Weblogs 4 comments

Idea

By on July 6th, 2005

Watching the "If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it…" meme spreading, I find myself with the thought: someone should devise a way of automatically tracking blog-memes and visualizing the results. Between Technorati, del.icio.us, and Bloglines, there ought to be a way to extract the information, no? I’m envisioning something like the TouchGraph Google Browser, part family tree and part network, with some way to show the direction of linking. You could make it display a meme’s progression over time. Then you could figure out the points where different sectors of the blogosphere connect — where the bridges between one interest group and another are.

It sounds a bit trivial (after all, nobody really cares who posted their "Which Tarot Card Are You?" quiz result first*), but I bet you could use it to investigate all kinds of questions about social networks, and degrees of separation, and small world theory, and whether Malcolm Gladwell is right about tipping points and the epidemic model of change.

Of course, someone with much more geek cred than I have has no doubt had this idea already, implemented it, and posted the results months ago. I just haven’t come across it yet. Which shows some of the boundaries of my own online social network. I’m not enough of a geek to jump from the lit-crit / humanities / operaphile sector to the internet-culture / technology / social-software / semantic-web sector. Not yet, anyway. (But I did re-locate the Google Browser project site after completely forgetting where I’d originally seen it, and I did so via a combination of hitting a few likely blogs and guessing at del.icio.us tags, which says something in itself about the usefulness of such networks for locating information even if you’re only peripherally connected to them, and I should really close this parenthesis now.)

Thoughts?

* I’m still the Hermit, last I checked. Time to look into getting a vial of Hermit perfume from BPAL.

Quotidian 12 comments

Query to fellow postacademics

By on July 5th, 2005

That little inner voice that whispers "You’ll never be smart enough, well-read enough, or knowledgeable enough to succeed at anything," that voice that I got to know extremely well as a graduate student — does that ever completely go away once you’ve left the academic track? Or does it just keep coming back to make matters worse when your energy is low and you’re feeling drearier and more neurotic than usual?

(I don’t hear it all the time, but today was one of those days. Sigh.)

Weblogs Comments turned off

MIT weblog survey

By on July 3rd, 2005

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

(What I want to know is, why isn’t "Because I like to write" one of the choices for the section of the survey where you check off reasons why you blog? And like Lynn, I wish MIT knew about culture blogs. But if the current set of survey results are any indication, the infamous and exceedingly tiresome "Where are all the women bloggers?" question can be answered with numbers the next time it comes up: 28,000 of us and counting.)

Library 1 comment

ALA swag report

By on July 3rd, 2005

Things brought back from Chicago, a partial list:

  • Beaded good-luck charm from vendor of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books
  • Posters from Casalini Libri and NYRB Classics
  • Two NYRB Classics books: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam and a book on the
    bog people in Denmark
  • Two back issues of Poetry, plus a Poetry Foundation magnet and button
  • "So many books, so little time" t-shirt (on mail order)
  • Print-on-demand copy of the Corriere della Sera from Milan, courtesy of the ProQuest booth
  • Tiny paint set whose provenance I now forget
  • Free pens, bookmarks, and highlighters from more vendors than can be enumerated
  • Brochures from the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information
    Science (I’m thinking seriously about applying to their LEEP
    program)
  • Coasters from Wayne State University
  • Dog-tag from RLG with Borges quotation: "I have always imagined Paradise to be a kind of library."
  • The Faber Book of Opera (found not in exhibit hall but during all-too-short visit to Powell’s in Hyde Park, and pounced upon gleefully)
Grab bag Comments turned off

News flash: Abyss stares back.

By on July 2nd, 2005

Fomalhaut

Gah! The Eye of Sauron is watching us!

(Via this Tolkien thread at The Valve, which I have just gotten around to blogrolling.)

Politics Comments turned off

They’ll overturn Roe v. Wade over my cold, furious, dead body.

By on July 1st, 2005

Oh, crap. We knew about the likelihood of Rehnquist’s stepping down soon, but O’Connor too? Two empty spots on the Supreme Court open for nominees who’ll want to overturn Roe v. Wade? Goddamn it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if abortion becomes illegal again, women are going to die. Poorer women will be the worst off, especially women who live in states where schools aren’t allowed to teach accurate information about birth control, and where pharmacists feel free to make it as difficult as possible for them to keep from getting pregnant in the first place. (You would think that anyone who doesn’t want to see abortions happen would work extra hard to ensure universal, easy, affordable access to a wide variety of birth control methods. Instead, the same people who don’t consider women responsible enough to make their own reproductive decisions seem hell-bent on causing unwanted pregnancies by making birth control harder to get and harder to learn about. Anyone who thinks it isn’t about controlling women is hereby invited to explain this particular paradox.)

I just e-mailed my Senators. I’m making a donation to NARAL and considering becoming a Planned Parenthood volunteer. Please consider doing something similar.

[Updated to add: Comments Nyarly, of Nyarlathotep’s Miscellany:

It’s like imagining how you’d commentate the last moments of the
apocalypse: “Yes, now it appears there is a… beast of some kind,
that’s really the best I can describe it, it’s kind of, I don’t know, slouching toward Bethlehem.  Very beasty.  Um.”

