Snarkmarket

The Clicks, They Are Involuntary

Robin — 2009-07-09T22:58:55-08:00

Again with the irresistible headlines from Wired Science:

Language and the New Liberal Arts

Tim — 2009-07-09T18:00:46-08:00

So I'm sitting here, working on making a plain-vanilla hypertext version of New Liberal Arts so folks can read it on their phones, Kindles, whatever, and cleaning up all the extra cruft to make it work -- you can just cut-and-paste from the PDF, it'll be easy, Robin says, forgetting that it's set in opposing faces that sometimes get out of order, that the all-cap fonts turn into gibberish, and that there's a freaking secret message in the thing --

And, maybe just naturally, or maybe as a function of what I'm doing, I am totally blown away - again - by Diana Kimball's "Coding and Decoding" and Rachel Leow's "Translation."

Seriously. Just check them out. They're so elegant and complimentary - Rachel's is about a kind of patient mastery and deep connection to other human beings past and present, Diana's about ambient awareness of linguistic symbols that we discover but whose deciphering is always going to be incomplete. Originally, I was going to write a separate NLA entry for "Languages" - when I first read these two, months ago, I realized that I had nothing I wanted to add.

Please Take This Simple One-Question Survey

Robin — 2009-07-09T11:35:07-08:00

I'm wondering about payment methods and purchase "friction." I have one question for you—click over to this Google Form and give me your gut reaction.

A Treasure-House of Language

Tim — 2009-07-09T05:48:02-08:00

I don't have a lot of criteria for friendship, but the one characteristic I think is invariant is a love of and care for language. If you don't take pleasure or find intellectual satisfaction in how words are strung together - maybe even especially written words - then you and I are quickly going to run out of things to say to or do with each other.

So that said, I think a good index of both your wordnerdery and the likelihood of the two of us becoming and remaining fast friends is your excitement in reading about the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which will be published - in two glorious volumes! - this fall:

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow.
It not only groups words with similar meanings but does so in chronological order according to their history - with the oldest first and most recent last. According to its publisher, the OED, it's the largest thesaurus in the world and the first historical thesaurus in any language.

With 800,000 meanings, 600,000 words and more than 230,000 categories and sub categories, it's twice as big as Roget's version.

And if that doesn't have him turning in his grave, it also contains almost every word in English from Old English to the present day, or 2003 to be precise - the cut-off date for the new dictionary.

� The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings based on the Oxford English Dictionary � The very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages from medieval times through the present � Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first � For obsolete words, the Thesaurus also includes last recorded use of word � Uses a thematic system of classification � Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings � Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English � Includes a free fold-out color chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure � Made up of two volumes: The main text, comprising numbers sections for semantic categories, and the index, comprising a full A-Z look up of nearly one million lexical items

Sweet mercy. Bless you marvelous pedants and this magnificent thing you have made.

Next Time, Bigger And More Humble

Tim — 2009-07-09T04:58:18-08:00

Selected early reviews of New Liberal Arts:

Kevin Kelly, "Innovative Publishing Model":

It really doesn't matter what's in the book. The model is brilliant, if you have an audience. The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible... As it happens, the PDF reveals that the content is pretty thin. But it did not have to be. Their premise is great (the new literacies), and their biz model innovative. We can hope they try again. I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.

The readers at Book Cover Archive: "This may be the only use of Century Gothic I'll ever appreciate," "friggin sold out! love that quarter binding..."

Court Merrigan, "Tiny Snarkmarket�s �free� strategy: 200 hardcover copies of �New Liberal Arts� sold in just eight hours":

Aside from the PDF�s inherent weaknesses as e-book format, this is a pretty cool idea. The tiny press run gives value to the hardcover, certainly pays for the free PDF giveaway, and gets the interest up for the next book to be thusly released... In any case, given that it took only eight hours for New Liberal Arts to sell out, the Snarkmarketers might want to think of printing more next time.

Mark Allen: "New Liberal Arts is a free PDF ebook about things Jason Kottke often refers to as �Liberal Arts 2.0� and is written by a lot of really smart people about some really interesting topics such as brevity, micropolitics, mapping, reality engineering and a bunch more. It also has an innovative publishing model. It�s only about 35 pages of content, and each page is a discrete, bite size idea that will likely send you off in a completely new direction for the rest of the day."

And nobody (besides late-rising Californians) has even seen the physical book yet! (Which, just to be clear, is a perfect-bound paperback, not a hardcover.*)

Quiver for Brushes

Robin — 2009-07-08T23:42:58-08:00

I just bought one of Ashlee Ferlito's terrific tiny paintings. Can you guess which?

That Magic Threshold

Robin — 2009-07-08T15:41:56-08:00

I have a question.

Per Farhad Manjoo, domains are for suckers. That goes both for buying them and keeping track of them. Why bother remembering talkingpointsmemo.com when I can just type "josh marshall" or "tpm" into the address bar in Firefox or Chrome (not Safari, though) and jump directly to the site?

Here's the question: Talking Points Memo is the first Google result for both "josh marshall" and "tpm"—that's how those browsers know to take me there straightaway. However, robinsloan.com is the first result for "robin sloan"... but I do not get the boom-tube treatment. So what's the missing piece? Do you need a certain number of links backing you up to activate the shortcut? A certain number of queries per day? Any ideas?

More examples: "nick kristof" takes me straight to Kristof's NYT topic page. "matt thompson" takes me to the Google results page. "farhad manjoo" takes me to Manjoo's Wikipedia entry. "jason kottke" takes me straight to kottke.org. "epic 2014" takes me straight to EPIC 2014. "tim carmody" takes me to Google results. Argh! Are we really that obscure?

Man on Plinth

Robin — 2009-07-08T13:53:08-08:00

Eyeteeth explains a cool new art project:

Since Monday, artist Antony Gormley has been asking Britons to use Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth to make "a portrait of the UK now." For the next 100 days, he's opened up the remaining empty plinth -- built in 1841 to support an equestrian statue of William IV, but never completed due to lack of funds -- in central London to anyone for an hour, to do whatever they'd like.

There's a live stream!

NEW LIBERAL ARTS: The PDF

Robin — 2009-07-08T11:54:35-08:00

I wondered for a moment whether we should wait a week, or ten days, to post the PDF—wait, that is, for all the printed copies to arrive. But then I got impatient. Here it is.

If you bought one, resist temptation! You're going to enjoy opening it up in the mail a lot more than scrolling through it in the browser.

More meta-commentary on the book and the whole process—soon.

Update: Kevin Kelly says the content is "pretty thin," but also that "I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book." Cool!

Swimming Out Of The Death Spiral

Tim — 2009-07-08T10:44:29-08:00

And now for a note on the dark side of printed books: Michael Jensen, Director of Strategic Web Communications for National Academies and National Academies Press, collects and analyzes data about global warming and ecological collapse. At the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia, he presented "Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity," an argument that the combination of financial and environmental necessity compels university presses to move away from printing, shipping, and storing books and towards a digital-driven, open-access model, with print-on-demand and institutional support rounding out the new revenue model.

(I'm posting Part 2 of Jensen's speech - the part that's mostly about publishing - here. Watch Part 1 - which is mostly about the environment - if you want to be justly terrified about what's going to happen to human beings and everything else pretty soon.)

This is one reason I'm kind of happy that we didn't print a thousand or more copies of New Liberal Arts. We can make print rare, we can get copies straight to readers, we can make print more responsible, but mostly we have to make print count. And - of course - share the information with as many people as possible.

Tasting Menu

Tim — 2009-07-08T07:33:18-08:00

Are you on the east coast, or (gasp) in the Eastern Hemisphere, and can't wait until your copy of the New Liberal Arts is delivered or late-rising Californians post the free PDF?

You can already read four of the New Liberal Arts entries for free, online, now:

Jennifer Rensenbrink, "Home Economics"
Matt Thompson, "Micropolitics"
Timothy Carmody, "Photography"
Rachel Leow, "Translation"

Enjoy.

Why Books Are Great, In One Link

Robin — 2009-07-07T23:14:08-08:00

From a neat presentation by the super-smart Matt Webb. He's talking about Bruno Munari, who in turn is talking about all the interesting ways there are of drawing a human face.

So, page one. As Webb says: "It's great prose, makes a lot of sense. And then you're halfway through a sentence, and you turn the page, and..."—(Click the "next" link on Webb's page, you'll see.)

What's great about this? The full-bleed-ness. There is no full-bleed on the web. And that totally sucks! It's such a crucial, powerful tool. Books and magazines get full-bleed. TVs and video game consoles get full-bleed. Even the Kindle and iPhone get full-bleed! But not the web. You don't ever get the full screen, the entire page, the total experience. In fact—the way browsers are going—you get less and less.

What's also great? The surprise. For some reason, hiding a reveal behind a hyperlink doesn't pack the same punch as the page-turn. I don't know why; I feel like it should work just as well. A super-fast, Javascript-y appearance would probably work better. But there's something special about the turn of a page. Maybe it's all the narrative expectation that we build into that physical experience over the course of years. Whatever it is, it's one of the things I really loved in the Kindle version of Penumbra (and missed in the web version): Page-turns became a storytelling tool.

The Real Reason to Make Books: You Get to Make Book Covers

Robin — 2009-07-07T20:16:58-08:00

Awesome! NLA designer Brandon Kelley gets some play over at The Book Cover Archive. Don't click over to their home page unless you want to be struck dumb by the transcendent beauty of books.

While I'm here: Wow, I really did not expect those books to sell out so fast. Now I wish we'd printed twice as many. But, a limited edition is a limited edition! PDF coming soon.

NEW LIBERAL ARTS: 200 Down

Robin — 2009-07-07T14:58:33-08:00

Whoah! ~~Only 41 left!~~ All gone. Look for the PDF tomorrow!

Thanks, everyone -- we sold out in eight hours.

A Fine Company of Newness

Tim — 2009-07-07T13:49:33-08:00

Just sayin':