Robbins Library Notes

Good afternoon, readers!

I’m posting Thursday afternoon, rather than Friday morning, this week as I will be out tomorrow.

Today’s offering is an editorial on the vook that appeared in a recent edition of The Crimson.  While I think the author, James McAuley, raises some interesting points, his claims for the imminent demise of the “traditional reader” and the printed book are, I think, a bit exaggerated.

There’s no doubt that electronic media and books will reshape the way we read and interact with words and text.  There’s no doubt that certain things will fall by the wayside and be lost.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either.  Admittedly, the change will be difficult at time, but, then, when is change otherwise?

Nonetheless, I still fail to understand why there must be a simplistic either/or when it comes to the future of books and print media — i.e., it’s either print/or electronic, nothing else, or so the message seems to be.  Why?   Isn’t the vook a blending of print text with multimedia?  Why can’t hybrids such as the vook exist comfortably along print-only and electronic-only texts?  Why can’t different forms of reading exist without one “having” to vanish?  For a good counterpoint along these lines, see Lane Wallace’s recent piece in TheAtlantic.com.

And “must” the “traditional reader” vanish completely?  Seems more like marketing hype to me.  (Indeed, the second comment makes the interesting claim that the piece is merely an advertisement for the vook masquerading as an editorial.  I’m inclined myself to agree.)

While I’m no longer a Luddite, I still must repeat — caveat lector.  Don’t mistake marketing hype, propaganda, and advertising spin for the way things “must” be.  And don’t throw out print texts simply to ride the wave of mere novelty for novelty’s sake.

What are your thoughts on this, readers?

Good morning, readers!

Lots of great items in this week’s Library News & Notes. Some of the most interesting include:

• A Bing/Google comparison
• “The end of theory in science?”
• “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data”
• “58 Essential Resources For Every Mac Geek”
• More on Twitter and Wolfram|Alpha

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

I came across this piece, “Blind Spots: Humanists must plan their digital future,” by Johanna Drucker, in the latest issue of Library News & Notes. I’m including this piece today, to provoke some thought on how the library of the future for the humanities would look like.

Drucker starts out by discussing how Stanford University is in the process of building a new library for its engineering collection, and how the original proposal for the facility met with strong opposition from the engineering faculty. A new design, based on more realistic expectations and continuity of digital and print media, arose out of collaboration by faculty and library professionals.

Drucker likewise sees collaboration between humanities faculty and library professionals as being critical for future endeavors for humanities research and collections:

The task of modeling an environment for scholarship (not just individual projects, but an environment, with a suite of tools for access, use, and research activity) is not a responsibility that can be offloaded onto libraries or technical staffs. I cannot say this strongly or clearly enough: The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task. After all, what will such “research portals” do? What kinds of work will they be designed to support? Editing? Annotation? Aggregation of leaves of manuscripts scattered at remote institutions? Collaborative writing? Close readings? Data mining? Information display? Multimedia writing? Networked conversation? Publishing? Those are enormous questions, to which no scholar would have the same set of answers as another. No scholar would have the same requirements. But creating boutique, custom solutions on a project-by-project basis is not practical, and the labor involved is too costly. The scope of the task ahead is nothing short of modeling scholarly activity anew in digital media. To answer that challenge, humanists have to do more than wave their hands at the technical professionals.

In fact, she argues, humanities scholars need to step up and be active participants in shaping the library and digital environments to best fit their research needs:

Many humanities principles developed in hard-fought critical battles of the last decades are absent in the design of digital contexts. Here is a short list: the subjectivity of interpretation, theoretical conceptions of texts as events (not things), cross-cultural perspectives that reveal the ideological workings of power, recognition of the fundamentally social nature of knowledge production, an intersubjective, mediated model of knowledge as something constituted, not just transmitted. For too long, the digital humanities, the advanced research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue with computational methods, has taken its rules and cues from digital exigencies.

If we are interested in creating in our work with digital technologies the subjective, inflected, and annotated processes central to humanistic inquiry, we must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for our future work. Nothing less than the way we understand knowledge and our tasks as scholars are at stake. Software and hardware only put into effect the models structured into their design.

