Recieved Ideas

In the spirit of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas. I once began to collect received ideas about digital media or new media. I remember one or two.

When someone talks about cutting edge technology and laments the passing of pencil and paper:
Say, "Pencil and paper is cutting edge technology."

When someone says, isn't it difficult to find good people:
Say, "Good people are always hard to find."

found at random

"CE QUE LE PUBLIC TE REPROCHE, CULTIVE-LE C'EST TOI." JEAN COCTEAU

Charles Lamb's folios

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?
New Year's Eve Esaays of Elia (1823)

I have frequently thought of Lamb when people talk about the loss of books and the rise of e-books. Not that Lamb would have wanted e-books. The point is Lamb would not have wanted what we call books. A paperback would have been, I suspect, as repellant to him as an e-book.
I used to encounter an old professor in the stacks when I was a grad student. On the several occasions when I was carrying an eighteenth century book, he would say to me, "Ah, I see you have a real book."

Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy

The Wikipedia page on the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy :

those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies.

from Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

De Quincey

Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard: but, as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one, but an intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew
Thomas De Quincey

quoted in Virginia Woolf's Common Reader

Reading/Writing

I attended a lecture last night, something I usually enjoy, and no doubt there were details in the lecture to enjoy, but somehow the stress of this time of year makes listening to someone natter on about his job and his concerns seem tedious. I found myself thinking that it would have been an interesting fifteen minute presentation—sad fact when one's career identity is interesting for fifteen minutes but not for forty-five.

Anyway, I opened my Moseskine notebook to take notes, and, when things became dull in the talk, I began to read, and later to write. I did not write about the paper, but about what I read in my notebook: stuff about myself over the past few years.

My point is that there is something about the notebook, about turning back the pages to earlier long-buried selves.

Fearing the Panopticon of Social Networks

Bruce Nussbaum observes, in a brief blog entry, that social network sites are beginning to put up up silos around social media. The implication is that this online world, like the now recorded world of the street, is part of a controlled space, a panopticon, where one can never be sure that someone is watching, or will watch at some point in the future.

Scattered Leaves

I went to the Scattered Leaves exhibit while in Saskatoon. I was impressed by the beauty of these manuscript leaves, something the website illustrations do not show clearly enough. I was interested too in the use of negative space in these manuscripts; even although vellum was valuable the aesthetics of page design mean that the majority of a page is left empty. In this image at the right I have illustrated the idea of page design according to the Golden Ratio where the text would be placed in the larger rectangle with the spiral (see the example in image 30 of the exhibit).

In designing for the web we have returned to the idea of illumination: we seem to want pages that have colour and pictures (even those not associated with the content) instead of having just plain text on an plain page.

The page that seems to come closest to a design for the web might be this annotated page from the Book of John which surrounds the main text with glosses and commentary. It seems odd that in designing for the web we want clutter even although our screen space is much less valuable than vellum.

Typography and the web

I have just been reading about Vertical Motion in web design on the site The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. The explanation of vertical motion is so logical and mathematical I am convinced it must be so, while at the same time I feel it is too mathematical and logical. I agree with the idea of rhythm and I can even see it in the author's plain yet elegant style, but I am most persuaded by the setting of headings with "asymmetrical margins," which they illustrate but do not use in their own design. Surely, this asymmetry works to connect the heading with the content related to it. So, perhaps, when I have the time I will try out their logical and scientific formulas for asymmetry.

Of course, I cannot try these out here on Blogger, where I struggle against a stubborn template with a somewhat jarring vertical motion.

Hand-Drawn Maps

I have been working with some mapping software, Google Earth and with ArcGIS, placing old maps onto satellite maps. Obviously, the old maps are inaccurate, but inaccurate in an interesting way. These cartographers produce a graphical representation that reflects their perception of the land, reflecting a human knowledge that satellite mapping cannot contain.

In Google Earth's "Featured Content" section, there is a 1733 map of North America (Rumsey Historical Maps) which is marvelously detailed and also remarkably out of scale. Some areas are foreshortened and twisted beyond recognition—Nova Scotia is grotesquely distorted, showing a basic misunderstanding of its shape and essential features. Other areas contain details which, while accurate, are out of proportion. For example, the area that Cooper uses as the setting for The Last of the Mohicans is out of scale, being larger than it is in reality (in the figure at the right, the yellow lines running diagonally up the image show the course of the Saint Laurence, which are considerably higher on the 1733 map). This distortion of scale could reflect some facts, especially the importance which the map's creator held a specific area of land, or the degree to which a piece of land had been explored or viewed as significant for navigation or trade.

In other words, the inaccuracies convey meaning and a type of knowledge. They are the kind of street-level knowledge Steven Johnson celebrates in The Ghost Map. Johnson sees today's mashups and online mapping applications as bringing something new to geographical knowledge. As he sees it, one of the key principles of this new generation of online maps is, "the importance of amateurs and unofficial 'local experts'" (Johnson, 225). However, looking at old, hand-drawn maps, one can find evidence of this same local expertise and local focus, if one cares to look for it. However, the mapping software is perhaps the best lens through which we can look to find this distortion.

