A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond

A Bear Called Paddington Book Cover A Bear Called Paddington
Paddington Bear
Michael Bond
Juvenile Fiction
Harper Collins
July 22, 2014; Original release in 1958
e-book
176
Overdrive

Paddington Bear had traveled all the way from darkest Peru when the Browns first met him in Paddington Station. Since then, their lives have never been quite the same . . . for ordinary things become extraordinary when a bear called Paddington is involved. First published in 1958, A Bear Called Paddington is the first novel by Michael Bond, chronicling the adventures of this lovable bear. Paddington has charmed readers for generations with his earnest good intentions and humorous misadventures. This brand-new edition of the classic novel contains the original text by Michael Bond and illustrations by Peggy Fortnum.

The beginning of the book felt like an uphill battle to read. Perhaps it was too much set up and not enough character? The character shines through more brightly later on in the stories toward the end. The opening was also a lot more initial set up and seemed to be a beginning of a larger plot which didn’t turn into anything while the final chapters were more or less stand-alone vignettes with their own internal mini three act structures. I think I preferred these smaller self-standing stories to the beginning. In form and structure, the book was more like a collection of short stories about Paddington than it was a novel with its own three act structure, which is what I had expected. As a result of this, I’m surprised that Paddington was made into a movie instead of a television show.

Paddington gets himself into the same types of trouble a typical 3-6 year old would in not understanding the culture, mores, and standards around him. In this sense the book falls into a category similar to Amelia Bedelia, who perennially doesn’t understand colloquialisms and other homophones. The difference is that, because he’s a cuddlier small bear, he’s cuter and thereby one is prone to be more forgiving than they would be of a child or of a grown woman who’s so dense that she apparently doesn’t have any linguistic intelligence at all.

Because Paddington is a bear and not a young child, the family also allows him to do things by himself that no sane parent would allow a young child to do: go to the market by themselves, wander around in a crowded theater unattended, float out into the ocean without a keen eye being kept on them. It’s this slight change which allows our young bear to get into far more trouble than a human youngster might.

Toward the end, I began to read using rapid serial visual presentation (with Spritz), and the language and quirks came through just as well as any other parts of the book. I did find myself picking up my Kindle Paperwhite to highlight a few choice passages and funny parts for later reflection though. There was a nice prologue with some interesting observations by the author several decades after he wrote the original. With a bit of thought, some of these make great advice for budding authors.

In sum, an entertaining an charming book whose self-contained chapters lend themselves well to bedtime stories.

Reading Progress
  • 05/27/16 marked as: want to read; “I’d watched the recent film version during the late Spring and thought I’d circle back around and read this again to see how closely the film followed the story. I haven’t read it since I was a child in maybe 3rd or 4th grade.”
  • 09/06/16 started reading
  • 09/08/16 ??.0% done;
  • 10/01/16 18.0% done;
  • 10/02/16 22.0% done;
  • 10/26/16 33.0% done; “The plot moves somewhat slowly and the action is mostly what one would expect from a 5 or 6 year old–except that it’s a bear–but the charming language and the way in which is told makes all the difference. Bacon in a suitcase–indeed!”
  • 10/28/16 47.0% done;
  • 10/30/16 70.0% done;
    Chapter 5: Paddington and the “Old Master”
    The pledge and the turn are reasonably well executed, but the prestige is lacking a bit.
    Chapter 6: A Visit to the Theater
    It’s episodes like this that make me wonder why they turned Paddington into a movie instead of a TV sitcom.”
  • 10/31/16 Finished book;
    Chapter Seven: Adventure at the Seaside
    The set up for this was short and sweet and the ending was what we’ve come to love in a Paddington story.
    Chapter Eight: A Disappearing Trick
    This is just hilariously charming. I do wish the uncivil neighbor had been better set up in a prior story, but the short treatment done here is sufficient for the hilarity that ensues with Paddington attempting a magic show.”

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Chapter One: Please Look After This Bear
It said simply, PLEASE LOOK AFTER THIS BEAR. THANK YOU.
Highlight (yellow) on page 4 | Location 53-53 | Added on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 10:45:06 PM
“You can’t just sit in Paddington Station waiting for something to happen.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 4 | Location 51-51 | Added on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 10:45:15 PM
“How’s that to be going on with?”
Highlight (yellow) on page 6 | Location 91-92 | Added on Thursday, September 8, 2016 12:44:27 AM

“Things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”

Highlight (blue) on page 9 | Location 127-127 | Added on Thursday, September 8, 2016 12:48:39 AM
Chapter Two: A Bear in Hot Water

“That’s the trouble with being small—no one ever expects you to want things.”

Highlight (blue) on page 13 | Location 194-194 | Added on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 7:48:41 PM

– Your Bookmark on page 16 | Location 231 | Added on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 10:43:26 PM
if the water didn’t get much less, at least it didn’t get any more.
Highlight (yellow) on page 18 | Location 265-265 | Added on Saturday, October 1, 2016 7:35:31 PM
“If Mrs. Bird sees this, I don’t know what she’ll say.”
“I do,” exclaimed Jonathan. “She says it to me sometimes.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 19 | Location 290-291 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 3:49:58 PM

– Your Bookmark on page 19 | Location 288 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 3:50:49 PM

– Your Bookmark on page 25 | Location 369 | Added on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 8:14:38 PM
Chapter Three: Paddington Goes Underground
The man sniffed suspiciously and called across to an inspector. “There’s a young bear ’ere, smelling of bacon. Says he made a mistake at the bottom.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 26 | Location 387-388 | Added on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 11:33:23 PM
Chapter Four: A Shopping Expedition
Modom
Highlight (orange) on page 31 | Location 465-465 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:35:17 AM
Don’t see this word often in America, much less the Anglicization Madam or Madame
“I’ll have one for worst if you like,” he said. “That’s my best one!”
Highlight (yellow) on page 31 | Location 468-469 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:36:00 AM
Paddington trying to keep his old hat.
Paddington had a very persistent stare when he cared to use it. It was a very powerful stare. One which his Aunt Lucy had taught him and which he kept for special occasions.
Highlight (yellow) on page 32 | Location 478-480 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:37:21 AM
Bears were rather unpredictable. You never quite knew what they were thinking, and this one in particular seemed to have a mind of his own.
Highlight (yellow) on page 33 | Location 492-493 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:38:59 AM

– Your Bookmark on page 33 | Location 491 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:41:19 AM

– Your Bookmark on page 34 | Location 517 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 7:58:30 PM

“I think,” said Paddington, “if you don’t mind, I’d rather use the stairs.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 41 | Location 616-617 | Added on Saturday, October 29, 2016 2:23:45 PM

– Your Bookmark on page 41 | Location 618 | Added on Saturday, October 29, 2016 2:24:05 PM
Chapter Five: Paddington and the “Old Master”
“That bear gets more for his ten pence than anyone I know,” said Mrs. Bird. “I don’t know how he gets away with it, really I don’t. It must be the mean streak in him.”
“I’m not mean,” said Paddington indignantly. “I’m just careful, that’s all.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 41 | Location 627-629 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:01:06 AM
“I don’t mind him just thinking,” said Mrs. Brown, with a worried expression on her face. “It’s when he actually thinks of something that the trouble starts.”
Highlight (blue) on page 45 | Location 679-680 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:05:41 AM
Originally it had been a painting of a lake, with a blue sky and several sailing boats dotted around. Now it looked like a storm at sea. All the boats had gone, the sky was a funny shade of gray, and half the lake had disappeared.
Highlight (yellow) on page 45 | Location 690-692 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:07:18 AM
Only Mrs. Bird had her suspicions when she found Paddington’s “spots” on his towel in the bathroom, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
Highlight (yellow) on page 48 | Location 722-723 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:09:32 AM
“I think,” said Paddington to the world in general, “they might have stood it the right way up. It’s not every day a bear wins first prize in a painting competition!”
Highlight (yellow) on page 50 | Location 752-753 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:12:52 AM
Chapter Six: A Visit to the Theater
But it’ll be an experience for him, and he does like experiences so.
Highlight (yellow) on page 50 | Location 767-767 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:14:52 AM
Commissionaire
Highlight (orange) on page 51 | Location 772-772 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:15:18 AM
Judy started to help him off with it.
“Mind my marmalade sandwich!” cried Paddington as she placed it on the ledge in front of him. But it was too late. He looked round guiltily.
“Crikey!” said Jonathan. “It’s fallen on someone’s head!” He looked over the edge of the box. “It’s that man with the bald head. He looks jolly cross.”
“Oh, Paddington!” Mrs. Brown looked despairingly at him. “Do you have to bring marmalade sandwiches to the theater?”
Highlight (yellow) on page 52 | Location 792-797 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 9:18:24 AM

