reCAPTCHA-ing the Book

I'm interested in some book digitization projects that are coming out of Carnegie Mellon. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (as seen below, in case you didn't know what it was called). reCAPTCHA is now what we all use to validate that we are humans, not computer programs. Usually these come up when we are buying something online or registering somewhere. 

Unlike it's predecessor, when you are typing in the two words on reCAPTCHA you are also helping to digitize books. (Let that sink in.) 

How does it work? (This synopsis will do no justice to the reCAPTCHA program, but there are links below for more information.) 

First, the book is scanned. Second, they use a computer software to decipher all the words on the digital image. Sometimes the digital image comes out unclear - words bleed into each other or the page is smudged. Unfortunately, the optical character recognition (OCR) software has a difficult time reading roughly 30% of books over fifty years old (Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University). So the software takes the words it cannot read and puts them in the reCAPTCHA box. Essentially, they are getting people to read the parts of the book the software can't, for free, little by little. 

One of the words in the reCAPTCHA box is known to the system and the other word is one from a book undergoing digitization. Take the above example. Perhaps the system knows the word Canada, which if you type correctly, will allow you to the other page. The system presumes that if you typed Canada correctly, you also typed blame correctly.  If a certain number of people have agreed the word is spelled "b-l-a-m-e", the word can be said to be digitized accurately. 

Websites that are using reCAPTCHA include Google, Twitter, Ticketmaster, and 350,000 other sites. This means that roughly 100,000,000 words are being digitized daily (Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University). That equals something around 2,500,000 books a year - one word at a time (Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University). 

I find it fascinating that researchers have found ways - or are at least thinking about ways - to incorporate things like internet security software to the digitization of print culture. To take it a step further, they found a way to accurately decipher words that OCR can't translate on it's own. That said, I have my reservations about calling it completely accurate. But it's a step in the right direction. 

I've included some information about CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA in the links below, should you be interested in a better description. The second link below has some critiques about the programs flaws, in you're interested in reCAPTCHA at all. 

http://www.captcha.net/

https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptcha.html

NB: The book wheel of the 21st century is something completely different. 

Dante's Inferno Facsimile

Last term in Rare Books & Manuscripts, I encountered a facsimile of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia at Fisher. The facsimile is a high-end reproduction created from an original manuscript, Palatine 313, which is preserved at the National Central Library in Florence. 

La Commedia : Pal. 313 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze facsimile. Printed by Imago in 2012.

Comparing the original with the Facsimile

The facsimile contains the original 37 miniatures attributed to Italian painter and illuminator  Pacino di Buonaguida (active in Florence between 1302-1330), as well commentary written in the gloss by one of Dante's sons,  Jacopo, an early scholar of his fathers work.

The facsimile is impressive to look at. The gold leaf is done by hand, on parchment paper, and is hand-treated to achieve the "appearance" of an aged book. The facsimile edition was intended to be rare from creation, with a print run of 599 copies in the world. 

I have always been a fascinated with Dante, and, on the one hand, seeing the facsimile was the closest I have been to "seeing" an original copy his work, outside of an Everyman's translation. But on the other hand, I felt underwhelmed, and it only left me with a longing see and feel the original text with my own eyes. 

In one sense, facsimile's can be a stand in for an original manuscript. But I find myself wondering what decisions were made to alter or digitally embellish parts of the text, miniatures, or markings on the paper while photographing the manuscript during the reproductive process?

Question 2- Digitalization

Admittedly, coming up with an example for this week was difficult. I pondered a long while and for some reason could only think of the relationship between VHS (Video Home System) cassettes and DVDs (Digital Video Device). Although I’m not sure VHS cassettes are considered non-digital objects, we may very ‘broadly define’ them as such. In the same way that Dr. Galey described the vinyl LP, the advancements in technology in film affect the representational choices and certainly alter the experience.

Before the introduction of menu buttons and fast navigational tools, videotape-cassettes involved the user in a more physical way. In order to progress to the main feature quickly, one was required to manually fast-forward through trailers and commentary. This aspect was part of the expected drudgery, and I myself found it quite annoying. Thankfully, DVDs developed and chose to represent the film in a different manner.  Whereas VHS tapes are displayed as one continuous block, DVDs on the other hand are a more digitized version that allow for chapter selection, title screens and an ease of navigation. The new representational choices are an interesting way in which audiences interact with the device.

