Category: Literature

ThoughtMesh: Tag your writing. Join the conversation.

Screen shot of ThoughtMeshMatt sent around a link to ThoughtMesh, an original idea about how tag-rich online publishing might work. You can get an account and upload an essay (it encourages you to divide into chunks) or self-publish so your essay is meshed. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it gives you contextual tag clouds to use to see related stuff.
Here is what Jon Ippolito says in his essay, ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement,

When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed–not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.

The World of Dante

Image of DanteThe World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.

Appropriation Art: 51st State Comic

Image of Comic CoverOnce I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.

Thanks to Erika for this.

Reassembling the Disassembled Book

Image of Pages being Scanned

There is a nice collection of essays on CH Working Papers on Reassembling the Disassembled Book. These are some of the papers that were presented under that theme at the Society for Digital Humanities meeting in 2007 in Saskatchewan which I blogged before. One paper I was pleased to read because it went by too quickly at the conference is Richard Cunningham’s Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing. This paper describes and theorizes a one day experiment Richard and others tried in taking apart an early modern book, scanning it, and reassembling as a electronic book. I love these “what can you do in a day experiments.”

Bad enough we had all agreed, before gathering in Victoria, to disassemble one book; in the end we discovered we would need to dismantle two books to achieve our representational goals. This need to use (or perhaps more appropriately abuse) two books rather than one was a direct result of the planning we undertook prior to entering the ETCL. We began with the basic idea of digitizing an early modern book and defining the project so that it could be completed in a single day. The opportunity for this project came in the form of a selection of early modern books that had been rescued from the discount bins of a couple of London’s antiquarian book stores. (Richard Cunningham, Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing)

There are links in the paper to a number of videos and images, including a long video that shows them cutting the pages. Not unlike my Text in the Machine series of photos, but for a far more important purpose.

New York Times: The Lessons From the Kindles Success

Well, I was wrong. I thought the Kindle, like other attempts at e-books would be a failure. According a New York Times story by Saul Hansell (Aug. 12, 2008), The Lessons From the Kindles Success argues that while the market of readers may be small, there seem to be a enough readers who read a lot and want the convenience of loading it up on a device. I suspect the ease of use is also a feature.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Seminar: The writer and the society of communication

Domenico Fiormonte drew my attention to an interesting seminar coming up next week in Valencia at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) on Editando al autor. El escritor en la sociedad de la communicación (PDF). The seminar brings together editors, authors, new media researchers and philologists on the subject of the writer in a society of communication.

Domenico has an interesting web site Digital Variants which makes available various the writings (and variants) of various contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. On the Digital Variants site they are experimenting with systems of frames to allow readers to compare variants. Here is one example of a Vincenzo Cerami Variants Machine
 created by Mario Macciocca.

Salman Rushdie in Guelph

On Sunday I went up to Guelph to dine with friends and hear a Salman Rushdie reading from his new book, The Enchantress of Florence.

After reading a section he was interviewed by Guelph professor and former CBC star of “The Dead Dog Cafe”, Tom King. King, who is of native descent, made jokes about Columbus searching for India and finding (American) Indians. To King’s question about what is most noble Rushdie talked about thinking and the importance of learning how to think and having the time to think. In answer to a question from the audience on the effects of the fatwa on his writing, Rushdie talked about how at first he wanted to keep on as if it hadn’t happened, but that instead he learned about power which has seeped into his writings. In meeting politicians around the world to get support to lift the fatwa Rushdie learned about how they think about and use power. This, in turn, has influenced his work – for example, the machiavellian side of The Enchantress of Florence.

The reading, one of two in Canada, was partly in support of the Bookshelf a Guelph bookstore + cafe + cinema that is celebrating its 35th year.

bleuOrange: revue de littérature hypermédiatique

Image from Sodome@homent2 has launched an online review in French, bleuOrange | revue de littérature hypermédiatique. The review has a number of effective new media works including a French version of open.ended and the disturbing Sodome@home. Bravo to the folks at nt2 for this new site for the publication of hypermedia literature.

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Image of VRML Dream

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)

Notes from the Walter Ong Collection » Blog Archive » Defining the Humanities for Congress

I came across a long quote from Walter Ong in 1978 when he was president of the MLA – Defining the Humanities for Congress. It is interesting to look back at this and how clearly Ong saw the humanities and technology.

The humanities depend on writing and on print as well as, less directly, on newer media and although oral speech, on which all verbal communication is always ultimately based, is not a technology, writing, print, and the electronic media are all technological developments. The printing press constituted the first assembly line. The humanities need technology.

However, if the humanities need technology, technology also needs the humanities. For technology calls for more than technological thinking, as our present ecological crises remind us. Technology demands reflection on itself in relation to the entire human life world. Such reflection is no longer merely technology, it includes the humanities even though it needs to be done especially by scientists and technologies.

See also the Technology category of this Notes from the Walter Ong Collection. I particularly like the quote “Nothing is more human than artifice.“