Digital History Now
What happens when someone on the vast scape of the World Wide Web decides he disagrees with a work of digital history? Worse, the person angrily disagrees with the historians assumptions? And, worse yet, what if he understands HTML, server codes, or knows people who can help him break into a system? The danger is obvious. The longer the digital history resides on the World Wide Web, the more it becomes vulnerable to tampering.
Let’s assume that “where there’s a will there’s a way,” and that anyone who wants to crack open a digital history and alter its contents may do so. It’s inevitable someone will, if only for the hell of it. Corruption trips lightly, but its effects are profound.
Surprisingly, though, this is not an argument about security. Rather, this is an interrogation of Web 2.O.
Digital history, like any history — like the papers and collections of its authors– requires physical archiving. Put another way, what resides in the “cloud” needs also to reside on the ground. A bumper sticker: “Work globally; Secure locally.” (I’ll send that one to the TSA.) The meaning is really quite simple: if you take your work seriously, store it in a safe place, safer even than your mother’s apron. As secure as the cloud maybe, it’s really just a clump of electrons.
I’m searching for a phrase, something like, “there is power on locality.” Unfortunately, the phrase has a geeky ring, despite the fact that it’s spot on. The integrity of digital history, and thus anything of real value that appears on a computer screen, rests on the ability of its authors to back up their work… in its entirety.
Simply put, the beauty of digital history is that it resides in the cloud. Concretely, the virtue of digital history is accessibility. It’s there for users 24-7. But that same virtue is its vulnerability. The solution to the problem is simple. Copies. Copies must be retained by authoritative individuals — and, better yet, institutions — where they may be preserved should questions about text or research arise.
This has been a big dance around a little fire, but it reflects on my recent blog about the digital historian’s obligation to his readers. (“Some Implications of Writing digital History”) In that piece, I worried about altering my own work as additional information became available to me, and whether that might somehow undermine my readers’ confidence in my work. There is more of course, and here I’m thinking about the — for want of a better word — democratization of digital history; in other words, the ability of readers to contribute and comment on the work. That’s a virtue. But the distinction between the author’s production, and those who contribute and comment on the work must remain distinct, and that distinction must be obvious.
In the case of this brief essay about the virtues of local archiving, I take the obligation of the digital author to the digital reader one step up the ladder. Digital history represents as rich and important a development to historians as movable type. Those who work the medium understand that. Those who take up the medium as consumers and readers should as well.
Some Implications of Writing Digital History
Digital history remains more gimmick than game changer, at least for now. The potential? Ubiquity, reference, sourcing, notes, bibliography, hyper-links, imagery, mixed media. The question is less why digital history hasn’t had its thousand flowers bloom, and more when will the garden finally ripen? Historians may have to cross the abyss of collegiality to realize the power of pixels. That means farewell, for the solitary researcher. Historians will have to pack in additional complex (and tedious) skills onto their trade, or hire on with colleagues to “compile” future histories. Which is a real problem. Certainly, it’s no route to the PhD as we know it. Yet the raw energy of digital media may compel change, the transformation from words to pixels and bytes. Digital histories promise a revolution comparable to the advent of movable type. The analogy is between the World Wide Web and Gutenberg’s printing press.
Around 1992, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web energized and organized the atomized universe of the personal computer, much as Gutenberg’s movable type vitalized the written word into the portable book, only with this difference: the power and impact of the World Wide Web has been immediate; it has spread exponentially faster than the crude technology of the printing press, which traveled the slow horse-back route outward from town to hamlet, across an agrarian landscape. Already, within two brief decades, the World Wide Web has raveled itself into the most distant societies, even out to the edges of our Solar System and beyond. Witness Google Earth or NASA’s Mars Rovers.
Speculating about how this unprecedented new media will affect our future is something of a sport.
For me, and for my work on the History News Network (hnn.us/blogs/74.hml), digital history raises questions of responsibility. In a word, I am talking about “revision”: the opportunity to return to a text and revise it after the reader has read and made up his mind about the information.
There is the question, when will the digital history ever be finished? The answer is, never. Or at least not as long as the author and researcher is alive. And not even then, necessarily. Should this undermine the confidence the reader places in the author? Perhaps. On the other hand, if the author is sedulous in handling his material, then time and revision become assets unique to digital history.
Prosthetic visions
Working with MacSpeech has led me to a new appreciation for writing’s most mysterious feature: Voice.
Let me first take a step back. Throughout my practice as a writer, I have found myself learning in stages. Strunk and White, for instance. At first, after reading the book, I quit on adjectives. Cold turkey. I just dropped them. Now I know adjectives have their place, and perhaps that was E.B. White’s plan: to make the writer less casual with his craft. Sorry if I am stating the obvious. Another example of the stages through which writing has taken me is the attention to the rhythms and durations of sentences. The need for short sentences, for example. And long sentences.
MacSpeech has produced a similar experience. I’ve jumped a stage.
At times, I can actually see the page in my mind. Going from the spoken word, to the computer, I have a graphical image of what I am writing on (within?) my interior mental space.
On another note, a convention I see emerging from the computer is the use of shorter paragraphs, an almost journalistic touch aimed at keeping the attention of the reader. For certain, reading on a computer — as opposed to perhaps an e-book — is not always pleasant. The short paragraphs help the reader; my guess, is by way of creating an analogy between the written page and the pixilated page. That is, with short paragraphs you can see the piece from beginning to end, as you see the pages in a book. The paragraphing provides a sense of duration. They thus solve a problem for the reader: the short sentence conveys a signal: this piece will probably be relatively short. As well, mini-graphs convey to the reader that what follows is more informative than momentous. The short paragraphs signify to the reader that they are getting a capsule not a dissertation. So do short sentences.
And so do short blog entries.
Juggling Prosthetics
Three new prosthetics have found their way onto my computer. Not all at once, though. One of them, I have written about, the smartpen. Soon I will blog about the other, DEVONthink (which is endlessly in beta 2.0. Yikes!) New developments abroad in both. However, this column is about an item that’s been around for a while, but never worked for me, until now. MacSpeech. It’s been a revelation. MacSpeech is speech recognition software: you blab, it types. I’ve discovered that the program has enabled me to break the fourth wall, a symbolic space filmmakers refer to. The fourth wall separates the actor from the camera and the camera from the audience. It’s where the suspension of belief takes place. When an actor looks at the camera and directly addresses the audience, he is said to be breaking the fourth wall.
In my world, the fourth wall is a glaring white page. Perhaps not the best analogy, but one that works for me. As intellectual prosthetics go, MacSpeech has allowed me to break the fourth wall of composition. As a result, I write more easily, I am more prolific, and I make fewer mistakes.
The truly incredible thing for me in this experience is the accuracy and speed of MacSpeech. Just as important, is the ability the software gives me to separate myself from the tyranny of the keyboard. With MacSpeech I am able to pace around as I “write,” to speak out loud, as nearly perfect text appears on the screen.
I am struck by the realization that I am able to translate the words in my mind directly onto the page. One instant there is a thought, the next instant produces the thought on the page. With my cranky cognitive processor, my brain, there is usually many a slip twixt cup and lip or, in this case, between brain and keyboard.
I remember a time in middle school when I could not understand why it was that the words I had in my mind did not translate into the words I wrote. I would be thinking one thing and writing another. What was that?
It was an article of faith with me that there should be a direct connection between what I thought and what I penned. There was not. In fact there was many a slip. MacSpeech changes that.
MacSpeech makes thought — intellection — literal. Ideas, instantly evoked. Reflection equals composition. And by combining the varieties of prosthetics available when words atomize into pixels and bytes, I am able to think in new ways. It’s like getting a good massage. By combining different forms of outliners, alternate thought processors (DEVONthink, for instance), and collection tools like Evernote, I gain the freedom to think and compose simultaneously.
