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NYPL Apps & Games: Making “Extraordinary Futures”?

Jun 27, ’11 12:50 AM

[There was a bug somewhere in here, so I had to delete and repost.]

Saturday’s New York Times included an article by Joshua Brustein on the New York Public Library’s recent tech developments — specifically, its new Biblion “boundless library” (a reader/media viewer app that’s received mixed reviews, but which I’m still eager to play around with); its partnership with Bibliocommons to create a more interactive online catalogue; and its “Find the Future: The Game,” created by Jane McGonigal and partners for the centennial celebrations. Brustein isn’t crazy about Biblion, but he’s keen on the game:

I had more fun with the library’s other new app, a smartphone scavenger hunt called Find the Future. The game accompanies an exhibition by the same name that runs through December at the library’s headquarters, on Fifth Avenue.

The game requires players to seek out various objects or books in the library, and awards points when you snap a photograph of the accompanying Quick Response code, readable by phone cameras. The app takes several moments to process these points, trying to get users to spend some time with the objects rather than running wildly through the building.

It worked for me. I lost an hour snapping photographs of things like Charles Dickens’s cat-claw letter opener and a draft of the Declaration of Independence, and still made it only about halfway through the first of the game’s nine chapters.

Whether or not “it worked” depends on what you regard as the game’s goal. Is it enough to convince (onsite or online) visitors to “spend some time” with the objects and snap some photos? McGonical seems to have set her sights much higher. I wrote about this back during the centennial weekend, on May 22. I’m all for the NYPL — and all libraries — getting involved in tech and software development in an attempt to attract new users, highlight underused collections, help users access and use their collections in new ways, etc. I say this because I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon when I admit that I have serious doubts that the game did, or can, live up to the promises McGonigal made for it. Don’t get me wrong: I think gaming is a great way to get people interested and involved in libraries — but I think we have to be realistic about what such projects can accomplish. I would’ve much rather heard the library’s take on the game’s function than McGonigal’s overblown rhetoric.

Here’s what I wrote last month, with some minor edits:

*     *     *     *     *

via http://bit.ly/igByG9

…Find the Future: The Game, meanwhile, encourages decontextualization of a different sort. This game, commissioned for the centennial and created by Jane McGonigal, Natron Baxter and Playmatics, “brings visitors to the Library together with players around the world to tap into the creative power of the Library’s collections” (via About). The game began on May 20, when 500 gamers (aged 18 and up) were invited to an all-night “lock-in” during which they “explore[d] the building’s 70 miles of stacks, and, using laptops and smartphones, follow[ed] clues to such treasures as the Library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand” (via NYPL). Upon finding each object, players were prompted to write an “artifact story,” a “short-personal essay inspired by their quest.” These essays were then gathered into a book — “a collection of 100 ways to make history and change the future” — that will be added to the library’s collection.


[Added June 26, 2011]

The next day, the game was opened up to the rest of the world. Anyone could access Find the Future: The Game online to pursue their own “quests” for library artifacts, write their own narratives, and collect “artifact powers.”

If only real-world research were this exciting! If only one could “find the wisdom to teach and inspire others — and the perspective to understand the world around you” by simply clicking a link!

I tried it myself. My first “artifact” choice was “Writing on the Wall,” a John Milton quotation inscribed above the doorway to the Rose Reading Room: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” Through an automatically advancing slideshow, I learned that Milton “made history by turning the fall of man into an epic poem,” that he is “one of the great poets of the English language,” that he is most famous for writing (while blind) “Paradise Lost,” and that the quotation is drawn from Areopagitica, which Milton write in 1644, “opposing censorship.” Armed with this insight, I’m then prompted to write my own artifact story:

The quote above the entrance to the Rose Reading Room has inspired many generations of visitors with words that are impossible to forget once you’ve read them. These people went on to become famous inventors, artists and leaders who changed the world. What would you say to inspire the next hundred years’ visitors? Imagine The NYPL has asked YOU to update this quote. They will put YOUR new saying over the entrance for the next 100 years. Write your own quote that you want to plant in the minds of millions of people.

