June 22, 2007 at 12:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I ask because I’ve suddenly started thinking back to the librarians I know, and whose blogs I read, and the incidence of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus erythematosus, polymyalgia and fibromyalgia seem to be high.
Am I imagining it?
Do I just hang out with old rickety people? (A: yes)
Demographic correlation? That is: Is there some ethnic bias for training in the library sciences, and that same ethnic group is more prone to rheumatological pathology?
Work-related injury, hefting books, sitting too much, standing at checkouts too often? The ergonomics of book-moving are pretty bad, admittedly.
Something causative? An exposure of some sort? Glue? Mold? Other people’s handprints? Paper sizing?
Maybe I’m imagining it. But a dataset showing incidence rates of RA and OA by job description would be interesting to see. Anybody got one?
June 20, 2007 at 2:32 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The title quote, as ever, comes from a Camper van Beethoven song. But you knew that surely.
On the agenda:
Building a new flower bed. Creating a new kind of technical education and research institution outside the University. Taking care of consulting work. Reading Taleb’s Black Swan (which I recommend highly). Quitting school.
Planning to have something wonderful (spoken in the tone of 2010) to share by Monday.
Quietude will resume, briefly. Then all kinds and species of hell will break out here. Maybe everywhere. Maybe even where you work.
With luck, some will be good hell. I think it might be. But then it’s my opinion that any hell, raised with style and grace, can be seen as good.
June 12, 2007 at 9:51 am · Filed under Uncategorized
If it’s in a book, it’s true and fixed and on your permanent record. People will see it in bookstores (if you’re lucky) or order it from Amazon (occasionally) or find it in their University library (if they think to look) or see it on the publisher’s table at technical conferences (forever and ever). You and your editor and the people you thanked have made sure to be careful. Even in the unlikely event of a new edition someday—you’re so topical!—you’ll edit in a modular way, shaving off single obsolete topics or snipping out chapters, adding an Appendix or two.
If I say it, I am often speculating, riffing, testing it in my ear, finishing a thought, responding to an ongoing conversation over beer or podium or conference table. We both understand this. Me: large; contain multitudes. I say it roughly so that both of us may respond in a more agile way, my audience and myself, steering the conversation to a new place we both want to be. We’re engaged. And the next time I try, I’ll say it a different way. I needn’t be consistent necessarily, or succinct, or crafted in my speech (most places). I want to elicit a certain response in you, my listener, and unless we’re staging something that will be edited on tape or podcast someday by some diligent producer, it’s throwaway verbiage. Effect beats cause. Even if you order me to “say that again”, I’ll make a mistake that doesn’t matter in reuttering or edit myself to improve the effect—and we don’t mind.
And here we are looking at our computers, and I am afraid the book has won.
A book is a thing. A conversation a process. Both ride models of the readers’ or listeners’ mental state, and given those premises attempt to induce a particular desired response. So trivially, sure, a book is a kind of very long, boring utterance, stated with aplomb and implicit practice and control.
But that doesn’t smell right, does it? “Book as utterance” is like “building as experiment”: its solidity and permanence allows it to escape the timely consequences and response a voiced utterance calls for. If indeed it’s part of a conversation, then it’s one the author can never take back.
I can change the words of this blog entry any time I want.
Why don’t I? Or, more generally: Why do we act as if this medium, with its isolated essays and links and rants and supposed conversation, shares even one mote of the solidity of the printed word?
I gave a (spoken) talk in October 2006 at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, and only this last month or so has the implication of one of the things I said there sunk into my own head. It was about digitization and crowdsourcing and the production of “authority for free” by Distributed Proofreaders. We scan a book, OCR the scans, fix the OCR errors by hand, upload the book to Project Gutenberg, and anybody can do whatever they want with it.
Which book is that? It’s a new version, surely; not on the 120-year-old printed page, the typography is altered, the relation between footnotes and the index structure have been altered; there may be typos corrected or modern editors’ notes inserted; there’s a good chance we missed some typos we introduced ourselves.