The Prosthetic Pen for Less
A surprise from Livescribe smartpen. Maybe more than one… The pen’s been selling at Target, a strange place for sophisticated tech tastes. The other surprise? Until now, smartpen has held its price point — $100/gig. But, yesterday, at Target I discovered at 20 percent price drop. The two-gig pen now sells for $160. While that’s good, I wonder what it means. For a long time, the pen’s price was inviolable. It cost the same at Amazon, Target, name-your-discounter. That gave me confidence in the company, because when a business maintains terms for all comers that signifies strength and stability. Considerable Apple. No one discounts their products. Interestingly, the price at the Livescribe store hasn’t budged. It’s holding at $100 per gig. While there are deals on pre-packs, they are the sort of deals you might see at Amazon, package deals: pen, notes pads, extra refills on sale for $225. Maybe Target realizes they are not the place for leading edge technical prosthetics and they’re clearing out inventory. eBay people might bite on that one.
What’s going on? This pen is hot and evolving. But the pace of innovation can be telling. Look at the growth of apps for the iPhone/iPod. With 25-thousand apps in January, Flurry says that the apps numbered 65-thousand in July. There’s a message in those numbers. Interest. Opportunity. Success! The public is on fire. Not at Livescribe. They need to get the developer community churning.
They could start with notepads. Humble but powerful. The standard notebook that comes with the pen is fine, but a variety of note taking notebooks would be … value added, a little spice in the process. I already break up the page in a modified Cornell Notes style, as I take notes with the smartpen. How about a notebook with no lines, but grids for notes, summaries and questions? The good news is that there’s already buzz among developers about moving to a new line of notepads… But is it real?
A small moleskin-style notebook would be great for the smartpen. A natural. The neat little notebooks on sale now are too thick and clunky for quick-draw writers and note takers.
On the other hand, the pen is not exactly fast on the draw, either. It’s big, which suggests a modified smartpen of the future. A whole new line. How about a smart pen with one flat side to keep it from rolling off the table? In classrooms, many desks are slanted for comfort. That can be dangerous for a delicate $200 writing device.
Or what about microphones. I did an interview the other day in a noisy restaurant. Ambient noise can be a problem for the pen. I got around the loud music and louder clientele by using the smartpen’s earphone/microphones like a lavaliere mic, planting them just next to my subject’s fork. It worked great. But why not a lavaliere mic for the smartpen? Add a little Bluetooth device to the pen and connect it through a Bluetooth mic… Farewell unsightly wires. Professionals like me would pay for add-ons that make work easier and more accurate. There are probably dozens of ways to modify existing pens to employ Bluetooth… But any kind of microphone that plugged into the pen would do.
Users like me want to see energy and stability from brilliant and innovative companies with products like the smartpen… And I’m watching for signs.
Prosthetic Pen?
So which statement is most accurate? A smartpen is an intellectual prosthetic. A smartpen is more flexible than a computer. A smartpen redefines non-linear organization. Roll the tape (and don’t forget to click the back button to read the rest of the blog!): The Livescribe paper-based computing platform
I just bought smartpen number two from livescribe for my son who begins high school in two weeks. Smartpen number one is mine. Bet on that. I use it for teaching and for interviewing.
Here’s the deal. Say you’re in a lecture, and you whip out your smartpen. Naturally, you begin taking notes. Your smartpen uses “special” paper (same price as “regular” paper), which allows the pen to simultaneously capture every word on the page as the pen’s microphone records every word in the lecture. Or, in my case, the interview. Back at your desk, you slip the pen into its “cradle,” and everything flows into a free software package. Now for the magic.
