Subject: Elpub2007 Open for Registration
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:15:31 +0000
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UKRegistration is now open for the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, hosted by the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, 13-15 June 2007.
I was quite excited for a moment, there, by the prospect of El Pub 2007 – my first thought was that it must be a beer festival in Spain.
In the Preservation Business, there are surely only two things you have to remember:
I think that’s the sum of what I’ve learned in 10 years in the Prez Biz: the best way to ensure anything is properly preserved is to follow the Two Commandments. Even a decade of high faluting deep thought about the special problems of managing digital data over the long term, hasn’t produced any results that don’t essentially boil down to one or both of the commandments.
So, next time you lose something, or find it broken, ask yourself if you’ve followed these two simple rules!
Wow, a pictorial history of mousetraps. Evidently, disappointingly, it wasn’t anything like the Little Nipper that Hamlet had in mind: maybe something more like these “humane” basket type traps.
I was pleased, in my little web digression on the subject, to discover the ongoing online wikified version of Samuel Pepys’ diary, and learn that the great man himself, 346 years ago this very week, “bought two mouse traps of Thomas Pepys“.
The Pepys diary project is ongoing, with entries added on the corresponding date. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed to keep bang up-to-date with latest news 343 years ago!
I managed to submit my first assignment for my MSc E-Learning yesterday. I was spoiled for choice for ways to do it. I had wanted from the outset to do it as a TiddlyWiki, but was a bit nervous about committing to it, until I could be sure it wouldn’t eat what I wrote – so I composed the essay in Google Docs mainly. I transferred it to a TiddlyWiki section by section: I think it looks all right.
One thing I didn’t manage to do in time was follow up my idea to try including citations automatically and dynamically from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like, using the copy of RSS2HTML that I’ve got installed here. I haven’t cracked it completely, not well enough to completely meet the citation format requirements, but below is an example of what we can do, using an Inline Frame (Iframe) which links to an instance of RSS2HTML, and dynamically transforms the RSS feeds into HTML
Unfortunately, unlike TiddlyWiki, Wordpress doesn’t seem to have an issue with more than one Iframe in a post, so here are separate links to output examples from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like.
Social site for college kids, Facebook seems to be big in Cote d’Ivoire, either that or hundreds of pasty-looking UK students seem to have taken to gone troppo for their studies. Here’s why:
[Wed Dec 06 19:28:50 2006]
Why have Country settings in my profile changed from “UK” to “Cote d’Ivoire”?
We updated our country list and broke down the UK into individual countries. You can now select “England” or whatever country you prefer under the Edit My Profile option. Sorry for the confusion and the inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further issues or concerns.
Thanks for contacting Facebook
Thanks. Surprised not to be notified by some means, other than reading my profile, and finding out I’ve moved to Africa! Surprised also you chose this way to break the country (UK) up. In international applications, I find the widely-accepted standard is usually UK as top level – as in National TLDs, ISO 3166. Country-of-UK can easily be expressed as a defined region, analagous with US state. I’m English, though my descent is also Welsh and Irish. I work at a London university, and study a distance course at Edinburgh University. Until some decison is taken in any part of the UK to change it, UK works for me.
Cheers
PS. See from a quick search that the Cote D’Ivoire population has swelled enormously at Faceboo.
I was thinking about the evolution of blogging, Web 2.0, and all its ramifications approaches to self-presentation and representation online – from effusive, barely literate teenage gurglings, like those at MySpace, to more sober, considered outpourings such as you find here at Relocution 
– and, suddenly, I remembered him: the Turkish Guy. We all had a good laugh at the time (1999), but I don’t remember making the connection with Borat. Well, the suit’s a different colour! Now, of course, it seems obvious: even down to the ping pong.
The legend of Mahir continues at ikissyou.org/ (currently looking pretty much as it did when he started). Borat has taken the basic idea to new technical heights at Myspace, with extensive use of YouTube. But who came first? Borat, or Mahir? Mahir, or Borat? (Now I’m starting to sound like our other Millenial TV favourite, Banzai!)
Is there any great point in the neverending quest for didfirstery? In a globally connected world – one that is, moreover, increasingly, cumulatively and automatically archived – we may have to rethink ideas about originality, across space and time. How many great achievements, starting with fire, were legitimately invented or discovered independently in different parts of the globe, in different epochs. Some even died out and were revived (like glass-making in Britain in the Dark Ages).
How different would it have been, if The Blog of Prometheus, or www.rome.it/careers/glassmaking, had survived? But does it really matter – morally, at least, whether Leibniz or Newton invented calculus? “Multiple connections and successful response status codes are what matter now,” says Billy The Cyborg, and I think he’s probably onto something.
As usual, Wikipedia takes the fun out of everything (in fact, Wikipedia’s not much fun all round), so you might as well go there for the full story, including a convincing account of the chronology of the Mahir vs Borat controversy. Then go and watch the Borat trailers at Apple. Nice!
Just too quiet here lately, so it’s nice to know, through the amazing power of the pingback, or somesuch, that “Dear Angie” is also favoured by Armour of Rod. Cheers, Rod!
There may have been a bit of confusion with Dear Angie over time, since I moved it from Blogger.com to here. Though all of the posts were successfully imported, I’m sure the place is littered with broken links. I also regret the loss of the earlier design, when DA moved into Relocution, and might do something about that, over time. Meanwhile here is the original Dear Angie logo (based on the scans sent by Han Schomaker).
Ten years since I wrote this short essay for my computing course at Birkbeck, Autumn 1996. Seems old hat now, and a bit quaint in places (we now have that HHGG: it’s called Wikipedia!) but I think it was good enough in its day. Covering (however briefly) 500 years of history in a short Computing Science essay was appealing; and of course it was prescient at least in signalling my move into digital archives not long after!
The celebrated library at Alexandria in Egypt contained the greatest collection of literature in the ancient world. Founded at the end of the 4th Century B.C., it had the objective of collecting in one place a copy of every important Greek text ever written. Ever since, a compulsion to compile just such a comprehensive collection of literature has been a feature of every major civilized culture: the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque Nationale, all were founded with similar aims, and now maintain massive collections of books and journals.
The scale of such undertakings, even in times when comparatively few written works were produced, was vast: writ large in these endeavours are exactly the problems of storage, retrieval and security which modern data processing managers wrestle with. The history of the Alexandrian Library itself offers one of the earliest object lessons in the importance of following effective data security procedures: Plutarch records that in 47 B.C. part of the library caught fire, and many books were lost forever that might otherwise have survived.
Like their present-day counterparts, scholars and philologists through the ages have embraced new technological developments which appear to facilitate their Sisyphian task. In the early Christian era the codex, the bound book format which we are familiar with, superseded papyrus and parchment rolls, offering more effective storage and ease of access; in the 8th Century, minuscule cursive letter forms (using small characters, rather than just capitals) were perfected for both Latin and Greek alphabets, bringing further benefits of compression and speed of copying; and, of course, with the introduction of printing five centuries later, publishing on a truly industrial scale became possible, with massive implications for every aspect of communication.
The role computers can play in this area has expanded considerably in recent years . The use of computerised catalogues and indexes of existing collections has improved their accessibility, while, for publishers, digitisation has virtually eliminated the need for type to be physically set by hand. But now that fast, cheap random access storage space is available to every level of application, it is clear that machines can effectively and efficiently store not only information about books and journals, but entire texts as well: written works may be published and read by thousands, without using a single sheet of paper or drop of ink. It seems likely that these developments will prove to be an important milestone in the history of the “written” word.
With the digitisation of historical, literary and scientific texts, scholarly chores such as indexing and cross-referencing can be left to a computer, not to mention the chore of following all those cross-references. Huge texts can be scanned almost instantly for a particular phrase. Once a text has been digitised the phenomenal processing power of the computer can be let loose on it. To the studies of literature and history have come new approaches of quantitative textual analysis, where the attribution of a work or a date to a particular author may be substantiated by the analysis of the frequency and distribution of key words, phrases, or unusual spelling. For example, in 1992 a computer running a neural network program was trained to distinguish accurately between plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher that it had never seen before. The significance of this is that it may assist Shakespeare scholars in correctly attributing sections of the plays (The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII) on which the two men collaborated in 1613.[note]
It’s not by magic, of course, that texts come to be digitised. Although much that is produced now (this essay being no exception) is committed directly to computer, what went before was not. Now commercial interests – software houses like Microsoft, or traditional publishers like Oxford University Press – are committed to producung works old and new in an electronic form. But before them, one major electronic source of public domain literature has been Project Gutenberg. The project’s aim is to create a quality archive of platform independent electronic source texts. Volunteers have typed in many millions of words, including classic novels, poems, historical and scientific works, and optical character recognition (OCR) technology is increasingly used. It may seem a rather luddite enterprise, nevertheless it is important work. The texts produced may be made available for downloading via the Internet, or collected on CD-ROM. And, once entered, they need never be re-entered, re-typed, or re-set.
There is one further way in which computerisation can improve the effective use of textual material. Project Gutenberg’s texts are still largely in what its director, Professor Hart, refers to as “plain vanilla” ASCII text. Hypertext is electronic text which contains links to other texts, or reference points within the same text; and the following of these links is handled by the computer . “By creating computer linkages from the citations of an article to the corresponding source documents, users would be able to navigate through a body of related literature online simply by following the ‘electronic footnotes.’” [note] It is widely used for on-line reference texts, dictionaries and encyclopaedias on CD-ROM etc. Most significantly, a hypertext model is the basis for the World-Wide Web, originally implemented using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and intended for distributing the literature of high-energy physics to researchers. Its application to other disciplines was encouraged, in particular by making the standards open, and few were slow to exploit its possibilities: in the Web we can presently see “a precursor of the networked environment that will permeate libraries in the future.” [note]
The storage and transmission of texts by electronic means is changing the way we use and approach them. They can be available from a single point of access anywhere in the world; the computer can take over the tedium of storing and retrieving the things we want to read or study. Where hypertext is exploited, the machine tirelessly performs the roles of librarian and page-turner. New developments may necessitate the removal of the data to other storage media, but this can be completely automated, minimising the opportunity for human error to play its traditional role in the copying process.
It seems unlikely that the proliferation of electronic texts will ever completely eradicate the urge to keep that hard copy “just in case”. It is hard to believe that there will ever not be a place for books in the world of the student or casual reader: there’s still a long way to go to make a device like Apple’s Newton as attractive – or cheap – as a paperback book. Yet now that so many words, not to mention sounds and pictures, are readily available in digitised form, the idea of such an encyclopædic electronic book as, say, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is less strange and wonderful than it was twenty years ago.
Found a great site dedicated to Windsor’s late, great alternative music venue The Old Trout (fl. 1989-1995).
Look at that gig list! It was damned unfair that I was living in Warwick or London most of that time. Still, I managed to catch a few great gigs there. Most memorable, The Pixies in August 1990 – positively nuclear, so many people were crammed in that tiny hall! When we got out, we looked longingly at the cool water of the river…
Worst gig: possibly Juliana “I find myself endlessly fascinating” Hatfield’s first solo outing after the Blake Babies. She was either having a bad hair day, or trying to prove how horrible she could sound if she tried.
Can’t see that Chipper gig listed, though! ;p
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