Just as I am excited about photography for the first time in a long time, Susan Sontag is killing my buzz.

I took a digital photography class this summer from the Mass Comm department at Briar Cliff. I was able to use my own camera and since we had to shoot everything on manual exposure, and build a varied portfolio, I finally learned to use my DSLR (Nikon D40X) that I got used closer to two years ago than I want to admit. [Thanks, Tracy!]

I had been shooting almost entirely on automatic even though I often knew what I needed to do to get better shots, or a shot, period. But I didn’t know how to make the setting in the camera. I used a Canon AE-1 for years (still have it) so I at least knew (once knew) how to partially control exposure on a camera. Actually, I know a fair bit about cameras and photography. I am just lazy when it comes to learning the complex features of software/electronics. I also learn these sorts of things orders of magnitude better when I actually need to use the feature and not by studying a book or manual.

Anyway. I now know a great deal about my camera, which is the primary reason I took the course, and even a little about Photoshop and the printing of color and B&W photos on Epson photo printers.

Now that I am effectively semi-retired (for the time being anyway) I have been contemplating taking my photography a bit more serious. I have no plans to become a professional but I’d like to step up my amateur game to the ‘serious’ level.

I have been reading a lot more about digital photography, perusing photo mags, lusting after things I cannot afford, reminding myself to use what I have until I reach its limits, and trying to figure out how I might get photos printed whether for myself or anyone else. I am also considering starting a photo blog with some of my better photos once I get my photo library migrated from iPhoto to Aperture.

How far any of this will go or how long it will last I have no idea. We (or I, anyway) will see.

So, Sontag? I came across a reference to her On Photography somewhere and I know that I read one of the essays a couple of years ago and thought it’d be a good idea to read all of the essays as collected in book form.

What a buzzkill! Thankfully I was already aware of much of her critique (so far. Am into the 3rd essay of 6.) so no big surprises. On the other hand, she is touching all of the right nerves with those critiques. While she is not citing any of them, she is using criticisms I have read (and agreed with) elsewhere, such as, from Jacques Ellul, Richard Stivers, and others, and from my own lived experience with photography.

The main thing mediating her critique for the moment is her rampant essentializing and over-simplification. While I frequently agree with her, I do not agree with her universal statements. While they are rarely written grammatically as universals they end up being so as they leave no room for disagreement, present no nuance, and make the claim that “photography is this, and it is that.”

I understand that by the 6th and final essay she had mitigated the views presented in the 1st one. I am hoping so. I feel that these critiques of photography are important. But. They must be fleshed out, contextualized and, above all else, nuanced.

One example is all I will provide for now. Perhaps if I write a review upon finishing I will quote her more.

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (7).

Hmmm.

Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart

Bonnie A. Nardi & Vicki L. O’Day; MIT Press 2000

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This book should be required reading for all librarians and for anyone using technology. Oh, yeah, everyone.

I read this immediately after Brown and Duguid which was about “information” and thus IT, and which sought a middle ground. This is about seeking a middle ground for “technology.” They are more or less contemporaneous with this being 1-2 years older.

Contents:

• Preface
• 1 Rotwang the Inventor
• 2 Framing Conversations about Technology
• 3 A Matter of Metaphor: Technology as Tool, Text, System, Ecology
• 4 Information Ecologies
• 5 Values and Technology
• 6 How to Evolve Information Ecologies
• 7 Librarians: A Keystone Species
• 8 Wolf, Batgirl and Starlight: Finding a Real Community in a Virtual World
• 9 Cultivating Gardeners: The Importance of Homegrown Expertise
• 10 Digital Photography at Lincoln High School
• 11 A Dysfunctional Ecology: Privacy issues at a Teaching Hospital
• 12 Diversity on the Internet
• 13 Conclusion

Preface

“A key to thoughtful action is to ask more “know-why” questions the new typically do. Being efficient, productive, proactive people, we often jump to the “know-how” questions, which are considerably easier to answer. In this book we talk about practical ways to have more “know-why” conversations, to dig deeper, and reflect more about the effects of the ways we use technology” (x).

The book uses the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang as an insight into technology with the first chapter providing a synopsis of the movie.

“We believe that we can and should argue about how technology is created and used. Lang suggested in Metropolis that technical sweetness is not enough. Technology development and use must be mediated by the human heart” (x).

Part I Information Ecologies: Concepts and Reflections

1 Rotwang the Inventor

A synopsis of Metropolis.

2 Framing Conversations about Technology

Nardi was trained as an anthropologist and O’Day in computer science. They have worked in industrial research labs at HP, Apple, and Xerox. (14)

“This book is addressed to people who work with and around technology. This includes schoolteachers and school administrators, engineers, salespeople, professors, secretaries,journalists and others in publishing, medical professionals, librarians, people who work in finance and banking, and many more. [Everybody!] We believe that our colleagues in technology design will also find this book useful.
For all of our readers, what we hope to accomplish is a shift in perception” (15).

“We have noticed two blind spots people seem to have in considering  work settings: informal practices that support work activities and unobtrusive work styles that hide valuable, skilled contributions” (16).

The rest of this chapter consists of three sections: The Rhetoric of Inevitability, Conversational Extremes: Technophilia and Dystopia, and A Different Approach. They discuss the unfortunate trend for technology development to be frequently characterized as inevitable; the two extreme views this inevitably drives discourse to, “the ends of a continuum [that] leave us with poor choices for action” (20); and call for a third way.

“Technological tools and other artifacts carry social meaning. Social understanding, values, and practices become *integral aspects* of the tool itself” (21).

“The issue is not whether we will use technologies, but which we will choose and whether we will use them well” (22).

3 A Matter of Metaphor: Technology as Tool, Text, System, Ecology

This chapter discusses the metaphors of technology as tool, text, system and ecology to reveal certain facets of technology because metaphors “both illuminate and obscure the relationships between people and technology” (25).

§ Technology as Tool

Discusses “affordances” (J.J. Gibson): “those properties of an object that neatly support the actions people intend to take with the object” (28).

“The tool metaphor is useful for questions and discussions about utility, usability, skill, and learning” (30).

“People who see technology as a tool see themselves as controlling it” (27).

§ Technology as Text

” … as a form of communication, a carrier of meaning that may be reinterpreted as the technology passes through different social situations” (31).

§ Technology as System

“[P]rovides the richest, most troubling and most mind-altering perspectives” and breadth of vision (33).

Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner are the theorists mentioned here. I have read a fair bit of Ellul, and taken a few seminars which focused on much of his work, although I have only read a small bit of Winner. I admire and agree with much of Ellul’s take on technology as a system but, as the authors state, these views leave us little room to act. They are totalizing. “This view does not address with enough force the possibility of local and particular change” (43).

The themes in the section on the Neutrality of Technology include how technology conditions our choices, “reverse adaptation”: the adjustment of human ends to match the character of the available means, and the pervasive adaptation of standards.

