Tags: lost, borges, narrative, starwars, storytelling

Posted at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 20, 2007

“Gone out of experience”

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on an Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã.

What makes this tribe special is that their language defies a major linguistic theory, championed by Noam Chomsky, that posits a “universal grammar” embedded in the human brain that explains the structural similarity between every language on Earth. In a nutshell, this theory claims that all languages are shaped by a unique biologically-based human ability to create recursive thought structures. What's that? Well, basically, it is inserting one thought into another. Such as the combination of “A dog is barking” and “The dog has fleas” into “The dog which has fleas is barking.”

The Pirahã don't do this. Indeed, it appears that they can't. They simply do not think this way because, in essence, recursion is based on abstraction and the Pirahã do not deal with abstraction.

... the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience -- which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío -- 'gone out of experience,'” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light 'goes in and out of experience.'”

This has set the linguistic world, much of which subscribes to the Chomskyan belief in an innate, biological basis for the structure of language, on its ear.

I've had a passing interest in linguistics since grad school and I bounce around the periphery of ongoing debate, but what really interested me about this piece is how much it reminded me of a comment my son made last year, which I wrote about:

Recently as we passed some strangers on the street he asked “What happens to people when you don't see them anymore?” He was hovering around asking whether they ceased to exist, though he never actually said so. We explained that they kept on living their own lives and that we'd probably never see them again. This saddened him a bit, though only slightly less that it puzzled him. I think he's only just realizing that the sum of human experience is a superset of his own.

That got me thinking about the “universal grammar” concept. Maybe abstraction is not biologically-based but learned. But it went further:

... he's even more obsessed with names. He simply cannot understand how there can be things that do not have names. He constantly asks about how something can exist if it doesn't have a name. I explain that there are thousands (millions?) of species of animals, mostly small critters, that we suspect exist but have not been discovered and so have not named. Not to mention undiscovered stars, comets, planets and new concepts, future fashion trends, and dance moves.... Like Adam naming stuff in Eden, the power to name is the power to make real for my boy.

So, there it is. One researcher in the Amazon jungle and one little boy in Chicago, both defying the reigning theory on the origin of language. Perhaps my son has Pirahã blood in his veins (though his genography says no).

Tags: experience, language, linguistics, amazon

Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 11, 2007

Eco-friendly, grammatically-moronic

See also: In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts on punctuation in the 21st century

Tags: grammar, advertising

Posted at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 7, 2007

Gathering in the town square

The MIT Technology Review has a short article on one of my main projects, called Meadan, which I've not discussed at all on this blog. Mostly this is because we're still in development, but recently we embarked on a closed alpha test phase so this seems like as good a time as any.

From the article:

The basic idea is simple: it's a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue.

What's really interesting about Meadan -- apart from its small part in removing barriers to rationale discourse between the West and the Muslim world -- is how it uses social networking technologies both to create communities (the “traditional” use of social networking) but also to enlist users to rate, edit, and correct the English-Arabic machine translation. Social networking as language feedback loop. What's missing from so much machine translation is a sizable corpus of informal conversation (not bizspeak or medical parlance, for instance). This is what helps MT learn grammatical and dialectical nuance and this is precisely the kind of conversation we envision on the Meadan site.

Much more on this in the coming months, of course.

Tags: arabic, english, machinetranslation, socialnetworking

Posted at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 18, 2007

Thamus (partially) vindicated

If you read yesterday's post early in the day you may have missed that Richard Powers responded to it. I'm grateful for his very thoughtful reply. But what everyone wants to know is: how did he find the post? You mean, Richard Powers -- MacArthur Genius, National Book Award Winner -- reads John Tolva's blog?

In a word, no. I e-mailed him and alerted him to the post. No buzz, no meme, no trackbacks, or digg swarms came to the attention of Mr. Powers. Just an old-fashioned note in his inbox that he graciously acted on.

Actually the story behind the reply is somewhat amusing. Powers initially commented but nothing showed up on the site. Usually that happens when the anti-spam script kicks in. But why would it block a regular comment? I was stymied and more than a little irked that this author had taken the time to respond and my site had black-holed his effort. And then it occurred to me that Powers was likely composing (or speaking) his response into an external application and then pasting it in-bulk into the blog comment form. This is a red flag for the spam script, since that's exactly how bots dump garbage into blog posts, as a single pre-written chunk. I asked him to paste it in and then type a little at the end. You know, act like an old-fashioned human writer. Type a little. It worked. Congratulations, Mr. Powers. You appear to be human. Your comment shall be accepted. Turing test passed. (If you recall my in-person encounter with Powers you will find this as ironic as I do.)

Truth is, I'm more in awe of Powers' talent than ever now that he's erased any doubts I had about his composition-by-dictation (on a keyboardless machine -- sheesh). I think my incredulity stems from the way I consider words spatially: objects on a page to be moved, sequenced, and arranged into thought. Almost like the visual arts. That's a pretty narrow way to think about language, of course, but it has taken this little episode for me to realize just how much the tools of word manipulation I use form what I write. Perhaps even constrain what I write. I guess I need to fire up the speech reco on this MacBook and find out.

Speaking of, so to speak, it might be interesting to listen to The Echo Maker as an audiobook, if it exists. (Yikes, $120. What the hell?) Does it read out loud better because it was composed out loud?

If you are interested, here's the tablet that Powers references in his reply. Litgeek!

