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#newsfoo books + articles

Dec 8, 2010 //

Throughout the course of the weekend, a number of reading suggestions came up in panels and side conversations. I’ve captured all of them and thought I’d share them, with links to more information (and in some cases excerpts)

Here are some more in-depth descriptions of each work. Which ones did I miss?

Books

  • Bit­ter Fruit
    Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, John H. Coatsworth
    Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.
  • From Counterculture to Cyberculture
    Fred Turner
    Before there was Wikipedia, there was the Whole Earth Catalog, or the first one-stop destination for anyone who ever wanted to know about everything. And before there was the World Wide Web, there was WELL, or the first online computer networking system. These marvels of innovation, of course, came from the mind of Stewart Brand and his acolytes, who would go on to found Wired magazine, and recast computers as a way of bridging differences through online communities and the frontiers of cyberspace. This book is their story. Fred Turner here revisits a forgotten but utterly fascinating chapter in the history of the 60’s counterculture—a look at how Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running encounter between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative worlds, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers—or the cyberia that we so frequently inhabit today. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, From Counterculture to Cyberculture reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
    Steven Levy (#newsfoo attendee)
    Steven Levy’s classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It’s a fascinating story for everyone interested in this seminal period in history. [Excerpt]
  • No Sense of Place
    Joshua Meyrowitz
    An attempt to mix the media theories of Marshall MacLuhan and Harold Innis (see below) with the Human Interaction ideas of Irving Goffman. The book helps readers understand how media changes information spaces and how that in turn (continually) changes behavior. [Excerpt]
  • Pandaemonium: The coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers, 1660-1886
         [compiled] by Humphrey Jennings edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge.
    This collection of contemporary writings from the Industrial Revolution – roughly from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th – is culled from papers gathered by the late film director Humphrey Jennings. The material, from diaries, letters, poems, novels and other sources, is chosen and arranged to conjure up the image of the world in transition.
  • Perilous Times: Free speech in wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the war on terrorism
    Geoffrey R. Stone
    An amazing volume on the history of attacks on the First Amendment during times of war. Beyond understanding how the press has been attacked by the courts and the government under the claim of defending national security, this book also provides historical evidence for how partisan the US press has traditionally been.
  • The Life and Death of Democracy
    John Keane
    Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world’s democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to join the poor dodo and the forests of Easter Island in the land of extinction? In particular Keane’s idea of a “Monitoring Democracy” was discussed at the conference.
  • The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
    William H. Whyte
    In 1980, William H. Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world. Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly’s Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly’s legacy.
  • The Victorian Internet
     Tom Standage (#newsfoo attendee)
    This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed — a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.
  • Understanding Media
    Marshall MacLuhan
    An attempt to wrestle with how electronic media is changing the way that we as humans interact. MacLuhan provides a number of valuable metaphors and ideas in terms of thinking about the challenges that we face today. [Excerpt]
  • What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
     John Markoff
    Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ‘70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.

Articles

 

#newsfoo books & articles

Throughout the course of the weekend, a number of reading suggestions came up in panels and side conversations. I’ve captured all of them and thought I’d share them, with links…

· No Sense of Place
Joshua Meyrowitz
An attempt to mix the media theories of Marshall MacLuhan and Harold Innis (see below) with the Human Interaction ideas of Irving Goffman. The book helps readers understand how media changes information spaces and how that in turn (continually) changes behavior.

· The Life and Death of Democracy
John Keane
http://www.thelifeanddeathofdemocracy.org/
Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world’s democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to join the poor dodo and the forests of Easter Island in the land of extinction? In particular Keane’s idea of a “Monitoring Democracy” was discussed at the conference.

· The Victorian Internet
Tom Standage (#newsfoo attendee)
http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/
This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed — a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.