If somebody scans and processes a different physical copy of a different edition, say one with more illustrations in it (done that)… should the two new versions of the text be combined? Kept separate?
How should they be annotated?
What if it happens ten times, or a dozen times? Is your new HTML edition of Twain supposed to have the same typos as the first physical edition, or the typos in the second physical edition, or the typos of the cheap pirated British edition, or the typos in the text-file version? Which is the book—the one that Twain wrote?
The book is the one in your hand. What it says to you is set in stone; you’re not supposed to ever be able to see more than one. The conversation you’re having with me is the one you’re listening to; you’re not supposed to compare what I said last year to my speech today.
So why do I feel it appropriate to edit my blog posts in the first few minutes after posting them? Without comment?
Why do we (I do it too) feel we need to say “update:” or “later:” when we alter the posts after some ill-defined time limit?
Isn’t it worth it to go over what you wrote a year ago, and fix it? Isn’t it due diligence? Wouldn’t it be nicer to have, I dunno, some forward-directed hyperlinks from older posts to newer posts, instead of just backward academic-style citation references?
If these words are my brand, my personal representative on the Web, what should I be allowed to do to them? For that matter, why shouldn’t you be allowed to edit them and fix them and use them? That’s a wiki, sure, or maybe a bliki (which is not a kind of delicious cream-filled Eastern European pastry).
And yet we do not, in the vast majority, consider it reasonable to use wiki software to blog. To write essays or diaries or even link lists.
Because of control.
The metaphor of the book implies shutdown of active editorial control once publication has happened, and blogging-seen-as-publishing demands that there be some deadline after which it’s on the page: don’t change it. Why? Because it’s an attempt by the author to induce changes in the readers’ minds, and what makes it interesting to the thoughtful reader is the vision they deduce of the author’s model of their own mind. John Ruskin thought I, as reader, was a very different person than William S. Burroughs did. Jerry Falwell spoke to a different me than PZ Myers does.
That metadata is important. Crucial, even. Why does a monograph hold more weight than a collection of essays by disparate authors? Because of the clarity of its overarching premise about us. The readers, that is. Consistency not in topic, not even in style, but in target.
A wiki, in the most extreme, disallows control not just of words but consistency of this reader model. Any bad person—a fanatic, an enemy, a spammer, a bot—could wander by and change what I said to what they wanted to say, or nonsense, or the opposite of what I wanted to say. But every one of those “collaborating authors” might be speaking to a different reader; how will we find the edges of their separate and overlapping contributions so we can know who is speaking to whom?
That loss of directed voice, somehow, seems also to taint blog editing — even by the author. She wrote a post, she set it down in preserved bits right there on the net in a Web page, it’s been indexed and commented upon. What if she has changed her mind? How will we know where she was speaking originally from ignorance, and later from certainty?
A bit more than three years ago, I sold my Erdős Number on eBay—initially as a joke, and later as… something much more important. Made the paper here in town, and
Science News, and
Chronicle of Higher Education. Made a big impression on my life, for a joke.
I blogged it during the auction, and intended to write an essay afterwards and a few columns. But then people in my family got sick and died, and I did some other things, and life moved on. Now, finally, I’m getting back to the story after three years have passed.
As it stands today, more than half the visitors (bots or not, I cannot know) arriving here come from the Wikipedia entry on the subject. For more than a year, they came to a blog entry I’d written about the sale; but then I changed blogging software and didn’t transfer all my old archives, and broke the link. About a year back somebody fixed the link to point at the root here, but there is no reference to the auction as far as I know.
Should I resuscitate the old entries? No.
Who is the reader I want to address now? Very different. Very different indeed. And I want to make that clear as day. A single voice, a single author, and thus a single model of the reader.
I started this piece thinking I would end by endorsing the free editing of “archived” blog posts, altering the past to fit the present, changing the record. Or maybe recommend version control systems and layered presentation, like MediaWiki uses to keep every fiddling little change and present it to the curious mob.
Instead, I’m unexpectedly advocating a middle ground: Forget. Erase. Start over.
Use your voice as a voice.
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