– Your Bookmark on page 60 | Location 916 | Added on Sunday, October 30, 2016 10:05:45 AM
Chapter Seven: Adventure at the Seaside
Paddington gave him a hard stare. “You said there was a bird,” he said. “And there wasn’t.”
“I expect it flew away when it saw your face,” said the man nastily. “Now, where’s my pound?” Paddington looked at him even harder for a moment. “Perhaps the bird took it when it flew away,” he said.
Highlight (yellow) on page 63 | Location 957-960 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:05:15 PM
The man looked serious. “And you say he can’t swim?” he asked.
“He doesn’t even like having a bath much,” said Judy. “So I’m sure he can’t swim.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 66 | Location 1011-1013 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:07:54 PM
The man looked at the picture. “We could send out a description,” he said dubiously. “But it’s a job to see what he looks like by that. It’s all hat and dark glasses.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 67 | Location 1015-1016 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:08:11 PM
This is hilarious thinking that people aren’t going to notice a small bear with such a costume amongst people.
“What’s going on at the pier, chum?”
Without stopping, the man looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Chap just crossed the Atlantic all by ’isself on a raft. ’Undreds of days without food or water so they say!” He hurried on.
The lifesaving man looked disappointed. “Another of these publicity stunts,” he said. “We get ’em every year.”
Mr. Brown looked thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said, looking in the direction of the pier.
“It would be just like him,” said Mrs. Bird. “It’s the sort of thing that would happen to Paddington.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 68 | Location 1033-1038 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:12:23 PM
Chapter Eight: A Disappearing Trick
Paddington thought this was a good idea, especially when he was told that bears had two birthdays every year—one in the summer and one in the winter.
“Just like the Queen,” said Mrs. Bird. “So you ought to consider yourself very important.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 70 | Location 1072-1074 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:19:14 PM
“I shall have a lot of ‘thank-you’ letters to write.”
“Perhaps you’d better leave them until tomorrow,” said Mrs. Brown hastily. Whenever Paddington wrote any letters, he generally managed to get more ink on himself than on the paper, and he was looking so unusually smart, having had a bath the night before, that it seemed a pity to spoil it.
Highlight (yellow) on page 71 | Location 1082-1085 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:21:26 PM
“Well,” said Mr. Brown, “so long as you don’t try sawing anyone in half this evening, I don’t mind.”
“I was only joking,” he added hurriedly as Paddington turned an inquiring gaze on him.
Nevertheless, as soon as lunch was over, Mr. Brown hurried down the garden and locked up his tools. With Paddington there was no sense in taking chances.
Highlight (yellow) on page 73 | Location 1118-1121 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:26:30 PM
Mr. Curry had a reputation in the neighborhood for meanness and for poking his nose into other people’s business. He was also very bad tempered and was always complaining about the least little thing which met with his disapproval. In the past that had often included Paddington, which was why the Browns had not invited him to the party.
Highlight (yellow) on page 74 | Location 1127-1129 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:27:18 PM
“For this trick,” he said, “I shall require an egg.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Bird as she hurried out to the kitchen, “I know something dreadful is going to happen.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 75 | Location 1140-1141 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:30:10 PM
“For my next trick,” said Paddington, “I would like a watch.”
“Are you sure?” asked Mrs. Brown anxiously. “Wouldn’t anything else do?”
Paddington consulted his instruction book. “It says a watch,” he said firmly.
Mr. Brown hurriedly pulled his sleeve down over his left wrist. Unfortunately, Mr. Curry, who was in an unusually good mood after his free tea, stood up and offered his. Paddington took it gratefully and placed it on the table. “This is a jolly good trick,” he said, reaching down into his box and pulling out a small hammer.
Highlight (yellow) on page 76 | Location 1165-1169 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:33:51 PM
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, telling lies in front of a young bear!”
Highlight (yellow) on page 77 | Location 1178-1178 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:34:23 PM
“You know, Henry,” said Mrs. Brown as they watched Paddington go up the stairs to bed, looking rather sticky and more than a little sleepy, “it’s nice having a bear about the house.”
Highlight (yellow) on page 79 | Location 1212-1213 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:35:48 PM
Postscript (by Michael Bond)
I realized I had a book on my hands. It hadn’t been written with any particular age group in mind, which was fortunate, because until then I had always written for adults, and if I had consciously aimed at a young audience I might have “written down,” which is a bad idea. Anyway, I agree with Gertrude Stein: a book is a book is a book, and it should be enjoyable on all levels.
Highlight (yellow) on page 80 | Location 1225-1227 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:36:38 PM
This is a brilliant bit of advice to writers of all stripes, but particularly children’s writers. Most of the best YA and children’s literature I’ve read didn’t pander down to their audience.
you never know quite what bears are thinking, and he was right. You feel you can trust them with your secrets and they won’t pass them on.
Highlight (yellow) on page 81 | Location 1229-1230 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:37:10 PM
This is an interesting insight into Paddington’s character and is somewhat similar to my comments above about what makes having a talking bear that seems somewhat common interesting in these stories rather than just a young child which would have made the stories very bland and unbelievable.
Another thing about bears is that one perceives them in the wild lumbering around on two legs, so they are already halfway to being human.
Highlight (yellow) on page 81 | Location 1230-1231 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:37:20 PM
Another bit which makes the stories slightly more plausible psychologically.
The first book in a series is always the most fun to write. The world is your oyster, and you can go wherever your fancy takes you. However, at the same time you build in certain parameters which are there for all time.
Highlight (yellow) on page 81 | Location 1231-1233 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:40:16 PM
Again great advice for writers, particularly those writing a multi-part series.
Paddington was, and always will be, very real to me. He has his feet firmly on the ground, and he has a very strong sense of right and wrong. So much so that when I come up against a problem in my own life, I often ask myself what he would do.
Highlight (yellow) on page 81 | Location 1240-1241 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:40:38 PM
WWPD?!
Each time I boarded a plane I knew it wouldn’t be long before he would be asked up to the flight deck. On one occasion I left him up there, strapped into a spare bucket seat while the crew explained the controls. A little later on, I received a second message asking if I would mind him staying up there because he wanted to practice landing the plane. I didn’t tell the other passengers!
Highlight (yellow) on page 82 | Location 1250-1253 | Added on Monday, October 31, 2016 11:41:38 PM
Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through

Photo Gallery from Dodging the Memory Hole 2016

Details for the conference can be found at Dodging the Memory Hole 2016.

The Journalism Digital News Archive has posted a nice bunch of photos as well.

My previous posts and notes about the conference:

Give your web presence a more personal identity

Not a day goes by that I don’t run across a fantastic blog built or hosted on WordPress that looks gorgeous–they do an excellent job of making this pretty easy to accomplish.

but

Invariably the blog’s author has a generic avatar (blech!) instead of a nice, warm and humanizing photo of their lovely face.

Or, perhaps, as a user, you’ve always wondered how some people qualified to have their photo included with their comment while you were left as an anonymous looking “mystery person” or a randomized identicon, monster, or even an 8-bit pixelated blob? The secret the others know will be revealed momentarily.

Which would you prefer?

A face on the internet could love
Identicon: A face only the internet could love
Chris Aldrich
Chris:  a face only a mother could love
An example of a fantastic blog covering the publishing space, yet the author doesn't seem to know how to do his own avatar properly.
An example of a fantastic blog covering the publishing space, yet after 11,476 articles, the author can’t get his photo to show up.

Somehow, knowing how to replace that dreadful randomized block with an actual photo is too hard or too complicated. Why? In part, it’s because WordPress separated out this functionality as a decentralized service called Gravatar, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. In some sense this is an awesome idea because then people everywhere (and not just on WordPress) can use the Gravatar service to change their photo across thousands of websites at once. Unfortunately it’s not always clear that one needs to add their name, email address, and photo to Gravatar in order for the avatars to be populated properly on WordPress related sites.

(Suggestion for WordPress: Maybe the UI within the user account section could include a line about Gravatars?)

So instead of trying to write out the details for the third time this week, I thought I’d write it once here with a bit more detail and then point people to it for the future.

Another quick example

Can you guess which user is the blog's author? Can you guess which user is the blog’s author in the screencapture?

The correct answer is Anand Sarwate, the second commenter in the list. While Anand’s avatar seems almost custom made for a blog on randomness and information theory, it would be more inviting if he used a photo instead.

How to fix the default avatar problem

What is Gravatar?

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

Gravatar.com

Need some additional motivation? Watch this short video:

[wpvideo HNyK67JS]

Step 1: Get a Gravatar Account

If you’ve already got a WordPress.com account, this step is easy. Because the same corporate parent built both WordPress and Gravatar, if you have an account on one, you automattically have an account on the other which uses the same login information. You just need to log into Gravatar.com with your WordPress username and password.

If you don’t have a WordPress.com account or even a blog, but just want your photo to show up when you comment on WordPress and other Gravatar enabled blogs, then just sign up for an account at Gravatar.com. When you comment on a blog, it’ll ask for your email address and it will use that to pull in the photo to which it’s linked.

Step 2: Add an email address

Log into your Gravatar account. Choose an email address you want to modify: you’ll have at least the default you signed up with or you can add additional email addresses.

Step 3: Add a photo to go with that email address

Upload as many photos as you’d like into the account. Then for each of the email addresses you’ve got, associate each one with at least one of your photos.

Example: In the commenters’ avatars shown above, Anand was almost there. He already had a Gravatar account, he just hadn’t added any photos.

Step 4: Fill out the rest of your social profile

Optionally you can additional social details like a short bio, your other social media presences, and even one or more websites or blogs that you own.

Step 5: Repeat

You can add as many emails and photos as you’d like. By linking different photos to different email addresses, you’ll be able to change your photo identity based on the email “key” you plug into sites later.

If you get tired of one photo, just upload another and make it the default photo for the email addresses you want it to change for. All sites using Gravatar will update your avatar for use in the future.

Step 6: Use your email address on your WordPress account

Now, go back to the user profile section on your blog, which is usually located at http://www.YOURSITE.com/wp-admin/users.php.

WordPress screenshot of admin panel for user information.
WordPress screenshot of admin panel for user information.

In the field for the email, input (one of) the email(s) you used in Gravatar that’s linked to a photo.

Don’t worry, the system won’t show your email and it will remain private–WordPress and Gravatar simply use it as a common “key” to serve up the right photo and metadata from Gravatar to the WordPress site.

Once you’ve clicked save, your new avatar should show up in the list of users. More importantly it’ll now show up in all of the WordPress elements (like most author bio blocks and in comments) that appear on your site.

Administrator Caveats

WordPress themes need to be Gravatar enabled to be able to use this functionality, but in practice, most of them do, particularly for comments sections. If yours isn’t, then you can usually add it with some simple code.

In the WordPress admin interface one can go to Settings>>Discussion and enable View people's profiles when you mouse over their Gravatars under the heading “Gravatar Hovercards” to enable people to see more information about you and the commenters on your blog (presuming the comment section of your theme is Gravatar enabled.)

Some WordPress users often have several user accounts that they use to administer their site. One might have a secure administrator account they only use for updates and upgrades, another personal account (author/editor admin level account which uses their name) for authoring posts, and another (author/editor admin level) account for making admin notice posts or commenting as a generic moderator. In these cases, you need to make sure that each of these accounts has an email address with an an associated Gravatar account with the same email and the desired photo linked to it. (One Gravatar account with multiple emails/photos will usually suffice, though they could be different.)

Example: In Nate’s case above, we showed that his photo didn’t show in the author bio box, and it doesn’t show up in some comments, but it does show up in other comments on his blog. This is because he uses at least two different user accounts: one for authoring posts and another for commenting. The user account he uses for some commenting has a linked Gravatar account with email and photo and the other does not.

One account doesn't have a Gravatar with a linked email and photo.
One account doesn’t have a Gravatar with a linked email and photo.

 

comments-yes
Another account does have a linked Gravatar account with linked email and photo.

More tips?

Want more information on how you can better own and manage your online identity? Visit IndieWeb.org: “A people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’.

TL;DR

To help beautify your web presence a bit, if you notice that your photo doesn’t show up in the author block or comments in your theme, you can (create and) use your WordPress.com username/password in an account on their sister site Gravatar.com. Uploading your preferred photo on Gravatar and linking it to an email will help to automatically populate your photo in both your site and other WordPress sites (in comments) across the web. To make it work on your site, just go to your user profile in your WordPress install and use the same email address in your user profile as your Gravatar account and the decentralized system will port your picture across automatically. If necessary, you can use multiple photos and multiple linked email addresses in your Gravatar account to vary your photos.