· From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Fred Turner
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=188350
Before there was Wikipedia, there was the Whole Earth Catalog, or the first one-stop destination for anyone who ever wanted to know about everything. And before there was the World Wide Web, there was WELL, or the first online computer networking system. These marvels of innovation, of course, came from the mind of Stewart Brand and his acolytes, who would go on to found Wired magazine, and recast computers as a way of bridging differences through online communities and the frontiers of cyberspace. This book is their story. Fred Turner here revisits a forgotten but utterly fascinating chapter in the history of the 60’s counterculture—a look at how Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running encounter between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative worlds, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers—or the cyberia that we so frequently inhabit today. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, From Counterculture to Cyberculture reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

· Pandaemonium: The coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers, 1660-1886
[compiled] by Humphrey Jennings edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge.
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL2535386M/Pandaemonium
This collection of contemporary writings from the Industrial Revolution – roughly from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th – is culled from papers gathered by the late film director Humphrey Jennings. The material, from diaries, letters, poems, novels and other sources, is chosen and arranged to conjure up the image of the world in transition.

· What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
John Markoff
http://books.google.com/books?id=cTyfxP-g2IIC&dq=%E2%80%A2%09What+the+Dormouse+Said:+How+the+Sixties+Counterculture+Shaped+the+Personal+Computer+Industry&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ‘70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.

· Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy
http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920010227
Steven Levy’s classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It’s a fascinating story for everyone interested in this seminal period in history.

Articles

· Users as Agents of Technologic

#newsfoo books & articles

Throughout the course of the weekend, a number of reading suggestions came up in panels and side conversations. I’ve captured all of them and thought I’d share them, with links…

  • No Sense of Place
    Joshua Meyrowitz
    An attempt to mix the media theories of Marshall MacLuhan and Harold Innis (see below) with the Human Interaction ideas of Irving Goffman. The book helps readers understand how media changes information spaces and how that in turn (continually) changes behavior.
  • The Life and Death of Democracy
    John Keane
    http://www.thelifeanddeathofdemocracy.org/
    Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world’s democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to join the poor dodo and the forests of Easter Island in the land of extinction? In particular Keane’s idea of a “Monitoring Democracy” was discussed at the conference.
  • · The Victorian Internet
    Tom Standage (#newsfoo attendee)
    http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/
    This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed — a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.
  • From Counterculture to Cyberculture
    Fred Turner
    http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=188350
    Before there was Wikipedia, there was the Whole Earth Catalog, or the first one-stop destination for anyone who ever wanted to know about everything. And before there was the World Wide Web, there was WELL, or the first online computer networking system. These marvels of innovation, of course, came from the mind of Stewart Brand and his acolytes, who would go on to found Wired magazine, and recast computers as a way of bridging differences through online communities and the frontiers of cyberspace. This book is their story. Fred Turner here revisits a forgotten but utterly fascinating chapter in the history of the 60’s counterculture—a look at how Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running encounter between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative worlds, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers—or the cyberia that we so frequently inhabit today. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, From Counterculture to Cyberculture reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
  • Pandaemonium: The coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers, 1660-1886
    [compiled] by Humphrey Jennings edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge.
    http://openlibrary.org/books/OL2535386M/Pandaemonium
    This collection of contemporary writings from the Industrial Revolution – roughly from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th – is culled from papers gathered by the late film director Humphrey Jennings. The material, from diaries, letters, poems, novels and other sources, is chosen and arranged to conjure up the image of the world in transition.
  • What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
    John Markoff
    http://books.google.com/books?id=cTyfxP-g2IIC&dq=%E2%80%A2%09What+the+Dormouse+Said:+How+the+Sixties+Counterculture+Shaped+the+Personal+Computer+Industry&source=gbs_navlinks_s
    Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ‘70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
    Steven Levy
    http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920010227
    Steven Levy’s classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It’s a fascinating story for everyone interested in this seminal period in history.

