David Weinberger, over at his Everything is Miscellaneous blog, points out three major problems with Amazon’s Kindle reader for scholarly work:

1) “note-taking and highlighting are jokes”
2) “doesn’t know the original page numbering”
3) “no bibliographical tool”

(From “Kindle is fun but sucks for scholars“)

One of the comments to that post suggests porting to the Kindle a version of Zotero, which could make use of your database portably. Presumably such a database could be loaded via the SD card or, perhaps, it could be shared via Zotero’s new database syncing (currently in preview). I think this is a useful suggestion and could potentially be stunning. However, it will only be stunning if the killer feature of Zotero — i.e. keeping pdfs/docs of items close to their bibliographical entries — is retained. After all, what sets the Kindle apart from any other device is not its organizational structure but its beautiful reading surface. So, combining the killer feature of Zotero with the killer feature of the Kindle sounds to me like a great idea. Of course, one major hurdle is that the Kindle software is proprietary. Unlike converting single books/pdfs into Kindle format, you would want to retain the entire structure and functionality of your Zotero database, which means converting the app. I wonder if a service like Feedbooks would work as a Zotero model: you put a list of hyperlinked out-of-copyright books on your Kindle which download immediately in Kindle format when you click on the link (via 43 Folders). If converted for use with Zotero, you could search your database locally but only call the pdf when needed. To save space the pdf could be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time, or better, it would somehow ask the user if he/she was ready to destroy the pdf. Of course, your shared database in the cloud would be maintained intact.

To me the iPhone is an ideal device for an implementation of Zotero.[1] The screen on the Kindle is better for reading lots of text, but the iPhone is much the better size for quick searches of your Zotero database while working in the stacks of a research library. Plus, I’m young enough to feel that pulling out my Kindle in public is a lot dorkier than pulling out my iPhone. In terms of content, perhaps a preliminary version wouldn’t necessitate the associated documents, but only the bibliographical entries — maybe adding new entries through photos of the barcode (à la Delicious Library). If it could be implemented, the killer feature would still be the built-in relationships between entries and documents, which is why I use Zotero in the first place. (though pdf support on the iPhone would have to improve) And adding to the database via MobileSafari would be a desideratum as well. Essentially, reproducing all the main features of Zotero on the iPhone are highly desirable to me, especially if my existing database is seamlessly integrated with the iPhone version.

All of this is well and good, but as John Gruber recently noted, developing for the iPhone requires adherence to the terms and conditions of the App Store, which seems to break the GPL. Presumably the Kindle has proprietary agreements for developers as well, and obviously lacks even the semi-open playing field of the App Store. Altogether, this is probably a deal-breaker for any portable Zotero implementation, though I hope I’m wrong. If anyone is working on this and can talk about it, please let me know!

[1] Feedbooks has an API which has been implemented in an iPhone app called Stanza by the company Lexcycle. I haven’t had a chance to test this app yet but I’ve heard good things about it. This API definitely seems to be a possible starting point for any homebrew iPhone-Zotero implementation, especially if the Zotero development group itself is unable to produce an iPhone app for whatever reason.

William Turkel, author of the excellent Programming Historian, has recently published a provocative post on his blog, Digital History Hacks. He writes there,

To some extent we’re all digital historians already, as it is quickly becoming impossible to imagine doing historical research without making use of e-mail, discussion lists, word processors, search engines, bibliographical databases and electronic publishing. Some day pretty soon, the “digital” in “digital history” is going to sound redundant…

Turkel’s post, well worth a read in toto, eloquently states what was decried last November by Anthony Grafton in the New Yorker:

The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention. (p.4)

Grafton and Turkel agree on the point that learning how to navigate the seas of digital information will be a crucial skill for any successful historian in the future (or even in the present). I wonder, however, if younger scholars raised on the Google, IMBD, and Facebook will find it so challenging as Grafton suggests to combine the results from multiple sites and search engines. In fact, the disjointedness of the internet is one of its few universalizing aesthetic qualities. Few people involved in the digitization of major research libraries are in favor of a single search to rule them all. Google is trying that and has met with fierce opposition, both from publishers and from libraries unwilling to cede control of their freedom to act independently. Grafton is obviously aware of this and makes a number of important points about Google in his article. I wonder, however, if Turkel’s knowledge of the technologies behind the current transition to digital libraries isn’t a sign of things to come. Is it conceivable that fluency with Python and archival APIs could become a prerequisite of creative scholarship in the next decade? In other words, as pithy as Grafton’s criticisms may be, could he be vastly underestimating the scale of the humanistic revolution at hand?

A colleague recently pointed me to the new version (3.1) of the Diogenes software for searching the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and PHI (Packard Humanities Institute) discs of Greek and Latin texts. The CD-ROM of the TLG (version E, last updated 2000) has long been surpassed by the web version — the latter includes a whole host of texts (mainly late antique and Byzantine) which are not on the disc (to see a list, click “Post-TLG E (web only)” on the left of the homepage). Impressively, the new Diogenes comes with both the revered Liddell, Scott, and Jones (LSJ) Greek Lexicon and the Lewis & Short Latin dictionary. These are indispensable resources for the classicist. (Lewis & Short is particularly helpful since the magisterial Oxford Latin Dictionary stops sometime in the early second century AD and is virtually useless for later Latin.) Both are locally searchable and also free, which is a huge bonus.

I’ve only been really playing with Diogenes for a day but I’m already impressed. The killer feature for me is the linking between the TLG Greek texts (a huge corpus) and the LSJ. If you’re reading a Greek text and want to look up a word, all you do is click on the word and the dictionary pops up on the right; further, every word in the dictionary is also tagged, so if you click on one of those, then you’re taken to another dictionary entry. This is all dependent on the Perseus morphological database, though not in real time (as discussed at the bottom of the FAQ page). All the words in the TLG and PHI databases have been run through Perseus’ Morpheus parser ahead of time.

So far so good. In fact, at this point in my brief investigation I was in heaven. I had barely used Diogenes before (a long while ago) and was not really taken with it. I have been using the Silver Mountain software “Workplace Pack” in combination with Logos/Libronix’s edition of LSJ since 2004 or so. In my first look Diogenes was surpassing my previous tools by a long shot. However, I’ve run into two snags which have dampened my enthusiasm somewhat:

1. The Diogenes/Perseus LSJ does not include the Supplement (1996). The Libronix version not only includes the Supplement but has integrated that material into the LSJ text itself (unlike any other version of the LSJ currently available). The Libronix edition has a number of other “search enhancements” that add value to the digital version.

2. The linking between text and dictionary, which is supposed to be bi-directional, is only really secure in the direction described above — that is, from the TLG text to the LSJ. If you try to go the other direction, that is, from a reference in the LSJ to the TLG, you are not likely to end up where you intended. In my brief (and unscientific) testing, only about 1 out of every 5 textual reference links will take you to the right spot in the given TLG text. Why is this? Well, here’s my theory (and I’m definitely willing to be corrected): the TLG has made it a point to include the most up-to-date Greek critical editions of its holdings, regularly replacing earlier editions. (As is well known, none of these editions includes critical apparatus, which is ostensibly how they avoid copyright infringement.) By contrast, the Perseus texts are all older, out-of-print editions (perhaps because of copyright? I’m not sure.). So why does the LSJ-to-TLG linking work at all? Well, many texts (Homer and the New Testament included) have had their verse-numbering structure set for a very long time, so the older texts and more recent texts share the same numbers. Click on any link to a Pausanias reference and you’ll be taken to a seemingly random place in the TLG text. By contrast, click on a reference to Sophocles and, most likely, you’ll find the spot you wanted. When it works, this is an incredible piece of software, but it is also infuriating to see the unrealized possibilities. To be fair, the actual text of many works has changed since their edition of the LSJ was published, so words can always be expected to appear where they once did. And, further, the LSJ reference may refer only to a chapter of a work and not to a specific paragraph or line, so some close reading will be necessary.

So what’s next? Well, the links need to be fixed, obviously, though I’m not sure whether that is Diogenes’ or Perseus’ responsibility. Presumably the latter, though Perseus doesn’t link directly to the TLG (even though the reverse is sometimes true for translations and dictionaries). Still, the Logos/Libronix has no TLG capability as far as I am aware, and linking (for all its patchiness) is still the killer feature of Diogenes. Another killer feature is the cross-platform capability (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Logos has recently released the alpha version of its Mac client, which is welcome news to many but which is still vastly under-powered. For instance, you cannot search the LSJ by entry word in Greek; you have to scroll through the alphabet, painfully. Finally, Diogenes, like Logos, is Unicode compliant — a no-brainer these days, but it’s indicative of the quality of this app that even the Coptic texts from the PHI disc are treated properly with Unicode. Overall, it is a really nice piece of software — I like the browser style interface, which is the same across the three platforms. There’s a lot of hand-coding that will have to be done to get the LSJ-to-TLG links to work correctly, though presumably some of that could be automated. One suggestion offered by my colleague Gregory Smith is that Diogenes could issue a search for each LSJ reference, when it is clicked, to ensure that the text is really there in the TLG. This would slow things down, but at least you could trust that you’re linking to the right bit of text.

PS A final issue I should at least mention is that, as someone who works primarily with later Greek texts, I would love to see the web TLG corpus brought into the equation somehow. The E CDROM is still very valuable for local searching, but there’s much it does not include (as mentioned above). I’m not sure if I would prefer web queries or a downloadable package of all the TLG texts (surely that wouldn’t be that hard to produce). But in either case, access via Diogenes to the complete TLG is a desideratum.

Good interview with blogger/editor Jason Kottke over at Clusterflock. The part I can relate to, being a NetNewsWire junkie myself (though not half the blogger Jason is):

What’s your process, then, how do you go about your day at the site?

I read a lot. 99% of it doesn’t make the site, 1% does. Most of the stuff I read comes to me through a newsreader. I follow roughly 300 sites a day.

Jesus! Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the influx? What’s your process for dealing with that?

Very overwhelmed. At this point, I’m probably just used to it. I get the sense sometimes that reading/skimming so much information every day is not good for my brain. Sometimes I can’t remember any details from what I’ve read the previous day. Don’t know if that’s all the input or something related to getting older.

I hear you, Jason.

While not what I promised in my last post and not at all what I originally imagined I would be writing on this site, I was thinking today that perhaps some music recommendations would be welcome to you readers.

First, if you haven’t yet, go check out NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast. Things they’ve done recently which I liked are:

1) The listeners’ picks for 2007’s best CDs. A number of artists on the list I had heard of but never actually listened to. If you spend some time with this, I think you’ll agree that the list points equally to the fecundity of the “alternative music” scene (that’s what we called it in the 90’s) as well as the good taste of NPR’s listeners.

2) Interview/Guest-DJ sessions with some well known artists like Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Colin Meloy from the Decemberists. I found the following quote from Meloy especially insightful: “I am more interested in writing outside my realm of experience. To be honest, I don’t find my life that interesting or compelling.” He had been asked about why he didn’t write songs about himself (like everyone else, presumably). More and more I find that books and songs that are transparently narcissistic can’t sustain my interest. I heard Tom Wolfe give a talk about this one time: of course, when he writes outside himself it has its own name, “New Journalism“. I guess increasingly I just like stories and good third-person narrative — in that regard, I definitely appreciate Meloy’s comments on the subject. These interviews are valuable, precisely because there is other music involved which the artists can use to exemplify and contextualize their thoughts.

3) Finally, they’ve got an incredible back-catalogue of live concerts from the 9:30 Club in D.C. I really liked the recent Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks concert. The series is called Live in Concert From All Songs Considered.

Second, lately I’ve really been enjoying the following records:

1) The Raconteurs, “Consolers of the Lonely” — there’s something very unpredictable and bluesy about this record. I really enjoyed the first one, “Broken Boy Soldiers”. There’s a number of things to like: musicianship, songcraft, electric guitar bravado. The last is well known from the White Stripes records and I love it.

2) SunKilMoon’s “April” is gorgeous. I am a huge fan of their previous records and am really happy to have a third.

3) Speaking of thirds, one of my favorite bands from college, Portishead, has a new album, “Third”, coming out at the end of this month. This is their first studio album in eleven (11) years. That’s a long time, and I really hope it doesn’t disappoint. (In college we used to turn the lights out in our apartment and turn on Portishead really loud while we played Goldeneye multiplayer on the Nintendo N64. Really spooky, let me tell you. Those were good times.)

4) Gary Louris, the lead singer of the Jayhawks, recently put out a solo record which I like a lot. It’s called “Vagabonds”. If you like the Jayhawks, you’ll dig this.

Third, a few bands I listen to have their own podcasts. They Might Be Giants’s podcast is by far the best. Their Friday Night Family podcast is mainly songs taken from their recent album, “Here Come the 123s”, which my kids like. Their previous album “Here Come the ABCs” is part of our family lore: the song “C is for Conifers” is incredible. There’s also the Radiohead podcast, in which they release live versions of their songs, recorded in their Oxford studio. (FWIW, I used to see Thom Yorke walking his son in the Oxford University Park on Sunday mornings while I was in grad school. The Park is right across from my college, Keble. I never said hi, though I was sorely tempted. He seems like a really decent guy.) Wilco also had a podcast for a while, but it doesn’t seem to have been updated lately.

On the subject of podcasts, I think I’ll try to put a list together soon of things I listen to on a regular basis. I find podcasts and audiobooks really enjoyable and a useful way to “read” or catch up on the news while you’re doing something else with your hands, like writing blog posts.

For those who are following this site, I realize that I’ve been rather quiet the past month. I’m currently trying to finish up a few longer posts amidst my regular academic business of attending conferences and constructing exams. I thought I might at least let you know the topics I’m working on and intending to discuss in the near future:

1. A representative of Project Muse has contacted me regarding my two posts on JSTOR. We’re trying to arrange a time to talk. I would very much like to add their perspective to the mix. Digitization is a subject that continues to fascinate me both for its practical difficulties and intellectual potential.

2. Zotero has become a mainstay in my research over the past month. I put it through the paces writing a recent conference paper, which will actually be a chapter of my current book project. Overall, I was thoroughly impressed, but there are some usability quirks that I find irksome, not least the integration with Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

3. Finally, I’m trying to figure out how to put said chapter online in its draft form, in the hopes of getting some tangible feedback. Obviously, it won’t be interesting to everyone, and it’s definitely got some warts, but one of my intentions for this site is to make it productive for my own research. I just need to figure out how this will work best.

I have some other thoughts too, including how I might use Twitter or some kind of chat software in the classroom during my upcoming Spring Term course. Many of my colleagues think it might make an interesting experiment, but I’m a little sheepish at the moment. We’ll see.

An email I received today from Lenovo about the newly released ThinkPad X300 states the following:

“The no-compromise, ultraportable, 13.3″ widescreen notebook with an optional integrated DVD drive and 3 USB ports, starting at just 2.9lb. Everything else is just hot air.”

Let us compare this final, taunting sentence with the X300 review from CNET, which states that, in every benchmark test they performed, the MacBook Air beats not only the X300, but also the Toshiba R500 and the HP Compaq 2710p. In one way, this is not a surprising piece of news given that the Air uses a regular, desktop-class Core 2 Duo processor, running at 1.6-1.8ghz, and not a low-power version (e.g. the SL7100), running at 1.2ghz, as in the X300. However, the fact remains that Lenovo is marketing itself as superior to the MacBook Air, when in reality it is inferior in terms of performance. There are a number of reasons you may buy a X300 over an Air, especially if you need a DVD burner or are especially rough on your laptops (that hybrid roll cage looks impressive). I like ThinkPads. I use one daily as part of my work. If I’m going to buy a PC laptop it’s going to be a ThinkPad. But the Air is currently a better performing machine, which is a significant fact in the current explosion of subnotebooks.

Last week I posted some positive thoughts on JSTOR and suggested that JSTOR might have a role in the new conversation about the distribution of scholarly knowledge. Harvard’s recent decision to self-distribute is very forward thinking and may have significant effects on academic publishing in the future.

The next day after posting the JSTOR post (in fact, about 12 hours after posting it) I got a call in my office from Jason Phillips, associate director for library relations at JSTOR. We talked for about an hour, and Jason answered numerous questions I had about JSTOR’s business and their plans for the future. Needless to say I was seriously impressed by Jason’s eagerness to make contact and his forthrightness about JSTOR’s work. Here are some nuggets from that conversation — much of this stuff is available on their website, if I had taken the time to look it up (which is all the more reason to be impressed by Jason’s call!).

1. The cost of the subscriptions to JSTOR which libraries have to pay (and my main point of criticism) is directly related to the cost of production (mainly scanning) and managing the content (archiving the data and preserving it). Hardware and software upgrades are part of this cost too: more on that below. JSTOR is technically a non-profit company, so all of its revenue goes back into the archival and maintenance process.

2. The publishers set the “moving wall” between the archive and the new volumes. No new publishers have a moving wall greater than seven years and most are at around three years. After first saying that the moving wall was a “joint decision”, Jason backed up and said that JSTOR “allows” for the gap in order to secure the publishers and archive their data. JSTOR does “revenue share” with publishers, but Jason claimed this was minimal. Essentially the publishers are not paid for having their content on JSTOR. That was probably the most enlightening piece of information for me and gives me more confidence about JSTOR’s role in the future model.

3. The moving wall discussion led to what I find most interesting, namely that JSTOR is largely a free-agent in all of this. They don’t really seem beholden to academic publishers, yet they do their best to be a responsible liaison between the publishers and libraries. This must be a crucial role because the publishers are willing to let their content be distributed without receiving much in the way of royalties. In other words, the archiving and distribution process must be worth more to them monetarily than the rights they have to all those back volumes. That fact is saying something really important about the “real money” value of archiving and distribution.

4. Now, this is where Harvard’s new model comes into the picture. What happens when a new method of distribution is taken up by a major university with lots of money and clout? Up to this point, of course, the university has been the consumer and has largely funded JSTOR’s archival process (in addition to donations from charitable institutions like the Mellon foundation, which founded JSTOR). But if the university gets into the archival and distribution business and, eventually, has no need for JSTOR — I’m assuming Harvard is going to digitize and self-distribute all the content in their library via someone other than or in addition to Google, which seems inevitable — then what is JSTOR’s role? And how are the publishers going to respond to this new economy of academic publishing? Especially given that it looks like Harvard will use its own weight to distribute as much as possible freely. (This is a huge copyright debate waiting to happen, and Harvard actually has the money and the will to fight it, which is exciting.) I asked Jason specifically what he thought JSTOR’s role in this new economy would be, and his answer was cautious and thoughtful. He said that JSTOR was essentially “a project” and “an archive” and does not necessarily need to exist in the future. However, JSTOR has 4,500 libraries “involved in” (i.e. subscribing to) the project and has a responsibility to them. More pointedly, he said that JSTOR’s mission statement had recently changed, and the organization is now calling itself a “platform for scholarship”. So, as I guessed, JSTOR certainly seems to be positioning itself to become a delivery mechanism for archived knowledge in the future, in whatever form that may occur, and very probably saw Harvard’s decision coming. Jason agreed with me that it was exciting and he pointed out that JSTOR had done a lot of work in the R&D of digitization technology, which is now being used by libraries all over the world, like Harvard, as well as by corporate partners/competitors like Google.

5. Speaking of redefinition and innovation, Jason encouraged me to take a look at the preview version of JSTOR’s new interface. I hope to write a review of this in the future — perhaps when it’s released in a month or so. Suffice it to say for the moment that this is an entirely new platform for them and the interface is attempting to be more individualized, with a “saved citations” section. It looks good so far — my only recommendation was that they put a thumbnail of the pdf next to the citation because, ultimately, that’s the direction all of this is heading (and is already there if you use Zotero) — you want the actual text of the article/book right next to (and incorporated with) the reference. This is something RefWorks (as I understand it) does not do, and EndNote in my experience handles this functionality rather poorly. In any case, you want a Cloud version of all your stuff anyway in case your computer gets lost or you are using a public terminal. So, it seems to me that JSTOR is moving in the right direction (viewing your pdfs is a two-click movement away from the citation list — that should be one click away and nested within the list). FWIW, you can also export selected citations from your library which is a nice feature, though I haven’t yet tested the fidelity to established bibliographical standards.

6. Finally, some criticisms. Or, rather, questions. The future is still very blurry to me, especially as it regards smaller universities and schools who cannot afford JSTOR’s (and the like’s) subscription rates. JSTOR is available in a huge number of countries but not all the universities in those countries have access to JSTOR. That’s a major issue that will need to be resolved. In some ways Harvard is going to bat for those universities while it goes to bat for itself. In terms of the new JSTOR platform, it is still a central issue that not everything is archived there. The knowledge is only as available as it’s available (duh). In other words, if they don’t have it archived (or if it’s behind the moving wall), many people will assume it doesn’t exist, including many of my students, who understandably struggle with this concept. A single archive, or better, a single network of interconnected archives (whether university or non-profit based) is going to emerge in the next several years (with no moving walls), and I assume that Harvard is already thinking about what this will look like. My point still stands, and perhaps is further emphasized by Jason’s helpful comments, that JSTOR has the ability to be involved in this if they so choose. The two keys, to me at least, are that 1) it needs to be free, and 2) it needs to be easy and clear. Neither key is currently the case across the board. JSTOR has largely achieved the second key and may be a viable option for those trying to achieve the first.

(Many thanks again to Jason Phillips for his enthusiasm and patience.)

Is it just me or has the “hide App” command changed in Leopard? In Tiger, as I remember, when I hide an application the app still shows up in my command-tab HUD of running apps. Now, in Leopard, when I hide an app with command-H that app no longer shows up in the command-tab HUD. I now have to go to the dock to select that app, or “re-launch” it with LaunchBar (I usually do the latter because my dock is always hidden). Anyway, if anyone else has noticed this behavior, let me know — is there an option for this in System Preferences or Finder options? If so I can’t find it. Overall, I don’t know how I feel about this change. I think I like it but I don’t know why.

As pimped on 43 Folders, the Ars Technica guide to nuking your .Mac syncs and starting over. I so, so, so need to do this right now. Every hour for the past day I’ve been getting a message on my laptop asking me if I want to add 185 Safari bookmarks. No, I don’t. Please deal with it and fix yourself.

My experience with .Mac has been largely positive, especially since they upped the basic package to 10gb of storage. But I have never been able to get certain syncing protocols to work — bookmarks usually work, despite my current predicament. The two that come to mind are Keychains and Mail Rules. These have caused massive confusion on my Macs in the past. I really wish they would get this stuff worked out because .Mac could be so much more than it already is.

Good editorial by Peter Cohen over at Macworld on the general frustration with Time Capsule vis-à-vis the Leopard-Airport debacle. See his post for the details, but FWIW I’m one of those who bought an n-series Airport base station under the pretense that Leopard would allow Time Machine backups to its shared drive. That statement on Apple’s website was removed the day (or maybe the day before) Leopard shipped. Neither the feature nor the promise of the feature has been mentioned since as far as I know.

I have the feeling from my post on Harvard’s recent decision that I’m being a little unfair to JSTOR-type services. There are, of course, numerous benefits to JSTOR, and certain crucial questions arise about this hypothetically utopian world without JSTOR and their ilk:

1. How will scholars go about retrieving archived articles if scholarship is linked to the university where the professors worked when those particular publications came out? Universities will obviously have to develop an open-access database to share all of these articles in a central location. Maybe JSTOR could even spearhead this initiative since they have the technology. But, as with our current system, any cost passed on to universities will ultimately be prohibitive for some smaller schools, unless the cost is truly minimal. Better, I think, to just make the whole thing free from the beginning.

2. There is a difference between JSTOR and other services, such as Project Muse, in terms of which issues of journals are on offer. JSTOR typically, at least in my experience, deals in the archives of a given journal, with the most recent five years or so being handled in a different way. Sometimes the academic publisher itself does it, or it can be outsourced. Project Muse, by contrast, seems to carry more recent journals only. For instance, two of the more important journals on Muse for my work, Classical World and the Journal of Early Christian Studies do not extend back to the first issues. And if you scan the list of what’s available on Muse, it seems like this is true across the board: not many begin before the late 1990’s.

3. A point raised to me in personal correspondence by my colleague and friend Prof. Greg Smith is that the “more available” journals are certainly affecting what is being read by students and researchers. If the journal is on JSTOR, then it’s more likely to get read than if it’s not. Or, as is often the case, there are multiple login screens between the user and the articles — or if the site is poorly designed — the likelihood of the student accessing that article is quite low. Given that I’m rather adept at this sort of research, comparatively speaking, way too often do I get bogged down in login/splash screens just in search of a decent pdf I can read. JSTOR is certainly much more user-friendly, as is Project Muse, and I think that’s partly why they’re well known and used. But the flip-side of that usability is a little scary. I’ve had students just search JSTOR not realizing that a whole host of scholarly literature isn’t stored there. Yet there’s a critical enough mass that it appears as if the whole world’s knowledge is at their fingertips. I’ve seen students dumbfounded when I search for their topic on Google Scholar and about 100 more references come up than what they found in JSTOR.

4. Finally, where is all the money going? That’s something I still can’t get my head around. Are the journals getting rich or is it the digital clearing houses? If it’s so cost prohibitive to subscribe that small colleges and schools can’t afford some journals, who is getting rich off of the process? Obviously it’s not the authors. I really don’t know the answer to this.

As an update to my previous post on the X300, it was officially released by Lenovo today. See the great post describing some of its unique features over at Inside the Box. Two things that were unmentioned (as far as I know) before launch: 1) it does have a type of roll cage (the “Hybrid Roll Cage II” design) like its larger siblings, and 2) the keyboard has LED indicators for buttons like caps lock and mute (not earth shattering, but a nice touch).
As a Mac user who also has a ThinkPad, one of the things that still gets me when I think about purchasing a X300 (or something like the Toshiba R500) is that, even with all of this fantastic hardware design (competitive, one could claim, with Apple), you still have to run Windows. There’s a disconnect for me in there somewhere. You spend all this time designing a great looking laptop (as mentioned in my previous post) and can’t put a beautiful OS on it. I’m sure the Lenovo designers would love to see Apple license the Mac OS — ain’t gonna happen, of course — but they’re stuck with Vista, or worse, XP. (And Linux is a non-starter in this discussion.) The intuitiveness of the interior design should match that of the exterior. Lenovo is probably the best at using the ThinkVantage system to negotiate between the user and the counter-intuitive design (to me, at least) of many Vista dialogs, but it sadly doesn’t make up for not being able to run Mac OSX on their machines.

On 12 February of this year the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences made what may turn out to be a momentous decision regarding the publication of scholarship. They unanimously voted to offer their own future scholarly articles (no mention is made of books) to Harvard University for open-access distribution (in pdf or another “appropriate format”). The copyright of those articles is to be given to Harvard for this purpose, provided that Harvard does not seek to make a profit on the articles. The implementation of this policy is not discussed in the docket (copied below) beyond the fact that the Provost’s office is in charge and that the Provost’s office “may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.”
I have innumerable thoughts on this, some of which are not fully honed and will be withheld here until I can express them appropriately. However, here are some initial jabs:

1. This is an incredibly positive move by Harvard. They have been wrestling with these issues for some time behind the scenes, not least in their partnership with Google. They essentially sold (if that’s the appropriate word) the digital rights, or at least a single digital license, to Google so that the latter could compile books.google.com (in addition to deals with other libraries, as has been well documented). Since then, they’ve been discussing other avenues of digitization. Harvard’s casting about for other opportunities was somewhat opaque to me at first until I remembered that Google is a business that is trying to make money off of knowledge (really ads, but potentially off the knowledge itself in some way in the future). One of the most fundamental tenets of the university credo is that knowledge should be free. It certainly seems that Harvard is unconvinced that Google is the way forward, despite their partnership, and is pursuing other means. (I have no inside knowledge of this, but it is a fact that Harvard is exploring multiple avenues of digital distribution.)

2. If you think about the long, long term implications of this, it essentially means that companies like Google will not be making money off of scholarly knowledge in the future. Imagine if Harvard had made this decision in some form in 1700, what would Google be able to scan and market? Relatively little, at least among Harvard faculty publications, since it would be available already. Now, imagine that every university in the world had adopted this policy in 1700, Google would have almost nothing to scan. So, by adopting a forward thinking policy Harvard is encouraging all universities to recognize both the value of knowledge and the viable means of distribution currently available.

3. Publishers cannot be happy with this. While it won’t wreck their business in the near term, something has to give, and Harvard has shifted its weight in the direction of their demise. This is especially true for the publishers of electronic journals — rather, the enormous collections, such as JSTOR — which charge astronomical rates for college and university subscriptions. Technically JSTOR and their ilk are non-profit companies. However, they still charge huge amounts of money, presumably passing on what academic publishers charge them to digitize their material. Small colleges throughout the US are unable to keep up with the cost of these subsciptions. They have to make unnecessary choices between collections when in reality all of this should be available to their students and faculty, without fee. The current system is completely backwards, as if knowledge were something that only the privileged, ultra-endowed universities should enjoy. Obviously there is a certain amount of infrastructure involved in distribution, but it simply has to be less than what is being charged. Really, it reminds me of the current RIAA / music industry implosion, where the traditionalists are so used to making a certain profit that they can’t bear to acknowledge and employ lower-overhead distribution schemes. The frustrating aspect of all of this, to me at least, is that Google seems to be thinking like the traditionalists, or at least the traditionalist publishers have threatened Google so much that it’s unwilling to fulfill its original goal, which I understand to be the availability of all that they’ve scanned to anyone on the web. I’m not unaware of the copyright issues, but many people (like Harvard) are suggesting that we need to rethink copyright, at least for scholarly publications, and I think they’re right. With all its clout and money, Google should also be making the case that copyright needs to be rethought.

4. I’m interested in the implementation of this. As noted by Dorothea Salo, Harvard can make it easy or hard for the faculty to submit their work. We’re both hoping for the former! From her blog Caveat Lector:

If Harvard is smart, it will automate as much article-gathering as possible. The less faculty have to do, the less they even notice that this policy is in place, the more it will be able to accomplish. I look forward to finding out what the Harvard provost’s office has up its sleeve.

5. The docket from the faculty meeting states (see below) that there is an escape clause if a faculty member can “explain the need” to be exempt from the program. It will be interesting to see how many people exercise this and how diligently the Provost polices the policy.

Here’s the original docket from the official pdf of the faculty meeting.

On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will move:The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

Other links worth reading:
Ars Technica
Harvard Gazette
Harvard Crimson
(Thanks to Prof. Greg Smith for his input on this post.)

Very interesting piece in BusinessWeek on the development of the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, the successor to the X40/X60 line. I have an old X40 which I beat into the ground. Of course, like most ThinkPads it’s still ticking. Those things are virtually indestructible. However, the back of the current X61 models don’t have the roll cage found in the T-series, an element that has justly made the latter famous. I have no fear throwing my T61p into a backpack with heavy items. I know the screen will be fine — in fact, check out this close encounter between a motorcycle and a R-series ThinkPad. I would like to know if the roll cage has been incorporated into the X300 — my assumption is that it hasn’t, since that magnesium-composite is a source of heft on the larger models.

I would love to see a similar history of development for the MacBook Air, since it no doubt went through just as many (if not many more) revisions and tweaks. Squeezing all of this hardware into thin machines is going to become a more intense competition over the next year. If Apple can beef up the MBA specs to compete with the X300, etc., while also bringing the price down in light of (though obviously not to the level of) the eeePC, etc., then I think consumers could really benefit in the subnotebook arena. There’s already talk about cheaper and (much) faster SSDs (solid state drives) later this year.

Finally, at least the Lenovo folks have some design sense: the picture at the top of this blog post is worthy of Apple. The hi-res version is on their flickr feed. The teardown photo at the top of the BusinessWeek article is also gorgeous. Is that a Lenovo photo or did BusinessWeek do that? I imagine it’s Lenovo — if so, can someone post a copy to flickr please?

(Thanks to Colin for the original link)

To follow up on the comparison between Google’s "cloud" offerings and those at Adobe, it’s interesting that Adobe seems to have beaten Google to the punch with its free storage service, SHARE. I’ve been playing around with SHARE (now in beta) and am really impressed with how simple and useful it is. You just point your browser to the SHARE site, browse your hard drive for the file you want to share, upload it, and type in the email addresses of the people you want to share with. They then get an email, and the document becomes available to them on the website. It remains in your library — currently limited to 1gb, though surely that will increase — until you delete it. It also generates a thumbnail of the first page of the file, which can be resized with a slider. You can change the file system from icon mode to hierarchy mode if you want. Right now SHARE works with pdf, jpg, gif, and png files, but presumably that will open up in the future. A close integration between Adobe Buzzword and Adobe SHARE would be ideal. That kind of union, the inclusion of more file formats (not necessarily music and video, but at least .doc, .docx, .odf, .rtf, etc.), and a much larger allotment of space would make SHARE super useful. Like Buzzword the interface shows close attention to design and usage. To my mind Adobe is quickly passing Google in both the beauty and usefulness of its online apps.

PS The people you share files with stay in your contact list, which is invaluable if you are regularly sharing files with a particular colleague or group of colleagues. As I think about it, here are a few more desiderata:

1. A comments section, for both public and private comments.
2. Support for Photoshop, InDesign, etc. file formats, and (as already suggested) direct integration with Buzzword for all text documents.
3. Blog support, perhaps through Buzzword, which has already been tagged as a potentially game-changing blog editor. I should be able to link to a document on SHARE from my blog.

See this very provocative take on Flash coming to the iPhone by John Gruber at Daring Fireball. He lays out the case that Flash will never appear on the iPhone, largely because it’s not in their best interests as a company. His case is logical and very compelling. The early take on the absence of Flash support was that Apple was using the iPhone to promote Quicktime. That seems unlikely to me seeing as Flash is so dominant, and it would take a seriously dominant phone (i.e. Razr-level penetration AND users actually browsing) to unseat Flash for good. But Gruber’s take is different, in that he considers Cocoa and Apple’s development processes to be the driving forces. Speculation that Adobe AIR would comprise the entire development environment for the iPhone SDK was voiced on MacBreakWeekly today. As cool as AIR is, Gruber’s argument speaks directly against its adoption as well. How many days till February 29th again? (16)

As mentioned in my previous post, I have no option to turn off the translucent menu bar on my 12in PowerBook 64 (1.5ghz, 1.25gb ram). Here’s a screenshot to prove it:

The Translucent Menu Bar option should appear below “Random order” which is grayed out in the picture above.

I confirmed that my G5 has the option (and I turned it off, of course). Very strange that the option is removed here — my menu bar on the PowerBook is non-translucent, apparently permanently.

There was a huge windfall of Mac Software Update releases today, including 10.5.2, which had been passed around to testers for some time previous, as I understand it. After you install 10.5.2 another update appears in Software Update entitled Leopard Graphics Update. Apple details the former here, but the support article on the latter is much less verbose. Notable changes include the optioning of the translucent menu bar and the addition of the hierarchical menus in the dock (opened either as a list or a grid). See the details here. I really like the hierarchical options for the dock. I keep a folder with iWork apps in the dock and can open those as a grid (represented now by a folder instead of a stack) while opening my documents or downloads folder as a list, grouped by name, date changed, etc. Nice touch.

An interesting side note to this update: I kept looking for the option to change the translucent menu bar but finally realized that it’s not showing up in the Desktop and Screen Saver preference pane like it should be. I’m running 10.5.2 and the Graphics Update on a PBG4 12in 1.5ghz with 1.25gb of RAM. If someone can explain why I don’t have the option please do — as soon as I rebooted it lost transparency and has remained so. Not that I’m complaining…

UPDATE: Maybe I’m just wishing this to be, but my aforementioned 12in PBG4 is running a lot faster after the updates. I don’t have benchmarks, but the snappiness factor is through the roof. NetNewsWire in particular is a different beast from prior to the update. Memory management might also be improved, since I seem to be using less memory with the same apps open. I have about 675mb free where I used to have about 200mb free with the same apps. Again, this may be wishful thinking, but things are feeling really smooth on this old laptop. I’ll check the G5 and update later.

UPDATE 2: The Graphics Update has been described as just a bunch of video drivers, and not anything to do with the GUI, which is reasonable but not something I remember seeing before.

An article from today’s NYT by Matt Richtel discusses the impact of Google Apps on Microsoft’s business model. There’s no mention of Buzzword, but one can imagine that a feature-rich online word processor could blow up the current détente. Is it conceivable that Microsoft could eventually give away Office, or at least the consumer version, for free?

Eventually, all our writing may be done on the web in some fashion, and local editing will seem antiquated. I’ve used Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formerly Writerly) a good bit and enjoyed it. The biggest negative, as you might expect, is the absence of features I’ve grown used to in Word, such as footnotes, not something you would think is a negotiable feature. Nevertheless, the sharing aspects of Google Docs are excellent, and the ability to open a document from within Gmail is superb. It is designed to be seamless — at least, until you try to open a document with footnotes or complex formatting, then you get a very pale reflection of what is actually contained in the document. E.g., upon upload, footnotes are converted into things that look like links but don’t actually link to anything and appear to break the connection present in the original Word document. The lack of pdf import is a huge gap as well, and the fact that you can’t edit documents in Safari is annoying. (Though I just tried with Safari for Windows and everything seemed to work fine, so perhaps I’m behind the times on Safari support.) Ideally, I would be able to store, and edit, all my work documents, with full parity with Word and Powerpoint (which for better or worse are still the standards in Humanities disciplines). This is impossible for a couple of reasons: first, no footnotes, as mentioned above; second, no support for complex scripts on the Mac. By complex scripts I mean Unicode OpenType fonts that have combining diacritics. This may mean nothing to you, but it means a lot for all the Syriac specialists out there (among other kinds of specialists). While this is no doubt a small market, Microsoft has seen fit to include full OpenType support in Windows since Windows 2000. (Part of this was due to the Syriac community’s own initiative — but I’m just using Syriac as an example and don’t need to go into detail. Many other complex scripts are included in Windows.) The point is that Apple has refused to include full OpenType support for an embarrassingly long time. It was completely absent up to the release of Tiger, then was partially included mid-way through Tiger’s development cycle (supposedly fixing Hebrew, though I know folks who would say that Hebrew is still fundamentally broken in Mac OSX). Back to my original point — I can’t use Google Docs on a Mac, even if they have fixed Safari support, simply because the right font technology does not exist in the OS. Documents including Syriac written in Google Docs via a Windows browser do not show up properly in Mac OSX. So, the whole collaborative benefit to Google Docs evaporates.

Now Adobe has released Buzzword, which was developed by a company from the suburbs of Boston called Virtual Ubiquity. Adobe bought Virtual Ubiquity last year (see here and here). Buzzword is a flash-based word processor similar in many ways to Google Docs. It’s also beautiful. Adobe is definitely becoming more design conscious with their apps (Acrobat 8 is a good example), and I am immediately attracted to Buzzword through its look and feel. (By comparison Google Docs looks clunky and merely functional, not unlike Gmail’s aging interface.) There are a couple of head-scratchers, such as why I have to move my cursor all the way to the right to select a different formatting mode, then all the way back to the left to work with that mode. But, overall, it’s a great looking web app. So, what about my roadblocks above? Footnotes? Yep, well, not exactly. It has endnotes, but they’re very well integrated into the text. Everything is very simple and elegant. I tried to import a heavily footnoted document and was very pleased with the result — the footnotes were converted to endnotes and all the necessary linking between reference and endnote was retained. In fact, the reference in the text gives a visual cue when you mouse over it, which is a great Apple-esque touch. The included fonts are of a high quality (Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, Garamond Pro, etc.) — all Adobe standards which you would have to pay for otherwise (actually, I got Garamond Pro from registering Adobe CS2, so they’re not that hard to come by). Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be Unicode support yet, even on Windows — all the Greek in the text I uploaded was turned into bullet points. And the same occurs when I try to type in Greek or Hebrew in a new document. Nevertheless, I’m very impressed with Buzzword, which has already surpassed Google Docs in the footnote arena. And, while I don’t have any inside information, it would seem to me that Unicode support is forthcoming (plus, OpenType I assume, since Adobe was one of the principal developers, along with Microsoft and, originally, Apple — for what it’s worth, OpenType is now an ISO standard).

For more information on the development of Buzzword, you can visit David Coletta’s blog The Joy of Flex, which I discovered earlier today and am pleased to note uses the same Wordpress theme this site.

PS There are other nice things about Buzzword, such as built-in commenting, but there are other gaps too, such as no pdf support (as with Google Docs — though you can export to pdf in the latter) and the inability to import or export to OpenDocument documents. Buzzword, however, supports the new .docx format, and Google Docs does not. The multiplicity of ways of viewing your documents in Buzzword is a marvelous feature and encourages the user to upload more.

I added the About page, which could certainly be expanded. I thought it might be helpful for people who didn’t want to slog through the CV. The phenomenon of posting your CV on the web is akin to a dog suggesting to another dog that he sniff his butt. Nevertheless, I’m convinced it has some practical benefit. (I guess it does for dogs too.)

I’ve included my email addresses, academic and personal, at the bottom of the About page. This may be integrated onto the front page in the future. there should certainly be a clearer “contact details” area. I’ll try to work on that.

More pages will be forthcoming. In particular, I hope to have an “experimental” page where I detail some of the work I’m doing at the moment, posting pdfs and outlines and things in the hopes that colleagues will comment, even briefly, on what they find. A sort of “work in progress” page, which could also serve collaborative ventures in the future. A links page would also be helpful. There are various sites out there for neighboring subjects to my own, such as Medieval History Sourcebook, but these things tend to be so gargantuan as to be unhelpful (and intimidating). Something like Michael Hemment’s Inter Libros at Harvard is more immediately helpful. (See Michael’s insightful blog as well.) But even there Inter Libros is a “gateway”. I would like to have a page that sorts the wheat from the chaff — sort of like a Colophon of websites I’ve found useful. Anyway, it will emerge eventually.

As always, suggestions are welcome.

Today I finished editing the CV and Colophon pages for the first time. Fair warning: both the content and layout of these pages will probably change often, and I doubt I will post every time they are. If there is something that you are especially interested in, be it academic or technical, please don’t hesitate to email me. (Right now I don’t have an email address posted on the site but will sometime later today.) If you think the layout and/or content of these pages needs to change, don’t hesitate to let me know (politely, of course!), since I’m always welcome to suggestions.