Notes, Highlights, and Marginalia: From E-books to Online

For several years now, I’ve been meaning to do something more interesting with the notes, highlights, and marginalia from the various books I read. In particular, I’ve specifically been meaning to do it for the non-fiction I read for research, and even more so for e-books, which tend to have slightly more extract-able notes given their electronic nature. This fits in to the way in which I use this site as a commonplace book as well as the IndieWeb philosophy to own all of one’s own data.[1]

Over the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting with some fiction to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of a workflow for status updates around reading books, writing book reviews, and then extracting and depositing notes, highlights, and marginalia online. I’ve now got a relatively quick and painless workflow for exporting the book related data from my Amazon Kindle and importing it into the site with some modest markup and CSS for display. I’m sure the workflow will continue to evolve (and further automate) somewhat over the coming months, but I’m reasonably happy with where things stand.

The fact that the Amazon Kindle allows for relatively easy highlighting and annotation in e-books is excellent, but having the ability to sync to a laptop and do a one click export of all of that data, is incredibly helpful. Adding some simple CSS to the pre-formatted output gives me a reasonable base upon which to build for future writing/thinking about the material. In experimenting, I’m also coming to realize that simply owning the data isn’t enough, but now I’m driven to help make that data more directly useful to me and potentially to others.

As part of my experimenting, I’ve just uploaded some notes, highlights, and annotations for David Christian’s excellent text Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History[2] which I read back in 2011/12. While I’ve read several of the references which I marked up in that text, I’ll have to continue evolving a workflow for doing all the related follow up (and further thinking and writing) on the reading I’ve done in the past.

I’m still reminded me of Rick Kurtzman’s sage advice to me when I was a young pisher at CAA in 1999: “If you read a script and don’t tell anyone about it, you shouldn’t have wasted the time having read it in the first place.” His point was that if you don’t try to pass along the knowledge you found by reading, you may as well give up. Even if the thing was terrible, at least say that as a minimum. In a digitally connected era, we no longer need to rely on nearly illegible scrawl in the margins to pollinate the world at a snail’s pace.[4] Take those notes, marginalia, highlights, and meta data and release it into the world. The fact that this dovetails perfectly with Cesar Hidalgo’s thesis in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,[3] furthers my belief in having a better process for what I’m attempting here.

Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll be able to add similar data to several other books I’ve read and reviewed here on the site.

If anyone has any thoughts, tips, tricks for creating/automating this type of workflow/presentation, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Footnotes

[1]
“Own your data,” IndieWeb. [Online]. Available: http://indieweb.org/own_your_data. [Accessed: 24-Oct-2016]
[2]
D. Christian and W. McNeill H., Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 2011.
[3]
C. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, 1st ed. Basic Books, 2015.
[4]
O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2004.

A Case for Why Disqus Should Implement Webmentions

Internet-wide @Mentions

There is a relatively new candidate recommendation from the W3C for a game changing social web specification called Webmention which essentially makes it possible to do Twitter-like @mentions (or Medium-style) across the internet from site to site (as opposed to simply within a siloed site/walled garden like Twitter).

Webmentions would allow me to write a comment to someone else’s post on my own Tumblr site, for example, and then with a URL of the site I’m replying to in my post which serves as the @mention, the other site (which could be on WordPress, Drupal, Tumblr, or anything really) which also supports Webmentions could receive my comment and display it in their comment section.

Given the tremendous number of sites (and multi-platform sites) on which Disqus operates, it would be an excellent candidate to support the Webmention spec to allow a huge amount of inter-site activity on the internet. First it could include the snippet of code for allowing the site on which a comment is originally written to send Webmentions and secondly, it could allow for the snippet of code which allows for receiving Webmentions. The current Disqus infrastructure could also serve to reduce spam and display those comments in a pretty way. Naturally Disqus could continue to serve the same social functionality it has in the past.

Aggregating the conversation across the Internet into one place

Making things even more useful, there’s currently a third party free service called Brid.gy which uses open APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Flickr to bootstrap them to send these Webmentions or inter-site @mentions. What does this mean? After signing up at Bridgy, it means I could potentially create a post on my Disqus-enabled Tumblr (WordPress, or other powered site), share that post with its URL to Facebook, and any comments or likes made on the Facebook post will be sent as Webmentions to the comments section on my Tumblr site as if they’d been made there natively. (Disqus could add the metadata to indicate the permalink and location of where the comment originated.) This means I can receive comments on my blog/site from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, G+, etc. without a huge amount of overhead, and even better, instead of being spread out in multiple different places, the conversation around my original piece of content could be conglomerated with the original!

Comments could be displayed inline naturally, and likes could be implemented as UI facepile either above or below the typical comment section. By enabling the sending/receiving of Webmentions, Disqus could further corner the market on comments. Even easier for Disqus, a lot of the code has already been written and is open source .

Web 3.0?

I believe that Webmention, when implemented, is going to cause a major sea-change in the way people use the web. Dare I say Web3.0?!

How many social media related accounts can one person have on the web?!

Over the years I almost feel like I’ve tried to max out the number of web services I could sign up for. I was always on the look out for that new killer app or social service, so I’ve tried almost all of them at one point or another. That I can remember, I’ve had at least 179, and likely there are very many more that I’m simply forgetting. Research indicates it is difficult enough to keep track of 150 people, much less that many people through that many websites.

As an exercise, I’ve made an attempt to list all of the social media and user accounts I’ve had on the web since the early/mid-2000s. They’re listed below at the bottom of this post and broken up somewhat by usage area and subject for ease of use. I’ll maintain an official list of them here.

This partial list may give many others the opportunity to see how fragmented their own identities can be on the web. Who are you and to which communities because you live in multiple different places? I feel the list also shows the immense value inherent in the IndieWeb philosophy to own one’s own domain and data. The value of the IndieWeb is even more apparent when I think of all the defunct, abandoned, shut down, or bought out web services I’ve used which I’ve done my best to list at the bottom.

When I think of all the hours of content that I and others have created and shared on some of these defunct sites for which we’ll never recover the data, I almost want to sob. Instead, I’ve promised only to cry, “Never again!” People interested in more of the vast volumes of data lost are invited to look at this list of site-deaths, which is itself is far from comprehensive.

No more digital sharecropping

Over time, I’ll make an attempt, where possible, to own the data from each of the services listed below and port it here to my own domain. More importantly, I refuse to do any more digital sharecropping. I’m not creating new posts, status updates, photos, or other content that doesn’t live on my own site first. Sure I’ll take advantage of the network effects of popular services like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to engage my family, friends, and community who choose to live in those places, but it will only happen by syndicating data that I already own to those services after-the-fact.

What about the interactive parts? The comments and interactions on those social services?

Through the magic of new web standards like WebMention, essentially an internet wide @mention functionality similar to that on Twitter, Medium, and even Facebook, and a fantastic service called brid.gy, all the likes and comments from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and others, I get direct notifications of the comments on my syndicated material which comes back directly to my own website as comments on the original posts. Those with websites that support WebMention natively can write their comments to my posts directly on their own site and rely on it to automatically notify me of their response.

Isn’t this beginning to sound to you like the way the internet should work?

One URL to rule them all

When I think back on setting up these hundreds of digital services, I nearly wince at all the time and effort I’ve spent inputting my name, my photo, or even just including URL links to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Now I have one and only one URL that I can care about and pay attention to: my own!

Join me for IndieWebCamp Los Angeles

I’ve written in bits about my involvement with the IndieWeb in the past, but I’ve actually had incoming calls over the past several weeks from people interested in setting up their own websites. Many have asked: what is it exactly? how can they do something similar? is it hard?

My answer is that it isn’t nearly as hard as you might have thought. If you can manage to sign up and maintain your Facebook account, you can put together all the moving parts to have your own IndieWeb enabled website.

“But, Chris, I’m still a little hesitant…”

Okay, how about I (and many others) offer to help you out? I’m going to be hosting IndieWebCamp Los Angeles over the weekend of November 5th and 6th in Santa Monica. I’m inviting you all to attend with the hope that by the time the weekend is over, you’ll have not only a good significant start, but you’ll have the tools, resources, and confidence to continue building in improvements over time.

IndieWebCamp Los Angeles

<

div class=”p-location h-card”>Pivotal
1333 2nd Street,
Suite 200
Santa Monica, CA,
90401
United States

When
  • Saturday:
  • Sunday:
R.S.V.P.

We’ve set up a variety of places for people to easily R.S.V.P. for the two-day event, choose the one that’s convenient for you:
* Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/indiewebcamp-la-2016-tickets-24335345674
* Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/2016/indiewebcamp-la
* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1701240643421269
* Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/IndieWeb-Homebrew-Website-Club-Los-Angeles/events/233698594/
If you’ve already got an IndieWeb enabled website and are able to R.S.V.P. by using your own site, try one of the following two R.S.V.P. locations:
* Indie Event: http://veganstraightedge.com/events/2016/04/01/indiewebcamp-la-2016
* IndieWeb Wiki: https://indieweb.org/2016/LA/Guest_List

I hope to see you there!

 

Now for that unwieldly list of sites I’ve spent untold hours setting up and maintaining…

Editor’s note:
A regularly updated version of this list is maintained here.

Primary Internet Presences

Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko

Chris Aldrich Social Stream

Content from the above two sites is syndicated primarily, but not exclusively, or evenly to the following silo-based profiles

Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Tumblr
LinkedIn
Medium
GoodReads
Foursquare
YouTube
Reddit
Flickr
WordPress.com

Contributor to

WithKnown (Dormant)
IndieWeb.org (Wiki)
Little Free Library #8424 Blog
Mendeley ITBio References
Chris Aldrich Radio3 (Link Blog)
Category Theory Summer Study Group
JHU AEME
Johns Hopkins Twitter Feed (Previous)
JHU Facebook Fan Page (Previous)

 Identity

Gravatar
Keybase
About.Me
DandyID
Vizify

Other Social Profiles

Yelp
Findery
Periscope
Pinterest
Storify
MeetUp
500px
Skitch
KickStarter
Patreon
TwitPic
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
MySpace
Klout

Academia / Research Related

Mendeley
Academia.edu
Research Gate
IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSOC)
Quora
ORCID
Hypothes.is
Genius (fka Rap Genius, aka News Genius, etc)
Diigo
FigShare – Research Data
Zotero
Worldcat
OdySci – Engineering Research
CiteULike
Open Study
StackExchange
Math-Stackexchange
MathOverflow
TeX-StackExchange
Theoretical Physics-StackExchange
Linguistics-StackExchange
Digital Signal Processing-StackExchange
Cooking-StackExchange
Physics Forums
Sciencescape

MOOC Related

Coursera
Khan Academy
Degreed

Reading Related

GoodReads
Pocket
Flipboard
Book Crossing
Digg
Readlist
MobileRead
Read Fold
ReadingPack
SlideShare
Wordnik
Milq
Disqus (Comments)
Intense Debate (Comments)
Wattpad
BookVibe
Reading.am (Bookmarking)
Amazon Profile
Wishlist: Evolutionary Theory
Wishlist: Information Theory
Wishlist: Mathematics
Camp NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo

Programming Related

GitHub
BitBucket
GitLab – URL doesn’t resolve to account
Free Code Camp
Code School
Codepen

