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From Ray I was led to a lecture at Yale by James J. O’Donnell, Provost and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, on the Kindle, A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read. O’Donnell has been involved for a long time in humanities computing, though he is now a provost, and speaks with experience thinking about electronic reading practices. He started with the question from Hugo of whether “this (the Kindle) will kill that (the book)”. This led to reflections on reading practices. “Devices and technologies predict behavior. This device predicts behavior.” He talk, therefore, was around what practices/behaviors does the Kindle (and ebooks more generally) support or predict.

He gives examples of the limitations of the Kindle.

• Annotation: The kindles annotation tools don’t let you manage your notes. O’Donnell uses a blog (like I do) to keep notes, but doesn’t make it public.
• Complex Documents: It is not friendly to complex documents with things like footnotes.
• Non-Linear Reading: Doesn’t let him compare things (a translation and original.) It is like the old scroll – it drives you away from non-linear reading. All you really are encouraged to do is to scroll and scroll and so on.
• Reference Works: Scholars need to be able to use important reference works in standard editions and “that is because books talk to each other.” The Kindle is meant for a person to encounter one book, but not for books to encounter each other.
• Lots of Stuff: The Kindle does have the virtue that it can hold a lot of stuff.
• What Sorts of Practices: O’Donnell describes different reading practices he tried like downloading lots of stuff for reading in free moments. He was very funny about his bedside table as a reading device that holds good intentions. He seems to see the value of the Kindle in getting books you plan to delete. He has bought various books that he expects to dislike and therefore to skim.
• Ludic Reading: He also sees this as potentially for “ludic reading” – the reading of murder mysteries on the train where you don’t expect to keep the book.
• Travel Accessory: He only reads on the Kindle when away from home because there is so much better stuff at home. It is a way to save space when travelling.
• Old Reading: Strangely, the Kindle supports mostly very old reading practices (scrolling). It doesn’t really support any of the newer non-linear practices. There is no innovation in the device – no interesting indexes. For O’Donnell the Kindle fails to replace the book because it doesn’t really innovate, it just remediates without even supporting the full range of practices a good book does.

I can’t help thinking that the iPad will blow the Kindle away. First, the iPad can do so much more than let you read. If you bring the Kindle when traveling to save space, you still need a cell phone, a lap top and so on. The iPad could replace multiple devices the way my iPhone replace two devices (the iPod and the cell phone.) Second, the iPad is open and will let you easily use many formats and use tools like your blog to write annotations and notes. (Wouldn’t it be neat to have an annotation tool built into WordPress that would let you go from the note back to the right spot in an ebook?) The Kindle seems designed to make it easy to buy books from Amazon.

I too, like O’Donnell, got a Kindle for Christmas and have been trying it. One use that stood out immediately for me was the easy of buying. Like iTunes, the Kindle makes it easy to buy books when the book stores are far and closed. I was in a little town in British Columbia hungry for leisure reading and the Kindle made it easy to spend 10 bucks to get some trash right after brushing my teeth when I want to curl into bed with a “book.” You can also (sort of) read in bed. The Kindle is light enough to hold with one hand, something the iPad may not be. That said, now that I am back at home where I have too many unread books, I don’t use the Kindle much any more. Perhaps O’Donnell is right – one uses the Kindle when traveling – in my case because access to books is an issue.

Another point about buying. I agree entirely with O’Donnell that the cost of books for the Kindle is too high to tempt me to buy anything except what I plan to delete. Anything that I think I want to keep I won’t buy for the Kindle because I don’t want to be stuck with it in one device. I just don’t trust Amazon (or reading devices.)

A final point about the Kindle. Their ranking system encourages groups to spam books into appearing to be popular. Looking for a good sci-fi novel to read I started browsing by popularity (which should be a reliable way to browse.) I bought a book that looked promising and by the first paragraph realized it Christian propaganda sci-fi. Going back to see from the reviews how I could make such a mistake I found buried a review saying just this – don’t buy the book – its popularity is due to a bunch of friends of the author stuffing the reviews section. Amazon needs to change the browsing so that we have more reliable ways to find impulse buys that can’t be manipulated by a community pushing crap.

Susan pointed me to a hilarious YouTube video about Brontë sisters action figures. The authors of it write,

This was a fake commercial we made in 1998 for a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures. Its educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired.

Steve Ramsay has put an interesting video essay about live coding up at Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo on Vimeo. He provides commentary to the live coding of Andrew Sorensen which in turn is controlling electronic music. Very neat!

Seamus pointed us to a great animation on YouTube, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster. They nicely dramatize the challenges and need for digital preservation.

Thanks to Jason I discovered an interesting collection of animated poetry that plays with type by David Jhave Johnston. See glia — neuronal jelly with network sauce — 2009.. In theory you can embed the animated poems in things, but it didn’t work in this blog. Perhaps they are best seen in glia.

