Science Library Pad

Ursula K. Le Guin tells me if Americans are Still Afraid of Dragons

Two years ago, I wrote a post about running across an article called "Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Day by day, month by month, the traffic comes in to that post.  For example, in my stats for today, the search phrase

why are americans afraid of dragons

is the third most popular phrase in incoming searches.  I have tried to figure out what's driving this traffic (other than curiousity) but I can't find any one source.

So when I saw Le Guin was coming to the Ottawa Writers Festival, I knew I had to go and ask her about her thoughts, 35 (!) years after her 1974 article.  (Plus, of course, I have enjoyed her books.)

With some preamble, in particular mentioning the popularity of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, I asked: Are Americans Still Afraid of Dragons?

Her answer, as I understood it, was twofold.

Firstly, that fantasy is still dismissed by the dominant business culture as "stories for children".

Secondly, however, that authors of science fiction and fantasy are increasingly being recognized by the mainstream of literature, that the genres are blurring.  (She mentioned a particular author who had won a particular mainstream award, but I don't remember the details.)

I should also mention that during the Q&A before the audience questions, there was also a lot of talk about finding truth through fiction, and about the dubious "facts" that capitalism and American businessmen prefer.

On the issue of blurring of genres, I can certainly comment on my amusement that mainstream lit and critics had to invent a "new genre" of speculative fiction, so that it could avoid calling literary giants like Margaret Atwood fantasy writers.  The only difference between fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction appears to be who writes it, not the actual content.

So I think in conclusion the answer to the question is: somewhat less than they used to be, but the dismissal of fantasy and fiction in general is still a very real aspect of our society.

I don't know how much of the festival will go online, but it's possible that
* audio of her talk may show up at http://oiwf.squarespace.com/listen/
* video clips may show up at http://oiwf.squarespace.com/festival-on-youtube/

Sidebar: I just remembered one discussion in the Q&A where things went a bit off track.  Sean Wilson asked her about hard science fiction versus soft science fiction.  The answer was that hard science fiction is about the hard sciences, physics, chemistry etc. which is not the usual definition of hard SF.  The difference as I have always understood it is about the nature of the imagined world.  In soft science fiction, you're allowed to bend the rules of what is currently known to be possible.  You might have time travel, or faster than light travel, or telepathy, or teleportation.  As they say, you can "play with the net down".  If you drop the net way down, you edge into fantasy, where the rules of the physical world may be dramatically different from what we currently know to be true.

Hard science fiction, on the other hand, is about obeying the rules of the physical world.  In the hardest of hard SF, you can't break any currently known scientific laws or go too far beyond current known technology limitations.  No faster than light, no teleportation, no super laser guns that fit in your pocket, etc.  But that's not to say hard SF can't be very character driven.  It often isn't, but something like Battlestar Galactica is actually quite hard SF - they do allow FTL for the purposes of moving the story along, but they fire bullets and missiles from their space ships, and they use nuclear weapons.  No ray guns.  They even try to do some reasonably realistic physics for the space fights.  All of that hard SF is however, only background detail, because BSG is actually all about the characters, not about the technology.

END SIDEBAR

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

Ottawa Writers Festival Spring 2009 - Science and Big Ideas

There are lots of authors coming to the Spring Writers Festival, I am just highlighting the science ones below.  You can see the full programme at

http://www.writersfestival.org/events.html

You have to pay, except some events are free for Carleton students.

Wednesday April 22, 2009 - 7 PM - Earth Day - New Science Series: Washing the Water

Alanna Mitchell discusses Seasick: The Hidden Ecological Crisis of the Global Ocean;

Wayne Grady discusses The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region

Thursday April 23, 2009 - 7 PM - The Big Idea: Carbon Shift

Join editor Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, and contributor William Marsden, author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) for a conversation on their new book Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future.

Sunday April 26, 2009 - 2 PM - New Science Series: How Mathematics Orders Our Lives - with Jason I. Brown, hosted by Stephen Brockwell

Thursday April 30, 2009 - noon - Masterclass Series: Why Poetry Antimatters - Metaphor, Entanglement and Particle Poetics

Join two stellar poets for a team Masterclass on poetry. Jeramy Dodds, recently shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, and Matthew Tierney, author of The Hayflick Unit and Full speed through the morning dark, for an exploration of the intersection of science and poetry.

