My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.
Matt has got a good overview and some useful ideas and I like the direction he’s moving. There has been more work on not only RSS but other feeds and specs like Microsub in the past few years. The IndieWeb has moved the needle a bit on this topic as well as related work on things like OPML. Even then, we still have a way to go on making the UI as easy as social media sites do.
In this issue, I want to open a conversation about a technology of our age that hasn’t quite worked out the way we all had hoped—and by we, I mean those of us who care about the composition and transmission of ideas, which I believe includes everyone on this list.
Twenty years ago, literary critic Sven Birkerts reviewed the new technology of ebooks and e-readers for the short-lived internet magazine Feed. They sent him a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook, and he duly turned them on and settled into his comfy chair. What followed, however, was anything but comfy:
René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)
My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I’m curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?
November 06, 2019 at 08:49PM
We are beginning a renovation of our main library at Northeastern University, Snell Library, and have been talking with architects (some of them very well-known), and I’ve found the discussions utterly invigorating. I would like to find some way to blog or newsletter about the process we will go through over the next few years, and to think aloud about the (re)design and (future) function of the library. I’m not sure if that should occur in this space or elsewhere, although the thought of launching another outlet fills me with dread. Let me know if this topic would interest you, and if I should include it here.
Dan, this is definitely interesting. Please include it here or on your main site!!!
November 06, 2019 at 08:43PM
But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (< $1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).
Nice to see this laid out. I’ve never seen a general overview of how this system works for libraries.
I’ve always wondered what it cost my local public library to loan me an e-book whether I read it or not.
November 06, 2019 at 08:40PM
It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.
For me, and potentially for a majority of others, our memories have evolved to be highly location specific. It’s far easier for me to remember what I’ve read when I read a physical book. I can often picture what I was reading at the top, middle, or bottom of the left or right page. This fact in addition to how far I am in the book gives me a better idea of where I am with respect to a text.
These ideas are very subtle and so heavily ingrained in us that they’re not very apparent to many, if at all.
See also Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture by Lynne Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
November 06, 2019 at 08:32PM
In September, the first reports of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries
exploding hit social media. At first, Samsung identified the issue as one
relating to the lithium polymer battery manufacturing process by Samsung
SDI, where too much tension was used in manufacturing, and offered to
repair affected phones. But several weeks later, some of the batteries in
those replacement units also exploded once they were in the hands of
customers -- causing Samsung to make the bold decision to not only recall
everything, but to cancel the entire product line.
This is every battery engineer’s nightmare. As hardware engineers
ourselves, Sam and I followed the story closely. If it was only a battery
part issue and could have been salvaged by a re-spin of the battery, why
cancel the product line and cede several quarters of revenue to
competitors? We believe that there was more in play: that there was a
fundamental problem with the design of the phone itself.
Legendary investor William H. "Bill" Miller III has committed a record $75 million to the Johns Hopkins University Department of Philosophy to broaden and intensify faculty research, graduate student support, and undergraduate study of philosophical thought.
Support for the humanities like this is definitely a worthy cause!
Directed by Cliff Bole. With Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Denise Crosby. After diverting to a secret meeting with an old friend and some of Starfleet's finest commanders, Picard finds the Horatio blown to bits just hours after the meeting and he returns the Enterprise to Earth looking for answers.
The mid-50’s claymation special effects here are almost hilarious!
I finally got my old ping pong table shipped to the house after after being in storage for a well over a decade. It will require some heavy dusting and cleaning, but who wants to play?
I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist. It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips. Make them too big and anti-racist people will accuse you of being a white supremacist peddling, in their words, the old ‘sambo’ myth. But too small and they don’t look like the lips of very many black people. It’s the same with the colour. At first, on my cartoon, I used a black felt-tip pen and so the figure came out very black indeed. ‘Sambo’ territory again, especially when I added big red lips and very white teeth. In the end I used cross-hatching with a pencil but this was, to my mind, unsatisfactory.
Chapter 1: Primary orality in the archaeological context
10% done; Finished Chapter 1
I appreciate the additional detail and references here. To an uninitiated audience it feels like she should have spent some time exploring the idea of mnemonic earlier, but I’m fine without it.
Five votes. That’s the number of votes that finally put Denise Menchaca over the top to win a seat on the San Gabriel City Council in 2016. But those five votes came at the end of a long and torturous road.
By Cher...
China's short-lived republic fell to corrupt power plays and maneuvering to restore the dynasty. Trace the country's descent into political chaos and rule by warlords, and ensuing encroachments by Japan. In addition, follow events leading to the birth of modern Chinese Nationalism.
Ok, so I have a Remarkable. I use Zotero a lot, and have started experimenting with Obsidian. I also have used Matter, but never really grew to love it and am considering Readwise, although I suppose I could go back to Pocket.
Anyone have good workflows that centre around Remarkable / Zotero, but include Obsidian and / or Readwise?
#ResearchWorkflow #ToolsOfAcademia #WritingTools
Instagram made some very big changes to authentication process. About 70% of our users are affected by them.
Before the changes the process was quite simple:
Sometimes Instagram decided that login from SNAP is “unusual” and asked for confirmation. You just had to open Instagram on your phone and...
An alarming photo of a hallway crowded by mostly maskless students in a Georgia high school raises issues with reopening schools all around the country.
This depresses me to read. It’s even worse when I think that this high school is just 36 miles South of the high school I attended. The local schools’ and government’s lack of care for the students under their supervision is appalling. It’s even worse when I think of the people who were sent home or punished for what I would consider minor dress code “violations” when I attended and yet now they’re saying they can’t manage to make mask wearing mandatory.
Dan Cohen
Fredrik Graver
