Metamedia

What I Will Miss About Newspapers

Seth Godin asked recently, "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" I will miss these two things: perusal and closure.

Perusal

Perusal is not the same as surfing. Perusal is bounded and hence focused in a way entirely different from surfing hyperlinks.

A pleasure of a newspaper is to flip the pages back and forth, letting the eye wander from headline to headline, choosing morsels and tasting as little or much as you wish, one section at a time.

Yet this is all focused within the clear bounds of a well-known organization. The choices are varied but limited, and chosen to fit together well; there's no anxiety about what might not be there, because it's all spread out before you.

Partly the pleasure of perusal is the pleasure of working within an established and well adapted convention, a convention with varieties. We have our favorite regular items and sections, a place to start or even an established strategy, but at any given read, new items for that day may grab our attention and draw us in.

Closure

Reading the newspaper brings a satisfying sense of closure, a sense of completeness as you finish the last section. This is also partly due to its bounded nature.

When done, you are done, complete, with no nagging knowledge that something has been left out, that there is still an infinitude of other possible pages.

In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as the pleasure of closure one finds in poetry. Longer than a lyric, more discursive than a short story, less of an odyssey than a film or novel, a good enjoyable newspaper read ends on a note a satisfaction, emphasis on the "satis" - just enough.

And the one thing the hyperlinked web does not provide is satiety.

Scarce InfoWorld and Abundant InfoWorld

The Desert is the Eco-Info System of Scarce InfoWorld that we are leaving behind.

To succeed there, information must survive the harsh environment. Husbanding resources and using them efficiently is important. There are a few types of things and only a few unique giants that easily stand out.

The Forest is Eco-Info System of Abundant InfoWorld we are entering.

To succeed there, information has to stand out from the thousands of varieties similar to it. Exuberance and variation are important. There are many types of things and the differences between them are often minute, and the quality that distinguishes success and failure can appear trivial.

Linktribution: background photos by the one and only cogdog.

What Would Aragorn Do?

[UPDATE: Next day, I took the book back and after some phone calls, they found a good copy at another store & I went and picked it up. But the staff at both stores all had to come and look at the defective (or, in book trade speak, "damaged") book -- they all seemed to appreciate the irony of the low quality control by Houghton Mifflin for the most expensive special edition ever made of this book.]

Here's a short video I just made about a problem I had with an analog information source, aka, a "book."  Books, almost by definition, having bindings. How to put bindings on them is a well known technology, going back at least 500 years.

But apparently Houghton Mifflin can't do it right: they have bound this special edition real leather bound, gold double gilt edge, special 50th anniversary slipcase edition backwards. Idiots.

Oh, this video has pretty bad sound. I  made this video with a Flip Camera and uploaded directly to YouTube (usually I put them into a video editor and clean them up.)

Bad sound huh? I could take the time to convert it in a editor and fix it by hand. But why should I waste more time doing that -- isn't the Flip software supposed to work right?

Kipple.

National Novel Writing Month Starts

Link: National Novel Writing Month

Don't know how I could have forgotten this one, but yesterday was the start of National Novel Writing Month. Sounds fun. One of my best friends is a writer and has done it several times.

I once wrote a screenplay in a month, mostly to learn more about how to do film structure analysis. But I never thought the great American novel (or any novel at all) was in me.

But with NaNoWeriMo (as it is acronymized) you are part of much larger community of writers, and gain support from them online that you would never be able to do in person the old fashioned analog way. Despite the logo with the pencil, I imagine the vast majority of this month's novels will be done digitally.

This is the test of poetry.

Reading Hans Ostrom's poems the second time, one wants to read them a third time and more. This is the test of poetry, after which no other test applies.

Karl Shapiro

Yes, that is the test of written poetry. What would be corresponding test for oral poetry?

Speaking of poetry, what happened to the public role of poetry ? An interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman asks and attempts to answer this:

Chances are, you don't read much poetry, at least not the new stuff. Don't feel bad, hardly anybody does ... In the hierarchy of cultural pursuits it sits somewhere just below classical music and just above clogging.

If poetry is dead, who killed it?

For almost everyone, it would appear, the test of poetry might simply be that it is read at all (outside of a college homework assignment.) Its place has primarily been usurped by popular song, from the highbrow "standards" of the 1920s and 30s, to Bob "Zimmerman" Dylan, to Billy Corgan, published poet.

And further, of course, reading poetry was the canary in the coal mine of the Literate way. All the signs were there. The recent angst over the demise of newspaper book reviews had its precursors as it will have its excelerating successors.

The culture of Typographical Literacy is in decline, permanent decline.

Already, the few remaining natives of that culture (i.e. those raised without television) are just as rare as the natives of true Oral cultures, and their children and children's children will slowly lose the influence of that way.