Articles

  • Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States
    Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch
    An academic essay discussing how farmer’s and other rural residents interpreted (and case modded) Model-T’s when they were first introduced, imagining unexpected uses for them. It’s a helpful article to think about the role that users play in determining what a technology is used for (e.g. reading and the iPhone).
  • White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art
    Manny Farbar
    http://www.jambop.com/jambop/2004/11/white_elephant_.html
    A consideration of the production and ideology of different forms of art.
  • The Bias of Communications
    Harrold Innis

al Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States
Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch
An academic essay discussing how farmer’s and other rural residents interpreted (and case modded) Model-T’s when they were first introduced, imagining unexpected uses for them. It’s a helpful article to think about the role that users play in determining what a technology is used for (e.g. reading and the iPhone).

· White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art
Manny Farbar
http://www.jambop.com/jambop/2004/11/white_elephant_.html
A consideration of the production and ideology of different forms of art.

· The Bias of Communications
Harrold Innis

 

 

 

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Categories praxis

wikileaks + soundbarriers – some ideas from #newfoo

Dec 7, 2010 //

“So does wikileaks represent the end of an age of journalism?”

Andrew Walk­ing­shaw asked me this as about 11pm on Sunday night as we waited for our flight to Newark.

“Or is it the start of a new type of journalistic construct?” was my response.

Without missing a beat, Andrew replied, “Isn’t that the same thing?”

Looking back, it’s hard to think of a conversation that took place at NewsFoo that didn’t eventually get to Wikileaks. People debated every possible aspect of the story, from the responsibility of papers working with Assange to address his political goals as outlined in his manifesto ((I realize that it’s called the Wikileaks Manifesto, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate the site from the individual)), to what is the responsibility of news organizations to monitor and call attention to the lack of transparency in Wikileaks’ processes and operation. Needless to say, while some minds were swayed and some new areas of consideration opened, nothing was settled.

As an outside to journalism looking in (the job of the anthropologist), the Wikileaks discussion is about a fundamental change in journalism from an institutional model to an “assemblage” model. By that I mean that instead of news being mediated by a single large institution (say the New York Times of old), the assemblage model is one in which a network of actors, including media institutions and new players such as Wikileaks, collaborate in releasing stories.

Visualize a Sonic Boom

Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (Marshall  Mcluhan, Understanding Media, pg 12)

This is exactly the sort of thing that I think McLuhan was getting at in the above quote. The constant discussion of Wikileaks, and the resulting cognitive friction is caused by, can be read as, a moment in which journalism is breaking through a barrier, transitioning from a moment of individual institutions to assemblages,

A range of social scientists and philosophers have argued that there are fundamental differences between the two forms. The institution is (somewhat) fixed, centralized, and lasting, while the assemblage is more fluid, distributed, and ephemeral.

So, for example, the assemblage blurs the line between sources and journalists, not allowing the two to be easily separated. Typically, in the institutional case, the source is hidden, or is at most treated as a somewhat neutral party in the production of the report. They give the reporter their information and then step away. In the assemblage case, the source ((admittedly, one could argue that Wikileaks isn’t a source but a mediator for the as-of-yet unknown individuals who leaked the encrypted documents…. This argument in itself notes the blurring of roles)) publicly  stands beside the news organization(s) in the report. From this perspective, the also share in the cultural power & prestige that comes from the final product.

As suggested in the opening exchange, we don’t know if we’re leaving or arriving, and perhaps we’re doing both. Either way, it’s unclear what the future of journalism will look like and whatever it will be will be worked out in part through experiments and debates such as this one.

Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (Marshall  Mcluhan, Understanding Media, pg 12]
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Categories praxis

a post-#newsfoo meditation on philosophy and friction

Dec 6, 2010 //

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism

This weekend, I had the honor of taking part in the inaugural O’Reilly News Foocamp. Sitting here, in my office at Cornell, looking out on a snowy quad, it’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago I was wandering the streets of Phoenix Arizona in the 70 degree sun-shine, engaging in discussions about the future of the news. Looking over my pages of raw field notes, I’m not quite sure where to begin to summarize the experience. Well, that’s not quite true. The best place to start is by answering what News Foo was. For that, I turn to a tweet from Steve Buttry (with a little bit of editing):

@stevebuttry
#newsfoo was News Foo Camp, an informal, cross-discipline discussion of the future of news, organized by O’Reilly Media [hosted by Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and sponsored by Google and the Knight Foundation].

