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Monthly Archive for January, 2011
From Rob Horning at The New Inquiry…
It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and reconfiguring serious study of the novel as a bloodless, quasi-objective matter of empirical data analysis. In this New Left Review essay, which touches on his idea of “distant reading” — the opposite of close reading, the careful scrutiny of particular works— Moretti declares, “We know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” If e-readers live up to their potential, he just may get his wish.
McLemee rightly cautions against making e-books vs. their printed and bound counterparts an either-or proposition: “I am biased in favor of reading itself, rather than towards one format,” he explains. In the aggregate, more reading will likely happen thanks to e-readers. As they become more prevalent, they will make more books accessible to more readers. Books will become cheaper, and as standardized digitization will make them easy to copy and circulate, most will be available free to those willing to test the piracy waters. And just as the advent of the mp3 led to heretofore impossible-to-hear music becoming available to anybody willing to search for it, long out-of-print books will probably end up being shared on niche blogs and torrent sites. No book need ever become lost. It will be like a library fire in reverse. More…
By Farhad Manjoo at Slate…
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). More…
A review by Nicholas Carr of Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!…
One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a Canadian television show in 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the ’60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”
Watching McLuhan, you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As Douglas Coupland argues in his pithy new biography, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of an apple from the base of his brain. A later procedure revealed that McLuhan had an extra artery pumping blood into his cranium. More…
Forthcoming title from Chandos Publishing…
This book addresses the question of how knowledge is currently documented, and may soon be documented in the context of what it calls ‘semantic publishing’. This takes two forms: a more narrowly and technically defined ‘semantic web’; as well as a broader notion of semantic publishing. This book will examine the ways in which knowledge is currently represented in journal articles and books. By contrast, it goes on to explore the potential impacts of semantic publishing on academic research and authorship. It sets this in the context of changing knowledge ecologies: the way research is done; the way knowledge is represented and; the modes of knowledge access used by researchers, students and the general public. More…
Authors: Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, USA and Liam Magee, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Australia
- provides an introduction to the ‘semantic web’ and semantic publishing for readers outside the field of computer science
- discusses the relevance of the ‘semantic web’ and semantic publishing more broadly, and its application to academic research
- examines the changing ecologies of knowledge production
- adds a social-scientific and philosophical perspective to questions of ontology and knowledge representation, central to computerised information recording
- suggests a practical, next-generation approach to knowledge representation and academic publishing