  Similarly, the choice to digitize film also eliminates the need for rewinding, another bothersome task. No longer is one required to physically remove the tape, place it in an external ‘rewinder’ and wait. While this aspect may not be a direct representational decision, it still reveals the effects of digitalization. Certain elements are completely omitted or forgotten from the ritual of film watching. Amusingly, future generations will not understand the phrase ‘be kind, please rewind.’ Overall, the active shift to new technologies modifies how we engage and process the information.       

The Visionary Cross Project

I have always tended to think that any sort of digitalization process necessarily subtracts from the overall value of the piece being digitalized.  Of course, such an opinion doesn’t make any sense. As Sperberg-McQueen makes clear and as professor Galey emphasized on the course blog, digitalizing an artifact doesn’t actually (or at least not usually) change the original nature of that artifact.  However, I still can’t help but think of it in terms of a Benjaminian aura being diluted with each level of representation. Regardless of my bias, there are a few ways in which digital representation can add value to the original, such as the Visionary Cross Project.

One of the main reasons I find this project so incredible is because I really have no idea what is possible in this world anymore. Essentially the project is creating a multimedia dossier of artefacts that belong to the Cult of the Cross: three physical crosses and a text (the Vercelli Book) that links them. 

Because of their age and delicacy, these are artefacts that are no longer able to be experienced in the way that they were meant to be.  By creating 3D scans of these crosses, the Visionary Cross Project aims to allow viewers to “walk around” the artefacts and read the engraved text—as they likely would have been experienced in the 8th - 10th centuries.  Additionally, it is possible to highlight panels on the individual crosses so that an explanation or a translation of the text will show up in a side panel.  Because the crosses can be rotated in multiple ways, it will actually be possible for modern viewers to experience and manipulate these crosses in a way that was not previously possible (the video below shows some of those options)

 

Full disclosure: after failing to upload this video directly from
YouTube, I just recorded it and uploaded it. The user that
posted the video is VisualComputingLaboratory Isti.

Nevertheless, something is still lost in this representation.  Although placing these artefacts in their contextual relationship with one another is one of the primary goals of this project, the viewer must necessarily lose the experience of encountering these artefacts in their original context.  Maybe this is less of an issue because all of these artefacts have been moved and are stored in locations other than where they originally were placed, but there is still something special, for example, about seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre rather than online--no matter how well it might be represented digitally.

If anyone is interested in more information, here is a link to the project's page.

A lot of people have already posted for this week's questions, but I'm holding out hope that someone, somewhere will write about that weird Tupac hologram.

Chromesthesia and Digitization

I have always had this wonderful image in my mind of colour rising out of the instruments in an orchestra instead of sound. Last semester I found out that some people actually have extra neural connections in their brain which cause them to involuntarily associate sounds with colour. This unique sensory experience is called Chromesthesia, or Sound-Colour Synesthesia. Approximately 1% of the world’s population is lucky enough to have a form of synesthesia, which is a wonderfully interesting neurological phenomenon wherein the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway. For instance there is Grapheme-Colour Synesthesia where synesthetes, individuals with a form of synesthesia, associate colour with letters and numbers.

I focused my research on Chromesthesia and learnt that colour associations can be triggered by various sounds, tones, pitches, notes and all of these types of sounds can be associated with different colours. The experiences of the colours themselves vary per synesthete, some individuals have wave-like colour associations across their vision, while others may experience more of a colour sensation.

In connection with this week’s blog question, I wanted to share a video I unearthed while researching chromesthesia. The video shows Bryan Wallick, a chromesthetic pianist, playing Rachmaninoff's Musicaux Op. 16 Second Movement.  What makes this video so extraordinary is that Bryan created a program which makes the colour-pitch associations he sees while playing the song available to the audience. Take a look it’s pretty amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0qprhkVhZU&feature=player_embedded

This video connects with the blog question because Bryan's program essentially digitizes the unique sensory experiences of one individual. Just like the books which were designed with forms that resist digitization, the sensory experiences of a chromesthetic individual are quite hard to represent in a digital form; which is one reason I find this video so fascinating! Thus this video is wonderful because it does not represent the digitization of a film, play, or text, but rather the digitization of a single individual’s idiosyncratic cognitive experiences in an accessible online format.