What do maps bring to texts?

They can illustrate

Namely, maps can allow the reader to understand the relation between people or events and places in a text. The reader can say, "Ah, now I see," and move on with reading.

They can be integral

Maps can be an essential part of the text—an important part of proving an argument or convincing the reader of a fact.

They can be tools for new knowledge and discovery

Maps can be open (perhaps the same way a text can be open) allowing readers to add their own knowledge and experience to the structured information that the maps contain and generate new information and knowledge.

They can be entry points

Instead of being secondary, or supplemental, maps could potentially be the way one enters a text. Much like someone wandering the streets of a city who comes across a plaque marking an historical event, the geogrpahic location is the trigger or starting point for the investigation

The obvious point to add is that with portable networked devices, the map becomes the abstraction of a real physical place one may be standing, and the entry point to an online text.

Does then the text become different. One suddenly sees the text not as the primary entity (the ground and starting point) but as the annotation, as it were to the physical place. In what way could or should the text be reconfigured to represent this changed hierarchy, or should it be?

Thinking about The Ghost Map

Some basic facts about Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map

1. (198-99) The map Dr. John Snow produced (to support his idea that cholera was transmitted by water) did not have a crucial or decisive impact on the debate. The fact is that opinion shifted only gradually to Snow's opinion.
   
   
   
   1. The stature of the map grew retrospectively
   
   
   2. The map was more important as proof of an idea once it had been widely accepted than as evidence which caused a change in public opinion


2. (67) Johnson sees Dr. Snow as a clear example of a researcher able to bridge different fields of science, a researcher with a rare and unusual perspective to bring to bear to a specific problem
   
1. (195) Johnson sees the great virtue of Snow's map as being the combination of the upper-level order of the map with the lower-level knowledge brought about by street-level knowledge and investigation


2. (220-221) Johnson views new online maps as capable of bringing about the same combination of digital maps with street-level, street-smart content
   

The difficulty is perhaps that the character of knowledge that Dr. Snow possesses
(2a) involves being able to see outside the boundaries of ordinary street-level knowledge, but the maps that Johnson imagines involve a mobilization of a democratic street-level knowledge (2b), and therefore could produce only an image of popular opinion, which in 1854 would have been the wrong idea

The Treasure Island Map

Certain books need to have maps. An obvious example is Stevenson's Treasure Island, because, as the author tells us in "My First book--'Treasure Island'", the story originated in the map. He drew the map during a period of his life when he would occasionally paint.

On one of these occasions I made the map of an island; it was elabourately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance "Treasure Island." (xii)

Only later, he tells us, "as I pored upon my map of 'Treasure Island,' the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods" (xii).
I have always been disappointed by the copies of Stevenson's Treasure Island I have owned because they always had inadequate versions of the map or no map at all. The version I have used for these quotations, for example, (The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson published 1904 by Scribner. Found through Google Book Search) does not have a map, although it contains Stevenson's essay (as preface) which discusses the importance of the map.

The connection between publishers and the map is a complex one. Stevenson tells us that the original map was lost by the publisher. Stevenson created a replacement map, "But somehow," he tells us, "it was never 'Treasure Island' to me" (xviii).
For Stevenson, the map of Treasure Island was a tool for imaginative discovery. To map the island was to create a space within which some people could be imagined moving and acting. A map of this sort creates a stage enabling a particular type of action. In addition, it establishes a particular scope or set of boundaries in which events have or will take place.

Because of the simbiotic relationship of the map and the words in the creation of the work, the book cannot be complete without the map. To be immersed in the world of the book involves encountering and studying the map. Certainly I felt this way when I first read the book.

The full map, of which the thumbnail above is a part, is the version I would choose for my edition of the book.

Mapping Books 02

James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans: A narrative of 1757 in the Gutenkarte version with accompanying interactive, context-sensitive map is a good example of a mashup that tries to create a map based on the document. Gutenkarte describes itself as "a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature." Its Book Catalog page gives a description of how the project creates its maps:

Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map.

The project aims to at some point allow readers to edit the geographical points stored in its database for particular works. So, the comments below are based on the documents as they are now posted.


The map which accompanies the first chapter covers the area between New York and the top of Lake Champlain. The place names listed are those, including Fort Edward (see the quotation below) which the GeoParser finds within the text. However, as the image makes clear the large scale of the map, combined with the lack of detail in the map itself, makes the map helpful in only the broadest sense, and, more importantly, not helpful in bringing alive the "spatial component" of Cooper's own description of the setting of the book's opening action.

In Chapter 1, Cooper describes in very clear detail the area in which the action is—at least—to begin:

The news had been brought, toward the decline of a day in midsummer, by an Indian runner, who also bore an urgent request from Munro, the commander of a work on the shore of the "holy lake," for a speedy and powerful reinforcement. It has already been mentioned that the distance between these two posts was less than five leagues. The rude path, which originally formed their line of communication, had been widened for the passage of wagons; so that the distance which had been traveled by the son of the forest in two hours, might easily be effected by a detachment of troops, with their necessary baggage, between the rising and setting of a summer sun. The loyal servants of the British crown had given to one of these forest-fastnesses the name of William Henry, and to the other that of Fort Edward, calling each after a favorite prince of the reigning family. (Gutenkarte's emphasis)

Cooper's verbal "mapping" of the area names the two points Fort William Henry and Fort Edward and describes the distance between them, both in terms of distance—"five leagues"—and in terms of time—a day's travel for a troop of soldiers. So, Cooper gives us a very clear idea of the setting for the action, even giving evidence which the resourceful reader could use to research the history or geography in more detail.

The other shortcomings are also revealing for this type of project...

City mapping: London: A Life in Maps

Gillian Tindall, writing a review of the Bristish Library exhibit London: A Life in Maps in the TLS (2007-01-19 p.13) asks,

In what does the essential quality of location lie, when it can be utterly transformed?

In thinking about Halifax: Warden of the North, the bush of 1749 has been shaped into streets and buildings. Even if the streets bear the same names as they did when laid out by the Royal Engineers, their character, appearance, and uses are utterly different. The bars and brothels of Water Street became warehouses and the warehouses became tourist shops or have been replaced by waterfront condos. So, when I wish to map the location of a building or an encounter or a riot or a celebration that Raddall describes in his book, I can determine the physical location, but what else do I need in order to make the tag significant?

Digression: As a poor first-time tourist in Paris, I purchased a second-hand Blue guide—arguing that the things I would be interested in (e.g. Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Sainte Chapelle) had been there for centuries and therefore a few decades made no difference. What I had not anticipated was that I should stumble across some of the events which the writers of 1949 thought significant, but which were strange to me. I remember sitting in a café in a small square and reading that (in August 1944) a bloody skirmish between the Resistance and the Germans had taken place on this square, and that bullet holes could still be found in the walls of the public building just opposite. I spent some time searching the walls of this building—which seemed freshly cleaned—but no bullet scars remained. I was disappointed. That field of urban combat would have been real for me in a more immediate way if I had been able to see a mark that I could trace precisely to that historical instant.

This kind of mapping requires a kind of triangulation: a point in space, a point in time, and to unite them, an observer (in this case either the writer of the book or the reader). But in addition, the point in space must belong in some significant way to that historical point in time, it must, ideally be the trace of that historical moment. The text with its GPS coordinate tag, the physical point in space and the identifiable point in time (marked with its own tag) must in some sense be locked in a necessary bond. The text to point out and to tell the story of that place and that time.

Mapping Books 01

Google maps and millions of books

Tom Elliott notes that Google "has added overview maps for full-view books in Google Book Search," and he includes an example of a history of New York with street locations marked on a Google map. A commentor on his blog post (Christopher Schmidt) notes that The History of the Peloponnesian War and other works, published online by Gutenkarte, also has "passage-by-passage mapping context."
The results are interesting, showing in particular how the scale of a text can be reflected in the scale of a map. In The Last of the Mohicans, for example the map generated by Chapter 1 shows a wide stretch of the north east stretching from New York to Lake Champlain giving a sense of the geographical scope or scale of the chapter. There is, however, the odd fact that the leader of the French forces Montcalm is misinterpreted as a place in New Hampshire or Vermont (it is difficult to tell which) whereas somehow connecting him with New France would have expanded the scope of the map usefully. Chapter 2 shows a much smaller scale map of the area around Boston, reflecting a narrowing of the narrative scope.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but I don't think so

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Vannevar Bush - As We May Think Section 6

I have been pottering around in the last few days, investigating features I could add to this page. But, apart from their novelty, I ask myself what they will accomplish. The problem is that the resources I use for teaching and for my various research projects build up in my del.icio.us pages, or in scraps of text notes I type into my computer, and the "trails" they were part of are now only represented by the vague folksonomies I created in the heat of the moment, or the titles of text notes I have filed away in a research folder. In other words, the technology creates a kind of order, and this order is much better than nothing, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Beginning again by writing longhand

Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose.
George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-four Part I

I used always to write longhand, but now "apart from very short notes," my work demands—or seems to demand—writing on a computer. Last year, writing a paper, and feeling very restless, I used a combination of Writely.com, MS Word, and pen & paper. I found this impurity of media worked well. The act of research, reading, and writing is now so completely bound up with the web, and web-based resources, that it is impossible, or at least impractical, to separate them.

I want this new blog to be a place where I can bring together resources from a wide range of locations and trace the trails of my readings on a range of topics—teaching, research, other interests. I hope that through this I will be able—as Winston Smith tried to do—to create a space for free thought.