On Humanist they announced the passing away of  Digital Historian Roy A. Rosenzweig. I had worked with him at the University of Virginia Tools Summit and admired many of the projects he led like the 9/11 archive. He will be missed in the digital humanities.
PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer
PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer is a cool web site where you can make small booklets for your pocket from a printout. They have Flash tool where you drag out the types of pages you want and then it prints the PocketMod so all you have to do is cut and fold into a booklet. Saves on cute little pocket organizers as they have a variety of pages you can use. A great way to recycle paper too.
Otto Ege and Karpeles: Manuscript Mavericks
Manuscripts are on my mind. At the 2007 Congress I heard a lecture by Peter Stoicheff about the architecture of the page. Stoicheff talked about Otto Ege, a manuscript trader who cut up manuscripts and sold sets of pages – one (set) ended up at the University of Saskatchewan and was featured in an exhibit Scattered Leaves that ran during the conference. I was fascinated first by his reorientation from the book to the page and then by the project of Remaking the Book – virtually reconstructing the books that were scattered across the sets Ege assembled. Stoicheff pointed out that it is easy to criticize Ege for cutting up books to sell pages, but went on to ask about the history of the book as the privileged object. The immediate horror we feel when we hear or see the cutting up of a book hints at how fundamental and unexamined an object the book is to academics. Stoicheff’s The Future of the Page (conference and book)
I was reminded of this story while reading about the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums, two of which are in historic buildings nearby in Buffalo. David Karpeles has put together what is supposed to be one of the largest private manuscript collections and makes many of the manuscripts available both through his museums and online through the Karpeles Manuscript Library. I particularly like the neat interface for viewing the manuscript with a lens to see the plain text. The web site for the Museums, however, is idiosyncratc, with music (including O Canada) that plays and poor navigation. Is Karpeles another manuscript maverick like Otto Ege?
Playing the Gallery
I just gave a paper for the Playing the Gallery symposium organized by the McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario. My paper was on “The Problem with Serious Games” where I worked with definitions of play to work out the tensions between playing games and serious work.
Serious Games (not serious gaming) is a label being used to self identify and authorize games designed for non-entertainment purposes. In 2002 the Serious Games Initiative was founded at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. The CMP Game Group has been running semi-academic Serious Game Summits and a web site Serious Game Source.
Wayfaring
Wayfaring is a site where you can create personalized maps using the Google Map system. You could create a map of your favorite Indian Restaurants.
Like many social networking sites, Wayfaring has commenting and tagging features. Maps can be shared, and they can be dropped into other web pages like YouTube videos.
The interface is slow, and the search is bizarre, but Wayfaring is young.
South-North Dialogue on Globalization Research
Is North-South dialogue possible and could informatics support such a dialogue? I’m at a conference, :: South-North Dialogue on Globalization Research organized by CIGI and Trudeau scholar William Coleman at McMaster.
William Gibson: Reading Spook Country
William Gibson can’t read his own fiction, I’m sorry to say. I went to his reading here in Hamilton organized by Brian Prince and some guy from a bookstore in Burlington who thought it was a good idea to merge the science fiction in his bookstore with the other fiction (see below). Gibson read from Spook Country which I blogged before. He is a bland reader who, when combined with local musician Tom Wilson looks pickled white. He also had some strange pronunciations, like “bitch” for “bench”. (Benches show up surprisingly often in Spook Country chapters, something you don’t notice until someone pronounces them “bitch.”) Perhaps it’s an elaborate joke, or a Vancouver accent, or just that Gibson was at the end of a tour in boring town in Ontario reading after Tom Wilson.
Reminder to self … never follow Tom Wilson!
To be fair Gibson was good at answering questions, most of which were of the sort, “what sort of books-music-movies do you read-listen-watch.” I think Gibson fans confuse him for an oracle of nerd cool because his recent characters seem so hip. To be frank I’m more interested in what music Tom Wilson listens to. For that matter, Gibson more or less said he doesn’t read fiction after a long day writing it. As for his musical tastes his answers felt canned, and sure enough, showed up verbatim on his web site.
Now to comment on the idea of merging sci fi with regular fiction. This was presented to us (Gibson fans) as a legitimation of sci fi as if we were worried all along that our reading wasn’t being taken seriously. Who cares what others think? I personally prefer my sci fi in one place so I don’t have to wade through a large bookstore by author; that’s how I discover new authors like Ian Banks. The advantage of organization by genre is that you can discover more books in that genre when you don’t have an author in mind. Margaret Atwood talks about what sci fi or speculative fiction can do in The Guardian. If she is right that certain things can be done better with sci fi, and if that is what you want to read, why not have a couple shelves dedicated to it (and, of course, fantasy, which doesn’t do the same stuff, but gets lumped in there.) Thank Atwood that Brian Prince hasn’t reorganized their shelves.
SlideShare: Sharing slide shows like PowerPoint
SlideShare is a beta social network site for sharing slide shows. You can have shows with audio attached, or just plain one that you click through.
I’m not really sure why slide shows should be shared, especially if they don’t have an audio track. This strikes me as a corruption. Slides were meant to enhance (not replace) talks. Now we have the slides without the talks they support. Tufte described the problems with shoehorning ideas into slides in The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. If slides are a crutch, SlideShare is a pilgrimage spot where you can see the crutches left by others.
Of course, there are uses for SlideShare. I guess you can put you slides up there so you can access them for a presentation. And trading decks of slides has become a way of proving you know something.
Social Software Building Blocks / nForm / Customer Insight, Strategy, Design and Development
Erica sent me this link to a short, but useful, thought on social networks, Social Software Building Blocks. The essay list seven elements to social network services like Flickr. These can be represented as seven hexagons.
This article is by Gene Smith of nForm. Other essays are at Publications.
One Laptop Per Child News
One Laptop Per Child News is a blog about the OLPC project that I have blogged about before. Reading this well-written, critical, and thorough “independent source for news, information, commentary and discussion” makes me worry about the project. The price keeps creeping higher (somewhere between $180 and $205 now), governments aren’t ordering, the software is non-standard, it looks like a kids toy, and production slips. What if it eventually costs $400 a laptop and feels like a kid’s toy? Why not buy PC laptops in bulk then? Will this be another ICON – a custom educational computer that can’t compete, at the end of the day, with commodity computers.
What is more interesting to me are the presuppositions behind the OLPC. The project is based on the hope that networked laptops would allow poor children to leapfrog their educational limits. There is a belief is the power of the Internet over schools in the project. There is a Western belief in technological fixes – a belief in the magical saving power of computers, behind the project. Why not start with something like TCOT (Twenty Kids One Teacher) for $100 a kid? (Because you couldn’t get people to donate to that.)
But, to be fair, at least the project is trying to help on an ambitious scale and in a way computer folk can contribute. And … there undoubtedly will be children touched by this even if it isn’t cost-effective for the 3rd world.