The fact that Bryan chose to represent his chromesthetic experiences in this form illustrates that the senses through which most people perceive the world are not the only ‘true’ way to experience reality. Also the fluidity of the shifting colours seems to underscore that these colours represent Bryan’s constant sensory reality, and highlight the fact that the audience experiences music and life in a completely different manner. Bryan managed to create a tangible representation of an intangible sense, which prompts his audiences to question the validity of their everyday sensory experiences. In conclusion, I wish I had chromesthesia, and the representation of these chromesthetic experiences in a digital form illustrates, quite beautifully, that truth is relative.

Sarah Silvestri

Encoding project idea

Hi there.  I mentioned using this book for the encoding project last class.  The challenge lies in all the extra data that is on the page besides the text.  There are footnotes, marginalia, images, and captions for those images.  It seemed like some people were interested in this project.  I know the project is still a ways off and you all likely have more pressing assignments, but if you would like to join me in working on this project, leave a comment or send me an email.  I'd also suggest a short meeting after next class, just to put names to faces and make sure we all have each others contact info.
-Eric

The Criterion Collection

This weeks blog question regarding examples of digitization that reveal interesting choices reminds me of The Criterion Collection. A company that has gone to great lengths to digitize and archive significant films from the American, French, and Japanese film traditions. The market for Criterion is the home video film buff.
In the process of digitizing film, Criterion often has to make choices. This is because the original filmstrips may have aged or been damaged. So Criterion goes through a careful process of attempting to represent these films in the manner they think those who made the film would have desired.
Some of the choices Criterion has made have really changed how we view films at home! For example, the "letterbox" format, in which our view of the movie is a long rectangle lying on the long side was ushered in by Criterion wanting to preserve the aspect ratio of the film. Can you remember wondering where the top and bottom of the movie had gone?
The landscape view we have all now become accustomed to is the result of a choice! Imagine if Criterion had instead chosen to stick with the 4:3 aspect ratio of TV's. They would have built an archive of pan-and-scan movies that would have changed the way we think about film.
One of the other major choices Criterion makes is what to digitize. I have always considered a film making the collection a much much bigger deal than any Oscar. As a way to explain themselves they have introduced a YouTube channel. Check out their reasons for adding The Seven Samurai to their collection.

With the advent of Netflix and online streaming, some of the really great aspects of The Criterion Collection have been lost, such as the amazing commentaries that were often DVD special features. I recommend trying to see if you can grab a Criterion film from your local video store. You might be surprised how fun and popular some of the collection movies are.

Misunderstood silence

Years and years ago I used to play the piano quite well. This was back when I was living in Israel, and going to a specialized high school for musicians and dancers. As part of our school year, we each had to perform a few pieces at an end of year recital. When I was about 14, I played Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique". It's a beautiful piece, and truly very full of pathos. Since this was my mom's favourite piece, she recorded me during the recital, and some years later transferred the tape to a CD. In one of my nostalgia fits I decided to listen to it, and discovered something funny has happened in the process: the sonata got split into two tracks! You see, I made a long dramatic pause between the second and third parts of the piece. To the audience who was in the concert hall it was very clear that the piece is not finished - my posture was still tense, my hands were slowly making an arc in the air from the high notes that ended the second part to the low notes that begin the third part...  Unfortunately, the machine that transferred the tape-recorded music onto a CD is programmed to count anything over two seconds of silence as a signal that the track is over and a new one is about to begin. On tape my dramatic pause was simply silence, and so, right in the most "pathetic" place in the piece, the CD player does a little humming sound as it moves to the next track...

Besides the annoying humming sound, the separation of the sonata into two tracks changes the whole structure of the piece. To use a text-based example, it would be like taking the final three or four chapters of a detective mystery and binding them separately (which actually might be a neat idea, if done intentionally). I guess that this instance, like my previous post about the Three Musketeers, highlights the problematic nature of automatic digitization of works. By digitizing automatically we accept the possibility of error, and usually the errors are small enough not to matter too much to most people. But there are times when a seemingly small error changes the entire work.

Prompt #2 and audiobooks

A major decision that needs to be made in the creation of an audiobook is deciding how it should be read.  The Wheel of Time audiobooks took an interesting approach to this question.  This fantasy series has multiple view points.  The creators of these audiobooks chose to overlook what seem to me to be the two obvious choices.  Either you just get one person to read the whole thing or you get a different person to read each viewpoint. 
Instead they chose only two readers.  One, a man, read all of the chapters written from the viewpoint of a male character and the other, a woman, read all of the chapters written from the viewpoint of a female character.  For the first book, there was really no problem.  That book was written almost entirely through the viewpoint of one character.  But once the plot started branching, to the point of containing nearly a dozen viewpoint characters, it bugged me a bit.  Dividing it by gender seemed very artificial.  It's not like all the men in the story saw the world in a similar way that was distinct from the way the women did.  Both readers did an excellent job, I just feel that having two readers was either too many or not nearly enough.  That being said, I have listened to both audiobooks with a single reader and fully voice acted audiobooks and can say that having one person works much better for me.
-Eric

Form and Meaning: Reading Hamlet on the Folger Luminary App

As I said in my introductory post last week, one of my major interests in the future of the book is looking at what kinds of possibilities digital editions of scholarly texts might open to students that can enhance their experiences studying these texts. Over the last few weeks I have been reading through a digital version of Hamlet produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library that is available only as an app for the iPad and the experience has been fascinating.

The Folger Library has created an individual app for each play (right now only Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet are completed and available) and asked several editors, actors, and other Shakespeare experts to contribute to the commentaries. Instead of having a single editorial voice providing an authoritative set of footnotes, each of several commentators has their own set of notes that you can choose to read while you're reading the text. For Hamlet, it seems as though each editor chose a theme to highlight and each has several notes throughout the play. They have also asked an actress who has played Ophelia to occasionally interject with notes about the experience of playing Ophelia and how she built a character based on the play text.The app also gives you the option to listen to the play read aloud by Shakespearean actors in a Shakespearean accent and gives you the opportunity to make your own marginalia and to share those observations with a group on a variety of social media platforms and on the app itself.

Reading the text this way challenges the constraints of a paper book by expanding the opportunities for creating, sharing, and reading marginalia in a way that I think is incredibly beneficial to a student's reading process while reading a Shakespeare text. Aside from the fact that the app is only available on the iPad (which creates all sorts of problems when trying to reach a wide user-base), I think the innovations are excellent.

I'll leave a link to the Folger website describing the app here: (http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=4716&CFID=56856051&CFTOKEN=42719310), but if anyone would like to take a look at the app in action I can bring in my iPad and share it with you.

Can an E-Book do this?

There's more than way to read a book — six, to be exact. A recent flickr post on The National Library of Sweden shows a 16th Century dos-à-dos (back to back) binding that can be opened six different ways! Like R.L. Stein's Reader Beware, You Choose The Scare! when I was growing up, flipping the pages with anticipation of what was lurking on the fated page. It reminded me of the books we saw in class, and the ways that publishers experiment with a books format. More photos and stories can be found at The Colossus. Enjoy!

Bradley 

The Art of the Book

After reading over the first blog question and keeping “forms effect meaning” in mind, I was reminded of an example where the form of the book directly effected the way it interested me and how the form of a book has the power to be extremely effective or in some cases ineffective.

A couple of years ago I went to an art exhibition in New York, at a gallery called Central Booking. What was so interesting about this place was that its focus was on the art of the book. All the shows and exhibits the gallery has had have all focused around the “artist’s books and prints and their integration into the larger art world” (http://centralbookingnyc.com/about-central-booking). As the concept of the book as an object continually seems to be disappearing, it was, in a way, comforting to encounter a place that was solely dedicated to the detailing and production of books as individual works of art.

After the show I continued to visit their website and gush over all the beautiful and innovative forms of books these artists were creating. One artists work has always stuck with me and it came to mind after thinking about this blog question. The artists name is Helen Friel and she took Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Imp of the Perverse” and reconstructed it into an interactive object. (For anyone who isn't familiar with Poe's short story, it focuses on the narrator's self-destructive impulses. The narrator explains his theory on the Imp of the Perverse, which is that it causes people to commit acts against their self interest.)

So with Friel's version of this short story, the reader is instructed to tear and fold sections to piece the story together. The books form is directly asking the reader to do something they are most likely conflicted with---destroying a book. The form of this book effects how the reader feels about playing a role in the destruction of the traditional form, while creating a new one. 

I have always thought this book has been a great example of illustrating exactly what is lost with digital books, which is not only a solid interaction with what you are reading, but also the art of the book. Friel’s book asks the reader to physically engage with the object instead of just passively reading it.

3D Image in Books

In class this week when Alan was discussing authors who were experimenting with the form of books, I immediately thought of Felix J. Palma’s novel The Map of the Sky. The inside covers at the front and back of this book have 3D images illustrating aliens attacking London. When I bought this book in hardcover, it included a pair of 3D glasses so that the reader can see the pictures correctly. Unsurprisingly, I lost the glasses a few days after purchasing the book, and am now the proud owner of a book with 3D images that are useless and just look blurry. I personally found that the addition of these images to the form of Palma's book encouraged me to buy the novel, but did not affect the way I interacted with the books content.

Thus while this is a great book, and I highly encourage everyone to take a look at Felix J. Palma’s novels, I wonder who made the final decision to include 3D images in the book’s design. The images are beautiful, but they are a little bit useless in the long run. By the time the reader reaches the point in the plot the pictures are depicting, they have probably lost the flimsy 3D glasses that were included in the purchase of the book; which is what happened to me. Really the inclusion of 3D images in this book perplexes me, and thanks to the discussions in class, raise more questions concerning form and meaning than I considered when I first read The Map of the Sky. 

I have a lot of questions about the addition of 3D images to the form of Palma's book. Are these images meant effect the reader's interaction with the plot and text of the book? When the book comes out in paperback, will the 3D images be included? If the book is rented from a library in hardcover and the 3D glasses are not included, will the reader even recognize that the images are meant to be 3D? What was the original intent of the author concerning the 3D images? If the images could not be included in the digitization of the text, would their absence alter the reader's initial interaction with the book's content and form? 

Therefore while these 3D images add an interesting obstacle to the digitization of the book, just as we discussed this week in class, they did not change the way I interacted with the book's content. In the end, the form of the images in The Map of the Sky struck me as an interesting way to grab the initial attention of a reader.

Unfolding on the Kindle

This week's blogging question is great because it has forced me to answer a question I had never considered. How does form effect meaning? What came to mind in answering this question is a novel experience I have had with the Kindle. In Eric's post, he touches on the thickness of a single book containing many works by the same author. As you read a collection like that you gain a visible and tangible experience of progress. The left side of the book grows thicker and the right side grows thinner. Except if you read on a Kindle!

The Kindle maintains the same thickness no matter how long your book. This is pretty obvious, but consider how that changes your experience of progress through a book. The software designers of the Kindle have added little progress meters, location numbers (not page numbers...leaving the book behind?), percentage complete, and time left in book. In place of changing thickness we now have a multitude of ways to quantify our progress through a book. However, my recent and novel experience comes as a result of turning off all the progress indicators. Now I simply read, change the page, read, change the page, read, and, on and on.

Forgive this tangent for a second. Anders Hektor wrote a book about information behaviour called What's the use?  In his book he describes an Information-Activity called "Unfolding." Unfolding is an activity in which we engage with an information source for a sustained and uninterrupted period of time, aka, reading.

Okay, so what I found was that the absence of a progress indicator dramatically changed my experience of unfolding. I had fewer distractions while reading, and thus my reading seemed to carry-on while I experienced a loss of a sense of time or progress. I truly enjoyed this deeper dive into the novel I was reading. Novels are great for sustained reading, and my ability to extend that sustainment, that unfolding, was a really cool experience.

#1 - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I recently bought a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and although I haven’t read it yet, I am somewhat familiar with the storyline.  The narrator is a nine year-old boy, and although I don’t believe it is explicitly addressed in the book, many readers have considered the possibility that he is autistic.  Official diagnoses aside, the narrator nevertheless displays unique and non-traditional thought processes, which are complemented by several non-traditional formal elements present in the book.  In addition to multiple photographs, there are also pages with colourful doodles, pages with just sequences of numbers, and pages in which the spacing between the lines of text becomes smaller and smaller until the text is layered and unreadable.  The narrator’s father died in the 9/11 attacks, and the last few pages of the novel feature the narrator considering what it would be like if his father hadn’t died.  As he is thinking about this, he reverses the order of a series of pictures of a man falling from one of the towers so that he is falling upwards, and this reverse flip book makes up the final fifteen pages of the novel.

Although I always think it’s interesting when authors play around with form, I find that I have a tendency to appreciate the idea of it more than the actual practice.  I often glance at the pictures of skim quickly over the footnotes and then return to the text as quickly as possible.  It’s hard to say why, but I never really value this kind of material in the same way that I value the text/narration.  Even when I was very young and read books (or was read to) with a lot of illustrations, they always seemed superfluous to the story itself.  It will be interesting to see if I still skim over these elements in Extremely Loud because it really seems as though they are meant to underscore the narrator’s approach to or understanding of the world around him, and shouldn’t be considered as simply superfluous or extraneous.  At any rate, I hope it will be a good exercise for me to try and learn how to read in different ways.

I actually initially wanted to talk about Tree of Codes (also by Jonathan Safran Foer), but we have already covered it in class.  Although there is one quick thing I would like to say about Tree of Codes that I don’t believe was mentioned in class.  It’s actually a cut-up version of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, but through JSF’s manipulation of its form, it became an entirely new book with an entirely new content.  In that sense, I think it is perhaps the most radical example of how form can e/affect meaning.  The Visual Editions website for Tree of Codes has a lot of interesting images and videos related to the book.

Question 1- Form and Meaning

        Considering the question posed this week, it was difficult to remember the many books I have read. I certainly have never thought about a book’s form affecting its meaning, yet one intriguing example comes to mind. I have little experience with digital books; as a result, my story shall be told through a printed item.

         Recently, I was in the Robarts Library researching a paper. I wanted to learn more about the American Museum and its founder P.T. Barnum. I was not sure what I was expecting to find, but rummaging through the aisles one particular book struck my eye. Bound within a crossed black ribbon and clasp, the Life of P.T. Barnum was contained between a dark leather hardcover. It was an autobiography written in 1855 and likely the oldest book I have held. The manner in which it was stored and the condition it was in affected the meaning of the contents.

         Even though it was in the library and available for public use, not being an extremely rare book, there was still a sense of care and caution in holding it. The act of warily untying the ribbon and slowly creaking the cover open was influential to how I would perceive the subject matter within. The unfamiliar process was quite interesting and immediately one realizes the age. While the book was not too old, it was very worn; the paper that it was written in was rather musty and coarse. The rough edges and the old medium commanded a certain sense of authenticity. I felt that the form helped make me appreciate the content as a primary document. I could interpret right away that this was antiquated, yet valuable, knowledge.

       Overall, the general appearance and condition had an effect on its meaning. The form directly caught my attention from the onset and shaped the experience in a way. While I may not have been completely enthralled by the story, this example was only the most recent in my memory. Regardless, it is not too often one holds a 160 year old book and the words were to a degree made more engaging.  

Question #1 & Lovecraft

As you may know, there is a trend with publishers to create huge volumes that contain the entirety of an author's works and sell it.  For example, you can get all of Jane Austen's books in one mammoth volume or all of the works of Lewis Carrol.  I have a copy of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction.  Both the cover and the title page simply read "H. P. Lovecraft  The Complete Fiction."  It's published by Barnes & Noble.  It is a massive hardcover book.

This presented me with a bit of a conundrum.  I had read one Lovecraft short story before and it was enough to encourage me to read more,  but this was a bit more than I had been expecting (I received it as a Christmas gift).  Also, I like reading books all the way through.  That is to say, once I start reading something, I don't like stopping before I've reached the back cover.  As I usually read novels or non-fiction I have never run into a problem with this before. To read it cover to cover would be a massive commitment and I wasn't sure that I wanted to devote that much time to it.  On top of that, as I had only read on story by Lovecraft previously, I wasn't sure if I really like reading Lovecraft.  I hate not finishing a book once I've started it, so even if I wound up hating Lovecraft, I would likely force myself to keep reading til the end.  Also this book, as a collection of short stories, wouldn't have a continuous narrative to keep me going.  Instead the multiple breaks would encourage me to put it down.

I tried to come up with some creative solution to this self-imposed dilemma.  As I wasn't used to reading collections, I had to find a new way of thinking about my reading practices.  My solution was to treat it as my break book.  Every time I finish reading a book, I take a brief "break" by reading one of Lovecraft's stories.  This way the massive book is broken into nice, manageable segments and I don't have to live with the guilt of not reading it.  In a sense, I'm always reading it (its been over a year now, but I'm over halfway done now).

I'm not sure how much this had to do with meaning per se, but it's the closest thing I could think of.  I may not be thinking of the stories themselves in any different way, but I had to think about the manner in which they were being presented and my approach to them. 

-Eric

Judging a Book by its Cover

I've spent the afternoon thinking about the question Alan posed on the class blogspot about how "forms effect meaning". I'm interested in the mechanics of how that happens, particularly in the ways different forms of a book can effect readership. How can the form of a book impact your decision to pick it up and read it? Certainly there are lots of things to consider before committing to a book; for me I often consider font size, the length of the novel, reviews, etc. And I'm ashamed to admit, sometimes the cover has impacted my decision to bring the book up to the cash register.

This question about form and meaning reminded me of a TEDTalks given in 2012 by Chip Kidd. Kidd is a graphic designer for Knopf, which is an imprint of Random House. He's had a very successful career designing - among other things - book covers. The talk he gave is one of the Smart Laughs in the TEDTalks series. It is called "Designing Books is No Laughing Matter. Ok, It Is".

Kidd is very adamant that the book cover plays an integral role publishing and readership. The cover likely offers the first impression readers have with the book. Despite the cliche, people do judge books by their cover. So the idea is to design a cover that sparks intrigue in the consumer. But Kidd's talk focuses more on the philosophical; to design the cover of a book, he says, "My job is to ask this question: What do stories look like?" In considering this question, the book designer's role "is one of translator and interpreter". Ultimately, the cover becomes the face of the book. His talk is 17 minutes, but it goes through quite a few examples of how the form of the cover impacts society and sometimes even become a cultural phenomenon.
The cover of David Sedaris' "Naked" was designed by Kid. It is a book about Sedaris' trip to a nudist colony. And it deals, among other things, with the insecurities of the naked body. This is the cover of the hardcover edition:

This is the jacket cover (left) and hard cover, after you remove the jacket (right).

Kidd said it was "an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off". I think, as a first impression, this dichotomy of images gives you an idea that this story is going to be about more than just being naked. Kidd says, you take off the cover - take off the pants - and "you don't get what you expect, you get something much deeper". I think we derive meaning from the cover, consciously or subconsciously.

As an aside, Kidd says that Sedaris loved the designed because at book signings he could do this:

As a form, I think book covers have an impact on readership and what they read. Personally, I like the cover of this book. It was eye-catching the first time I stumbled across it in a bookstore.

In his talk Kidd argues the physicality of the book is culturally important. He offers that this kind of cover, and inferences you can glean from it, would be lost in an e-book. He says that perhaps you lose something with a Kindle: “tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness, [and] a little bit of humanity".  You also lose the smell of the book, “the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages”.

He concludes that smelling an iPad will get you nowhere.

A Brief Introduction to Myself, Bordering on a Rant

Hello everyone,

My name is Kevin McCormick. Undoubtedly, you remember the half dozen emails I've harassed you with trying to put the group together. Sorry, for spamming your inbox. From now on, I believe I will just spam this blog.

I am a first year student in the ARM stream and I am also in the book history and print culture collaborative program. I came to the iSchool with an English and classical studies background from uOttawa, mostly interested in medieval and classical literature. Since I've been at UofT, my interests seems to be changing everyday. In fact, yesterday I became interested in marginalia in popular culture - think about Harry Potter finding Snape's heavily annotated text book in the Half Blood Prince or how Edward Norton realized Anthony Hopkins was the cannibal in the Red Dragon because he saw the word 'Sweetbreads' written in the margins of one of Hannibal Lector's anatomy books.

As for the future of book, I am interested in e-readers. Though I do not like e-readers.  I'd become upset when I found out that several of my authors (Kevin Hearne and Veronica Roth, to blame a few) have been publishing novellas, some strictly with Amazon, on e-book format. (Finding torrents in .pdf form has become increasingly difficult and bothersome.) They used to publish their short stories and novellas on their websites, available for free download. Those blissful days have long past. So of course the logical thing to do was to buy the $125 device so I can buy the $0.99 30-60 page novella. But I'm not bitter. In fact, I've really switched to the dark side on the e-reader front. I use Goodreads a lot and found a number of books that I really want to read, but are either out of print, exclusively published through Amazon, or too obscure to be shelved in most book stores of libraries. The saving grace of the e-reader is that these obscure books are readily available from the comforts of my bedroom, through my Kindle Book Store-thing for $2.99 (no tax).