One wonders what jacket-blurber and long-time Powers fan Sven Birkerts (of neo-Luddite Gutenberg Elegies fame) thinks of all this. The fate of writing in the electronic age!

By the way, if you liked The Echo Maker's exploration of memory (and stories that begin with a mystery-shrouded car crash) you must read Michael Joyce's seminal hypertext fiction afternoon, a story. A comparison of these two works would be interesting indeed.

Oh, and Prof. Turnbull you should engage Prof. Powers. If anyone can squeeze a publication from this, it's you. :-)

Thanks again, Richard!

Tags: composition, richardpowers, speechreco, turingtest

Posted at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 16, 2007

Echoes and real voices

I recently finished the latest novel from Richard Powers called The Echo Maker. It was one of the finest books I've read in years. Powers is by leaps my favorite writer. His books are poems trapped in the novel form. The craft with words every bit as compelling as the stories they tell. I'm a big fan.

But there's something different about this novel. It is still superbly crafted for sure, but the narrative engine revs louder. There was something about it. Something I couldn't quite identify. As I was reading the book a fellow Powers fan friend of mine alerted me to an article in the NYT (login required), written by Powers, about how he composed the novel using only speech recognition software on a tablet computer. That was it, I thought. This must be the stylistic difference. A novel voice-crafted versus hand-crafted.

Except. The more I think about it, the more I can't believe it. I work for IBM, a company deeply committed to speech recognition, text-to-speech, and machine translation. It is hairy, complex computing -- bordering on AI. Personally I've been working in Arabic-English translation since 2000 and I know just how thorny the problems are in getting good recognition. I simply can't believe an author as talented as Powers could create a book as linguistically complex as The Echo Maker using speech reco alone.

I'm not saying he's lying. I've had some interaction with Powers, all positive. He kindly responds to e-mail, for one. And yet, there's precedent for this tale of novel-by-dictation being fiction too. In 2002 at the Chicago Humanities Festival Powers delivered a talk called “Literary Devices” about an ELIZA-like machine that sucked him into an e-mail conversation that was as real as any human author's output. I bought it. Most bought it. We bought wrong. The story itself was fiction -- which only made it better. Humans falling for a story about a machine that tells stories indistinguishable from human stories. Amazing.

So, I guess I'm asking this. Mr. Powers, did you really dictate this whole novel? Or should we nestle comfortably in what is admittedly a damn good story even if you didn't? All half-dozen readers of this blog are dying to know. And if we can't tell your response from a computer impersonator we'll obviously consider the dialogue valid. Do tell!

UPDATE: Powers replies. Wow. More on this in a bit ...

See also the follow-up post Thamus (partially) vindicated.

Tags: fiction, speechreco, richardpowers

Posted at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

October 1, 2006

TiVo the Tutor

My oldest son has taught himself to read. He takes every opportunity he can to sound out letters into words. Identifying road signs is a favorite pastime, though not without its hazards. Like yesterday when he sounded out the words "Road Closed" and let rip a bloodcurdling "No!" from his car seat that almost caused me to wreck.

But the best exercise he's created for himself by far is to search for his favorite TV shows by spelling out their names in TiVo's "Search by Title" feature. No one showed him how to do this; my wife and I rarely use Search by Title. TiVo is a perfect tutor, actually. He thinks of a show he likes -- Hip Hop Harry, for example -- then starts typing the letters he thinks make up the title. TiVo of course starts displaying what it thinks are matches which my son visually identifies. If he really screws up the spelling TiVo won't show any matches and he'll have to back up. And the reward for a correct spelling is that he gets to record his show. Positive reinforcement!

Gotta figure out how to get the microwave to teach him mathematics and we'll be all set.

Posted at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 20, 2006

Inspiration

The Romantic concept of the poet inpsired from seclusion and singular inspiration seems to be alive and well, though once removed. My post on the isolation tank seems to have been the muse for a poem. Here's an excerpt.

groupmind human searing feedback feedback human searing in human and groupmind and groupmind and and in to groupmind in feedback feedback and and

The weird thing (among many) is that it looks copy-and-pasted, but it isn't. It's non-random.

Here's the full post/poem.

Update: some interesting stats from Chris.

504 is the dominant number in the sequence. If the (perhaps deliberately) malformed "groupmindand," "nd" and "earing" were normalized then "prayer," "and," "feedback," "groupmind," "human," in," and "to" would all appear 504 times. 504 is also the HTTP status code for "Gateway Time-out."

Just gets weirder, eh?

Posted at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 24, 2006

Story witch doctor

Recently I've been working with a really smart researcher in computational linguistics and, as is happening with increasing frequency with my colleagues, he happened upon my blog. The Icelandic connection with my last name (Tolva = "number witch doctor" = computer) was particularly interesting to him. He writes:

You're right about the aversion to foreign words in Icelandic. I observed that there. The Icelandic "tala" for "number" appears to be related to the words "tal" in Danish and "Zahl" in German for "number". "Tala" may also be related to "tell" and "tale" in English, because these English words go back to an Indoeuropean word "del" that means "count" or "recount". There seems to be a semantic etymological connection between telling (a story) and counting. German "zählen" means "count", and "erzählen" means "tell". Danish "tælle" is "count", and "tale" is "speak". In English we can "recount" a story or give an "account" of some event(s). Maybe the semantic connection is that as you're telling a story, you're counting off the events?

So not only is my surname the made-up word for computer, but it has etymological connections to storytelling. Computers and narrative. Counting and recounting. It's all so clear to me now. I suppose I am doing what I was destined to do.

