Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
December 23, 2010
Here’s a fascinating little essay by Cory Doctorow on . . . well, it’s complicated. He’s explaining why he’s happy with his decision to self-publish his new collection of stories, but he’s using that situation to explore the problem — or the “problem” — of having too much information and too many options: I’m not...
December 22, 2010
A typically thoughtful and thought-provoking essay by Jonathan Zittrain, emphasizing the need for internet users — especially those reliant on the cloud for storage of their data — to think about portability as much as they think about privacy: We enjoy access to massive archives of our digital trail in the form of emails, chats,...
December 21, 2010
Martin Rundkvist writes: I’m a cultural and aesthetic relativist. This means that I acknowledge no objective standards for the evaluation of works of art. There are no definitive aesthetic judgements, there is only reception history. There is no objective way of deciding whether Elvis Presley is better than Swedish Elvis...
December 20, 2010
See that? Huge spike on the word “internet” in . . . 1903. Natalie Binder explains why Google’s really bad metadata is going to limit the usefulness of the word-hoard it is assembling. But hey: it’s going to get better.
December 20, 2010
Ben Schmidt writes the smartest thing I’ve yet seen about Google’s Ngram project: But for now: it’s disconnected from the texts. This severely compromises its usefulness in most humanities applications. I can’t track evolutionary language in any subset of books or any sentence/paragraph context; a literary scholar...
December 16, 2010
Posting will be light to nonexistent for a few days, as I travel to Alabama to visit my family and try to wrap up the end-of-semester . . . stuff, so let me just leave you to meditate on these words of wisdom, words worthy of governing a wise man’s life: You have to play the ball where the monkey drops it.
December 15, 2010
Two cool posts from if:book: first, a defense of the value of pagination, even in digital texts: It’s important to realise what you’re doing when you’re scrolling. You’re gazing at the line you were reading as you draw it up the screen, to near the top. When it gets to the top, you can continue reading. You do...
December 14, 2010
In support of Sarah Werner’s thoughtful comment on my previous post, I’d like to cite this wonderful passage from Edward Mendelson’s book The Things That Matter: Anyone, I think, who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest both in the closed fictional world of that novel and in the ways the book provides models...
December 14, 2010
Hillary Kelly at The New Republic is experiencing considerable agitá about Oprah’s selection of two Dickens novels for her book club: But what can Oprah really bring to the table with these books? Oprah has said that, together, the novels will “double your reading pleasure.” But is that even true? And do the novels even complement...
December 14, 2010
For the chart lover, much to love in Francesco Franchi’s Flickr photostream. Via Ministry of Type. (Click on the photo for a much larger and awesomer version.)