epub-tools is a suite of command-line utilities for creating and manipulating epub book files. Included are: epubmeta, epubname, epubzip. This software uses the epub-metadata library, also available on Hackage.

epubmeta is a command-line utility for examining and editing epub book metadata. With it you can export, import and edit the raw OPF Package XML document for a given book. Or simply dump the metadata to stdout for viewing in a friendly format.

epubname is a command-line utility for renaming epub ebook files based on their OPF Package metadata. It tries to use author names and title info to construct a sensible name.

epubzip is a handy utility for zipping up the files that comprise an epub into an .epub zip file. Using the same technology as epubname, it can try to make a meaningful filename for the book.

My favorite metaphor for explaining programming to non-coders is that it’s like carpentry. You can put together a chest of drawers with nails and glue, and it’ll fall apart in a year, or you can build something lasting and use dovetail joints. We’re not plumbers providing a utility, but neither are we artists. It’s nice if our work is beautiful, but it also must be durable. We’re craftsmen. We make things that people use.

It is not always easy to discern digital and analog experiences. A lot of seemingly analog devices have digital technology built in without us realizing it (tape decks, ovens, cars), and, as you might have noticed, more and more digital devices try to look and feel like analog tools.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

PANDA is your newsroom data appliance. It provides a place for you to store data, search it and share it with the rest of your newsroom.

“Yes, many of the books on the shelves are available under those options. We can have the publisher drop ship a brand new copy anywhere you like, or you can purchase this used copy. You can also rent the book, but you might want to consider a membership because then the rental is free. Members don’t pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and we order another.”

“Well, if you invest in a membership and thus in this store, then we can sell you a DRM-free ebook edition for many of the titles in the store. Many of the publishers we work with have been convinced that if you have a stake in the store, you will have a stake in its continuance and your access to the books we offer.  And that, they hope, would be enough for you to use the file only in legal ways. They also get a cut of the membership fee, which they don’t have to pay royalties on, or any other costs for that matter.”

James Gleick is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard and the author of a half-dozen books on science, technology, and culture. His latest bestseller, translated into 20 languages, is The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, which the NY Times called "ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical." Whatever they meant by that. They also said "Don't make the mistake of reading it quickly."

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. It’s a hybrid approach, reflecting the web’s way of landing us in a feral state—the predicament of a domestic creature forced to live by its imperfectly-rekindled instincts in a world where it is never entirely at home. The feral is a metaphor—and maybe more than just a metaphor—for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk will weave critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles’ new collection, The Sovereignties of Invention.

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware”—that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press.

Narula proposed the use of microformats and the little-known rev attribute to attach semantic meaning to links, allowing browsers to handle different kinds of links differently. (rev is supposed to represent a reverse link. All major browsers, when faced with a rev attribute now, just ignore it. It’s like a cousin to rel.)

Eugene Wu, a graduate student of computer science at MIT, demonstrated a suite of tools called DBTruck that makes data comparison a snap. Enter the URL of a CSV file, JSON data, or an HTML table and DBTruck will clean up the data and import it to a local database. Normally you might go to a web page like this, select and copy the table, paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, then spend 15 minutes trying to fix the misplaced cells and formatting issues. DBTruck is automated and fast.

Too often we just get a giant number — the U.S. debt is $15 trillion, Chinese greenhouse gases are the highest in the world at 7 billion tonnes a year, Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, etc. Is there some way of helping to put these statistics — huge to the point of meaningless — into an understandable, human framework?

The Globe created what it calls the Globe Lab, a space where employees are encouraged come up with ways to breathe life back into the newspaper industry.

With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details.

Ouwi is first, and foremost classifiable as a 'non-linear two dimensional writing system.' If I convince you that it's a good idea, but you don't like how Ouwi works, I have tried to break down the issues here so you can design your own. Either way, you should become more conscious here of the problems and possibilities of a language and writing system like Ouwi.

Most of the feedback comes from everyone in the company. I hope that doesn’t change. I feel like even when we were five people, we all knew when something was right or wrong because we use it so much. We still get feedback from the Support team. If Support’s getting thousands of emails about a design or functional piece, we can react to that.