4 Information Ecologies

Definition: “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment.” The spotlight is “on human activities that are served by technology”; not the technology itself. (49)

The concept of information ecologies is introduced “in order to focus attention on relationships involving tools and people and their practices” (50).

§ Characterizing Information Ecologies

• System
• Diversity
• Coevolution
• Keystone Species
• Locality

metaphorical – ” to foster thought and discussion, to stimulate conversations for action” (50).

§§ System

“Like a biological ecology, an information ecology is marked by strong interrelationships and dependencies among its different parts.” Change is systemic. (51)

§§ Diversity

Different kinds of people, tools, roles, ideas, resources (51-2)

§§ Coevolution

“Information ecologies evolve as new ideas, tools, activities, and forms of expertise arise in them” (52).

“The social and technical aspects of an environment *coevolve*” (53).

§§ Keystone Species

“An ecology is marked by the presence of certain keystone species whose presence is crucial to the survival of the ecology itself” (53).

“Mediators—people who build bridges across institutional boundaries and translate across disciplines—are a keystone species in information ecologies. Ironically, their contributions are often unofficial, unrecognized, and seemingly peripheral to the most obvious productive functions of the workplace” (54).

§§ Locality

With references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Faust we get that “[t]he name of a technology identifies what it means to the people who use it” and that “it positions the technology more directly under the control of its users” (54).

“The habitation of a technology is its location within a network of relations;” “its set of family ties in the local information ecology” (55).

There is an opportunity but also a responsibility for “the participants of an information ecology [to] establish the identity and place of the technologies that are found there” (55).

§§ Why Ecologies?

“We are suggesting that people act locally in a committed, reflective way that acknowledges technique as Ellul documents it, but having recognized it, chooses to respond with initiative that is grounded in local understanding and values” (56).

6 How to Evolve Information Ecologies

Summarized as:

• work from core values
• pay attention
• ask strategic, open-ended questions about use (65)

Part II Case Studies

7 Librarians: A Keystone Species

Based on studies at Hewlett-Packard Library and Apple Research Library (82)

§§ Information Therapy (reference interview) (85-92)

8 Wolf, Batgirl and Starlight: Finding a Real Community in a Virtual World

A text-based virtual world centered on Longview Elementary School in Phoenix, AZ, with Phoenix College, Xerox PARC and some senior citizens

9 Cultivating Gardeners: The Importance of Homegrown Expertise

“Gardeners” (140-1)

• tinker with computers
• learn software a little better
• often good at configuring hardware
• troubleshoot/solve problems when others are stumped
• likes to help others with tech tasks
• learn about computational things on their own
• translate concepts and mechanism back and forth between domain of work and the technology
• occupy a special niche = bridge

11 A Dysfunctional Ecology: Privacy issues at a Teaching Hospital

“Information was taken out of its original context and presented in a new context, without the buy-in of the people who generated the information.
Information changes shape and function dramatically when its broadcast boundaries are altered” (182)

Exactly! Begins to explain some of the issues in our networked, “broadcast” world as I see them; thinking primarily of the Internet and re-sharing/purposing of information and how it changes context. Multiple ecologies must be added in/considered.

12 Diversity on the Internet

“We view the internet as a set of environmental conditions that provide a substrate for the growth of ecologies that span traditional geographic and social boundaries. The Internet can serve as connective tissue between and within information ecologies” (185).

13 Conclusion

“We want to avoid being taken in by the rhetoric of inevitability. This rhetoric is powerful in part because it takes two seemingly opposite forms: the despair of dystopia and the don’t-worry-be-happy optimism of technophilia. A key impediment to creating and nurturing robust information ecologies is believing (optimistically or pessimistically) that technical “progress” is ungovernable and inevitable. The most extreme but not uncommon manifestation of the rhetoric of inevitability is believing that any kind of technology is desirable as long as it can be reasonably engineered and manufactured.
We have adopted an ecology metaphor because it matches the dynamics we observed in the settings we studied” (211).

This is an important and still timely book which pairs quite well with Brown and Duguid’s The Social Life of Information.

The technology of orgasm: “hysteria,” the vibrator, and women’s sexual satisfaction

Rachel P. Maines; The Johns Hopkins University Press 1998

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I really wanted to title this “universal orgasmic mutuality” [see below] but I figure this post is already going to draw too much of the wrong traffic to my blog. ::sigh::

This book was far more interesting than I ever imagined. It was quite the page turner. It describes the 2000-year plus history of the medicalization of normal female sexuality, the androcentric model of sex that supports this, the highly lucrative medical service of manual massage for “hysteric” female patients, the drive for efficiency in this procedure that led to the invention of the vibrator and related technologies, and how all this ties together in where we are today.

The story it tells, and the facts it is based on, are illuminating, intriguing, sometimes titillating, and frequently sad and maddening.

Let me record up front that the author does not lay this state of affairs entirely at the feet of men. In the last chapter she writes:

“The penetration myth is not a conspiracy perpetuated by men; women want to believe in the ideal of universal orgasmic mutuality in coitus” (115).

I am not so sure that men or, more specifically, the male medical establishment, ought be let off so easy, though.

Bottom line: I found this book fascinating and highly recommend it to pretty much anyone. OK, anyone past the age of puberty and with a modicum of maturity.

My one complaint is that it would have been nice to know where the images were when several pages away. That is, in addition to image number provide the page number as the images were never on the pages they were mentioned on and, frequently, were several or more pages away.

The rest will pretty much be some quotes to whet your appetite. I have also included all of the section headings so you can get a better feel for the content.

Contents:

• Preface
• 1 The Job Nobody Wanted
• 2 Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology
• 3 “My God, What Does She Want?”
• 4 “Inviting the Juices Downward”
• 5 Revising the Androcentric Model

1 The Job Nobody Wanted

“Descriptions of this treatment [manual stimulation] appear in the Hippocratic corpus, the works of Celsus in the first century A.D., those of Aretaeus, Soranus, and Galen in the second century, …. Given the ubiquity of these descriptions in the medical literature, it is surprising that the character and purpose of these treatments for hysteria and related disorders have received little attention from historians” (1-2)

While “hysteria” is no longer defined as a disease, it was “from at least the fourth century B.C. until American Psychiatric Association dropped the term in 1952, …. This purported disease and its sister ailments displayed a symptomatology consistent with the normal functioning of female sexuality, for which relief, not surprisingly, was obtained through orgasm, either through intercourse in the marriage bed or by means of massage on the physician’s table” (2).

The author uses the vibrator and its predecessors to examine three themes:

• androcentric definitions of sexuality and the construction of ideal female sexuality to fit them
• reduction of female sexual behavior outside the androcentric standard to disease paradigms requiring treatment
• means by which physicians legitimated and justified the clinical production of orgasm in women as treatment for these disorders (2)

“Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, and mechanizing this task significantly increased the number of patients a doctor could treat in a working day” (3).

“The demand for treatment had two sources: the proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in women” (3).

