http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2010/12/zombie-editions-archaeology-of-pod.html This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable scholarly print editions published by university presses, indistinguishable at first glance except for a few glaring markers. Like a mismatched cover image -- -- or excessively expressive titles: Closer examination reveals their undead status. In the case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica, the publisher is the aptly-named BiblioLife, a project of BiblioLabs, which designs software "to address the challenges of cost-effectively bringing old books back to life." (BiblioLabs takes… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:06:15 -0700 http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2010/12/zombie-editions-archaeology-of-pod.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author? Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 07:04:52 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom The Mechanic Muse: a brief history of reading devices from scroll to screen http://t.co/0bYUTKp4 #x #technology #reading #codex #search ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:45:32 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom The Mechanic Muse: a brief history of reading devices from scroll to screen http://t.co/0bYUTKp4 #x #technology #reading #codex #search ]]> Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:29:18 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom The Mechanic Muse: a brief history of reading devices from scroll to screen http://t.co/0bYUTKp4 #x #technology #reading #codex #search ]]> Fri, 16 Sep 2011 06:52:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?_r=3/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen-nytimescom http://t.co/e75AE1R/learnunlearnrelearn-the-internet-makes-it-hard-to-concentrate-good-distraction-sparks-innovation-amp-creativity-httptcoe75ae1r-x Learn/Unlearn/Relearn. The #internet makes it hard to concentrate. Good. #Distraction sparks innovation & creativity http://t.co/e75AE1R #x ]]> Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:03:29 -0700 http://t.co/e75AE1R/learnunlearnrelearn-the-internet-makes-it-hard-to-concentrate-good-distraction-sparks-innovation-amp-creativity-httptcoe75ae1r-x http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves. As a kid I borrowed books from libraries. When I was a student I often bought used books, some with other people’s annotations in pencil. These could be erased, but I occasionally settled for a book with the previous owner’s name and notes… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:09 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves.

As a kid I borrowed books from libraries. When I was a student I often bought used books, some with other people’s annotations in pencil. These could be erased, but I occasionally settled for a book with the previous owner’s… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:32:05 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus.
According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs "at no fixed place or time":
When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no… ]]> Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:15:14 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tournier.htm French writer, who gained fame at the age of forty-three with his first novel, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967, Friday; or, The Other Island), an ingenious reworking of the classic Robinson Crusoe theme. Michel Tournier's parodic and sometimes disturbing works can be read as comments upon the contemporary world, but are often based on old myths and stories.

Robinson was too exhausted to measure the full extent of his misfortune. "Since it isn't Más a Tierra" he reflected simply, "then it is the Island of Desolation," summing up his own situation with this impropmptu babtism.… ]]> Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:36:10 -0700 http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tournier.htm http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter… ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:21:36 -0700 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment -- machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions. That… ]]> Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:48:28 -0700 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3340 While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the technological, social, behavioural, and neuroscientific impacts that the Internet is having on the practice of reading. A particular focus is given to the reading behaviour of emerging university students, especially within Canada and the United States. A brief overview is provided of the recent transformation of academic libraries into providers of online digital text in addition to printed books and other materials, before looking at research on college students’… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:36:26 -0700 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3340 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://chronicle.com/article/Narcissus-Regards-a-Book/126060/ Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority of people who continue to read—read for one purpose and one purpose only. They read for pleasure. They read to be entertained. They read to be diverted, assuaged, comforted, and tickled. The evidence for this phenomenon is not far to seek. Check out the best-seller lists, even in the exalted New York Times. See what Oprah's reading. Glance at the Amazon top 100. Look around on the airplane. The common… ]]> Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:26:30 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Narcissus-Regards-a-Book/126060/ http://thenewinquiry.com/post/2583944966/open-books-the-e-reader-reads-you It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and reconfiguring serious study of the novel as a bloodless, quasi-objective matter of empirical data analysis. In this New Left Review essay, which touches on his idea of “distant reading” — the opposite of close reading, the careful scrutiny of particular works— Moretti declares, “We know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” If e-readers live up to their potential, he just may get his… ]]> Thu, 06 Jan 2011 21:17:54 -0700 http://thenewinquiry.com/post/2583944966/open-books-the-e-reader-reads-you http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/09/the-anthropology-of-hackers/63308/ A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But… ]]> Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:08:00 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/09/the-anthropology-of-hackers/63308/ http://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-Books-Good-For-/124563 I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:23:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-Books-Good-For-/124563 http://www.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else. ]]> Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:38:00 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=194 [in continuation/response to Rosa’s post responding to Kyle's post responding to Evan's post]

Inherent in glitch art is a denial for codification. Attempts to [con/de]fine this phenomenon, which by it’s very nature will always be in flux, can be easily dismissed as futile. At the same time glitch art is something specific: Bob Ross’ mountain ranges is not glitch art – Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries is. Points in Iman Moradi’s thesis were problematic, but it laid [contributed to] the foundation for a conversation which sought to get a handle on things – it was followed by further… ]]> Sat, 11 Sep 2010 05:29:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=194