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Christian directed me to a fascinating chronology of information technology (in French) by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe. It is called Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information. and the web design isn’t the best, but it seems detailed and annotated. It seems like a good place to start if you want to understand the types of information aides from encyclopedias, indexes, and so on. Here division of time into epochs is also interesting. The bibliography is also good.

Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,

One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.

The last week and a bit I have been in Kyoto to give a talk at a conference on the “Possibilities in Digital Humanities” which was organized by Professor Kozaburo Hachimura and sponsored by the Information Processing Society of Japan and by the Ritsumeikan University Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Culture.

While the talks were in Japanese I was able to follow most of the sessions with the help of Mistuyuki Inaba and Keiko Susuki. I was impressed by the quality of the research and the involvement of new scholars. There seemed to be a much higher participation of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students than at similar conferences in Canada which bodes well for digital humanities in Japan.

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Thanks to Willard, I’m reading Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin’s Romance of the Machine, a defense of American materialism, science and engineering. He identifies 3 sets of technologies that have consolidated the Union – the telephone, the vacuum-tube oscillator (radio), and the gas-engine (auto and airplane.) He weaves a consciously idealistic story about engineering mirroring the machines of nature and weaving peace.

The machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature. (p. 29)

It looks like an act of providence that the telephone was born when the consolidation of our Union needed it most; the vacuum-tube oscillator arrived in time to lend its aid in the consolidation of this nation with the other nations of the world. Many an enthusiast believes that these two machines are messengers sent from heaven to aid in the guidance of the destiny of this nation, and of the whole world. This enthusiasm is not surprising. (p. 92)

There is a very interesting chapter (“Romance of the Telephone”, III) where Pupin argues that the telephone provided two important innovations – first the communications network and second a model democratic industry.

There is another epoch-making service which the telephone
rendered to this nation. This service was the creation of a great
American telephone industry, which in many respects serves to-day as a model to other big American industries. (p. 67)

His argument is that ATT is too big to be owned by wealthy families. Instead it is owned by the middle class – people like its employees. He further sees the management as coming from the same middle class and being professionals. He sees a shift from political democracy to economic democracy which benefits all. Whatever happened to that idealism?

Our telephone industry and the other large American industries encourage us in the belief that we are much nearer to the ideal of economic democracy than we are to Lincoln’s ideal of political democracy. The first is developed by scientists and engineers, the second is <pb> in the hands of politicians. (p. 77 – 78)

One thing that happened is a loss of faith in the technocracy. The second thing was a shift in business towards management who saw their mandate narrowly as being only to increase investor value.

Some more quotes:

There will be no place for barbarism, like war, in a world in
which the two American machines, the telephone and the vacuum-tube oscillator, are afforded every opportunity to develop their latent powers for the enlightenment of the world.

Here are two.machines which the American machine civilization has produced, and thus laid the foundation of the radio art, the most subtle and refined of all the technical arts ever conceived by the human mind. No trace of materialism can be detected in their history. On the contrary, their achievements represent them as messengers from heaven sent to earth to rid the world of barbarous notions and raise it to a higher level of civilization.(p. 94)

The telephone, the telegraph, the vacuum-tube oscillator, the aeroplane, and the automobile, will certainly bring the peoples of the world closer to each other and establish between them bonds of friendship, just as they are establishing them between the peoples of our States. That is the highest mission of these machines. (p. 103)

The book ends by talking about “The Great American Experiment” and how this political experiment inspired engineers and scientists to develop technologies to consolidate the Union so that “The designers, the builders, and the machines employed by them are the inseparable parts of the American machine civilization.” (p. 111)

Bibliographic Reference: Michael Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).

Ian Wilson of the new U Waterloo Stratford Institute talked to the York/Peking Symposium on the Canada 3.0 Forum among other things. He talked about the Stratford Declaration (reproduced below) that emerged. It is a national declaration that calls for a Canadian project.

Canada 3.0 – The Stratford Declaration June 22, 2009

On June 8-9, 2009, over 1500 people interested in the digital economy gathered in Stratford, Ontario to review and debate the opportunities and challenges for Canada’s future. Canada 3.0 brought together industry, government and academia in workshops and discussions all focused on Canada’s digital future.

Recognizing the need for urgent attention to the issues of digital media, the participants in the Canada 3.0 Conference agreed to the Stratford Declaration:

• Success in digital media will be central to national prosperity in the 21st century. This fast growing field is producing jobs, ideas, products, services, companies and opportunities at a rapid pace – but Canada is not yet a world leader.
• Canada has the potential to be internationally competitive in this field on a sustained and focused basis, but it will not get there based on current trends.
• The foundations of Canada’s digital economy and society are not yet strong and stable. Significant upgrades are required to the digital infrastructure, including both the technological infrastructure and made-in-Canada digital content.
• Consistent accomplishment in the digital economy will require collaboration, partnership and collective action on an unprecedented national and cross-sectoral scale. Canada must use the digital revolution to reinvent the manner in which this country trains, educates, creates new businesses, cooperates, serves the population and views its collective future.
• Canada’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to bridge the technological and content fields, and to thereby produce and deliver internationally competitive products and services. The creative talents of this country must be connected to the technological potential of this age.
• Canada must become a global test-bed for new digital products and services and must be seen as a new economy incubator where consumers, governments and companies are known for embracing digital innovation.
• Canada needs to produce a regulatory and legal environment attuned to the 21st century and needs to use these arrangements to propel the nation into a position of global leadership in digital rights management.
• The digital ecology produces global competition for talent, ideas, patents and emerging companies. Canadians need to make a strong commitment to the country as a place to train, innovate, work and prosper if the digital economy is to flourish.
• There is an urgent need for a national project of such scale, scope and impact that Canadians come to understand the potential of the digital economy and that produces the collaboration, cooperation and cross-country engagement necessary for international digital leadership.
• Canada must set an ambitious target – to become the first truly digital nation in the world – and must move with urgency and determination toward this goal.

Canada 3.0 – La Déclaration de Stratford Le 22 juin 2009

Les 8 et 9 juin 2009, la ville de Stratford, en Ontario, a accueilli plus de 1 500 intéressés qui se sont penchés sur le dossier de l’économie numérique et ont débattu les possibilités et défis qui se dessinent pour le Canada de demain. Réunissant des délégués de l’industrie, des gouvernements et du monde universitaire, la conférence Canada 3.0 a été le théâtre d’ateliers et d’échanges portant sur l’avenir numérique du Canada.

Conscients de la nécessité de porter une attention immédiate aux enjeux liés aux médias numériques, les participants de la conférence ont entériné la Déclaration de Stratford :
• Au 21e siècle, la réussite des médias numériques sera au cœur de la prospérité du pays. Emplois, idées, produits, services, entreprises et débouchés se multiplient à un rythme effréné dans ce domaine en plein essor. Cependant, le Canada n’y occupe pas encore une position de chef de file mondial.
• Le Canada possède tous les atouts requis pour affronter de façon durable et ciblée la concurrence internationale dans le domaine. Cependant, ce potentiel ne se réalisera jamais à moins que le pays ne change de cap.
• Le Canada ne dispose pas encore d’assises stables et solides en ce qui touche l’économie et la société numériques. L’infrastructure numérique doit faire l’objet d’améliorations marquées, notamment sur le plan de l’infrastructure technique et des contenus numériques de confection canadienne.
• En matière d’économie numérique, la cohérence des réalisations nécessite une collaboration, des partenariats et une action concertée sans précédent à l’échelon national et intersectoriel. Le Canada doit profiter de la révolution numérique pour réinventer ses modèles de formation, d’éducation, de création de nouvelles entreprises, de coopération et de service au public ainsi que pour revoir la façon dont il envisage l’avenir collectif de la nation.
• L’avantage concurrentiel du Canada tient à sa capacité de conjuguer techniques et contenus et, ainsi, de produire et de diffuser des produits et services compétitifs dans l’arène mondiale. Les talents créateurs de ce pays doivent être « branchés » sur les possibilités techniques de notre époque.
• Le Canada doit devenir une plateforme mondiale d’essai des nouveaux produits et services numériques. Il doit également être perçu comme un incubateur de la nouvelle économie où consommateurs, gouvernements et entreprises se distinguent par leur capacité de faire place à l’innovation numérique.
• Le Canada doit se doter d’un milieu réglementaire et légal qui s’accorde avec le 21e siècle. Il lui faut également miser sur de telles dispositions pour se propulser au sommet du palmarès mondial de la gestion des droits d’auteur électroniques.
• L’écologie numérique alimente la concurrence mondiale sur le plan des talents, des idées, des brevets et des nouvelles entreprises. Les Canadiens doivent s’engager résolument envers leur pays pour en faire un lieu où apprendre, innover, travailler et prospérer. Le développement futur de l’économie numérique en dépend.
• Il est urgent de lancer un projet national d’une envergure, d’une portée et d’une incidence telles que les Canadiens en viendront à saisir les possibilités offertes par l’économie numérique et qu’il en découlera la collaboration, la coopération et la mobilisation intersectorielle requises pour l’exercice d’un leadership numérique mondial.
• Le Canada doit se fixer un objectif audacieux — devenir la première véritable nation numérique du monde — et s’employer prestement et résolument à atteindre cet objectif. (This is from the Facebook Page.)

So a bunch of us started a project yesterday as part of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing workshop. Ours is, of course, the best project. We have motors that drive a reading of a fax carbon based on a “knowledge radio” on the Day of Digital Humanities.

