Johnson on reading e-books

Steven Johnson, author of  (among other books) Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, writes in the Wall Streed Journal about "How the E-book Will Change the Way we Read and Write. More books, but also more distractions, and reading - like everything else - will become a social activity.

The new curriculum: Writing for non-readers

Thanks Bill - for those of us who have been out of date since birth and missed out on the benefits of the new curriculum,  professor Lanham's ENG371WR offers hope. The prerequisites are daunting, though.

TextFlow

I signed up for a beta of TextFlow months ago but forgot all about it until this month's review in Technology Review. TextFlow bills itself as the "first parallel word processor"; it uses Adobe Air software and merges multiple versions of the same document into a single version with suggested changes arranged side by side. I tried it out on two different versions of a translation, and found it very cool and very easy to use - and far less confusing than working through a document that has been marked up with "track changes" comments. If you're interested, the 2 minute video explains the essentials.

Phlook

Phlook adds a hover-over menu to images on your website that provides at least one useful feature; it allows you to zoom in on the photo to view it in its original size. Those who would like to cast a vote for the image, tag it with a comment, or email it so someone else, can do that also. To accomplish this, you need to upload your photo to Phlook.com, which then generates a snippet of code that you include in your blog/website.

Blogrunner

Blogrunner is a news aggregator that collects headlines from established media sources as well as blogs, conveying  "News at Blog Speed" and a strong sense of what is being buzzed about on the web. The site is organized around 12 main topics, but by selecting "All topics" you get a complete subject index, including countries -  I selected Norway, and found much that was of interest to  me up here. Blogrunner.com is owned by the New York Times, and offers an "annotated version" of the newspaper of record.

Google News Timeline

This is neat and useful from Google - a display format that organizes search results chronologically and allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies. (see the faq for details) The default display shows Wikipedia Events and Time Magazine but components can be added/deleted with the "Add more queries" option. Here I've done a search for "Russia and missile defense" and displayed the results month by month. An excellent tool for seeing how the newspicture unfolds, but (unfortunately) also irresistible for whiling away the hours...

Facebook Group: World Leaders

Local news

In the February 2009 issue of Internet Law Researcher (not online), Ken Kozlowski compiles and reviews some useful local news sources, including

Newspapers.com
Online Newspapers
News and Newspapers Online
News Voyager
Internet Public Library
RefDesk
The Paperboy
U.S. Newspaper List
NewsLink
Hometown News (Koslowski omits this one..)
Newseum Front Pages
(map view is cool!)
Press Display
C-Span's links to political newspaper pages and independent political websites in 50 states.
Topix
Google News (enter zipcode in "local news" window)
Everyblock
ScrippsNews
For locating newsreaders, see Feed Readers and NewsOnFeeds
For newsfeeds in particular, see Yahoo Syndic8, and Moreover.

Embed it!

Sometimes embedding a document or webpage in your blog or webpage is more compelling than linking to it. To embed a static document, from your computer or from the web, you can use Embedit.in - for example, instead of linking to Caleb Crain's 2007 New Yorker article Twilight of the Books, I could embed it in a scrollable window right here in this post, as I've done below. Use the full-screen option for an easy to read format, and use the slide to adjust the size of the text to your needs. Embedit.in works with documents (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp) images (png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai) and text (txt, rtf, csv) You can also embed a webpage, but what you get is a static copy of the page as it appeared when you captured it; sometimes that might be what you need, but if you want to embed a webpage real-time, use an RSS widget instead.

Before Oprah

I was there before Oprah, were you?

Facebook survival guide for awkward adults

I'd not previously thought of MSNBC as a font of snarky hilarity, but Daniel Harrison makes it so. His "Facebook survival guide for awkward adults" made me laugh out loud, which I guess proves that I'm not an awkward adult.  I also enjoyed his "10 gadgets that make you look like a jerk"

Writing about reading and annoyed librarians

I'm interested in the discussion about the fate of thinking, culture, books, reading, attention spans etc. in the digital age, and have posted about it here from time to time. But only recently did I discover Walt Crawford's excellent summary of the debate in Writing about Reading 2...which led me back to Writing about Reading 1. Required reading if you're interested in these issues. A thing that puzzles me however is the rancor with which many in the library community dismiss the claims of prophets of doom who go on about the erosion of our reading and reasoning abilities by new technologies. They are after all defending librarianly values, and a more appropriate response - if one disagrees, and I don't always - with people like Michael Gorman, Sven Birkerts, the NEH and Dana Gioia, Susan Jacoby, Nick Carr, Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, etc. etc. would be a friendly and reassuring "Oh come come, things aren't so bad as all that. Remember [pat on back] there's nothing new under the sun, you haven't forgotten what Socrates said about writing, have you? But thanks for being concerned and sticking up for those things libraries are all about." You sure don't hear much of that last bit though; instead, many librarians get completely bent out of shape by such well-intentioned admonition, and contempt is showered on these valiant knights. I don't get it...

Happy 1000th anniversary Knowbodies

This blog rounded post nr.1000 yesterday; our forebears were mining gold here as early as "November 23, 2003". Please join me in a moment of silence and quiet reflection.

Migrant Integration Policy Index

MIPEX is a useful resource for measuring the relative success of EU+3 nations in integrating migrants.

MIPEX measures policies to integrate migrants in 25 EU Member States and three non-EU countries. It uses over 140 policy indicators to create a rich, multi-dimensional picture of migrants' opportunities to participate in European societies.

(from the website...)
MIPEX uses the term ‘migrants' to refers to Third Country Nationals legally residing in an EU Member State. Unless stated, it does not refer to refugees or asylum seekers, irregular migrants, EU citizens exercising their free movement rights or EU citizens with immigrant origins.

MIPEX covers six policy areas which shape a migrant's journey to full citizenship:

- Labour market access
- Family reunion
- Long-term residence
- Political participation
- Access to nationality
- Anti-discrimination

Best practice for each policy indicator is set at the highest European standard, drawn from Council of Europe Conventions or European Community Directives. Where these are only minimum standards, European-wide policy recommendations are used. Since policies are measured against the same standards across all Member States, MIPEX is a ‘benchmarking' tool to compare performance.

Twitterers are cold, unfeeling birds...

This Science Daily article discusses a forthcoming article that "raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter."(citation: "Neural correlates of admiration and compassion." By Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 16, April 20, 2009)  I was alerted to it through Clay Shirky's Twitter feed

Vacation time

This blog goes on vacation until April 14. In the meantime, for the information that you look for at Knowbodies first, please try our competitors - LibTech Metagator (actually a subsidiary...) and Google.com

It's gonna be done so soon so soon, it's gonna be done in about 2 weeks..."

Thanks to Mike for this one

Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

Death of newspapers

Clay Shirky's March 13th Thinking the Unthinkable  post about the death of newspapers has engendered much discussion,  much of it  collected at  Pressthink. There was also this piece about Why newspapers can't be saved but the news can at   NYT's opinionator.

Readability

If you prefer a reading experience like the one above to the one below,  Readability is for you. Visit Readability, tailor the reading experience to your preferences, and slide a bookmarklet up to your toolbar. The next time you're on a page that is the visual counterpart to "talk radio, except the commercials play during the program in the background", click on your bookmarklet for soothing silence!

To kindle is to set fire to

In this nicely turned piece, Emily Walshe makes the inevitable (though I would never have thought of it) connection between the fiery success of the Kindle and Ray Bradbury's cautionary tale of bookburning. Refreshingly, Walshe emphasizes the distinction between access and ownership instead of pretending that it doesn't exist, the familiar tactic of those who pooh-pooh the very notion of intellectual property rights. Walshe acknowledges that the difference is big indeed, and warns against the dangers of "digital commodification." For a well-fed fellow like me living comfortably in the world's s most comfortable kingdom, it's (far too) easy to say pish when alarmists start going on about civil liberties and Orwellian or Bradburian dystopias, but Walshe argues compellingly.

Access equals control. In this case, it is control over what is read and what is not; what is referenced and what is overlooked; what is retained and what is deleted; what is and what seems to be.
To kindle, we must remember, is to set fire to. The combustible power of this device (and others like it) lies in their quiet but constant claim to intangible, algorithmic capital. What the Kindle should be igniting is serious debate on the fundamental, inalienable right to property in a digital age – and clarifying what's yours, mine, and ours.

Does it suck or rock?

Phil Bradley used "Does it Suck or Does it Rock?" to compare librarians, libraries, and a bunch of search engines. What a testimony to our profession! The relative popularity of librarians to lawyers is also interesting.

ePodunk

What a wonderfully useful site this is!
"ePodunk provides in-depth information about more than 46,000 communities around the country, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, Pottstown to Podunk. Our listings also include geocoded information about thousands of parks, museums, historic sites, colleges, schools and other places across America."
And, I might add (using dear old Madison as an example), 

• Ancestry & family history
• Business
• Demographics
• Disability access
• Gay & lesbian
• Health
• Housing
• Politics
• Sports & rec

Nice words, adopt them!