Saturday May 2, 2009 - 4 PM - New Science Series - Cyburbia: Consciousness, Communication and Community in the Digital Age

The way we live has apparently been transformed by new ways of communicating. But where did these trends start? And if they can change our behaviour, can they also change the way we think? In Cyburbia James Harkin describes how the architecture of our digital lives was built over seventy years.

I have also added these events to LibraryThing, you can see them e.g. attached to the Saint Brigid's venue:

http://www.librarything.com/venue/40511

It was a bit of a pain transcribing all this stuff - organisations need to get smarter about providing information in machine-readable formats.  I can't think of an easier standard format than calendars.  Jon Udell is trying to address some of this with his community calendar project.

Galileo would have been a blogger

Observing with his 20-power telescope in late 1609 and early 1610, writing a letter about what he observed on 7 January 1610, and publishing in book form a first ever description of phenomena such as Jupiter's moons, just 9 weeks later.

Galileo continued his observations of the new planets [moons] as the printing progressed. His last observation is dated 2 March 1610.

On 13 March 1610 he sent an unbound copy to the Tuscan court, with a properly bound copy following on 19 March 1610. The book was Sidereus Nuncius, usually translated as Sidereal Messenger, although I prefer the more evocative Starry Messenger.

How's that for time between observations and publication.

The book is a short and clear read, full of excitement.
I was inspired to read it after hearing quotes from it in the amazing Tafelmusik Galileo Project.
It's a pleasure to be able to blog about it, almost 400 years later.

Accordingly, on the seventh day of January of the present year 1610, at the first hour of the night, when I inspected the celestial constellations through a spyglass, Jupiter presented himself. And since I had prepared for myself a superlative instrument, I saw (which earlier had not happened because of the weakness of the other instruments) that three little stars were positioned near him--small but yet very bright.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

science book audio from Ottawa International Writers Festival

Lots of great audio of authors talking about their books, including

• Gwynne Dyer talking about Climate Wars
• Leonard Susskind on Black Holes, October 24, 2008

Writers Festival New Science Series - October 2008

The Ottawa International Writers Festival has a jam-packed lineup, including a New Science Series.
As usual when these sort of things happen in Ottawa, I just discovered I will be away for all of it.

Friday October 24, 2008

6:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: Dan Falk on Understanding Time
Nature Network: Dan Falk

7:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: THE BLACK HOLE WAR:
      Leonard Susskind on Quantum Mechanics and Black Holes

Saturday October 25, 2008

NOON

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES:
      Stephen Pinker on Language as a Window into Human Nature

2:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: CLIMATE CHANGE
      With Jay Ingram and Andrew Weaver

Sunday October 26, 2008

NOON

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES:
      John W. Moffat on Reinventing Gravity

LibraryThing Local Ottawa + Writers Festival

All of a sudden a bunch of events have shown up in

http://www.librarything.com/local/place/Ottawa%2C+Ontario

mostly relating to the upcoming Ottawa International Writers Festival 2008.

You can also find the Writers Festival in Facebook.

Ronald Wright will be speaking at LAC this week, unfortunately between the website and the social sites, it's not clear whether it's on September 5 or 6.

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Trouble with Medical Journals?

Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.

30 minute Windows Media video

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv

Book info at

http://www.rsmpress.co.uk/bksmith.htm

Google Book Search API

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

                   

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

http://code.google.com/apis/books/

via LibraryThing blog - Google Books in LibraryThing - March 13, 2008

We need APIs everywhere for everything.

Chapters invites you to their content acquisition community

Chapters-Indigo is the major bookstore chain in Canada.  What do they provide for booklovers online?

Chapters Indigo Community, "Acceptable Use Policy"

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/Legal-Statement/legal-art.html

Emphasis mine.

