Google Book Search: Opinion

To scan or not to scan? (Guardian Unlimited, March 8, 2006) is an blog entry by Culture Vulture Victor Keegan in defense of Google’s scanning of millions of books, including books still under copyright. The comments are good too. The key issue seems to be whether this is covered by “fair use”.

Technically, as Charles Arthur points out, this is blatant infringement. Turn to the front of any book and you will find a paragraph that states that no part of it shall be copied or stored without the publisher’s permission. The University of Michigan is keeping material that is still within copyright “dark” until the copyright runs out, while Google argues that letting people read snippets of copyrighted books is covered by “fair use” provisions of the kind that mean we don’t go to jail for sneaking into Waterstone’s to look up a reference.

I found this from the Google Book Search – News & Views – Media Coverage page.

Amazon Text Analysis

Amazon has recently added a neat feature to the pages on certain books. If you go, for example to, Amazon.com: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture: Books: John Battelle and mouse-over the image of the book it gives you:

  • SIPs: Statistically Improbably Phrases
  • CAPs: Capitalized Phrases
  • and the ability to search inside the book and get a concordance.

They are providing a simple form of text analysis right on the book page. You can click on a SIP and see what other books (for sale on Amazon) have a high frequency of that improbable phrase.

UK Children Go Online

UK Children Go Online: Emerging Opportunities and Dangers is a large and systematic study of the “nature and meaning of children’s internet use and maps emerging paterns of attitudes and practices across diverse contexts and social groups in the UK.” The report has some interesting stuff about the risks of children encountering porn (57% of 9-19 regular users have come across porn) and the risks of online communication (“parents underestimate” it).

At the site you can get copies of their reports and links to comparable reports elsewhere.

Tools to the Rescue?

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature by Martha Brogan with assistance from DaphnÈe Rentfrow (Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Library Federation, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2005) is a deep report on the state digital resources for the study of American literature. It concludes that while there are some excellent resources, things are fragmented and there need to be better tools. The MLA is criticized as “missing in action” compared to other organizations, which is probably not fair, but indicates an a problem of perception. The MLA isn’t viewed as leading in this area.
Continue reading Tools to the Rescue?

Study of RuneScape Game

How gaming is all work and no play (Marcgh 14, 2006) is a summary of a study by two Brunel University academics about online playing on RuneScape. Simon Bradford and Nic Crowe explain their findings from their 3 year study in the BBC story:

The stark fact is that many young people spend as much time playing video games as they do doing their homework.

Concerned parents reading these statistics may have a sharp intake of breath. To them, this is proof that their children spend too much time being “anti-social” in front of a screen.

It is not that simple. Having researched gamers for three years, we have found that it is far from an anti-social activity.

Continue reading Study of RuneScape Game

Alice Programming Language

aliceGlobe.gifAlice is a programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon that is designed for teaching programming, especially to girls. It uses a drag-and-drop interface and it focuses on creating virtual worlds, animated movies and simple games that can be exported to the web. They have just recieved support from Electronic Arts to use The Sims content (characters) to enahce the sophistication of the resulting animations. The development of Alice is driven by research into teaching programming.

Interest in CS

Computing Research News has an analysis of survey results from the Highter Education Research Institute at UCLA showing the drop of Computer Science majors.

One thing that is interesting is that this isn’t the first time interest has dropped. It looks like there was a spike of interest in the early 80s that then dropped off to then start spiking again in late 90s.

See also my previous post on this at Dropping Enrollments in Computer Science.

Upgrade!

I am (finally) upgrading my blog software. This is going to take a while. My apologies if you find links within the blog don’t work, or if it vanishes for a while. The promise is that I might be able to turn commenting on later.

Web Slide Shows

I once wrote an XML language to replace PowerPoint that had style sheet that turned my class outline into slides, but I have found a better way. HTML Slidy by Dave Raggett is a slide show about using XHTML to do slide shows. Dave has done a nice job at it using Javascript and CSS. My one problem is that the code is verbose – it needs a wiki crib language for quickly getting ideas out.

Another approach is to use Opera – see the Opera Show Tutorial. They have a online Opera Show Generator which creates the HTML for you. Neat.
Continue reading Web Slide Shows

Interactivit?© et formes narratives

I’m behind on blogging as I’ve been busy at conferences. I was invited to speak at a special session of Association francophone pour le savoir – Congr?©s on Interactivity and Narrative. The papers were excellent – well theorized and provocative. Some worth noting:

If there was one problem with the papers it was that everyone was connecting interactivity to narrative and few questioned whether narrative was appropriate. Sometimes the fit seemed forced.