Posted: December 6th, 2010 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Digital Humanities, Discovery, Technology | No Comments »
The latest NYT article on digital humanities was published over the weekend. (Here’s the first.) I like how the graphic for the frequency of “Christian” looks like a skyline filled with churches.
The full project is available online at victorianbooks.org, where the researchers have kindly made their data available open access.
Posted: May 28th, 2010 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Discovery, Machines, Technology | No Comments »
Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.
They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.
This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.
Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.
If it’s Amazon: what a business model! Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.
The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Art, Books, Digital Humanities, Discovery | No Comments »
Clicking a book links you to WorldCat, at which point you can request the title from ILL-- a nice touch from the non-lending library.
If you can’t get down to Marfa, TX (which, at some point in your life, you should), Donald Judd‘s library is now browseable online. Housed at the Chinati Foundation (hundreds of miles from Anywhere, TX) on some very Juddly shelves, the collection was meticulously recreated online for all to see.
Read an interview with the developers of this resource on ARTINFO.
Posted: April 30th, 2010 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Discovery, History | No Comments »
The Rosetta Project has full page/full color scans of children’s books published in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. A great source of imagery and illustration– with some adult titles as well.
Posted: April 27th, 2010 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Discovery, Technology | Tags: machines history periodicals | No Comments »
Preparing for my recent ETS Colloquium talk, I came across this letter to the editor of LIFE Magazine, in response to their September 10, 1945 reprint of Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think (with fantastic/terrifying illustrations). Both issues (9.10.45 & 10.1.45) are available via Google Books, and are well worth a look. I excerpt the letter here, though, to ensure that you read it:
Sirs:
The plan outlined by Dr. Bush of having a small camera akwardly strapped to the forehead is antiquated. I have experimented with a small camera built directly into the skull. The flesh and skin is scientifically grafted right up to, but not over, the lens. Removing upward of 38% of the brain matter gives ample space for the most advanced science of dry photography.
In Dr. Bush’s archaic plan he stated that “the cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man’s sleeve wihin easy reach of his fingers.” For releasing the shutter of our improved built-in forehead camera, we insert thin wire throug an old arm vein no longer needed on account of the substitution of a more scientific plastic vein. This up-to-date method not only operates the camera with greater speed, but eliminates the cumbersome and unsightly tube hung over the right ear in Dr. Bush’s method.
MATTHIAS KOOPS JR.
Chillicothe, Ohio
Posted: April 15th, 2009 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Creative Writing, Discovery, Poetry, Technology | No Comments »
I just noticed Amazon’s Statisctically Improbable Phrases feature when looking at the Amazon page for Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, a great handbook to understanding prosody. The improbable phrases for this book include: terminal trochee,
spondaic substitution, trisyllabic substitution, musical scansion, initial trochee, trochaic substitution, metrical contract, tetrameter quatrain, medial caesura, metrical norm, metrical variations, tetrameter couplets, syllabic meter, line integrity, stanzaic form, metrical regularity, sprung rhythm, metrical analysis, iambic feet, ballad stanza, pentameter line.
Seem pretty probably for me for a book about poetic forms, but in the grand scheme of things, I suppose not so probable.
I noticed the URL structure of these pages allows users to create lists of their own improbable phrases and instantly get a list of search-inside books containing them. Here’s the structure:
http://www.amazon.com/phrase/crazy-phrase/
This could be the new google-whack!
Posted: April 13th, 2009 | Author: Patrick | Filed under: Books, Discovery, Technology | No Comments »
Search PDF is a search engine that prioritizes free ebooks in its results– boasting 225 million titles currently. A few cursory searches for “linguistics” and “discourse analysis” brings up mostly conference papers and syllabi (and some old memos about budgets and faculty meetings), but it does seem to be pretty good for software and business titles. I’ll be checking back in on this one.
via Lifehacker.
