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Twitter Links Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural…

January 29 2012, 4:05am | Comments

Twitter Links Worth a new Mass?

How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?

December 8 2011, 8:06am | Comments

Link Zombie Editions: An Archaeology of POD Areopagiticas

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…

October 16 2011, 9:06am | Comments

Link Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft:…

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron…

July 20 2011, 4:10am | Comments

Link How to survive the age of distraction

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…

June 25 2011, 5:21am | Comments

Link How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the…

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews,…

June 20 2011, 9:16am | Comments

Link Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.…

June 15 2011, 8:50am | Comments

Link Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for…

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…

June 6 2011, 1:36pm | Comments

Link Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why…

Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend…

June 2 2011, 1:19pm | Comments

Link Technology Of Writing

Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

May 11 2011, 11:03am | Comments

Link The Font of the Hand

JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De…

March 24 2011, 5:23pm | Comments

Link Prop Theory in a Nutshell

Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game –…

March 10 2011, 10:31am | Comments

Portfolio Errors in Things and “The Friendly Medium”

February 16 2011, 8:39am | Comments

Link B.S.Johnson - Albert Angelo

Albert Angelo is the second novel written by the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson (1933–1973). Published in 1964, the book achieved fame for having holes cut in several pages as…

February 16 2011, 7:59am | Comments

Link The lost art of editing

But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production…

February 15 2011, 4:32am | Comments

Link How the Internet Gets Inside Us

That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in…

February 10 2011, 5:18pm | Comments

Link Lev manovich: software culture. the common grammar of…

Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media”…

December 13 2010, 7:12pm | Comments

Portfolio On (Text and) Exaptation

December 6 2010, 2:41pm | Comments

Link Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting…

November 13 2010, 4:58pm | Comments

Link The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality…

by Niklas Luhmann The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by…

November 12 2010, 8:10am | Comments

Link In Praise of Copying: Get Your Free Copy

Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying,…

November 3 2010, 8:26am | Comments

Link Do writers need paper?

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the…

October 24 2010, 5:05pm | Comments

Link GLI.TC/H Program booklet « GlitchBlog

gli.tc/h art in Chicago

October 9 2010, 5:32am | Comments

Link What Are Books Good For?

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…

September 30 2010, 4:23pm | Comments

Link Will the Book Survive Generation Text?

Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get. Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp…

September 1 2010, 11:17am | Comments

Link Cover story

In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the…

September 1 2010, 11:16am | Comments

Portfolio Rancière’s Ignoramus

July 26 2010, 6:43am | Comments

Link The Web Means the End of Forgetting

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example…

July 25 2010, 7:15am | Comments

Link Art and Thingness, Part Two: Thingification

by Sven Lütticken In a text written in response to the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet avant-garde, Carl Einstein claimed that tradition “piles up in the…

July 19 2010, 8:08am | Comments

Link The Outskirts of Progress

Much of your life is now spent traveling along the American Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston. Like many who’ve plowed back and forth along this route, you’ve grown overly familiar…

July 17 2010, 12:37pm | Comments

Link Goodbye to the Graphosphere

For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and…

July 17 2010, 12:36pm | Comments

Miscellanous Projects first issue of rattle journal

July 8 2010, 8:55am | Comments

Link Losing our minds to the web

Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the…

July 1 2010, 6:50am | Comments

Link Why e-books will never replace real books

Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things. In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late…

June 29 2010, 8:21am | Comments

Link The Writer Who Couldn't Read

"In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided…

June 27 2010, 8:03am | Comments

Link "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" by Jacques Rancière

We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the…

June 23 2010, 9:48am | Comments

Link Everything you need to know about the internet

The internet: Everything you ever need to know In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown.…

June 21 2010, 3:38am | Comments

Link The Code is not the Text (unless it…

by John Cayley Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has…

June 21 2010, 3:33am | Comments

Link As technology advances, deep reading suffers

Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages,…

June 20 2010, 10:55am | Comments