The User acknowledges that any content, e-mails, postings, offers, software, videos, photos, text, graphics, music, sounds, questions, creative suggestions, messages, feedback, ideas, recipes, notes, drawings, articles, stories or other information, data, materials and opinions (including, without limitation any postings on community forums) ("Submissions") that he or she may provide, e-mail, post, upload or otherwise transmit to the Website shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Indigo, including all copyright, without reservation, and User waives in favour of Indigo any and all moral rights in such Submissions. Except as provided in the Privacy Policy, none of the Submissions shall be subject to any obligation of confidence on Indigo’s part, and We shall not be liable for any use or disclosure of any Submissions. Without limitation of the foregoing, the User acknowledges and agrees that all or any portion of the Submissions may be used, edited, reproduced, published, translated, sublicensed, copied and distributed and/or incorporated into other works in any form, media, or technology now known or hereafter developed for the full term of any copyright that may exist in such Submissions, without compensation of any kind to the User. When You post Submissions to the Website, You authorize and direct Indigo to make such copies thereof as We deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the Submissions on the Website. By posting Submissions to any part of the Website, You automatically grant, and You represent and warrant that You have the right to grant, to Indigo an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such Submissions for any purpose on or in connection with the Website or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Submissions, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold Indigo, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and each of their directors, officers, agents, contractors, partners and employees, harmless from and against any loss, liability, threatened or actual claim, demand, damages, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of or in connection with any of Your Submissions.

Err thanks, but my idea of community doesn't involve transferring my ideas to a private corporation for reproduction in formats yet to be invented, until the end of time.

Way to miss the point of social networking, Chapter-Sin-digo.

They say they have 80,000 members, I don't see how that is even possible, considering that even the older, well-established, and wildly popular LibraryThing only has 368,000 members.

audiobook DRM on the way out

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

...

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

New York Times - Publishers Phase Out [AntiCopying] - March 3, 2008

(The actual NYT headline "publishers phase out piracy protection", while alliterative, is stupid.  Copying is not piracy.)

I think it's a shame that more libraries didn't push back harder on publishers about DRM, but it appears that it is dying a well-deserved death anyway.

LibraryThing 1200

The 1200th book in my LibraryThing library is Brunelleschi's Dome.  It's quite interesting so far.

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

Rainbows End free online - Nippon 2007 Hugo science fiction nominee

There's a lot to like about Vernor Vinge's visionary novel Rainbows End.  I reviewed it in August of 2006 (I could have sworn it wasn't that long ago, time flies).

It's now available in its entirety, free online.

via Boing Boing

A nice year-end present.

As I mentioned in the title, it is a nominee for the Nippon 2007 Hugos.

If you get a taste of it and decide to buy it, here are my Amazon USA and Canada affiliate links:

   

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

tag cloud on book cover

I was kind of amused to notice this tag cloud on the cover of the Lonely Planet Lyon travel guide

I assume it's a pseudo-cloud, rather than being based on the actual book text, but it has all elements of a typical cloud: terms vary both in size and brightness.  It would be interesting to compare it with a real tag cloud for the book, but I'm the only one on LibraryThing with it (most people don't put travel guides in their LT, let alone travel guides en français).

27th Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair - Oct 27-28, 2007

They don't seem to have a website, but the Ottawa Congress Centre events site says

The Twenty Seventh Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair has become an exciting fall event for book lovers from across Canada. A display and sale, recognized as one of the finest book fairs in the country, features rare, unusual and collectible books. The fair will include over 40,000 items, dating from the 15th century to the present day, displayed by over 65 booksellers from across Canada.

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas

Google Earth Book Search Layer - geobooking is here

Google pushed out a new "Featured Content" layer today called "Google Book Search". This layer, when you turn it on, shows little book icon placemarks when you zoom into different places around the world. You don't have to enter a place into the search, just browse places and the placemarks will appear. These placemarks are results from search of places found mentioned in books indexed by Google's search engine. For famous places like "Rome", you will see a huge array of icons in a series of concentric circles. Each icons shows the results of that city mentioned in a particular book. There may be dozens of such references, but you you can click on a summary link that will take you straight to the book search results on a web page.

Google Earth Blog - New Google Earth Book Search Layer

This is very cool, but there are still loads of problems.
Click the book in the centre of the Ottawa ring

and you get The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, which is all very grand.  The hits are for Nepean, which is indeed an Ottawa suburb.  A suburb named for Sir Evan Nepean.  Unfortunately, Nelson is writing TO him, in his early days as Evan Nepean, Esq.  Nelson isn't writing about the town of Nepean at all.

