Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

(emphasis added) – [Knuth versus Email]

I’m not giving up email (heaven forbid!). And none of us are Knuth!

But I am weeding: culling away most listservs and feeds that aren’t core to semantic web or social web, or to my personal life (or joy). I’ll be keeping an eye on twitter, of course.

cc licensed flickr photo “weedy mulch on the start of compost pile” by Liz Henry

This (hopefully) brings me more attention for figuring out what’s going on in the semantic web and social web community, and for my literature review. But it means I’m going to have to accept lagging behind a little in everything else.

I have a love for being-in-the-know and finding interesting links. That makes it hard to stay on the bottom of things! For now, this energy and mindset get directed to my literature review (which is very much like finding the coolest new thing, only that thing may be from 1985, and nearly wholly forgotten, and not cool or new to anyone except for oneself.)

The good news is that when studying the social web, total disconnection generally isn’t desirable!

If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.

-Sergey Brin, New York Times, A Library To Last Forever

Brin is wrong: the proposed Google Books settlement will not smooth the way for other digitization projects. It creates a red carpet for Google while leaving everyone else at risk of copyright infringement.

The safe harbor provisions apply only to Google. Anyone else who wants to use one of these books would face the draconian penalties of statutory copyright infringement if it turned out the book was actually still copyrighted. Even with all this effort, one will not be able to say with certainty that a book is in the public domain. To do that would require a legislative change – and not a negotiated settlement.

– Peter Hirtle, LibraryLawBlog: The Google Book Settlement and the Public Domain.

Monopoly is not the only risk. Others include³ reader privacy, access to culture, suitability for bulk and some research users (metadata, etc.). Too bad Brin isn’t acknowledging that!

Don’t know what all the fuss is with Google Books and the proposed settlement? Wired has a good outline from April.

1. “Several European nations, including France and Germany, have expressed concern that the proposed settlement gives Google a monopoly in content. Since the settlement was the result of a class action against Google, it applies only to Google. Other companies would not be free to digitise books under the same terms.” (bolding mine) – Nigel Kendall, Times (UK) Online, Google Book Search: why it matters
2. “Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project.” (bolding mine) – Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (pardon the paywall)
3. Of course there are lots of benefits, too!

I started thinking about this because of Paul David Erb’s twitter coverage of a talk at the Scholars’ Lab. I didn’t understand this tweet:

Places, not locations, provide the backdrop for historical events. The key idea is to map events and tie them to locations.

and Paul didn’t have a quick answer, either. After some unsuccessful searching for the original paper (which took me to several databases) and scanning citations from speaker Ian Johnson’s university bio page and “long bio [DOC]“, I started thinking about the problem more generally. Googling for “ian johnson” gis places locations led me to an interesting source: papers and presentations for Harvard’s China Historical GIS group. Lex Berman gave a concise explanation in one of his papers: [1]

If we are to take the sum of the information about what transpired at a
particular geographic location over the course of time, we must realize that
what we are not observing a single persistent identity, but a series of
historical instances. Each instance of an historical place, although it may
indeed be seen as occupying a certain temporal extent and geographic
extent, actually makes more sense in a political and cultural context which
expands and contracts.

He also says:

We have extensive historical documentation about the administrative units that were
established, abolished, re-named, or re-established in roughly the same
geographic space as today’s Beijing.

Those are all the same location. But they’re different places. Suddenly I understood (at least some small part of) the difference Ian Johnson must have been articulating.

My database searches, on the other hand, were a rich source of follow-up reading about space and place, on a variety of topics from computer science, to history of the book, to social science, to geopolitics. For me, database searching is great for keeping my fingers busy while engaging my head. And for turning up lots of things I’d like to read. However, I didn’t have enough data to figure out what paper Ian Johnson was referring to (something he wrote about places, locations, mapping events). In retrospect, writing him would have been most reasonable. Failing that, his profile might have been a better place to start. Other search strategies you’d suggest?

Lex Berman on Finding Places in the Past: What's in a Name?

Lex Berman has some beautiful slides (ZIP). [2]

[1] Berman, Merrick Lex. (2006 February). Persistence or Transience? Tracking the evolution of places over time with historical Geographic Information Systems [GIS]. Presented at Hist2006 – Geschichte im Netz Conference, Berlin.

[2] Berman, Merrick Lex. (2005 December). Places in the Past: What’s in a Name? Presented at PACSL GeoHistory Network Conference, Philadelphia.

While I’m sure that the Penguin2.0 team is doing the best with what they have, they would do well to focus on getting in the flow, rather than trying to be a destination. Get listed by existing mobile ereader software: treat iPhone’s Stanza, Ereader, and BookZ and other ereaders as intermediate consumers.

On to the details. The Penguin US app presents an array of options:

In fact, this page presents Penguin’s mobile site in their custom browser. (Note: to keep entry point URIs short, choose m, rather than mobile, for the subdomain.) Italics indicate suggestions from W3C mobile web best practices.