The advantage of this system is we’re making all the decisions ourselves — we’re recognizing the problems and solving them ourselves — so when something doesn’t work, we know exactly why. When you’re A/B testing or solving problems for other people, and you ask for someone’s opinion, you’re not going to get an honest answer. You’ll get an answer because you asked a question. Also, you’re not going to recognize why you’re fixing something if you didn’t yourself recognize that it was wrong. You’re solving someone else’s problem.

For example, there is no longer a follower count displayed on the Dashboard. We moved that to the user’s blog page for two reasons. First, we wanted that column on the Dashboard to only relate to things you subscribe to — who you follow, who you like, tags you’ve subscribed to. Second, we wanted to take the focus off follower counts. It can be an intimidating number, and something to obsess over, and ultimately a huge distraction from why you’re on Tumblr. A high follower count is not a good reason to share something, and posting something purely as follower-bait is not ideal. You should post something that you like, to attract the audience that’s kindest and most similar to you.

But when we moved the follower count to another page, it bothered a lot of people. Data would show that the number of visits to the page dropped off dramatically. Both of those facts would indicate that we should move the page back up front, but we made a conscious decision: We just don’t want to show the number so prominently.

I’m a big fan of old car dashboards, like Volkswagen’s Mark I Golf. I love seeing dashboards in old concept cars. Car dashboards are fascinating because they’re supposed to be usable instantly. And a lot of it needs to be usable without even looking at it. Turning on a blinker, using the radio. Checking speed, fuel, hitting the horn, even steering — all usable at a glance or less. You have hundred-year-old technology that makes sense to anyone as soon as they sit in a car. These dashboards deal with colors, they deal with touch, they deal with language, they deal with ergonomics. The result when it’s done really well — when someone can use it without being told how to use it — is really beautiful. And yet it doesn’t need to be beautiful because no one’s really looking at it.

A lot of aca­d­e­mic work is highly spe­cial­ized, and highly spe­cific. This kind of work is vital to the pro­fes­sion. Right now if you write such a book, a book aimed at a very spe­cial­ized audi­ence, you shop it to presses, and a uni­ver­sity press takes it and pub­lishes it for, say, $75 for the hard­cover and $35 for the ebook. Or $55 for the print ed. and $25 for the kindle/ebook. The press hopes to make most of its sales to libraries, which are A: fac­ing bud­get cuts, and B: likely to be going dig­i­tal more and more. The high price dis­cour­ages both libraries and all but the most seri­ous readers.

Aside from the fact that it’s indeed nice to have a phys­i­cal book, what is the advan­tage of our tra­di­tional meth­ods, to any­one? Do you want an object, or do you want your book read? Ide­ally, you’d like both, but if the book costs $60 dol­lars, get­ting either becomes unlikely. If the AHA pub­lished them as eBooks, and left dis­tri­b­u­tion to Ama­zon and Apple and B&N, or sold them directly its own web­site, your work would be embla­zoned with the author­ity of the AHA, “in print” for­ever, and instantly avail­able at low cost to all read­ers. If you want a phy­isi­cal object, print on demand is read­ily avail­able. In fact, uni­ver­sity presses use it them­selves.

Yes, the AHA would have to do some edi­to­r­ial work, and it’s not triv­ial, but the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is status–publishing with a major uni­ver­sity press con­fers sta­tus; hav­ing a nice look­ing book on your shelf con­fers sta­tus. But really hand­some car­riages used to con­vey sta­tus too, and so did hav­ing a “princess” phone. The AHA should take this on. They could make money, they could re-assert their cen­tral­ity to the enter­prise of his­tory, they could elim­i­nate weirdly, grossly over­priced books.

Four years ago, its traditional-to-digital-audience metrics were at a one-to-one basis, meaning for every traditional reader there was a digital one, according to Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company. Now, he says, on average, its digital audience is 25 times higher than the print audience. According to ComScore, The Atlantic got 3.6 million uniques in April 2012. On the advertising side, more than 50 percent of its revenue will come from digital.

Quartz is its boldest move yet. Helmed by ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney and slated to officially launch later this year, Quartz is looking to succeed where Portfolio most recently failed. It plans to take a global perspective — sprinkling correspondents around the globe — and offer a mix of magazine-like analytical content and the short bursts and infographic fare that’s more au courrant on the Web but aimed at global business leaders.

