An accomplishment?

People who know me through the SCA can probably guess at the mixture of emotions I experienced upon discovering this site, which seems to be a reader mistaking something I wrote for the SCA "in persona" for an actual 12th century treatise.

The Grateful Dead Archive

Thanks to a fascinating article in the New Yorker, I am now aware of  the vast archive of Grateful Dead concert recordings at  archive.org.  Well over 2000 concerts exist, and a huge number are there, free for  the taking.

I am astonished to think of the sheer physical energy required to produce that much music. A magnificent obsession? And the determination of fans to preserve all that music – the mind boggles.

I've always had a lot of respect for the Grateful Dead, even though I don't qualify as anything but the most casual fan. Listening to some of these concerts however I understand both their limitations and their genius. The music can seem a bit monotonous but then there are these amazing moments where you sit up straight and say, "what was THAT?" or "that's IT!"

Image: The front cover of "Live Dead," an early commercial release.

Provocative films, angry riots: the downside of new media

Doug Saunders at the Globe and Mail has been writing some really good stuff on the Middle East for a while now.  See this for clear-eyed clear thinking, clearly expressed  (my emphases):

After this week’s violence in the Middle East, two things are apparent. First, a lot of Arabs in the region believe that “the United States” created a video mocking the Prophet Mohammed. And second, a lot of people in North America believe that “Egypt” and “Libya” attacked U.S. diplomatic outposts and killed an American ambassador.

Few protesters in Cairo or Benghazi believed that the video Innocence of Muslims could have been created by a largely unknown group of anti-Muslim activists in California, a group so obscure that it took U.S. reporters more than a day to identify them – or that this network of bigots could be allowed to exist simply because American laws protect freedom of speech. This could only be a direct product of Washington.
After all, this was, until recently, how things worked in their own countries. If something was allowed to exist in Egypt or Libya, the authoritarian government must have encouraged it to exist. Ergo, this wasn’t some fringe oddball in California offending them; it could only have been the United States assaulting them.

Likewise, many Americans, including prominent ones, simply could not believe that a consulate or embassy could be stormed by anti-American protesters without the active consent, and likely direct involvement, of the country’s government. These attacks prove that America has “lost Egypt” or “been betrayed by Libya,” commentators wrote, likening this week’s relatively small-scope protests to Iran’s 1979 revolution

We need to take three lessons from this week’s events.

The first is that both Arab and Western citizens – and sometimes politicians – are failing to appreciate the polyphonic nature of democratic nations. This has always been a problem for the U.S. and its neighbours: One-note nations such as Russia and Iran have never really believed that every political statement, protest march and YouTube video emerging from a diverse Western country isn’t orchestrated by the national government.
But now it’s also a problem for the new Arab democracies. Suddenly, they are large, and contain multitudes. They have become polyphonic. We should not mistake the signal from the noise, even when things become very noisy, indeed.

The second is to realize that the new freedoms – both political and electronic – allow the most obscure and marginal figures to dominate the agenda. ...

The third is to realize that, as a result of this, these fringe movements are increasingly threatening, far out of proportion of their actual numbers, not just within their small sphere of action but on a larger stage. The past decade has seen a largely unnoticed ascent of the circle of xenophobic activists behind the short film that triggered this violence, their rise into mainstream politics, and the failure of mainstream conservatives to confront and denounce them...

This is a new, wide-open world – one whose freedoms, if we aren’t careful, can easily be seized and abused.

A new era in publishing (might be "The Call of All Nations")

At the ccel.org site, they have an electronic copy of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History.

And this note.

This book has been accessed more than 1280134 times since July 13, 2005.

This is not the only copy on the Web, either.

Information overload

 Ken Stange said this video was superlative and he was right.

"If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem; maybe it's a fact."

Read this

Jeff Sypeck at Quid plura, though a great user of electronic materials, expresses his fears and sorrow over the eclipse and devaluation of the codex (the physical book):

...Megan McArdle concludes:

What will happen to the pleasures of pulling a random book from the shelves of a home where you are a weekend guest?

They’ll be replaced by other pleasures, like instant gratification.  And it’s probably more gain than loss.  But I’m just a little bit sad, all the same.

It’s not just about “pleasures.” What about the brainy kid whose parents are either too poor, too disdainful of education, or just too ignorant to give him a Kindle or an iPad? Yes, nearly anyone who wants Internet access can get it, and inquisitive kids are resourceful kids, and the Internet offers brilliant opportunities for intellectual exploration—but there’s no reason to diminish or destroy one convenient, low-tech, time-tested way to feed the brain.

“But you know,” croaks yon straw man, flailing his arms, “it’s expensive to store books in a big building and pay for a staff to maintain them.” Of course it is—but preserving and propagating knowledge is a core function of a college or university. Most American campuses have dozens of costlier programs and facilities that would wither if anyone were challenged to justify their educational merit.

Harvard isn’t trashing a quarter to one-third of the books in its libraries or turning them into glorified Internet cafes. If your college your kid attends is, you may want to ask a dean why they assume their graduates will never compete against kids with big-name degrees. (You might also ask them: “Would you send your child here?”)

* * *

But then why would most people associate libraries with learning anymore? Ads in D.C. Metro stations tout public libraries as places to take yoga classes and hold meetings, and the library system’s website assures the aliterate that a new library “offers more than just books.” (Whew! No one will think you’re a nerd!)

My own neighborhood branch is extremely popular, and the staff is terrific, but when lawyers in million-dollar homes use their library cards to check out government-subsidized Backyardigans DVDs for their kids, we aren’t exactly living the Carnegie dream.

* * *

Maybe there’s hope. In November, I sat in a bayou and beguiled my seven-year-old nephew with the exploits of Beowulf. Last week, by phone, he told me that during a recent visit to the local library, his quest for a sufficiently gory version of Beowulf led him to books about Theseus and the minotaur, the labors of Hercules, and Odin and Loki.

These books may change the course of his life; they may be a fad. Either way, a first-grader in rural Louisiana senses what pundits and college administrators forget: Random access to analog information is a freedom all its own. The Internet is wondrous, and e-readers are great, but if you let technology circumscribe and define your intellectual world, you literally won’t ever know what you’ve missed.

 And there is more here.

 Image:  How long?

Music for Easter from the future

Again from TED.com, again thanks to Ken Stange.

This isn't good

From the Times of India:

Pak govt told to block anti-Islamic websites
PTI,Mar 1, 2011, 04.52pm IST

LAHORE: With Facebook and several other websites allegedly featuring blasphemous material against Prophet Mohammed and the Quran, the Pakistan government has informed a court here that all required steps are being taken to block objectionable and anti-Islamic portals.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and Information Technology Ministry are blocking all internet websites that feature blasphemous material, Deputy Attorney General Naveed Inayat Malik told the Lahore High Court yesterday.

After Malik gave this assurance on behalf of the federal government, Chief Justice Ijaz Chaudhry disposed of petitions seeking a ban on Facebook and several other websites.

An inter-ministerial committee is screening websites to block access to blasphemous and anti-Islamic material, Malik said.

This on top of the assassination of the Minister of Minorities, a Christian who had opposed the use of blasphemy laws against non-Muslim Pakistanis.

The Internet as a force for freedom?

Maybe not!

A knowledgeable and thought-provoking interview at RFE/RL.

Harassmap.org -- using web-based publicity in Cairo to fight the harassment of women

From PRI:

Cairo is a bustling city. Its streets are almost always full. But walking around for women here can be unpleasant.
EMAN MORSI: You get people just saying things like hey sweetie, hey honey… Or just insults.
Eman Morsi is an Egyptian woman in her twenties.
EMAN MORSI: Another type of street harassment is when they just brush across. And that kinds of tends to be a bit intimidating. There’s also when they grope you and stuff. I think pretty much many women went through that but we don’t really talk about that.
That’s why a crowd of young Egyptians gathered last week at a cultural center in Cairo. We all know that sexual harassment is a wide-spread phenomenon, online activist Sara El-Demerdash told the audience.
The kids – many with laptops on their knees – were being introduced to a new website that hopes to help change that.
The site allows women to send emails or SMS messages reporting harassment. The information is used to create an online map of harassment in Cairo: HarassMap. Rebecca Chiao is with the HarassMap team.
Rebecca Chiao: “The goal of our effort actually is not just to create a map. The goal is to change the social acceptability of harassment. So, the map is the first step.”
Chiao is an American who’s lived in Egypt for many years, working on women’s rights. She and three Egyptian colleagues created HarassMap. The online map will help identify harassment hotspots, says Chiao.
Rebecca Chiao: “And after identifying them, we’ll go to the communities in groups of volunteers and speak to people with roots in community, you know, shop owners, and use the map to show them: this is what’s happening in your neighborhood.”