Steve’s post gives us a definition for the camp, but I’m not sure it defines it. Most of my thought time on the flight(s) back from Arizona was spent turning that question over and over in my head. How do I try and capture the experience of Foo?

A step towards the answer came in the form of a tweet that was posted about the camp by an observer (again with my edits):

@couch
This weekend [#newsfoo] seems an apt example of “thinkers” versus makers. Contrast http://goo.gl/qihjG (#newsfoo) with http://goo.gl/2u5QU (#tohack).

To me, this tweet, which appeared as part of an exchange critical of New Foo, completely gets and completely misses the point of the event. This post (the first of a few on News Foo) is going to meditate on two linked ideas from the weekend: philosophy and friction.

What O’Reilly and its partners did was work to open up a space for thinking about the process of creating the (future of) news. Nothing could be more representative of this than a session that Tim O’Reilly ran on Sunday Morning called “Do news organizations need a staff philosopher?” As Tim reminded us, philosophy is not and should not be made into an abstract process. Instead it is a constant attempt to understand the new realities that we are creating (and that are being created around us) every day. It is the question of how we continue to exist and act within the world.

Philosophy, when it loses its grounding can often descend into navel gazing (hence those critical scare quotes around thinkers in the above tweet). So the question was how to keep us from going down that path. The answer to this was friction. That said, overall, I think there was more than enough friction at News Foo to make the vast majority of sessions productive.

Friction as a concept/value was invoked throughout the weekend. Participants were encouraged to push back on accepted ideas. So, for example, David Cohn asked the question “If the news industry was to disappear tomorrow, and people continued getting information that gave them the news, would this be a bad thing?” Heck, there was even a panel called “Convince me why I should read the news each day.”

And note, that it was journalists and media people who were asking the antithesis: “why should we (as a culture) care if the news (industry) changes?”

Getting back to the topic of philosophy, Hegel (and Marx after him) proposed the dialectical model of inquiry: thesis (news is a good thing and something that should be sustained) is met with antithesis (why should we care if the news industry goes away tomorrow if people can still get information about the world) to reach synthesis (this is what is valuable about the service of the news). It seems to me that much of News Foo was spent considering the middle part of that particular equation, asking the antithesis.

A few things often get lost in discussions of the dialectic. First is that it isn’t an instantaneous process, philosophy (like any science) is played out over time. Interpretive reasoning is not instant. Secondly, it’s not a linear process. You don’t just start and stop it. Rather, each new synthesis is in itself a new thesis, the start of a new dialectic. Think of it more in terms of concentric spirals that can move up or down, inwards or outwards. Sticking with the spiraling metaphor for a moment, not unlike a tornado, the dialectic can pull new information and ideas into itself. It can also forcefully spin off ideas. Finally, the dialectic (tornadoes, and change for that matter) tends to be messy and unpredictable. The same is true for News Foo.

Messy and unpredictable, that’s not a value judgment — nor is it a statement on the organization of foo or facility (both of which were amazing). In fact, I think that this controlled chaos was a good thing. The messiness seems to me to be a reflection of the current state of the news. As journalist Quinn Norton put it, this is the first Foo held around an Industry/Way of Life that is in crisis. By opening up a space for thinking, for that messiness, News Foo gave its participants an opportunity to reflect on this larger moment that we are at.

So, for example, it was a chance to see that there’s still not a lot of agreement, across disciplines that are now working on the news, about what is meant by terms like context, transparency, reporting, and journalism. While definitions may seem like small issues, the nature of software is that many of these ideas get, quite literally, coded into a platform and its interface. Technology isn’t neutral in that respect. And so an upfront understanding of the perspectives from where different actors are building from helps contextualize the work that they are doing.

