Posts by Tim

After I followed Robin’s link to the photos of the Apollo 11 astronauts, I wondered, “why don’t we have ticker tape parades any more?” Of course, it’s because lower Manhattan isn’t swimming in ticker tape. We’ve got the words (a change in a stock price is still called an uptick or downtick) but the telegraph-and-paper-strip-printing machines are long gone.

On Metafilter, someone asked: “How long will it take to remove the word ‘videotape’ from the collective vocabulary?”

I caught myself yesterday asking somebody if his performance was videotaped. Of course, there is no tape involved in this process any more. Why was that the first phrase that sprang to mind even though “recorded” or “digitally recorded” are the technically accurate terms? How long does it take for language to catch up with technological obsolescence?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. Virtually nothing in language goes away, so long as it’s rooted sufficiently deep – it just restructures itself. Tape is a great example of this. The ticker tape era closed; the magnetic tape era opened. Tape itself went nowhere. Even the meaning of the noun – a thin, flat strip of material – didn’t change. The verb did; “tape” no longer meant “to shower with paper” – that would be “TP” – it means (or meant) to record or to stick. It doesn’t matter what the tape is made from, either. Tape used to just mean “ribbon,” especially a cloth ribbon used to tie clothing or parcels – but that sense is now mostly displaced by tape made of paper, cellophane, and metal.

The great thing about tape is that it shuns whatever qualifiers you want to put on it, and it’s still perfectly clear what it means. Tape is equally adhesive tape, audio tape, video tape, paper tape, surgical tape, the tape at the end of a race. And it always means both the physical strip of tape itself, its container, and its contents, as well as the act of putting the tape into use.

Are there other words that carry the same grammatical structures regardless of their contents? It’s almost like speakers intuitively assume, “well, if ‘tape’ is going to mean a ribbon AND to tie that ribbon, then it HAS to mean the sticky tape AND the act of sticking it, the magnetic tape AND the act of recording to it,” etc. We’re effortlessly swapping contexts all the time.

Claude L

Writing up the new Oxford Historical Thesaurus, Jason Kottke laments the lack of an advertised online version: “what a boon it would be for period novelists to able to press the ‘write like they did in 1856’ button.”

So, being a total dork, and already in love with the not-even-shipping OHT, I tweet:

I want a “write like they did in 1856” button!

and then:

Actually, not a “write like ANYBODY in 1856” button. I want a “write like Flaubert” button. (Quiz: what writer in 1856 would you choose?)

This is harder than it sounds. 1856 might have seen just about the greatest confluence of writers ever. Do you want to write like Flaubert, Baudelaire, or Hugo? Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Melville or Whitman or Dickinson? The Rosettis, the Brownings, or George Eliot? In nonfiction, you could write like Darwin, Marx, Carlyle, Mill, Schopenhauer, Lincoln, or Emerson.

All that said, I’m sticking with Flaubert. That’s the year he finished and serialized Madame Bovary. (The next year, he went on trial for obscenity, and won, on the grounds that he wasn’t a pornographer, but a genius. This changed everything for modern literature.)

Gustave’s my guy. Who’s yours?

P.S.: On the Oxford University Press page for the historical thesaurus, it includes a link for an online version – it’s almost certainly going to be subscriber-only, and the link ends up with placeholder info for now. But it will happen.

Two different blog entries about health care ended up in my RSS reader at the same time. They argue for diametrically opposite positions based on what appear to be identical principles.

One is by Conor Friedersdorf, who’s filling in for Andrew Sullivan. It’s essentially a follow-up to his earlier post about requiring Congress to read the laws they pass, which I commented on here.

The worst thing about “comprehensive reform” efforts are that they shut the average citizen out of the legislative process by making bills so complicated that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to properly evaluate whether on balance it is a wise or unwise measure. Who can predict all the effects of a 3,000 page bill spanning all manner of issues? Often times not even the legislature itself. Certainly not the press, which often focuses on bits of the legislation that won’t actually have the most impact, sometimes because legislators themselves are deliberately obscuring what’s actually at stake.

It’s a conservative lesson: we should make “small, piecemeal improvements to public policy, rather than the kind of sweeping efforts that flatter vanities but fail citizens.”

And here Ezra Klein presents an argument from a reader named Lensch, who compares the current reform bill being considered to the old Ptolemaic epicycles in astronomy:

We want a “uniquely American solution.” So we have weak plans, strong plans, coops, exchanges, individual coverage, community ratings, etc., etc., etc. I still haven’t seen we are going to handle the problem of people with pre-existing conditions. If we cover them, people will take out minimal insurance until they get sick and then switch. We need some more epicycles.

If Copernicus were alive today, I am sure he would say, “If you simply give everyone Medicare, you wouldn’t need all this complication, and I’ll bet it would be cheaper, too.”

The practically radical answer turns out to be intellectually conservative; it’s a back-of-the-envelope solution.

I don’t think one answer trumps or refutes the other. I think there’s another meaning of “simple” here, which both arguments ignore. The health care proposal floated in the House, is intellectually complex not only because it’s designed to please different legislators and constituencies, but because it’s designed to have a minimal impact on most people, particularly those who already have some kind of health care. If by a stroke of law, we switched everyone from private insurance to Medicare tomorrow, it would be chaos. That’s why you get epicycles – because it turns out that asking the earth to move in this case might actually make it change its orbit.

And really, the same thing could be said about the plan to make Congress read their bills out loud and then take a day to deliberate about them. It would actually introduce a great number of brand-new complications into the legislative process, not just for them, but for us, particularly if we actually cared enough to pay attention. You mean, my politicians actually want me to pay attention to what they do and weigh in on complex issues and hold them accountable? Wouldn’t it be easier just to complain that they’re all crooks who don’t represent my interests?

Conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith introduces a new issue of Poetry devoted to probably the most divisive no-va-nt-guar-d writing in generations:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Read more…

I think, for folks interested in what’s happening with digital books, at this point it’s foundational to read Anthony Grafton’s 2007 New Yorker essay on book digitization. Grafton is a historian of Renaissance humanism and early print culture; he writes with a great deal of sympathy even as he criticizes a lot of the ramshackle moves that have been made in getting print books up on the web.

It’s a weird thing – I think I can say that age of digital humanism we’re in shows the same enthusiasm as the Renaissance in getting old texts into circulation and generating new information, but much less care than the early humanists in making sure that the information is complete, accurate, or discriminating. And it seems as though this is what traditionalists and futurists argue about, endlessly.

This at least, is the tension in Peter Green’s TLS review of Grafton’s new book, Worlds Made By Words, which contains an expanded version of that New Yorker essay, plus plenty of tasty goodness about Renaissance humanists like Leon Battista Alberti, or Justius Lipsius, a Flemish philologist who “offered to recite the text of Tacitus with a knife held to his throat, to be plunged in if he made a mistake.” Green’s review is titled “Google Books or Great Books,” and it offers a nice peek into what Grafton’s all about. Here’s a slice of the good:

An editor at Cambridge University Press, reputedly the world’s oldest publisher, cheerfully admitted to Grafton that, conservatively, “95 percent of all scholarly enquiries start at Google”. Which, as Grafton says, “makes sense: Google, the nerdiest of corporations, has roots in the world of books”, to the point where (if you throw in Amazon and one or two others) “the Web has become a vast and vivid online bookstore”… Today all would-be members of the Republic of Letters, all hopeful explorers of past history, have, in a literal sense, the world at their fingertips. As Grafton says, “it is more than transformative to sit in your office at a small liberal arts or community college and call up, as you already can, thousands of books in dozens of languages, the nearest material copy of which is hundreds of miles away”.

And the bad:

Scanning by optical character recognition, ironically, commits some of the same errors as those made by careless medieval scribes, including long “s” read as “f” (German scholarship sometimes appears as Wiffenschaft), and the confusion of u and n. Thus, key in the meaningless qnalitas for qualitas (a key term in medieval philosophy) and you get over 600 hits for qualitas which you would miss if you only keyed in the correct word. Much of the old German spiky Gothic black-letter material (Fraktur) comes out in “plain text” as gobbledegook.

Which Grafton synthesizes in a really lovely way, as follows:

Yes, the young scholar is told, take every advantage of the new electronic Aladdin’s cave. But – and here Grafton shows a rare moment of deeply felt emotion – these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books.

Here’s a thought. One term that I think we can use to bring the digital enthusiasts and the traditional scholars – besides humanism, which I still think is a super-powerful idea – is standards. One thing web and software people are actually surprisingly good at, considering the libertarian ethos that drives a lot of the best work, is at establishing standards of mutual interoperability.

What if scholarly bodies like the Modern Languages Association, American Library Association, American Historical Association, etc., worked together with the tech guys to establish standards for digital scholarly texts in their fields? Work to verify the scans, establish the bibliographies (it would really help to know, for example, if a full-preview book in Google Books is actually from a pirated or faulty edition), and verify the results? Hashtags for scanned books!

I think that could be beautiful.

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy goes there:

See, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He’s #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he’s got Beyoncé. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America’s inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

But here’s the other question: are Jay-Z and Beyoncé really in the same game? What about The Shins? In other words, maybe one set of actors are in the sphere of realist power politics, and another set are acting under a completely different set of assumptions – maybe idealist, maybe postmodern, maybe not based on the nation-state/single artist framework at all.

This was always my issue whenever we examined competing explanatory frameworks in political science: the assumption that whatever assumptions you made, they had to apply to all actors equally and individual actors consistently.

To me, it seemed (and seems) perfectly consistent to suppose that rational actors could be operating under different frameworks of rationality at different times, or even in some instances scuttling rationality altogether due to misinformation, contradictory internal forces, or misguided teleologies. “You can’t build models that way,” my freshman poli sci teacher said, half-joking but half-serious. No, I guess you can’t.