Moreover, university administrators need to see such work as more valuable than they have to date. Faculty members and graduate students committed to remodeling knowledge with innovative approaches to scholarship have to be supported. With rare exceptions, the work, too easily seen as tool-building, has occurred at the edges of digital projects and is usually financed with grants. That does not result in approaches that can be generalized beyond specific projects.

Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn’t designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to “them” is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

What do you think, readers, of Drucker’s argument? What do you think a future library for the humanities should look like? What sort of digital formats, media, etc. do you envision? How can print be integrated into this?

Good morning, readers!

I came across these two articles while browsing through Bookforum.com a few days ago.

In the first article, “Knowledge Overload,” Ken Coates examines the explosion of scholarly publishing in recent years, arguing that this explosions makes it basically impossible for anyone to keep up with any scholarly research, except in very narrow sub-disciplines.  After offering examples of how the flood of information and knowledge results in little to none of it being assimilated and making a difference, he concludes by writing:

We have collectively created the equivalent of an academic monsoon over the past three decades, with no change in the forecast for the coming years. Without a major reconsideration of how we share and use information, how we keep up with the field, and how we recognize academic accomplishment, we will continue to add to the floodwaters, all the while spending less attention on whether or not anyone reads our work, listens to our presentations, or appreciates our professional contributions. Academe 2.0 offers tools to build more effective dikes and even to regulate the flow. But we need to realize that the lakes at the end of the bloated academic rivers – our faculty, researchers and students – have finite capacity, in terms of time and ability to assimilate information. Controlling the scholarly input is crucial to ensuring that we actually learn from and about each other, and ensuring that our academic work truly makes a difference.

What do you think, readers?

Scott McLemee, in “Print or Byte,” offers his views on how the current economic crisis will push academic publishing to a more digital environment, one in which print on demand and digital editions will become more common.  He argues, though, that this will not signal the death of the printed book, as some claim.  I like his predictions, and agree that print and digital media can co-exist.

Thoughts?

Good morning, readers!

I found this interesting article on print-on-demand publishing yesterday, and offer it for your reading pleasure this morning.

Why?  Well, for one thing, it’s my belief that print-on-demand publishing will be the direction in which book publishing moves in the future.  It is more economical, for one thing.  For another, it is more environmentally friendly: books are only printed when purchased, rather than having huge runs of copies printed, as they are now.  For a third, it is more democratic, allowing more people to publish their work, rather than having publishers rely on a small stable of highly-profitable authors.  Finally, books will be able to remain in-print for longer periods of time, since publishers will not have to keep inventory on hand.

Naturally, there are drawbacks, such as the potential for lack of editorial review for manuscripts.  Also, there will likely be an increase in vanity publishing.  Another potential problem is how to link these works to e-book readers like the Kindle, with its closed architecture platform?

Still, I don’t think that these drawbacks are insurmountable.

What do you think, readers?

Amazon releases free Kindle app for iPhone

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday!

I’m going to continue to look at Amazon’s Kindle today, with an article I found in “American Libraries Direct”: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book: Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle’s lead will become a very short story.

Tim O’Reilly looks at why Amazon’s decision to use a proprietary, closed architecture may hurt the early success of the Kindle in the long run.

Good morning, readers!

Yesterday, I received information about the court-approved Notice to the Google Book Search settlement, and have been asked to update you about this.  You can read the Notice at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/notice.html. This Notice, according to the e-mail I received, “summarizes the settlement, important terms, claims process, and key dates.”

Additionally, “rightsholders may now claim their works at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com.”

Good morning, readers! Welcome back!

Via Bookforum.com: some interesting commentary on Robert Darnton’s piece on Google about which I recently posted.

I’m also curious to know what people think about Amazon’s second-generation Kindle e-book reader. I agree that e-books will change and re-shape the way we read — not necessarily a bad thing — but I’m still not sold on the idea that they will supplant paper books entirely.

What do you think?

Good morning, readers!