“There is no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers, such as the attentions of a husband, the hands of a midwife, or the business end of some tireless and impersonal mechanism. This last, the capital-labor substitution option, reduced the time it took physicians to produce results from up to an hour to about ten minutes” (4).

“Hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment” (4). [See below for economic impact of women's health in 1870s.]

§ The Androcentric Model of Sexuality

“The androcentric definition of sex as an activity recognizes three essential steps: preparation for penetration (“foreplay”), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as “the real thing”" (5).

>50% (perhaps >70%) of women do not reach orgasm via penetration alone. “This majority of women have traditionally been defined as abnormal or “frigid,” somehow derelict in their duty to reinforce the androcentric model of satisfactory sex” (5).

“In the development of Western medical thought been thought on the subject of sexuality, it has been thought both reasonable and necessary to the social support of the male ego either that female orgasm be treated as a by-product of male orgasm, or that its existence or significance be denied entirely” (6).

§ Hysteria as a Disease Paradigm

§ The Evolution of the Technology

“In 1869 and 1872 an American physician, George Taylor, patented steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus” (14)

The first electromechanical vibrator internationally marketed, a British model by Weiss, was designed by physician Joseph Mortimer Granville. Battery powered, it was patented in the early 1880s. (15)

“By 1900 a wide-range of vibratory apparatus available to physicians,” (15) and “Mary L.H. Arnold Snow, writing for a readership of physicians in 1904, discusses in some detail” about twenty-four different vibrators, “including musical vibro-massage, counterweighted types, tissue oscillators, vibratory forks, hand- or foot-powered massage devices, simple concussors and muscle beaters, vibrates (vibrating wire apparatus), combination cautery and pneumatic equipment with vibratory massage attachments, and vibrators powered by air pressure, water turbines, gas engines, batteries and street current through lamp-socket plugs” (16-17).

“In the first two decades of this century [20th], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as Needlecraft, Home Needlework Journal, Modern Women, Hearst’s, McClure’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and Modern Priscilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as “all the pleasures of youth .. will throb within you”" (19).

In the late 1920s vibrators “disappeared both from doctor’s offices and from the respectable household press.” Was this due to “greater understanding of women’s sexuality by physicians” or the appearance of vibrators in erotic films? They reemerged in the 60s as an “openly marketed” sex aid. “Its efficiency in producing orgasm in women became an explicit selling point in the consumer market” (20).

2 Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology

§ Hysteria in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

“Hysteria was a set of symptoms that varied greatly between individuals (and their physicians), including but not limited to fainting (syncope), edema or hyperemia (congestion caused by fluid retention, either localized or general), nervousness, insomnia, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, shortness of breath, loss of appetite for food or for sex with the approved male partner, and sometimes a tendency to cause trouble for others, particularly members of the patient’s immediate family. The disorder was thought to be lack of sufficient sexual intercourse, deficiency of sexual gratification, or both (23).

“Hysteria appears in the medical corpus as early as 2000 B.C. in Egypt, but it was not until the time of Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. that the Western clinical definition of the disorder began to take shape” (23).

§ Hysteria in Renaissance Medicine

§ The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

“Russell Thacher Trall, …, who was associated mainly with the hydropathic school, wrote in 1873 that women, including but not of course limited to hysterics, were an economic godsend to the profession of medicine, claiming that “more than three fourths of all the practice of the profession are devoted to the treatment of diseases peculiar to women” and that of the annual estimated aggregate income of United States physicians of more than $200 million, “three-fourths of this sum—one hundred and fifty millions—our physicians must thank frail woman for.” This amount “equaled just under half of the entire federal budget” (38).

§ The Freudian Revolution and Its Aftermath

3 “My God, What Does She Want?”

§ Physicians and the Female Orgasm

§ Masturbation

§ “Frigidity” and Anorgasmia

§ Female Orgasm in the Post-Freudian World

§ What Ought to Be, and What We’d Like to Be

4 “Inviting the Juices Downward”

§ Consumer Purchase of Vibrators After 1900

§ Hydropathy and Hydrotherapy

§ Electrotherapeutics

§ Mechanical Massagers and Vibrators

§ Instrumental Prestige in the Vibratory Operating Room

§ Consumer Purchase of Vibrators After 1900

5 Revising the Androcentric Model

§ Orgasmic Treatment in the Practice of Western Medicine

“The history of physical therapies for hysteroneurasthenic disorders … tell us several things about Western physicians.”:

• normal conditions can be medicalized, especially in women
• doctors both create and become invested in dominant social and medical paradigms
• disease paradigms go in and out of fashion (111)

In Western medical practice, “[t]here is a systematic effort to subsume the knowledge that the clitoris, not the vagina, is the seat of greatest sexual feeling in most women into the androcentric model and to avoid one-to-one heterosexual confrontation over orgasmic mutuality by shifting the dispute onto medical ground” (112).

§ The Androcentric Model in Heterosexual Relationships

“Many questions can and should be raised about the persistence of Western belief that women ought to reach orgasm during heterosexual coitus” (115).

“The penetration myth is not a conspiracy perpetuated by men; women want to believe in the ideal of universal orgasmic mutuality in coitus” (115).

“In our own culture there have been, and remain, powerful means of negatively reinforcing women’s demand for orgasmic mutuality” (117). [See also the rest of the paragraph!]

“Despite the systematic perpetuation of ignorance and misunderstanding—by women as well as men—most heterosexual men have looked to the female orgasm to reinforce their self-respect as sexual beings” (118).

§ The Vibrator as Technology and Totem

My conclusion:

Bottom line, this is an excellent book. It does a first-rate job detailing a bizarre, multi-millenial history of the medicalization of the normal functioning of women’s sexuality. Sadly, we have not really left it behind despite physicians no longer manually massaging women to orgasm, while denying that was what it was, and despite the APA dropping “hysteria” as a psychiatric condition.

There still exists far too much ignorance and misunderstanding about normal sexual functioning and far too many men measure their sexual (and general) self-worth on bringing their partner to orgasm via the androcentric model.

Read this book. It will give you a lot to think about.

The social life of information

John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid; Harvard Business School Press 2002

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This is the 8th book for my 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge.

Short version: Librarians, and others in any “information industry,” should read it and ponder its critiques of “information fetishism.”

I bought this book back in May 2005 and finally got around to reading it. I am following it up with Nardi and O’Day’s Information Ecologies which I bought in May 2006. Where this book focuses on the binary rhetoric of “information,” and thus of information technology, Nardi and O’Day focus on the binary rhetoric of “technology.” Nardi & O’Day is 1-2 years older, is cited by Brown & Duguid, and I am hoping they’ll make a nice complementary pair.

Contents:

• Preface: Looking Around
• Introduction: Tunneling Ahead
• 1 Limits to Information
• 2 Agents and Angels
• 3 Home Alone
• 4 Practice Makes Process
• 5 Learning—in Theory and in Practice
• 6 Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
• 7 Reading the Background
• 8 Re-education
• Afterword: Beyond Information

This book lived up to what I thought it might be after seeing so many references to it over the last 6 years. Originally released in 2000 (my ed. from 2002) I would say that it has held up quite well. Although I would love to see it updated, I truly doubt that much of the analysis would actually change. But with the changes in higher ed, and all of the mergers of massive media conglomerates over the past decade plus, it would be interesting to see if and how their take on the issues might change.