One feature of Johnston’s work is how he plays with type using, among other technologies, Mr. Softie from Obx Labs.

Back to Pontypool, the semiotic zombie movie that has infected me. The image above is of the poster for the missing cat Honey that seems to have something to do with the start of the semiotic infection. The movie starts with Grant Mazzy’s voice over the radio talking about,

Mrs French’s cat is missing. The signs are posted all over town. Have you seen Honey? Well, we have all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat. Nobody, until last Thursday morning when Miss Collettepiscine … (drove off the bridge to avoid the cat)

He goes on to pun on “Pontypool” (the name of the town the movie takes place in), Miss Collettepiscine’s name (French for “panty-pool”), and the local name of the bridge she drove off. He keeps repeating variations of Pontypool a hint at the language virus to come.

As for the language virus, I replayed parts of the movie where they talk about it. At about 58 minutes in they hear the character Ken clearly get infected and begin to repeat himself as they talk on the cellphone. Dr. Mendez concludes, “That’s it, he is gone. He is just a crude radio signal, seeking.” A little later Mendez gets it and proposes,

Mendez: No … it can’t be, it can’t be. It’s viral, that much is clear. But not of the blood, not of the air, not on or even in our bodies. It is here.

Grant: Where?

Mendez: It is in words. Not all words, not all speaking, but in some. Some words are infected. And it spreads out when the contaminated word is spoken. Ohhhh. We are witnessing the emergence of a new arrangement for life … and our language is its host. It could have sprung spontaneously out of a perception. If it found its way into language it could leap into reality itself, changing everything. It may be boundless. It may be a God bug.

Grant: OK, Dr. Mendez. Look, I don’t even believe in UFOs, so I … I’ve got to stop you there with that God bug thing.

Mendez: Well that is very sensible because UFOs don’t exist. But I assure you, there is a monster loose and it is bouncing through our language, frantically trying to keep its host alive.

Grant: Is this transmission itself … um …

Mendez: No, no, no, no. If the bug enters us, it does not enter by making contact with our eardrum. It enters us when we hear the word and we understand it. Understand?

It is when the word is understood that the virus takes hold. And it copies itself in our understanding.

Grant: Should we be … talking about this?

Sydney: What are we talking about?

Grant: Should we be talking at all?

Mendez: Well, to be safe, no, probably not. Talking is risky, and well, talk radio is high risk. And so … we should stop.

Grant: But, we need to tell people about this. People need to know. We have to get this out.

Mendez: Well it’s your call Mr Mazzy. But let’s just hope that your getting out there doesn’t destroy your world.

As one thoughtful review essay points out, Pontypool is not the first to play with the meme of information viruses that can infect us. Snow Crash, the Stephenson novel which features a language-virus, even appears in the movie.

Pontypool itself is infectious, morphing from form to form. Sequels are threatened. The book, Pontypool Changes Everything, which starts with a character who keeps Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his, led to the movie which led to the radio play which was created by re-editing the movie audio (and it apparently has a different ending with “paper”.)

Shannon pointed me to The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic band from the 80s that was one of the entertainments at Showbiz Pizza. Rock-afire Explosion has been resurrected by a fan and one of the original creators of Creative Engineering who are programming tunes and uploading video to YouTube. See, for example, Madonna’s 4 Minutes. They take bids on New Shows to Program at a strange and not very clear site. If you bid high enough and it isn’t “dirty” they will program the animatronic band to do a song you want. (Would they do Plato’s dialogues?)

I cannot begin to describe how strangely captivating this all is. Perhaps the documentary made about it (see Rockafiremovie.com) captures the passion. Or, for a computing perspective, see the clip about Programming the Rock-afire Explosion.

Whatever happened to animatronics? Will it make a comeback now that we all carry around smartphones that can control things?

Garry pointed me to Percussa AudioCubes. These cubes communicate by infrared to communicate distance information that you can use as input.

Location, orientation and distance information is passed to the software, while you interact with the cubes. The software can connect via MIDI or OpenSoundControl (OSC) to any software or hardware for music or visuals which you already have, or you can use it within your DAW (digital audio workstation) software as a VST plugin, or as a host for VST instruments to let you create sound immediately. (From How do they work?)

Thanks to James K I discovered Twitterfall which shows a waterfall of tweets based on keywords and other settings. An interesting example of what St̩fan Sinclair and I call a Knowledge Radio Рan application that organizes knowledge into a live stream.

I put a photo set up on Flickr for our Hacking as a Way of Knowing project. The set documents the evolution of the project which I’ve tentatively named the “ReReader for the Writing on the Wall”. Thanks to all those who made the project and the workshop a success. Now I have to think a bit deeper about making as knowing and things as theories.