That’s it? Armed with a few superficial facts about Milton I’m now prepared to inspire “the next hundred years’ visitors”? Do I really have enough context to be charged with such a tremendous responsibility?

My choice of inscription: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards” – Huxley

The game, McGonigal says, is “designed to empower players to find inspiration for their own extraordinary futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and personal objects of people who made an extraordinary difference in the past.” What does it mean to come “face-to-face” with these artifacts? The lucky 500 who played on-site on May 20 were able to encounter the original artifacts (although I imagine some were more busy snapping QR codes than inspecting the artifacts they marked) — but are those brief, superficial encounters sufficient to convey the “extraordinary difference[s]” these people made in the past? Is it enough for me to know that the Gutenberg Bible was the first book to be printed on a movable type printing press; that “its publication in 1455 is considered by many to be the single most important innovation of the last millennium” (why?); that before the press, books were copied by hand or by using woodcut letters; that Gutenberg devised a system using metal letters that could be quickly rearranged and printed using specially-mixed inks; that there are fewer than 50 known copies of the Gutenberg Bible in existence, and that the NYPL has two of them? Do these facts then qualify me to write something that “everyone on Earth” can read?

The Gutenberg Bible marked the start of the printing revolution, in which messages could be spread to millions worldwide through the mass production of printed books. Now modern technology allows us to message thousands of people instantaneously. New advances could bring even more widespread communication. If you could write something that everyone on the planet could read, what would it be? Write a message that could be read by everyone on Earth.

The game shifts abruptly from an historical to a contemporary context, without explaining how to responsibly make that temporal transition. It shifts equally abruptly from a focus on the artifact to an egocentric focus. “How would you like to shape the future?” The prompts for these “artifact stories” barely reference the artifacts’ historical context. They barely address the social responsibilities inherent in, or methods required for, making such consequential decisions. [Added June 26:] This is particularly problematic because the game — this one and others that will inevitably be developed in emulation — have the potential to appeal to audiences far outside the pilot test’s 18+ gamer demographic. How, for instance, will school-aged children deal with these important epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues — or how will they know that such issues exist if no one poses the difficult questions to them?

“Like every game I make,” McGonigal says,” Find the Future: The Game” has one goal: to turn players into superempowered, hopeful individuals with real skills and ideas to help them change the world.” I can see how this game cultivates hope and empowerment: it’s fun, you win points, you acquire super-human cognitive powers and affective capacities by simply clicking on links, your opinion is sought on matters of grave importance, etc. But in what context is this play taking place? What skills are being developed? What ideas, aside from cursory factual information (how can you claim that the Gutenberg Bible is the “single most important innovation of the last millennium” without explaining why?!), are being circulated here?

If gaming is the future of education, as many have claimed, I still need to be convinced that gaming provides sufficient “context” for all those skills and ideas it’s purporting to cultivate. I’m still not sure that gaming is the appropriate model for “help[ing] people change the world” — when so much world-changing work isn’t fun, doesn’t win you any points or super-powers, and carries responsibilities that a game simply can’t simulate. I’m not doubting gaming’s potential; I just think we have to be realistic about when it’s an appropriate tool and what it can accomplish.

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NYPL @ 100 Part 2: Speaking of Context… Shuffle + Find the Future: The Game

May 22, ’11 8:53 PM

The main event for me in this weekend’s NYPL centennial celebrations, was Shuffle, a performance piece staged in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room. A collaboration between theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service, statistician Mark Hansen, and artist Ben Rubin, the work lived up to its name on multiple levels: it shuffled texts, temporalities, spatialities, genres, etc.

Shuffle. Photo: Ariana Smart Truman - Via NYPL: http://bit.ly/lJgGfO

The script was generated algorithmically, in real-time, by pulling from the scripts of three previous ERS productions — Gatz, The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), and The Select (The Sun Also Rises) – and the literary texts that inspired them. The performers accessed the ever-evolving script via iPhones tucked into print copies of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway’s books. All the while, the group, dressed in their librarians’ best, shuffled throughout the periodicals room, champagne flutes in hand. The pace and placement of their actions seemed to vary in relation to the speed of the script: small groups might congregate and chat leisurely at the circulation desk, while a colleague would bolt from one end of the room to the other, in response to some apparent reference emergency. Others performed the signature actions of librarians: one might rifle through a card catalogue, extracting and organizing slips of paper with no apparent rhyme or reason; another might peck away at a typewriter; while still another might scramble up and down the stairs while her colleagues amble or dart through the stacks. The audience, meanwhile, was free to wander around the room, watch the script unfurl on monitors positioned at each of the library tables, peruse print-outs listing a selection of the text snippets fed through the algorithm, and come and go at will. While I was there, the algorithm “selected” a long string of phrases comparing two male figures — “he was [a], while he was [b]“; two babies in strollers, who happened to be conveniently located next to the actor algorithmically chosen to read this section, were subject to a prolonged cataloguing of their virtues and vices.

In short, the multiple overlapping contexts of this performance were constantly shuffled.  “The text – arranged into new strings of sentences and phrases – creates a compelling look at literature that we thought we knew,” explained director John Collins. What’s more, “Shuffle [blurs] the boundaries of performance space, private, and public space,” Collins adds, “and [is] an exciting way to experience the beautiful and majestic building.” By removing and remixing familiar codes and contexts, Shuffle shifted our engagement with these classic texts and spaces and genres of performance. This was a productive decontextualization.

via http://bit.ly/igByG9

Find the Future: The Game, meanwhile, encourages decontextualization of a different sort. This game, commissioned for the centennial and created by Jane McGonigal, Natron Baxter and Playmatics, “brings visitors to the Library together with players around the world to tap into the creative power of the Library’s collections” (via About). The game began on May 20, when 500 gamers (aged 18 and up) were invited to an all-night “lock-in” during which they “explore[d] the building’s 70 miles of stacks, and, using laptops and smartphones, follow[ed] clues to such treasures as the Library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand” (via NYPL). Upon finding each object, players were prompted to write an “artifact story,” a “short-personal essay inspired by their quest.” These essays were then gathered into a book — “a collection of 100 ways to make history and change the future” — that will be added to the library’s collection.


[Added June 26, 2011]

The next day, the game was opened up to the rest of the world. Anyone could access Find the Future: The Game online to pursue their own “quests” for library artifacts, write their own narratives, and collect “artifact powers.”

If only real-world research were this exciting! If only one could “find the wisdom to teach and inspire others — and the perspective to understand the world around you” by simply clicking a link!

I tried it myself. My first “artifact” choice was “Writing on the Wall,” a John Milton quotation inscribed above the doorway to the Rose Reading Room: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” Through an automatically advancing slideshow, I learned that Milton “made history by turning the fall of man into an epic poem,” that he is “one of the great poets of the English language,” that he is most famous for writing (while blind) “Paradise Lost,” and that the quotation is drawn from Areopagitica, which Milton write in 1644, “opposing censorship.” Armed with this insight, I’m then prompted to write my own artifact story:

The quote above the entrance to the Rose Reading Room has inspired many generations of visitors with words that are impossible to forget once you’ve read them. These people went on to become famous inventors, artists and leaders who changed the world. What would you say to inspire the next hundred years’ visitors? Imagine The NYPL has asked YOU to update this quote. They will put YOUR new saying over the entrance for the next 100 years. Write your own quote that you want to plant in the minds of millions of people.

That’s it? Armed with a few superficial facts about Milton I’m now prepared to inspire “the next hundred years’ visitors”? Do I really have enough context to be charged with such a tremendous responsibility?

My choice of inscription: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards” – Huxley

The game, McGonigal says, is “designed to empower players to find inspiration for their own extraordinary futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and personal objects of people who made an extraordinary difference in the past.” What does it mean to come “face-to-face” with these artifacts? The lucky 500 who played on-site on May 20 were able to encounter the original artifacts (although I imagine they were more busy photographing QR codes than inspecting the artifacts they marked) — but are those brief, superficial encounters sufficient to convey the “extraordinary difference[s]” these people made in the past? Is it enough for me to know that the Gutenberg Bible was the first book to be printed on a movable type printing press; that “its publication in 1455 is considered by many to be the single most important innovation of the last millennium” (why?); that before the press, books were copied by hand or by using woodcut letters; that Gutenberg devised a system using metal letters that could be quickly rearranged and printed using specially-mixed inks; that there are fewer than 50 known copies of the Gutenberg Bible in existence, and that the NYPL has two of them? Do these facts then qualify me to write something that “everyone on Earth” can read?

The Gutenberg Bible marked the start of the printing revolution, in which messages could be spread to millions worldwide through the mass production of printed books. Now modern technology allows us to message thousands of people instantaneously. New advances could bring even more widespread communication. If you could write something that everyone on the planet could read, what would it be? Write a message that could be read by everyone on Earth.

The game shifts abruptly from an historical to a contemporary context, without explaining how to responsibly make that temporal transition. It shifts equally abruptly from a focus on the artifact to an egocentric focus. “How would you like to shape the future?” The prompts for these “artifact stories” barely reference the artifacts’ historical context. They barely address the social responsibilities inherent in, or methods required for, making such consequential decisions.

“Like every game I make,” McGonigal says,” Find the Future: The Game” has one goal: to turn players into superempowered, hopeful individuals with real skills and ideas to help them change the world.” I can see how this game cultivates hope and empowerment: it’s fun, you win points, you acquire super-human cognitive powers and affective capacities by simply clicking on links, your opinion is sought on matters of grave importance, etc. But in what context is this play taking place? What skills are being developed? What ideas, aside from cursory factual information (how can you claim that the Gutenberg Bible is the “single most important innovation of the last millennium” without explaining why?), are being circulated here?

If gaming is the future of education, as many have claimed, I have yet to be convinced that gaming provides sufficient “context” for all those skills and ideas it’s purporting to cultivate. I’m still not sure that gaming is the appropriate model for “help[ing] people change the world” — when so much world-changing work isn’t fun, doesn’t win you any points or super-powers, and carries responsibilities that a game simply can’t simulate.

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The History of Universality, Technological Determinism, and Other Deep Thoughts

Mar 27, ’11 7:49 PM

This weekend I attended the “Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality” conference at Columbia. Now, when I say “attended,” I mean to say that I was physically present, in room 501 Schermerhorn Hall, for most of the sessions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Jonathan Crary’s keynote on Thursday evening. I also missed Joseph Vogl’s keynote on Friday, because I went downtown for Diana Taylor’s keynote at the Memory conference at The New School. And I just couldn’t make Saturday morning happen, so, sadly, I missed Erhard Schüttpelz, Weihong Bao, and Marilyn Ivy. Even though I was bodily present for all the other panels, I can’t say that I was mentally all there. As I explained a few weeks ago, in regard to my experience at SCMS, there’s a limit to my concentration — particularly when the object of concentration is a 45-minute scholarly presentation…or two or three in succession. I found myself much more engaged with the first presenter on each panel, and a little less attentive to the second and third presenters. Regardless of the order of presentation, however, several of the presentations seemed to me much better suited for the page than the ear (a valid observation at a conference on epistemology and materiality, I’d say!); I would’ve much preferred to read these papers, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to do so at some point.

Those presentations that most stuck with me were Adrian Johns’ “Unpacking the Universal Library: The Morals of Massive Research Collections, 1810-2010″ and John Durham Peters’s “Two Cheers for Technological Determinism.” I was also inspired by Jimena Canales’s “A Tenth of a Second”; her book has been on my “wish list” for a while, and I’ve finally decided to order it. And Mary Ann Doane’s “Lost Time: Technologies of the Gap” reinforced my admiration for her earlier writings on time, indexicality, and cinema.

Job Koelewijn's Mobius bookshelf via BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/hv9ipz

Johns’s presentation was particularly satisfying because he essentially covered, in 30 minutes, much of the same terrain we’re covering in my “Libraries, Archives & Databases” graduate seminar this semester; it served as a welcome reassurance that I did a pretty good job of constructing that syllabus! He called for a historicization of the concept of universality. The dream of the universal library of course has a long history — but various epochs’ notions of universality are tied to their distinctive understanding of how books work; of the economics of book production, distribution, and consumption; of how reading takes place (i.e., what does it mean that, today, books are scanned not to be read by people, but to be read by machines?); of how aspirations toward “placeless” information are perhaps paradoxically tied to the construction of library places.

The Q&A after the presentations, led by Ben Kafka, raised interesting questions regarding the significance of ordering and classifying library materials; these are not only epistemological concerns, but also moral ones. And what of the new librarian for the digital library? Is she a human or an inanimate aggregator? According to Johns, librarians advocate for themselves as professionals who perform important skills-based, critical educational roles. We’d all agree that this should be the case — that librarians should serve as “information mediators,” and patrons should rely on them as such — but will this be the case? Or will patrons simply turn to aggregators whose algorithms for selection we don’t understand? These questions of “library morality” have long been woven into library history; just look at the Progressive Era library and its aspiration to serve as an instrument of uplift. How the library aspired to function, and how patrons used it, are two separate issues.

As a closeted McLuhan sympathizer, I was especially psyched by Peters’s “Two Cheers” polemic. Peters traced the history of “technological determinism” — particularly its use as an insult (calling someone a technological determinist, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young says, is akin to saying he likes to strangle puppies!) or its invocation as a preemptive disclaimer (“Of course I do not mean to lapse here into technological determinism!”). He traces the concept through Thorstein Veblen’s use of the German technik (see also this), to 20s and 30s debates about economic history, to Lucian Febvre, to Mumford’s technic, to McLuhan, to SCOT and actor-network theory. Peters argues that fear of technological determinism rests in part on a “suspicious subject/object distinction,” a failure to recognize that human are “always-already technical beings.” We often fail to realize that “to say that technology creates possibilities is not to say that it causes them.” Fear of technological determinism “hinders big thoughts.” Media studies is necessarily interested in media shape, form, delivery, etc., and to resist exploring and arguing for these factors’ potential roles in influencing social change or shaping history, is to “giv[e] up critique.”

An immensely inspiring talk.

Redeeming McLuhan?

 

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We’ve Got the Archive Fever… Achoo!

Mar 26, ’11 2:32 AM

Awww! via Aureusbay on Flickr: http://bit.ly/fOX2Ih

My plan was to try to bounce between three great conferences happening in the city this weekend: the Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality conference at Columbia, the Memory conference at The New School, and the Mapping New Media symposium at the Bard Graduate Center. Alas, I missed the mapping symposium (thanks to the wonderful Tanya Toft for generously sharing her notes with me!), which left me to spend two days thinking about universal libraries, archives, drawings, paperwork, medium-specificity, seriality, temporality, memory, preservation, epistemology, materiality, and myriad related “ities.” What a luxury! It’s rare that I can spend a whole day — let alone two — thinking about the ideas that most captivate me. Still, I must admit: all that archive fever is enough to give one an archive headache! (groan)

But wait: it’s actually such references to “archive fever” that trigger a slight uneasiness. Over the past couple years I’ve noticed that a lot of people are appropriating Derrida’s phrase to refer to a supposed infatuation with archiving — a passion for assembling and sorting and storing; a compulsion to do things like organize houseplants in retired card catalogues (which I’d totally do, by the way, if I had a card catalogue sitting around); a tendency to refer to our hard drives and junk drawers as “archives.”  ”We’re cuckoo for collecting!”

But that’s not what “archive fever” is about, really.

via pcorreia on Flickr: http://bit.ly/eC2Z2o

 

Derrida’s lecture is titled Mal d’archive, which, Carolyn Steedman argues, would be much more appropriately translated as trouble…, misfortune…, pain…, hurt…, sickness…, wrong…, sin…, badness…, or evil of the archive, rather than the “faintly comic ‘fever’ of the English translation.”[1] But even if that off-the-mark title translation escapes us, Derrida’s description of the mal d’archive in the book’s Exergue should clue us in to the fact that this mal isn’t some cutesy fad: it’s an “irrepressible desire to return to the origin” — one linked as much to the pleasure principle [2] as it is to the death drive.

Not so cute. I’m not cuckoo for that.

X

[1] Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust” The American Historical Review 106:4 (October 2001): 1159-1180.

[2] Side note: principle/principal are homophones that lend themselves to funny mix-ups. Consider, for instance, what a Pleasure Principal would be. I bet that’d be a popular job :-)

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Networked Libraries

Mar 18, ’11 2:54 PM

via wetheim on flickr: http://bit.ly/eAkUlr

The New School is part of a consortium of libraries that includes NYU, Cooper Union, the New York Historical Society, and a few other institutions. The contract forming this consortium is occasionally renegotiated — and when that happens I often wonder how people are talking about divisions of labor. How do they divvy up the responsibilities to build particular collections, to provide services to one another’s faculty and students, and to provide all those essential back-of-house services?

Given the number of great libraries in New York — and the fact that all of them, public and academic alike, are facing serious budgetary issues and demands to continually prove their relevance to the powers that be (whether the taxpaying public, city officials, university administration, etc.) — I’ve occasionally wondered when something like this would come along:

“The New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia University and New York University—three renowned research institutions all on the island of Manhattan—have launched an initiative to expand collections and better serve their users.

The collaboration, dubbed the Manhattan Research Library Initiative, or MaRLI, will help the institutions increase access to research collections, increase use of specialized collections, and stretch collection dollars for covering research resources.

The institutions will coordinate their research collecting, eliminating overlap of specialized materials and identifying opportunities for shared collecting.  They will be able to do so by making their collections mutually available to researchers.”

via NYPL Press Release, 3/17/2011

As long as, collectively, they continue to offer multiple access points — with diverse services that meet the needs of their different user populations, I think this makes total sense. Together, the three major-partner institutions, and their secondary partners (of which The New School is one), can offer an amazingly extensive collection, with little wasted on unnecessary duplication. They can save their time, money, and effort for providing excellent service, and for doing all the other super-important things that libraries do that go beyond building a collection and providing access to it.

And checking books out of the 42nd Street Library? (I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to call it the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — although I certainly do thank Mr. Schwarzman for his generosity!) Dude, that’s huge!

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Archive This!

Jan 21, ’11 1:44 AM

via Fillip: http://bit.ly/bDo1UN

After endless tinkering with readings and assignments, a hard-drive crash, a five-day wait for a new drive, four Time Capsule restorations, countless Javascript errors, hours upon hours on the phone with Apple Care — and still no resolution! — I’ve managed to complete what I think is a rather lovely syllabus for Libraries, Archives, and Databases. This could be the final version — although, given my tendency toward obsessive niggling, I imagine I’ll make a few final changes.

Check out the website, too!

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Reading Rooms Are All the Rage

Jan 11, ’11 8:21 PM

e-flux

Simultaneously working on my “Libraries” syllabus, reviewing proofs for my article on the Woodberry Poetry Room, and prepping to revise for publication an article about the materiality of architectural publishing forms, I was reminded again of how hot reading rooms/ad-hoc libraries seem to be.

Martha Rosler created one with e-flux. Then e-flux did it again, seemingly sans Martha. Dexter Sinister has had an “occasional bookstore” in their basement space on Ludlow Street, and then they made a reading room with Shannon Ebner in Berlin. Speaking of Germans: common room created a reading room at the Goethe-Institut’s Spring Street space in NY. Ooga Booga did the same for the Swiss Institute. Bidoun’s mobile library is traveling the world; it stopped off at The New Museum for a while last fall. Proteus Gowanus regards itself a “gallery and reading room.” Coincidentally, they’ve got the Reanimation Library right next door — along with Cabinet, which built its National Library out in the desert a few years ago. Cabinet’s Canadian kindred spirit, Fillip, has a reading room (they even have an invisible reading room — oooh!), and they brought an AAAARG branch to this year’s NY Art Book Fair (speaking of which: the Reanimation Library and Ooga Booga both participated on an Experimental Libraries panel at the conference; both Andrew Piper and I were there). The Van Alen Institute also has a reading room, and now they’re creating a pop-up bookstore at street-level in their building. The CCA‘s into the whole pop-up thing, too.

I’m totally fine with this trend.

Ebner / Dexter Sinister Reading Room

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By George, I Think I’ve Got It!

Jan 11, ’11 5:43 AM

This guy provides "book solutions."

Oh, that guy? He’s Thatcher Wine. He helps people create libraries full of books they’ll never read.

But enough about him! I’ve finally managed to pull together a full draft of my “Libraries, Archives, & Databases” syllabus! I”m still weighing some reading options, and I have yet to nail down the assignments — but at least I’ve got all 15 weeks, and two field trips, mapped out. I can’t even begin to tell you how long it took me to get to this point.

If you’re enrolled in the class, I welcome your feedback. Even if you’re not enrolled in the class, I’d love to hear your comments.

Comments (4)

Getting Organized

Jan 10, ’11 5:28 AM

I updated my WordPress theme last week and discovered that it has a lot of great new functions on the back-end — but that the update introduced a few blips on the front-end. That pesky “search” box is hanging out under “links” and “zotero” up top, and the second of my two sidebars doesn’t seem to want to be beside the first one. I hope we’ll get these issues fixed soon.

In other news: after six solid weeks of reading (and rereading tons of material I read a decade ago, while researching my book), and one solid week of playing around with various syllabus configurations, I’m happy to say that I think I’ve nearly finalized the first five weeks of my 15-week Libraries, Archives & Databases class. The weeks that remain will be dedicated to archives (3 weeks); databases (3 weeks); a design activity; a “flex week,” where we tie together loose ends and investigate students’ interests; and student presentations. I’ve got all the material for those final 10 classes; my problem is that I’ve got too much great stuff to choose from. Over the next few days I’ll be whittling away at my list of potential readings, screenings, and field trips.

I’ll post below what I’ve got so far, and within the week I hope to post the rest. Things are starting to take shape over at the new course website, too.

JANUARY 25: Introductions + Historicizing Information Overload

X

FEBRUARY 1: Ordering Media’s “Innumerable Species”
[will need to cut some of the following]

  • Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books [1970]1994): xv-xxiv.
  • Georges Perec, “Think/Classify” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1997): 188-205.
  • Roy Boyne, “Classification” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 21-30.
  • G. G. Chowdhury & Sundatta Chowdhury, “Organizing Information: What It Means,” “Ontology” & “Information Organization: Issues and Trends” In Organizing Information: From the Shelf to the Web (London: Facet Publishing, 2007): 1-15, 172-85, 213-24.
  • Clay Shirky, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” Shirky.com (2005).
  • Excerpts from David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Holt, 2008).
  • Excerpts from Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

X

LIBRARIES

FEBRUARY 8: Libraries: From Ur to Madison Ave.
Field Trip: Morgan Library, 225 Madison Ave @ 36th Street – to be confirmed

  • “Library” Oxford English Dictionary (2010).
  • Matthew Battles, Excerpts from “Burning Alexandria, “ “The House of Wisdom” & “Books for All” In Library: An Unquiet History (New York: W.W. Norton 2004): 22-81, 117-155.
  • Skim Library Bureau, A Handbook of Library and Office Fittings and Supplies (Library Bureau, 1891).
  • Charles E. Pierce, Jr., “Private to Public: Opening Mr. Morgan’s Library to All” In Paul Spencer Byard, et. al., Eds., The Making of the Morgan: From Charles McKim to Renzo Piano (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008): 21-32 or Paul Spencer Byard, “Becoming the Morgan Library & Museum: A Historical Interpretation” In Paul Spencer Byard, et. al., Eds., The Making of the Morgan: From Charles McKim to Renzo Piano (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008): 109+.
  • The Morgan Library & Museum, “McKim Building Restoration.”
  • Holland Cotter, “Let There Be Light, and Elegance” New York Times (28 October 2010).

FEBRUARY 15: Idiosyncratic Libraries

  • Georges Perec, “Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1997): 148-55.

The Warburg Library

  • The Warburg Institute Library and Classification Scheme.
  • Excerpts from Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2007) or Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, “On the Warburg Humanities Library,” Trans. Mark Walz, In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 253-267 or Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Ed. & Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
  • Anthony Grafton & Jeffrey Hamburger, “Save the Warburg Library!” New York Review of Books Blog (1 September 2010).

The Prelinger Library

  • Megan Shaw Prelinger, “To Build a Library” Bad Subjects 73 (April 2005).
  • Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “A World in Three Aisles” Harper’s (May 2007).

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Saturday, February 19: Optional – but highly recommended! – field trip to the Reanimation Library
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FEBRUARY 22: The Future Library
Screen In-Class: Holmes Films, The Librarian, 1947; Alain Resnais, Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 1956

  • Anthony Grafton, “Future Reading” The New Yorker (5 November 2007).
  • Anna Klingmann, “Datascapes: Libraries as Information Landscapes,” In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 406-23.
  • Robert Darnton, “Can We Create a National Digital Library?” The New York Review of Books (28 October 2010).
  • Geoff Manaugh, “The Atomized Library” BLDGBLOG (11 February 2010).
  • Netherlands Architecture Institute & Netherlands Public Library Association, “Architecture of Knowledge” [video]

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And here’s all the stuff I’ve cut from the assigned readings, but which I’ll probably try to incorporate into my presentation or the class discussion:

Week 2: Barbara Fisher, “The Dewey Dilemma” Library Journal (1 October 2009); Elaine Svenonius, “Information Organization” + “Bibliographic Languages” In The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Cambridge, MA: 2000): 1-14, 53-66; Couze Venn, “The Collection” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 35-40.

Week 3: Jan Assman, “Libraries in the Ancient World – with Special Reference to Ancient Egypt,” Trans. Robin Benson, In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 51-67; Thomas Augst & Kenneth Carpenter, Eds., Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Thomas Augst & Wayne E. Wiegand, Eds., Libraries as Agencies of Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale 2001); Roger Chartier, “Libraries Without Walls” Representations 42 (Spring 1993); Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Space” [on Diderot’s Encyclopedie] The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 81-89; Sean Cubitt, “Library” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 581-606; Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Vintage, 1999); Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria” October 100 (Spring 2002): 133-153; Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (New York: Continuum, 1999); Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Myth” [Tower of Babel & Library of Alexandria] The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 6-34; Shannon Mattern, Morgan Library Notes; Konstantinos Sp. Staikos, The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2000).

Week 4: Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Order” The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 36-63; Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, “Every Shot, Every Episode”; Chris Cobb’s “There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World” color classification]; PRELINGER: Melanie Feinberg, “Classificationist as Author: The Case of the Prelinger Library” [unpublished manuscript]; Megan Shaw Prelinger, “On the Organization of the Prelinger Library”: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~alysons/LibraryOrg.html; Marie L. Radford, Jessica Lingel & Gary R. Radford, “Alternative Libraries as Heterotopias: Challenging Conventional Constructs” Paper presented at Library Research Seminar V, University of Maryland, College Park, October 6-9, 2010; WARBURG: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” In Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006): 85-102; Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Mind” [Warburg Library] The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 198-212; “Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,” Frieze 80 (January-Feburary 2004).

Week 5: Robert Darnton, “The Library in the New Age” The New York Review of Books (12 June 2008) [history of writing, books; inherent instability of texts; unreliable news; editions of canonical texts; library as citadel of learning;  incompleteness of record created by Google Books; shore up the library]; Robert, Darnton, “The Library: Three Jeremiads” The New York Review of Books (23 November 2010): [cost of journals; “settlement” btw Google Books and academic library partners; proposal for National Digital Library]; Holmes Films, The Librarian, 1947

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A Little Mental Mastication at Lunchtime This Wednesday

Nov 29, ’10 2:34 PM

This coming Wednesday Robert Kirkbride will be hosting a little presentation/conversation to celebrate the launch of the “Geometries of Rhetoric” special issue of Nexus Network Journal. I’ve been asked to talk a bit about my article on the Phillips Exeter library at 40 — its competing geometries of print and networked media, and their implications for teaching and learning and institutional identity. And Robert will tell us about the issue’s other contributions, most of which are way cooler than mine.

We’re meeting in the”glass corner” on the 2nd floor at 25 East 13th Street at noon.

Geometries:

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