Category Archives: libraries

After a 2-month hiatus of Convivium: tl;dr

I’m trying to pull together the fragments I’ve been sorting and knitting, to (a) summarize what I’ve been working on during the hiatus, and (b) to articulate what that activity has taught me (or is it learned me?) about the past, the present, and possibly the always-murky future. The result amounts to an assessment of who I am, and what it is that I do, and what I have been doing all along.

The core is a report of my recent bout of mental and digital housekeeping, but there’s also a reflective side [what It All Means] that has been more and more to the fore in the last 5 years: self explaining self to self by examining the Process. I’d like to think there’s something shareable with the like-minded others out there, something beyond the warm and fuzzy what a good boy am I sense that one gets from conversations with the Mirror.

My Word of the Year of 2024 was Curate, and I’m sticking with it for 2025 as I glance back over 2024 to see what I have and haven’t accomplished as a curator. In 2022 and 2023 the WotY was Narrative (see also the 2022 iteration), primarily concerned with extracting and articulating the Stories that I inhabit. Making sense of the STUFF that surrounds me…

Curation is partly a matter of identifying and addressing messes, working at negentropy by organizing bits strewn about. Begin with the image of library shelves: where do items belong in relation to one another? But clearly it quickly goes beyond linear (2-D) arrangement, and the mental model I’ve used to invoke 3-D (and 4-D) relationships is macramé.

One hopes to construct an eloquent and artful structure for one’s Knowledge —partly to discover what it is that one Knows, and to work out how to map and navigate the construction. There’s something spider-like and web-tendy, though I’m less concerned with catching metaphorical flies than with being able to explore amongst what I’ve collected. Because I am and have always been a collector.

The habit/method/strategy of emailing links to myself (and of course to like-minded others) has been with me for a long time, indeed back to my first uses of email in the early 1990s. HTML gave me the tools to Keep Found Things Found (KFTF) by constructing Web pages to trace my progress/process. Before blogs became a thing, I was making “log files” of my discoveries, and trying to inspire colleagues and students to do likewise. I was more successful for myself than as an inspiration to others. It’s all at oook.info, reaching back 30 years.

And here I’ll invoke Informing Others, and cite the image of the Energizer Bunny to describe how my enthusiasm was received, but temper that vision with a digression into Walt Kelly’s Bun Rabbit, and the broader subject of avatars.

The thing is, all of this Informing is digressive, forever hareing off [gratuitous lagomorph reference] after another promising bit of curiosity/interest. Rabbit Hole does seem an apposite metaphor.

So my most outstanding mess/problem was the overstuffed email inbox of unread sent-to-self links, more than 1000. My Do Right page assembles my progress, much of it in the last two months. And what did I discover in assembling these chronological summary pages? The tracks of my curiosity and kaleidoscoping interests, laid out so they can be explored more easily: a nascent Index of my wanderings. Without such a catalog, it all becomes kind of a blur; but once the task is done, it’s practical to analyze the flow to discover and thus map my expanding and branching Interests. With every thing that crosses my path, there’s the question: how does it fit with and/or extend what I already know? And who of my Information clients would wish to know?

I have a lot of sensors/feelers deployed in Infospace, via print materials (NYRB, LRB, Literary Review, etc), digital subscriptions (paid and otherwise), RSS feeds, and sites I visit regularly (viz. YouTube)

The problem of curating the incoming flood of YouTube videos is vexing, and my interim solution of links displayed on HTML pages isn’t very satisfactory. The chaos could be reduced by sorting according to … well, what? And what’s a sensible workflow to get from lists to appropriate subcategories? Still thinking about THAT riddle.

and somehow it’s 2022

Has it really been a month since the last blog post? Of course lots of stuff in that time, books arriving and being wolfed down and at least partially digested, various end-of-year summings-up, and the plunge into 2022. Staying home, minimizing f2f encounters, watching It All Go Down.

Preparations for the weekly Convivium have supplanted blogging to some degree, and

tell the tale of my wandering attentions pretty well.

By way of paying attention to the world outside the many comforts of home, I’ve been following Heather Cox Richardson and Umair Haque, both sort of paywalled (or anyhow I’m not sure if hyperlinks to their posts on Substack and Medium are readily accessible), and both painting not-rosy pictures of what’s just around the corner.

…and I’ve revisited Joan Didion and Jorge Luis Borges profitably, and lately discovered Unflattening (Nick Sousanis) and The Secret To Superhuman Strength (Alison Bechdel), among (many) others.

Reacquaintance with Borges reminded me yet again of the charms of his Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, and The Library of Babel (see Jonathan Basile’s obsession: The Library of Babel and about The Library of Babel) … and if the Work itself is unknown to you, there’s a pdf available). Among the additional resources I’m now navigating, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel (William Goldbloom Bloch) and The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Edwin Williamson)

…and then consult The Aleph (pdf), when you’re ready for the next thing… Hell of a ride. I’ve just ordered The Total Library : Non-Fiction, 1922-1986, so The Future Is Assured for the rest of January. And of course other things will appear, seemingly out of nowhere.