Optimism and pessimism “are both products of the same technology-centered tunnel vision. Both focus on information and individuals in splendid isolation. Once agents are set in a social context, both conclusions—sublime and despairing—seem less probable” (xi).

“This book is particularly concerned with the superficially plausible idea … that information and its technologies can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people. We think of this as “information fetishism”" (xvi).

“Our underlying argument in the discussion of education and the common thread that runs throughout … this book is that change is not necessarily occurring where, how, or when predicted, nor for the reasons most commonly cited. Hence, we suspect, many people have become increasingly unhappy with the binary simplicities of predictions about new technology” (xxii-xxiii).

Ch. 2 is primarily about bots, ch. 3 about telecommuting, ch. 4 business process reengineering, ch. 5 knowledge management and learning, ch. 6 knowledge as sticky and leaky, ch. 7 paper and documents, and ch. 8 higher education.

Ch. 7 “Reading the Background” provides excellent examples of what documents do, of the social roles they fill, and of the societies that they help to create. Seeing as I approached this primarily as a librarian that is the area I will focus my excerpts on.

“Among many things relegated to history’s scrap heap by relentless futurism have been, …, paper documents. Here, focus on the information they carry has distracted attention from the richer social roles that documents play—roles that may sustain paper documents despite the availability of digital ones. … …, we believe that documents, like other older technologies, probably will not be replaced (when they should be) or augmented (when they could be), if their richness and scope are underappreciated (xix-xx).

Argues that until we understand what documents do—physically and culturally—we will not understand what they are and how to replace or improve them. A narrow focus on the information that documents carry will fail to result in useful change.

“Documents not only serve to make information but also to warrant it—to give it validity. Here again, the material side of documents plays a useful part. For information has trouble, as we all do, testifying on its own behalf. Its only recourse in the face of doubt it s to add more information” (187).

“So documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it. More intriguing, perhaps, documents also help structure society, enabling social groups to form, develop, and maintain a sense of shared identity” (189).

“Documents then contribute not only to forming and stabilizing the worlds but also, …, to reforming, destabilizing, and transforming them. The presence of heretics reminds us that the “information” is not the sole contributor here. The orthodox and the heretics both form around the same information or content. They are distinguished from one another by their unique disposition toward that information” (193-4).

“The political scientist Benedict Anderson provides yet another example of the way groups form around documents. He considered networks so large, so diverse, and so spread out that individual members could not possibly know one another. They nonetheless may develop a sense of membership and belonging if they can create an image of the group as a single community with a single identity. Anderson described the communities as “imagined” and claimed that shared documents play an essential part in this imagining.

Anderson argues that such a document culture made a key contribution to the creation of independent nations” (194).

This is an important work and is still highly relevant. I am going to let it simmer for a while in the back of my mind. But I do think it fits well with my slowly awakening thesis that “information” as a foundational concept for libraries and librarians is a dangerous one.

Constructing my previous post, Books Read in 2010, was far too difficult.  Still.

I keep a simple running list of books I read in VoodooPad, a personal wiki, on my laptop.  I record them by date started, author’s last name and title.  When I finish I add that date.  At some point I look them up in a library catalog—generally WorldCat nowadays—and bring them into Zotero and add them to a folder titled Books Read in 20xx.

In the past I have exported that folder from Zotero as a bibliography in HTML and pasted it into WordPress.  With some minor editing I got a decent bibliography including COinS data for every title.  But somewhere along the line over the last year or two things have gone wonky and some interaction between the COinS-formatted HTML from Zotero and WordPress have caused much of that data to be stripped out.  Last year was a real pain and seeing as this year my list was 20-some-odd percent longer I could not face all of that work simply to have much of it disappear no matter how much wrangling and struggling I did.

My next thought was that I would simply use the OpenBook plugin by John Miedema that I am using for book reviews [example post].  I was not looking forward to plugging one hundred or so ISBNs into its input form one at a time but it was in theory doable. [This was due more to how much work I had already done verifying ISBNs, "correcting" those in Zotero and pasting a copy of the ISBN into the text file created with the bibliography exported from Zotero than it was the effort to use the plugin.]

So I ran a little test trying a few “random” ISBNs from the list to see what the Open Library records looked like and/or if they had records for some of my less popular titles.  The results were horrible!  I estimated I would have to add records for at least 20 titles and fix records on 2 to 3 times that many.  I began slowly poking away at them over the course of a couple days—days when I should have been doing other things of course—and although my estimates were highly accurate I got it done.

At some point in my cataloging I noticed that Open Library had recently added a lists feature.  I thought perhaps I’ll just make a list there and point my blog readers to it; although that did strike me as rather dismal.  Of course, I noticed the list feature after I had added or re-cataloged somewhere around 30 books; which meant I had to look them all up again individually to add them to my new list.  ::sigh::

Then I discovered that you can export a list in either JSON, HTML or BibTex.  Sadly I know little to nothing about either JSON or BibTex so if they would have made my life easier—without a steep learning curve first—then I did myself a disfavor by using HTML.

Well, the HTML needed a lot of massaging to look decent once imported into WordPress.  As the native page exported by Open Library it looks OK, but WordPress treats those h3s, spans and divs much differently. [Technically not an export but a simplified page generated from your main list that you can save and/or copy from the source.]

I believe the titles are in the list in the order I entered them, or something close to that anyway.  Sadly, that order bears no relation to anything useful.  Thus, I had to cut and paste the whole list into the order I wanted.  Then I started playing with layout to see what would look decent enough in WordPress.  Once I figured it out I started changing the divs and h3s to spans and removing all the extraneous white space.  By hand.  TextEdit was of no use in the white space changing game.  As I was getting really tired of all the mousing, etc. involved I remembered that Dreamweaver might do a much better job with white space in find and replace.  With hope I fired up the long disused copy of DW and opened my file.  I highlighted a group of white space and a tag to change, hit ⌘-C to copy it, hit ⌘-F to open Find and Replace, saw that the white space was intact, put the cursor in the replace box, hit ⌘-V to paste the same in, deleted the white space I wanted removed, and hit OK.  It did what I wanted so I had it fix the rest of those and went on to the next bit needing fixed.  Thankfully Open Library had been consistent in how and where it added the white space.

After that it was rather simple to verify my data and do the odd minor correction here and there.  As for the ebooks, I pulled those out of my original list exported from Zotero and ginned them up in a text file with links to each book in feedbooks.  Yes, Open Library has ebooks but from what I could find not a single one from feedbooks.  I could have added them but I was in no mood to add another 18 books, and cataloging free ebooks that give absolutely no indication of which text they are was not something I intended to undertake.  Ebooks are great in many contexts!  Ebook metadata is in a despicable state! [That is a rant for another, and previous, occasion.]

