Caveat Lector

Peter Sefton got a mite huffy at me for my contention that Word-template-based scholarly-article production systems invariably fail when they meet the author.

I don’t make this stuff up just to be annoying. Honestly and truly, I don’t.

Seems everything old is new again at Extreme Markup 2007 too:

I went to see David Lee of Epocrates on getting content authored in MS Word into appropriate XML. The core of this talk was an extended lament on how authors insist on using Word; even if you provide specialized authoring tools, they compose in Word and then cut and paste, more or less incorrectly, into the specialized tool. Epocrates has tried a variety of strategies: Word styles (authors won’t use them), tagged sections (authors screw them up), form fields (plaintext only, so authors delete them and type in rich text instead). In the end, they adopted Word tables as the safest and least corruptible approach. A few Word macros provide useful validations, and when the document is complete, a Word 2003 macro rewrites it using Word 2003 XML (unless it is already in that format). I pointed out that the approach of having authors use Word and saving in plain text was also viable, leaving all markup to be added by automated downstream procssing; David said that design was too simple for the complex documents his authors were creating.

My contentions in a nutshell. Thank you, Mr. Lee and Mr. Cowan.

I will add that testing such tools on a small, highly-selected author population (as Mr. Sefton’s blog post indicates that he has done) leads to tools that work very well for a small, highly-selected population of authors—and fail utterly once they move beyond that population.

I do not. DO. NOT. Make this stuff up. Been there, done that, don’t even have the T-shirt any more.

What the heck is this? Seriously, what? Did somebody over at Castle Ariadne prick a finger on a spinning-wheel such that the entire editorial board fell asleep?

It’s abominably cutesy. I’m looking for Umbridge’s pink kittens gamboling on china, I truly am. Unless you’re either in the biz or a Ph.D-level subtext decipherer, it’s hard to find any actual content in it. I can’t imagine either of these people normally writes this way for a professional audience. So what gives? Why have they suddenly gone all Bulwer-Lytton-contest on us?

Because they’re scared, that’s why. There. I’ve blown everyone’s cover, including my own.

Look. The elephant in the closet is that institutional repositories are in trouble. They haven’t done what everybody thought they were going to do, which was attract lots of shiny happy faculty managing all their shiny happy peer-reviewed content such that we could finally tell big-pig publishers to take their ridiculous journal pricing and shove it somewhere painful.

It didn’t work, okay? And it shows no signs of tipping into a workable state. That’s a damn scary thing to say, if you’re a repository-rat. So I understand the sudden submergence in cutesy metaphor, I really do; it’s a subliminal distress signal for those in the know that doesn’t ring alarm bells elsewhere. It’s hard to be the kid in the crowd yelling about the emperor’s nudity; emperors execute people. I’m not happy at the notion of fingers of blame jabbing in my general direction, never mind my job evaporating. Perhaps self-indulgently, I don’t think the mess institutional repositories find themselves in is my fault!

But how are we going to make any progress if we don’t first acknowledge the problem, openly and publicly and with appropriate systems analysis and without obfuscatory metaphor? How?

This is why I am writing Roach Motel. Nobody else is. Everybody else is drawing gamboling pink china kittens.

From Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:

In contrast, all researchers, without exception, do want to make their publications P-OA, and the online infrastructure for publication-archiving (a worldwide interoperable network of OAI [1]-compliant Institutional Repositories [IRs][2]) already has all the requisite functionality for this.

Can I have some of what they’re smoking? Must be primo stuff.

I am tempted to rant, but I’m saving it for the Roach Motel article. Suffice to say my jaw dropped hard enough to take out some intervening floors. What world do these people live in that they can make this claim with a straight face? It ain’t my world, that’s for sure, lowly repository-rat that I am. Do they not even notice the bitterly bizarre irony of “incentivizing” a practice that everybody supposedly wants?

And how can they think that spreading bushwa like this helps anyone?

Right. Right. Not ranting. This is me not ranting. Back to the Roach Motel article now. Sheesh.

Summer gave way to a not-unwelcome taste of fall this weekend: cool, gray, rainy. I quite liked it. I like the occasional weekend when staying home and sacking out comfortably on the couch with a Goth or two is the only reasonable, logical thing to do.

Summer isn’t as varied on the bay as are spring and fall. That isn’t to say there aren’t nifty creatures to see: goslings and ducklings and young rabbits and muskrats growing up, swallows and goldfinches and noisy gulls. The pair of green herons is still hanging around, as is a belted kingfisher; they’re shy, though, so I don’t see them every time I go out. I’ve heard killdeer, too, but not managed to see one.

Down the street from where I live dwells a brown-point Siamese with bright blue eyes and oddly crinkled ears who has decided I’m a friend and will come out to meet me of an afternoon. Crinkle-ears has a blue-eyed, normal-eared, brown-point sibling, but sibling is not as forthcoming.

Amusing sequelae to walking to work: my right arm faces east in the morning as I walk north, and west in the afternoon as I walk south, so it has tanned several shades darker than my left arm, and freckled up near the shoulder to boot.

We’ve gotten used to the CSA, though I think we’ll have an easier time of it next year (and we’ll be re-upping, yes we will). I’ve barely stayed ahead of the bounty some weeks, but I’m learning, and I’ll be better prepared next year. I certainly can’t complain about variety or quality. What we’ve gotten has been outstanding. Last box’s watermelon was a dream, and the little canteloupe-y melons weren’t far behind. I dig the edamame we’ve had lately, too; perhaps over the winter I’ll have to start buying that from the little Oriental grocery.

The condo we rented in Fairfax had its admirable qualities, but performance in bad weather was not one of them. The wind used to find all sorts of hollow whatnots to howl noisily in, and one of our bedroom windows had a flat drip… drip… drip that was infuriating, especially at night. Our current apartment just lets the rain rattle kindly on the roof, as is right and proper.

I haven’t quite gotten over the thrill of being home again yet. I don’t mind that, not at all.

Affordances. The word you and you and some other people are looking for is “affordances.”

What’s an affordance? Well, try this on for size: “an aspect of an object which makes it obvious how the object is to be used.” Close enough, though virtual “objects” also have affordances. I tend to turn the word inside-out a little, Humpty-Dumpty fashion, using it to mean “properties of an object that lend themselves to particular uses.”

Opening up a can of ex-medievalist-fu here… very early in the history of the Western printing press, bookmakers discovered that printing had affordances that manuscript copying didn’t. Pages being identical across copies was the big kahuna: that allowed for innovations such as running heads and indexes. (Tables of contents already existed, but as you can imagine, they were a bit obnoxious to prepare on a manuscript and so weren’t exactly common. Most of the ones I’ve seen were chapter-level, rather than for the entire work.)

The reverse also obtained. Nobody illuminated print books; nobody could, just too many of them. Crude woodcuts became the order of the day instead, and even those were so expensive to produce that printers ripped them off from each other by tracing. (Oh, hush. No copyright then. And yet somehow creators still created… go figure.) Other manuscript commonplaces, such as glosses and marginalia, were difficult to impossible in the print-book world.

Tinkerers being tinkerers, however, printing added to its arsenal of tricks. More and better fonts. Processes that allowed for color. Large-sheet printing for maps and such. And as time passed, these tricks added up to a praxis that, while sharing many goals and practices with the copyist’s praxis, differed significantly and irrevocably from it. In a way, printers didn’t really start innovating until they emerged cautiously from under the manuscript’s long shadow.

And eventually we got printed books every bit as useful and beautiful as manuscripts.

So with ebooks, etexts, whatever you want to call ’em (pace Mark Lindner). The affordances are different, and we’re finding out what we can do that we couldn’t before. Current tools and processes are crude, and tied much too closely to the printed page.

Despite the bruising I took my first time through ebooks, I still very much believe the ebook trajectory has been and will continue to be similar. If that makes me a wild-eyed heretic preaching the downfall of the sacrosanct book—okay, I’ll cop to that. Outside of comics and graphic novels, I don’t know too many hand-letterers—and even in comics, a lot of creators are turning to electronic type.

I’m not scared. I’m not upset. I’m excited, and always have been. New affordances are fun, and so is working on analogues to the old affordances. That, that enjoyment, is why my kind get called wild-eyed heretics, you see. We’re not supposed to play with these things; we’re supposed to scorn them because they’re imperfect compared to their predecessors.

Well, duh. If the inquisitors can’t see why that’s both challenge and opportunity…

The Information Tomorrow anthology that includes my libraries-as-publishers essay has a splash page at last. Plus an ISBN and a price (yikes, really that much?!) and all that good stuff.

I don’t know what the other contributors wrote about (hey, Info Today, how about a TOC?), but I certainly do see names I’m interested in reading. I look forward to receiving a copy.

In other writing news, “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel” is slowly starting to look more like an article (you know, with an actual argument and flow of ideas and such) and less like a disjointed collection of random thoughts. I can tell this because now when I have one of those “oh, that’s something else I really need to write about” moments, I know right away where to put the paragraph stub for it.

It’s a hard article to write, I tell you what. Confronting some home truths about the frustrating, dysfunctional on-the-ground reality of running IRs means confronting some home truths about myself and the career choices I’ve made. I am definitely suffering through uncomfortable “oh, great, I’ve found myself another bloody windmill” moments. I’m still convinced, mind you, that open access is not a windmill—it’s viable, it’s necessary, and it will happen under various guises. Institutional repositories… well, the doubts I’ve had all along about ’em are only intensifying as I write.

It’s not all doom and gloom. I see ways forward, several of them. But the first step is cutting through the (peculiarly Statesian, for whatever reason) denial. If nothing else, “Roach Motel” ought to start some unhappy but necessary conversations among academic-library administrators, software developers, OA proponents, et cetera. And then maybe we can remember what progress looks like.

Both of the immediate supervisors I’ve had in libraries know about my blog. Neither of them has ever made the slightest move to call official work attention to it, and neither have I. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m gun-shy about this; if you check the early days of CavLec, it isn’t hard to find out why. I don’t generally recommend that everyone follow my example, but in this case, I do think everyone ought to at least think about it.

Sure, it’s possible to write a blog of sufficient quality to merit inclusion on a tenure report or annual evaluation. Especially in libraryland, though, that means putting a hefty muzzle on things. Don’t you dare write anything personal that someone else might get angry or squicked at. Don’t go too far outside the norm (and lest we forget, the blog-norm is gendered, racially weighted, heteronormative, ableist, fat-hating, class-bound, and a few other ugly things picked up from the society it derives from). And don’t have opinions on matters libraryish that differ too much from your boss’s. Asking for trouble, that.

And when you get in trouble, no one will defend you. You shoulda known better, mate. It’s the Internet, after all. Everybody knows that bosses are control freaks who’ll lower the boom at the first sign of trouble.

Go there if you want to. I sure wouldn’t.

But just to look at the other side of the glass for a moment, imagine you’re a library manager and you find out one of your reports does this really killer blog. Shouldn’t you bring it under the library fold? Good publicity, 2.0ishness, and all that?

No. No, you really shouldn’t. No matter how professional that blog is, it is a function of the librarian and not the library. (After all, you don’t get to keep the blog should your report leave your library, do you?) Treat it as you would any other publication by one of your reports. Reading it is totally kosher. Talking to your report about it at the water cooler is fine. If you regularly make note of your librarians’ professional activities, it’s probably all right to point out one or two posts that got quoted a lot in a meeting or a librarian-activity report (but I’d ask first, honestly I would). It’s fine to ask that person to talk about blogging tools, or to work on a duly-constituted library blog.

But your report’s blog is not your library’s blog. That simple. Makes life easier for your report, and gives you deniability in case your report pulls something stupid.

And for heaven’s sake use judgment. (I know, I know, asking a lot here.) A pseudonymous LiveJournal intentionally left uncrawled by searchbots isn’t the same as a wholly-owned domain running WordPress with a swanky template. If it looks personal, it probably is. Treat it as such.

Really, all this ought to be common sense, but I ran into a friend’s situation yesterday where it wasn’t, so I decided to spell it out. Without, thankfully, spelling it out in lolcat.

First there was ICE-RS, now there is Lemon8-XML.

I’ve asked to test both of them, and I’ll let y’all know what happens. I’m glad there’s more than one development effort going on; if the developers are as sensible as they seem to be, we’ll see some cross-fertilization, which can only be to the good.

Now, this is just not fair.

Back in the day, I used to get heinous nightmares before the start of every grad-school semester. Nothing outré about them, just the usual bit about a class on my schedule I don’t remember signing up for and don’t know what building it’s in and never went to and exams are in two weeks and I’m a dead duck.

Last night, two years safely out of the last graduate degree program I’ll ever be in, I dreamt that I suddenly realized I was supposed to be teaching a class I didn’t remember signing up for and didn’t know what building it was in and never went to and exams are in two weeks and oh $DEITY the poor students, how much do I suck for abandoning them!

Gah. I’m not nervous about teaching this class. I’m not. Stupid bloody subconscious is sulking like a two-year-old, that’s all.

Back in the day, CavLec was a nerve center for spine-tingling rants about markup and publishing workflows. (I think my favorite one is still this, perhaps because it’s less ranty, though for those who like rants this one’s good too.) Then I quit ranting about markup and publishing workflows in favor of all kinds of other fun things to rant about.

The circle does close, though. I left a shamefully snippy comment to this post about PDFs in repositories because snippy was the nicest I could manage, my eyes were rolling so hard. (I have pretty serious PDF-hater cred, but even I know PDF is way easier to deal with in workflows than HTML.) Then another blog post picked up my snippy comment, whereupon it winged its way to Peter Murray-Rust’s blog.

Ah, markup and publishing workflows. You are really only marginally better than no markup. Why? No tools. CavLec’s been ranting about “no tools” since 2002, folks, and there are still no tools.

There’s almost a tool, though, it appears. Peter Sefton is working on a project called ICE-RS, one of whose goals is to make such a tool.

I never, ever, ever rhapsodize over something like this before I get my hands on it. Ever. I’ve seen too many tools promise the moon and deliver a misshapen meteorite. But from what I can tell, it looks generally to be the right idea—word-processing templates that, if used properly, do the right thing. (The big caveat is “if used properly.” Authors do horrible things with word-processors. You really can’t imagine until you’ve seen it. Unless it sharply restricts the host program’s functionality, no template on this earth will get decent results from all or even most authors.) Plus, such templates tend to be designed by someone with all the design sense of an eight-year-old.

So we’ll see. But if it works as advertised, I’d use it—because I know how to use these things. Learned nearly a decade ago, working in a little typesetting house. Everything old, it is new again.

As for repositories and HTML—I always do website imports into the repository myself. Not only does that mean nobody (not even me) has to deal with DSpace’s nasty clicky-clicky file-at-a-time upload UI, it means I get a chance to fix links and grotty markup, something else I learned to do a decade ago.