Scanning the table of contents for the book points out another issue, which is that Google's digitisation is far from perfect, e.g. page xi where the left-hand side is cut off, losing about 10 characters.

Problems aside, it does turn up gems like Hudson's Bay: Or, Every-Day Life In the Wilds of North America by Robert Michael Ballantyne (1859)

On Sunday the 19th of October we commenced descending the magnificent river Ottawa, and began to feel that we were at last approaching the civilised nations of the earth.

Previously:
January 29, 2007  Google geobooking
January 12, 2006  libraries as warehouses of dead paper: set your books electronically free

Are Americans still Afraid of Dragons?

In 1973, the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference, which turned into an article "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" in PNLA Quarterly 38, Winter 1974 (unfortunately not online).  The essay is collected in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Since we're in Harry Potter season, it seems appropriate to revisit the topic.

As you may know, the topic of "witchcraft" seems to have a thread running in American society from the days of Salem, including the strange idea (perhaps unique to a particular strand of American religion?) that books like Harry Potter are a bad influence.  A thread strong enough for The Onion to satirise in the classic "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children", which had enough of an impact to merit an entry in Snopes Urban Legends.

I was interested to see if this had also been the case over 30 years ago, but actually Le Guin's essay turns out to be a scathing critique of general American cultural conservatism - no mention is made of religion whatsoever.  Well, she does connect to the Puritan work ethic, but not to the sort of fundamentalism behind some of the anti-Harry rhetoric in the US these days.

In wondering why Americans are afraid of dragons, I began to realize that a great many Americans are not only antifantasy, but altogether antifiction.  We tend, as a people, to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect, or as contemptible.

...

"Fairy stories are for kids.  I live in the real world."

Who speaks so?  ... It is, I fear, the man in the street--the hardworking, over-thirty American male--the men who run this country.

Such a rejection of the entire art of fiction is related to several American characteristics: our Puritanism, our work ethic, our profit-mindedness, and even our sexual mores.

To read War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings plainly is not "work"--you do it for pleasure.  And if it cannot be justified as "educational" or "self-improvement," then, in the Puritan value system, it can only be self-indulgence or escapism.  For pleasure is not a value, to the Puritan; on the contrary, it is a sin.

Equally, in the businessman's value system, if an act does not bring in an immediate, tangible profit, it has no justification at all.

Have these elements of American culture changed in the past thirty years?  Or is it that capitalism, which must bring endless growth and at least the appearance of novelty, must eventually expand to encompass everything, every subculture?  Or maybe it was Star Wars that gave it a push?  Pulling in millions of dollars for a space opera in 1977 certainly would have gotten the attention of even the dullest businessman.  But I think at most it became the case that it was more acceptable to use SF and fantasy to market to kids, not to adults.  When did the real adult crossover start?  When the Star Wars generation became adults?

It's clear that Harry Potter has been a major crossover success, to the point of having separate covers for adults.  And the Lord of the Rings movies brought some wonderfully executed adult fantasy to the screen.  Could the Lord of the Rings movies have had the same success in the 1970s?  I know there was a phase of popularity coming out of the "hippie" days - was it the hippies that turned us all on to fantasy?

Did the return of Star Trek with the Next Generation in 1987 bring a ubiquitous presence to television science fiction?  I know I can't switch a channel these days without coming across Trek or some other flavour of sci fi.  Was it a cultural shift or was it just Paramount finding it can make piles of money?

With shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, with complex plots aimed directly at adults, are we in a new era?  Or is it just that the market has fragmented into so many pieces that what would have been niche programming now has an acceptable fraction of the audience?

And has this acceptance of fantasy penetrated to the ruling class that Le Guin describes?  I don't have any impression that it has.

I think that a great many American men have been taught... to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.

Now I doubt that imagination can be suppressed.  ... If it is rejected and despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed.  At its best, it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming; at its worst, it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously.  ... Nowadays, with our secular Puritanism, the man who refuses to read novels because it's unmanly to do so, or because they aren't true, will most likely end up watching bloody detective thrillers on television, or reading hack westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography...  It is his starved imagination, craving nourishment, that forces him to do so.  But he can rationalize such entertainment by saying that it is realistic--after all, sex exists, and there are criminals...and also by saying that it is virile, by which he means that it doesn't interest most women.