Once I had the ebooks fully ginned up in the text file I cut and paste them into the blog post where they went in the list.  Then I wrote the text that went along with the list and waited for the end of the year a few days away.  On the 31st I made a few minor corrections to the list since I finished one of the books I had given up on and added another that I read on the 30th and 31st.  I also fixed the numbers/commentary regarding the other two books and added a bit more commentary.

Sadly, the only COinS data available is for the post itself and I doubt many of you are truly interested in adding my post to Zotero, Mendeley, or whatever.

If I had used OpenBook I could have had COinS.  But I got distracted by needing to fix so many records at Open Library and then by finding the Open Library list feature.  After spending so much time futzing and seeing what it would do for me I had given up on Open Library.  Honestly, I had no desire to copy and paste 100+ ISBNs into it one by one either.  Still, I wonder how well it would have handled the job? [John, if you are still reading, any idea how the plugin might handle 100+ titles using template 5, embedded? Certainly wouldn't want to be making all those calls to OL live.]

None of this is meant to take away from the OpenBook plugin for which I greatly thank John Miedema!

It makes me sad that it is 2011 and this task is still so darn difficult.  Much progress has been made in the sharing and linking to book data on the web but it is still so crude.  Much of the assorted quasi-FRBRization going on in places like Open Library, WorldCat, goodreads, Library Thing, etc. actually seem to make it worse.  If one only cares about pointing at a title/work then things are somewhat better.  But I cared about editions long before I became a cataloger.  In most cases if someone takes a recommendation from me I could care less which edition of the work they read or listen to in the end.  But in some cases it does matter.  And for my own purposes I want to know which manifestation(s) of the work I engaged with.

Some day the future may arrive and making a list like this in which the titles will bring their own (accurate) metadata along with them will be easy. That day simply has to arrive. Soon.

Then again, I’m still waiting on the flying car I was promised almost 50 years ago.

This list of books that I finished this year is based on the date I started reading each book. Though they were generally finished in something close to this order, some books took much longer than others. I finished a total of 102 books in 2010. Five of these were re-reads.

I read 85 print books and 17 ebooks (epub) this year. I gave up on 3 print books and 2 ebooks (epub), although one of the print books was really just interrupted. I placed it on my 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge list [see below] and I will begin that one again. I am also working my way through a pdf book, Digging into WordPress v3 which is not included on this list.

My ebook reading is off due mostly to changes in travel and other lifestyle-related issues. I have not become averse to ebooks in any way, they simply do not fit my current lifestyle as much as they once did. All of the ebooks I read this year were epub formatted free books from feedbooks.com (except for the one pdf book).

Of the two ebooks I did not finish, one was Lady Chatterley’s Lover which I discovered about halfway into it that it was an expurgated version. Sara who was also reading it as an ebook found an unexpurgated print copy and started over. Although I was somewhat enjoying the story, I did not find it that compelling so said the heck with it. The other was Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. While this is an important work, she just droned on and on. There are far better examples of effective literature in this genre, even if few this early.

In August a friend of mine introduced the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge to begin in September. Here is my post accepting the challenge. Is it really any wonder that mine is a baker’s dozen? Here is my list at goodreads, at Open Library, and the 12 Books, 12 Months tag here on the blog. This designates a book on my list.

If I wrote a ‘review’ here on the blog I have linked to it after the entry for the book as [Review]. All of the 12 Books, 12 Month Challenge books that I have read so far (7) have been reviewed here. There are more reviews at goodreads but most are simple commentary and I am too lazy to go find them and link them. [Do not get me started on the amount of work required to generate, much less format, the following list!]

I received four of these books via the Library Thing Early Reviewers program. They are identified by “Library Thing Early Reviewer copy” and a link to the review at Library Thing.

I read 31 books of poetry, not including the one for weddings. I also read 2 books about poetry (Oliver and Kooser), not including the one on syntax. The author I read the most by is the poet Mary Oliver with 13 titles (12 poetry, 1 about poetry). The author in 2nd place is Roy Harris with 6, four of which were re-reads. The author in 3rd place with 3 titles seems to be Conan Doyle, all ebooks. Perhaps I missed someone else with 3 titles though. There were several authors with 2 books each in my list: Jim Harrison, Wilkie Collins, Anne Carson, Pablo Neruda, ….

• Residence on earth by Pablo Neruda. 2004, New Directions. I made it 80% through this book before giving up several months ago but I finally picked it back up in the last two days of the year to finish it. It contains much lovely poetry but the last 40% of the book (Tercera residencia) was originally “published twelve years after the second, [and] shows a poet deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War and the murder of his fellow poet Federico García Lorca. Neruda writes with a deep sense of involvement in social justice and in political decency. España en el corazón (Spain in our hearts), which was brought out separately in 1937 and is now part of this volume, is the noblest poem to come out of that war” (Translator’s note, 363). Be that as it may, those verses are brutal (as war imagery perhaps ought be) and page after page they add up. My psyche could take no more after a while and I had to put it down for a time.
  
• Dewey decimal classification : principles and application. 3rd ed. by Lois Mai Chan and Joan S. Mitchell. 2003, OCLC
• Curious, If True : Strange Tales by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. 1859. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3335
• Given by Wendell Berry. 2006, Counterpoint
• The art of the novel by Kundera, Milan. 2000, HarperPerennial
• House of light by Mary Oliver.1990, Beacon Press
• The watchmaker’s table by Brian Bartlett. 2008, Goose Lane Editions
• The Monkey’s Paw by William Wymark Jacobs. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4548
• Committed : a skeptic makes peace with marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert. 2010, Viking
• The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4448
• Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison. 2006, Copper Canyon Press
• After Epistemology by Roy Harris. 2009, Bright Pen
• I Do : a guide to creating your own unique wedding ceremony by Sydney Barbara Metrick. 1993, Celestial Arts
• In search of small gods by Harrison, Jim. 2009, Copper Canyon Press
• Human information retrieval by Julian Warner. 2010, MIT Press
• New and Selected Poems Vol. 1 by Mary Oliver. 2004, Beacon Press
• Integrationist notes and papers 2006 – 2008 by Roy Harris. 2009, Bright Pen
• Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany. n.d. ebook (epubs). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3356
• Winter Hours : prose, prose poems, and poems by Mary Oliver. 2000, Mariner Books
• The Moonwatchers Companion : everything you ever wanted to know about the moon by Donna Henes. 2004, Hodder Mobius
• Basil by Wilkie Collins. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4471
• The art of syntax : rhythm of thought, rhythm of song by Ellen Bryant Voigt. 2009, Graywolf Press. Read about 90% and then gave up as she was making no sense to me. Following the subtitle her entire analysis of syntax is based on musical theory. Perhaps if you already understand music theory there would be something to learn from her ideas, but if, like me, you do not then you are simply left bewildered.
  
