The Invisible Library

The Village Voice:

When this attacked city was selected to host the convention way back in January 2003, Bush might have believed he’d come here as a hero, with bin Laden’s head in tow, a new tower rising, $20 billion in thank-you’s awaiting, and a landslide on the way, beginning in NY. Instead, along the same westside route where Bush was cheered lustily on September 14, 2001, protesters may gather by the hundreds of thousands, a revolution in receptions marking the ugly shift in national spirit that’s infected Bush’s years. A president who came then to our battlefield as a unifier is returning as a user�turning our city into a carnival rationale for his war and re-election.

Read about The 10 Ways Bush Screwed New York.

I’m not in New York. I have Grad School starting tomorrow and besides it’s really hot out there today.

But flipping through the channels on this Sunday afternoon, I came across C SPAN’s live coverage of the protesters in New York (you know, all those bomb throwing Anarchists we’re supposed to be so afraid about). I haven’t seen a wide shot yet… Oh, there’s one. Wow. That’s a lot of people. It’s hard to judge crowds but that looks like several thousand. How many protesters marched at the Democratic convention in Boston? Not nearly this many and they aren’t rounded up behind razor wire fences. Yet.

But I understand how the Republicans might be scared about violence. I mean, I just saw two of the scariest looking elderly people pass the camera. They looked like they were hiding Molotov cocktails in their fanny packs. Seriously though, this is pretty peaceful protest. I guess the fear-mongering is just that: BushCo. trying to scare the crap out of Ma and Pa Kent, who might have heard about those unruly Anarchists congregating in New York City, trying to undermine the Republicans undermining of our Democracy.

Ooh! Security! Search that Woman with the fiddle! There’s probably a machine gun concealed inside!… OK, Not very likely.

I think my favorite sign so far is the one with the red elephant shitting bombs. That’s a vivid image, one that sums things up nicely, I think.

Christian writes:

Athens, Greece - August 24, 2004

That’s right. I am currently in Greece spending my first R&R and hitting the Olympics. I left Baghdad for Kuwait last Friday and arrived in Athens Saturday morning. Although I have been enjoying my work there, it is certainly good to take a break. Before I left, things were coming to a head with Sadr and the situation was getting tense. Now, it seems so far away although I will be back soon enough.

Presently, I am visiting close friends from my graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon. It is a great joy to relate to good friends in person the adventures I have been having. One of my friends, Alejandro, just arrived from Kabul where he is working with the UN to reestablish the customs services. There are vast differences between our work and the respective situations but there are also tremendous similarities! For instance, both operations face the challenge of dealing with multiple stakeholders and competing claims of interest. Additionally, we also both face the fact of dealing with governments that are very limited in their control of their respective countries. It also seems that the creation of the both governments is a similar process. In Afghanistan, they held the Loya Jirga. In Iraq, we recently held the National Conference. Both bodies were made up of a large number of representatives from throughout the country and both were responsible for providing legitimacy to the present government. Both governments face the challenge of insurgents and armed groups unwilling to take part in the political process. Although Iraq has dominated the news for the last year, we cannot forget Afghanistan. Failure there will have consequences for Iraq and likewise the other way round.

Read the rest.

Last night, I saw Hero. It’s a briliant, moving and superbly done Martial Arts Opera. But for the love of Lao Tzu, it’s not a Kung Fu movie! I would have thought people would have learned this lesson from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: that when you see the preview of Jet Li flying slowly throught he air, sword dancing, this means that it’s going to be operatic, not action/adventure. So, all you jackasses last night who snickered at the melodramatic love story and were bored by the philosophy, take a hint. I’ve sat through two of these movies with you uncultured swine and I’m not doing it a third time. So in two or three years, when another Martial Arts Opera comes out and you think it looks like a cool kung Fu movie, just stay home and watch Jessica Simpson make a fool of herself on MTV. If she isn’t divorced and in rehab by then.

Update: I just spoke with my wife, who also went to see Hero last night and she had the same experience. I think this disrepectful, swinish attitude relates to al arger issue, one we’ve all seen in politics and in the media lately, That willful ignorence and disdain that the gung ho, Love It or Leave It crowd has towards anyone who tries to appreciate something forign and different. The attitude that says being respectful of other cultures is Un-American (and don’t even think about trying to understand root causes in terrorist actions. That’s fucking treasonous). And we wonder why no one likes us. Or, sadly, we as a country don’t but I do.

From now on, whenever I travel overseas I’m telling people I’m Canadian.

Following up on a post from earlier in the week re: the Victorian sex ed manual for children: My wife e-mailed a friend of ours who works at the Library of Congress, asking about their copy of Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey, only to find that alas, their copy was recently stolen.

Stealing books from Libraries is wrong, kids. I don’t care if you steel books from Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks, after all they’re corporations and probably deserve it. But libraries, especially the Library of Congress are valuble institutions, promoting literacy and the free spread of knowledge. And they don’t have a very large budget. So if you stole this book, please return it. Just slide it in the book return slot or leave it wrapped in paper on the front steps in the middle of the night. Heck, if you just walked in and handed it to the first librarian you came across, I doubt they’d even care that you stole it, so happy would they be to have their book back.

One of the first things we learn in Librarian School is that, when doing reference work, always make sure to consult a reliable source. But how do we know a source is reliable and authoritative? That’s the big Existential question that haunts many a reference librarian. After all, their is no simple way to determine a resources authenticity. God does not come down from the mountaintop with a little rubber stamp and declare every worthy almanac, journal, encyclopedia or thesaurus “Authoritative” and cast the rest into burning pits of doubt. The only way to find the holy grail of authoritative resources is by doing research (usually with some metaresource designed to verify authenticity, which in turn requires consulting a meta-metaresource and so on) or, as is most often the case, simply using a resource that others find useful. This is really what determines a resources authoritativeness: weather or not you can turn to it repeatedly and get the same accurate results.

E-reference takes this authoritative uncertainty to a whole new sphere of paranoia. No online resource has been around long enough yet for their to be any way to gage its authoritativeness beyond a shadow of a doubt. Sure, The Oxford English Dictionary is online, as is Bartleby’s full line of reference works, including the Columbia Encyclopedia. These are wonderful sources, full of much poured over articles, all of them vetted to the highest standards. They aren’t complete though. They have holes, sometimes very large ones, especially when it comes to evolving social trends in popular culture or technology¹. By the time the article is written, verified and posted, the subject has ceased to be relevant and is now something that happened, back then. That is simply the nature of our wired world. Which is why Wikipedia has become such a valuable resource. It’s a free, open source encyclopedia, which means that anyone can write an entry. The genius of this is that instead of having a few specialized lexicographers and researchers (who are often out of touch, being academics and not all that comfortable with this whole computer thing), Wikipedia has at their disposal the potential knowledge of everyone on the web. Facts can be checked by numerous sources, notes compared and articles on cutting edge topics written, posted and updated within hours, instead of months.

However, the entrenched Authoritarians among us are shocked and dismayed by the audacity of such a concept. Just ask Al Fasoldt of the Syracuse Post-Standard:

In a column published a few weeks ago by my companion Dr. Gizmo, readers were urged to go to the Wikipedia Web site at www.wikipedia. org/wiki/Main Page , an online encyclopedia, for more information on computer history. The doctor and I had figured Wikipedia was a good independent source.

Not so, wrote a school librarian who read that article. Susan Stagnitta, of the Liverpool High School library, explained that Wikipedia is not what many casual Web surfers think it is.

It’s not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials.

“As a high school librarian, part of my job is to help my students develop critical thinking skills,” Stagnitta wrote. “One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site.”

Wikipedia, she explains, takes the idea of open source one step too far for most of us.

“Anyone can change the content of an article in the Wikipedia, and there is no editorial review of the content. I use this Web site as a learning experience for my students. Many of them have used it in the past for research and were very surprised when we investigated the authority of the site.”

Mike, a contributing writer at Techdirt tried explaining to poor, blinkered Mr. Fasoldt the intricacies of Wikipedia:

While I can understand why, at first, the concept of Wikipedia seemed a little scary to those who hadn’t seen it in action, I figured the reporter in question might want to know a few more details about it, and perhaps correct some of his misperceptions. My main problem was that he seemed to write off Wikipedia based solely on how it was created and maintained, and not at all on the actual content. Along with my post, I sent an email to the writer, Al Fasoldt, giving him some additional information about Wikipedia, and wondering why, after telling us how you can’t trust any random info online, he trusted the email from a random librarian claiming Wikipedia was somehow untrustworthy. The ongoing discussion with Mr. Fasoldt has been quite a lesson in watching how a journalist (a) continues to make unsubstantiated allegations (b) seems to prefer insulting me and putting words in my mouth to actually responding to my points or questions and (c) sticks steadfastly to his belief that only “experts” can be trusted with information — and, in his case, only experts that he chooses. Yet, somehow, we’re supposed to find him more trustworthy than a self-correcting community. Figuring he might appreciate the views of others in his profession (you know, “experts”), I sent him links to Dan Gillmor’s article on Wikipedia and Steve Yelvington’s recent realization of the power of Wikipedia. However, rather than actually look at that information, Mr. Fasoldt accused me of wanting “students to trust a source that’s not trustworthy.” After some back and forth of this nature, where Mr. Fasoldt responded to my request that he do a little more research by saying: “I’m glad you’re not the publisher of a newspaper” (apparently, his publisher lets him do no research at all) and then telling me that anyone who wrote for Wikipedia obviously knew nothing (his phrase was: “100 times zero is still zero”), I suggested an experiment. I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect — and see how long it lasted. Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and finally (in another email) “dangerous,”

I’ve run into similar attitudes concerning not just online resources like Wikipedia but also search engines. You should see the sneers I’ve gotten from some professors when I tell them that I found some piece of information on Google (in only five minutes of searching) as opposed to using the high end and laborious subscription database like Dialog or Factiva. Apparently, there are still Librarians and information professionals who think that authority does come from on high, and if it doesn’t bare the stamp of approval from the OED or the ALA (or a high subscription price), then it isn’t worth our time and might even be dangerous. Regardless of the fact that it works, which ultimately, is the only true test of a resources Authoritativeness.

Update: Bryan, in comments, sums it up nicely:

Wikipedia uses the peer review standard of all scientific journals. While the base value of “peer” is more extensive and inclusive on Wikipedia, the procedure is exactly the same.

The “established” reference works that have been ported to CD have still not been debugged primarily because the established institutions simply don’t have the staff to do the job in a timely manner.

Update: 8/30

While Mr. Fasoldt dismissed Mike of Techdirt’s Wikipedia Challenge, someone else didn’t:

He [Alex Halavais] made 13 changes to 13 different Wikipedia pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. He figured he’d give them a couple of weeks and then fix the ones that weren’t caught. Every single change was found and changed within hours.

_________
Thanks for the link goes to Corry Doctorow at the ever useful and authoritative Boing Boing.

1. As an example, here is the entry in the Columbia Encyclopedia for “blog”. And here is Wikipedia’s entry.

A press release from PRKA. By George Saunders:

Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.

At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man’s penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.

During Phase IV, just after lunch, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs were dropped, during the lazy afternoon hours, on crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb momentary silences were then heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage, and/or frantic imprecations to a deity. No sleeping baby was awakened from an afternoon nap by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/her domicile during Phase IV.

Please read the whole thing. Then, If you’re already a member, keep doing absolutely everything. If you’re thinking of joining, continue to do so. We’ll be here when you decide. If you read these words and your only reaction is to mumble something under your breath about “Dirty Peaceniks” or “Traitorous Lefties,” then you may want to have that ulcer checked out.

Thanks to Scout at And Then… for the link.

Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library:

At the time of their inception in the nineteenth century, public libraries were seen as critical institutions in the creation of a free and democratic society. The public library was conceived as a “people’s university”: a university that was open to everyone. But the purpose of this people’s university was not, as has come to be the case today, to merely train people to become more productive workers, let alone to entertain them. The purpose was to educate people to function responsibly as free and equal citizens in an enlightened democracy. Thus, the current decadent state of our public libraries reflects the state of the culture at large. In writing about the condition of public libraries I mean to open discussion on broader social and cultural issues as well.

I’ll be reading the whole thing over the next few weeks and commenting on it as I go But what I’ve read so far is spot on.

Thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan for the link.

Via BoingBoing, I found this intriguing little gem: a re-edit of Planet of the Apes as an episode of the Twilight Zone:

When I first started gathering information about POTA, I was surprised to learn that Rod Serling co-wrote the screenplay for Planet. Then suddenly it all made sense. “Of course! Planet is a two-hour episode of The Twilight Zone!”

That idea stuck in the back of my head ever since. Then with the recent advances in digital filmmaking technology and especially after reading about fan edits (particularly the couple of Star Wars: Episode I edits that surfaced), another thought struck me: “Wouldn’t it be cool to take Planet and edit it down into a thirty minute episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with Rod Serling narration?” I knew the project would take a lot of patience to assemble the pieces, but once I got them together, it would be great fun to create the final product.

Technology is letting us do some really interesting things. Sure, they violate copyright laws but those laws are the sorts of things that are just begging to be violated. They’re draconian, stifling and all serve the corporate mass marketers rather than the creators they were originally designed to protect. So, if being an artist in the 21st century means being a pirate too, well then all I have to say is, “Argh, Matey!”

The Village Voice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Everything Is Funnier With Monkeys. If J. Fred Muggs, Lancelot Link, or zoo-house fecal tossing have taught us anything, it is that every human endeavor is enriched by the addition of a screaming, leg-humping, ass-biting primate. Even, say, sex education. I beg your pardon? you might ask. Clearly you’re not acquainted with the strangest children’s book of the 19th century– Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey (1874). Written by health crusader and mail-order magnate Dr. Edward Bliss Foote (1829-1906), it’s the five-volume Manhattan saga of the 12-year-old son of freed slaves. It does indeed also feature a sidekick monkey named Sponsie–and yes, as promised, he is troublesome.

[edit]

It’s a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey.

“Encountering Sammy Tubbs was a eureka moment, like a shot of a very powerful, very pleasurable drug,” Michael Sappol, curator at the National Library of Medicine, tells the Voice. Sappol’s metaphor is apt: The Sammy Tubbs series mixes nearly every progressive and fringe element of 19th-century physiology and politics into a sort of patent-medicine speedball. There are lectures against tight-fitting clothes, against tobacco and alcohol, and for phrenology and animal magnetism; there are thrilling showdowns between bigotry and the rights of women and minorities. And there are, courtesy of illustrator H.L. Stephens, hundreds of drawings of everything from shrub-like capillary diagrams to flying monkeys and animated kitchen appliances. Rather more down to earth–if not downright earthy–illustrations include those of genitalia. One set of these occurs on page 180 1/2– the publishing netherworld equivalent of Floor 7 1/2 in Being John Malkovich�so that mortified parents could razor out the drawings without Junior noticing a break in pagination. But even razored copies still contained a drawing of a vagina with a tiny musical note tooting out of it–a sly touch by Stephens removed from later printings.

Sappol first encountered Tubbs in the early days of researching his recent book, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2002), newly published in paperback and featuring a chapter devoted to Tubbs.

I’d love to get a hold of a repro copy of this book. So far, I haven’t been able to track one down though. But I’ll find it. Oh, yes. I will find it.