Audio / Video

Huffduffer
Last.fm
Spotify
Pandora (Radio)
Soundcloud
Vimeo
Rdio
IMDb
Telfie (TV Checkin)
Soundtracking
Hulu
UStream
Livestream
MixCloud
Spreaker
Audioboo (Audio)
Bambuser (Video)
Orfium
The Session (Irish Music)

Food / Travel / Meetings

Nosh
FoodSpotting
Tripit (Travel)
Lanyard (Conference)
Conferize (Conference)

Miscellaneous

RebelMouse (unused)
Peach (app only)
Kinja (commenting system/pseudo-blog)
Mnemotechniques (Memory Forum)
WordPress.org
Ask.fm
AppBrain Android Phone Apps
BlogCatalog
MySpace (Old School)
Identi.ca (Status)
Plurk (Status)
TinyLetter
Plaxo
YCombinator
Tsu
NewGov.US
Venmo
Quitter.se (Status)
Quitter.no (Status)
ColoUrLovers
Beeminder

Defunct Social Sites

Picasa (Redirects to G+)
Eat.ly (Food Blog)
Google Sidewiki (Annotation)
Wakoopa (Software usage)
Seesmic (Video, Status)
Jaiku (Status)
Friendster (Social Media)
Flipzu
Mixx
<a href=”http://getglue.com/chrisaldrich” target=”_blank rel=”" noopener noreferrer”>GetGlue (Video checkin)
FootFeed (Location)
Google Reader (Reader)
CinchCast (Audio)
Backtype (Commenting)
Tungle.me (Calendar)
Chime.In (Status)
MyBigCampus (College related)
Pownce (Status) – closed 02/09
Cliqset (Status) –  closed 11/22/10
Brightkite (Location/Status) – closed 12/10/10
Buzz (Status) – closed 12/15/11
Gowalla (Location) – closed 3/11/12
Picplz (Photo)- closed 9/2/12
Posterous (Blog) – closed 4/30/13 [all content from this site has been recovered and ported]
Upcoming (Calendar) – closed 4/30/13
ClaimID (Identity) – closed 12/12/13
Qik (Video) – closed 4/30/14
Readmill (Reading)- closed 7/1/14
Orkut (Status) – closed 9/1/14
Plinky – closed 9/1/14
FriendFeed (Social Networking)- closed 4/10/15
Plancast (Calendar) – closed 1/21/16
Symantec Personal Identity Program (Identity) – closing 9/11/16
Shelfari (Reading) – closed 3/16/16

How many social media identities do YOU have?

Notes from Day 2 of Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Online News | Friday, October 14, 2016

If you missed the notes from Day 1, see this post.

It may take me a week or so to finish putting some general thoughts and additional resources together based on the two day conference so that I might give a more thorough accounting of my opinions as well as next steps. Until then, I hope that the details and mini-archive of content below may help others who attended, or provide a resource for those who couldn’t make the conference.

Overall, it was an incredibly well programmed and run conference, so kudos to all those involved who kept things moving along. I’m now certainly much more aware at the gaping memory hole the internet is facing despite the heroic efforts of a small handful of people and institutions attempting to improve the situation. I’ll try to go into more detail later about a handful of specific topics and next steps as well as a listing of resources I came across which may provide to be useful tools for both those in the archiving/preserving and IndieWeb communities.

Archive of materials for Day 2

Audio Files

Below are the recorded audio files embedded in .m4a format (using a Livescribe Pulse Pen) for several sessions held throughout the day. To my knowledge, none of the breakout sessions were recorded except for the one which appears below.

Summarizing archival collections using storytelling techniques


Presentation: Summarizing archival collections using storytelling techniques by Michael Nelson, Ph.D., Old Dominion University

Saving the first draft of history


Special guest speaker: Saving the first draft of history: The unlikely rescue of the AP’s Vietnam War files by Peter Arnett, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism
Peter Arnett talking about news reporting in Vietnam in  60s.

Kiss your app goodbye: the fragility of data journalism


Panel: Kiss your app goodbye: the fragility of data journalism
Featuring Meredith Broussard, New York University; Regina Lee Roberts, Stanford University; Ben Welsh, The Los Angeles Times; moderator Martin Klein, Ph.D., Los Alamos National Laboratory

The future of the past: modernizing The New York Times archive


Panel: The future of the past: modernizing The New York Times archive
Featuring The New York Times Technology Team: Evan Sandhaus, Jane Cotler and Sophia Van Valkenburg; moderated by Edward McCain, RJI and MU Libraries

Lightning Rounds: Six Presenters



Lightning rounds (in two parts)
Six + one presenters: Jefferson Bailey, Terry Britt, Katherine Boss (and team), Cynthia Joyce, Mark Graham, Jennifer Younger and Kalev Leetaru
1: Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive, “Supporting Data-Driven Research using News-Related Web Archives” 2: Terry Britt, University of Missouri, “News archives as cornerstones of collective memory” 3: Katherine Boss, Meredith Broussard and Eva Revear, New York University: “Challenges facing preservation of born-digital news applications” 4: Cynthia Joyce, University of Mississippi, “Keyword ‘Katrina’: Re-collecting the unsearchable past” 5: Mark Graham, Internet Archive/The Wayback Machine, “Archiving news at the Internet Archive” 6: Jennifer Younger, Catholic Research Resources Alliance: “Digital Preservation, Aggregated, Collaborative, Catholic” 7. Kalev Leetaru, senior fellow, The George Washington University and founder of the GDELT Project: A Look Inside The World’s Largest Initiative To Understand And Archive The World’s News

Technology and Community


Presentation: Technology and community: Why we need partners, collaborators, and friends by Kate Zwaard, Library of Congress

Breakout: Working with CMS


Working with CMS, led by Eric Weig, University of Kentucky

Alignment and reciprocity


Alignment & reciprocity by Katherine Skinner, Ph.D., executive director, the Educopia Institute

Closing remarks


Closing remarks by Edward McCain, RJI and MU Libraries and Todd Grappone, associate university librarian, UCLA

Live Tweet Archive

Reminder: In many cases my tweets don’t reflect direct quotes of the attributed speaker, but are often slightly modified for clarity and length for posting to Twitter. I have made a reasonable attempt in all cases to capture the overall sentiment of individual statements while using as many original words of the participant as possible. Typically, for speed, there wasn’t much editing of these notes. Below I’ve changed the attribution of one or two tweets to reflect the proper person(s). Fore convenience, I’ve also added a few hyperlinks to useful resources after the fact that didn’t have time to make the original tweets. I’ve attached .m4a audio files of most of the audio for the day (apologies for shaky quality as it’s unedited) which can be used for more direct attribution if desired. The Reynolds Journalism Institute videotaped the entire day and livestreamed it. Presumably they will release the video on their website for a more immersive experience.

Peter Arnett:

Condoms were required issue in Vietnam–we used them to waterproof film containers in the field.

Do not stay close to the head of a column, medics, or radiomen. #warreportingadvice

I told the AP I would undertake the task of destroying all the reporters’ files from the war.

Instead the AP files moved around with me.

Eventually the 10 trunks of material went back to the AP when they hired a brilliant archivist.

“The negatives can outweigh the positives when you’re in trouble.”

Edward McCain:

Our first panel:Kiss your app goodbye: the fragility of data jornalism

Meredith Broussard:

I teach data journalism at NYU

A news app is not what you’d install on your phone

Dollars for Docs is a good example of a news app

A news app is something that allows the user to put themself into the story.

Often there are three CMSs: web, print, and video.

News apps don’t live in any of the CMSs. They’re bespoke and live on a separate data server.

This has implications for crawlers which can’t handle them well.

Then how do we save news apps? We’re looking at examples and then generalizing.

Everyblock.com was a good example based on chicagocrime and later bought by NBC and shut down.

What?! The internet isn’t forever? Databases need to be save differently than web pages.

Reprozip was developed by NYU Center for Data and we’re using it to save the code, data, and environment.

Ben Welsh:

My slides will be at http://bit.ly/frameworkfix. I work on the data desk @LATimes

We make apps that serve our audience.

We also make internal tools that empower the newsroom.

We also use our nerdy skills to do cool things.

Most of us aren’t good programmers, we “cheat” by using frameworks.

Frameworks do a lot of basic things for you, so you don’t have to know how to do it yourself.

Archiving tools often aren’t built into these frameworks.

Instagram, Pinterest, Mozilla, and the LA Times use django as our framework.

Memento for WordPress is a great way to archive pages.

We must do more. We need archiving baked into the systems from the start.

Slides at http://bit.ly/frameworkfix

Regina Roberts:

Got data? I’m a librarian at Stanford University.

I’ll mention Christine Borgman’s book Big Data, Little Data, No data.

Journalists are great data liberators: FOIA requests, cleaning data, visualizing, getting stories out of data.

But what happens to the data once the story is published?

BLDR: Big Local Digital Repository, an open repository for sharing open data.

Solutions that exist: Hydra at http://projecthydra.org or Open ICPSR www.openicpsr.org

For metadata: www.ddialliance.org, RDF, International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif) and MODS

Martin Klein:

We’ll open up for questions.

Audience Question:

What’s more important: obey copyright laws or preserving the content?

Regina Roberts:

The new creative commons licenses are very helpful, but we have to be attentive to many issues.

Perhaps archiving it and embargoing for later?

Ben Welsh:

Saving the published work is more important to me, and the rest of the byproduct is gravy.

Evan Sandhaus:

I work for the New York Times, you may have heard of it…

Doing a quick demo of Times Machine from @NYTimes

Sophia van Valkenburg:

Talking about modernizing the born-digital legacy content.

Our problem was how to make an article from 2004 look like it had been published today.

There were 100’s of thousands of articles missing.

There was no one definitive list of missing articles.

Outlining the workflow for reconciling the archive XML and the definitive list of URLs for conversion.

It’s important to use more than one source for building an archive.

Jane Cotler:

I’m going to talk about all of “the little things” that came up along the way..

Article Matching: Fusion – How to convert print XML with web HTML that was scraped.

Primarily, we looked at common phrases between the corpus of the two different data sets.

We prioritized the print data over the digital data.

We maintain a system called switchboard that redirects from old URLs to the new ones to prevent link rot.

The case of the missing sections: some sections of the content were blank and not transcribed.

We made the decision of taking out data we had in lieu of making a better user experience for missing sections.

In the future, we’d also like to put photos back into the articles.

Evan Sandhaus:

Modernizing and archiving the @NYTimes archives is an ongoing challenge.

Edward McCain:

Can you discuss the decision to go with a more modern interface rather than a traditional archive of how it looked?

Evan Sandhaus:

Some of the decision was to get the data into an accessible format for modern users.

We do need to continue work on preserving the original experience.

Edward McCain:

Is there a way to distinguish between the print version and the online versions in the archive?