Every word in your funky handwritten notes is searchable! Pulse smartpen from Livescribe
And more, if you don’t understand those inky gobs others call your handwritten notes, there’s remedy. You simply touch the pen to the scrambled words and the pen replays the lecture/interview from the garbled blob of cursive in question. Word! Watch how University of Kansas professor, cool Mike Wesch and his class, use the pen: SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool
This is serious stuff with lots of opportunities for those in search of intellectual prosthetics, and we haven’t begun to address the opening questions raised by this blog. Not to mention one or two improvements and a problem-O…
To be continued…
Lost… Without a byte
Driving south on I-147 yesterday, it dawned on me that I could be headed north. Or should have been. After clicking cruise control, I had this inkling that I-147 south might not lead to I-40. And, yes, I had no GPS. I’d loaned it to my daughter. No iPhone, either. I did, however, have an iPod Touch, but roadside wifi isn’t even on the map. Which meant that I was lost, with no directional prosthetic. There was this stubborn overwhelming sense coursing through me that there had to be some digital solution at hand, a button somewhere in the Honda that would help me find my way home. The sensation was palpable and didn’t go away even when I stopped at a gas station for directions. Without sending a message by way of Western Union, something has happened, and there’s no going back: I’ve succomb to technology. Not good. Not bad. Just lost.
The Other Side of the Mirror — Setting Limits
Writing The Honey Trap: The True Story of Madame Elizabeth Brousse, A/K/A Cynthia has been an awakening, of sorts. Going digital seems to make all the difference in the world to the process of drafting, editing and publishing.
Until now, the idea behind this blog has been to examine the affect of software on the writing process. But now that I’m on the other side of the mirror, which is to say, writing code — in essence, turning the writing into software — I need to reflect on my original aims.
To be brief, coding interferes with writing. It’s just tedious. However, I’m convinced it improves the reading experience, which is crucial, perhaps the whole point. It occurs to me that The History News Network could present a problem (hnn.us/blogs/74.html) because their interface is so limited. It’s really not designed for “digital literary non-fiction.” Comparing The Honey Trap with, say, The Dolly Madison Digital Edition, from UVA can be disheartenting, although it may be missing the point.
Perhaps what I need to do is to set limits, to define what THT can actually achieve digitally.
Here’s one idea: To make the Honey Trap sufficiently interactive that other scholars can employ my links and resources to prove, disprove, augment or even transmute the story of OSS, the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Madame Brousse. Digitizing THT should provide historians with resources to advance the story, beyond what I am able to achieve.
Next up: How using software to produce digital copy changes the art/craft of writing.
Twice failed
Twice now, I’ve tried to coax facebook into working as a writing slate. Once, after two martinis, I pumped out an on-the-run review of a Jonathan Stratham chase-movie, “Transporter III.” I could hardly keep up. The facebook review process failed for a single simple reason: in order to follow a running review, the reader had to continuously update his/her page to see my status(es). Too much dedication from readers required, particularly from a social network site. But, nice try, nonetheless.
More recently, I tried to produce dialogue via facebook status lines, but failed because the continuity was lost, except on my own page (and who reads that?). There was a worse problem, though. One I can’t fix. My dialogue ran in reverse order. Egad. But, nice try, nonetheless.
I have two thoughts about my failures, maybe three. I can’t be the first person to have tried this. Second, it’s not yet possible to create live self-updating contiguous posts via social networks. Too bad. Any developers listening? This should be possible, a value-added feature. Mr. Zuckerman? There’s poetry to be done, songs to be written, short stories…
Second point (or is this the third?), the prosthetic element of Web 2.0 social software played no role in the “creative” process, no symbiosis, no synergy, no ghost in the machine, just chatter and clutter. In fact, the social network software got in the way. (I may try this with a Hash (#) Twitter, we’ll see. It could work.) Worse, no one gave a damn, but what else is new? No difference to me.
Time to make a statement:
Social networking should offer a new twist on publishing, something live and interactive and available to readers — if there are any (left) — to comment and possibly drive the story. See my post below on the Japanese women who write novels on their cell phones. What am I missing? What is social networking missing (a simple, intuitive way to reverse order status lines)? What have those Japanese thumbsters got that I ain’t got?
