Category Archives: the_networked_book

“finally, I have a Memex!”

There’s an essay worth reading in the ny times book review this past sunday by Steven Johnson about a powerful semantic desktop management and search tool recently released for Macs. vannevar.gif The software (called DEVONthink) not only helps organize and briskly sift through readings, clippings, quotes, and one’s own past writings, but assists in the mysterious mental processes that are at the heart of writing – associative trains, useful non sequiturs, serendipitous stumbles. In effect, we now have a tool resembling the Memex device described in the seminal 1945 essay, As We May Think by visionary engineer Vannevar Bush. Working with the cutting edge technologies of his day – microfilm, thermionic tubes, and punch, or “Hollerith,” cards – Bush pondered how technology might help humanity to manage and make use of its vast systems of information. His recognition of the basic problem is no less relevant today: “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.” Fast forward to 2005. Now, the holy grail of search is the Semantic Web – moving beyond the artificiality of crude content-based queries and bringing meaning, relevance, and associations into the mix.
“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” – Vannevar Bush

memex-1.jpg

It’s quite suggestive that DEVONthink’s semantic search function can to an extent be trained, taking the obnoxious little puppy on Windows search toward its full potential – a sleek, truffle-tuned hound. When Johnson loads his body of work onto the computer, the hound picks up the distinctive scent of his writing, which in turn suggests affinities, similarities, and connections to other materials – truffles – that will find their way into later works.
20truf-dog.jpg Says Johnson on his latest blog post, which goes into much greater detail than the Times piece:
“I have pre-filtered the results by selecting quotes that interest me, and by archiving my own prose. The signal-to-noise ratio is so high because I’ve eliminated 99% of the noise on my own.”
But it is significant that DEVONthink is not useful for searching entire books (the author’s own manuscripts notwithstanding). Currently, the tool is ideal for locating chunks of text that fall within the “sweet spot” of 50-500 words. If your archives include entire book-length texts, then the honing power is diminished. DEVONthink is optimal as a clip searcher. File searching remains a frustrating enterprise.
Johnson makes note of this:
“So the proper unit for this kind of exploratory, semantic search is not the file, but rather something else, something I don’t quite have a word for: a chunk or cluster of text, something close to those little quotes that I’ve assembled in DevonThink. If I have an eBook of Manual DeLanda’s on my hard drive, and I search for “urban ecosystem” I don’t want the software to tell me that an entire book is related to my query. I want the software to tell me that these five separate paragraphs from this book are relevant. Until the tools can break out those smaller units on their own, I’ll still be assembling my research library by hand in DevonThink.”
Another point (from the Times piece) worth highlighting here, which relates to our discussion of the networked book:
“If these tools do get adopted, will they affect the kinds of books and essays people write? I suspect they might, because they are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they’re associative tools ultimately. They don’t do cause-and-effect as well as they do ‘x reminds me of y.’ So they’re ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: more ‘Lives of a Cell’ and ‘The Tipping Point’ than ‘Seabiscuit.'”
dog.gif And what about other forms of information – images, video, sound etc.? These media will come to play a larger role in the writing process, given the ease of processing them in a PC/web context. Images and music trump language in their associative power (a controversial assertion, please debate it!), and present us with layers of meaning that are harder to dissect, certainly by machine. It is an inchoate hound to be sure.

from the nouveau roman to the nouveau romance

from the nouveau roman . . .

I’ve been working out of the Brooklyn Public Library lately, which has free wireless internet and an interesting collection of books. The organizing principle seems to be, as far as I can tell, that everything remotely interesting gets stolen. This means, in practice, that they have an exceptional collection of criticism of the French nouveau roman, which seems to have gathered dust on the shelves there since the early 1960s. The nouveaux romanciers were a loosely-knit group of novelists from the 1960s determined to shake the French novel out of existential doldrums through the use of new styles of narrative. Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s microscopic examinations of everyday life might be seen as exemplary of the movement, though the novels of Marguerite Duras are probably the most widely read today.

butorbuch.jpgTo me, the most interesting of them is Michel Butor, who wrote four increasingly experimental novels in the early 1960s, and then tired of writing novels altogether. Mobile, his next major production, confused the critics immensely, some of whom declared that not only was it not a novel, it wasn’t a book at all. Mobile is fantastic: it’s a travel guide to the United States presented as a collage, abandoning the author’s voice for bits of history, advertising, and found text. Following the example of Stéphane Mallarmé, the texts are spread over the pages, an analogue to the spatial journey the book describes, presenting a range of sensory (and historical) impressions of America. The French version has the text rotated 90 degrees so you have to hold the book sideways, a feature sadly not carried over into Richard Howard’s otherwise wonderful English translation (recently republished by the Dalkey Archive). While the author’s voice seems to be absent in favor of his found materials, there’s clearly a subtext: the history of racism underlying the country from it’s deep history to the present Butor found in 1964. More than a book, the effect on the reader is like that of the film-essays of Chris Marker (I’m thinking particularly of A Grin without a Cat) and Agnes Varda.