Audience Question:

Could a researcher do work on the entire corpora? Is it available for subscription?

Edward McCain:

We do have a sub-section of data availalbe, but don’t have it prior to 1960.

Audience Question:

Have you documented the process you’ve used on this preservation project?

Sophia van Valkenburg:

We did save all of the code for the project within GitHub.

Jane Cotler:

We do have meeting notes which provide some documentation, though they’re not thorough.

ChrisAldrich:

Oh dear. Of roughly 1,155 tweets I counted about #DtMH2016 in the last week, roughly 25% came from me. #noisy

Opensource tool I had mentioned to several: @wallabagapp A self-hostable application for saving web pages https://www.wallabag.org

Notes from Day 1 of Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Online News | Thursday, October 13, 2016

Today I spent most of the majority of the day attending the first of a two day conference at UCLA’s Charles Young Research Library entitled “Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Online News.” While I knew mostly what I was getting into, it hadn’t really occurred to me how much of what is on the web is not backed up or archived in any meaningful way. As a part of human nature, people neglect to back up any of their data, but huge swaths of really important data with newsworthy and historic value is being heavily neglected. Fortunately it’s an interesting enough problem to draw the 100 or so scholars, researchers, technologists, and journalists who showed up for the start of an interesting group being conglomerated through the Reynolds Journalism Institute and several sponsors of the event.

What particularly strikes me is how many of the philosophies of the IndieWeb movement and tools developed by it are applicable to some of the problems that online news faces. I suspect that if more journalists were practicing members of the IndieWeb and used their sites not only for collecting and storing the underlying data upon which they base their stories, but to publish them as well, then some of the (future) archival process may be easier to accomplish. I’ve got so many disparate thoughts running around my mind after the first day that it’ll take a bit of time to process before I write out some more detailed thoughts.

Twitter List for the Conference

As a reminder to those attending, I’ve accumulated a list of everyone who’s tweeted with the hashtag #DtMH2016, so that attendees can more easily follow each other as well as communicate online following our few days together in Los Angeles. Twitter also allows subscribing to entire lists too if that’s something in which people have interest.

Archiving the day

It seems only fitting that an attendee of a conference about saving and archiving digital news, would make a reasonable attempt to archive some of his experience right?! Toward that end, below is an archive of my tweetstorm during the day marked up with microformats and including hovercards for the speakers with appropriate available metadata. For those interested, I used a fantastic web app called Noter Live to capture, tweet, and more easily archive the stream.

Note that in many cases my tweets don’t reflect direct quotes of the attributed speaker, but are often slightly modified for clarity and length for posting to Twitter. I have made a reasonable attempt in all cases to capture the overall sentiment of individual statements while using as many original words of the participant as possible. Typically, for speed, there wasn’t much editing of these notes. I’m also attaching .m4a audio files of most of the audio for the day (apologies for shaky quality as it’s unedited) which can be used for more direct attribution if desired. The Reynolds Journalism Institute videotaped the entire day and livestreamed it. Presumably they will release the video on their website for a more immersive experience.

If you prefer to read the stream of notes in the original Twitter format, so that you can like/retweet/comment on individual pieces, this link should give you the entire stream. Naturally, comments are also welcome below.

Audio Files

Below are the audio files for several sessions held throughout the day.

Greetings and Keynote


Greetings: Edward McCain, digital curator of journalism, Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and University of Missouri Libraries and Ginny Steel, university librarian, UCLA
Keynote: Digital salvage operations — what’s worth saving? given by Hjalmar Gislason, vice president of data, Qlik

Why save online news? and NewsScape


Panel: “Why save online news?” featuring Chris Freeland, Washington University; Matt Weber, Ph.D., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Laura Wrubel, The George Washington University; moderator Ana Krahmer, Ph.D., University of North Texas
Presentation: “NewsScape: preserving TV news” given by Tim Groeling, Ph.D., UCLA Communication Studies Department

Born-digital news preservation in perspective


Speaker: Clifford Lynch, Ph.D., executive director, Coalition for Networked Information on “Born-digital news preservation in perspective”

Live Tweet Archive

ChrisAldrich:

Getting Noter Live fired up for Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News https://www.rjionline.org/dtmh2016

Ginny Steel:

I’m glad I’m not at NBC trying to figure out the details for releasing THE APPRENTICE tapes.

Edward McCain:

Let’s thank @UCLA and the library for hosting us all.

While you’re here, don’t forget to vote/provide feedback throughout the day for IMLS

Someone once pulled up behind me and said “Hi Tiiiigeeerrr!” #Mizzou

A server at the Missourian crashed as the system was obsolete and running on baling wire. We lost 15 years of archives

The dean & head of Libraries created a position to save born digital news.

We’d like to help define stake-holder roles in relation to the problem.

Newspaper is really an outmoded term now.

I’d like to celebrate that we have 14 student scholars here today.

We’d like to have you identify specific projects that we can take to funding sources to begin work after the conference

We’ll be going to our first speaker who will be introduced by Martin Klein from Los Alamos.

Martin Klein:

Hjalmar Gislason is a self-described digital nerd. He’s the Vice President of Data.

I wonder how one becomes the President of Data?

Hjalmar Gislason:

My Icelandic name may be the most complicated part of my talk this morning.

Speaking on Digital Salvage Operations: What’s worth Saving”

My father in law accidentally threw away my wife’s favorite stuffed animal. #DeafTeddy

Some people just throw everything away because they’re not being used. Others keep everything and don’t throw it away.

The fundamental question: Do you want to save everything or do you want to get rid of everything?

I joined @qlik two years ago and moved to Boston.

Before that I was with spurl.net which was about saving copies of webpages they’d previously visited.

I had also previously invested in kjarninn which is translated as core.

We used to have little data, now we’re with gigantic data and moving to gargantuan data soon.

One of my goals today is to broaden our perspective about what data needs saving.

There’s the Web, the “Deep” Web, then there’s “Other” data which is at the bottom of the pyramid.

I got to see into the process of #panamapapers but I’d like to discuss the consequences from April 3rd.

The amount of meetings were almost more than could have been covered in real time in Iceland.

The #panamapapers were a soap opera, much like US politics.

Looking back at the process is highly interesting, but it’s difficult to look at all the data as they unfoldedd

How can we capture all the media minute by minute as a story unfolds.

You can’t trust that you can go back to a story at a certain time and know that it hasn’t been changed. #1984 #Orwell

There was a relatively pro-HRC piece earlier this year @NYTimes that was changed.

Newsdiffs tracks changes in news over time. The HRC article had changed a lot.

Let’s say you referenced @CNN 10 years ago, likely now, the CMS and the story have both changed.

8 years ago, I asked, wouldn’t we like to have the social media from Iceland’s only Nobel Laureate as a teenager?

What is private/public, ethical/unethical when dealing with data?

Much data is hidden behind passwords or on systems which are not easily accessed from a database perspective.

Most of the content published on Facebook isn’t public. It’s hard to archive in addition to being big.

We as archivists have no claim on the hidden data within Facebook.

ChrisAldrich:

The could help archivists in the future in accessing more personal data.

Hjalmar Gislason:

Then there’s “other” data: 500 hours of video us uploaded to YouTube per minute.

No organization can go around watching all of this video data. Which parts are newsworthy?

Content could surface much later or could surface through later research.

Hornbjargsviti lighthouse recorded the weather every three hours for years creating lots of data.

And that was just one of hundreds of sites that recorded this type of data in Iceland.

Lots of this data is lost. Much that has been found was by coincidence. It was never thought to archive it.

This type of weather data could be very valuable to researchers later on.

There was also a large archive of Icelandic data that was found.

Showing a timelapse of Icelandic earthquakes https://vimeo.com/24442762

You can watch the magma working it’s way through the ground before it makes it’s way up through the land.

National Geographic featured this video in a documentary.

Sometimes context is important when it comes to data. What is archived today may be more important later.

As the economic crisis unfolded in Greece, it turned out the data that was used to allow them into EU was wrong.

The data was published at the time of the crisis, but there was no record of what the data looked like 5 years earlier.

Only way to recreate the data was to take prior printed sources. This is usu only done in extraordinary cirucumstances.

We captured 150k+ data sets with more than 8 billion “facts” which was just a tiny fraction of what exists.

How can we delve deeper into large data sets, all with different configurations and proprietary systems.

“There’s a story in every piece of data.”

Once a year energy consumption seems to dip because February has fewer days than other months. Plotting it matters.

Year over year comparisons can be difficult because of things like 3 day weekends which shift over time.

Here’s a graph of the population of Iceland. We’ve had our fair share of diseases and volcanic eruptions.

To compare, here’s a graph of the population of sheep. They outnumber us by an order(s) of magnitude.

In the 1780’s there was an event that killed off lots of sheep, so people had the upper hand.

Do we learn more from reading today’s “newspaper” or one from 30, 50, or 100 years ago?

There was a letter to the editor about an eruption and people had to move into the city.

letter: “We can’t have all these people come here, we need to build for our own people first.”

This isn’t too different from our problems today with respect to Syria. In that case, the people actually lived closer.

In the born-digital age, what will the experience look like trying to capture today 40 years hence?

Will it even be possible?

Machine data connections will outnumber “people” data connections by a factor of 10 or more very quickly.

With data, we need to analyze, store, and discard data. How do we decide in a spit-second what to keep & discard?

We’re back to the father-in-law and mother-in-law question: What to get rid of and what to save?

Computing is continually beating human tasks: chess, Go, driving a car. They build on lots more experience based on data

Whoever has the most data on driving cars and landscape will be the ultimate winner in that particular space.

Data is valuable, sometimes we just don’t know which yet.

Hoarding is not a strategy.

You can only guess at what will be important.

“Commercial use in Doubt” The third sub-headline in a newspaper about an early test of television.

There’s more to it than just the web.

Kate Zwaard:

Hoarding isn’t a strategy really resonates with librarians, what could that relationship look like?

Hjalmar Gislason:

One should bring in data science, industry may be ahead of libraries.

Cross-disciplinary approaches may be best. How can you get a data scientist to look at your problem? Get their attention?

Peter Arnett:

There’s 60K+ books about the Viet Nam War. How do we learn to integrate what we learn after an event (like that)?

Hjalmar Gislason:

Perspective always comes with time, as additional information arrives.

Scientific papers are archived in a good way, but the underlying data is a problem.

In the future you may have the ability to add supplementary data as a supplement what appears in a book (in a better way)

Archives can give the ability to have much greater depth on many topics.

Are there any centers of excellence on the topics we’re discussing today? This conference may be IT.

We need more people that come from the technical side of things to be watching this online news problem.

Hacks/Hackers is a meetup group that takes place all over the world.

It brings the journalists and computer scientists together regularly for beers. It’s some of the outreach we need.

Edward McCain:

If you’re not interested in money, this is a good area to explore. 10 minute break.