This morning I was reading Bruce Bawer's tribute to poet Tom Disch.  As an example of  Disch's way with words,  Bawer cites his characterization of  Elizabeth Hardwick, the last surviving member of a group of mid-century New York intellectuals, as the "tontine winner."  Had to look that one up, but I agree, very nice! Then - in an embarrassment of riches for a Tuesday - my colleague pointed me to "Save the Words"  As you may know, when words fall into desuetude, they also fall out of the dictionary.  Lexicographers need room for new words and are all to happy to get rid of old ones....just like librarians and their books. Save the words urges you to "adopt" words in effort to save them from oblivion,  and provides advice on how you  can help spread  the word(s)  For hours of good clean fun!

Record for longest shush not held by librarian

Here is another installment in the increasingly popular tough reference questions series; when I asked a youth to keep her voice down in the reading room the other day, she responded sassily by asking, "Tell, me, does a librarian hold the record for the longest shhhhh ever?" I answered sassily, hands on hips: "No young lady, that record belongs to art director Mark Sikes of San Francisco." That's just one example of the many hard to find answers a reference librarian will find at the useful "Universal Record Database"

NewsShow

If you'd like to put a news ticker/box on your website, that can be arranged. Type in your searchwords, and Google's newsshow wizard does the rest.

Limiting searches by date

Librarian in Black just redicovered this post by Phil Bradley, causing me to discover it. Very useful overview of the (limited) possibilities for limiting your itnernet searches by date. ResearchBuzz's Goofresh mashup has moved since Phil's post, and is now here.

CopyTaste

CopyTaste must be the fastest/easiest way to post text on the web for sharing with others...and with the Firefox plugin, it can all be done with the click of a button. Here's how it presents itself:

CopyTaste enables you to create your own private URL with the data you wish to share with your friends or colleagues.  You can paste codes, tips or stories into the text editor, upload an image or a video file, or share a video link from any video streaming site. And the best part is that you can do all of these at once without any registration required!

Battles with Birkerts

People who read this blog - or, for that matter,  read about it in other publications - will know that digital doubters like Sven Birkerts, Nick Carr, Lee Siegel and others with misgivings large or small about where IT is taking us, are treated respectfully here.  Even Michael Gorman.

When Birkert's Gutenberg Elegies came out in 1994 (!), it stood out in contrast to the glib Californian internet evangelism of the day as a beautifully written and serious consideration of issues that are still important today; in particular, the intense privacy of the reading experience, and the threat to that kind of privacy that connectedness poses. But hey, the world moves along, and at some point, the steady drone of an axe grinding becomes tedious.  I'm afraid Birkerts has reached that point now, with his recent piece in the Atlantic about his resistance to the Kindle. I will still read him gladly on literature, but suffer him less gladly on technology. In Resisting the Kindle he seems to argue that reading a book on a screen - never mind which book - somehow diminishes the reading experience - and the culture of writing and reading - by decontextualizing it. Huh?  He explains:

But we should not forget that the sum of reader-text encounters creates our cultural landscape. So if it happens that in a few decades—maybe less—we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button, and libraries survive as information centers rather than as repositories of printed books, we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another. We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators.

To me this sounds a bit contrived - nicely put perhaps, but you can't help notice the speaker is standing in a a corner with wet paint all around. In In Defense of the Kindle, rare books librarian Matthew Battles responds. Like Birkerts, Battles is a serious, scholarly sort with a reverence for books and learning (and the author of Library: an Unquiet History [2003]) but he argues - very persuasively, I think - that the digitized ease of access that an apparatus like the Kindle provides, will promote the culture of letters rather than undermine it. In the following passage Battles does Birkerts a disservice, however:

When someone at a party he [Birkerts] attends responds to a question about Wallace Stevens by calling a Stevens poem up on his BlackBerry, he frets that we may be "gradually letting go of Wallace Stevens as the flesh-and-blood entity he was, and accepting in his place a Wallace Stevens that is merely the sum total of his facts."

This incident took place at  a poetry reading, not a party.

Open Congress Wiki

The Sunlight Foundation's exemplary Open Congress project now includes OpenCongress Wikii - an editable guide to Congress for the people by the people.

A nosegay of miscellaneous new stuff...

New for me anyway...
A Free Technology for Teachers - jam-packed with useful stuff for teachers and others.

Techfuga - all the top tech news aggregated in one clean page. Read this - in addition to your regular scanning of the Knowbodies LibTech Metagator - and you will be respected and relied-upon.

Phrontistery - Gadzooks, what a trove this is! Its owner says: "Since 1996, I have compiled word lists in order to spread the joy of the English language. Here, you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources." If you're wondering whether there are lists of rare three letter words, or unusual animals (320 of them), the answer is yes and yes. The latter also includes that carnivorous mouselike Australian marsupial the antechinus.