Hmm, ego-centered wishful thinking taken seriously?  Does that sound like any of the country-runners these days?  CSI and porn seem to be going strong too.  Has the culture just grown to encompass more options?  Or is there a mainstream culture that is much more diverse, and a "serious old men" culture that is still clinging to a distaste for dragons?  When was the last time a politician said they were reading a science fiction or fantasy book?  But they have no problem saying they faithfully watch 24.

Have the geeks gone mainstream, or is the mainstream just so big and ill-defined now that everything is mainstream?

UPDATE 2007-07-16: I ran across this Washington Post article

Harry Potter and the Death of Reading

More than half the adults in [the United States] won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.

That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Has reading Harry simply become a typical American mega-event, where participation in to some extent semi-mystical, the idea being that somehow being associated with a big success may cause some of success to rub off on you?

Are we moving into a Long Tail world, or is Harry a tail-less dragon that's eaten up all the casual readers?

Do the library patron trends support the assertion of the decline in fiction reading?  (I work in a science library, so it's hard to know what the fiction trends are.)

UPDATE 2009-05-02  There's nothing like going right to the source: Ursula K. Le Guin tells me if Americans are Still Afraid of Dragons.

Casey Bisson on Scriblio and OpenLibrary

In the BIGWIG library social software showcase, Casey Bisson writes about his proposal to further enhance Scriblio.  Scriblio is a vision of a modern library web presence that is about finding books, not being a book inventory.

With its partners, the Internet Archive will build an open, structured website that includes tools to provide public and institutional access to library resources around the world. OpenLibrary.org will offer a system of integrated tools that can be used individually or together to meet a library or patron’s needs, that is free to the user and the library. The overall goal of the project is to shorten the distance between initial query and document.

Assault on Reason: a review

A disappointing book.  Starts out strongly with quite an erudite examination of American history, but then descends into a long, long list of factual yet useless critiques of the policies and actions of the 2000-2008 US federal executive branch, and concludes with a call for Internet Net Neutrality.

Network neutrality has many merits, but I don't think singlehandedly saving the United States of America from unreason is one of them.

I'm afraid I am quite the literalist.  I expect a book to be about the topic stated in its title.  For example, I expected Laura Penny's Your call is important to us : the truth about bullshit to be about businesses and the false language they use.  The phrase "to serve you better," for example, deserves an entire chapter, since it almost always translates into "we are inconveniencing you, our bothersome customers, in order to make more money for our shareholders".  But instead, Penny's book is a long, long rant about how the B-C administration sucks, and the American right sucks, and big corporations suck.  Which, as I've said, even when true, is not illuminating.  A much better book is Death Sentences, which actually is about the assault upon our capacity to reason with language that is "business speak".

I therefore expected Gore's book to be about the systematic undermining of reasoned thinking in the United States, and its deliberate replacement with appeals to emotion and faith.  Similar books in this genre are Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, Schneier's Beyond Fear, or Glassner's The Culture of Fear.

And indeed, Gore's first chapter, "The Politics of Fear," (available free online from ABC News) explores this terrain quite well.  But as he progresses through the next seven chapters, I'm afraid Mr. Gore's passions gradually over-ride his reasoned discourse, so that we go from the misuse of religion (and the current executive and his party), through the misuse of wealth (and the executive), to chapters that, well, are all anti-current-administration, all the time.

In Al Franken's book Lies and the lying liars who tell them, he had two chapters amusingly titled "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" and "You Know Who I Don't Like? Ann Coulter".  Gore's book has rather more reasonable-sounding chapters, but in the middle section, they could be fairly accurately retitled "Worst. President. Ever.", "You Know Who I Don't Like? President #43" and so on.

This is unfortunate for two reasons.  One is that this meaty diatribe in the midst of a book about reason is going to be the main section that many partisans seize upon.  The second, and more important, as I stated in my opening paragraph, is that it is factual yet irrelevant.  The entire section could have been replaced with a reference saying "See factually documented issues with current executive in (selected list of books, articles, and websites)" with Gore's formidable intellectual energies then going into analysis.