Don’t forget to leave your thoughts on the questions at the back of the room.

We’re going to get started with our first panel. Why is it important to save online news?

Matthew Weber:

I’m Matt Weber from Rugters University and in communications.

I’ll talk about web archives and news media and how they interact.

I worked at Tribune Corp. for several years and covered politics in DC.

I wanted to study the way in which the news media is changing.

We’re increadingly seeing digital only media with no offline surrogate.

It’s becomign increasingly difficult to do anything but look at it now as it exists.

There was no large scale online repository of online news to do research.

#OccupyWallStreet is one of the first examples of stories that exist online in ocurence and reportage.

There’s a growing need to archive content around local news particularly politics and democracy.

When there is a rich and vibrant local news environment, people are more likely to become engaged.

Local news is one of the least thought about from an archive perspective.

Laura Wrubel:

I’m at GWU Librarys in the scholarly technology group.

I’m involved in social feed manager which allows archivists to put together archives from social services.

Kimberly Gross, a faculty member, studies tweets of news outlets and journalists.

We created a prototype tool to allow them to collect data from social media.

Journalists were 2011 primarily using their Twitter presences to direct people to articles rather than for conversation

We collect data of political candidates.

Chris Freeland:

I’m an associate library and representing “Documenting the Now” with WashU, UCRiverside, & UofMd

Documenting the Now revolves around Twitter documentation.

It started with the Ferguson story and documenting media, videos during the protests in the community.

What can we as memory institutions do to capture the data?

We gathered 14million tweets relating to Ferguson within two weeks.

We tried to build a platform that others could use in the future for similar data capture relating to social.

Ethics is important in archiving this type of news data.

Ana Krahmer:

Digitally preserving pdfs from news organizations and hyper-local news in Texas.

We’re approaching 5million pages of archived local news.

What is news that needs to be archived, and why?

Matthew Weber:

First, what is news? The definition is unique to each individual.

We need to capture as much of the social news and social representation of news which is fragmented.

It’s an important part of society today.

We no longer produce hard copies like we did a decade ago. We need to capture the online portion.

Laura Wrubel:

We’d like to get the perspective of journalists, and don’t have one on the panel today.

We looked at how midterm election candidates used Twitter. Is that news itself? What tools do we use to archive it?

What does it mean to archive news by private citizens?

Chris Freeland:

Twitter was THE place to find information in St. Louis during the Ferguson protests.

Local news outlets weren’t as good as Twitter during the protests.

I could hear the protest from 5 blocks away and only found news about it on Twitter.

The story was bing covered very differently on Twitter than the local (mainstream) news.

Alternate voices in the mix were very interesting and important.

Twitter was in the moment and wasn’t being edited and causing a delay.

What can we learn from this massive number of Ferguson tweets.

It gives us information about organizing, and what language was being used.

Ana Krahmer:

I think about the archival portion of this question. By whom does it need to be archived?

What do we archive next?

How are we representing the current population now?

Who is going to take on the burden of archiving? Should it be corporate? Cultural memory institution?

Someone needs to currate it, who does that?

our next question: What do you view as primary barriers to news archiving?

Laura Wrubel:

How do we organize and staff? There’s no shortage of work.

Tools and software can help the process, but libraries are usually staffed very thinly.

No single institution can do this type of work alone. Collaboration is important.

Chris Freeland:

Two barriers we deal with: terms of service are an issue with archiving. We don’t own it, but can use it.

Libraries want to own the data in perpetuity. We don’t own our data.

There’s a disconnect in some of the business models for commercialization and archiving.

Issues with accessing data.

People were worried about becoming targets or losing jobs because of participation.

What is role of ethics of archiving this type of data? Allowing opting out?

What about redacting portions? anonymizing the contributions?

Ana Krahmer:

Publishers have a responsibility for archiving their product. Permission from publishers can be difficult.

We have a lot of underserved communities. What do we do with comments on stories?

Corporations may not continue to exist in the future and data will be lost.

Matthew Weber:

There’s a balance to be struck between the business side and the public good.

It’s hard to convince for profit about the value of archiving for the social good.

Chris Freeland:

Next Q: What opportunities have revealed themselves in preserving news?

Finding commonalities and differences in projects is important.

What does it mean to us to archive different media types? (think diversity)

What’s happening in my community? in the nation? across the world?

The long-history in our archives will help us learn about each other.

Ana Krahmer:

We can only do so much with the resources we have.

We’ve worked on a cyber cemetery product in the past.

Someone else can use the tools we create within their initiatives.

Chris Freeland:

repeating ?: What are issues in archiving longerform video data with regard to stories on Periscope?

Audience Question:

How do you channel the energy around archiving news archiving?

Matthew Weber:

Research in the area is all so new.

Audience Question:

Does anyone have any experience with legal wrangling with social services?

Chris Freeland:

The ACLU is waging a lawsuit against Twitter about archived tweets.

Ana Krahmer:

Outreach to community papers is very rhizomic.

Audience Question:

How do you take local examples and make them a national model?

Ana Krahmer:

We’re teenagers now in the evolution of what we’re doing.

Edward McCain:

Peter Arnett just said “This is all ore interesting than I thought it would be.”

Next Presentation: NewsScape: preserving TV news

Tim Groeling:

I’ll be talking about the NewsScape project of Francis Steen, Director, Communication Studies Archive

I’m leading the archiving of the analog portion of the collection.

The oldest of our collection dates from the 1950’s. We’ve hosted them on YouTube which has created some traction.

Commenters have been an issue with posting to YouTube as well as copyright.

NewsScape is the largest collecction of TV news and public affairs programs (local & national)

Prior to 2006, we don’t know what we’ve got.

Paul said “Ill record everytihing I can and someone in the future can deal with it.”

We have 50K hours of Betamax.

VHS are actually most threatened, despite being newest tapes.

Our budget was seriously strapped.

Maintaining closed captioning is important to our archiving efforts.

We’ve done 36k hours of encoding this year.

We use a layer of dead VCR’s over our good VCR’s to prevent RF interference and audio buzzing. 🙂

Post-2006 We’re now doing straight to digital

Preservation is the first step, but we need to be more than the world’s best DVR.

Searching the news is important too.

Showing a data visualization of news analysis with regard to the Heathcare Reform movement.

We’re doing facial analysis as well.

We have interactive tools at viz2016.com.

We’ve tracked how often candidates have smiled in election 2016. Hillary > Trump

We want to share details within our collection, but don’t have tools yet.

Having a good VCR repairman has helped us a lot.

Edward McCain:

Breaking for lunch…

Clifford Lynch:

Talk “Born-digital news preservation in perspective”

There’s a shared consensus that preserving scholarly publications is important.

While delivery models have shifted, there must be some fall back to allow content to survive publisher failure.

Preservation was a joint investment between memory institutions and publishers.

Keepers register their coverage of journals for redundancy.

In studying coverage, we’ve discovered Elsevier is REALLY well covered, but they’re not what we’re worried about.

It’s the small journals as edge cases that really need more coverage.

Smaller journals don’t have resources to get into the keeper services and it’s more expensive.

Many Open Access Journals are passion projects and heavily underfunded and they are poorly covered.

Being mindful of these business dynamics is key when thinking about archiving news.

There are a handful of large news outlets that are “too big to fail.”

There are huge numbers of small outlets like subject verticals, foreign diasporas, etc. that need to be watched

Different strategies should be used for different outlets.

The material on lots of links (as sources) disappears after a short period of time.

While Archive.org is a great resource, it can’t do everything.

Preserving underlying evidence is really important.

How we deal with massive databases and queries against them are a difficult problem.

I’m not aware of studies of link rot with relationship to online news.

Who steps up to preserve major data dumps like Snowden, PanamaPapers, or email breaches?

Social media is a collection of observations and small facts without necessarily being journalism.

Journalism is a deliberate act and is meant to be public while social media is not.

We need to come up with a consensus about what parts of social media should be preserved as news..

News does often delve into social media as part of its evidence base now.

Responsible journalism should include archival storage, but it doesn’t yet.

Under current law, we can’t protect a lot of this material without the permission of the creator(s).

The Library of Congress can demand deposit, but doesn’t.

With funding issues, I’m not wild about the Library of Congress being the only entity [for storage.]

In the UK, there are multiple repositories.

ChrisAldrich:

testing to see if I’m still live

What happens if you livetweet too much in one day.
password-change-required

Twitter List for #DtMH2016 Participants | Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News

Live Tweeting and Twitter Lists

While attending the upcoming conference Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News later this week, I’ll make an attempt to live Tweet as much as possible. (If you’re following me on Twitter on Thursday and Friday and find me too noisy, try using QuietTime.xyz to mute me on Twitter temporarily.) I’ll be using Kevin Marks‘ excellent Noter Live web app to both send out the tweets as well as to store and archive them here on this site thereafter (kind of like my own version of Storify.)

In getting ramped up to live Tweet it, it helps significantly to have a pre-existing list of attendees (and remote participants) talking about #DtMH2016 on Twitter, so I started creating a Twitter list by hand. I realized that it would be nice to have a little bot to catch others as the week progresses. Ever lazy, I turned to IFTTT.com to see if something already existed, and sure enough there’s a Twitter search with a trigger that will allow one to add people who mention a particular hashtag to a Twitter list automatically.

Here’s the resultant list, which should grow as the event unfolds throughout the week:
🔖 People on Twitter talking about #DtMH2016

Feel free to follow or subscribe to the list as necessary. Hopefully this will make attending the conference more fruitful for those there live as well as remote.

Not on the list? Just tweet a (non-private) message with the conference hashtag: #DTMH2016 and you should be added to the list shortly.

Tweet: I'm attending #DtMH2016 @rji | Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News http://ctt.ec/5RKt2+ Lazy like me? Click the bird to tweet: “I’m attending #DtMH2016 @rji | Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News http://ctt.ec/5RKt2+”

IFTTT Recipe for Creating Twitter Lists of Conference Attendees

For those interested in creating their own Twitter lists for future conferences (and honestly the hosts of all conferences should do this as they set up their conference hashtag and announce the conference), below is a link to the ifttt.com recipe I created for this, but which can be modified for use by others.

IFTTT Recipe: Create Twitter List of Attendees from search of people using conference hashtag connects twitter to twitter

Naturally, it would also be nice if, as people registered for conferences, they were asked for their Twitter handles and websites so that the information could be used to create such online lists to help create longer lasting relationships both during the event and afterwards as well. (Naturally providing these details should be optional so that people who wish to maintain their privacy could do so.)

Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016

A Problem with Transcripts

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen dozens of news outlets publish multi-paragraph excerpts of speeches from Donald Trump and have been appalled that I was unable to read them in any coherent way. I could not honestly follow or discern any coherent thought or argument in the majority of them. I was a bit shocked because in listening to him, he often sounds like he has some kind of point, though he seems to be spouting variations on one of ten one-liners he’s been using for over a year now. There’s apparently a flaw in our primal reptilian brains that seems to be tricking us into thinking that there’s some sort of substance in his speech when there honestly is none. I’m going to have to spend some time reading more on linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. Maybe Stephen Pinker knows of an answer?

The situation got worse this week as I turned to news sources for fact-checking of the recent presidential debate. While it’s nice to have web-based annotation tools like Genius[1] and Hypothes.is[2] to mark up these debates, it becomes another thing altogether to understand the meaning of what’s being said in order to actually attempt to annotate it. I’ve included some links so that readers can attempt the exercise for themselves.

Recent transcripts (some with highlights/annotations):

Doubletalk and Doublespeech

It’s been a while since Americans were broadly exposed to actual doubletalk. For the most part our national experience with it has been a passing curiosity highlighted by comedians.

dou·ble-talk
ˈdəblˌtôk/
n. (NORTH AMERICAN)
a deliberately unintelligible form of speech in which inappropriate, invented or nonsense syllables are combined with actual words. This type of speech is commonly used to give the appearance of knowledge and thereby confuse, amuse, or entertain the speaker’s audience.
another term for doublespeak
see also n. doubletalk [3]

Since the days of vaudeville (and likely before), comedians have used doubletalk to great effect on stage, in film, and on television. Some comedians who have historically used the technique as part of their acts include Al Kelly, Cliff Nazarro, Danny Kaye, Gary Owens, Irwin Corey, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Stanley Unwin, and Reggie Watts. I’m including some short video clips below as examples.

A well-known, but foreshortened, form of it was used by Dana Carvey in his Saturday Night Live performances caricaturizing George H.W. Bush by using a few standard catch phrases with pablum in between: “Not gonna do it…”, “Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture”, and “Thousand Points of Light…”. These snippets in combination with some creative hand gestures (pointing, lacing fingers together), along with a voice melding of Mr. Rogers and John Wayne were the simple constructs that largely transformed a diminutive comedian convincingly into a president.

Doubletalk also has a more “educated” sibling known as technobabble. Engineers are sure to recall a famous (and still very humorous) example of both doubletalk and technobabble in the famed description of the Turboencabulator.[4] (See also, the short videos below.)

Doubletalk comedy examples

Al Kelly on Ernie Kovaks

Sid Caesar

Technobabble examples

Turboencabulator

Rockwell Turbo Encabulator Version 2

Politicobabble

And of course doubletalk and technobabble have closely related cousins named doublespeak and politicobabble. These are far more dangerous than the others because they move over the line of comedy into seriousness and are used by people who make decisions effecting hundreds of thousands to millions, if not billions, of people on the planet. I’m sure an archeo-linguist might be able to discern where exactly politicobabble emerged and managed to evolve into a non-comedic form of speech which people manage to take far more seriously than its close ancestors. One surely suspects some heavy influence from George Orwell’s corpus of work:

The term “doublespeak” probably has its roots in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four.[5] Although the term is not used in the book, it is a close relative of one of the book’s central concepts, “doublethink”. Another variant, “doubletalk”, also referring to deliberately ambiguous speech, did exist at the time Orwell wrote his book, but the usage of “doublespeak” as well as of “doubletalk” in the sense emphasizing ambiguity clearly postdates the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell’s classic essay Politics and the English Language [6] , which discusses the distortion of language for political purposes.

in Wikipedia.com [7]

 

While politicobabble is nothing new, I did find a very elucidating passage from the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election cycle which seems to be a major part of the Trump campaign playbook:

Repetition of a meaningless mantra is supposed to empty the mind, clearing the way for meditation on more profound matters. This campaign has achieved the first part. I’m not sure about the second.

Candidates are now told to pick a theme, and keep repeating it-until polls show it’s not working, at which point the theme vanishes and another takes its place.

The mantra-style repetition of the theme of the week, however, leaves the impression that Teen Talk Barbie has acquired some life-size Campaign Talk Ken dolls. Pull the string and you get: ‘Congress is tough,’ ‘worst economic performance since the Depression,’ or ‘a giant sucking sound south of the border.’

A number of words and phrases, once used to express meaningful concepts, are becoming as useful as ‘ommm’ in the political discourse. Still, these words and phrases have meanings, just not the ones the dictionary originally intended.

Joanne Jacobs
in A Handy Guide To Politico-babble in the Chicago Tribune on

 

In the continuation of the article, Jacobs goes on to give a variety of examples of the term as well as a “translation” guide for some of the common politicobabble words from that particular election. I’ll leave it to the capable hands of others (perhaps in the comments, below?) to come up with the translation guide for our current political climate.

The interesting evolutionary change I’ll note for the current election cycle is that Trump hasn’t delved into any depth on any of his themes to offend anyone significantly enough. This has allowed him to stay with the dozen or so themes he started out using and therefore hasn’t needed to change them as in campaigns of old.

Filling in the Blanks

These forms of pseudo-speech area all meant to fool us into thinking that something of substance is being discussed and that a conversation is happening, when in fact, nothing is really being communicated at all. Most of the intended meaning and reaction to such speech seems to stem from the demeanor of the speaker as well as, in some part, to the reaction of the surrounding interlocutor and audience. In reading Donald Trump transcripts, an entirely different meaning (or lack thereof) is more quickly realized as the surrounding elements which prop up the narrative have been completely stripped away. In a transcript version, gone is the hypnotizing element of the crowd which is vehemently sure that the emperor is truly wearing clothes.

In many of these transcripts, in fact, I find so little is being said that the listener is actually being forced to piece together the larger story in their head. Being forced to fill in the blanks in this way leaves too much of the communication up to the listener who isn’t necessarily engaged at a high level. Without more detail or context to understand what is being communicated, the listener is far more likely to fill in the blanks to fit a story that doesn’t create any cognitive dissonance for themselves — in part because Trump is usually smiling and welcoming towards his adoring audiences.

One will surely recall that Trump even wanted Secretary Clinton to be happy during the debate when he said, “Now, in all fairness to Secretary Clinton — yes, is that OK? Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me.” (This question also doubles as an example of a standard psychological sales tactic of attempting to get the purchaser to start by saying ‘yes’ as a means to keep them saying yes while moving them towards making a purchase.)

His method of communicating by leaving large holes in his meaning reminds me of the way our brain smooths out information as indicated in this old internet meme [9]:

I cdn’uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arpppoiatrely cllaed typoglycemia.

 

I’m also reminded of the biases and heuristics research carried out in part (and the remainder cited) by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow [10] in which he discusses the mechanics of how system 1 and system 2 work in our brains. Is Trump taking advantage of the deficits of language processing in our brains in something akin to system 1 biases to win large blocks of votes? Is he creating a virtual real-time Choose-Your-Own-Adventure to subvert the laziness of the electorate? Kahneman would suggest the the combination of what Trump does say and what he doesn’t leaves it up to every individual listener to create their own story. Their system 1 is going to default to the easiest and most palatable one available to them: a happy story that fits their own worldview and is likely to encourage them to support Trump.

Ten Word Answers

As an information theorist, I know all too well that there must be a ‘linguistic Shannon limit’ to the amount of semantic meaning one can compress into a single word. [11] One is ultimately forced to attempt to form sentences to convey more meaning. But usually the less politicians say, the less trouble they can get into — a lesson hard won through generations of political fighting.

I’m reminded of a scene from The West Wing television series. In season 4, episode 6 which aired on October 30, 2002 on NBC, Game On had a poignant moment (video clip below) which is germane to our subject: [12]

Moderator: Governor Ritchie, many economists have stated that the tax cut, which is the centrepiece of your economic agenda, could actually harm the economy. Is now really the time to cut taxes?
Governor Ritchie, R-FL: You bet it is. We need to cut taxes for one reason – the American people know how to spend their money better than the federal government does.
Moderator: Mr. President, your rebuttal.
President Bartlet: There it is…
That’s the 10 word answer my staff’s been looking for for 2 weeks. There it is.
10 word answers can kill you in political campaigns — they’re the tip of the sword.
Here’s my question: What are the next 10 words of your answer?
“Your taxes are too high?” So are mine…
Give me the next 10 words: How are we going to do it?
Give me 10 after that — I’ll drop out of the race right now.
Every once in a while — every once in a while, there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that there aren’t very many un-nuanced moments in leading a country that’s way too big for 10 words.
I’m the President of the United States, not the president of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.

As someone who studies information theory and complexity theory and even delves into sub-topics like complexity and economics, I can agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Though again, here I can also see the massive gaps between system 1 and 2 that force us to want to simplify things down to such a base level that we don’t have to do the work to puzzle them out.

(And yes, that is Jennifer Anniston’s father playing the moderator.)

One can’t but wonder why Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to have ever gone past the first ten words? Is it because he isn’t capable? interested? Or does he instinctively know better? It would seem that he’s been doing business by using the uncertainty inherent in his speech for decades, but always operating by using what he meant (or thought he wanted to mean) than what the other party heard and thought they understood. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Idiocracy or Something Worse?

In our increasingly specialized world, people eventually have to give in and quit doing some tasks that everyone used to do for themselves. Yesterday I saw a lifeworn woman in her 70s pushing a wheeled wire basket with a 5 gallon container of water from the store to her home. As she shuffled along, I contemplated Thracian people from fourth century BCE doing the same thing except they likely carried amphorae possibly with a yoke and without the benefit of the $10 manufactured custom shopping cart. 20,000 years before that people were still carrying their own water, but possibly without even the benefit of earthenware containers. Things in human history have changed very slowly for the most part, but as we continually sub-specialize further and further, we need to remember that we can’t give up one of the primary functions that makes us human: the ability to think deeply and analytically for ourselves.

I suspect that far too many people are too wrapped up in their own lives and problems to listen to more than the ten word answers our politicians are advertising to us. We need to remember to ask for the next ten words and the ten after that.

Otherwise there are two extreme possible outcomes:

We’re either at the beginning of what Mike Judge would term Idiocracy[13]

Or we’re headed to what Michiko Kakutani is “subtweeting” about in her recent review In ‘Hitler’ an Ascent from ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue [14] of Volker Ulrich’s new book Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939[15] 

Here, one is tempted to quote George Santayana’s famous line (from The Life of Reason, 1905), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, I far prefer the following as more apropos to our present national situation:

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (), a British statesman, historian, writer and artist,
in House of Commons, 2 May 1935, after the Stresa Conference, in which Britain, France and Italy agreed—futilely—to maintain the independence of Austria.

 

tl;dr

If Cliff Navarro comes back to run for president, I hope no one falls for his joke just because he wasn’t laughing as he acted it out. If his instructions for fixing the wagon (America) are any indication, the voters who are listening and making the repairs will be in severe pain.

