from last October when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize. I had coincidentally re-read The Golden Notebook over the summer and when I realized that none of my younger colleagues had read it, or even knew anyone of their generation who had read it, I started musing about the possibilities of having readers from two generations reading it together, commenting publicly in the margins in something like CommentPress.

I mentioned this idea to Antonia Byatt of the British Arts Council only to find that she, by coincidence, had also just re-read the book over the summer. Antonia was intrigued by the idea and eight months later we have a grant from the Arts Council and a deal with Harper Collins that will make this a reality. In mid-October 3-5 readers will begin reading The Golden Notebook and carry out a conversation in the margins. The site will be open and the rest of us will be able to follow their reading and participate in a related public forum.

Who do you think should be the readers? The book is perhaps best known for its role in the beginning of the women's liberation movements of the 1970s but it also confronts complex issues of race and the political fall-out from the ideological collapse of the soviet union. The original idea was to invite women from different generations, but we're open to other ideas.

Please, tell us who you would like to see as the designated readers. We're interested in general categories but also in specific recommendations. You can even nominate yourself. [The Arts Council grant includes a generous honorarium for each of the readers.]

By the way we're working with a fantastic group in London, apt, to build a completely new CommentPress-like application that should be much better for reading both the text and the comments.

google, digitization and archives: despatches from if:book

2008-06-16T20:35:05Z

In discussing with other Institute folks how to go about reviewing four year's worth of blog posts, I've felt torn at times. Should I cherry-pick 'thinky' posts that discuss a particular topic in depth, or draw out narratives from strings of posts each of which is not, in itself, a literary gem but which cumulatively form the bedrock of the blog? But I thought about it, and realised that you can't really have one without the other.

Fair use, digitization, public domain, archiving, the role of libraries and cultural heritage are intricately interconnected. But the name that connects all these issues over the last few years has been Google. The Institute has covered Google's incursions into digitization of libraries (amongst other things) in a way that has explored many of these issues - and raised questions that are as urgent as ever. Is it okay to privatize vast swathes of our common cultural heritage? What are the privacy issues around technology that tracks online reading? Where now for copyright, fair use and scholarly research?

In-depth coverage of Google and digitization has helped to draw out many of the issues central to this blog. Thus, in drawing forth the narrative of if:book's Google coverage is, by extension, to watch a political and cultural stance emerging. So in this post I've tried to have my cake and eat it - to trace a story, and to give a sense of the depth of thought going into that story's discussion.

In order to keep things manageable, I've kept this post to a largely Google-centric focus. Further reviews covering copyright-related posts, and general discussion of libraries and technology will follow.

2004-5: Google rampages through libraries, annoys Europe, gains rivals

In December 2004, if:book's first post about Google's digitization of libraries gave the numbers for the University of Michigan project.

In February 2005, the head of France's national libraries raised a battle cry against the Anglo-centricity implicit in Google's plans to digitize libraries. The company's seemingly relentless advance brought Europe out in force to find ways of forming non-Google coalitions for digitization.

In August, Google halted book scans for a few months to appease publishers angry at encroachments on their copyright. But this was clearly not enough, as in October 2005, Google was sued (again) by a string of publishers for massive copyright infringement. However, undeterred either by European hostility or legal challenges, the same month the company made moves to expand Google Print into Europe. Also in October 2005, Yahoo! launched the Open Content Alliance, which was joined by Microsoft around the same time. Later the same month, a Wired article put the case for authors in favor of Google's searchable online archive.

In November 2005 Google announced that from here on in Google Print would be known as Google Book Search, as the 'Print' reference perhaps struck too close to home for publishers. The same month, Ben savaged Google Print's 'public domain' efforts - then recanted (a little) later that month.

In December 2005 Google's digitization was still hot news - the Institute did a radio show/podcast with Open Source on the topic, and covered the Google Book Search debate at the American Bar Association. (In fact, most of that month's posts are dedicated to Google and digitization and are too numerous to do justice to here).

2006: Digitization spreads

By 2006, digitization and digital archives - with attendant debates - are spreading. From January through March, three posts - 'The book is reading you' parts 1, 2 and 3 looked at privacy, networked books, fair use, downloading and copyright around Google Book Search. Also in March, a further post discussed Google and Amazon's incursions into publishing.

In April, the Smithsonian cut a deal with Showtime making the media company a preferential media partner for documentaries using Smithsonian resources. Jesse analyzed the implications for open research.

In June, the Library of Congress and partners launched a project to make vintage newspapers available online. Google Book Search, meanwhile, was tweaked to reassure publishers that the new dedicated search page was not, in fact, a library. The same month, Ben responded thoughtfully in June 2006 to a French book attacking Google, and by extension America, for cultural imperialism. The debate continued with a follow-up post in July.

In August, Google announceddownloadable PDF versions of many of its public-domain books. Then, in August, the publication of Google's contract with UCAL's library prompted some debate the same month. In October we reported on Microsoft's growing book digitization list, and some criticism of the same from Brewster Kahle. The same month, we reported that the Dutch government is pouring millions into a vast public digitization program.

In December, Microsoft launched its (clunkier) version of Google Books, Microsoft Live Book Search.

2007: Google is the environment

In January, former Netscape player Rich Skrenta crowned Google king of the 'third age of computing': 'Google is the environment', he declared. Meanwhile, having seemingly forgotten 2005's tussles, the company hosted a publishing conference at the New York Public Library. In February the company signed another digitization deal, this time with Princeton; in August, this institution was joined by Cornell, and the Economist compared Google's databases to the banking system of the information age. The following month, Siva's first Monday podcast discussed the Googlization of libraries.

By now, while Google remains a theme, commercial digitization of public-domain archives is a far broader issue. In January, the US National Archives cut a digitization deal with Footnote, effectively paywalling digital access to a slew of public-domain documents; in August, a deal followd with Amazon for commercial distribution of its film archive. The same month, two major audiovisual archiving projects launched.

In May, Ben speculated about whether some 'People's Card Catalog' could be devised to rival Google's gated archive. The Open Archive launched in July, to mixed reviews - the same month that the ongoing back-and-forth between the Institute and academic Siva Vaidyanathan bore fruit. Siva's networked writing project, The Googlization Of Everything, was announced (this would be launched in September). Then, in August, we covered an excellent piece by Paul Duguid discussing the shortcomings of Google's digitization efforts.

In October, several major American libraries refused digitization deals with Google. By November, Google and digitization had found its way into the New Yorker; the same month the Library of Congress put out a call for e-literature links to be archived.

2008: All quiet?

In January we reported that LibraryThing interfaces with the British Library, and in March on the launch of an API for Google Books. Siva's book found a print publisher the same month.

But if Google coverage has been slighter this year, that's not to suggest a happy ending to the story. Microsoft abandoned its book scanning project in mid-May of this year, raising questions about the viability of the Open Content Alliance. It would seem as though Skrenta was right. The Googlization of Everything continues, less challenged than ever.