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
June 3, 2010
“Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.” — W. H. Auden
June 2, 2010
Jacqui Cheng: There are already several open e-book formats out there — ePub and MobiPocket are just a couple. The major e-book devices even support them; with a little bit of effort, you can get an ePub version of a book onto your Kindle or iPad in no time. The problem is the “effort” part—e-book sellers like Amazon, Barnes...
June 2, 2010
Ruth Franklin in The New Republic: At one panel I attended, titled “The Next Decade in Book Culture,” Nicholas Latimore, a publicist for Knopf, waxed lyrical about the material qualities of a hardbound book. His house has always gloried in its beautiful design: the colophon page at the end that identifies and gives the history of the...
June 2, 2010
Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen see user-interaction chaos in new gestural devices: In Apple Mail, to delete an unread item, swipe right across the unopened mail and a dialog appears, allowing you to delete the item. Open the email and the same operation has no result. In the Apple calendar, the operation does not work. How is anyone to...
June 1, 2010
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an overview of Franco Moretti’s lab at Stanford, devoted to quantitative work on, especially, Victorian fiction: The idea that animates his vision for pushing the field forward is “distant reading.” Mr. Moretti and Mr. Jockers say scholars should step back from scrutinizing individual texts...
June 1, 2010
Robert McCrum: For new and original books to flourish, there must be privacy, even secrecy. In Time Regained, Marcel Proust expressed this perfectly. “Real books”, he wrote, “should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk, but of darkness and silence.”How many “real books” enjoy “darkness and silence” today? Not...
May 31, 2010
Now here’s a really interesting idea — from Neal Stephenson and others — for a book . . . or rather an app . . . or a service . . . sort of a wiki or a game . . . oh heck, just read it: The Mongoliad stand out as a possible way forward for post-print publishing. PULP makes this book into something that’s truly the product of...
May 30, 2010
Psychology Today: College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students. ....
May 28, 2010
The Quintessence of Ham: Roger Chartier identifies eighteenth-century concerns about scarcity and abundance which closely parallel the challenges faced by digitial humanists. For example, he notes that the “fear of obliteration obsessed the societies of early modern Europe.” According to Chartier the eighteenth century compounded the...
May 28, 2010
Views: A New Humanities Ph.D. – Inside Higher Ed: Humanities education needs to do more than change the shape of the dissertation, legitimate non-academic jobs, or validate academic jobs that are not tenure-track teaching posts. The crisis in academic humanities, brought on by years of focus on nothing but turning out...