27 August 2010
Not much to say, other than seeing a young Hugh Laurie doing comedy is also fun. (Why is it that comedians so often turn out to be fine dramatic actors, but the reverse is usually not the case.) Enjoy.
(Hat tip to Pharyngula)
Crowdsourcing Peer Review
24 August 2010
Peer review of academic articles is a flawed process, but it serves as a necessary function. Experiments like this one outlined in a New York Times article are healthy explorations into how the process can be improved by the new media.
More on Google Books
24 August 2010
[Actually, this is a year-old article—which explains why “there is little new” in it. I mentioned it a year ago. --DW, 8/27]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted or linked to a post about the problems with Google Books. But here’s an article on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg. For those that are familiar with the topic, there is little new in this article, but the parade of errors in the metadata is humorous, if nothing else. And this conclusion of Nunberg’s is spot on:
In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.
While I share many of Nunberg’s complaints, I don’t share the sentiment in the title that Google Books is a “disaster.” On balance, Google Books is an invaluable resource. Yes, Google has gotten a lot of things wrong, and those errors severely limit the utility of the digital library, but the benefits of ready access to the truly vast number of books outweighs the problems with the system.
(Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily)
A Couple of Links About Copyright
21 August 2010
The Arts and Letters Daily blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education is really a must-have for your RSS feed. Today, it features two articles of note about copyright.
The first is an article in Der Spiegel Online about a hypothesis by historian Eckhard Höffner that contends Germany’s economic and industrial expansion in the nineteenth century was largely the result of the country not having a copyright law. While I’m skeptical of this rather strong contention, I have no doubt that the free exchange of ideas does lead to economic and technological progress and that can be strangled when ideas are given too limited a circulation. In this case I think the problem in England, to which Höffner compares Germany, was not so much the copyright law, but the business models of the publishers that limited the free flow of ideas.
The second is a very creative, graphical review by cartoonist Ward Sutton of Lewis Hyde’s new book, Common as Air. Hyde’s book takes on what is perceived by many to be abuses of copyright law in contemporary American society. Evidently, Sutton regularly produces graphical reviews for Barnesandnoble.com.
Jack London Biography
15 August 2010
Johann Hari has a review of a new biography of Jack London in Slate.
London may be my favorite writer. His prose style is terse, yet evocative (and can’t be easily parodied like that of his imitator Hemingway), and unlike many of his nineteenth-century predecessors remains accessible and readable today. Yet he was an enormously complex, and in some respects despicable, human being.
One of the reasons I may like London so much is that, unlike most kids, I was not assigned his works in middle or high school. (I read the short story “To Build a Fire” in school,” that’s all.) I discovered his work as an adult. I object to the characterization of his most famous work, The Call of the Wild, as “a dog story.” Yes, many consider it that, probably because they last read it in eighth grade, at an age where they could not truly appreciate its themes. But calling it “a dog story” is like calling Huckleberry Finn “a boy’s adventure novel.” It is a complex tale that highlights how thin the veneer of civilization is in us all. And the prose is just glorious to read. I’m all for exposing children to great literature at a young age, but in so doing we should be careful not to pigeonhole those works as children’s literature.