Quartz is also taking an interesting distribution by focusing more on mobile and tablets. Its content won’t be created for Web reading, then ported over to tablet and mobile, Delaney said. Instead, features will be native to those environments. One trend Quartz is not joining: paywalls. All its content will be free on desktop, mobile and tablet.

Most MSs ship with markup, which is then stripped out as part of flowing the manuscript into typeset pages. The typeset pages are then sent for proofreading against the requested markup. Is a verse extract set as such? A proofreader makes sure.

Moreover, she checks to ensure that common typesetting and pagination errors (widows, hyphen stacks, loose lines, too few lines below a head, a figure preceding its callout) have been avoided. Occasionally, the copy is changed to fix said problems. If the book is coming in overly long, and the length is not the fault of the book designer, then the copy will be hacked away at until it fits (there are printing budgets to stick to, after all). And even under the best of circumstances faulty copy will sneak all the way up to this rung of the bookmaking ladder—it needs to be marked, sent to typesetting, sent back to proof, and then OK’d. It is an impressively thorough, expensively fusty process.

Clearly: to fit your proposed standards, all editorial changes should be integrated into the initial MS, and any pagination should be set aside until all parties are completely satisfied with the digital book. Version control then becomes the problem. Will edits for length and typographical sturdiness be allowed? Then the hardcopy book becomes a pan-and-scan to epub’s letterbox. Will the physical typesetting be allowed to suffer in the name of fidelity to the copy? That hurts the book’s reputation as the more-beauteous (and therefore more premiumly-priceable) iteration of a text.

We’ll invent new beauties, most certainly, that aren’t dependent on trim sizes and the like. Or: we’ll accept that paper is costly and pixels are not, so let the page count swell and damn the cost of printing a perfect thing. A certain class of consumer will learn to pay for that perfection.

Advertising student. Advertising's not in a bubble; some very rich and formerly successful advertisers are just doing an awful job at adjusting to the change in society that's now been twenty years in the making. Dumbasses.

Here's how advertising works from its creator's point of view. There are a few principles abstract enough that you can apply to any piece of advertising. Good advertising positions itself within a market, develops a brand image, establishes its product as a good product (not even necessarily better-than: as long as you look trustworthy and people know your name, you'll sell). The bulk of ad research, meanwhile, goes into studying individual forms. TV ads. Product placement in films. Radio spots. Magazine spots. There's a series of long-tested techniques which advertisers rely on. Even these techniques usually fail, because plenty of advertisers are fucking idiots who don't get that ads are a creative medium, and if you're formulaic rather than creative, you'll sell jack shit.

The challenge of the Internet is that every web site has its own unique form. Most of these forms weren't even designed for ads (Facebook at least knew how they wanted to sell ads; Twitter still has no clue). To sell on Twitter is different from selling on Facebook is different from selling on Reddit or Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram. There's no formula. And some of these sites are so limited that advertisers simply have no clue how to push their shitty little message out to suckers, ahem, consumers.

The fix, of course, is that instead of selling a brand you start interesting conversations, create dialogues that engage people with the thing you're selling, even start communities of people who revolve around your product. But advertisers aren't bright enough or genuine enough or ambitious enough to do this the right way. Community-building especially: nobody wants to join a forum for a product that isn't a car. Yet some people persist in thinking that if they build it, fans will come.

One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly. One's the model Facebook is still struggling with: connect super-small businesses with precisely the people who want to buy their product. These anti-Facebook ads stories recently only show that you have to be smarter advertising on Facebook than you'd have to be in a newspaper. The really good Facebook ads get friends talking about them, because they really are something that those people enjoy. But that runs counter to how advertisers think about their sheep, goddammit I mean targets, no wait that doesn't sound nice either.

The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people. That means fewer start-ups designed to sucker people into wanting some bullshit connection they never really needed (YC has some exactly like this), fewer advertisers looking down at the masses like they're ripe for the picking, fewer businesses geared toward herding people up and selling them wholesale. The more freedom you give people w/r/t how they consume media and how they express themselves, the harder it is to trap them in your crap. Ultimately it becomes more profitable to just treat them like human beings, and act like a human yourself. But plenty of products will die when this happens because plenty of products were never intended for human consumption in the first place.