“Special Interest” may be an industry term, but I doubt it’s meaningful to most consumers (clarity). (It ranges from “African American” to “Short Reads”, and includes, for instance, “Current Affairs” and “Parenting”, BTW.)

Loading is v-e-r-y slow, even on wireless, going to subscreens… (Use the network sparingly.)

It’s slow going back home, too. (Are they providing caching information?) (Note 3 ways to get home from this screen: Besides the breadcrumb labeled ‘home’, and the global navigation in the lower left, the penguin icon in the upper right links to home. Cute, however provide only minimal navigation at the top of the page.)

Limit scrolling to one direction. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of whitespace in the margins.

This is the Classics page (scrolled overfar). The books themselves are at the bottom of this page (clarity, central meaning). I felt a bit disoriented at first, because news about classic titles is at the top of the page (e.g. Benjamin Button, a new production of All My Sons).

Podcasts sound great (capabilities). However, they do tie up the device (deficiencies).

The blog is not optimized for mobile viewing. For instance, there are missing plugins(deficiencies).

I’m sad that the Penguin Mobile ‘about’ page is just half a line overfull. (A pet peeve, clearly!) Perhaps the designers forgot about the service bar? Or tested in Safari (whose back button is smaller than the Penguin global navigation)? (testing)

It’s not all bad: Excerpts are always available, even without an internet connection. And I find this next screen charming: well-done!


In listing excerpts, they do keep with the color theme!


Excerpts start with a cover image and book information, pulled straight from a catalog, I presume. (limited, suitable) Tweaking formatting could make this more compact, with a more prominent title to next to, rather than below the cover image:


Scroll down to get to the first chapter:

It will be interesting to see how other publishers respond to the iPhone as an ebook platform. The Stanza free ereader for iPhone, for instance, currently has two publisher listings at the top of its online catalog: “Free Harlequin Love Stories” (4 novellas) as well as “Random House Free Library” (currently 9 recent titles, ranging from backlist massmarkets to summer and fall hardcover releases). Pan Macmillan (UK) is offering titles for purchase.

App name: Penguin US [appstore]
Maker: Penguin Group USA, web2.0
Cost: free
Quirks: Pages behave as fixed-width when zooming. Odd handling of double taps. Full-width is not used for excerpts in landscape mode.
Features: Free excerpts. Easy access to Penguin podcasts.

Better than Free: ChangeThis issue 53.01

Wired’s Kevin Kelly looks at the internet as a copy machine. That makes it a harbringer of change:

the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
[Kelly]

Making money with free copies seems absurd. But it isn’t, because some things can’t be copied–such as trust. “When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” Kelly gives 8 answers:

1. immediacy
2. personalization
3. interpretation
4. authenticity
5. accessibility
6. embodiment
7. patronage
8. findability

These cannot be copied; they are ‘generative’:

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
[Kelly, page 4 ChangeThis 53.01 PDF]

About advertising, Kelly remarks:

Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the only solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.
[Kelly, page 9 ChangeThis 53.01 PDF]

Why I care

First, I’m fascinated by the evolution of publishing and how it relates to the communication of ideas. Kelly’s argument presents a rationale for free publishing. The interests of the players, the possibilities for commodification, and cheap distribution will drive the shifts ahead. ‘Free’ is one way for for readers, authors, and publishers to interact. Authors and musicians want an audience or, perhaps, compensation (depending on their needs); readers want content (or perhaps content of guaranteed quality); publishers want sales or, perhaps, wide distribution (depending on their for-profit-status and long-term goals). Whatever is ahead, it will be interesting to watch “the new ways money is made selling the free”.

Second, I recently read that “Google sees advertising as a form of information in and of itself.” Search engine-based advertising is Google’s best-known commodification. (I also read, recently, BTW, a humorous argument about how much their search engine sucked, because webmasters needed to supply keywords and use AdSense to actually have their pages found. Can’t find it again though. Alas.) In my view, Google’s great strengths are its massive diversification and its attention to usability. The movement towards enterprise Gmail and GoogleDocs, for instance, might be cast in terms of ’selling the free’. It’s certainly diversification.

Third, I’m watching friends succeed (and get income) while giving away their work. It’s very gratifying.

An attractive screen greets the reader:

Appropriately, it’s Domenico di Michelino’s painting, Dante e suo poema (“Dante and his poem”).

Navigation is simple and straightforward, and mirrors the division of The Divine Comedy. Choose a canticle—Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso—to get to Canto I of that section of the poem. Within each canto, scroll up and down (using default iphone behavior—there are no options or settings). Use arrow keys at the top right to get to the next (or previous) canto in the same section.

An info screen, accessible from the cover screen, gives credits:

If you ignore scrolling, that’s 102 screens!