But it does not mean reading and writing will disappear, any more than the eclipse of Oral cultures by writing meant the end of speaking and hearing.

But it will be transformed fundamentally. In a hundred years, it will make just as much sense to talk about "residual literacy" as it does now to speak of "residual orality."

The Camel Book Drive

Link: Rocketboom June 13 2007: Camel Book Drive video

A terrific story from Rocketboom about the old fashioned way of spreading Literacy: distributing books by camel in Kenya.

This is how it was for us Euro-descendants too, before the advent of mass reproduction of cheap books, and especially before the Typographic revolution.

Notice how 80% of the people reached by the Camel Book Drive program can not read, so the emphasis is on reaching children who will then grow up reading.  After all, in most villages for most of literate history, only a privileged few could read, and as such, usually read aloud to groups.

(There is a great depiction of this in one of the episodes at the beginning of  Pasolini's film version of The Decameron, where an old man is reading from a book to a large group gathered around him.)

Of course, digital books won't work - yet - in such a situation. Computers are still physical objects and so are the wires needed for access.

So if Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia wants to get a free encyclopedia into the hands of every person on the planet, it means those camels will get a lightened burden, but what will they carrying into that village? Fossil fuel generators ? PCs ? Fiber ? Uplinks ?

I hope he is talking to Iqbal Qadir, but I hope they are both learning from the Appropriate Technology model. Otherwise, all we are doing it plugging them into the cult of consuming Big Science / Big Technology.

Sometimes, camels are the most appropriate technology.

Books, too.

The Serendip's Tale

Tonight I was at my local Goodwill store searching for some unnecessary plastic objects, and lo and behold in the book section I found a copy of Benson's third edition of The Riverside Chaucer. 

With no markings on it, only the first few dozen pages watermarked about the edges, it cost only $2.99. That's a 97% discount.

Sweet!

Even better, while perusing it over dinner at my local bachelor burrito place, I found this fascinating item in the preface explaining why the information in the notes of the various editions had changed over time:

The First Edition, published in 1933, had provided magisterial surveys of scholarship and criticism, including almost everything worthy of note that had been written on each subject.  By 1957, when the Second Edition appeared ... such comprehension treatments were no longer possible...

Benson then has to admit that this third edition of 1987 can only supply

the information needed to begin the study of the work and to provide references for further investigation.

Such is the evidence of the growth of information overload in a fifty year span during the mid twentieth century: a single book on one of the major authors of English literature could once contain a comprehensive survey of the scholarship on it, but no longer.

Now it is the gateway to that land, not the whole land.

And this is the result not of finding new major works or giant breakthroughs in scholarship about this author, but rather the growth of scholarship paralleled by the growth in information sharing during this time.

I used to introduce my students to Chaucer, right after reading something ribald from The Decameron, in my integrated Humanities classes. I  would always begin, before ever telling them what we were about to read, by first playing a couple of recitations and asking simply

• what language is this?
• and is it the same as this?

Friday's Fun Find: LibraryThing

I thought I'd try and blog something every Friday about one of the fun social network sites I have found that might find their way into an academic life. Or not.

Here's the first: LibraryThing.

It's a wee bit hard to describe it, because it is a LOT more than a place to catalog the books in your library.

You can in fact create any book list at all. Under the free account you will max out at two hundred items and after that you can pay a modest fee to join and list all the books you like. That's a pretty good business model: after all what bibliophile worth their dog ears could restrain themselves to a mere two hundred books.

I put up a simple list of the books I am reading or have read in the last month or so, from which as you can see, I have been reading all the early novels of H.G. Wells. 

In fact, it was only after I made the list that it struck me I have been inexplicable stuck in the decade of the 1890s for a while. (Where did we park the TARDIS, Sarah Jane?). So I learned something already.

Your personal book catalog is a core part of LibraryThing, but even more important is the community that has grown up around it that discuss and talk about book culture, in part aided greatly by the very deft use of social networking software tools to show you who else, both individuals and groups, are interested in, have read, or are reading one of the books on your list. 

Think of it sort of like Facebook, but with books at the center of the web of associations instead of a face, and a nice fine pinot noir instead of ... well you get the idea.

And where there are books there will be conversations. Lots of them.

Kudos to Tim Spalding, founder -- after all anyone who loves Isidore of Seville enough (as I did in my medieval days, second only to the Hisperica Famina in my heart) to name a domain after him, has got to be one great character.

Maybe one day I will get the fifty boxes of books I have still in storage from my last move unpacked and shelved again. And then I can catalog them on LibraryThing. One day; but not today.

In the meantime, LibraryThing, our fun find for Friday, comes recommended.

Both Sides Now

When is a tag not a tag ?

When it is part of a text cloud rather than a tag cloud.