The Prosthetic Editor
My last blog entry literally ended on the word “editor.” I concluded that I just might need an actual human being with a red pencil to help me through my writing. But wait! How to reconcile intellectual prosthetics with professionals dragging red pencils? Well it’s not easy and, as it turns out, it’s not necessary. Not if you’re a Mac user. Which is the reason that I continue using MS Word on my Mac, instead of switching over to Google.docs. My Editor. On any given day, my editor could be Alex, Bruce, Kathy, Princess, Zorvox. Zorvox?
Who are these characters? They’re the synthesized voices of my Mac.
I’ve actually been using Princess for some time now, but I’ve just discovered Alex, a new voice that comes with Leopard. He’s really pretty good. Unlike other synthesizers, Alex will actually breathe as he reads, which is a nice touch. In some ways (read: my fragile ego), Alex is better than an editor, which is why I parted ways with my most recent red-pencil type. Synthetic Alex. He supplies the electronic prosthetic I most need as a writer.
I’ll be honest, I’ve got a processing defect in the CPU-between-my-ears. It means I not only don’t realize when I’m leaving out words, misspelling them or barfing-up sentences. It’s actually worse than that. I fail completely when it comes to proofing my own copy. I can’t see a word I write, or fail to write.
The difference is Alex. He’ll read everything I write just as I write it. He’s one cold dude. And more, when he speaks I listen. And when I listen, I hear the errors I fail to read.
Good-bye red pencils. Thank you, Alex, you intellectual prosthetic you. And did I mention Alex doesn’t charge for his services?
Small Change
The blog started out as a way to examine a book project — a biography I had been working on about an American woman who spied for the British during World War II — as writing developed though the use of intellectual prosthetics: software.
Then my publisher went belly up. http://tinyurl.com/rdg7k5
That was 18 months ago. Last summer, I got the idea of contacting Rick Shenkman http://home.sprynet.com/~rshenkman/ and asking him if the History News Network would be interested in turning the biography I had been writing into a "digital biography." Rick's quite a guy. He was enthusiastic, and I underestimated the challenge. The project turned into a portmanteau word — part slow plodding, and some occasional progress: plodgress.
Fortunately my friend, Jay Ballenger, was around to help me. He built the solution to the problem, a companion web page that links to HNN and functions like the back matter in a scholarly text, hosting the bibliography, the notes, etc. The page is still under construction, and I hope it will continue to be. In fact, one difference between a digital biography and a book is that while I intend to reach a conclusion, I don't foresee the project really ending. As I learned from my first book, the unfortunate business about traditional publication is that it's over when it's done. Not so on the WWW. There's always time and room for augmentation, elaboration, discovery. A digital (i.e., hyper-linked) writing project is open to others, to some degree. Comments are invited. The curious thing is that HNN project — THE HONEY TRAP: THE TRUE STORY OF MADAME ELIZABETH BROUSSE, A/K/A "CYNTHIA" (http://hnn.us/blogs/74.html) feels like the top tenth of the iceberg, whereas the page Jay helped me create –www.madamebrousse.com — feels like all that underwater mass lurking beneath the iceberg. (No, this is not an allusion to the Titanic, at least I hope it's not.)
Now comes the confession. For all the software I've thrown at this project, over many years, I still can't figure out the first 1,000 words. I simply don't know what the reader needs to know about Madame Brousse, and in what order. Where's the focus? Do I play for hype? Sex? Hell, the woman does a strip tease in the Vichy French embassy located twenty minutes from the White House while Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt are smoking in the Map Room trying to figure out whether to invade France's colonies in North Africa.
The one wise adjustment I've made is to limit the scope of the project. Instead of wringing out my character's entire life, I'm focusing on just one eventful period in her career as a spy, a perfect moment — consequential, little examined (how can that be?), revelatory (where are all the graduate students, they should be on this like white on rice), and a historical turning point.