• Owls and Other Fantasies : poems and essays by Mary Oliver. 2006, Beacon Press
• Why I Wake Early : new poems by Mary Oliver. 2005, Beacon Press
• Erotic Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets). 1994, Alfred A. Knopf
• Integrationist notes and papers 2003-2005 by Roy Harris. 2006, Tree Tongue
• Typee by Herman Melville. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4592
• Retire Retirement : career strategies for the boomer generation by Tamara J. Erickson. 2008, Harvard Business School Press
• Buddhism without Beliefs : a contemporary guide to awakening by Stephen Batchelor. 1998, Riverhead Trade. [Review]
  
• The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/459
• Twelve moons by Mary Oliver. 1979, Little, Brown
• Rules for the dance : a handbook for writing and reading metrical verse by Mary Oliver. 1998, Houghton Mifflin
• Poems of the night : a dual-language edition with parallel text by Jorge Luis Borges. 2010, Penguin Books
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/92
• The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/352
• Poems and readings for weddings and civil partnerships by Aruna Vasudevan. 2009, New Holland
• Anywhere, anytime, any body yoga by Emily Slonina. 2010, Hunter House Pub. Library Thing Early Reviewer copy
  
• The Tower of the Elephant by Robert Ervin Howard. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4574
• The Disintegration Machine by Arthur Conan Doyle. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/354
• A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4677
• When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/355
• Erotic Bookplates by Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen. 1970, Bell Publishing
• The Call of Cthulhu by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/18
• Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/95
• The Poetry Home Repair Manual : practical advice for beginning poets by Ted Kooser. 2005, University of Nebraska Press
• The illusion of freedom and equality by Richard Stivers. 2008, State University of New York Press
• The Awakening and Other Short Stories by Kate Chopin. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/342
• Poems selected and new by P. K. Page. 1974, Anansi
• The Legacy of Cain by Wilkie Collins. n.d. ebook (epub). http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4375
• Evidence : poems by Mary Oliver. 2009, Beacon Press
• Urbana by Ilona Matkovszki and Dennis Roberts.2009, Arcadia Pub.
• Easy : poems by Marie Ponsot. 2009, Alfred A. Knopf
• On literature by Umberto Eco. 2005, Harcourt
• Rupture : poems by Patricia Gray. 2005, Red Hen Press
• Sweet Life : erotic fantasies for couples by Violet Blue. 2001, Cleis Press
• You’ve just been told : poems by Elizabeth Macklin. 2000, Norton
• Mercy Thompson : homecoming by Patricia Briggs. 2009, Del Rey
• Poems from Guantánamo : the detainees speak by Marc Falkoff. 2007, University of Iowa Press
• Running anatomy by Joe Puleo. 2009, Human Kinetics. [Review] Library Thing Early Reviewer copy
  
• Rain by Don Paterson. 2010, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
• High voltage tattoo by Kat Von D. 2008, Collins Design
• The language machine by Roy Harris. 1987, Cornell University Press
• The erotic lives of women by Linda Troeller, Marion Schneider. 1998, Scalo
• ASQ : alternative tools for information need and accountability assessments by libraries by Brenda Dervin and Kathleen Clark.1987, Peninsula Library System for California State Library
• The illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. 2009, Omnidawn Pub.
• Cleopatra’s nose : essays on the unexpected by Daniel J. Boorstin. 1994, Random House
• Fables Vol. 13 by Matthew Sturges, Bill Willingham and others. 2010, Vertigo
• HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith. 2010, A Book Apart
• Mythistory and other essays by William Hardy McNeill. 1986, University of Chicago Press. [Review]
  
• The Footnote : a curious history. Rev. ed. by Anthony Grafton. 1997, Harvard University Press. [Review]
  
• Ariel : the restored edition by Sylvia Plath. 2007, Faber and Faber. [Mention]
  
• You are not a gadget : a manifesto by Jaron Lanier. 2010, Alfred A. Knopf
• Dream Work by Mary Oliver. 1994, Atlantic Monthly Press
• More than cool reason : a field guide to poetic metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. 1989, University of Chicago Press. [Review]
  
• White pine : poems and prose poems by Mary Oliver. 1994, Harcourt Brace
• Blue pastures by Mary Oliver. 1995, Harcourt
• Stitches : a memoir by Small, David. 2009, W.W. Norton & Co.
• Signs, language, and communication : integrational and segregational approaches by Roy Harris. 1996, Routledge
• Autobiography of Red : a novel in verse by Anne Carson. 1999, Vintage. [Review]
  
• Selected Poems by Anne Sexton. 2000, Mariner Books. [Mention]
  
• Postsecret : confessions on life, death, and God by Frank Warren. 2009, William Morrow
• The dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan. 2010, Scholastic Press
• Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk : a modest bestiary by David Sedaris. 2010, Little, Brown and Company
• A universal history of iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges. 2004, Penguin
• Vacation sex quiz book : 55 mental quickies and erotic games for adults at play by Marc Dannam. 2010, Hunter House Publishers. Library Thing Early Reviewer copy
  
• West Wind : poems and prose poems by Mary Oliver. 1998, Mariner Books
• Seeking Meaning : a process approach to library and information services. 2nd ed. by Carol Collier Kuhlthau. 2003, Libraries Unlimited. [Review]
  
• The Koran, a very short introduction by M. A. Cook. 2000, Oxford University Press
• Confronting the lunar by Darwin H. Hurni. 2010, Darwin H. Hurni
• Fully Empowered 2nd ed. by Pablo Neruda. June 2001, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• How It Seems to Me by Phil Hey. 2004, MWPH Books. [Review]
  
• Spunk & Bite : a writer’s guide to bold, contemporary style by Arthur Plotnik. 2007, Random House Reference
• The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. 2004, Vintage Contemporaries
• Rootbound : poems by Jeanne Emmons. 1998, New Rivers Press
• The great debate about art by Roy Harris. 2010, Prickly Paradigm Press
• Reading and writing the electronic book by Catherine C. Marshall. 2010, Morgan & Claypool. [Review]
  
• Plainwater : essays and poetry by Anne Carson. 2000, Vintage
• The Alchemist : a graphic novel by Paulo Coelho. 2010, HarperOne
• Seven nights by Jorge Luis Borges. 2009, New Directions Pub. Corp. [Review]
  
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams : short stories, prose, and diary excerpts by Sylvia Plath. 2008, HarperPerennial
• Fitness illustrated by Brian J. Sharkey. 2010, Human Kinetics. Library Thing Early Reviewer copy
  
• Swan by Mary Oliver. 2010, Boston, Massachusetts

This is my 5th book review for the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge.

Note: This is in no way a balanced review of this book. I do think this can be a valuable book to read if you are interested in the topic; at least it will be for a little while longer. But it has some issues, and those are what I primarily focus on here.

Table of Contents

• Ch. 1 Introduction
• Ch. 2 Reading
• Ch. 3 Interaction
• Ch. 4 Reading as a Social Activity
• Ch. 5 Studying Reading
• Ch. 6 Content: Markup and Genres
• Ch. 7 Beyond the Book

Introduction

This book examines “a rather more pragmatic set of issues and developments” and is based on “sources from information science, computer science, and human-computer interaction, but especially on the results of studies I have conducted with colleagues and by myself over the last decade-and-a-half” (8).

Reading

In defense of the sociality of reading, one of her examples is “…, drivers read billboards together as they speed by the landscape, …” (16).  Seriously?  The other examples actually support the claim of reading being social but this is beyond me as to how it can be considered social.

In this book:

“The word eBook can refer to hardware, software, content prepared to be read on the screen, or a combination of all three. In much of this book, when we talk about eBooks, we’re by and large referring to the software—the reader—used to present the content” (33).

“…; after all, no one needs instructions on how to read a book, assuming they are literate” (33-34).  On one hand, “No shit!”  To become literate we learn to read books.  This, also, includes how to interact with the physical book; knowledge of which is needed to correctly operate said book so it can be read once learns to read the language marks inscribed in the book.  So her claim is accurate but also inherently circular with regards to what it means to be literate in our society.  On the other hand, there are plenty of books for which we need training to use, although they are not extremely prevalent.  I am thinking of specialty reference books here primarily.  Also, has she never heard of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book or similar titles? Reading is not a simple, unitary skill, nor or all books “read” in the same manner.

Interaction

Discussing some early objections to eBooks based on their immutability she quotes Baudrillard:

“The compact disc. It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as though you’d never used it. So it’s as though you didn’t exist. If things don’t get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 32-33)” (39).

That is beyond silly.  They do wear out in several ways, both physically and access-wise.  We don’t even have to get into hardware and format changes here.  Borrow a handful of CDs from your local public library and it is quite probable that at least one is wholly or partially unusable.  Quoting some bad analysis by a French theorist, which doesn’t support the point you are trying to make, is not helpful.

Reading as a Social Activity

This chapter begins with a two-by-two matrix borrowed from computer supported cooperative work that divides the world up by place and time.  It is used “as a simple framework to examine the social side of eBook use. Use that occurs in the same place at the same time implies that people are reading together” (73, emphasis in original).  Other than the stipulation that this chapter is about reading as a social activity I fail to comprehend how one can simply stipulate that this implies reading together.  Based on other examples given to support the matrix, I fail to see why two different people cannot be present at the same coffee house, for instance, at the same time.  Perhaps they are even sitting at the same table but reading different things, nor are they discussing what they read.  This is not social reading (unless we admit the billboard example from above; which I am not admitting). This stipulation, and the matrix, thus overestimates the amount of social reading taking place.

Content: Markup and Genres

§6.1.4 Accessibility is in its entirety three sentences long.

“Accessibility refers to the characteristics of eBooks that allow people with visual impairments to read them. Disability advocates have maintained pressure on eBook content providers and eBook platform manufacturers to adhere to accessibility standards and principles. These standards have been developed for the Web and are documented at http://www.w3.org/WAI/” (125).

Clearly this topic is far larger than this book but I find these three sentences to be extremely shortsighted and a slight to the otherwise enabled.  The WAI Introduction to Web Accessibility clearly states: “Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.” http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php

“Creative Commons is a licensing alternative to DRM that allows publishers and authors to mark their work to indicate the conditions they wish to apply to it” (129).  Oh really?  There is no reason a CC-licensed book (some licenses anyway) can’t also be DRMed.

In the section on eTextbooks Marshall references the dissertation of Jay Dominick who “makes many interesting observations about the textbook genre before he goes on to discuss his findings about eBooks” (136).  Regarding the economics of textbooks we get the following footnote:

“Dominick makes the important observation that the person purchasing the book (often, the student’s parents) is not the person reading the book. Furthermore, the publisher is selling the book to the instructors, not to the students. The bizarreness of the commercial circumstances that make up textbook economics cannot be overstated” (fn 16, 137).

I wholeheartedly endorse the fact that the textbook market is full of bizarre.  And while we do use “selling” in this aspect I still think that this is highly sloppy writing.  Textbooks are marketed to instructors; they are bought by (that is, sold to) students.

The rest of the discussion re textbooks and eTextbooks is confusing and perhaps even somewhat contradictory.

Overall Comments

The book is well laid out, except for narrow gutters.  It is quite affordable as a paperback.  But it is poorly edited; distractingly so.  Copy editing and proofreading seem to be the biggest issues.  The issues start early and continue throughout.

Examples

• “Rereading is a meta-type that is included in the table as a reminder that any type of reading may be occur multiple times” (T2.1, 20).
• “… and the reader buys finished book, …” (21).
• “… leapfrogging beyond explicit the ratings and reviews …” (93).
• “Digital materials is easy to copy” (126).
• “The course packs are heavy and bulky; they materials are usually read quickly; …” (138).

Out of Date

This should not have been a book as it is already out of date.  At best, it should have been an ebook.  There is an ebook but try getting access to it.  Neither amazon nor Google ebooks has one.  From the publishers site you can get 24-hour access to a PDF or a PDF Plus for $20.00.  If you institution has an institutional subscription then you seem to be golden. http://www.morganclaypool.com/toc/icr/1/1

Either way, this book is already out of date.  Some of the reasons why without going into much detail:

• In the sections on readers the iPhone is barely mentioned at all; the iPod Touch not at all.  In the subsection on navigation I noticed a few things that the iPhone can do that was not mentioned.
• No mention of epub format
• No mention of books as apps
• No mention of iPad
• No mention of HTML5 and CSS
• No Kindle’s circulated (144).  This one was true at the time it was written probably but no longer is.

This book is worth reading.  Some of my critiques are minor and clearly a book  (or any other document) cannot comment on something that did not exist before it was published (e.g. the iPad).  Then again, should documents that will be out-of-date as they go to press still be being printed as physical books?

My recommendation:  This book is of value to those with an interest in or need to understand some of the areas it touches upon.  It is also a gateway to the assorted literature(s) of studies on ebooks.

Do your wallet a favor and get the book from the library.

How It Seems to Me: New & Selected Poems

Phil Hey; MWPH Books 2004

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

I have been wanting to try the OpenBook plugin for WordPress for a while now. When I came back to blogging a few months ago John Miedema posted on his own blog that he was working on version 3 so I decided to wait. Well, he released v3 a couple of days ago so I decided I best step up.

I installed it a few minutes ago, grabbed the handiest book that I recently finished reading and here we are. In this post I chose to embed the HTML instead of having it make a live call to Open Library.

Phil Hey is a professor of English and writing at Briar CLiff University, where Sara works. A week or two back we had the privilege of going to a poetry reading by Phil where we picked up this book and a chapbook of his St. Francis feast day poems [BCU is a Franciscan Catholic university.].  Each year on St. Francis feast day (Oct. 4) Phil gets up at first light and writes a poem, which he collected into a chapbook last year.

I quite enjoyed these poems. They are very natural and primarily focused on the Midwest, small town, and positive feelings. But as one of the blurbs says on the back cover [James Autry]: “In these poems, Phil Hey offers his unconditional and uncompromising Midwestern sensibility without limiting the work in any way that could be described as ‘regional.’ I highly recommend this work.”

In Fall 2005 I took a class with Prof. Chip Bruce on Pragmatic Technology. One of our assignments was to:

Produce an analysis of one keyword of your choice (see Raymond Williams, Keywords A vocabulary of culture and society. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press) for examples. This keyword is not just an index term as in the bibliography, but a core concept for the field. The analysis is a short essay (1-2 pp.) on the definition, history, and multiple uses of a term, which is central to understanding a text or a field of study.

I chose “technology.” This assignment represented 10% of our grade.

I found this little piece the other day while poking around my hard drive and decided I was going to put it here for assorted reasons, if only primarily for myself so I might find it easier in the future.

LIS590PT Fall 2005  Keywords Assignment  Mark Lindner  14 Sep 2005
“Technology,” definition, history, and multiple uses of a term

Plato distinguished Techne (art) from empiriae (knack) as having a logos, a rationale which “necessarily includes a reference to the good served by the art” while knack consists of “rules of thumb based on experience but without any underlying rationale” (Feenberg).

Feenberg argues that we moderns have lost the connection between techne and the good.  “We can still relate to Plato’s emphasis on the need for a rationale, a logos, but we’re not so sure it includes an idea of the good. In fact, we tend to think of technologies as normless, as serving subjective purposes very much as did Plato’s knacks” (Feenberg).

What is the history of technology in between, and is Feenberg correct?  The OED lists several senses of technology that are of relevance to us:

1. a. A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts. (1615 BUCK Third Univ. Eng. xlviii)

b. transf. Practical arts collectively. (1859 R. F. BURTON Centr. Afr. in Jrnl. Geog. Soc. XXIX. 437)

c. With a and pl. A particular practical or industrial art. (1957 Technology Apr. 56/1)

2. The terminology of a particular art or subject; technical nomenclature. (1658 SIR T. BROWNE Gard. Cyrus v.)

Oxford American lists the etymology of technology as from the Greek, tekhnologia systematic treatment, from tekhnê art.

Thus, as far as standard English usage goes technology was earliest applied to language about, or the language of, the practical or industrial arts.  Over time this meaning shifted to the practical arts collectively, and then finally as a referent to any of the individual practical arts.

It seems to me that in American usage that technology has come to shift meaning over the last half-century or so from referring primarily to technoscience or applied science to the machines produced and used by such to primarily refer to the electronic gadgetry of everyday life; personal computers, iPods, DVD players, etc.  Most “normal” Americans think of technology as normless, as Feenberg said.  Atomic bombs, depleted uranium shells, land mines—it all depends on what you do with them.  Their development and existence is morally neutral according to this view.

Philosophers of technology use technology differently than in standard usage, but even there the meaning has shifted over the last sixty or so years.  Classical philosophers of technology (Ellul, Mumford, Heidegger; et al.) thought that technology “…must not be thought of as applied natural science, that is less an instrument than a form of life, and that it must be understood as a “system” (in Ellul’s word) or as a “megamachine” (Mumford)” (Achterhuis, 3).  Ellul uses the French word technique specifically due to the narrower connotation of technology with machines.  For Ellul, “technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (xxv).

Newer philosophers of technology (Noble, Hughes, Scwartz and Thompson; et. Al.) have pointed out the intertwining of technology and society as “technosociety,” “technoculture,” “network of technological affairs,” and as a “social process that is extraordinarily inaccessible to us because we are so much a part of it” (Achterhuis, 6-7).

Pacey points out in Meaning in Technology that technology has both social and individual meanings.  He also points to the difference between the “political economy” of the use and development of technology and its wider role in society and, the “social construction” of technology through a “variety of “actors” responding to a complex of social pressures” (4).  Pacey’s point about the shift from the “political economy” of technology to its “social construction” is similar to the shift from the early focus on the material and historical conditions for the rise of Technology as a system to the more recent focus on technologies that impact society while being influenced by the same society.  Pacey’s book is an attempt to redirect some of the focus back onto the meaning of technology created by the individual’s experience of technology, not just of society’s experience.

Sources Cited

Achterhuis, Hans, ed. American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Feenberg, Andrew. “Can Technology Incorporate Values? Marcuse’s Answer to the Question of the Age.” Paper presented at the conference on The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, University of California, Berkeley, November 7, 1998.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd ed. online, 1999.

Pacey, Arnold. Meaning in Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

“Technology.” Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

This a followup to my Iowa Library Association Conference post from last week, which was written on an iPad (at home), about the use of the iPad at the conference.

All in all, it worked great. Thankfully, there was fairly reliable wifi in both the hotel proper and the conference center portion of the Coralville Marriott (which, by the way, is wholly owned by the city of Coralville. Nice!).

I never did figure out how to make a link in the WordPress app but then I never tried again either.

I primarily used the iPad to take notes and to check email, RSS feeds, twitter and facebook. The iPad came configured with lots of apps on it from the Briar Cliff University (BCU) Library, most of which I had no interest in or needed to use.

I used Safari to log into GMail, an app called Reeder for logging into GReader, Twittelator for twitter, and friendly for facebook. For note taking I used Plain Text. The beauty of Plain Text, besides being free, is that it syncs with DropBox automagically. Thus, no worries about what device I am on or if I forgot to get my notes off of the iPad before returning it the library where it was completely wiped and reset to the default setup when I returned it.

Now this setup—in some cases there were alternate apps available—worked for me as I just had to log into these assorted apps with my account info and I was ready to go.

On the other side of the usability and convenience fence, there were two things I did not like or didn’t work well.  The minor one is that in friendly (facebook) there was no F.B. Purity. I swear by F.B. Purity. Facebook still sucks somewhat with it (it is facebook after all) but I despise trying to find the value in facebook without F.B. Purity installed and up-to-date.

The more major issue was that 750words just did not want to act right on the iPad. To even begin to use it at all we used Atomic Browser (paid version)—which is more useful on the iPad than on my Touch—and told it to report itself as desktop Safari. Leaving it set as a mobile browser meant it wasn’t going to work. Even with setting it to spoof as a desktop version of Safari it still had issues.

What I was attempting to do, and was ultimately successful at doing with some heartache, was to copy and paste my notes from that day’s sessions/sightseeing into 750words. It did not like that at all. It would only show a small portion of what had been pasted in, there was no way to force a save, and eventually it would show you all of the text pasted in but the word count stayed at what you had written by hand, if any. You had to leave and come back and then maybe nothing was there or perhaps it had updated but you had to log in again because it wasn’t remembering that you had just been there. In the end it worked but it was a pain in the rear.

In summary, I have several online accounts for which there are multiple apps available that only require one to log in and be on your way. The iPad as set up by the BCU Library worked great for me at this conference, but my needs were reasonably light.