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.

Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information

Christian directed me to a fascinating chronology of information technology (in French) by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe. It is called Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information. and the web design isn’t the best, but it seems detailed and annotated. It seems like a good place to start if you want to understand the types of information aides from encyclopedias, indexes, and so on. Here division of time into epochs is also interesting. The bibliography is also good.

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.

Brontë sisters action figures

Susan pointed me to a hilarious YouTube video about Brontë sisters action figures. The authors of it write,

This was a fake commercial we made in 1998 for a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures. Its educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired.

More on Facebook and Privacy

For those interested, there is a fair amount of information about Facebook and privacy. See, for example the EFFs timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies. They also have a video (and instructions) on how to opt out of Instant Personalization. That’s if you can’t bear to quit entirely.

Matt McKeon has an animated visualization of the change in privacy from 2005 to now.

Jeff Jarvis has a nice long blog post on Buzz Machine on Confusing *a* public with *the* public. He makes the point that what we liked about Facebook was that we could control who our public was (who our circle of friends is.) He argues that Facebook confused our willingness to share information with a small public with a willingness to share with a large and corporate public. That is the promise of a social presence site – that it lets you control who you want to see what. Ning gets it, though the site is slow. I’ve used Ning to create family private networks.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com

From Twitter I discovered Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative on Wired.com by Ryan Singel.

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Ryan Singel is right. It is time to replace Facebook. They have decided that privacy is overrated and that their audience doesn’t care. They may be right, but those of us who do care need to vote with our feet (or fingers.) The first step is deactivating Facebook.

I’ve stayed on Facebook, despite the fact that I rarely check it, because old friends have found me on it (and it sends me an email when they befriend me.) It seems that my generation all started joining Facebook a couple of years ago and through it I got in touch with old school friends. That’s the power of social sites like Facebook – their value to us grows as more and more people join. When it was just youth on Facebook it was more of a curiousity, but now that it has become popular across generations, it is harder to quit. After all my long lost California cousins now stay in touch with me on Facebook. Thus Facebook has us where we are afraid to lose our online social presence if we close our account, which is why they can start monetizing our privacy. Singel has convinced me that they have deliberately made that choice.

For this reason I think we have to start deliberately deactivating our accounts, despite the social outcomes (which, to be fair, are not that great when you really think about it.) Deactivating is a message itself about privacy and the social that you send to others on Facebook. If enough people deactivate, the value of Facebook drops for others, which would probably panic Facebook into changing their policy. Imagine if word got out that people were dropping off Facebook – just the perception that it was no longer “the place to be” would threaten its business model. Social media depend on the perception of growth, for which reason they should fear a movement to drop out.

Now I have to figure out how to gracefully quit Facebook.

Mind the Gap: Bridging HPC and the Humanities

Next week we are running a workshop at the University of Alberta on the subject of bridging the digital humanities and high-performance computing (HPC). This workshop will bring together teams that will prototype ideas for HPC digital humanities projects. We will have Stephen Ramsay and Patrick Juola as guest speakers. It should be an excellent mix of formal and informal meetings. Above all, Megan Meredith-Lobary developed a neat graphic for the event. See Mind the Gap: Bridging HPC and the Humanities.