My thoughts exactly.]

Memes 2 comments

All too true.

By on June 30th, 2005

"If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog
entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog."

(Via Riba Rambles.)

Poetry 1 comment

In case any classics geeks out there hadn’t noticed…

By on June 30th, 2005

… there’s a new Sappho poem! (And now languagehat has posted the Greek. Where’s my middle Liddell again?)

Uncategorized 2 comments

ALA report

By on June 29th, 2005

So ALA was good, aside from the frazzling logistics of traveling between convention center and conference hotels 3 miles north, and a scorching Chicago heat wave. Oh, and the power failure Friday night that zapped both the convention center and the hotels in the area, including mine. Fortunately the electricity came back on after a few hours, but checking in by the light of emergency back-up lighting was a bit of an adventure.

Barack Obama packed them in at the keynote session on Saturday night (“Wow, that’s a lot of librarians!” was the first thing he said as he looked out over all 10,000 of us). If he hadn’t already won me over, he’d have done so when he remarked, during the Q&A, that he’d always learned more from fiction than from nonfiction, because fiction
shows us how to empathize, and “we have an empathy deficit right now.” (Has he been reading my posts on literature and empathy?)

Saturday’s panel on Cataloguing Cultural Objects was excellent, and I’m not just saying that because one of my UVa colleagues (Ann Whiteside, Director of the Fine Arts Library) was on it. Some really interesting points about the philosophy and the practice of cataloging things that aren’t in book format, including installation art, buildings, archaeological discoveries, and the kinds of objects that fall into the vague category of “decorative arts.” I was also very interested in the discussions of what constitutes “aboutness” for images. And it was totally cool to hear about both MARC and Erwin Panofsky on the same panel. (The fact that I got all excited over a panel on cataloging and metadata is, I think, indicative of my ongoing transition to librarian-ness.) The other highlight of Saturday was the panel on the impact of EEBO and ECCO on scholarship, which featured both scholars and librarians; lots of food for thought there, which I think I’ll cover in a separate post.

I spent Sunday going to Literature in English Section meetings, and on Monday I attended the “Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts” panel (I love how medievalists are some of the biggest e-text geeks around), then hit the exhibit hall before getting on the El to O’Hare. LES-folk are absolutely lovely. Next time I’ll make it to the blogger salon.

It was strange, but good, to be back in Chicago, where I spent my undergraduate years. I went down to Hyde Park to have lunch with a former mentor from those days, and felt like I was about to collide with my younger self at every street corner. Powell’s Used Books on 57th Street hasn’t changed a bit. The Medici still serves eggs scrambled with the frother of its espresso machine. The view from the upper deck of the Metra train is still the same (though the stations
have been spiffed up since I lived there, I think). The Michigan Avenue office building where I had my first serious
college-intern job is still there, though I didn’t go in. The view of the river from Michigan Avenue still makes me happy. I wish I’d gotten a chance to go to the Art Institute and see my favorite paintings again, but I’ll be back again.

And now when I sit at my office computer I can look at a lovely Casalini Libri poster with a view of Fiesole in front of me, and a gloriously lurid NYRB Editions poster of Edward Gorey’s book jacket for The War of the Worlds behind me. Full swag report to follow.

Weblogs 2 comments

Library blogosphere roundup

By on June 17th, 2005

An accumulation of links from my library-related Bloglines folder…

Via The Shifted Librarian, a fabulous use of podcasting: Who Said? A Literature Game, in which you listen to a snippet of a novel read out loud and then guess the novel, the author, and the character. (I’ve been listening to previous snippets, and was chuffed to recognize a passage from Mrs. Dalloway.) For everyone who likes fiction, mystery quotations, being read to, or podcasts.

Dorothea Salo offers meta-librarian-blog commentary on academic librarian bloggers and why defining "academic librarian blogger" as "one who posts on one topic, all the time" is both silly and riddled with gender issues. As a grab-bag blogger myself, I tend to agree. And belated congratulations on the awesome new job, Dorothea!

Lorcan Dempsey posts about Nick Hornby on the subject of how our books reveal us, and on how that connects with social networking via book recommendations. Which reminded me of a favorite Borges poem:

Mis libros (que no saben que yo existo)
son tan parte de mí como este rostro
de sienes grises y de grises ojos
que vanamente busco en los cristales
y que recorro con la mano cóncava.
Non sin alguna lógica amargura
pienso que las palabras esenciales
que me expresan están en esas hojas
que no saben quién soy, no en las que he escrito.
Mejor así. Las voces de los muertos
me dirán para siempre.

[My books (which do not know that I exist) / are as much part of me as is this face, / the temples gone to gray and the eyes gray, / the face I vainly look for in the mirror, / tracing its outline with a concave hand. / Not without understandable bitterness, / I feel now that the quintessential words / expressing me are in those very pages / which do not know me, not in those I have written. / It is better so. The voices of the dead / will speak to me for ever.]

— Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Alastair Reid)

(I confess to being a compulsive scrutinizer of other people’s bookshelves whenever I first visit their houses, so I like the idea of using tastes in books to connect kindred spirits — though I’m leery of the connection with Amazon on account of not wanting to give the massive commercial retailers too much detailed information about myself.)