(Of course, I'm not Icelandic at all.)

Posted at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 13, 2006

Misanthropomorphism

The elevators in our building have a curious recorded floor announcement. The female voice has an unplaceable accent: nasal, snooty-almost-schoolmarmish, vaguely Canadian. Probably the result of a focus group on pleasing intonation gone wrong.

I rode the elevator down today with a construction worker. We didn't speak. As we emerged from the car I heard him mutter to himself "damn foreign elevators." And he clomped off.

I'm really not sure he was kidding.

Posted at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 6, 2006

In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts on punctuation in the 21st century

Just finished a delightful little book on punctuation. No, really I did. The central theme of the book -- hey, you should care about punctuation because, if you don't, what you mean to say can run off the rails -- is made through a variety of humorous reflections on individual punctuation marks. (The author, Lynne Truss, would have a real problem with my use of the dashes above, for instance. And probably my love affair with the parenthesis for that matter.)

The final chapter deals with the effects of computer-mediated communication and the Internet on punctuation usage. As you'd guess, she's not impressed.

Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes.

Clearly the emoticon is less like punctuation and more a crude surrogate for emotive language. But I think there is one aspect of computer-based writing that does deserve consideration as a new kind of punctuation: the hyperlink. By those who love the link it is usually treated as a technical feature or a design aspect. To those decrying the end of the book (and thus the end of critical thinking and thus the end of civilization) it is seen as a roadblock to sustained argument and reason. But people get too hung up on the fact that the link leads somewhere. In fact, the hyperlink really does act like punctuation, regardless of where the link takes you.

Consider how many links you encounter in prose that you do not click. Hundreds if not thousands daily. Clearly they change the structure of the sentence, whether you click on them or not. So what is the effect, from a punctuation perspective, of the unclicked link? Well, it isn't a pause or a full stop so that means it isn't like a comma, semi-colon, or period. (Stay with me people, this is interesting.) Assuming it is visually different from normal text, the unclicked link is more akin to a colon whose job it is to introduce some thought clearly related to what precedes it. Truss describes it so:

... [the colon] rather theatrically annoucnes what is to come. Like a well-trained magician's assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

The link is a multi-dimensional colon. Oh, it announces what's to come alright, but what's to come doesn't exist on the same plane as what you were just reading.

The link also performs a role similar to parentheses, brackets, em-dashes, and even quotation marks. The unclicked link, in short, suggests structured meaning in prose without actually conveying an idea the way words do -- which of course is exactly what punctuation does. You might say, well the link is just a fancy kind of footnote. But that too focuses too much on the function of the footnote after you've followed it where it leads and not on how it operates semantically in the context of the sentence. The footnote superscript is punctuative (whoa, Googlewhack candidate alert) in that it says "hey, this is important enough to require commentary." Even if you don't travel down the page or to the endnotes this extra bit of meaning has been conveyed by the superscript. Same with the link. It is a call-out, evidence however slight that there's elaboration, example, or extra material nearby.

In his book Interface Culture, Steven Johnson noted the unique use of links by the now-defunct Suck site. I'd argue that the best linking on the web today has mostly caught up with the style pioneered by Suck.

The rest of the Web saw hypertext as an electrified table of contents, or a supply of steroid-addled footnotes. The Sucksters saw it as a way of phrasing a thought. They stitched links into the fabric of their sentence, like an adjective vamping up a noun, or a parenthetical clause that conveys a sense of unease with the main premise of the sentence. They didn't bother with the usual conventions of "further reading"; they weren't linking to the interactive discussions among their readers; and they certainly weren't building hypertext "environments". ... Instead, they used links like modifiers, like punctuation - something hardwired into the sentence itself.

What it comes down to is only this: I am getting to the point where I don't trust online writing that does not contain links. Just like you're wary of the grocer who sells "apple's" or the the writer whose sentences run on for miles without a period, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with writing that's link-free. I may never click the links I encounter, but their presence indicates a structuring of thought that subtly affects how I approach what I am reading. Just like punctuation.

Posted at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 4, 2006

Vanity googling

One of my resolutions in January was to find my roommate from study abroad in Rome in 1993. I listed his name hoping that it'd get indexed and that at some time in the future he'd Google himself and find that I was looking for him. This is exactly what happened. Some people feel self-conscious about Googling themselves, which is crazy. It is the one sure bet you can make: people will Google their own names (and download naughty things, I suppose). This behavior is so natural that if you have your name on a page with another's name you can be fairly certain the other will see it at some point in the future. Sort of like posting a note for a person to find out in the wilderness. But found it will be, eventually.

Can you tell what photos of a fan-powered Santa, a stumped computer-user, a truckload of anchovies, and middle-aged Swedes dancing the night away have in common?

They are all returned as image results when Googling my last name. Now, I've known for a while that my last name is Icelandic for 'computer,' but a majority of the images are of construction equipment or bizarre machinery. The Santa hoverpack? No idea.

Think of it as visual tagging or reverse-steganography. Instead of embedding a secret word in images, you deduce the word from the images themselves. What would be great is a Google image upload feature (akin to typing a keyword) that matched submissions against the database and provided you with shared keyword terms.

Flickr has a tag game sorta like this.

