Total today: 2,846 words
Total for the month: 2,846 words
Matthew Kirschenbaum (Twitter)Unspoken in all the academic flutter about leaving Twitter is this simple truth: I’ve spent a decade and a half (!!) building reputation capital (to what end, you can judge) in this place. If I leave, NONE of that is portable. It is my labor, and I’m not abdicating it lightly.
— Matthew Kirschenbaum (@mkirschenbaum) November 1, 2022
Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online communities, not just an exodus from a troubled platform.
— Ethan “no blue check before it was cool” Zuckerman (@EthanZ) November 4, 2022
Back to Mastodon…
In the book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester describes the pigeonhole and slip system that professor James Murray used to create the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors essentially put out a call to readers to note down interesting every day words they found in their reading along with examples sentences and references. They then collected these words alphabetically into pigeonholes and from here were able to collectively compile their magisterial dictionary. Those who are fans of the various methods of knowledge collection and management represented by the index card-based commonplace book or the zettelkasten, will appreciate this scheme as a method of collectively finding and collating knowledge. It’s akin to Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s work on creating the Mundaneum, but focused on the niche area of lexicography and historical linguistics.
The Professor and the Madman is broadly the fascinating story of Dr. W. C. Minor, an insane asylum patient, who saw the call to collect words and sentences began a written correspondence with James Murray by sending in over ten thousand slips with words from his personal reading.
A similar word collecting scheme is currently happening on the internet now, though perhaps with a bit more focus on interesting neologisms (and hopefully without me being cast as an insane asylum patient.) The lovely folks at the online dictionary Wordnik have been using the digital annotation tool Hypothes.is to collect examples of words as they happen in the wild. One can create a free account on the Hypothes.is service and quickly and easily begin collecting words for the effort by highlighting example sentences and tagging with “wordnik” and “hw-[InsertFoundWordHere]”.
So for example, this morning I was reading about the clever new animations in the language app Duolingo and came across a curious new word (at least to me): viseme.
To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.
So I clicked on my handy browser extension for Hypothes.is, highlighted the sentence with a bit of context, and tagged it with “wordnik” and “hw-viseme”. The “hw-” prefix ostensibly means “head word” which is how lexicographers refer to the words you see defined in dictionaries.
Then the fine folks at Wordnik are able to access the public annotations matching the tag Wordnik, and use Hypothes.is’ API to pull in the collections of new words for inclusion into their ever-growing corpus.
Since I’ve collected interesting new words and neologisms for ages anyway, this has been a quick and easy method of helping out other like minded word collectors along the way. In addition to the ability to help out others, a side benefit of the process is that the collected words are all publicly available for reading and using in daily life! You can not only find the public page for Wordnik words on Hypothes.is, but you can subscribe to it via RSS to see all the clever and interesting neologisms appearing in the English language as collected in real time! So if you’re the sort who enjoys touting new words at cocktail parties, a rabid cruciverbalist who refuses to be stumped by this week’s puzzle, or a budding lexicographer yourself, you’ve now got a fantastic new resource! I’ve found it to be far more entertaining and intriguing than any ten other word-of-the-day efforts I’ve seen in published or internet form.
If you like, there’s also a special Hypothes.is group you can apply to join to more easily aid in the effort. Want to know more about Wordnik and their mission, check out their informative Kickstarter page.
I almost jumped yesterday when Jim Groom and the Reclaim Hosting spun up a Mastodon instance focused on DS 106 at https://social.ds106.us/about. I’ve followed a large part of that community for over a decade, but didn’t have the bandwidth.
This morning I noticed that Boris Mann and gang have spun up a Mastodon instance around the idea of tools for thought which dovetails with their efforts at Tools for Thought Rocks! So I’m going to bite there to see what happens and have the experience of a smaller specific and focused timeline to watch.
I still have to figure out how to best dovetail the experience into my own IndieWeb site given potential limitations with backfeed of POSSE posts from Brid.gy. Perhaps I’ll just use it as read only to start and simply federate my content there? We’ll see. It’s solely an experiment, but some of those few already there are people I see regularly. No guarantees on how much I’ll post there, but if it’s your favorite reader/platform you can find me at @chrisaldrich@toolsforthought.rocks. Most likely anything I post to it will be more relevant to thinking.
