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.
Category: Literature
Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime
ars technica has a good summary of the Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds. Their story, Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime (Chris Foresman, Jan. 21, 2010) ends with some good news,
The report notes that kids spend less time reading magazines or newspapers, though online reading has supplanted that to some degree. However, the average time spent reading books has stayed relatively steady, at about an hour per day. Only the heaviest of media users reported increases in poor grades or low levels of personal contentment. And it seems parents that are active about placing restrictions on media use have kids that consume significantly less media than kids without restrictions. Leaving the TV off, limiting hours of TV, video game, or computer use, and having rules about types of content all help curb media use. One final bit of good news: kids on average spent almost two hours a day engaged in physical activity, up slightly from five years ago.
The bad news is that media consumption is becoming a full time job for kids taking up all the time they are asleep or at school. Is there anything other than media consumption?
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.
Darnton: The Library in the New Age
Robert Darnton has a new book out The Case for Books and it touches on the issue of “google and the future of the book” (and the library.) There is an essay by Darnton in The New York Review of Books (v. 55, n. 10, June 12, 2008) that covers some of the ground. The essay is titled, “The Library in the New Age” and it argues,
Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital repositories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
Ritsumeikan: Possibilities in Digital Humanities
The last week and a bit I have been in Kyoto to give a talk at a conference on the “Possibilities in Digital Humanities” which was organized by Professor Kozaburo Hachimura and sponsored by the Information Processing Society of Japan and by the Ritsumeikan University Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Culture.
While the talks were in Japanese I was able to follow most of the sessions with the help of Mistuyuki Inaba and Keiko Susuki. I was impressed by the quality of the research and the involvement of new scholars. There seemed to be a much higher participation of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students than at similar conferences in Canada which bodes well for digital humanities in Japan.
Continue reading Ritsumeikan: Possibilities in Digital Humanities
Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult
The Guardian online has a story about how novelist Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult. According to the story by Alison Flood (Monday 26th of October, 2009),
He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.
I wonder if it true that screens take less concentration than books. I can believe it about television, but not about doing things on the screen like programming or even playing a console game. I can finish most books much faster and with less hard work than playing a console game (which may say something about my gaming skills.) Is it really the form of the object (screen vs book) or the content (typical TV show vs difficult novel)?
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.
Conference Report: Tools For Collaborative Scholarly Editing Over The Web
I am at ITSEE in Birmingham at a workshop on tools and collaboration. See my Conference Report, Tools For Collaborative Scholarly Editing Over The Web.
There is a lot of talk about ontologies and interoperation of tools.
import random
Stephen Ramsay sent me one of my first Python programs that I wrote in response to his telling me about Perl poems. No doubt I was also influenced by Jerry McGann and his ideas on deformation.
#!/usr/bin/python
import random
def Random_Means(Words):
return random.randrange(len(Words))
How_Much = ["How much", "All", "Some", "Every", "The", "No"]
Of_What = ["interpretation", "rhetoric", "fiction", "fabrication",
"deformation","representation"]
Could_Be = ["could be", "was", "is", "will be", "would be"]
At_End = [".", "!", "?"]
All = Of_What[Random_Means(Of_What)]
Interpretation = Could_Be[Random_Means(Could_Be)]
Is = How_Much[Random_Means(How_Much)]
Just = Of_What[Random_Means(Of_What)]
Deformation = At_End[Random_Means(At_End)]
print Is + " " + All + " " + Interpretation + " " + Just + Deformation #?
This playful exercise then led to Untitled #4 which led to our dialogue with the same name which led to the Animation!
PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die
Last night I watched a Canadian gem of a zombie movie, PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die. The movie takes place almost entirely in a radio studio in the basement of an old church in the small town of Pontypool Ontario. Grant Mazzy, a talk-radio host at the end of his career, exiled from the big city, stays on the air dealing with the eruption of a language plague where English words (primarily endearments like “honey”) carry the new type of virus that infects people. With his producer and technician they try to figure out what is real or not as strange reports come in and they are interviewed by “our affiliate” the BBC. Eventually the zombies, who follow the sound of speaking, repeating words or phrases, break in to try to eat their way to the voice. Grant and his producer figure out that talking in their poor French (remember the importance of bilingualism in Canada) is one way to avoid infection and they work out a cure which involves disrupting mean by asserting things like “kill is kiss”. Back on the radio to talk through the cure, the movie ends with a count down from 10 in French from off camera. Are the French Canadian troops sent in to eradicate the plague about to blow up the radio station just when they have figured out the cure? Was the talk show of the radio station the source of the plague in the first place or was it the posters for a lost cat “Honey” plastered all over town? Could the interview Grant gives to a BBC news announcer have spread the logorrhea abroad? Can words spread ideas (or memes) like a plague closing down our understanding until we are babbling zombies. After all, in the beginning was the word, not its understanding.
Talking of how zombie movies are often a metaphor for things we fear infection from like communism, the author of the screenplay and original book, Tony Burges, says about the movie that,
(a zombie is) really a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they have been meaningful. They keep coming at you. … They’re figures of speech that become predatory long after their sort of meaning as figures of speech have sort of left the stage. And so … that for me is the interesting last hundred yards of a zombie’s life. (From an interview with Tony Burgess in December of 2008 at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. Interview by Ian Daffern, co-produced and edited by Tate Young of Vepo Studios.