Posted at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

January 3, 2006

Engineer

Got a Christmas card from some colleagues in Egypt on my return to the office today. It was addressed to Eng. John Tolva. Eng. for Engineer, an honorific I've never seen in the West but which is always given in Egypt to (I think) graduates of science-related or engineering-related programs. I like this. It seems more logical to award prefixes based on the type of degree than the level attained, doesn't it? Imagine a world where everyone was addressed by the job or role they performed.

"Bricklayer Jones, so nice to see you today!"

"You as well, Seamstress Diaz! Say, here comes Ambulance Chaser Franklin."

There's a certain LEGOland quality to the division of labor and labelling, but I think I could like it.

Posted at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 13, 2005

To create an aquifer

My father wants to add a word to the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, I love my parents very much so I mean no disrespect when I say that language is not their strong suit. They've been making up words for as long as I've known them -- but they don't know they are making up words. For example, my mom calls me an "aggravant" which is like an irritant who aggravates. Great word, but not in the dictionary of course.

Only recently has my dad gotten the bee in his bonnet to actually get one of his neologisms into the OED. Poor guy. He doesn't realize you can't just write the editor a letter to petition for inclusion. Here's an excerpt of his submission:

The word is "acquifier". It means "the process of acquifying". It is used in governmental and scientific writings to refer to the material comprising the "acquifer" and / or performing "the process of acquifying". Unfortunately, it is believed by some that the only acceptable word is "acquifer". But, "acquifer" refers to a specific area or place (frequently a proper noun) rather than the afore stated material and / or process.

Essentially what he is asking for is a word for the process of the creation of an aquifer. The problem is that "aquifier" implies that there is a process called aquifying and it suggests that there is an agent of this aquifying (the "aquifier"). I am not sure this is the case. What is the agent? Water itself? But the real problem is that, unlike the word police French, American lexicographers don't just add words. New additions have to be proven to be in common usage.

So let me take a moment to state officially that Ascent Stage does not use nor does it support the usage by others of the word "aquifier."

Posted at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 18, 2005

Spam of the day

"Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface."

Made me laugh. If only computers were as easy as guns, you know? You can pry my computer from my cold dead hand.

Posted at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 30, 2005

Lingualism

Real time translation in a conference setting always amazes me. The translators in their claustrophobic boxes have to keep up with nervous, mumbly presenters whose language is often specialized or vague. I try to make it a point to thank whoever has the misfortune of translating me. But it is such a great service. Sometimes I think about how life-changing it would be to have this device all the time. I have, in fact, walked out of a conference hall with the headset on and momentarily forgotten that it is not a Universal Translator that will work anywhere. Darn.

The movie The Red Violin is the first I have seen that moves smoothly and rapidly between many different languages, five in this case. Just when you've disabled the subtitles in an English section you're thrown back into German or Chinese and you have to turn them on again. Thankfully toggling DVD subtitling, especially on a laptop, is painless. (Though it would be nice to be able to say "if any language other than X is being spoken I need subtitles.")

Which brings me to website design. Multilingual sites -- which should be every site but for obvious practical reasons cannot be -- must work just as the translator headset or as DVD subtitles work. There should be complete symmetry in all languages and minimal design variation so that a lateral flitting from one to the other is seamless in every regard, except that the language changes -- just like switching channels or subtitles. Wikipedia famously achieves this. Eternal Egypt is based on this premise too. In effect what you create this way is a single site with multiple languages, rather than multiple language sites for the same content.

Posted at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 22, 2005

Sweet language

I met Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, last week. He was describing the new Museum of Tolerance to be built in Jerusalem. It is, in part, a learning center and so in describing the philosophy behind the center's outreach he used an analogy from a tradition in teaching the Hebrew alphabet. When first encountering the alphabet Jewish children have a drop of honey placed on their tongue as they pronounce the first letter, the aleph. This is meant to equate learning -- perhaps language too -- with sweetness.

Honey on the Aleph. This I like a lot.

Posted at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colorful language

Data visualization master and Most Admired Colleague Martin Wattenberg has created a new info map. Color Code takes English nouns and represents them using the color average of corresponding images of that noun found on the web via Yahoo. Interesting how earth-toned nouns are, but then I suppose much of what we name is human or organic. Yes, all your favorite sexual nouns are included. Yes they are fleshy.

A great extension of this would be to infer colors for verbs based on the images of nouns that the verbs most often operate on. For example, the verb "to fly" might be bluish because of its association with the sky and because the machines that do fly are often colored similarly.

Posted at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 19, 2005

Decompile

Sentence diagramming. Man, did I love sentence diagramming. I can almost hear Sister Bernadette, my obese, structuralist 7th grade teacher, coming up with ever-obscurer sentences to slice-and-dice. It is so out of vogue to teach sentence diagramming now. I'm not even sure they teach the parts of speech anymore. This is a shame. Diagramming was like a game, a kind of puzzle where you were forcing organic, fungible elements of language into a Cartesian, controllable structure. Diagramming a sentence was like decompiling a program, with similar messiness. There are tools now, but nothing beats the one-on-one encounter with a hellishly convoluted syntax:

All this ... the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me.

Never heard of sentence diagramming? I know some people similarly handicapped. Read up at Wikipedia.

Posted at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 3, 2005

Attention span is overrated

Recently I finished the gigantic Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson -- a monumental tale of the struggle for sustained progress in an age unaccustomed to it. And by that I mean my reading was such a struggle. 3000 pages -- more if you count the 900+ "sequel" published in 1999-- is a hell of a task, even for a bibliophile like me. With other reading priorities, book clubs not to get kicked out of, magazines piling up, movies to watch, blogs to cover, and TiVo to play catch-up with I bet it took me two-and-a-half years to read it all. Like Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle was a fantastic, mythopoeic intertwining of real events and people with fictional threads. Not quite historical fiction, not quite science fiction, just geek epic. (Quick test: if this intrigues you, you'll like the book.) But long. Way long. And long enough that more than a few people I know just said screw it. I'm glad I didn't. Back to this in a sec.