App name: La Divina Commedia [appstore]
Maker: Stefano Sanna
Cost: free
Bugs: none found
Quirks: To navigate to a canto, you must scroll through the previous cantos; there’s no. Dante scholars often prefer to treat the first canto as introductory, and not part of the Purgatorio, making each canticle a neat 33 cantos. While scrolling follows iphone conventions, there is no scrolling; that limits the usability, especially if the font size doesn’t suit.
Features: A solid, free text of Dante’s famous work.
Other reviews: See comments at http://www.iphoneos.it/?p=3

• Murray Leinster. A Logic Named Joe. Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.
  There’s also a nice radio adaptation [mp3], aired in 1950.
• Tom Godwin. The Cold Equations. Astounding Science Fiction, August 1954.

Both are stories of the conflict of humans and technology, and I recommend them both. They’re very different, and I don’t know if it’s the difference of a decade, or just happenstance, that humans get the upperhand in one case, and technology dominates in the other.

I discovered A Logic Named Joe from an article about the semantic web, from Issue 4 (September/October 2008), page 23 [PDF] of Talis’ Nodalities.

Folk singer and filk singer Kathy Mar recommended The Cold Equations during an interview [at 3:59 of my interview, MP3]. Kathy also mentions that there’s a song based on the short story. Know any more? The closest song that I can find is really pretty different.

Here are some errors Greetham pointed out in 1992. Mostly from his own experience!

• Corrections to a printout could be made to an old file “representing an earlier state of the text”. “The result would be a mixture of the latest version of the pre-publication text with the earliest.” (Greetham 289)
• An earlier version can be sent to press instead of the final, corrected version—a likely mistake when filenames are similar.

• Photocopies can cut off lines of a text—even changing its meaning.

As I read down to the end of the first page of the copy on letter-size paper, all looked well, for there was an apparently perfect syntactic link between the end of page 1 and the beginning of page 2. It all seemed to make sense, except that the argument in the sentence appeared to be the opposite of what I knew to be Taylor’s general position on Shakespearean revision. Suspicious, I retrieved the A4 version to discover that the photocopying had neatly cut off the bottom line of the A4 in transferring to letter-size, and that this excised line (which syntactically could be omitted from the sentence without structural harm) contained a verbal negative which completely reversed the remnant of meaning in the photocopy. Lines can, of course, be omitted in any copying, but this particular omission, and the resulting inversion of meaning, was caused only by technological means (and, admittedly a little human fallibility in the selection of the wrong-size paper). (Greetham 290)

• Typesetting codes can wreak havoc with formatting. (Sometimes, I’d add, with meaning.)

Other types of error peculiar to electronic transmission include improper changes in typesetting commands caused by embedded codes. For example, some of the alt commands entered by a graduate assistant to access special symbols (e.g., ü) in early versions of the bibliography for this book where read by my typesetting program as commands to switch on or off such features as italic or boldface, so that titles of books and their authors would slip back and forth from italic to roman without any apparent logic. Of course, the combination of a visual check of the print-out with an investigation of these hidden codes identified and then removed the problem (or, at least, I hope so), but the introduction of a new type of error demonstrates that the challenge of textual bibliography has not disappeared just because of the move from print to electronic transmission. (Greetham 289)

• Corrections can leave remnants of earlier states.

In fact, electronic transmission can even have identifying typographic symptoms: thus, an article in the New York Times after the failed Soviet coup in August, 1991, invented a new ethnic/religious group when it claimed “the loss of its [Ukraine's] 52 million Slavs would tilt the ethnic balance of the remaining union toward the Muslim oslems of Central Asia,” (August 26,1991: A10). These mysterious “oslems” were presumably created with a Times stylist noticed the form “Moslems” (rather than the preferred Times sytle “Muslims”), but instead of striking out the entire word left the initial “M” in place and inserted “uslims,” without, however, remembering to delete the offending “oslems.” The sequence of error would be impossible in a non-electronic medium. (Greetham 290-291)

“Every act of copying introduces new errors” and every technology “carries with it the possibility of determined or accidental variation” (289). 16 years later, I wonder, what new sorts of errors do find on the Web?

• Copycat spam sites (determined variation there!)
• Print stylesheet errors

More?

Greetham, D. C. 1992. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland reference library of the humanities vol. 1417. New York: Garland.

Reading on the iphone was a satisfying experience. The screen is crisp and paging down through the text becomes automatic. Just tap in the lower third of the screen. (Paging up is not enabled, but the upper 2/3rds of the screen allow scrolling up or down.)

I prefer reading in landscape mode:

Formatting of Shakespeare’s verse can be awkward in horizontal mode:

App name: Shakespeare[appstore]
Maker: Readdle
Cost: free
Bugs: Beware of losing your place when changing between landscape and horizontal screen modes. Pagination routines need to be updated.
Quirks:

• Navigation and font size selection are only available in the horizontal screen mode.
• Landscape mode is supported only within a text; it is not supported in the main, about, or help screens.

Features: 10 font sizes, changed by tapping buttons in horizontal screen mode. Navigating down through a text is easy: tap on the lower third of the screen.

Other reviews: A video overview starts at 1:18 of this T4 videopodcast.