Coordinating Reading Redux

Behold The Thumb Thing... nifty gizmo for keeping books open. As a notorious perambulatory reader (a tendency that often requires one-handed reading), I for one could use one of these things. And a headlamp to facilitate reading during my walk home from the El after dark.

[image and link via Swissmiss]

Hot on the press

Boing Boing informed me that famed tech-book publisher O'Reilly has launched Rough Cuts, a service granting access to books-in-production. Even more interesting (in my estimation) is the ability to shape the written product. From the Roughcuts page:

[Rough Cuts gives] access to an evolving PDF manuscript that you can read, download or print. Once you've purchased a Rough Cuts title, you will have a chance to shape the final product-you can send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors.

I don't know much about the publishing industry, but this seems a very smart response to encroachments on publishing from the web. It's a way to profit on time-sensitive content (not a bailiwick of print-publishing) and leverage a target-market that is used to being able to contribute its two cents. There's even a nice caveat emptor:

Rough Cuts titles live up to their name-they haven't been fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or formatted for print. In other words, they'll be very current, but they won't be pretty.

Coordinating Reading

Dr. B recently blogged about nifty print-your own bookmarks. What I like best about them is the inclusion of a Note feature. I frequently just use small pieces of blank paper so I can jot down notes while I read (provided I don't own the book in which case I write all over the thing). For fiction, I sometimes need reminders of character names (especially when I've only got time to pick up the book twice a week and have forgotten everyone). For non fiction, well, I jot down things to blog or look up or just think about. I don't know if I'll use these things (the note space is a little cramped), but they sure are better looking than my usual scrap-paper bookmarks.


[Image from Fabiosirna.com]

On writing together

Earlier this month the New York Times reviewed Aquamind's NoteShare. Fallows does a good job pinpointing the crux of the difficulty of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) -- simple interface usually means limited functionality while robustness usually means the need for an entire IT department. NoteShare sounds like a comfy balance. Looking forward to the PC version later this year. I'm getting tired of emailing documents and creating Yahoo groups for every conference panel proposal I'm on.

While asynchronous collaboration certainly works for most academic work, there are often times early in the process (identifying the unifying theme of several projects) and late in the process (close-editing of collaboratively-written documents) when synchronous collaboration would be nice.

I seldom sit down at a computer with another person, but in co-authoring an article with Jason Swarts when I was in Raleigh last year, we'd meet in a coffee shop with a laptop and pass it back and forth. Extreme writing, as it were. I found the process extremely rewarding. One of my main concerns about teaching composition is that by having students writing in isolation all the time, they can develop bad habits or at least never see other ways of writing that they themselves might benefit from. They develop a mere knack when learning a craft is the goal.

Happy Birthday Louis Braille

Google honors Louis Braille, the inventor of a system of writing for the blind and visually impaired based on raised dots. The braille system represents a wonderful early example of accessibility well ahead of its time. Here's a great image of someone reading braille. In looking at images of braille, I've noticed that there are different modes of presenting it. This image shows raised-dot-only text. This, however, shows ink on the dots which might help different readers. And this image shows traditional writing printed with the braille text. Finally, there are numerous devices which output digital text into braille. (You can see one in action in one of my favorite movies, Sneakers.)

[image from Google]

Einstein sez...

Thanks to Hetemeel's dynamic image generator.

Put the information where you need it (?) 1.4

Two new gadgets limn the outer limits of putting information wherever you maybe, might *possibly* need it.

First, the rsstroom reader -- a gadget that prints rss feeds onto your toilet paper. [via everyone and their mom]

Next, the weather toaster -- a gadget that prints the days weather on your toast. Well, actually, it toasts the bread and singes a graphic of the day's forecast. [via information aesthetics]


[image from The Register]

Calculator Help

C? CE? I can never remember what each one does. So when I need to clear the current calculation, I hit them both (a couple of times actually... you can never over-erase a current calculation as far as I'm concerned... same goes for crosswalk buttons, but that's a different story).

So today while calculating income from a the few little projects that I've patched together for the summer (ah, academia), I had to choose CE or C. On a hunch, I right mouse clicked over the buttons and was delighted to see, "What's this?" followed by an explanation.



The mouseover help not only tells me what each button does, but explains it in terms of other familiar computer functionality. (Well, who uses the ESC key? But it's a nice gesture.) Now I'll just have to tape that information on my manual calculator.

[Update: I'm not the only one on about minute levels of usability today.]

Wiki as Personal CMS?

This Ask Ars installment features a question about using a wiki as a personal content management system (the discussion offers myriad solutions). The writer, who lives in a house with four roommates, asks about using one to manage mundane tasks:

We’ve all decided that a wiki would be an efficient way to communicate information to everyone in the house. For example, when is the water bill due? Check the wiki. Who do we contact about the trash pickup which never seems to come? Check the wiki.

This life-hack question reminds me of Cheryl Geisler's research into the use of technologies for managing home-life (here and here). It's my home-life texts that I have the most trouble tracking (especially due to nearly annual moves). Electronic banking and bill-pay has cut down on the negative effects of this, but remember how complicated it can be with multiple roommates.

Strikethrough Text as Paralipsis

I’ve recently noticed the trend of using strikethrough text as a humorous device, as seen in this example from Stephen Bainbridge’s recent post about blogging during faculty meetings.

What started out as a useful way to update a document while leaving evidence of its original and new form became a device for ironic “correction”. Stephen Baker at Businessweek seems to think this is new, but as with most concepts and dramatic plots, the ancient Greeks came up with it first. It’s called paralipsis, meaning “to leave to one side”. Carolyn Miller once told me it was her favorite rhetorical trope, and I can see why. When used overtly, it can be wry. More often, it’s sneaky (as in, “I won’t be dragged in to discussing my opponent’s drinking problem.”).

But there’s precedence for print-based paralipsis too. The Hacker’s Dictionary describes pre-strikethrough “writing under erasure” thus:

There is also an accepted convention for ‘writing under erasure’; the text>

Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.

reads roughly as “Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...”, with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string ‘^H’. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text). Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style

I also see similarity to a comedic technique I’ve seen two other places: Kevin Nealon’s SNL character Mr. Subliminal, who would make a statement and quickly interject its (usually politically incorrect) translation, sotto voce. Today, we can see the same effect on Comedy Central’s new Colbert Report in my favorite segment “The Word”, in which the politically incorrect translation appears beside Colbert. [Edit: On re-reading, I think this technique is merely similar to paralipsis... I might have to coin a new trope!]

Mostly, I see print-paralipsis as yet another clever playfulness with language that seems typical of hackers specifically and technophiles more generally. Clever word-play and retoolings of language and use is in their nature.