President Obama was in Warren, MI today (not far from where I grew up) to give a speech about community colleges. Here’s the gist:

In a speech Tuesday in Warren, Mich., he proposed sinking nearly $12 billion into revamping the country’s community-college system. The plan would provide $9 billion in grant money to boost academic programs and raise graduation rates, plus another $2.5 billion to upgrade school facilities. It would also fund open-source online courses so that schools don’t have to build more classrooms to admit more students.

Community colleges have long been where the bodies are in higher education, but now it’s ridiculous. The economy’s collapse has sent college students’ enrollments rolling downhill – kids who would have gone to expensive private schools are enrolling in moderately priced public universities, the university kids are going to regional colleges, and the regional students to community colleges. If you want to get more students with college degrees, community colleges are a natural place to start.

Christopher Beam at Slate notes further advantages:

If the university system is an ocean liner, community colleges are the speedboats of higher education. If they get more money and use it wisely, the thinking goes, they can produce results in a matter of years. After all, they’re designed to respond to the needs of the local community. For example, LaGuardia Community College recently introduced a program to train designers in New York City. When the fishing industry started struggling in Massachusetts, Cape Cod Community College turned its focus to nursing and other health-care-related jobs. When Connecticut introduced its first casino, one nearby community college started training croupiers. For an administration looking for shovel-ready projects, community colleges can provide a lot of shovels.

Let’s imagine the community college in twenty years. It’s taken up a fair amount of the role once played by larger state universities. It offers a wide range of four-year and two-year degrees, plus some applied postgraduate degrees. What’s more, different community colleges, like different universities and technical schools now, specialize. Some are outstanding teachers’ colleges, while others train designers, still others business professionals. But the biggest boom is in information technology – info techs work in medicine, business, law, government… You used to go to a community college to learn data entry. Now you go to learn data management, analysis, and modeling.

Think about it. Community college students (and teachers and IT departments) today often aren’t as tech-saavy as their university counterparts, but they can innovate in the use of digital technology. In fact, they have to. They don’t have the same physical plant and infrastructure as larger, more expensive schools. They’re unlikely to have folks on campus doing original research. They’re not mainframes. They’re terminals. But there’s a difference between smart and dumb terminals.

A community college, with an instituional subscription to the Google Books of the future, can do without a substantial library; they can do without cyclotrons or football stadiums or anything else that drains dollars and energy, public or private; I don’t know, but it seems to me that we’re standing at a unique juncture. Just as many of our parents (and especially grandparents) often don’t quite recognize what schools are like today, those of us in our twenties might not recognize the delicate ecology of colleges and universities when our kids start filling out those applications.*

Read more…

Ezra Klein writes that “I imagine that when Sonia Sotomayor is putting together her scrapbook of memories from the time she was nominated for the United States Supreme Court, this will be a page she’ll particularly treasure”:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor

Legislators – in the US, but probably elsewhere too – don’t read bills before they vote on them. No one could.

Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they’ve been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I’m kind of more interested in that too — at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly’s formulation of what we did is worth repeating: “The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible.” We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don’t think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there’s a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the “ransom” model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions’ football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn’t sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn’t even show you another football game, you’d just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:

It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a country’s subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called “high arts” which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect).

What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more “democratic” for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a “traditional” Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).

The new digital Maecenate! Just typing it gives me shivers of delight.

Until I read Adema’s post, though, the way I’d been thinking about it was less classical, and maybe less flattering. I was thinking about Polish farmers in Prussia.

Okay, I’ll explain. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism begins with a weird and probably a little racist anecdote about Catholic farmers in the Eastern province of Germany. The farmers, and young people from the farms who’d emigrated to the cities, didn’t seem to respond to economic incentives. They were traditionalists: if you showed them a new way to farm that yielded more crops, unless the difference was overwhelming, they didn’t care; they’d just do it the way they always did it. If you paid them more for their crops to try to get them to produce more, they’d work less, because they could live off of the same amount of money they’d always had.

Actually Weber very smartly avoided the racist conclusion – that the Polish farmers were congenitally lazy — that most of the Prussian farmowners who employed these Polish workers had made. Instead, he concluded that to work your butt off to make more money than you could most likely spend was actually a very strange way to live – that it wasn’t, as some of the early economists and social engineers thought, a natural and universal response to maximize utility, but a historically contingent phenomenon.

He spends the rest of his startlingly brilliant book trying to trace the conditions under which that phenomenon could have emerged based on the startling economic success made by Protestant sects in Western Europe and the United States, all of which hinged on new notions of work and personal austerity that turned out to be, quite accidentally, a primary engine in the development of modern capitalism as it emerged in the West.

So, where am I going with this?

Well, the NLA model is like a color negative of the noncapitalist peasant. I say a color negative because the economic conditions have actually reversed. The peasant could earn more, but he didn’t really have any place to put it. Once his physical needs were met, he had no reason to keep working. He would curtail the potential abundance of nature when the scarce physical resources were purchased.

What can do is the opposite – to unlock the potential abundance of the artificial once the scarce physical resources have been paid for. Instead of stopping work – stopping the flow of goods and closing the circuit of circulation – this opens it up. This is only natural.

*My calfskin-and-vellum copy is particularly nice.