The term text cloud, which I borrow from Joe Lamantia's article "Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?", is a very useful one, because is shows us that the ONLY thing a text cloud and tag cloud have in common is the style of the visualization, the representation. The underlying represented is quite different.

Both of the following are mistakenly called by the same term, tag cloud, but the first is a text cloud, and the second is a tag cloud.

Image:	Source:
	State of the Union
	PennTags

A text cloud will show me the unchanging visual lexical distribution based on author data; basically it's just a visual form of a good old fashioned word frequency index. It is controlled by one person: the author. It does not vary.

A tag cloud will show me the changeable conceptual visual distribution of the audience metadata, that is, how many many individuals have categorized and conceptualized the text. It can and should vary both over the concepts of the individual contributors, and also should vary through time as the concepts of the audience change as the audience changes.

Text Cloud	Tag Cloud
Data	Metadata
Text	Comment
Author	Audience
Lexical	Conceptual
Fixed	Fluid
Invariant	Stable Core & Individual Variants

See also my other posts on tags: To Tag or Not To Tag and The Persistence of Tags.

Some further tag example sites:

• A nice list at Joe Lamantia's post
• Culture Cloud, a site with clouds as a core metaphor
• Intro to the IBM Many Eyes tool
• Wordworks post in search of the perfect tag cloud
• One of my favs: Microsoft history

Text cloud creators:

• Tag Crowd
• Text Tag Cloud
• Chirag Mehta's Tagline Generator

Also, don't forget there are books:  one of the great classics in this are is Edward Tufte's famous The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

To Tag or Not to Tag - That is the Question

What is the most common word in Hamlet ?

Fear, death, murder ? Hamlet?

For example, consider this example of not a Tag Cloud, but rather a Text Cloud, of Hamlet, specifically the public domain version of the First Folio available at Project Gutenberg.  It says the most common word is 'Hamlet'.  Doh.

All is not well; I doubt some foul play.

But the data in that cloud is skewed: it treats the play as a script, since it includes as data the stage directions and all the dialog speaker names, which mean that Proper Names will be a much much higher percentage of usage.

In fact, in the experience of the play in a theater, the audience never hears those words or the stage directions: they are theatrical metadata, as every playwright and script writer knows.

So I took the same Gutenberg text used to create the cloud above (which is a transcription of the first folio, not a modernized text), stripped out all the dialog slugs and stage directions, and got this cloud (via TagCrowd) of the top 100 items instead:

 

'tis againe against away beleeue body comes dead death deere denmarke doe done doth downe drinke eare earth england euen eyes faire father feare friends giue god goe hamlet hast hath haue head heare heart heauen hee heere himselfe hold horatio ile indeed king laertes leaue life liue looke lord loue mad madnesse man marry matter meanes mine mother nature nay neuer night nor nothing oh once ophelia owne players poore pray queene seene selfe shall shew sir sonne soule speake speech spirit sweet sword thee thinke thou though thoughts thy till true vp vpon vs whose words world yet

created at TagCrowd.com

Haue, shall, thou, thy. 'tis, vpon, vs, selfe, doe...

As you can see, the most common word is 'haue' which is a typographical anachronism present in the text since it is a transcription from the First Folio. Like the terms shall, thou, thy, these are words that would ordinarily be left out of text cloud analysis as common words.

Lord

Is Hamlet especially prayerful?  No. Hamlet is a prince, his mother is the queen, his father was the king, and just about everybody in the play is either royalty speaking, or speaking to royalty. The high presence of the Lord in Hamlet is because most of characters are Lords, and as a play it is filled with direct address, is it not so, My Lord?

Hamlet, Father, Loue, Mother

Aye, there's the rub.

You could of course, take a spelling regularized version of the play and clean up the distribution. You could also adjust the word stop list to include or exclude certain terms.

Here is what happens if you clean up the text from a regularized text, then go to Tag Crowd and choose the "shakespeare" word filter which turns many of the anachronisms into their common modern equivalents so they are treated as ordinary words and many disappear from the list:

 

against away bear believe better blood body clown comes command daughter dead dear death denmark done drink ear earth else england eyes fair faith farewell father fear fit friends ghost god gone grief hamlet head hear heard heart heaven himself hold horatio itself king lady laertes leave life light lord love madness majesty man marry matter means mother murder nature nay night noble nothing once ophelia players poor pray purpose queen question rest seen since son soul speak speech spirit state sweet sword thanks therefore think though thoughts tongue true watch welcome whose wind words world young yourself youth

created at TagCrowd.com

A much more insightful text-cloud, don't you think?

You could do other things to manipulate the data as well. I leave that to you as your homework.

So beware, as alway, the statistics, one of the three types of lies. Just because it's visual and thus more perusasive -- and maybe much more insightful as well -- does not mean that we must abandon our critical facilities.

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere.