Caveat Lector

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lorcan Dempsey did:

I think we have a very dreary ‘published’ literature. We have a set of niche publications, many of little sustained interest. The literature is a citation farm for those involved in formal research activity, and in the US, a necessary career convenience for those librarians who work within the tenure system.

At last winter’s London presentation, I made the point at some length that communication is no longer the central purpose of the “scholarly communication” system; there are too many faster, easier ways to communicate. The central purposes of the scholarly communication system are marking territory (for authors and for disciplines) and lengthening CVs.

I’m glad to be out of the tenured-librarian rat race—not because I don’t have anything written to contribute to the profession, but because I don’t have to play CV-puffery games. Last year at this time, I was working on three-four written things at once. This year, I’m tying up one thing from last year and working on one other thing. (Okay, and a review… but reviews, I am discovering, don’t take me long. It helps when the book I’ve been handed is pure effluent, too. We don’t do technical reviews any more, I take it, Neal-Schuman? “XML is a language” on the very first page, sheesh.)

As for the literature… when I put together my syllabus for this fall’s course, I ended up with one book and two articles from “the literature.” (The book was Putting Content Online, because I think it kicks butt. The articles were on RFID. Couldn’t find anything suitable in the blogosphere. That probably says something about RFID’s future, but I’m not sure I should speculate as to what.) The rest is cobbled together from good tech sites, blogs, the tech-news site Ars Technica, and yes, Wikipedia.

Because our literature, it reeks, and we don’t read it anyway, so what’s the point?

Got my lab results back the other day. Thyroid checked out fine, so that wasn’t the source of the brain-fog I’ve been laboring under for the last some-while. What did turn up? Vitamin B12 deficiency.

Now, I should have thought of that myself; it’s hardly uncommon among vegetarians. But I didn’t, so I’m glad the doc did. Three days of supplements and I already feel more myself—made it through a six-hour meeting today without going all space-case once—though I have learned that I need to take the pill in the morning, because it acts like a pep-pill and causes me insomnia if I take it at night.

My heredity is catching up with me, in the form of a nasty cholesterol profile and borderline-high blood pressure. I am less than pleased about this, and I’ll do what I reasonably can, but hell’s bells, the family history I’m fighting is a regular Goliath.

On the whole, though, I’m only slightly broken, and I can live with that.

PRISM. Such a pretty acronym. Such a pity it looks to be a conglomeration of lying profitmongering scum.

Read Peter Suber’s rebuttal. Check out this reframing of the acronym. Recall the last effort along these lines. Then raise your voices with mine.

SCUM.

Edited to add: My excellent colleague kindly obliges with another translation.

David IMed me while I was at work yesterday, something he doesn’t ordinarily do, and when he does, it’s usually about trouble.

This time? Stray kitten in the back yard. He emailed me pictures of a sad little grey waif with big scratches on its forehead, a bald spot over one tawny-orange eye and immense elf-ears. It’s been raining for a solid week here (no joke; the bay is within half a foot of overrunning its normal banks).

Well, damn.

I’m calling it Mouser for the time being (after Leiber’s Gray Mouser, of course). Last night we were able to feed it and entice it up onto our back porch. This morning it came a few feet inside our bedroom, bribed by kitty treats. When we talk to it, it answers back in a piercing mew. Definitely not pettable yet… but we have hopes, at least of getting it to a vet to get its scratches seen to and its shots done.

We think Third Goth got scooped off the street and taken care of; I saw a “Found Cat” sign in the neighborhood that answered to his description. So now there is Mouser instead.

I forgot to mention that yesterday was our locale’s annual neighborhood yard sale, so David and I left Mouser a full bowl of food and walked around to see what was what. We came back with some books, a dinner-dish for Mouser, and a Tripitaka statue (”Tripitaka” or a variant thereof is a common nom de net of David’s).

We also discovered the Washington Hotel Coffee Room, which is an utterly charming little establishment at the back of a local knitting shop, with a lovely view of Monona Bay, even to a bird-spotting scope set up near the windows for the convenience of guests. David strongly recommends the apple juice.

On my way out, I spotted the MACSAC cookbook, which I’d heard good things about, and grabbed it at once. Vegetarian cookbooks I have in plenty, but most of them don’t heed seasonality, which is hard on a CSA subscriber. This one is designed for CSA subscribers, and should make my life easier.

Today Mouser learned the glories of fleece, as well as the art of attacking milk-jug-ring-on-a-string. Miraculously, he has decided we are allowed to pet him—when he’s in the mood. We caught him in the middle of one of our spiny backyard bushes, and he hissed when I reached in toward him. Half an hour later, though, he was stretching his scrawny little neck so I’d scratch his head harder, purring to wake the dead.

I accidentally left the bedroom door open while Mouser was inside. Didi wandered in and came nose-to-nose with Mouser. Miraculously again, neither of them hissed or growled or clawed or bit; they were both rather “wtf?” nonplussed until I shooed Didi back out and shut the door.

When she tells Dream, though, we’re in for trouble…