...

Nihad Al Qumsan heads the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights. A 2008 survey the center carried out showed that about 80 percent of women in Egypt have faced some form of harassment.
NIHAD AL QUMSAN: “When they’re speaking generally, men will say that harassment is the result of women wearing provocative clothes. But when they filled out our survey they admitted they also harass women who are veiled. The men try to find an excuse for their behaviour, but most women in Egypt are veiled. And anyway a woman is free to wear what she wants.”

See Harassmap.org (English version).

Good-bye to dreams of uniqueness

For some time now, I have been thinking that the Internet is a great eroder of that sense of uniqueness that many of us have been attached to.   I have a rather odd last name, and I have never met anyone named Muhlberger who was not related to me. My father, who lived until his mid-80s, never did either. But now, thanks to the Internet, I know that there are a fair number of Muhlbergers in South America and even more in German-speaking Europe. The latter group includes one Steven Muhlberger, who like a variety of other Muhlbergers appeared in a scientific journal in a footnote.  Of course I could have guessed that there must be other Muhlberger around – in fact I had evidence  of their  existence  – but search engines easily throwing out numbers of Muhlbergers have made a bigger impact on my view of life.I may not have  physically stumbled across any nonrelated Muhlbergers, but they are easy enough to find if you really are interested.

There is a humorous report on the Internet which makes a point of non-uniqueness, or at least our realization of that situation. Chuck Shepherd, in connection with News of the Weird, back in 2003 assembled a list of things that can no longer be considered unusual, since they have been reported in the media so often. (I believe John Emerson referred this to me.)  Here are the first 10 of those items. No proof whatsoever is offered at these things have been reported ad nauseam, or just happen to occur all the time, but you know they have been. Just ask your stomach:

1. an old, widely-advertised phone-sex number is reassigned to a
church/charity
2. suspicious package thought to be a bomb, turns out to be something stupid
3. robber leaves his ID [wallet or appointment card for probation officer or etc.] at the scene
4. peace/brotherhood conference erupts into violence
5. robber on getaway accidentally hails unmarked police car
6. political candidate dies but still wins the election
7. family thinks he's dead, but he's not and attends his own funeral
8. hunters shoot each other
9. funeral home owner neglects/mixes up bodies
10. "victimized" drug buyer complains to police that someone sold him weak or bogus drugs

Plenty more where those came from!

The Muslim Brotherhood's own version of Facebook

From Arabist.net:

The National's Matt Bradley has a story on the Muslim Brotherhood's Facebook clone:

IkhwanBook joins a veritable suite of Brotherhood-affiliated (“Ikhwan” is Arabic for “Brotherhood”) websites, such as IkhwanWiki, IkhwanWeb, IkhwanGoogle – a “Cusotmized [sic] search engine specialized in searching muslim botherhood’s [sic] websites” – and IkhwanTube. Many of the sites are published in English and each of their functions is tailored to Brotherhood-related content.

The article then wonders why the Ikhwan bothers: IkhwanBook is after all technologically extremely inferior to the real Facebook, and the other sites are not that sophisticated either. And there are plenty of young Brothers on Facebook — anyone who's ever met them can expect to be friended within 24 hours, after all.

Brian Whitaker, noting the story, writes:

The interesting and slightly puzzling question is what the Brotherhood hopes to achieve by this. It's hard to imagine the Ikhwan sites gaining anything like the popularity of those they replicate, and they look like a move towards exclusivity which is generally uncharacteristic of the Brotherhood.