Likewise, no one I talked to had a polished answer to the aforementioned question of why the news industry should be sustained – what is the value in journalism. But, given that the dialectic is something that is as much lived as anything else, it seems to me that the answers for that question are going to be sought in the days to come in each individual’s daily practice. As Tim O’Reilly suggested, the answers come through living and struggling the philosophy, not just putting it in a missing statement.

All of this isn’t to say that sessions didn’t spend time in the trenches. Quite literally, a number of the talks were about the sharing of war stories (and a future post will be specifically about that). More importantly, a number of those talks also backed up their discussions with data – the presentation by the Guardian’s Meg Pickard was apparently one example of this. The most tweeted Ignite talk, by the brilliant ((seriously, in an airport discussion, Andrew Walkingshaw made a understandable and convincing argument for why misapplied metaphors from Quantum Mechanics have had a negative influence on how we approach scientific knowledge, and how Hysteresis is a better metaphor for changes in the world)) Andrew Walkingshaw used real world data to model the size and (economic) value of the journalism industry to provide a “good enough” context to allow us to frame the problem.

Ultimately, though, News Foo was a “thinking” event versus a “making” one. That makes quantifying its effect much more difficult than at Hack Day (which it was being compared against). That said, I’m not sure why we need to be comparing the two. It seems that much like separating “thinkers” from makers, all that’s doing is creating a false (and easy) binary – a system that ultimately is lacking in productive friction. I wasn’t in the session that Tom Coates‘ tweet was critical of – though from what I’ve heard about it, I support the issues he took with it. As for Tom’s critique of the section, in some ways that seems in keeping with the weekend’s theme of productive friction – in the end It may have a greater effect than anything said in that discussion (provided we keep that particular conversation going).

Ok, ’nuff for now. I’ll blog a bit more specifics on News Foo (from an anthropologist’s perspective tomorrow).

Other Takes on News Foo:

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Categories praxis

how to correct problem pdfs in one quick step

Oct 6, 2010 //

PDF IconPDFs are an indispensable (and unavoidable) part of modern scholar’s lives. Unfortunately, all to often, they are often responsible for slowing down the scholars, too. Far too many of the PDFs used by researchers, professors, students, and journals are improperly made or just not optimized, resulting in countless moments lost repeatedly rotating pages, transcribing passages out of PDFs, searching PDFs by eye for key words and phrases, and waiting far to long for articles to download and print (or worse waiting for someone else’s document to print).

To fix your PDF library, you need to acquire a PDF editor with OCR, Optical Character Recognition, capabilities. My choice to use Adobe Acrobat is threefold:

  • Its available on both the Apple and PC platforms.
  • Adobe’s relationship with higher ed, also means you should be able to find the software on many public computers in college and university media centers.
  • Adobe offers aggressive academic discounts on their software (as of writing, Acrobat Pro is $119 for academic use and $499 for professional use).

Selecting OCR from Document menu

The actual OCR process is surprisingly easy:

  1. Load the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro – note that this is a different program than the Adobe Acrobat Reader
  2. Under the Document menu, navigate to OCR Text Recognition
  3. Under that menu choose Recognize Text using OCR…
  4. OCR PanelUsually the default setting are enough for most people (I’ll discuss optimizing them in a moment), just be sure that All Pages is selected and click “ok.”

That’s it. Step away from Acrobat for a few minutes and get a cup of coffee or answer emails. When you come back, your PDF will now have a selectable text layer (and depending on the state it began, pages may have rotated into the correct orientation as well). Be sure to save the file, as the software does not do it automatically.

If you’re interested in the specific nuts and bolts of the ORC process, or want to learn how to further optimize your PDFs via OCR, I’ve written a short white paper that you can download (it’s a PDF with selectable text!).

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Categories praxis, teaching

a Wallace Stevens poem on reading

Aug 31, 2010 //

Thanks of Richard Nash of soft skull press for calling my attention to this reminder how the act of engaged reading can create a profoundly intimate space of information and exchange between subject and object.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens (1947)

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Categories praxis
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