I received an announcement yesterday about the launch of PhilPapers.org, a new “virtual environment for philosophical research.”  Here’s the text:

PhilPapers

http://philpapers.org

I’m pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  PhilPapers has been developed at the ANU Centre for Consciousness by David Bourget and me, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and  books in philosophy, concentrating especially although not exclusively on items that are available online.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to http://philpapers.org and try it yourself.  A casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on. However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you’ll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

At the moment, the PhilPapers database includes entries for 188,000 articles (typically via publication information and/or links, with full papers stored elsewhere).  The database has been compiled mainly through automatically harvesting many Internet sources.  It includes entries for (i) 124,000 journal articles harvested from the websites of more than 200 philosophical journals, (ii) 33,000 books harvested from the Library of Congress database, (iii) 18,000 books and articles from the MindPapers database, (iv) 7000 papers harvested from more than 1000 personal websites, (v) 5000 papers harvested from Internet archives, (vi) 1300 historical e-texts from the Episteme Links database, and (vii) a few hundred user submissions.  About 95% of the articles are available online (via links to journal sites, personal sites, archives, and so on), while about 17% of the books are available online (typically via a Google Books preview).  The database itself is growing fast.  For example, the addition of books has just started and is still in progress (so far we have only added books published after 1970).

A key feature of PhilPapers is a fine-grained category system for philosophical areas.  The system is an extension of the MindPapers category system, and now has about 3000 categories under five main clusters with 6-8 main areas each.  Of course the category system is still very tentative and is subject to ongoing refinement.  To date, there has been only very partial categorization of papers, through limited automatic and manual classification, and through inheriting categories from MindPapers. However, we have developed a number of categorization tools (e.g., a “categorize” link under each paper) that users can use to classify entries themselves.  Our hope is that over time, in a Wiki-like way, this will lead to every entry being categorized in 1-3 categories, with resulting dynamic bibliographies for all sorts of areas of philosophy.  If you have relevant expertise, please contribute by categorizing papers.  The PhilPapers site has much more information under the “help” menu.

Discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers.  These are devoted to discussing the papers and books in PhilPapers, as well as to discussing other philosophical and professional issues.  By clicking “Discuss” under a paper or book, you will be given the opportunity either to create a discussion forum for that item, or to contribute to an ongoing discussion.  Each such forum will be included in turn in encompassing forums for associated areas of philosophy, where these encompassing forums can also include other discussion threads, not associated with papers and books.  There are also forums for general philosophical discussion, for discussion of professional issues, and for discussion of PhilPapers itself.  These forums are something of a grand experiment, but we encourage users to use them, in the hope that these might become a central locus for discussion among philosophers.

PhilPapers is primarily intended for professional philosophers and graduate students, although anyone interested in the field is welcome to use it.  Non-professionals are subject to some restrictions in contributing articles (contributions are possible, but they won’t be included in the default “professional authors only” filter for listing entries), and in contributing to the discussion forums (for which they are subject to a daily posting limit).  We hope that this arrangement strikes a reasonable balance between keeping the site accessible to all, and maintaining a high quality that will maximize the value of the site to researchers in the field.

PhilPapers has been through a month or so of beta testing with a limited number of users, who have uncovered various bugs and other issues, but there are certainly many problems that remain.  For now, the site remains in “beta” mode, and we encourage all users to report any bugs that they encounter, via the bug report link at the top of every page, or through the bug report forum.  (So far we’ve mainly optimized the site for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer, and there may be problems with other browsers.)  There are also numerous glitches in the database, especially for articles harvested from personal websites.  In these cases, we encourage users who know the correct information to correct the entries themselves, using the “edit” link under each entry.  We’ll monitor edits, but we hope that the editing functionality will lead to a self-correcting system over time.  (Users might start by correcting any errors in the listings for their own articles.)  More generally, we encourage you to give feedback and suggestions in the forums dedicated to discussion of PhilPapers.

Finally, I should say that this site is largely a product of the programming and design genius of David Bourget, who had the idea for the project in the first place and who has done most of the hard work. He has done this in the middle of writing his Ph.D. thesis and having articles published in Nous, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.  (My own role has mainly been limited to designing the category system and to endless discussion.)  A major role has also been played by Wolfgang Schwarz, who designed the system for harvesting papers from individuals’ websites, and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features to the site.

–David Chalmers.