I think both Matt and Brian miss the point slightly. The first reason for having all these sites — and believe me, there are a LOT of Ikhwan sites out there, practically one for every governorate of Egypt plus many more on specific issues before you reach the Facebook and Wikipedia clones — is that there simply is enthusiasm to build them. Beyond the apparent correlation one notices between tech-savvy and religious inclination (just visit any of the computer malls on Midan Sphinx in Cairo), there are a lot of young talented programmers in Egypt who would love to show their enthusiasm for the gamaa by building websites for it. And there are a lot of young people in the Brotherhood, no matter how elderly the leadership is, for whom these websites may be a way of expressing their views as well as gain practice in the art of political and religious rhetoric.

The second reason is that this resonates with the groupthink and in-group mentality that the Muslim Brotherhood cultivates. These sites won't replace Facebook or Wikipedia, they are a virtual gated community (gated, that is, by strong symbolic references and imagery that are likely to alienate those not already versed in the Ikhwan universe) for like-minded people, where they can create a more orderly version of the sites that they copy and where the membership is self-selecting. The Muslim Brothers tend to socialize together, marry within each others' families, work together (or for each other) and a whole lot more. It's a support group as much as a political organization. It makes sense that, online, they will tend towards a closed ecosystem — alongside the open internet, not instead of it.

It's just the way online forums thrive: through community-building. That's true for computer geeks and religious geeks

.

Re-creating a lost art on Facebook

A long time ago, not quite so far back as Plato's time, but before Google, there was a particular kind of conversation that intelligent people would enter into. They would be sitting around drinking coffee or beer, at a party or at work, and stumble onto some interesting subject. Someone would ask a question and no one would know the answer. Since the people involved were intelligent and well-informed, they would attempt usually in a good-natured way, to figure it out.

I have been half jokingly saying for months now that this kind of conversation is obsolete. The answer to all of these interesting and obscure questions seems to be "look it up!" ( Meaning on the Internet, probably using Google.) At least for people temporarily isolated from the net, an art was dead or maybe just dying.

I discovered over the last week that I was too pessimistic. Subject of some significance came up in a post to Facebook: have the Afghans beaten every army of invasion which ever tried to take the country? Including Alexander the Great?

This precis of Afghan history has become a great cliché for obvious reasons, and I am not sure I believe it. I drew the line at Alexander. The person who raised the issue this time is an intelligent military historian so I engaged in the conversation. And so did several other people. It was really neat. And the issue remains unresolved. As so often in the old days.

What this proves to me is that there is always room for intelligent conversation that goes beyond the mechanics of "looking it up." I you really want to discuss the fortunes of empires in what is now Afghanistan, you are going to need a good library and a convincing argument. Wikipedia is not good enough.

Image: an ancient Greek symposium.

The *new* menace of Wikipedia!

Over at Wormtalk and Slugspeak, Michael Drout, who has recently been a TV talking head, drops this alarming observation:

What I could glean of the script [for Clash of the Gods] from the questions made it seem pretty decent (which has been borne out so far). The writers/producers had done good work tracking down reasonable information. However, it was a little surprising how much the agenda (as opposed to the actual content) seemed to be set by Wikipedia. For example, I got asked a question about the Canterbury Charm, which I hadn't studied very much. I was impressed at how wide-ranging the inquiry was until I happened upon the Wikipedia page for Thor and found the Canterbury Charm referenced. I'm not a Wiki-hater, but the influence of Wikipedia on the script does give yet another reason why professors in relevant fields should perhaps look at the relevant Wiki entries and correct them if need be (though I, sadly, haven't gotten around to doing this yet).

Urk!

E-books: in general and specifically at Nipissing University

Earlier this month, Charlotte Innerd gave a presentation on the state of e-book publishing as it applies to availability of material at Nipissing University. Despite my constant use of the Internet for scholarly and personal purposes, I didn't know at least half of this stuff. She has posted a voice/slide presentation and I highly recommend that you take a look. It is less than 10 minutes long.

Thanks, Charlotte!

Audience atomization overcome

You may or may not find this essay by Jay Rosen as recapitulating the obvious. The conclusion:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.

Which is how I got to my three word formula for understanding the Internet’s effects in politics and media: “audience atomization overcome.”