As ever, following me directly via my own site is the best way to ensure you’re getting the best of everything.
Cusick (C.IM)What should I have been reading in 2017 to have heard about the #fediverse five years earlier?
I clearly need to upgrade my sources of information.
Maybe all of them.
#feditips #newhere #eternalseptember #twittermigration #diversity #reading #histodons #news #indieweb #openweb #foss #web #masto #fedilab #fedi22
I'll rephrase:
I'm a heavy reader.
The volume of what I read online spiked substantially from 2017-2020 while I worked at Longreads. Before that, I was in publishing and the book industry for years. I've been thinking about how writing reaches a general audience for nearly a decade.
My question is not:
How stupid am I?
or
How stupid are millions of people, who all lived under a rock until last week?
My question is:
What publication or website would I have needed to be reading in 2017 that covered new fediverse developments so regularly and exhaustively that if I so much as looked at it that year, I would not have missed the work you were all doing?
Personally, as a favorite major source, I’ve been reading and keeping up with the IndieWeb community (indieweb.org, their wiki, newsletter, and chat) since about 2014. Their community, while relatively small, is large and diverse enough that I’ve seen and been exposed to a variety of technologies, online movements, and even social movements in the last several years that I’m sure I would have never seen in the mainstream until after the sea changes had already occurred. Without an insignificant amount of attention they also manage to do it all with a flourish of kindness and care.
The secondary issue isn’t just seeing or hearing about it, but also having the bandwidth to delve into it, explore it, make sense of it, or even do something about it. I might posit that IndieWeb is working on something even more powerful and subtle than the Fediverse idea, but that it’s not quite ready for mass consumption (yet).
If I had to choose a single source to optimize for time and attention across a variety of sources and topics, I might recommend following Kevin Marks (also at @KevinMarks) who consistently sees and finds some of the best in technology that’s out there.
On the flip side, I’m sure that there are a variety of your own sources that you consume that may prefigure other changes and shifts. If you throw them over, it’s possible that you’ll missing seeing something else that may have otherwise been more obvious. Again, you have to adjust your time and attention to things which matter most to you.
It’s now been redubbed the Quidditch chair by the household.
If they were book titles, I’d rather read the first though.
As a result, while everyone is exploring new platforms and new online spaces for maintaining their identities and communicating, I’m going to suggest something else interesting to shift our online social patterns: Instead of spending time on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, or other major social platforms, start practicing #FeedReaderFriday by carving out some time to find and follow people’s websites directly with a feed reader or social reader. Then engage with them directly on their own websites.
I already spend a reasonable amount of time in a variety of readers looking at both longform articles as well as social media posts (status updates, notes, bookmarks, and photos), but starting this Friday, I’m going to practice #FeedReaderFriday. Instead of opening up Twitter or Mastodon, I’ll actively and exclusively reach for one of my feed readers to read people’s content and respond to them directly.
As part of the effort, I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.
Currently I’m relying on readers like Inoreader, Micro.blog, and Monocle, but there are a huge variety of feed readers and a nice selection of even more fully featured social readers available.
Just as many people are doing the sometimes difficult but always rewarding emotional labor of helping people migrate from the toxicity of Twitter and its algorithmic feeds, perhaps those of us who have websites and use social readers could help our friends and family either set up their own spaces or onboard them to social readers in this effort? Mastodon’s decentralized nature is an improvement and provides a reasonable replacement for Twitter, but eventually people will realize some of the subtle issues of relying on someone else’s platform just as they’ve seen issues with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or the now defunct Google+.
Feel like you’ll miss people’s content on traditional social media? There are definitely a variety of ways to follow them in a variety of feed and social readers. Not sure what RSS is? Feel free to ask. Know of some interesting tricks and tools you use to make discovering and subscribing to others’ blogs easier? Share them! Have fantastic resources for discovering or keeping up with others’ websites? Share those too. Not quite sure where to begin? Ask for some help to better own your online identity and presence.
It may be a slow start, but I think with some care, help, and patience, we can help to shift both our own as well as others’ online social reading and correspondence habits to be kinder, smarter, and more intentional.
What will you read on #FeedReaderFriday? Who will you recommend following?
Featured photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash
