Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library”*…
Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame? The redoubtable Robert Darnton reviews the equally-estimable Peter Baldwin‘s important new book, Athena Unbound- Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All…
In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization…
Darnton, who shares Baldwin’s goals of preservation and open access, unpacks the history of digital sharing/lending and of the forces massed to oppose it, and reviews the risks that attach, concluding in the end on a less optimistic (or at least, more complicated) note than Baldwin– a “dialogue” that’s enormously informative.
“The Dream of a Universal Library” (possible paywall; archived link here), from @RobertDarnton.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we accelerate access, we might send exquisitely-curated birthday greetings to Belle da Costa Greene; she was born on this date in 1879. A librarian, she managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Her life was a sad comment on access of another sort. Born to Black parents (her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first black student and first black graduate of Harvard [class of 1870], who ultimately served as dean of the Howard University School of Law), Greene passed for white. After she took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again and listed him as deceased on passport applications throughout the 1910s, despite his being alive until 1922.
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it”*…
In 1968, Stewart Brand and small group of colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, then followed it over the years with a series of updates, spin-offs, and sequels. An at-the-time unprecedented marriage of counterculture magazine and product catalog, it (and its successors) have been enormously influential. Now, as Long Now‘s Jacob Kupperman reports, the entire run of Whole Earth publications is freely available online…
When the Whole Earth Catalog arrived in the Fall of 01968, it came bearing a simple, epochal label: “Access to Tools.” As its editor and Long Now Co-founder Stewart Brand wrote in the introduction to that first edition, the goal was for the Catalog to serve as an “evaluation and access device” for tools that empowered its readers “to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”
The key word in all of that idealistic declaration of purpose was “access.” The Whole Earth Catalog did not intend to directly grant its readers this knowledge, wisdom, and mastery, but to provide a kaleidoscopic array of gateways from which they could attempt to find it themselves.
Yet for years, access to the Whole Earth Catalog itself has been difficult. 55 years on from the first publication of the Catalog, it mostly lives on in the interstices — as a symbol of a vibrant countercultural history and an inspiration for writers, designers, and technologists, but less so as an actual set of catalogs that you can read. The Catalog is not lost media per se — copies can be found in libraries, archives, and personal collections across the world — but accessing its trove of information is no longer as easy as it was in its heyday.
That is, until now.
on the 55th anniversary of the publication of the original Whole Earth Catalog, Gray Area and the Internet Archive have made the Catalog freely available online via the Whole Earth Index, a website bringing together more than 130 Whole Earth Catalog-related publications, ranging from some of the earliest Catalogs published in the late 01960s and early 01970s to 02002 issues of Whole Earth Magazine.
Within the site’s grid of publications rests a cornucopia of writing and curation, from in-depth looks at space colonies to ecological analyses of the insurance industry to reporting on the state of the global teenager at the turn of the 01990s. The Whole Earth Index is a work of love, a noncommercial enterprise designed, as project lead and Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw told Long Now Ideas, to “allow us to reflect on how we got to where we are and regain some of that connection to the countercultural world” of the Bay Area of the 01960s and 01970s.
…
For the people who helped make the Whole Earth Catalog and its descendants, the Whole Earth Index is in many ways a dream come true. Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly, who wrote for, edited, and led the CoEvolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, and later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, told us that he found “the interface to this historic collection to be as good, maybe even better, as reading the original paper artifacts,” adding that he’d “been giddy with delight in how satisfying this archive is.” The project’s model of “instant access from your home, for free!”, Kelly noted, was something that the team behind the Whole Earth Catalog could only dream of when they began their work.
The open-ended design of the Whole Earth Index is intended as a sort of provocation towards future works — a message and invitation in the spirit of the original catalog’s epochal claim that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The tens of thousands of scanned pages will live on the servers of the Internet Archive — as good a place as any to try and stave off a Digital Dark Age — but the ideas of the Whole Earth Catalog and its heirs will always live among those of us who read it and access its tools. What will you do with them?
The Whole Earth Catalog and its descendants are newly available online through the Whole Earth Index: “The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog,” from @Jacobkupp and @longnow.
* Stewart Brand, in the “Statement of Purpose” in the first Whole Earth Catalog
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As we treasure tools, we might spare a thought for a man whose work kicked in about the same time as the Whole Earth Catalog– and intersected with it in myriad ways (e.g., The WELL), Jon Postel; he died on this date in 1998. A computer scientist, he played a pivotal role in creating and administering the Internet. As a graduate student in the late 1960s, he was instrumental in developing ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series from which internet standards emerged, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for founding and administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death.
During his lifetime he was referred to as the “god of the Internet” for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this “compliment” came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a “professional,” and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: “Of course, there isn’t any ‘God of the Internet.’ The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.”
“I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better”*…
Was Walter Benjamin the ur-podcaster? Peter E. Gordon on Benjamin’s audio adventures, how they relate to his cultural theories, and what they suggest about what has become (and may yet become) of audio…
No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.”
Today Benjamin is widely esteemed as one of the foremost cultural critics and theorists of the 20th century. But his career was uneven and marked by failure. In 1925, after the faculty of philosophy in Frankfurt rejected his enigmatic study of German Baroque drama and dashed his hopes for an academic career, he found himself adrift, with little assurance of a regular income. But this failure also brought freedom. His untethering from the university meant that he could indulge in his interests without restraint, and he turned his talents to writing essays that took in the whole panorama of modern life—from high literature to children’s books and from photography to film—and, for nearly six years, he supplemented his earnings with radio broadcasts, some for adults and others meant especially for children. Of the many broadcasts, about 90 in all, that he produced for the radio stations in Frankfurt and Berlin, only a fragment of a single audio recording has been preserved; unfortunately, Benjamin’s voice cannot be heard.
Now transcripts of these broadcasts have been assembled and translated into English in a new volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal, whose incisive introduction assists the reader in appreciating their true significance. One can’t help but wonder what Benjamin would have made of all this attention, since he was inclined to dismiss his radio work as unimportant. In correspondence with his friend Gershom Scholem, he wrote with some embarrassment of “piddling radio matters” and condemned nearly all of it as having “no interest except in economic terms.” Today we know that he was mistaken. The transcripts are more than mere ephemera; they are perfect specimens of Benjamin’s interpretative method, exercises in a style of urban semiotics that he would later apply during his exile in Paris. Hannah Arendt once likened her late friend to a pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the rarest of treasures. The radio transcripts offer further evidence of a genius whose career was ended far too soon…
A fascinating– and illuminating– read. Walter Benjamin’s radio years: “President of the Moon Committee,” from @thenation.
* Alistair Cooke
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As we listen in, we might spare a thought for Hugo Gernsback, a Luxemborgian-American inventor, broadcast pioneer, writer, and publisher; he was born on this date in 1884. Gernsback founded radio station WRNY, was involved in the first television broadcasts, and is considered a pioneer in amateur radio. And he was a prolific inventor, with 80 patents at the time of his death.
But it was a writer and publisher that he probably left his most lasting mark: In 1926, as owner/publisher of the magazine Modern Electrics, he filled a blank spot in his publication by dashing off the first chapter of a series called “Ralph 124C 41+.” The twelve installments of “Ralph” were filled with inventions unknown in 1926, including “television” (Gernsback is credited with introducing the word), fluorescent lighting, juke boxes, solar energy, television, microfilm, vending machines, and the device we now call radar.
The “Ralph” series was an astounding success with readers; and later that year Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories. Believing that the perfect sci-fi story is “75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science,” he coined the term “science fiction.”
Gernsback was a “careful” businessman, who was tight with the fees that he paid his writers– so tight that H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith referred to him as “Hugo the Rat.”
Still, his contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, he is sometimes called “The Father of Science Fiction”; in his honor, the annual Science Fiction Achievement awards are called the “Hugos.”
“The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out”*…
Political and government bans and censorship, publishers attacking digital access/ lending— there’s a growing struggle underway (in the U.S. and abroad) that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared, and preserved — or lost forever. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on why we must care…
… The fact that crucial decisions about whether to keep or destroy data are kept in the hands of actors with profit motives, autocratic aspirations or other self-serving ends has a huge implication not only for individuals but also for the culture at large.