At the end of the week I’ll be going to Toronto for what I expect will be one of the most interesting workshops ever. William J. Turkel at Western has organized a hands-on workshop on Hacking as a Way of Knowing to reflect on electronic waste and data about the environment. The short description of the purpose is,

This three-day workshop will explore the theme of E-waste and environmental data. Working in small groups, participants will be given the task of hacking some typical consumer e-waste to create reflective technological assemblages that incorporate ‘nature’ in some form while calling one or more of our basic assumptions into question.

This is not so much about building something, but about thinking about how fabrication (hacking) is a way of thinking through AND in this case we will be thinking through the environment and all the waste around computing. I suspect I’m going to be embarassed by how much I waste.

Thanks to Peter O I came across Clay Shirky’s excellent analysis of what’s going on with newspapers and the web, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable . Some of the salient points:

• Change has been so rapid that it has changed who is pragmatic and who is a fabulist. Newspapers are in denial about the realities of online content so those who describe what is happening (the pragmatists) are treated as fabulists.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.

• The economics of publishing have changed. It used to be that there was a tremendous upfront cost to set up a newspaper or broadcasting facility. Now the infrastructure of distribution is paid for by all so publishing is cheap.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

• It is easy to describe life before or after an epochal shift. It is hard to describe the chaos of experiments during the shift. Shirky looks to The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an example of the hard type of history.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

• Advertisers don’t want to pay for the costs of a full-featured newspaper (with international bureaus and investigative reporting.) They will move their money to where it connects with their (usually local) audience.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

• Newspaper reporting provides a public service that will be missed, but knowing we will miss it doesn’t save it. We just don’t know how to fill the gap that will be left when daily papers dissappear in cities.

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

Actually I think there are ideas floating around as to what might fill the gap:

• Blogs may take up some of the slack with various advocacy groups and NGOs providing investigative reporting in the areas that concern them. I think it is wrong to assume that amateurs will necessarily do a worse job than professional reporters. In fact, as most know, professionals are too busy to usually go into depth and whenever they write about something you know they get it wrong in all sorts of ways. A blog like Buckets of Grewal probably does a more indepth job of examining the Grewal controversy than any newspaper story. The difference is rather that the professionals are committed to breadth and they write better.
• Publicly funded broadcasters like the BBC and the CBC will provide tax funded news reporting with foreign bureaus and so on. They don’t have to have make a profit and can invest in things perceived as useful for society.
• There will always be some big and international newspapers like the New York Times or Reuters because there will always be a demand for that sort of news. The internet reduces diversity – every city doesn’t need a newspaper with a foreign bureau. All we need is a couple of news services with foreign bureaus.
• Some companies have already figured out how to package news as analysis and get other businesses to pay for it. This will accelerate as newspapers fail. Companies like Oxford Analytica will meet the demand of multinational businesses who need access to strategic information. The sooner the newspapers fail the sooner we will see these companies come out of the woodwork and start selling their products to us.

To conclude with another quote from the Shirky essay, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

Reading the book on Canadian book design, The Surface of Meaning I came across a reference to Beatrice Warde’s The Crystal Goblet. This was given as a lecture in London in 1930 with the title “Printing Should be Invisible” and was printed in the 1950s. It is a clear and apparently influential statement of the modernist view of how a book design should be transparent letting the ideas shine through. It starts with a metaphor of the book as a goblet.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. …

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. …

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist. …

It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization. …

the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. …

Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. ..

it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor. …

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. …

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline.

Perhaps the time comes when printing reluctantly hands off its usefulness to a digital successor like the Kindle which would explain the (re)discovery of pressing form into paper and other arts of the book. I am not making a prediction and especially not recommending this, just reflecting on how the book need not be so transparent as it was supposed to be. When the burden of usefulness is eased off the shoulders of books they can become post-modern chalices, opaque and shiny.

For another take see Book Design in Canada at Cardigan Industries.

Now for the wine within.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog entry about Gary Hall’s book Digitize This Book! I noted that I couldn’t find a digitized copy of the book and asked if others knew of one. To my surprise Gary wrote me back and pointed to the items listed below. Now that is the Internet at work! He is trying to get the publisher to allow a digital copy to be posted online, but in the meantime pointed out online versions of what became chapters in the book:

(2003) ‘Digitise This’, Mediactive, Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 76-90); republished in (2004), The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, January-March (pp. 23-46) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0147/_.doc (MS Word Document)

(2007) ‘IT, Again: or, How to Build an Ethical Virtual Institution’, in Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber, edited by Gary Hall and Simon Morgan Wortham (Fordham University Press: New York) (pp.116-140) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2008/01/0740/_.doc (MS Word Document)

Gary Hall says that “Since the book came out I’ve also published a new piece on open access publishing and the humanities” at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current. A video of him presenting it as a talk is available at Pirate Philosophy – Steal This! .

I take back any irony in my previous post. (Can one take back irony? Perhaps I can only apologize for being ironic to early.)