I resolve to start building my very own Lifebox, inspired by Rudy Rucker’s The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, The Meaning of Life, And How to Be Happy. Well, I’ve been building it all along, but the project longs to have its own dedicated (hyper)space.

and that was July

Once again I’ve got only a single blog posting for the month. The photostream records a succession of grill-watching evenings:

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(Kate does the grilling, I having no genes for that activity.
She includes kohlrabi and green beans and zucchini as regular grillage,
and it seems possible that ALL garden produce can be grilled…)

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Organizing projects in shop and Library Annex proceed:

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I bought a couple of professional-grade book carts to facilitate the Library (re-)organization process:
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…and it proceeds slowly, arranged by my own idiosyncratic and ever-morphing categories:
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It’s been very pleasant to spend afternoons sitting here dipping in and out of a succession of rediscovered books.
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In Convivium space, I spent quite a while thinking about the Future. On other frontiers, lots of books read, music played, videos watched, trash picked up. Quite content to be mostly At Home, going from thing to thing.

KFTF

I’ve been thinking about the perennial problem of Keeping Found Things Found, and about narrating explorations of the past and present, and that has led to consideration of Finding Aids for my various collections. Many happy hours have gone into the process of figuring out how to construct such summaries and guides, and most recently I’ve been using LibraryThing to build the database for my library of photography books (see a list of those tagged ‘photography’ for its current state) and considering how to sort and sub-categorize that collection to make it more useful and accessible. Others will follow.

This morning I picked up Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, which I’ve had for 10 years or so and dipped into now and again. A couple of passages leapt off the pages and seem to cast useful light on my present concerns:

The closer we look, the more detail we find. The only limitation to our view is the limitation of our ability to see. In order to find something new, we simply have to be willing to look more closely, more carefully.

We refer to the written work of the past to see what has been done and how it has been done… we focus on the maker’s methods and assumptions. We find tools and ways to use them… our work will, inevitably, echo and respond to the work of the past that resonates most strongly for us.

We all have our touchstones.

Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination, pages 207, 220, 221

Otlet

I read a lot of books, pinballing amongst genres and across disciplinary declevities as I please, and investigating some very odd (or at least infrequently-visited) corners of the print world. Mostly I don’t try to inflict my idiosyncratic tastes on others, but sometimes a book comes along that’s just too good not to make a fuss about. Today’s case in point:

Alex Wright’s Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age.

Paul Otlet is probably not a person you’ve encountered before (and if he’s already familiar to you, I’d like to know how), but he belongs in the same visionary realm as Melvil Dewey (of library cataloging and 3×5 card fame), Ted Nelson (who instantiated hypertext), Tim Berners-Lee (pater of the World Wide Web), Doug Engelbart (of Mother of All Demos fame), Vannevar Bush (Memex and As We May Think), JCR Licklider (Man-Computer Symbiosis, ARPA), and a clutch of others (Watson Davis, Patrick Geddes, Emanuel Goldberg, Otto Neurath, John Wilkins) who will probably also be new to you. These people are arguably the primary architects/engineers/makers of the electronic world we all inhabit. The book is especially commended to

  • anyone interested in the history of Information, and the precursors of the Web in particular
  • anyone engaged with European intellectual history, and/or with the world of the first 50 years of the 20th century

Other books I’ve read that I’d put into the same heap, and reread in light of Wright’s book:

George Dyson Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

James Gleick The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

John Markoff What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Ted Nelson Possiplex: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization: An Autobiography

Fred Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

David Weinberger Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

I’m just starting Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, and hoping for More Of Same.

I pay them extra and make them mean what I like

I can’t say enough in praise of r0ml Lefkowitz’ talks on Semasiology of Open Source (this year’s and last year’s, from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention). Now that kind of thing OUGHT to enliven a meeting of librarians, but doesn’t. The atmosphere of library meetings is tainted by the fact that the participants are mostly fixated on an Institution that I love in the abstract, but find a lot to be pessimistic and critical about in the particular and concrete. Part of the problem is the attitude of most or at least many librarians: all too many are fraidy-cats, cringingly grateful for the crumbs that Academe bestows, and (with precious few exceptions) very much disinclined to rock even the boats that most NEED rocking. Another irritant for me is that many librarians just aren’t very curious about the territory outside the Profession. Few would see why they should listen to a keynote from an Open Source convention, let alone a couple of hours on Semasiology.

I must confess that Semasiology was not in my lexicon until I heard these sessions, though attention to the shifting meanings of words has been one of my lifelong playgrounds. (A Google Scholar search vouchsafes that “Carnap divided the study of language into syntactics, semasiology, and sematology…” …and Carita Paradis’ Reinforcing adjectives: a cognitive semantic perspective on grammaticalization reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the linguist’s perspectives on language).

three different takes on Google Print

Says Bob Stein, at if:book:

Google Print really is shaping up to be a library, that is, of the world pre-1923 — the current line of demarcation between copyright and the public domain.

Umair Haque, at Bubblegeneration, tucks this in near the end of a long posting:

Google Print is also a killer example of an edge competence based strategy. Like core competences in the 80s and 90s, edge competences are going to dominate the post-network economy of the 21st century. By making info about books more liquid and plastic, Google atomizes upstream and downstream segments in the value chains. For example, it dilutes Amazon’s market power directly, by massively reducing switching costs – and, in general, the market power of anyone on either side of its value chain segment. Value shifts away from the core, and towards the edges.

Tim Wu, at Slate:

Google has become the new ground zero for the “other” culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California’s cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control. The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work? Authors and their advocates have long favored maximal control—but we undergoing a sea-change in our understanding of the author’s interests in both exposure and control. Unlike, perhaps, the other culture war, this war has real win-win potential, and I hope that years from now we will be shocked to remember that Google’s offline searches were once considered controversial.