Many instances of data loss have ramifications for cultural production, the writing of history and, ultimately, the practice of democracy…
Alongside the need to maintain public trust in democratic institutions, we must consider how we ought to preserve our collective cultural memory. Institutions like museums, libraries and archives must play a more proactive role while creating stronger institutional safeguards — including rules mandating secure transport of public sector data and professional management of archives, in addition to requirements for public accessibility — on their own conduct. These organizations, whether they are upstart archival initiatives or established public institutions, require stable financial and institutional support to flourish…
The history of knowledge is not one of simple progress or accumulation. Knowledge production in the digital era, like the creation and storage of knowledge across the centuries, is unfolding as a continual oscillation between gains and losses.
Data loss on a small scale — missing phone contacts, digital files lost to a glitch — is the occupational hazard of existing in a digitally reliant world. But data erasure at scale is always political. Responses to erasure and loss must exceed technical fixes and knee-jerk reactions; instead, governments and organizations must constantly reassess the ethical and regulatory frameworks that govern our relationship with data. The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The World’s Digital Memory Is at Risk” (gift link)
Pair with the Internet Archive‘s Brewster Kahle‘s “Our Digital History Is at Risk” and Richard Ovenden‘s important (and engrossing) Burning the Books.
* Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
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As we prioritize preservation and open access, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that the Rainbow Flag was flown for the first time during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Created by Gilbert Baker, it has become a sign of LGBTQ pride worldwide.
“I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.”*…
A map to the promised land…
In his fifth-century commentary on Ezekiel’s vision of New Jerusalem, Jerome quotes the Aeneid, likening the path of salvation to a minotaur’s maze: “‘As once in lofty Crete the labyrinth is said to have had a route woven of blind walls’ . . . . So I, ente[r] the ocean of those scriptures and, so to speak, the labyrinth of God’s mysteries, of whom it is said ‘He made darkness his covert’ and ‘there are clouds in his circuit’.”
This 1705 maze (Dool-hoff), signed by the Dutch Catholic printer Claes Braau, also comes with clouded pathways, but here the way to New Jerusalem is cobbled by didactic verse. The broadsheet’s four dead-ends are burnished with spiritual gravity by its epigraphs: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14.12) and “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise” (Ephesian 5:15). Each pathway is paved with texts that narrate vocational and moral choices at various lengths. The road dedicated to economic wealth is full of twists and turns, but ultimately leads to the same fate as the short meander through a trench describing vanity: your journey’s abrupt termination. Choosing the “wrong path” forces the puzzler to backtrack, should they want to meet the Lamb of God at the maze’s center. Luckily, there are many ways to reach salvation, such as by studying the seven liberal arts.
The Dool-hoff was published in Haarlem during a period when neighboring Amsterdam was awash with secular mazes. “Doolhof inns,” a type of surreal public house, became increasingly popular in the seventeenth-century, treating tipsy patrons to mechanical statues, uncanny waxworks, and disorienting hedge mazes. Claes Braau’s Dool-hoff strayed from the path of these “astonishing and unprecedented novelties”, in Angela Vanhaelen’s words, and their “Bacchic conviviality.” Instead, it drew upon an older Christian tradition, represented by cathedral labyrinths like the one at Chartres, which W. H. Matthews hypothesized might reference “the various degrees of beatitude by which the soul approaches heaven, as figured by Dante.” That is, a byzantine journey through the labyrinth of the world toward a paradise of the heart. In its marriage of text and spatial warren, the Dool-hoff formally recalls the script labyrinth of Johann Neudörffer (1539), the Geistlich Labyrinth of Eberhard Kieser (1611), and several other precursors…
The remarkable story of a remarkable document: “Dool-Hoff: A Dutch Maze with New Jerusalem at its Centre” (where you’ll find a larger version of the picture above), from @PublicDomainRev.
The translation of the text in the paths is here. You can also view the maze in the Rijksmuseum Collection on the Internet Archive.
* James Baldwin
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As we find our ways, we might recall that it was on this date in 398 that the man we now know as St. John Chrysostom became the Bishop of Alexandria. An ascetic who railed against abuses of authority, he was a wisely-admired preacher, whose oratorial gifts earned him the name Chrysostom (“golden-mouth”). He was exiled in 403 for his outspoken criticism of his congregation, including Empress Eudoxia. After the church recalled him, he again offended Eudoxia, who exiled him again. He died three years later, in 407.
John is honored as a saint in the Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches, among others.
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