Shawn sent me this link for the The Most Unusual Books of the World. Loyal readers will have seen my Text in the Machine experiment on Flickr (where there is a photoessay).
McMaster’s archives actually have a number of English fore-edge painted books that were, apparently, popular gifts in their time.
I’m trying to imagine a visualization tool that would show you selected passages cut sculpturally out of a 3D book.
Hussein Chalayan is a designer who is creating crystal and laser dresses that are extraordinary to watch. The Swarovski site has short videos of Hussein explaining how they make the outfits and then video of them shown. It is another take on smart fabrics.
Thanks to Jennifer for this.
The e-book that seemed to be dead as an idea is back. Sony has their Reader which uses e-ink to offer a more paper-like reading experience.
Amazon has just announced the Kindle which has a keyboard and can EV-DO free wirless access so you can order material from Amazon without connecting to your PC. The Amazon video mentions that you can automatically get newspapers and updates from blogs.
I’m guessing one of the real strengths of Kindle is Amazon – that they will have the best content and with EV-DO they will have easy access to content wherever you can get a connection. On the other hand the Kindle looks dorky (not that the Sony looks much better.) As they say, WWAD (what would Apple do?)
To be honest I thought the e-book reader as a device was dead after the last round of devices like the Rocket eBook. I figured tablet PCs and PDAs would make dedicated readers obsolete – we do after all read lots of pages off screens already. See Cory Doctorow on Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books. But, I was wrong … it seems the big guys think there is a market for such appliances.
Live Projections is an exhibit by my colleague Liss Plat and others.
Saturday, November 24, 8pm
Latvian House, 491 College St., Toronto
Welcome to theoreti.ca, or the new version of grockwel: Research Notes. Why the change? Well … it was time to upgrade and it was time to bring my research and personal pages together in one place. Thanks to Shawn for all the work figuring out how to move a blog that has been going since 2003 – images and all. Please redirect your links and RSS readers here.
In the next month geoffreyrockwell.com will also be moved here and the interface coordinating.
At the beginning of November I was asked to give a keynote for a Digital Scholarship/Digital Libraries symposium at the beautiful of Emory Conference Centre. My talk was titled “The Social Text: Mashing Electronic Texts and Tools” and my thesis was that we needed to forge a closer relationship between scholarly projects and digital libraries. This is a two-fold call for change:
A copy of the slides in PDF is up for FTP access. The file is 15 MB.
We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion, in six movements” that harvests recent blog posts for “I feel” or “I am feeling” and then stores information for visualization. There is an applet where you can look for “men who are abiding”. Thanks to Guy for this.
I’ve been experimenting with Flock – The Social Web Browser. It to have integrated support for social network sites like Flickr and Facebook. The interface is confusing, perhaps because of everything it is trying to do, or my not getting it. Some of things it does are:
Visuwords online graphical dictionary and thesaurus is a tool that visualizes WordNet relationships. It shows the synonyms and definitions for words you search for. Thanks to Shawn for this.
On jill/text I cam across an interesting graph about OpenSocial vs. Facebook showing the difference in market share. Hitwise provides statistics and analysis of internet usage. They get their data from ISPs, which sounds like it could be a privacy issue. See their Product Features for the services they provide that most of us can’t afford. See what they say about how they gather information in How We Do It or here is quote from their press release on Hanah Montana Most Searched for Halloween Costume:
Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.
They have blogs by their analysts, most of whom seem to be in the UK, that have interesting notes about trends like iTunes overtakes Free Music Downloads in Internet Searches.