Cliff Navarro

Footnotes

[1]
“Genius | Song Lyrics & Knowledge,” Genius, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://genius.com. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[2]
“Hypothesis | The Internet, peer reviewed. | Hypothesis,” hypothes.is, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://hypothes.is/. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[3]
“Double-talk – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” en.wikipedia.org, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-talk. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[4]
“Turboencabulator – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” en.wikipedia.org, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[5]
G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1st ed. London: Harvill Secker & Warburg, 1949.
[6]
G. Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, vol. 13, no. 76, pp. 252–265, Apr. 1946 [Online]. Available: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
[7]
“Doublespeak – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” en.wikipedia.org, 29-Sep-2016. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[8]
J. Jacobs, “A Handy Guide To Politico-babble,” Chicago Tribune, 31-Oct-1992. [Online]. Available: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-10-31/news/9204080638_1_family-values-trickle-bill-clinton. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[9]
M. Davis, “cmabridge | Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,” mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk, 2012. [Online]. Available: https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/. [Accessed: 29-Sep-2016]
[10]
D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan, 2011.
[11]
C. Shanon E., “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 379–423, Jul. 1948. [Source]
[12]
A. Sorkin, J. Wells, and T. Schlamme , “Game On,” The West Wing, NBC, 30-Oct-2002.
[13]
M. Judge, Idiocracy. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006.
[14]
M. Katutani, “In ‘Hitler’ an Ascent from ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue,” New York Times, p. 1, 27-Sep-2016 [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/books/hitler-ascent-volker-ullrich.html?_r=0. [Accessed: 28-Sep-2016] [Source]
[15]
V. Ullrich, Adolf Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, 1st ed. Knopf Publishing Group, 2016.

Homebrew Website Club — Los Angeles

In an effort to provide easier commuting access for a broader cross-section of Homebrew members we met last night at Yahoo’s Yahoo’s primary offices at 11995 W. Bluff Creek Drive, Playa Vista, CA 90094. We hope to alternate meetings of the Homebrew Website Club between the East and West sides of Los Angeles as we go forward. If anyone has additional potential meeting locations, we’re always open to suggestions as well as assistance.

We had our largest RSVP list to date, though some had last minute issues pop up and one sadly had trouble finding the location (likely due to a Google map glitch).

Angelo and Chris met before the quiet writing hour to discuss some general planning for future meetings as well as the upcoming IndieWebCamp in LA in November. Details and help for arrangements for out of town attendees should be posted shortly.

Notes from the “broadcast” portion of the meetup

Chris Aldrich (co-organizer)

Angelo Gladding (co-organizer)

  • Work is proceeding nicely on the overall build of Canopy
  • Discussed an issue with expanding data for social network in relation to events and potentially expanding contacts based on event attendees

Srikanth Bangalore (our host at Yahoo!)

  • Discussed some of his background in coding and work with Drupal and WordPress.
  • His personal site is https://srib.us/

Notes from the “working” portion of the meetup

We sketched out a way to help Srikanth IndieWeb-ify not only his own site, but to potentially help do so for Katie Couric’s Yahoo! based news site along with the pros/cons of workflows for journalists in general. We also considered some potential pathways for potentially bolting on webmentions for websites (like Tumblr/WordPress) which utilize Disqus for their commenting system. We worked through the details of webmentions and a bit of micropub for his benefit.

Srikanth discussed some of the history and philosophy behind why Tumblr didn’t have a more “traditional” native commenting system. The point was generally to socially discourage negativity, spamming, and abuse by forcing people to post their comments front and center on their own site (and not just in the “comments” of the receiving site) thereby making the negativity be front and center and redound to their own reputation rather than just the receiving page of the target. Most social media related sites hide (or make hard to search/find) the abusive nature of most users, while allowing them to appear better/nicer on their easier-to-find public facing persona.

Before closing out the meeting officially, we stopped by the front lobby where two wonderful and personable security guards (one a budding photographer) not only helped us with a group photo, but managed to help us escape the parking lot!

I think it’s agreed we all had a great time and look forward to more progress on projects, more good discussion, and more interested folks at the next meeting. Srikanth was so amazed at some of the concepts, it’s possible that all of Yahoo! may be IndieWeb-ified by the end of the week. 🙂

We hope you’ll join us next month on 10/05! (Details forthcoming…)

Live Tweets Archive


Ever with grand aspirations to do as good a job as the illustrious Kevin Marks, we tried some livetweeting with Noterlive. Alas the discussion quickly became so consuming that the effort was abandoned in lieu of both passion and fun. Hopefully some of the salient points were captured above in better form anyway.

Srikanth Bangalore:

I only use @drupal when I want to make money. (Replying to why his personal site was on @wordpress.) #

(This CMS comment may have been the biggest laugh of the night, though the tone captured here (and the lack of context), doesn’t do the comment any justice at all.)

Angelo Gladding:

I’m a hobby-ist programmer, but I also write code to make money. #

I’m into python which is my language of choice. #

Chris Aldrich:

Thanks again @themarketeng for hosting Homebrew Website Club at Yahoo tonight! We really appreciate the hospitality. #

Introduction to Complex Analysis – Lecture 1 Notes

For those who missed the first class of Introduction to Complex Analysis on 09/20/16, I’m attaching a link to the downloadable version of the notes in Livescribe’s Pencast .pdf format. This is a special .pdf file but it’s a bit larger in size because it has an embedded audio file in it that is playable with the more recent version of Adobe Reader X (or above) installed. (This means to get the most out of the file you have to download the file and open it in Reader X to get the audio portion. You can view the written portion in most clients, you’ll just be missing out on all the real fun and value of the full file.) [Editor’s note: Don’t we all wish Dr. Tao’s class was recording his lectures this way.]

With these notes, you should be able to toggle the settings in the file to read and listen to the notes almost as if you were attending the class live. I’ve done my best to write everything exactly as it was written on the board and only occasionally added small bits of additional text.

If you haven’t registered yet, you can watch the notes as if you were actually in the class and still join us next Tuesday night without missing a beat. There are over 25 people in the class not counting several I know who had to miss the first session.

Hope to see you then!

Viewing and Playing a Pencast PDF

Pencast PDF is a new format of notes and audio that can play in Adobe Reader X or above.

You can open a Pencast PDF as you would other PDF files in Adobe Reader X. The main difference is that a Pencast PDF can contain ink that has associated audio—called “active ink”. Click active ink to play its audio. This is just like playing a Pencast from Livescribe Online or in Livescribe Desktop. When you first view a notebook page, active ink appears in green type. When you click active ink, it turns gray and the audio starts playing. As audio playback continues, the gray ink turns green in synchronization with the audio. Non-active ink (ink without audio) is black and does not change appearance.

Audio Control Bar

Pencast PDFs have an audio control bar for playing, pausing, and stopping audio playback. The control bar also has jump controls, bookmarks (stars), and an audio timeline control.

Active Ink View Button

There is also an active ink view button. Click this button to toggle the “unwritten” color of active ink from gray to invisible. In the default (gray) setting, the gray words turn green as the audio plays. In the invisible setting, green words seem to write themselves on blank paper as the audio plays.

Hector Zenil

I’ve run across some of his work before, but I ran into some new material by Hector Zenil that will likely interest those following information theory, complexity, and computer science here. I hadn’t previously noticed that he refers to himself on his website as an “information theoretic biologist” — everyone should have that as a title, shouldn’t they? As a result, I’ve also added him to the growing list of ITBio Researchers.

If you’re not following him everywhere (?) yet, start with some of the sites below (or let me know if I’ve missed anything).

Hector Zenil:

His most recent paper on arXiv:
Low Algorithmic Complexity Entropy-deceiving Graphs | .pdf

A common practice in the estimation of the complexity of objects, in particular of graphs, is to rely on graph- and information-theoretic measures. Here, using integer sequences with properties such as Borel normality, we explain how these measures are not independent of the way in which a single object, such a graph, can be described. From descriptions that can reconstruct the same graph and are therefore essentially translations of the same description, we will see that not only is it necessary to pre-select a feature of interest where there is one when applying a computable measure such as Shannon Entropy, and to make an arbitrary selection where there is not, but that more general properties, such as the causal likeliness of a graph as a measure (opposed to randomness), can be largely misrepresented by computable measures such as Entropy and Entropy rate. We introduce recursive and non-recursive (uncomputable) graphs and graph constructions based on integer sequences, whose different lossless descriptions have disparate Entropy values, thereby enabling the study and exploration of a measure’s range of applications and demonstrating the weaknesses of computable measures of complexity.

Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Computational Complexity (cs.CC); Combinatorics (math.CO)
Cite as: arXiv:1608.05972 [cs.IT] (or arXiv:1608.05972v4 [cs.IT]

YouTube

Yesterday he also posted two new introductory videos to his YouTube channel. There’s nothing overly technical here, but they’re nice short productions that introduce some of his work. (I wish more scientists did communication like this.) I’m hoping he’ll post them to his blog and write a bit more there in the future as well.

Universal Measures of Complexity

Relevant literature:

Reprogrammable World

Relevant literature:

Cross-boundary Behavioural Reprogrammability Reveals Evidence of Pervasive Turing Universality by Jürgen Riedel, Hector Zenil
Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01671

Ed.: 9/7/16: Updated videos with links to relevant literature

Instagram Single Photo Bookmarklet

Ever wanted a simple and quick way to extract the primary details from an Instagram photo to put it on your own website?

The following javascript-based bookmarklet is courtesy of Tantek Çelik as an Indieweb tool he built at IndieWebCamp NYC2:

If you view a single photo permalink page, the following bookmarklet will extract the permalink (trimmed), photo jpg URL, and photo caption and copy them into a text note, suitable for posting as a photo that’s auto-linked:

javascript:n=document.images.length-1;s=document.images[n].src;s=s.split('?');s=s[0];u=document.location.toString().substring(0,39);prompt('Choose "Copy ⌘C" to copy photo post:',s+' '+u+'\n'+document.images[n].alt.toString().replace(RegExp(/\.\n(\.\n)+/),'\n'))

Any questions, let me know! –Tantek

If you want an easy drag-and-drop version, just drag the button below into your browser’s bookmark bar.

✁ Instagram

Editor’s note: Though we’ll try to keep the code in this bookmarklet updated, the most recent version can be found on the Indieweb wiki thought the link above.

Attack of the Killer Donald Trump: A Zombie Movie?!

There is a multi-lingual low-budget movie shooting across the street from me in which Trump is terrorizing some Spanish speaking gardeners!

It doesn’t appear to be a comedy and Trump is grumbling as if he’s a Zombie!

There were some more-than-steamy scenes (shot behind the neighbors’ bushes) which are NSFW, so they won’t appear here.

I won’t spoil the ending, but the last shot I saw involved the cinematographer lying on the ground shooting up at a gardner with a shovel standing over him menacingly.

Click below for some of the video I shot.


Instagram filter used: Normal

Photo taken in: Glendale, California