Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
August 31, 2010
Via Scott McCloud. At least one of his examples shows how horribly these can be used to caricature arguments, but hey, that’s how it goes. Along these lines, I really like the visual representations of ideas-in-conflict on Debategraph.
August 30, 2010
When it first became common for college students to write on computers, researchers noticed some changes in the quality of their writing. (I think I read about this first in Michael Heim’s 1989 book Electric Language, though I could be misremembering.) On the sentence level, they tended to improve, largely because it is so easy on...
August 26, 2010
There’s been a lot of talk in my Twitter feed and elsewhere online about this NYT story on open-access online peer review of literary scholarship. For me, this model marks an obviously significant improvement over the usual peer-review model. Pretty much everyone else whose views I’ve seen feels the same way, but their emphasis —...
August 25, 2010
Episode 12 of Ulysses is called “Cyclops,” and in the schematic outline of the book that Joyce produced for a few friends the “technic” (technique) of the episode is identified as gigantism. Everything here is extreme; it’s too much; it’s over the top. See for instance the introductory description of the Irish-nationalist...
August 24, 2010
We’ve noted before that when you’re reading an e-reader in public, no one knows what you’re reading — it could be porn or Proust. (Well, for some people Proust is porn, in a way.) Thus reading in public becomes a more private activity. Things magazine puts another knot in this cord: You wouldn’t just pick up...
August 23, 2010
August 23, 2010
Gestures from João Machado on Vimeo. Via swissmiss (in the comments to an earlier post), what we do with our hands when we read books.
August 22, 2010
Click on the image for a much larger version. More about this book here.
August 20, 2010
So, in footnote 304 — ten thousand words or so ostensibly devoted to a history of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents — we get a beautifully and truly prophetic account of online plagiarism, a topic of occasional interest here at TP. A teenager named James Struck consults the B.P.L. ArchFax database for information about this group,...
August 19, 2010
“The Case for Boredom” isn’t really a case for boredom as such, but for pauses — for moments, especially in the lives of young people, when external stimuli cease long enough for some actual thought to arise, or contemplation to occur, or (mirabile dictu) mere silence to settle in for a time.In Boredom: the Literary History...