Right after I finished the last volume, The System of the World, I eagerly began Steven Johnson's long-deferred Everything Bad Is Good For You. Johnson's book took me less than a week to finish, mostly on the train. Having followed Johnson's blog throughout the book's writing I felt I knew its argument going in. Johnson targets the cherished piece of conventional wisdom which holds that popular culture seeks the lowest common denominator, that it dumbs-down content to hit the widest possible audience. He effectively argues the reverse, that today's television shows, videogames, computer interfaces, and movies to some degree are all much more complex entities than they were 20 or 30 years ago and that this complexity -- the storyline of an episode of 24 or gameplay in Sim City -- makes us smarter or, at the very least much better at problem-solving, pattern-matching, and long-term recall. Actually Johnson retains the "largest possible audience" part of the equation, but he suggests that the complexity of contemporary pop culture is aimed at creating that large audience through repeat viewings over time rather than during a single moment of programming as in the past. For example, Johnson argues that the complexity of a single episode of Seinfeld or The Simpsons rewards repeat viewing far more than one of Starsky and Hutch. This argument reminds me of author Michael Joyce's admonition that these days "a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings."

Something I've not seen addressed in commentary on Johnson's book is the short section that deals with what he calls the "peripheral effects" of pop culture's current state that may be seen as "less desirable". Johnson writes:

Thanks to e-mail and the Web, we're reading text as much as ever and we're writing more. But it is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred-page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in short bursts, following links across the Web, or sifting through a dozen e-mail messages .... But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form.

He means novels, of course.

You have to commit to the book, spend long periods of time devoted to it. If you read only in short bites, the effect fades, like a moving image dissolving into a sequence of frozen pictures.

Which brings me back to The Baroque Cycle. I've already admitted that it took an effort bordering on masochistic to complete such a long work when I rarely have more than a few minutes of time that something else isn't forcing itself into my cognitive foreground. But what's interesting is that I experienced Stephenson's magnum opus exactly as Johnson suggests a novel shouldn't be: in short bites, short bursts, successive attendings -- and I still loved it. Were the The Baroque Cycle a monothematic, page-turning best-seller I probably couldn't make this claim. But the sheer density of arcs, allusions, ideas, and characters allowed me (or, perhaps drove me unwillingly) to return to it consistently.

This drive didn't come from a longing to know what happens next -- in a story of such complexity things happen somewhat slowly. I'm pretty sure what kept me going was the complexity itself, the likelihood that, even if I could not remember where I was in the storyline (which gotta admit was often), some allusion would trigger a memory from hundreds of pages ago, like picking up on a reference in a Seinfeld episode from one many seasons before. This is Johnson's precise argument in Everything Bad, but he stops short of extending it to contemporary novels. As with movies, where Johnson notes that only a subset of overall output provides viewers with the structural complexity that most kinds of pop culture demonstrate, Johnson reels in his argument when it comes to today's written fiction. And I'm not sure why. The Baroque Cycle is an extreme example, but I think, like film, complex narrative exists and, while it might not be the dominant form (thank you Oprah, et al) it certainly partakes of the trend that Johnson describes. More succintly: believe it or not, certain forms of contemporary literature, heirs of the dense novels of the past, actually fit quite nicely into the hectic, multimedia culture of today. Their complexity rewards successive attendings as well as sustained attention.

Sidenote. As I am writing this I see that Kottke posted about Stephenson and Johnson too, though not with quite the same slant.

See also: Urban Library | Wheels and Towers

Posted at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

Maximizing reading time

Recently, anticipating a dull drive into downstate Illinois, I purchased Freakonomics as a digital audiobook from iTunes. Well-blogged and approaching supermeme status, Freakonomics was an excellent book. My only criticism was in the format. Some of the data-heavy parts of the narration (lists, recitation of percentages, etc.) didn't work so well in the format of an ever-onward audio stream.

But the audio format did give me an idea. Smartly, the iPod and iTunes synch virtual "bookmarks" so that you can always know where you left off. But what I'd really like is the ability to tell an audiobook on the iPod which page I left off in the print version of the book (and vice versa, to have the iPod tell me where I would be in print). Why? I would like the ability to seamlessly switch reading modes -- visual and audiotory -- as the environment around me dictates. The most common scenario I envision is on my commute, the precious time when most of my day's reading happens. I carry my book with me on the walk to the L train so that I have it out when I reach the platform, but that walking time is time I could be reading if I didn't have to be heads-up negotiating traffic on my stroll to the L. But since I always have my iPod headphones on (for music) it would be great if I could tell the iPod where I left off in print. I'd gain an extra few minutes of reading time. Likewise, if the train was too crowded to comfortably open a book I could revert to the audio format. I still highly value the physical phenomenon of reading a book and would not want to give that up, but it seems to me some fluidity of output would increase my reading efficiency greatly.

Practically this would be problematic. For one, audiobooks are expensive. Owning hard copies in addition to audio versions seems excessive. Also, with so many versions and paginations of a single book title -- no to mention abridged and extended audio versions -- the synching would be very difficult. Lastly, and I suspect this is the real deal-breaker, I bet it would be somewhat jarring cognitively to switch back-and-forth between reading modes. Reading a book normally simply takes more work, a greater level of engagement, than sitting back and having it read to you. Maybe I underestimate our ability to do this. People switch between reading, watching TV, and carrying on a conversation all the time. But I think it is the fact that these tasks are all different as opposed to being an identical narrative in different modes that allows us to make the cognitive switch.

Guess I'll have to test it out and report back.

Posted at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 26, 2005

Corporate Lingo Watch

Got smacked with a new flavor of corporate metaphor this week. This is so meta it deserves a post-modern critique.

Guy is referring to a business deal that is taking longer than it should. The metaphor here is that it doesn't have much energy. Running out of steam. Batteries are low. That kind of thing. What does he say? "This deal is low blood sugar." After the split second what-did-he-say? I next wondered if there were any diabetics on the line.

Also, please do not use "uptick" and "downselect" in the same sentence. Makes me need to grab the desk to steady myself.

Posted at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 24, 2005

Idiot and the Odyssey

As I am getting on the elevator at work today a gaggle of dronish businessmen get off on my floor. Clearly they don't work on the floor and are looking for a meeting. I hear one guy say "Odyssey. We're looking for the Odyssey room. I wonder where that is." Some other guy snickers "Next to the Caravan room, maybe." Consensus chortling and I think even a ha-ha backslap ensue. I spend the elevator ride wondering what the hell he means. Some obscure Homeric allusion? Then it hits me. A minivan joke. The guy made a minivan joke, for the love of god.

Oh suburbia, is there any limit to the ways you enrich our culture?

Posted at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 2, 2005

Remanence

Matt Kirschenbaum has uploaded a really smart essay challenging the common notion of electronic text as impermanent or less stable than the printed word. He argues that the physical trace evidence of supposedly erased data force us to question the prevailing mental models of electronic text and also suggest a range of skills that will be needed of future bibliographers. Can't wait for his book.

Combine this mode of investigation with the "literary forensics" popularized by people like Donald Foster and the potential for a completely new field of inquiry in new media opens up. The opportunity for a meaningful digital paleography arises precisely because electronic documents are considered so volatile and impermanent; rarely is the effort expended to truly expunge unwanted data. Somewhat boggling (and exciting) to consider what lies undiscovered at the level of the magnetic dipoles.

Posted at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 17, 2005

In a kingdom by the sea

I rediscovered this poem this weekend. Forgot how much I loved it.

Annabel Lee, by Edgar Allen Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know.
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love --
I and my Annabel Lee --
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this is the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me --
Yes! -- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we --
Of many far wiser than we --
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the Beautiful Annabel Lee:
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the Beautiful Annabel Lee:
And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side
Of my darling -- my darling -- my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea --
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Thanks, Anabeli!

Posted at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

April 8, 2005

A picture isn't worth a thousand lines of code

I like to prattle on about poetry and code-writing. I've been known to do the same about images and poetry. But I've never invoked the transitive property to claim that painting and code-writing are kindred activities. Honestly, it never ocurred to me. Maciej Ceglowski ruminates on why this is such an awful analogy.

Posted at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 27, 2005

Codewords

It's not hard to see the similarities between computer code and poetry. Like code, poetry is highly formalized and structural and almost all poems attempt to effect an experience greater than the sum of their words. Call the best of each examples of very artful data compression.

Perlgeeks have been re-writing poems in code for years. Some of it is really quite good, though none of it achieves the grail of actually executing something that might be meaningfully related to the poem. (How cool would that be? A poem turned into an executable program whose runtime output was some kind of answer or manifestation of the poem subject?)

Two gents at MIT have created an application that takes this idea one step further. Metafor is a system for visualizing the "programmatic" nature of the English language. Basically the app takes standard language and creates what looks like a a formalized program. The idea is to use this method of "scaffolding" natural language as a stepping-stone to the ideal of being able to program in plain English. This is sentence diagramming on overdrive.

INPUT: "There is a bar with a bartender who makes drinks."

OUTPUT:

def __main__():
     class bar:
           the_bartender = bartender()

     class bartender:
           def make(drink):
               pass

There's also a great video available that makes the process clear.

Like the Perl-ified poems, this code does not actually do anything. And I fear that this method of translation will come crashing down (so to speak) when it encounters allusion, metaphor, or any of the myriad other figurative fossils embedded in the strata of English. But I like the exercise.

See also: E-mailing Richard Powers

Posted at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 18, 2005

Urban library

A line in Neal Stephenson's The System of the World comparing the streets of London to bookshelves crystallized something I had been thinking about in an informal way since I first played with the A9 Yellow Pages Search. Well, a few things. First, seen edge-on a shelf full of books does in a way resemble the variegated facades of an urban streetscape. But more than the physical resemblance, there's a kind of functional similarity. The front of a building, like the spine of a book, is both its human interface and its metadata. Not only do you judge a book (and a building) by its cover, but you must. This is how we apprehend reality, at least initially. One of my favorite tricks in a library is finding the location of a book I think I want then browsing in the region of the book once I find it. Kind of a physical fuzzy search. Same thing with urban streets, especially where businesses cluster based on some similarity (wares, targetted demographic, etc). And this is why the A9 Yellow Pages search is so cool. Amazon merely used the experience of bookshelf scanning as a model for browsing businesses by their building facades. (Though, strangely, you can't browse Amazon's book collection this way.) Seems that, at heart, Amazon's still a bookstore. And I love that.

Anyone know of any other city-as-bookshelf conceits out there? Seems ripe for exploration, especially considering the many relationships between cities and narratives. Also, if urban streets resemble a bookshelf what about suburbia? How can we tweak the analogy to account for strip malls and parking lots?

See also: Virtual flâneur | The Pavilion of Literary Profundity

Posted at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 8, 2005

Networks and lines

I have been thinking about networks since Craig's thought-provoking comment about the radial nature Chicago L system a few days ago. Thing is, I can't shake the feeling that narrative and transportation networks are somehow related.

One easy relationship has to do with consumption. I enjoy being on the subway because it affords me time to read that I otherwise would not have. (I turn down rides home because I crave the time to read on the subway.) But what I really love is the way the L -- especially when it is underground and impervious to cell transmission -- eliminates options. You may be late for work, but there's really nothing you can do about it. You can't call anyone; you can't get off the train and get to work any faster; you're stuck. And that is wonderful. I feel like I suffer from a surfeit of options sometimes. It is so nice to just resign yourself to the moment. I'm going to keep reading until my stop, damnit. So nice to succumb to linearity.

But that's not really what interests me. I'm still trying to tease this out, but clearly subway system design has conceptual similarities with new media. Stories can be point-to-point, multi-linear, radial, and true networks. They can even break out of the established route, creating new stations further afield. If you mapped these narrative arcs I bet they would bear a striking resemblance to the abstracted maps of subways around the world.

Posted at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 17, 2005

Was This Information Useful? Yes | No

Reading Microsoft's primer for parents who want to decrypt their kids's computer slang is like listening to über-caucasian Bill Kurtis announce that the murder suspect also "did drugs and was into [dramatic turn to address the camera] rough sex." It is just so overwhelmingly unhip that you are compelled to keep staring at the screen.

Among the terms that Microsoft highlights to help you "protect" your children:

"warez" or "w4r3z": Illegally copied software available for download.

"h4x": Read as "hacks," or what a computer hacker does.

"sploitz" (short for exploits): Vulnerabilities in computer software used by hackers.

"pwn": A typo-deliberate version of own, a slang term that means to dominate. This could also be spelled "0\/\/n3d" or "pwn3d," among other variations. Online video game bullies or "griefers" often use this term.

Thank you, Microsoft. Now I finally have the tools to protect my family. Actually, it is a clever ruse. Big Brother masquerading as Beaver Cleaver. Aw shucks, did I just get h4xxored?

Posted at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 9, 2005

Whose skills?

I am on the L tonight. The man next to me is reading a printed Powerpoint deck on his lap. Three points per page. No more than a few words per line. Like a set of flashcards or a very large type edition of a book. Except that the storyline has been broken down into bullets. I think maybe he is doing foreign language drills or something. It all looks very See Jane Run.

I peer closer. The subject matter is serious indeed. The deck is a school board report instructing teachers on how to raise the abysmally low reading skills of their K-3 students.

• I wince at the irony.
• I think of Tufte.
• I exit at the next station.

Posted at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 31, 2005

Physicalized words

I can't read Chinese, though I am able to at least distinguish it from Korean and Japanese scripts. (Cut me some slack, that's progress! But don't even ask about distinguishing Traditional from Simplified. I'll have to be content in my ignorance on that one.) What this means is that, since I have no idea what idea is being conveyed, my growing love for Chinese characters is almost purely visual. A reverse ekphrasis, the strokes of even the most mundane lines are painterly, evocative of an artform more fully engaged with the space around it than Western writing. Chinese calligraphy, such as I have seen it, is more akin to dance or yoga than it is to other scribal arts. It is all very physical.

Consider the "calendar" in the image above. Called the 81 Days of Winter, it is a single phrase that evolves slowly over the course of the winter. Each day the author/painter adds one stroke to the characters; a total of 81 comprise all nine characters. Ticking off the days like an Advent calendar, the phrase is complete by the end of winter:

The weeping willow of the pavillion waits for the warm breath of spring.

But it isn't just script that is spatialized.

The item on the left is called a Ruyi. Long ago it was an imperial backscratcher, but it eventually lost that function altogether and merely became a royal symbol. The item to the right is a spitoon shaped like a persimmon flower. Together they form a visual pun. The word "ruyi" also means (or sounds like) "whatever you wish" in Chinese. The word for persimmon also means "everything". So, taken together, the two completely symbolic objects mean "everything you wish for". You see these objects conspicuously placed together on furniture throughout the Forbidden City, a portmanteau resting amongst the other objects of daily life.

Posted at 2:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 20, 2005

The Good Earth

There's a possibility of upcoming work in China, so I'm trying to get a feel for the history, places, and people. I had read some "Complete History of" titles for the macro sweep view when Pearl Buck's The Good Earth was released in a new edition. (OK, fine. It was for Oprah's Book Club. Can I help it that she picked this book too?) It is a deceptively simple book about a farmer who achieves great success through hard work and love for his land while, periperhal to his rural experience, the country heaves and lurches toward revolution. The tale is reminiscent in a way of William Dean Howells' classic American novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, though Buck's story is made more powerful by the knowledge of what would happen to China after she wrote the book in 1931. Indeed, the final scene somewhat eerily presages the widespread seizures of land that marked the civil war and Communist rule.

Anybody have any other good titles on Chinese life, history, or politics?