Because reason is not about listing facts, it is about analyzing them to come to useful conclusions.  Yes, all these things happened.  The war.  The Kyoto situation.  But WHY.  Why aren't the American people reacting?  Why aren't the American people informed?  Why do they fear the wrong things and draw the wrong conclusions?  Why are the people in power making certain choices?  Unless we can understand why people are doing things, we can't start to develop a strategy to address the situation.  This book needs to be less case for impeachment, more What's the Matter with Kansas? writ large.

And I find it odd that Gore does not take a global view.  This is a man who as I've said is very intelligent, with a particularly incisive understanding of how to separate local, regional, and international concerns (demonstrated by his environmental analyses in Earth in the Balance).  Yet not once does he step outside America to ask why, if other Western nations also have television and corporate power, two of the key threats to reasoned discourse he identifies, yet those other nations still have populations that participate in their political processes and that demonstrate a reasonable understanding of science and current affairs.

I'm also a concerned that, rather than being a reasoned argument starting with facts and using analysis to draw conclusions, Gore has decided on his conclusions in the same way that he accuses his opponents of doing, and then chosen his examples to support his conclusions.

Fundamentally, his conclusion is that active two-way Internet participation will re-invigorate American democracy.  I will have lots more to say about that, but to start with, in order to draw this conclusion, he then has to construct two eras: the print era, in which there was reasoned bidirectional discourse, and the radio/television era, in which there is not.  In the print era, he argues, barriers to entry were low, so that differing ideas could circulate and be debated.  I will state clearly I am no expert, but I don't believe such a golden era existed.  There was, to be sure, a time of vigorous pamphleteering, but surely never more than a tiny percentage of the population was ever involved in actually writing and circulating pamphlets.  Surely the more defining characteristic of that time period was that people who engaged in democratic discourse were often deeply educated (whether formally or self-taught) in the world's classics of literature and thought, and expected to engage in the Enlightenment ideal of active, informed debate.  They knew much, they were richly adept with the English language, and they both cared and acted.

Certainly it's true that television is a one-way visually-driven reactive medium, versus the imaginative, reflective medium of print.  But as I said above, since pretty much everyone in the  Western world has a television, there has to be more to the change in American discourse than just a change in communications technology.

What exactly, I can't say, since it's a topic that needs someone to study deeply and write a book about, a book that sadly this is not.

After his long listing of the current administration's sins, Gore devotes just a single chapter, chapter 9, to his proposed solutions.  Outrageously, he discounts somewhat the value of education in addressing the failures of reason

Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient.

Hmm.  If one may venture, as Ghandi Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, that "it would be a good idea", similarly perhaps before dismissing the possibilities of American education, it would be a good idea to, well, actually have some.  Some education that at least leaves students upon graduation clearly understanding how America's constitutional democracy works (which Gore demonstrates with various poll statistics that they currently don't) and also able to read and write well enough to understand the power and limitations of language and, as a bonus, maybe know some science and basic techniques of logical reasoning as well?

Alas, Gore's prescription for debate amongst an informed citizenry consists instead of:
- broadband Internet ideally able to stream television-quality video continuously
- advocacy web sites
- blogs
- wikis and particularly Wikipedia
- "Web 2.0 social networks"
- most important of all, Network Neutrality

Err, yeah, good luck with that.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Internet has a role to play in reasoned discourse.
A small role.  A useful tool for pointing attention to falsehoods and referencing inconvenient truths.
But electronic communications have a fatal allure of virtual action.

Concerned about the environment?
No need to go outside and walk in the woods,
or clean up a polluted lot in your neighbourhood,
or knock on your representative's door and explain the urgency of your position.

No, instead you can just fire off an email, write a blog posting, and then turn up the air conditioning and the lights and stretch out on the couch and read a good book.

You want to make things happen?

GO OUTSIDE, DO SOMETHING AND TALK TO PEOPLE IN PERSON

Amaznode related book visualization

Amaznode uses Flash and the Amazon API to extract and visualize related books for a search.

See e.g.

paris

and

gps

Note: it will continue pulling in results for a while (about a minute).

Via BlogSchmog.