But I'm stuck on the second sentence, which I write and rewrite and then start over again. And again. No, I'm not turning into Jack Torrance. Maybe I need a better intellectual prosthetic. Or an editor.
So I’m not alone…
http://gridskipper.com/343491/keeping-your-laptop-lewdness-safe-from-border-security
Judge Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court in Los Angeles threw out evidence that had been seized from a laptop on the grounds that our computers are inside our minds, man:
Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory, they are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.
Unsurprisingly, Judge Pregerson’s kooky mind-meld ruling is expected to be reversed on appeal.
For better or for worse?
Tap, Tap, Tap… Who’s there, the Raven or Marshall McLuhan?
An article in Sunday’s NY Times describes a Japanese tech phenomenon called “cellphone novels”: bodice-rippers (obi-rippers?) tapped out on thumb-pads. These packet-sized “books” have proved to be a huge success in Japan, eventually being reformatted into hardcover best-sellers resold through standard outlets. However, a crisis has arisen among authors, most of whom are young women who go by one name; the example used by the Times was a 21-year-old with the nomme de phone, Rin. What’s wrong with Rin? It seems that cellphone authors are up-in-thumbs about the gestalt of cellphoning. They worry that some typers may be tapping their tales on a computer instead of their iPhones, which not only violates the rules of the game but the essence of the “genre.” In other words, the medium is the text message. Quoth the Times: “When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone. Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.” Oh-hiyo gozi-emashta! Welcome to BentWrite. How does the writing tool affect the act/art of writing? Good question. Can a cellphone be an intellectual prosthetic? Indeed it can. One writes by any means necessary, although there may be a ghost in the machine: the medium certainly involves the message. A young cellphone author who was forced to switch to a computer because of ingrown thumbnails — too much tapping — has evolved beyond the emoticons of cellphone novels composed of pin-prick sentences, and bonsai paragraphs, according to her publisher. Says the New York Times: “Since she’s switched to a computer her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.” Surely the end is near.
The plan
The latest chapter of my biography began with a flash of insight, not software. Over the weekend, as I edited one chapter, I was searching for a theme for my next. I knew that I needed to make a narrative leap, which would entail a hard cut back into the day-to-day life of my character. However, there were lots of mechanical details that got in the way of the seemingly simple business of moving the story forward. The problem was finding the right place to return to the action, a place that would grab the reader’s attention. My final decision, I knew, had to be driven by timing, pacing and development. I expected software to be usefel, because I assumed that logic would lead the way, but I surprised myself. Somehow I got my mojo working. There, in a flash, was the solution. Inspiration (not the software by the same name) beats thinking any day. There’s something special about magic. It validates the creative process. What happened was simple. I suddenly realized that I could leap over all the mechanical details and drop my character into an arresting environment: Territet Switzerland, near Montreux on the coast of Lake Geneva. This is where my young spy attended finishing school at age 13, and every good spy needs to know their way around Switzerland, right?
The work plan for the day required browsing and reading through my subject’s diary entries, which I had digitally photographed at the Churchill College Archive Center in Cambridge England. I used iPhoto to view the images and WORD to make notes. Eventually, I will use Inspiration (the software) to structure the chapter, creating lists and hierarchies as tools to find story turns. For me, this very mechanical process is the equivalent of ”finger exercises” on a piano. Down the road, I can juxtapose my subject’s diary entries against letters written by her father during this same period. That material was collected for me by a researcher, Jason Eckert at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Thanks, Jason. To add breadth and perspective to the chapter, I picked up some useful artifacts on the Internet: a postcard of the drawing room (circa 1920) where my character studied in Switzerland, which I found on eBay. Sometimes researching is not different from visiting the flea-market. In addition, I used views from Google Earth to establish my character’s phyisical world — Monteux, Territet, Lake Geneva. I also found floor plans for the Institution des Essarts, where she lived.
