spacer image
spacer image

August 31, 2009

Rhonda Extended

Robin says,

I'm going to keep you apprised of new developments with this 3D sketching app Rhonda, just because I think it's such an exciting, novel visual tool. In this video, Andreas Martini exports the raw geometry from Rhonda—that's a new feature—and plays with it in a more traditional 3D program. The result is a neat little hand-drawn, day-glo neighborhood.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:50 PM

Reading Poems Out Loud, Or Not

Robin says,

I think I just realized something. I enjoy reading poems out loud. But I only enjoy it when I am the one reading. Stuff like this—A. Van Jordan reading a poem called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—it's like, it loses all of its poetry somehow. Gone. Drained.

Even a poet I love as much as Billy Collins—to hear him reading his stuff is just not edifying. I can barely hear how it's poetry, and not just an odd string of words.

Agree? Disagree? Am I missing a gene?

(The A. Van Jordan link is via Swindle, a neat poetry aggregator. Well, kinda neat. I like the idea, but the links are so devoid of context I can't always muster the interest to click on any. Good titles get me.)

Update: Some great recommendations, and a bonus MP3, in the comments.

Comments (8) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:43 PM

Launch Emma, Part Two

Robin says,

This book trailer for Flatmancrooked's Launch Emma project (previously) features, against all odds, a giant metallic Veritech fighter (in robot mode, naturally) extolling the virtues of arts patronage. SOLD.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 12:11 PM

The End of the Modern Age of Comics

Robin says,

A few reactions to Disney's purchase of Marvel:

  • Can we call this the close of the Modern Age of comics? Sometime during the early 00s—maybe even earlier—it seems like big corporate comics (DC and Marvel) shifted decisively from creating new characters and storylines to mining the creative capital they'd accrued over decades. (There's a fossil fuel analogy lurking here.)

  • I'm not talking about relaunches and re-interpretations, a la The Dark Knight Returns and John Byrne's Superman reboot back in the 80s. I'm talking about all you do is look backward—whether it's retold tales like Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man or recursive loops like DC's Infinite Crisis.

  • Okay, I'm sure there are lots of little exceptions, but I really really want to pronounce Marvel and DC dead. C'mon, can't we just pronounce them dead?

  • And what I mean by that is: They are no longer engines of creation. They now exist to license, merchandise, expand and exploit the IP they've been nurturing over the years. Which is totally okay! But...

  • Who's gonna create the new characters?

(Hmm. That ended up being more suited to paragraphs than bullets. Oh well, not changing it.)

Another detail from the story: Marvel has just 300 employees. Think of that company's cultural "throw-weight"—not insignificant—and divide that by its headcount. Pretty impressive.

What have you noticed about comics in the last 3-5 years? Anything noteworthy? Anything that this deal crystallizes? Where is the medium going?

Comments (7) | Permasnark | Posted: 9:26 AM

One-Hundred Percent

Robin says,

Amazing! My Kickstarter project hit 100% sometime after I went to sleep but before I woke up. What a thrill.

I posted a project update on Sunday afternoon, for the curious.

(Don't worry, it's not gonna be all Kickstarter all the time around here. I have a post on ancient coins coming.)

Update: Nice mention on the HarperStudio blog. I love that the post's author is, simply, "Intern." Thanks for the shout-out, Intern, whoever you are!

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 9:22 AM

August 30, 2009

Tim's thoughts: Man, I never get to have any fun. ;)... >>

Your Future Portaphone

I love Matt Novak's blog Paleo-Future, which combines everything I love about paleoblogging and hot buttered futurism into a single delicious pie.

He hasn't posted a ton lately, and really, going after mobile phones is low-hanging fruit, but I was still delighted with today's look at portable phones (from a 1976 book titled Future Facts). It includes this quote:

For a while at least, the portaphone will remain a business tool or luxury item. In time, however, portaphones will get smaller and cheaper, just as transistor radios have.

First: "portaphones!" When did we stop applying multisyllabic prefixes to words? Probably around the same time "port-a" became uniquely associated with outdoor toilets.

Second: today, we would almost certainly have to reverse that analogy: "Over time, transistor radios became smaller and cheaper, just as celullar phones have today." I consider this a sign of the analogy's intrinsic merit.

Last: it's easy to look at old predictions of the future with awe at what they get right and glee at what they get wrong. But this should be taken seriously as symptoms. They show how the past dreamed itself, and indeed, how it dreamed the present, in all of its possibilities and constraints, into being.

Tim-sig.gif
Posted August 30, 2009 at 4:51 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, Object Culture, Technosnark

Hey, This is the Kind of Post That I Usually Write

Robin says,

Hmm, this seems to be happening more and more often—Snarkmarketers do something interesting and somebody else explains What It Means for Media. (Usually that's our gig.) In this case it's Eoin Purcell, with a really nice, complimentary post about my Kickstarter project.

And I especially appreciate it because I feel like I have totally written That Post before, and I know how jazzed I was when I was writing it.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:29 AM

Scholars To Google: Your Metadata Sucks

Geoff Nunberg at Language Log on one of the biggest problems for scholarly use of Google Books: :

It's well and good to use the corpus just for finding information on a topic — entering some key words and barrelling in sideways. (That's what "googling" means, isn't it?) But for scholars looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass, say, it doesn't do a lot of good just to enter "I contain multitudes" in the search box and hope for the best. Ditto for someone who wants to look at early-19th century French editions of Le Contrat Social, or to linguists, historians or literary scholars trying to trace the development of words or constructions: Can we observe the way happiness replaced felicity in the seventeenth century, as Keith Thomas suggests? When did "the United States are" start to lose ground to "the United States is"? How did the use of propaganda rise and fall by decade over the course of the twentieth century? And so on for all the questions that have made Google Books such an exciting prospect for all of us wordinistas and wordastri. But to answer those questions you need good metadata. And Google's are a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

The devil here is in the details - Nunberg goes on to list dates and categories that aren't accidentally, but systematically misapplied, in wild, impossible fashion. There's a great discussion after the post, too - not to be missed.

It's actually surprising that this is such a problem, considering that the bulk of Google Books's collection is gathered from major research libraries, who DO spend a lot of time cataloguing this stuff for themselves. What happened?

In discussion after my presentation, Dan Clancy, the Chief Engineer for the Google Books project, said that the erroneous dates were all supplied by the libraries. He was woolgathering, I think. It's true that there are a few collections in the corpus that are systematically misdated, like a large group of Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the errors are clearly Google's doing. Of the first ten full-view misdated books turned up by a search for books published before 1812 that mention "Charles Dickens", all ten are correctly dated in the catalogues of the Harvard, Michigan, and Berkeley libraries they were drawn from. Most of the misdatings are pretty obviously the result of an effort to automate the extraction of pub dates from the OCR'd text. For example the 1604 date from a 1901 auction catalogue is drawn from a bookmark reproduced in the early pages, and the 1574 dating (as of this writing) on a 1901 book about English bookplates from the Harvard Library collections is clearly taken from the frontispiece, which displays an armorial booksmark dated 1574...

[It's like that joke from Star Trek VI: "not every species keeps their genitals" (by which I mean, metadata) "in the same place."]

After some early back-and-forth, Google decided it did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the scans themselves, and now it evidently has them, but I understand the company hasn't licensed them for display or use -- hence, presumably, the odd automated stabs at recovering dates from the OCR that are already present in the library records associated with the file.

Ugh. I mean, the books in these libraries are incredibly valuable. But when you think about all of the time and labor spent documenting and preserving the cataloguing info over centuries, it's kind of astonishing that we're losing that in favor of clumsy OCR. Out of any company, Google should know that a well-optimized search technology is at least as important as the data it helps to sort.

Maybe they're just excessively cocky about their own tools. After all, the metadata problem isn't limited to browsing through Google Books. If you've ever tried to use an application like Zotero or EndNote to extract book and article metadata from Google Scholar, you find incomplete and mistaken information all over the place. You spend almost as much time checking your work and cleaning up as you would if you'd just entered the info in manually in the first place.

And in the end, manual entry is what we want to avoid. I'd say half the value of digital text archives for scholars is that they can put their eyeballs on a document - the other half is that they can send little robots to look at thousands and thousands of them, in the form of code that depends not least on good metadata.

Tim-sig.gif
Posted August 30, 2009 at 5:49 | Comments (0) | Permasnark
File under: Books, Writing & Such, Technosnark

August 29, 2009

Recommended Reading

Tim says,

I loved Virginia Heffernan's postscript to the Facebook exodus:

You