Emily Dickinson’s poems weren’t published during her lifetime- it was only after her death that her sister found Emily’s manuscripts, tucked at the bottom of a trunk, and decided to publish them. In the translation from manuscript to printed page, many aspects of her poems were lost. In editor’s notes, scholars admit to getting snagged on her unusual punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks. The biggest stumbling block comes with Dickinson’s endnotes. For many poems in her manuscripts, Dickinson provided alternate lines. Sometimes only an adjective changed but at other times entire stanzas morphed. In “How the Old Mountains drip with Sunset” (291), Dickinson couldn’t decide upon a single preposition, so there became six ways that one could be in relation to Solitude.

I’ve been building a Sophie book, which pulls Dickinson’s alternate lines into the body of the poem. I’ve been trying to make the lines no longer seem like potential-yet-never-permanent afterthoughts. When the line is presented within the text of the poem, I find it receives more consideration (if not equal weight, at least more screen time). Plus, in most publications, editors make the decision which lines to incorporate and which ones to discard. With this version, the reader gets pulled into that discussion, closer to Dickinson’s original work. When there is an alternate line, the reader can press on a black button and scroll through Dickinson’s suggested changes:

Now, when reading “When we stand on the tops of Things” (242), the reader can see what effect it has when “they bear their dauntless/fearful/tranquil heads.” In the book, the reader begins to encounter questions that surface frequently in literary translation, the question of “what is best in context of the poem.” However, I think that another type of issue is happening here with Dickinson’s work. In “Many a phrase has the English Language” (276), Dickinson waits, tucked in her bedroom in Amherst, for a phrase to arrive with its thundering prospective. The line can read: a) till I grope, and weep; b) till I stir, and weep; or c) till I start, and weep. Each single phrase is fine. But I prefer to think of Emily Dickinson thrashing in her sleigh bed, groping, stirring, and starting all at once. A certain open playfulness becomes built into the framework of the poem once you can let all the possibilities toggle by in one reading experience.
In terms of timing, it pleased me to see Judith Thurman’s recent New Yorker article “Her Own Society.” Thurman describes Dickinson’s dashes as moments in which she “evaded the necessity of putting a period to their mystery—or to her own.” And, earlier this summer, Dan gave me Susan Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson” to read. At one point, Howe argues that Dickinson built a new poetic form grounded in hesitation. I liked that idea of hesitation, circling back and reconsidering what you might say, what you could possibly. For “I prayed at first, a little Girl” (576), Dickinson gives two final stanzas. The two aren’t that unlike. However, looping back, you notice that they accomplish markedly unique things.

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent now,
It takes me all the while to poise —
And then — it does’nt stay —

Till I could catch my Balance
That slips so easy, now,
It takes me all the while to poise —
It isn’t steady tho’.

At this point in the project, I’m afraid I’ve sunken too deep into semi-obsessive adoration to begin to see how this Sophie book could be useful. With this blog post, I’d like to open up the concept for discussion. How do you think a collection like this could be used? Is it ultimately helpful?
Download it here
Right click to download the file. Unzip the file to open the folder. Open “ED Ten” in Sophie Reader.

Zoomii, a new virtual bookstore that uses Amazon’s prices and fulfilment, provides a nifty ‘browse’ interface that lets the viewer zoom in and out of 21,000 ‘books’ – read cover thumbnails – arranged on ‘shelves’ according to category.
It’s the most bookshop-like experience I’ve encountered online. Within seconds I’d been reminded of several books I’ve been meaning to read. And arguably the proximity of a diverse selection of titles could help strikes a blow for browsing and against the homophily that characterizes much Web browsing.
It’s debatable, though, whether this kind of heavily-mediated pseudo-serendipity, while a pleasant change from the messy Amazon experience, isn’t one metaphor too far. After all, how ‘serendipitous’ are the book thumbnails I find on its digitally-rendered ‘shelves’?
What concerns me is that, while this site provides something of the feel of browsing a bookstore, this is not only a superficial impression but reproduces the worst of the industrialized mainstream bookstores. The buying practices necessitated in order to keep a large bookstore financially viable these days have skewed the kinds of books that are deemed saleable profoundly; the redemptive promise of the Web was that the magical long tail might create markets for even those niche publications that have been edged out of mainstream publishing and book sales.
And yet (as I understand it – corrections welcome) for a book to be sold in more than one place online it must be equipped with a set of tags (ISBN, summary, thumbnail image etc) according to a metadata standard. Without these, the multiplicity of bookselling affiliate schemes, APIs and so on will not be able to carry the title, and the book will not sell. And this additional informational labor is beyond the technical and time resources of many small publishers. So while a bookstore (in its ideal, pre-Scott Pack form at least) might be imagined to carry a genuinely serendipitous mix of local publications, the manager’s choices, remainders, bestsellers and second-hand titles, this slick performance of serendipity relies on several intricate but invisible additional layers of technologization. Thus, while it gives the feeling of serendipity, the data architectures required to sustain the ‘bookstore’ metaphor push the available selection ever more towards a literary monoculture.
In an age where more books than ever are being published, perhaps this doesn’t matter. But despite the attractiveness of Zoomii as a piece of data visualization, it seems to me to point towards a worst-case combination of manual, recommendation-free browsing and industrialized depletion of diversity.

I made a passing mention of email-me-chunks-of-book-to-read service DailyLitin my recent-ish post on writing less. Though I’ve not tried it, it’s been picking up some press lately as a way to get your reading done via the network.
The latest news is that DailyLit is experimenting with public and participative reading via Twitter. Texts on offer include Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
A little look around indicates that the Twitter element – slightly to my disappointment – neither involves abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at a time. Readers sign up for Twitter updates, which then alert them whenever a new instalment of the book goes up on DailyLit. This they can then discuss in related fora. So rather than proposing literature especially for Twitter, DailyLit is using Twitter much as many bloggers do: for status updates that drive readers to a webpage elsewhere.
Doctorow’s book at present has 300 followers (nearly double the following of Pride and Prejudice…). There’s not much uptake in the fora at present. But overall it’s a timely experiment in networked, cross-platform public reading, and will no doubt have much to teach us as we prepare for the Golden Notebook public reading project.

A new project by HP Labs aims to make print-on-demand magazine publishing available to everyone. MagCloud uses a similar model toLulu for books, or Moo for stickers and cards: upload your digital content here and we’ll deal with fulfillment.
In his post introducing MagCloud, founder Derek Powazek makes the point that well over 50% of most magazines never make it to a buyer – that the distribution shelves are merely a rest-stop between the printer’s warehouse and the recycling plant. Between sustainability concerns and economic ones, a print on demand model seems a logical step for the ever-more-fragmented magazine market.
So will the days of Xeroxed ‘distros’ soon be behind us forever? It’s hard to tell – it’s still in beta at the moment, and publisher accounts are invite-only. Key to success will be how slick, user-friendly, customizable and adaptable the publishing tools are – or whether it’s a matter of getting a PDF designed somewhere else and treating MagCloud like a slightly complicated printer. Then the magazines on offer for purchase are fairly sparse, and the interface for browsing before you buy is unwieldy. I’d like to see ways of embedding a Cafepress-style link into other webspaces, so as to give ezines and small magazines an easy channel to retail a print version. I’d also like to see and also more tools for users/readers to review magazines published through the site.
But it seems churlish to snipe too much – it’s very early days, and the idea has considerable potential as a tool for leveraging the Web to service very small interest groups.
(Link via Booktwo)

My last review post covered the debates around digitization of public domain archives, especially with reference to Google. Key to these debates are questions of access: who gets how much, what to, how is this controlled, and who by? And who benefits? Though Google is mentioned with disturbing frequency any ttime someone worries about privacy and ownership of data, the debate is much wider. So this piece takes a look at some related issues.
If concerns for privacy and freedom of speech usually refer to state interference, net neutrality often points the other way: towards private corporations remaking the Web in their image. Clearly this is frequently (as recent coverage of the ongoing Viacom/Google spat points out) about attempts to ringfence pre-Web approaches to copyright. But space is limited, so I haven’t tried to cover DRM and copyright in depth here.
Net neutrality: who owns the pipes?
Ben’s November 2005 post about net neutrality was the first if:book article on the topic. It picked up an article by Doc Searls about the dangers of the Web being hijacked by major telcos, and explored some of the parallels between the failure of two-way radio and the potential erosion of a multidirectional Web. A second post on December looked at the possibility that redrafted telco regulations could help the creeping transformation of the Web from a read/write medium towards a broadcast-only model.
Reports of Google’s decision to serve a neutered service in China in response to Chinese governmental restrictions prompted a remarkable January 2006 article from Benthat ranged across net neutrality, privacy, censorship, and the utopian ideals of the Web. Very much worth a look. Ray picked up the theme again in February. The same month, we reported on Lessig’s gloomy prognostications for the read/write web, drawing out the relationship between net neutrality and copyright. And in May, a handful of people protested against the net neutrality bill; in June, Congress passed the amended telcos bill, roundly condemned by this blog. But net neutrality seems these days to be of more concern to telcos than to individuals: a recent IPDemocracy post gives an indication of the extent to which the issue is a hot topic to carriers (which have an economic interest) and states (which have a political one), but of little interest to everyday internet users.

Privacy: who owns your (meta)data?
Of all the past posts on privacy, the three strongest are arguably Ben’s three posts on ‘The book is reading you’, parts 1, 2 and 3, published between January and March 2006 – especially the third.
The first looks at the privacy implications of technologies that track your clickstreams across digitized archives such as Google and Amazon.
The second discusses Google’s acquisition of Writely: would web-based word processing extend Google’s domain of searchable private material even beyond email inboxes to individuals’ private documents? (I have to say, from the vantage point of 2008 it is not clear that adoption of web-based office tools has been as overwhelming as some anticipated in those heady years of web2.0 fever. The view from here is a little more measured; Google Docs, as Writely is now called, is one tool among many but has none of the uncontested dominance of the search engine. But the post marks a key moment in the imperial expansion of the Google machine into ever new territories.)
The third is a wide-ranging essay that covers net neutrality, copyright, software licensing and Google issues. One paragraph is worth quoting in full, as it’s remained central to many of the Institute’s concerns:

Though print will always offer inimitable pleasures, the social life of media is moving to the network. That’s why we here at if:book care so much about issues, tangential as they may seem to the future of the book, like network neutrality, copyright and privacy. These issues are of great concern because they make up the environment for the future of reading and writing. We believe that a free, neutral network, a progressive intellectual property system, and robust safeguards for privacy are essential conditions for an enlightened digital age.

In the runup to these posts, we also covered Yahoo!’s purchase of del.icio.us, the launch of the Open Rights Group, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s sobering thoughts on Google, privacy and privatization (still very much worth a read) – and amongst other things a string of digitization deals between Google and public archives (see my previous review post).
The issue of privacy is not just a narrative of one corporation’s info-expansionism. The issue of freedom of expression around the world collided with that of Google when it was revealed in January 06 that Google had decided to comply with the Chinese government’s insistence on restrictive search terms within China, somewhat dampening the cred Google received for saying no when Cheney requested government access to citizens’ Google search records.
In March, Jesse wrote about identity management in the age of search engines. Though the app he mentioned does not seem to have gained much traction, the issues are still relevant. In April, Ben drew together a string of net neutrality and privacy posts for a hefty post about the disturbing confluence of deregulated Web infrastructures and privatised info-accumulation taking place online.
One final theme that deserves a mention is that of Flash and other read-only media. Where the ‘View Source’ command enables the curious to review the code behind any HTML site, Flash and its kin, while making the Web infinitely richer and in some ways more accessible, has also exacted a price in transparency and interoperability across platforms. This has been discussed periodically, as here in October 2006, and again in March 2008.

if:book readers may remember my excited post from last October when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize. I had coincidentally re-read The Golden Notebook over the summer and when I realized that none of my younger colleagues had read it, or even knew anyone of their generation who had read it, I started musing about the possibilities of having readers from two generations reading it together, commenting publicly in the margins in something like CommentPress.
I mentioned this idea to Antonia Byatt of the British Arts Council only to find that she, by coincidence, had also just re-read the book over the summer. Antonia was intrigued by the idea and eight months later we have a grant from the Arts Council and a deal with Harper Collins that will make this a reality. In mid-October 3-5 readers will begin reading The Golden Notebook and carry out a conversation in the margins. The site will be open and the rest of us will be able to follow their reading and participate in a related public forum.
Who do you think should be the readers? The book is perhaps best known for its role in the beginning of the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s but it also confronts complex issues of race and the political fall-out from the ideological collapse of the soviet union. The original idea was to invite women from different generations, but we’re open to other ideas.
Please, tell us who you would like to see as the designated readers. We’re interested in general categories but also in specific recommendations. You can even nominate yourself. [The Arts Council grant includes a generous honorarium for each of the readers.]
By the way we’re working with a fantastic group in London, apt, to build a completely new CommentPress-like application that should be much better for reading both the text and the comments.

The period of extreme introspection is winding down. As you’ve seen over the last few days Sebastian Mary has embarked on a review of if:book’s first four years. This will unfold over the next few weeks and will prepare the way for a re-design of the site intended both to encourage a lot more reader participation and also to free us from the chronological tyranny of the traditional blog format, which cuts off so many conversations just as they start to get interesting.
There’s a ton of interesting things to tell you about. I’ll be posting a lot in the next few weeks.

Whew. I expected my review of the if:book archive to take me a few days, and selecting/commenting on posts to be a quick job requiring at most a handful of posts. Wrong. It took me a week of digging to get through the archive. As for reviewing what’s there, it is hard to know how to do justice to it.
In the process of reviewing, it became clear that while a whole category of post reads more like extended, thoughtful essays many of which are as relevant now as they were three or four years ago, others tell the story of developments in the world of discourse online in a more journalistic style. It makes no sense to privilege one kind of post over the other; to foreground ‘newsy’ posts would be to imply that nothing stays the same long enough to merit commentary, and to privilege ‘thinky’ ones would be to suggest that if:book is merely a collection of arcane musings with no relationship to the world at large. Then of course, much of the time the ‘newsy’ and ‘thinky’ strands are inseparable, complicating matters still further.
In any case, I’ve chosen to break the posts down thematically as well as chronologically, and in this way attempt to trace developments both in the fields the posts describe, and also – where relevant – in the Institute’s thinking on different topics. Though I’ve worked closely with other if:book folks on the period before I arrived at the Institute, this tracing, collating and commentary is naturally a partial activity that will to a large extent reflect my personal taxonomies and interests. But arguably archiving will always be somewhat guilty of this.
So over the next while I’ll be posting my take on if:book past and present, along with whatever thoughts about linkrot, Web entropy, digital archiving and so on occur along the way. All help gratefully appreciated. First post to follow shortly…

Popping out of review and archiving mode for a quick mention of bkkeepr, a new project recently out of stealth mode. Based around Twitter and ISBN data, it creates a timeline of who’s reading what.
The feed provides intriguing browsing, even in its current relatively sparsely-populated state. As usage picks up, I love the idea of individual books getting timeline pages.
A project of James Bridle‘s lit-futures endeavor booktwo, bkkeepr is one of a new crop of technologies weaving together real-world and digital media: neither pushing the transhuman agenda of uploading us all to a mainframe, nor agitating for a return to the analog past. It’s still a bit fiddly for lazy bookmarkers such as myself to update (you have to send the ISBN number to bkkeepr, which is tricky if your edition is older than 1972) but promises an appealing, if skewed, map of what Twitter’s compulsive lifebloggers are reading in paper form.

sorry for the extended absence from these pages. we’ve been wonderfully busy at the first Sophie workshop (at USC) this week. news of that and much else next week.