The future of academic publication

In my usual daily wandering through a number of blogs, most of them concerned with foreign policy and American politics, I ran across this post at the blog Open Left. It is a response by Chris Bowers to another blog post by David Appell that basically argues, in an unfortunate ad hominem fashion, that blogs are worthless for discussing any serious issue. (The critic includes his own blog in his rather sweeping statements.) Rather, he says one should go to serious magazines and journals for the real stuff since what you find there is backed up by in-depth investigation.

I could reply to Appell myself, but I am more interested in something that Bowers says in defending his own devotion to blogging:

I have a personal stake in this, of course. Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20's trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academia, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The "experts" that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have. Either they were wrong about my writing, or I just wasn't writing about the best topics for me. Probably a combination of both, but I'm pretty sure the balance of evidence shows they were wrong. (Man, I am still really angst ridden about this.)

It seems likely that somewhere in Bowers's soul he thinks of himself as a failed academic. I, as an employed and high-ranking academic at a small but respectable academic institution, think he has nothing to apologize for (I am talking about activity level, not the specific things that he has written.) He does talk about important issues. And I note that if he and others like him had left it to the established media to cover and interpret what is going on in the world, things would be much worse than they are now. But again that's not the point of this post. The point is this:

50 million freaking direct page views!

In that fact I see the doom of the academic journal as it now exists, in particular the paper version thereof. Fifty million direct page views!
I don't fear for the academic book actually, because I think books, at least good ones, provide an in-depth experience that nothing else has been able to rival so far. But when it comes to investigating the small pointsthat lead to the big insights, or clear up the small mysteries that clarify the big picture, why not do it all electronically? (Preservation questions apart of course; again, nothing beats paper yet. And there are other practical questions to be considered.)

I am quite aware that most so-called academic blogs, including my own, are made up of snippets that may or may not be developed into some important scholarly contribution -- and usually not. But blogs and the habit of reading them is a rather new thing. See how they grow.

One example of the direction they might go can be seen in the medievalist group blog In the Middle. Here some like-minded scholars, with a penchant for complex literary theory that sometimes leaves me behind, are throwing out some of their best new ideas in what might be seen as half developed form, so that their blog partners and any passing reader can think about them and comment, favorably or unfavorably. This is not instead of the usual academic activity. Material on In the Middle relates directly to conference papers, potential articles, and monographs being worked on by the blog owners, material it should be noted that otherwise I never would have heard of (being a more or less conventional historian). I'm part of an unexpected audience that was attracted to the blog by a reference to some other blog. And there must be many others, all of whom are in a position to comment, at whatever length. Who knows what some half-random reader may say that may contribute to this remarkable productivity?

This is just one way the Web can work for you.

Working academics who are reading this: be honest. When was the last time you sat down with a congenial group and really kicked around an idea that appeared in an academic article? There's nothing better for getting the intellect really working, for shooting down mistaken ideas, for putting together half-formed thoughts into useful ones. But they are rare, those in-person opportunities. But the Internet, for us lucky ones, is always available. And damned cheap to compared to paper journals.

PS: what about copyediting, you ask? It's dead anyway, as I'm here attest on the basis of much recent reading of ink-on-paper publications by big-name scholarly presses.

Image: Fifty million marks, Germany, 1923.

And another video goes viral...

...one can hope.



This may be the top cultural achievement of the 21st century (so far). I'm not kidding. A bit of an antidote to all the crap flying around.

Thanks to Jennifer Lynn Jordan at Per Omnia Secula for alerting me. "Pretty remarkable" indeed.

But...no yoga? :-)

Update: more on the video. The NY Times is right to say the Internet is central to the matter.

Mapping the all-too-narrow boundaries of human creativity

From Dr. Nokes.

Some interesting insights on argumentation and writing

This week I stumbled across an interesting site by a well-known IT expert, Paul Graham. His site has a variety of purposes, including attracting people with good start up proposals. What I found interesting and worth blogging about were two articles on communication -- or perhaps I should say, rhetoric.

One is probably intended as a guide for people who have never thought very seriously about the structure of arguments, but as Internet users now find themselves involved in quite a few of them. One might call this a pocket guide to rhetoric and dialectic.

Then there's a very short but useful discussion of how Graham thinks effective writing can be accomplished. The essence of the article is:

As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong;...

Oops, I'm duplicating the essay.

Recommended.