Today’s tools were iPhoto, WORD, Google Earth, a digital camera and eBay.
Pass it on…
Here’s a double recommendation for the New Year. First, the BBC’s writing site, and then an interview on the BBC’s writing site with Neil Cross, author of Mr. In-between. Cross turns out to be a fan of Scrivener, and discusses how the program was developed, why it works for him, and how he uses it. This recommendation will be a twofer, containing both the site and the interview together. Good reading. Love the Beeb!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/insight/neil_cross.shtml
An idea is a nest, is a nest, is a nest… a nest
Can you mingle?
If I were an outliner-vendor-guy, I’d worry about Voodoopad (VDP). What VDP does is Biblical; it breathes life into words. Having said that, Voodoopad’s magic has been around for years. It works off hyperlinks.* (Here, wiki, wiki….) This is what Flying Meat, the company that created VDP, says: “Within …VoodooPad … there is no “natural” sequence of pages. Like the web, any VoodooPad page is a click away on an appropriate hyperlink. And, of course, this is a natural way to organize ideas… This is what helps VoodooPad organize our minds.”
The reason VDP poses a threat to outliners is because it hyperlinks wordsand phrases. With VDP, you don’t need to list notes in any special order, you just hyperlink them by highlight and tapping your mouse. Which is a mixed blessing. On the Hallelujah side, if you hyperlink multiple pages and documents into your notes you crash the static barrier of outliners. And the Dark Side? In the process you sacrifice the hierarchies that are the very reason for outlining and outliners. “Inspiration,” by the way, does it all, and easily: outlining, snapping into visual maps, hyperlinks; but it’s just so, so… cute.
Lots of software programs hyperlink, some better than other. Tinderbox is the king, (assuming I ever come to terms with its weird interface). By contrast, VDP insists on hyperlinking. Best of all, VDP makes hyperlinking easy. The hyperlinks allow you to surf your own thoughts, which is not the same thing as “organizing your thoughts,” as Flying Meat claims. Hyperlinks chiefly offer control in one direction: going forward. That is, creating hyperlinks after the data has grown into dozens of pages and thousands of words is no fun. At least it wasn’t the last time I checked. That means using VDP to its full potential requires planning. Outliner, anyone?
*(A hyperlink is a connection among two or more points, allowing information to be cross-referenced/interconnected: linked.)
Mind Maps
My “mind mapping” experiences have been confined to paper and pencil, and maybe that’s all a writer needs. But a website called “Newsmap” piqued my interest. (http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/). Strictly speaking, this isn’t “mind mapping.” Far from it. This is more “wisdom of the crowd” stuff. The creator of “Newsmap,” Marcos Weskamp, describes his creation as “A Treemap visualization algorithm.” It constantly updates Google News. He believes it accentuates news bias, which was my first reaction, but that may depend on his algorithm. Or Google’s. Or how you look at “Newsmap.” Click on “select all countries,” and while there’s a fight for computer real estate (big headlines get scrunched down to 8 pt. type), a close look demonstrates a variety of editorial viewpoints. Farewell bias; welcome comparative headlining. May I have a larger screen, please?
For writers, visualizing information could, for instance, extend the power of outliners. Programs like Inspiration (Inspiration Software, Inc.) take a baby-step in that direction, instantly alternating between outlines, trees, split-trees, mind-maps… Tinderbox should be the contender, but ugh; writers don’t have the time to become software masters. There are just too many adjustments and fine tunings in Tinderbox to mine its powers. (Still, I haven’t given up; inch by inch…)
In reality, writers need to be able to import (dump!) information into their software or, alternatively, to accrete information as they do with a good database or spreadsheet. Then they can let the software do the heavy lifting: revealing unexpected relationships, discovering new contexts, sussing out hidden associations. Yes, I realize Microsoft Excel has a sharp learning curve, but too many complex programs can send a writer around the bend. The hope would be for programs to evolve new capabilities. DEVONthink is a candidate. Use it, learn it, make it grow new capabilities. Users have been goading the DT people to add visualization to their product. But so far, DT has not been encouraging. Still, the ability of DT to collect information, count words, and produce concordances may be a step in the right direction. The information is already there, now make the software capable of picturing it. Visualization could be a breath away. Or not.
Then, there’s “Many Eyes.” (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home) It’s a creature of IBM that’s at the root of “Newsmap.” It’s worth the time to study and possibly another blog. There’s always data to be crunched, and a better way to crunch it. I think there’s a bumper sticker here for writers who are heavy software users: Crunch Before Writing. My thanks to my friend Adam Blumenthal for making me aware of “Newsmap” and for introducing me to Christopher Perrien, who led me to “Many Eyes.” Here’s looking at you, guys.
Some quick housekeeping:
Item 1. Great article accidentally written about writing in yesterday’s NY Times Book Review, by P.J. O’Rourke (16 December 2007), reviewing Starbucked, by Taylor Clark. In sum, O’Rourke hated the book, loved the writer and turned out to be a generous reader. What interested this writer was O’Rourke’s explanation about how he approaches book reviews: collecting items and notes into a general folder, then working those bits into his actual notations on the book, which produces his writing outline. By the way, he did not say he used a “software outliner” in his review. No computer talk. I suppose that a writer with his chops doesn’t need software. Not only does he have perfect diction (as musicians have perfect pitch), he can afford to hire slaves if he wants to. Here’s the URL to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/O-Rourke-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref. Or try searching the review under “books” on the New York Times web page.
Item 2. A question I would pose to those who comment on the blog: When using a particularly valuable piece of software to study and organize information, have you ever recognized the software designer’s algorithms or heuristics (ouch, big word) influencing your approach to own your material? If so, what are you thoughts about those influences? Have you seen research on the subject? Who else has been thinking about this idea?
Kitchen or tool shed?
Discussing the “mental kitchen,” the December 2007 issue of Harper’s quotes poet W.H. Auden: “…few labor saving devices have been introduced into the [writer's] mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc., — but these mechanisms are very crude… Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything is done by hand.” Too bad Auden died before discovering marijuana or modern software. Not that I know anything about marijuana; I’ll leave that to wiser men like Bill Maher. However, I do know a little bit about the “mental kitchen,” the “cyber tool shed” where I work. So I’m going to take a few blogs to go over the software you might find there.
DEVONthink is the Big Foot on my desktop. It’s my goto program apart from WORD. I use it to hold all my research, and there’s the rub. It’s grown too big and slow. So while its virtue lies in its capacity, so do its problems. It’s like the story of the omnipotent man who built a house too large to live in. Here’s what’s going on. DEVONthink (DT) is a database, but not any database. It’s a place to store and clip your work, anything on the computer, even Quicktime (I think). What makes DT unique is that it can function as a brainstorming assistant. The people who developed the software for DT like to say that it offers artificial intelligence, which it does depending on your definition of A.I. Having said that, no other database I know does what DT does. For instance, it’s canny. It has the ability to make connections. It can suggest a hierarchy of files where newly imported information might be filed. It can also connect highlighted paragraphs (in the database) to related information stored elsewhere its file system. That’s a leap. That makes it more than a memory aide or sophisticated filing system. The program will make associations that might not otherwise be apparent to the writer. It has the potential for dialogue, at least among its stored parts. Unfortunately, it needs a computer with more than 3 gigs of RAM to make it live up to its potential.
The Intellectual Prosthetic and Billboard
Let's try this notion a slightly different way — the "Intellectual Prosthetic" as a connection machine, a billboard, and advertisement for myself, the new era of publication, from words to pixels and bytes. Thus, the intellectual prosthetic morphs the word and the language. Exploring we go!
May 16, 2009 Posted by BentWrite | Commentary | | No Comments Yet