Posted at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 27, 2004

Wine and fine fabrics

Gutenberg, the story goes, was inspired to build his printing press from the mechanics of a wine press. Who knows if that's true or not, but I've always loved the idea that the most important invention in the history of the world sprang from a way of making alcohol. No less interesting a story -- though certainly better documented -- is the degree to which the automated weaving loom created by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1802 inspired punch-card controlled computing and, arguably, the entire notion of separating data from the control program in an automated system.

I've got some history of fascination with the loom as a metaphor for computing and so I was naturally drawn to James Essinger's new book on Jacquard and his loom. The book is about 100 pages too long and too strident in its claims about the importance of the loom to the history of computing overall, but it is not a bad book at all: controlling weaving patterns with punch-cards did in fact inspire Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith to do the same with their computing and tabulating engines. What's most interesting to me is the historical prevalance of the computing-as-weaving or computing-begat-from-weaving motif. Though Ada Lovelace was probably the most articulate in portraying the linkage, the idea has never been so much a part of the popular imagination as it is today in the World Wide Web. Arachne'd be proud.

Posted at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 20, 2004

E-mailing Richard Powers

The e-lit blogs are abuzz about "They Come in a Steady Stream Now," a new online piece by Richard Powers, the much-lauded author who consistently joins themes of technology and art in his novels. The general tenor of the comments on the new piece (with exceptions) seems to be mild disappointment that such an esteemed author didn't create a masterpiece with his first foray in digital lit. I disagree, but not because "They Come in a Steady Stream Now" is exceptional -- it isn't, though it is very good indeed.

Thing is, Richard Powers is already an e-lit author. I saw Powers speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival a few years ago. It was the first time I'd heard him after years of knowing him through the written word alone. Perhaps that explains what happened to me. Powers delivered a reading of what came to be called "Literary Devices" at the CHF. This gets a bit convoluted so follow me here. In the listening "Literary Devices" seemed like a straightforward recounting of an e-mail exchange that Powers was involved in after delivering a real paper called "Being and Seeming" ("real" because I Googled it right after the talk -- still online here). I was completely captivated by the conversation which, in a nutshell, revolves around a system called DIALOGOS, a next-generation ELIZA that convincingly writes fiction and sucks Powers into an ongoing exchange. It was only after the session ended on my way home did I realize that I had been completely duped. The CHF had not invited him to deliver a paper -- it was total fiction, just sittin'-around-the-campfire storytellin'. And I had given myself to it utterly. I was the test subject who couldn't distinguish the human from Turing's machine.

Now, granted, this wasn't electronic literature. Hell, it wasn't printed literature. (Only much later did Salon publish the story, since removed, but available for purchase now.) This was oral literature in its most primitive form. Yet, in its colloquial, fast-paced, almost stream-of-consciousness delivery it really did evoke an e-mail exchange: call it performance e-lit. I was so amazed at how taken I was with this story I e-mailed Powers as soon as I got home. Like the now-fictional correspondent from the talk, I was the audience member who was striking up a real dialogue with the author, effectively continuining the narrative by e-mail -- my own personal electronic appendix to the story.

All of this is an elliptical way of making the point that I consider the reading of "Literary Devices" to be Powers' first jump into electronic literature, though it had none of the trappings of typical e-lit. No links, no point-and-click interactivity. But in its is-this-real-or-am-I-witnessing-artifice way it was the perfect Turing test and one that spawned at least one (though probably more) personalized narratives via other channels. The experience of the story, rather than the words on the page, was akin to some of the best e-lit experiences I've had and that's why I consider "Literary Devices" an exemplar of the form.

"They Come in a Steady Stream Now" is certainly worth reading -- Powers as always plumbs the human depths of technology -- but it is more run-of-the-mill electronic literature and that, in the end, is why it is, well, run-of-the-mill.

UPDATE: Powers joins the conversation at Grandtextauto. An 8th e-mail, so to speak.

Posted at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 16, 2004

a + 30 + a'

I hadn't read John McDaid since his seminal hypertext fiction Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse helped push me out of traditional literary studies onto the track I'm on now. Eight years ago maybe? Then this week Boing Boing enthusiasically blogged "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," one of McDaid's short stories. Since it caught me in that rare moment when I have just finished a book on the train to work and have nothing to read on the ride home and it was available for download I thought I'd give it a try. Well well well. I gotta agree with Cory. This is one hell of a story. You have to think McDaid is familiar with Richard Power's Goldbug Variations (especially given his epigrammatic mention of gene sequences), the only other story I know so self-consciously influenced by Bach's Goldberg Variations. I dare not try to wring a synoposis from either. Suffice to say that McDaid ably turns the reader into a rapt listener at a futuristic piano recital. It is a beautiful, lyrical story. Frankly I don't remember his prose being so textured, but maybe that's because I was too enamored of the medium back in the Uncle Buddy Hypercard days. In any event, this is worth your time. Pop Glenn Gould on too, if you have it. Download here.

Posted at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 9, 2004

Derrida departs

Upon returning to the States I learned that Jacques Derrida died in Paris on the day I left there. Reading Derrida was tough, no question about it. But you felt so damn accomplished when the concepts all came together. Adieu, monsieur.

Coincidentally, that's Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing (and source of the "Tut" in Tutankhamun), on the cover of Of Grammatology. Makes sense, I suppose. Aren't most of Derrida's ideas present in the Thoth episode of Plato's Phaedrus?

Must. Stop. Making Egypt references.

Posted at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)