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La Divina Commedia is another simple ebook application for the iPhone. Like Shakespeare, it provides free access to a classic read in its original language.

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

It’s refreshing to find stories on the web. Thanks to Baen’s great collection of sf online (and via wikipedia), I was able to read two short stories online recently. No tracking down anthologies!

• 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.

I made Leah Allen a wikipedia page after skimming a 1908 San Francisco Call.

“Halley’s Comet after 75 years rushes Earthward again” shares page 2 of the Sunday August 23, 1908 San Francisco Call with “Fattening Properties of the Potato”. The article starts by discussing E.E. Barnard‘s ambitions for photographing Halley’s Comet. The second half of the article announces the appointment of Leah B. Allen to the post of Carnegie assistant at the Lick observatory. The Brown graduate, who later became professor of astronomy at Hood College, is described as “a pretty Providence girl” who “always sailed her own sailboat” and “has a delightful personality”.

100 years ago, such a description raised no eyebrows. What shocks me is that the article was written by another woman, Mary Proctor, who wrote popular books about astronomy. It’s hard to imagine what life as a woman in astronomy was like, in the early 1900’s.

Especially since women were not particularly new to the field: Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) is generally known as the first professional woman astronomer in the United States.

Yesterday the NYTimes announced a new API, TimesTags, “based on the taxonomy and controlled vocabulary used by Times indexers since 1851”. The browseable version of this vocabulary, http://topics.nytimes.com/ , is a great entry into NYTimes articles published since 1981.

NYTimes Topics

Ed Summers did some scraping while also asking the Open NYTimes team for a SKOS version. Meanwhile, I’m playing around with the classification (online and scraped). Its quirks seem to reflect how it’s been used, and how it has evolved over time. Classification systems can highlight the material classified; they also tend to give insight into the worldview of the people classifying materials or creating the system. The interplay makes integration of classification systems, such as through topic maps, an interesting research area. But that’s a topic for another day.

Here are some things I’ve noticed while playing around with the vocabulary.

Overall Structure

The NYTimes’ main navigation lists 15 sections. The NYTimes taxonomy has 3 top-level categories: news, opinion, and reference. 7 sections fit within the news taxonomy. Opinion has its own category. Travel is an explicit subject within the reference category. Technology, arts, and style are topical, drawing primarily on the reference category. (Cooking, however, is similar to travel in its treatment.) The 3 advertising sections (jobs, real estate, and auto) are already classified, and thus, out of scope.

The remaining 7 sections we dub “news”. Here are examples of taxonomy terms, showing the category structure:

News

1. World: international/countriesandterritories
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/canada
2. U.S.: national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/michigan
3. N.Y. / Region: newyork, newyorkregion
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/columns/lens/
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/nyregion/columns/clydehaberman/
   nyregion and newyorkandregion are both used, but they are not interchangeable (in the sense that there aren’t redirects)
   
4. Business: business/companies
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/spicy-pickle-franchising-inc
5. Science: science/topics
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/quasars
   
   
6. Health: health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/amnesia
   As the name (diseases, conditions, health topics) suggests, this encompasses a wide range of topics: particular drugs such as Ritalin, categories of drugs such as antibiotics, topics such as smoking, sleep, teenage pregancy, and twins, and professional groups such as surgery and surgeons.
7. Sports: sports, olympics
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/philadelphiaphillies
   http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/atlantahawks
   Beyond sports, subcategory names vary considerably. Other sections, such as for the Olympics, are outside the main hierarchy:
   http://topics.nytimes.com/olympics/2008/swimming

Opinion: opinion

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/bobherbert
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/thepubliceditor/calame
Again, beyond opinion, there is variation. However, editiorialsandoped is the main subcategory.

Reference: reference

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/mozilla_foundation

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/swimming
Travel is handled as a subject: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/travel_and_vacations

Spelling Discrepancies

Drugs (Pharmaceuticals) has two spellings: drugs_pharmaceuticals and drugspharmaceuticals are aliases.

E TRADE Financial Corporation and E*Trade Financial Corporation, however, appears to be an error: they have some data in common, and other data not in common. Either an error or a bizarre story behind that.

Differences in usage

Where to put recipes

Apples is a subcategory of cooking (e.g. apples):
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/cooking_and_cookbooks/apples
Perhaps because apples tend to be used as a cultural reference? Still, where do apple recipes belong?

Pumpkins, on the other hand,  has a subcategory for recipes:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/pumpkins/recipes

Dogs are in science, but fossils are not

While most subjects are classified only alphabetically, there are exceptions. Compare fossils to dogs.
Fossils is a plain-old subject, (subjects/f):
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fossils/
Dogs, however, is a science topic, (news/science/topics):http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/dogs/
I wonder if that’s because dogs are a more common subject than fossils?

Saying what you mean

Disambiguation, eh? Here, shrimp is a topic within science, so don’t expect recipes (except in the ads):
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/shrimp

Category structure

Prominent subtopics

Subtopics are sometimes listed at the top level. For instance United States Attorneys seems to contain United States Attorneys: Editorials & Opinion. Both are listed at the top of the topics tree.

I find it fascinating that Cookies and Cookies, Recipes are separate topics. Again, culturally justified.

Depth of categories

There may be several levels of subcategories, e.g.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/space_shuttle/atlantis

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/wines/alsace

Mixing of keyword and controlled terminology

I’m surprised to find “hot dogs” as the top two “articles about dogs”, after some nice featured content. NYTimes may also want to refine handling of multiword terms.

Hot dogs turn up in dogs

Another example is “Baby Quasar(Skin Care Devise)” showing up under quasars.

By versus About

Times writers (e.g. Tom Zeller Jr.) are listed in italics and classified as people. The ‘by’ versus ‘about’ distinction is made primarily in meta tags. “PSST” seems to identify Times writers.For instance, compare the meta tags from Tom Zeller Jr’s page:

<meta name=”PT” content=”Topic” />
<meta name=”CG” content=”Times Topics” />
<meta name=”GTN” content=”Zeller, Tom Jr.” />
<meta name=”PST” content=”People” />
<meta name=”PSST” content=”Writer” />

to those on (non-Times) writer Toni Morrison’s page:

<meta name=”PT” content=”Topic” />
<meta name=”CG” content=”Times Topics” />
<meta name=”GTN” content=”Morrison, Toni” />
<meta name=”PST” content=”People” />
<meta name=”SCG” content=”The Public Editor” />

Final thoughts

The world of electronic publishing blurs the lines between producers and indexers. Archival content, served up by organization, person, or topic, is a great offering. The secondary publishing market (abstracting, indexing, etc.) is changing quickly. Source-based browsing, as at NYTimes Topics, is part of that change.

Errors creep in. Even in electronic transmission.

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.

Backing up my ginormous Zotero library was something of a deterrent, so I didn’t install Firefox 3 until Ubiquity (Introducity Ubiquity, Mozilla Labs) (Ubiquity Firefox Plugin) piqued my curiosity.

At first glance, Ubiquity strikes me as Quicksilver for the Web. I suspect it will be much more.

Install a single plugin, then summon Ubiquity’s command box with a keysequence. You can also use a contextual menu (right). Pre-installed commands are sorted in order of expected use. ‘Tag’ uses Firefox’s local tagging capability. To add delicious bookmarks, you could try delicious plugin code from Ryan Sonnek.

Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity Intro Video gives a sense of the current capabilities. For instance, Example #2 shows that highlighting Craigslist apartment listings and invoking ‘map these’ generates a map of the listings.

Step 1: Highlight Craigslist apartment listings

Step 2: Invoke Ubiquity's 'map-these' command

Step 3: Voila! Mapped listings. (Less clicking, more mapping!)

Nice, eh? Go try Ubiquity. Or, if you want to read more first, there are plenty of options:

Ubiquity Info for Users: Mozilla Labs Post | User Tutorial

More: Extra Commands | Ubiquity Herd (Stats/Dashboard) | Support/Discussions | post from Aza Raskin’s personal blog

Ubiquity Info Developer Links: Author Tutorial | Source Code | Google Group | Wishlist | Labs Wiki

Every week, I take a look at old newspapers pulled from Chronicling America by Ed Summers’ 100 Years Ago Today feed. Sometimes my gaze is caught by events of the day—telephones, auto accidents, odd notions of gender roles. Just about every week I stare at the magazine section of the front page of The San Francisco Sunday Call*. Often I don’t know how to interpret these—do they really have something to do with the news of the week?

The Girl of the Butterflies, San Francisco Sunday Call, August 23, 1908

This week’s cover is particularly beautiful: The Girl of the Butterflies. So many questions arise from one simple image from August 23, 1908: Were there really so many butterflies in San Francisco 100 years ago? Would a woman really go netting in such a costume? What do butterflies have to do with anything? The wonderful thing about peering into the past is that it opens more questions than answers.

*The San Francisco Call wikipedia entry is a good start but needs some work.

After seeing a great local production, I decided to reread As You Like It. Before I got around to digging out my Complete Works of Shakespeare, I got a copy for my iphone.

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.