Butor continued to experiment with forms: he made radioplays for simultaneous voices, and has worked in collaboration with just about any sort of artist that can be imagined. Though he’s produced an enormous amount of work since the 1960s, only a tiny fraction of it has been independent work. One of the first of his collaborations was with the composer Henry Pousseur; in the late 1960s, the two of them wrote an opera called Votre Faust, “your Faust”. It was a modern retelling of the Faust story, but with a twist: at certain points during the production, the audience was asked to vote on what should happen next. Depending on how the audience voted (or failed to vote, which was also taken into account), the opera might have any of 25 different endings. After a long public gestation, it was finally produced in 1969 in Milan. It went over like a lead balloon, and subsequently largely vanished from sight, though the critics’ pre-performance excitement remains frozen in time at the Brooklyn Public Library. LPs were evidently put out at the time. I’m curious what exactly was on them – was it a full recording of all the possible music, letting home listeners construct their own personal opera, or did it only contain one version?

Butor is still happily alive and still churning out poetry and other works; at some point in the nineties, he had his own website, though he doesn’t look to have updated it in a while. His art, though, seems to have been perpetually ahead of his time: while Votre Faust didn’t work in a live setting, it might have made a fine CD-ROM or DVD. I don’t know if he’s ever written specifically for electronic media, as Chris Marker has; I’d love to see what he would do with it.

. . . to the nouveau romance

0105-0-373-76629-7.gif“Harlequin” has achieved brand ubiquity: a “harlequin” is a trashy, disposable romance novel, just like a “kleenex” is a tissue and a “xerox” is a copy. We don’t even bother thinking about the word any more than we usually think about romance novels. Do the romance novel and the Future of the Book have anything in common? Of course not! any right-thinking future-bookist would angrily declare. The future, as everybody knows, is the domain of science fiction, not the romance. A look at eharlequin.com, Harlequin’s website, suggests that this might not be the case. The first surprise: how much content they have online. The second surprise: how much is interactive, and how much is devoted to the process of writing. Look at how much there is in the writing bulletin board, dedicated to helping the users write their own romance: templates for various varieties of romances that Harlequin publishes, advice on business, suggestions for those with writer’s block.

0105-0-373-06487-XX.gifThere’s also participatory authoring: in the Writing Round Robin, participants take turns writing chapters of a novel, and critiquing others’ chapters. Unlike some of the open source and wiki novels elsewhere on the web, this is highly moderated writing: note the rules here. This might be expected: Harlequin, after all, is a publishing house, and experimentation isn’t being done for experimentation’s sake, but because it fits into a business model.

But to bring this back around to Butor’s opera: consider eharlequin’s Interactive Novel, where chapters are added one at a time, and the readers vote on how the work should progress: a chapter’s written (or put online) accordingly. Right now the meddling readers are worrying themselves over whether or not Tess is pregnant with Derek’s baby.

It’s become a truism that porn drives technology: see here for one of the many observations of this. (Who first made this connection? Does it date back to before the VCR?) It might not be so surprising that seems romance is doing the same thing in the popular arena of the novel. Even more surprising might be that it’s romance where this is happening. Sarah Glazer, writing in the New York Times Book Review was surprised to find that the biggest current growth market for ebooks is in romances. Is the future of the book to be found in the romance? It seems counterintuitive, but there seems to be more of a participatory literary culture at Harlequin’s website than a quick scrutiny of some scifi publishers’ websites would reveal. (I’d love to be proved wrong about this – can anyone provide examples?)

There’s almost certainly no direct line that goes from Butor and Pousseur’s Votre Faust to eharlequin.com’s Interactive Read, except, I suppose, in the head of this particular reader. There’s a whole history of interactive fiction that I’ve omitted – Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, a whole slew of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. But it’s interesting that Butor & Pousseur’s unsuccessful attempt (“It was very difficult to play. . . But we both have made many efforts to make it easy to realize. Without success.” notes Butor in an online interview) should be taken up in such an unlikely form.

The romance novel, everyone concurs, is not art. There’s not a great deal of critical theory thrown around about romances. The New Novelists were all about creating critical context for their fiction: Robbe-Grillet kicked things off with Pour un nouveau roman, a collection of essays on the novel’s past and present, and Butor wrote a piece titled “The Future of the Book”, among many others. This might be why the nouveau roman is generally considered a failure: it didn’t end up remaking the mainstream of fiction. The contrast with eharlequin might be instructive: outside of the critical eye (and with the support of publishers) romance readers are becoming authors, seemingly constructing their own possible future of the book.

tools for collaborative writing

splash-overnight.png SubEthaEdit is an elegant collaborative writing and editing tool, originally designed for coders, but increasingly popular among educators, especially writing teachers. And if you’re using it for non-commercial purposes, it’s free! Here’s a fun piece written during the blizzard by a 3-person group using the software, courtesy of Slashdot. It’s a piece of collaborative writing about collaborative writing. Very meta. Reading it through once, I couldn’t really pick out individual voices.

networked book/book as network

Book as Network/Networked Book? That’s the koan I’ve been puzzling for the last few weeks. Can something made from, let’s say, hundreds of semi-anonymous contributors or commentors be considered a book? Is this what the texting generation is going to want–something a little less single-author, a little more…bloggy? The possibility makes me slightly sick and dizzy (I’m still paying student loans for a single-author oriented MFA in creative writing). At the same time it’s kind of exciting. Could, for example, my newest favorite blog Overheard in the Office a spin off of Overheard in New York be considered a dynamic anthology?
What about multi-player game-based narrative formats like Sims; are they the digital equivalent of networked novels? Bob recently sent me a link to an article entitled: Sims 2 hacks spread like viruses. Apparently, hackers have infected the Sims 2 universe, messing with individual games/narratives. About this Bob says: this seems so interesting to me if we consider it as one of the strands of future narrative where the author evolves into a god who creates a universe that people populate and mess with as people do; i.e. that the author creates a starting place for an unfolding story. Of course this has been a visible strand since the advent of computer games, especially the large multi-player ones — but for me the added bit here, that the mortals are messing with the game’s code and thus vastly increasing the scope of the game, brings the whole subject up with renewed interest.
The future book will be a networked book or a “processed book” as Joseph Esposito calls it. To process a book, he says, is more than simply building links to it; it also includes a modification of the act of creation, which tends to encourage the absorption of the book into a network of applications, including but not restricted to commentary.
A modification of the act of creation…what, exactly, does this mean for the craft of storytelling? Is it changing utterly? And is somebody going to tell the MFA programs?
btw. if you know any great examples of networked books let me know. I’m building a collection.

city chromosomes – an sms chronicle

screenshot_01.jpg Found this on textually.org. The City Chromosomes project is a sort of scrapbook of the city of Antwerp made entirely from text messages beamed in from mobile phones. Further evidence of the new genres emerging from this technology. An english version has just been published under a Creative Commons license.
Also take a look at this sister project, CityPoems, from Leeds. Posts from the Leeds project are interspersed through the english version of “Chromosomes.”
From the introduction to “City Chromosomes”:
“The city of Antwerp is full of writers. And many of these writers describe their city, often in splendid stories, novels and poems that gain a wide readership. In this way, they determine a large part of our image of the city. But what about the people who only readers, or even those who do not care for reading, what do they think of the city? And would it not be possible to persuade them to write this down?
“This was the point of departure for the City Chromosomes project. We got the idea of gathering sms messages. Nearly everybody has a mobile phone. Everybody has a moment to spare to type in a message. This was the ideal way to make the project accessible to everybody. The people of Antwerp, and anyone else with something to say about city, could submit their impressions anonymously. We established 25 text sites across the city, and the contributors could indicate with a simple code to which part of the city their message applied. By means of posters, flyers and ads, we asked people for their impressions. The only restriction: the messages should not be longer than 160 characters.”

Parsing the Behemoth: Thought Experiments

Bob talks about the book as metaphor. It is the thing that does the heavy lifting, a technology that allows us to convey our thoughts through a concrete vehicle. This site looks at how that vehicle is changing as a new electronic means of conveying written information begins to come of age.
When asked to imagine a metaphor for “the book,” we come up with something more organic, a lumbering behemoth with a hundred arms, waving anemone-like through the air to catch out particles of human discourse. The creature has some kind of hair or fur entangled with innumerable flotsam and jetsam. It is buzzing with attendant parasitical organisms, and encrusted with barnacles. To ask if the behemoth has a future is not the right question because the book, as we are picturing it in this analogy, is an immortal. The electronic incarnation of the book does not kill the old behemoth, but rather becomes part of it.
In his afterword to “the Future of the Book,” Umberto Eco noted that:
“In the history of culture it has never happened that something has killed something else, something has profoundly changed something else.” We are interested in the nature of this change as it relates to the book and its evolution.
To examine this heavy lifting device, to define and to understand this aggregate behemoth is the project of our “future of the book” blog. To begin, we have initiated a few thought experiments and put forth several questions that we hope will engender productive discourse. We welcome ideas and suggestions for future experiments.
Go to Thought Experiment #1: Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview