Category: Markup and Text Representation

A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read

From Ray I was led to a lecture at Yale by James J. O’Donnell, Provost and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, on the Kindle, A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read. O’Donnell has been involved for a long time in humanities computing, though he is now a provost, and speaks with experience thinking about electronic reading practices. He started with the question from Hugo of whether “this (the Kindle) will kill that (the book)”. This led to reflections on reading practices. “Devices and technologies predict behavior. This device predicts behavior.” He talk, therefore, was around what practices/behaviors does the Kindle (and ebooks more generally) support or predict.

He gives examples of the limitations of the Kindle.

  • Annotation: The kindles annotation tools don’t let you manage your notes. O’Donnell uses a blog (like I do) to keep notes, but doesn’t make it public.
  • Complex Documents: It is not friendly to complex documents with things like footnotes.
  • Non-Linear Reading: Doesn’t let him compare things (a translation and original.) It is like the old scroll – it drives you away from non-linear reading. All you really are encouraged to do is to scroll and scroll and so on.
  • Reference Works: Scholars need to be able to use important reference works in standard editions and “that is because books talk to each other.” The Kindle is meant for a person to encounter one book, but not for books to encounter each other.
  • Lots of Stuff: The Kindle does have the virtue that it can hold a lot of stuff.
  • What Sorts of Practices: O’Donnell describes different reading practices he tried like downloading lots of stuff for reading in free moments. He was very funny about his bedside table as a reading device that holds good intentions. He seems to see the value of the Kindle in getting books you plan to delete. He has bought various books that he expects to dislike and therefore to skim.
  • Ludic Reading: He also sees this as potentially for “ludic reading” – the reading of murder mysteries on the train where you don’t expect to keep the book.
  • Travel Accessory: He only reads on the Kindle when away from home because there is so much better stuff at home. It is a way to save space when travelling.
  • Old Reading: Strangely, the Kindle supports mostly very old reading practices (scrolling). It doesn’t really support any of the newer non-linear practices. There is no innovation in the device – no interesting indexes. For O’Donnell the Kindle fails to replace the book because it doesn’t really innovate, it just remediates without even supporting the full range of practices a good book does.

I can’t help thinking that the iPad will blow the Kindle away. First, the iPad can do so much more than let you read. If you bring the Kindle when traveling to save space, you still need a cell phone, a lap top and so on. The iPad could replace multiple devices the way my iPhone replace two devices (the iPod and the cell phone.) Second, the iPad is open and will let you easily use many formats and use tools like your blog to write annotations and notes. (Wouldn’t it be neat to have an annotation tool built into WordPress that would let you go from the note back to the right spot in an ebook?) The Kindle seems designed to make it easy to buy books from Amazon.

I too, like O’Donnell, got a Kindle for Christmas and have been trying it. One use that stood out immediately for me was the easy of buying. Like iTunes, the Kindle makes it easy to buy books when the book stores are far and closed. I was in a little town in British Columbia hungry for leisure reading and the Kindle made it easy to spend 10 bucks to get some trash right after brushing my teeth when I want to curl into bed with a “book.” You can also (sort of) read in bed. The Kindle is light enough to hold with one hand, something the iPad may not be. That said, now that I am back at home where I have too many unread books, I don’t use the Kindle much any more. Perhaps O’Donnell is right – one uses the Kindle when traveling – in my case because access to books is an issue.

Another point about buying. I agree entirely with O’Donnell that the cost of books for the Kindle is too high to tempt me to buy anything except what I plan to delete. Anything that I think I want to keep I won’t buy for the Kindle because I don’t want to be stuck with it in one device. I just don’t trust Amazon (or reading devices.)

A final point about the Kindle. Their ranking system encourages groups to spam books into appearing to be popular. Looking for a good sci-fi novel to read I started browsing by popularity (which should be a reliable way to browse.) I bought a book that looked promising and by the first paragraph realized it Christian propaganda sci-fi. Going back to see from the reviews how I could make such a mistake I found buried a review saying just this – don’t buy the book – its popularity is due to a bunch of friends of the author stuffing the reviews section. Amazon needs to change the browsing so that we have more reliable ways to find impulse buys that can’t be manipulated by a community pushing crap.

