The indispensable ProfHacker on how truth begins with fiction in the academy:
Faking it is a crucial way to get anything accomplished.
AllMany abstracts for conferences or proposals for books or sabbaticals or anything else are written before the project described therein is finished, or sometimes even started. You build a constituency for a new course in part by positing its existence, and then trusting that a successful iteration of it will lead to even more interested students.
Via Andrew Sullivan comes Atlantic colleague Max Fischer, “A Free-Market Case for the Public Option.” I’ll just pull the same graf as Sullivan:
Something like televisions exist in a free market because consumers, if they don’t like any of the new TVs on the market, can simply keep their old one. If they really don’t like the market, they can even forgo owning one altogether; it will make you unpopular on game day, but it won’t risk your life. Insurance is different. Anyone with a sense of basic self-preservation has no choice but to buy health insurance every single month. You cannot opt out, there are few options to choose from, and it’s difficult to know how to price your future risk of injury. So health insurance companies have distorted incentives to innovate or provide a more cost-effective product.
With ordinary goods, the zero-position ownership is acceptable and even virtuous. Not so with health care.
There are a few goods that are similar, like education. You could, under a highly charged set of circumstances, opt out of giving yourself or your child a basic education, and there are many parts of the world where this is not uncommon. Nobody, however, really seems to think that this is a good thing — whether you’re home-schooling, using private education, or sending your kid to a public school, the norm is that your kids ought to get an education. And in industrialized democracies, there’s usually a robust system of public education which (problems and inequalities aside) does a good job of serving most people’s basic needs.
The question is whether the zero-position of health care is something like “ambulance in the event of a gunshot wound” or something more like K-12 education. (I think our views on the zero-position of education are changing too, as access to good pre-K and postsecondary ed look more like defaults rather than extras.)
I’ve written here before about the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius – see here and here. Clay Shirky is into Manutius too – both of those posts trace back to CS. But this post on book publishing and this one on digitization convinced me that everyone needs to know this story, because we need heroes like Manutius today.
This is from Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (one of my favorite books ever):
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and many of the Greek scholars who had established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Venice became the new centre of classical learning. Some forty years later the Italian humanist Aldus Manutius, who had instructed such brilliant students as Pico della Mirandola in Latin and Greek, finding it difficult to teach without scholarly editions of the classics in practical formats, decided to take up Gutenberg’s craft and established a printing-house of his own where he would be able to produce exactly the kind of books he needed for his courses. Aldus chose to establish his press in Venice in order to take advantage of the presence of the displaced Eastern scholars, and probably employed as correctors and compositors other exiles, Cretan refugees who had formerly been scribes.
In 1494 Aldus began his ambitious publishing program, which was to produce some of the most beautiful volumes in the history of printing: first in Greek – Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides – and then in Latin – Virgil, Horace, Ovid. In Aldus’s view, these illustrious authors were to be read “without intermediaries” – in the original tongue, and mostly without annotations or glosses – and to make it possible for readers to “converse freely with the glorious dead” he published grammar books and dictionaries alongside the classical texts.
Not only did he seek the services of local experts , he also invited eminent humanists from all over Europe – including such luminaries as Erasmus of Rotterdam – to stay with him in Venice. Once a day these scholars would meet in Aldus’s house to discuss what titles would be printed and what manuscripts would be used as reliable sources, sifting through the collections of classics established in the previous centuries. “Where medieval humanists accumulated,” noted the historian Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance ones discriminated.”
Aldus discriminated with an unerring eye. To the list of classical writers he added the works of the great Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch among others.
Aldus didn’t just pick great texts (and great people to edit them) – he made great books, introducing several important innovations.
As private libraries grew, readers began to find large volumes not only difficult to handle and uncomfortable to carry, but inconvenient to store. In 1501, confident in the success of his first editions, Aldus responded to readers’ demands and brought out a series of pocket-sized books in octavo – half the size of quarto – elegantly printed and meticulously edited.
To keep down the production cost she decided to print a thousand copies at a time, and to use the page more economically he employed a newly designed type , “italic”, created by the Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo, who also cut the first roman type in which the capitals were shorter than the ascending (full- height) letters of the lowercase to ensure a better-balanced line. The result was a book that appeared much plainer than the ornate manuscript editions popular throughout the Middle Ages, a volume of elegant sobriety.
What counted above all, for the owner of an Aldine pocket-book, was the text , clearly and eruditely printed – not a preciously decorated object. Griffo’s italic type (first used in a woodcut illustrating a collection of letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, printed in 1500) gracefully drew the reader’s attention to the delicate relationship between letters; according to the modern English critic Sir Francis Meynell, italics slowed down the reader’s eye, “increasing his capacity to absorb the beauty of the text.”
I love that italic type is above all a technology — operating both on the eye (to increase attention) and the page, to decrease the total size of the text and allow more words to be printed on fewer sheets of paper. That in turn allows all of the dimensions to be reduced, saving money and making the books easier to use.
Like all technologies, though, the printed octavo volume in italic type has definite social preconditions AND consequences:
Since these books were cheaper than manuscripts, especially illuminated ones, and since an identical replacement could be purchased if a copy was lost or damaged, they became, in the eyes of the new readers, less symbols of wealth than of intellectual aristocracy, and essential tools for study.
Booksellers and stationers had produced, both in the days of ancient Rome and in the early Middle Ages, books as merchandise to be traded, but the cost and pace of their production weighed upon the readers with a sense of privilege in owning something unique . After Gutenberg, for the first time in history, hundreds of readers possessed identical copies of the same book, and (until a reader gave a volume private markings and a personal history) the book read by someone in Madrid was the same book read by someone in Montpellier.
So successful was Aldus’s enterprise that his editions were soon being imitated throughout Europe: in France by Gryphius in Lyons, as well as Colines and Robert Estienne in Paris, and in The Netherlands by Plantin in Antwerp and Elzevir in Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht and Amsterdam. When Aldus died in 1515, the humanists who attended his funeral erected all around his coffin, like erudite sentinels , the books he had so lovingly chosen to print.
Publishers need to act like… record labels.
Say it again.
If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed, (disposable income permitting.)
Think about how true that feels. And think about how few institutions or mechanisms there are that create a sense of trust or of identity in book publishing – especially in the wide-open, nobody-knows anything world of mainstream fiction and nonfiction.
Four excerpts of Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller on the ontology of bad data:
1. For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me. Instead there is evidence that I am still under observation…
2. The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. In the third year a “protocol office” was established. I had to be made suitable for the office by means of two recruitment tests carried out by the secret service officer Stana. After the second refusal, his goodbye was: “You’ll be sorry; we’ll drown you in the river.” One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place now belonged to an engineer, I was no longer allowed in the office. I couldn’t go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, defiant, I sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase between the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I didn’t work. The office staff walked past me, silent…
3. In October 1984 I really was allowed to travel. The intention, however, was malicious: I was to be seen as profiteering from the regime and, in the west, to be suspected of being an agent. The secret service worked intensely on both, but in particular on the “agent” persona. Spying staff were sent to Germany with the task of smearing. The plan of action of 1 July 1985, states with satisfaction: “As a result of several journeys abroad, the idea was launched among some actors at the German State Theatre in Timisoara that Cristina is an agent for the Romanian Securitate.” After my emigration, the measures to “compromise and isolate” were intensified. A “Nota de analiza” from March 1989 reads: “In the action to compromise her, we will work with Branch D (Disinformation), publishing articles abroad or sending memoranda – as if issued by German emigration – to several circles and authorities wielding influence in Germany.”
4. In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch “D” (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn’t just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?
For more on the history of files, secret police, and identity, see Cornelia Vismann’s magnificent book Akten, translated last year as Files: Law and Media Technology.
Just before the Nobel nominees were submitted, January 22, 2009, “Obama orders Guantanamo Bay closed, bans torture”:
With a few strokes of a pen, President Obama this morning reversed linchpins of the Bush administration’s war on terror.
He signed executive orders to shut down the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center within a year and to ban harsh interrogations — what critics say are tantamount to torture .
Obama signed the orders after meeting with 16 retired military officers, who he said pleaded with him to stand up for human rights and American values in combatting terrorism.
“They made an extraordinary impression on me,” said Obama, as they stood behind him and applauded.
After signing the orders, Obama said, “the message we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”
“We think that it is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world,” he said. “We intend to win this fight. We’re going to win it on our terms.”
I wish George W. Bush had issued the same executive orders two years earlier. I wish there were a group of in-Iraqi statesmen, real Willie Brandts, who had sought reconciliation or had even hammered out a revenue-sharing and peace agreement to bring real security to Iraq. I wish Guantanamo were still on track to be closed within the year.
We should take seriously Obama’s idea that this isn’t “a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.” It’s not an award for Barack Obama, but for Obama’s transformation of the office of President of the United States.
But let’s be honest with ourselves here. This is about an American President reversing awful, inhumane, war-promoting policies that no American government should ever have allowed, let alone endorsed. We’re Kissinger, here, or Arafat: murderers, criminals, who have astonished the world by taking the tiniest steps in the opposite direction.
Howard Dean sees the political (and immediate) benefits of a public-option-plus*:
{Dean} also warned that the public option may hurt Democrats politically next year. “If the Democrats want to hold on to their majority, you’re going to have a problem,” he said. That’s because the public option wouldn’t be up and running until 2013, long after the 2010 elections, meaning voters won’t really see any benefits until long after the election.
To address that problem, Dean said Democrats need to do something that will have tangible results by next summer. His proposal: opening up Medicare to people over the age of 50 so that a “certain mass” of people will already have benefited from health reform by the elections. “You need to have people sign up for this program by July 2010,” Dean said.
Why not make it kids and Medicaid instead? Under 13, or 18? If you lose your job, your kids don’t lose their health care. And if you have an employee base full of parents w/ lots of dependents, you just saved some money.
Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison and the legacies of early cinema:
[T]he truth of film’s origins as a series of devices enabling various public and private diversions persistently lurked in the goal of widening or multiplying its screen, or in the sport of enlisting other sensory apparatuses, with gimmicks like 3-D, Sensurround, and Smell-o- Vision. And this lurking truth explodes into relevance again in the era that began with the introduction of the VCR, and persists in a presently unfolding future that includes YouTube and handheld viewing devices, with episodic serials beamed into portable telephones already commonplace. As David Thomson points out in The Whole Equation, Edison’s Kinetoscope may just now be having its day.
Edison’s own last great contribution was, perversely, in driving the industry westward, out of the grasp of his copyrights and patents. Squatting toadlike on his rights, indeed, employing a private force of roving bully-enforcers, Edison more or less accidentally routed the fugitive innovators to California, beyond his reach. So the activities that began flourishing there, at that coastal brink of American self-invention, were branded as permanently expedient and on the run, piratically bold, and driven by a geographically renewable innocence, like the nation itself.
That’s from A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers – “a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice” (Scott Eric Kaufman), “neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too” (Laura Miller).
Mark Sigal at O’Reilly looks at “four different use cases that capture the promise of an improved user experience around a reboot of the book” – in this case centered around the mythical Apple tablet (called here an “iPad”):
Travel Books: As noted in my post Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch, travel is a very fertile space for a re-envisioned book, as it depends on good, timely information, just when you need it. For example, a travel book could always be up to date with real-time event calendars. Listings could be interconnected with maps, Wikipedia, live review sites, reservations/ticketing systems, video libraries, trip photos, messages and discussion threads, and fellow travelers’ notes of interest.
Children’s Books: Remember the Pop-Up book? It was the first interactive book, and it was pretty cool when I was a kid (before computers). What if you married the pluggable simplicity of Radio Shack’s 150-in-1 Electronic Project Kit to creating pop-up books? What kind of engaging stories could you create?
Comics & Graphic Novels: A format like the comic book or the graphic novel could push the envelope on good storytelling, especially if it was designed with the prosumer blogger in mind. I can readily imagine classics like Judge Dredd and Swamp Thing jumping off the screen on the iPad, not to mention the ability of storytellers to create multiple outcome forks based on different narrative paths chosen by the reader.
History & Science Books: Imagine learning what it’s like living through the current recessionary times with a book that is traversable based upon events, chronologies, or the road traveled by specific characters. A great sports book could allow you to relive a game-changing moment in a classic Series, or be game-ified to allow you to test your managerial instincts and see how different moves might have played out. What kind of pertri dish could an iPad enable, especially if it took advantage of the physical hardware accessory plugins the iPhone Platform can support?
Some overlap with what Snarkmarket’s said about the future of e-book readers, among, other places, here and here.
This post also included some thoughtful links to people writing about the new iTunes LP format, which does indeed show some potential for next-gen text. Jay Robinson talks about how it looks, then digs into the guts of the files to find WebKit, CSS, etc., while Tristan Lewis wonders about the possibility that the format could create something like an AppStore for content developers:
What if independent movie-makers or musicians could sell directly through the iTunes store and provide content on all the apple platforms (TV, iPod, phone, computer) with a single click. I suspect that many would be willing to give up 30 percent of their revenue in order to get to that public.
The components all seem to be there and it seems to me that it won’t be long before Apple starts pushing the idea that we are all content producers (an old idea at Apple, which was at the source of their creating the iLife suite) and we can all make some money at producing that content.
For my part, I’ve got no idea whether that’s what Apple is up to*, or even if this tablet, however coveted, will ever materialize.** But yeah, I think that could be nice.
* This is where Apple-as-a-toll-collector almost begins to make sense. Really, why do we need to wait? I mean, couldn’t ANYONE create a new format like this to deliver content? It’s HTML and CSS, folks – it’ll work in a web browser! But Apple’s got the store, the way to get it on dedicated devices, and the marketing clout to get people interested in it. So we wait.
** I also wonder whether Apple’s just waiting until we all get accustomed to reading things and watching video on teeny tiny screens, so that there won’t be a need to up the size of the iPod touch at all, rendering the whole thing moot. “Hmm, can’t find a good touchscreen vendor at that size… Maybe we can just wait for everyone’s brains and eyes to adapt.”Generations will die and be replaced by those who can easily read whole novels off pages the size of a deck of cards! We’re all going to have magnifying glasses implanted in our eye sockets, while our fingers become filed down to stylus points. And it will be magical.
When I read this:
At most European universities, students receive their undergraduate degrees in three years – and Graduate School of Education professor Robert Zemsky thinks American should do the same…
First, he argues that because the majority of students now pursue advanced degrees, it is logical to find ways to shorten the time they spend in college in order to get a jump-start on professional and graduate degrees.
Second, Zemsky says in order to help American students transition to a three-year undergraduate system, their senior year of high school could be focused on developing the skills students will need to keep up with the accelerated pace.
I thought, don’t we do this already, by having most undergraduates (at least at relatively elite schools) take a year or semester abroad? Then Chris Shea backed me up:
Some American colleges–Yale, for example–used to be so presumptuous as to say that students would be better off spending all four years on the campus. The argument was that courses in the U.S. were more rigorous than most of those that students could find abroad. Want to see the world? Take a grand tour after college.
You don’t hear such arguments anymore. To study abroad is an expected, and seldom-challenged, part of the American college experience.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, however [subscribers only], John F. Burness, a visiting policy professor at Duke, says there’s more than a grain of truth to the old-fashioned view. The courses students take in study-abroad programs are often weaker than the ones they take at home. And too many students, he says, treat study-abroad programs as an extended opportunity to travel, with coursework, at best, a bonus.
Now travel is nice and all (and, to be sure, the best study-abroad programs are simultaneously challenging and horizon-expanding). But as one Marshall Scholar, a serious recent graduate, tells Burness: “For many students, study abroad is a semester off, not a semester on.”
So, the real problem seems to be that many university undergraduates really DO have a three-year college education; but that many of them are wasting their time in Europe rather than applying to graduate schools before they turn twenty-one.
The logic in both counterarguments is all about efficiency, acceleration – and implicitly, that a student should be finished with their education sometime between 21 and 25.
I will be the first to admit that is a terrible, terrible thing – really, a kind of disease – to be a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student. (Being a thirty-year-old postdoctoral fellow is a little like being in remission.) But I don’t think that hurrying the entire process along is a) where we are headed or b) where we want to head.
On the other hand, if you wanted to promote a three-year baccalaureate on the grounds that it would be easier for adults to finish their education and retrain themselves for new positions — I think I’d be a lot more sympathetic to that.