Ok, this post is devolving into a rant. I'll cut it off here. I look forward to blogging with you all.

- Kevin

 

The Three Musketeers (as read on my smartphone)

Before you start chuckling about my reading choices, I will say in my defense that I downloaded this book by accident while trying out the different features on my brand new Huawei smartphone. Since it was on my phone anyway, I would read it periodically, usually while waiting for something or someone. And, I will admit, it grew on me. As for details that would help in tracking it down, my phone says that "this is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online". The publisher is listed as "George Routledge and Sons", located in London. The year of publication is 1878.

In the very beginning of the story (page 8) I encountered the following sentence: "'Milady* must see nothing of this fellow,' continued the stranger". The asterisk is in place of a footnote, explaining that while the title "Milady" is usually followed by a name, it will be used on its own in the book as the name of the famous femme fatale. However, because a "page" on my phone can only contain about a quarter of a page of the original book, I had to "flip" forward four times before I reached the explanation. Since I didn't bother to search for the footnote right away, encountering it four "flips" later forced me to think back to the instance the footnote was referring to, creating a rift in the nearly seamless progression of the story.

While this is a small issue that didn't significantly affect my enjoyment of the book, it did highlight the importance of format, and the issues that can arise when an item undergoes a change of format. Despite the ability to "flip" pages and see the "cover" of the book on my phone, this little footnote made it very transparent that this is not, in fact, a bound book, but rather a scanned imitation of one.

A Post To Introduce Myself

Hi All,

My name's Jeremy and I'm a first year ARM student, although I'm hoping to leave the program to pursue my PhD in English in the Fall. I've just finished an MA in English at Queen's and did my BA at Ottawa University (also in English).

In an ideal world, I'd be working on a PhD thesis on the apprentice actor's on Shakespeare's stage in the early years of the 1600's (Alexander Cooke and Robert Armin in particular). My research interests circle around the original staging of Shakespeare's comedies, but my interest in staging and comedy extend into contemporary theatre, film, and television. I try to keep current on internet and pop culture and I spend an awful lot of time (although, surprisingly, not that much money) on seeing live theatre. I've been to see approximately one show a week since moving to Toronto and am going to see closing night of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart at the end of March (along with If/Then with Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp, which I'm equally excited about).

As far as my interests in the future of the book go, I'm currently looking at new ways to teach Shakespeare through interactive e-book editions of the texts that include multiple notes and built-in audio and video recordings of the plays. Right now I'm working with the Folger Luminary Editions and find them fascinating.

DISCLAIMER: I've got a tendency to write long, thorough blog posts and tend to take devil's advocate positions (or at least positions that question the assumptions of the arguments of others) in order to expand discussions and bring conversations to their most robust conclusions. I genuinely do not mean to harm or offend you if I contradict or question your argument. One of my more neurotic fears is that my comments will be interpreted this way, so I tend to make this disclaimer a lot.

Looking forward to an excellent semester and to getting to know all of you!

-Jeremy

PS. I meant to add before that I work for the Media Commons in Robarts, so feel free to stop by and pick up the latest DVDs!

A bit about me

Hi everyone!  My name is Eric Bradshaw and I am from the little town of North Brunswick in New Jersey.  I did my undergrad at the University of Manitoba where I majored in Classical studies with a minor in Medieval Renaissance studies.  This is my first year at the University of Toronto and I am in the LIS stream.  I can't really say what aspect of librarianship I am interested in as each course that I take seems to reveal new, fascinating aspects.  At the moment reader's advisory and collection development seem very interesting fields. 
I'm not sure how personal these introductions are supposed to get, but I will share one of my hobbies with you.  I love to read.  I read a lot of stuff, from books on classical or medieval history to fantasy to early 20th century fiction.  And I'm always looking for new stuff to read, so feel free to give me suggestions!  I look forward to hearing from you all.
-Eric (1/15/14)