The Shape of Things to Come — Rice University Press

Jerome McGann and Rice have published the Proceedings of The Shape of Things to Come — Rice University Press in record time. The conference took place in March and the essays are now up on line and coming out in print. (See my blog entry and conference report on the original conference.)

“Certain questions,” Jerome McGann writes in his introduction, “are especially insistent: How do we sustain the life of these digitally-organized projects; how do we effectively address their institutional obstacles and financial demands; how do we involve the greater community of students and scholars in online research and publication; how do we integrate these resources with our inherited material and paper-based depositories; how do we promote institutional collaborations to support innovative scholarship; how do we integrate online resources, which are now largely dispersed and isolated, into a connected network?”

My paper is titled As Transparent As Infrastructure. I argued that there has been a turn to infrastructure as a way to get sustained funding for things, but that don’t really know what infrastructure is and we are tempted to turn into infrastructure things that are still being negotiated.

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

I’m at a conference organized by Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Schedule at the University of Virginia. The focus is on sustainability and Mellon is supporting the conference. My conference report is at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeOfThings.

Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites

Thomas Crombez on his Doing Digital History site has a post on Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites « Doing Digital History. His argument and instructions make a lot of sense. The idea is that you use something like TEI to encode your scholarly data and then you publish it on Google Sites instead of setting up something fancy at your university or lobbying for research infrastructure that doesn’t exist. Google provides stable infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain at an unbeatable price that is “off-campus” (which can have advantages) and which is as likely to survive as a university service.

Either way — running your website on a university server, a private hosting solution, or your own server — you are basically into self-publishing. Will you use an established platform aka CMS (Content Management System, e.g., WordPress or Drupal) or do you prefer to grow your own HTML/CSS? What is the most advantageous and flexible place to host it? If you run your own server, when does it need to be updated? Do you really need that latest Apache update? If you are doing a dynamic website, will the database continue to behave as it does today? When to update your database software? Is it possible that your website will one day attract a lot of traffic, necessitating more than one server? What search engine do you use for your collection of texts? Do you simply plug in a Google search box, or do you want some more searching power for your users? If so, what software do you choose?

I see more and more people moving to Google (and other commercial solutions) as a way of doing projects quickly and with modest resources. I call it Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand.

Informatica Umanistica: Interrupting Digitization

Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,

One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.

MagCloud | The Best New Magazines, Printed on Demand by HP

Looking at my Flickr account (where I’m steadily uploading pictures taken in Kyoto) I came across MagCloud, a print-on-demand service for publishing magazines, catalogues and other visual printed works. The idea is that you upload a PDF and then people can come an buy a copy off MagCloud who then print and mail it. I wonder what the quality is like.

Onè Respe is an example of a publication using MagCloud. It is a collection of photographs of Haiti donated by many photographers. The proceeds from sales will go to benefit the victims of the disaster.

Bibliothèque Nationale – a set on Flickr

bnf

A couple of weeks ago I went to Paris for a meeting and was able to visit the new (see my Flickr set on the Bibliothèque Nationale). It is hard to tell from one short visit how it is as a library, but it is a stunning building to walk around. It spoke to me of exclusion – a cave (or inferno) of knowledge that you get progressive access to. The deepest levels are reserved for the true scholars (not tourists like me.)

Princetonian: Kindles yet to woo University users

Thanks to Sean for pointing me to a story about Princeton’s experiment with Kindles replacing textbooks. In a pilot program students in certain courses were given a Kindle DX with all their course readings. Princeton was partnering with Amazon.com (Bezos went to Princeton) as part of a sustainability initiative to save paper. The problem is that the students didn’t like using the Kindles.

Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.

Stan Katz (who was one of the instructors experimenting) is quoted in the Princetonian story supporting the student view. He found the Kindle hard to annotate and he found that without page numbers it was hard for students to cite accurately.

The Kindle doesn’t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,” Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are “convenient for reading,” they are “meaningless for anyone working from analog books.

There is a Slashdot summary with lots of comments too.