BOOKS may appear to inhabit a flat, monochromatic space. But Sarah Werner, a director at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, stresses that they carry a wealth of information which pours out only on close inspection, by looking, touching or even smelling a physical copy. They also change over time. This richness cannot—at least not yet—be captured in book-scanning projects.

She turns to a page with a handprint on it. The stain had to be that of a printer's devil, as a young shop assistant was known in those days. The handprint extends into the binding (see picture), so it must have been made before the book was still in large sheets (called signatures) and before it was folded and bound, she explains. In "Incipit textus Sententiarum", a book printed in Basel in 1482, she shows your correspondent a similar handprint on an outer margin. That was probably smeared at a later stage, possibly by a reader.

The assembly is important. Previous centuries treated books and manuscripts interchangeably, Dr Werner says, and some books were delivered as loose pages that were folded, sewn and bound. Books had their covers and bindings removed at times, and were rebound into new forms that suited the owner.

Presentation for the 3rd Language Creation Conference, March 21, 2009.

David Markson left all the books he owned to New York's Strand bookshop; now, they are likely further spread. This blog collects annotations and commentary that people have found in books previously belonging to Markson. Brilliant.

Christened with the new name last month, the four year-old platform is now much more than a CMS. It comes with nearly every tool that’s needed for publishing, all tightly connected. And it’s already powering hundreds of SB Nation sports fan sites around the country, plus our gadget-oriented pseudo-competitors over at The Verge, forthcoming gaming site Polygon, and whatever else Vox decides to launch (I’ve heard there’s one coming about cars, for example).

The solution, one that I believe we’ll see more often at top online publications, was to create a tight development loop between developers and writers.

One of the most maddening parts of publishing online today is all the data entry related to a story — adding links to previous articles, tags, categories, images, and any other non-writing elements within the text editor. This process often takes up more time than writing the story itself, and the only solutions I’ve seen have been half-functional plugins.

On the topic of photos and videos, Chorus also has some careful solutions in place. The text editor includes a section that shows writers relevant licensed photos to use, whether from the AP, Getty or other services. It also comes with a streamlined photo editor to help writers crop images to their needs, and a tool for quickly uploading videos and photos that they’ve taken at events.

In the early days of being a librarian, I remember when The Urban Dictionary website launched. I remember some people in my literary and library circles talking about how it was a useless, crappy, sub-cultural icon in the way of many of the other sites at the time they looked down upon—LiveJournal, MySpace, etc. But I absolutely loved The Urban Dictionary. Where else could I go to figure out what on earth my students and younger colleagues were saying without looking like a complete dork and having to ask them directly?

And now so many years later I actually have two entries in The Urban Dictionary. There’s something visceral about knowing that something I wrote, something that came out of my head, is now recorded in the lexicon for all ages (or at least until the interwebs explode due to the zombie apocalypse). These entries are more meaningful to me than having published my book. Silly, right? Maybe yes, maybe no.

The two entries are related: Twitter Glitter and Facebook Fairy Dust. Both describe the act of marking one’s significant other (or desired significant other) using social media—mentions, check-ins at the same place, comments, likes, etc. It’s a way to tell the world “Hey! This person is mine. Back off.”

The phrase references the long-standing (somewhat) covert practice of women (and some men) of wearing glitter-laden cosmetics intentionally—so that you can get close to your significant other, spread your glitter, and thereby mark him or her. It’s a warning to others that this person’s taken. And if you see your own significant other covered in mysterious glittery sparkles, that’s a good indicator that there’s been another fox in your henhouse. This is also why strippers never, ever wear glitter. They know better than to get their clients in trouble at home.

One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.

Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vault blog.

“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogues and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogues, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalogue.”

“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”

“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”

But old source code isn't the only cultural artifact that requires specialized knowledge to preserve. As paper and dyes deteriorate, acetate degenerates, and the minute magnetic flux recorded in analog tape fades with the ages, how do we preserve cultural artifacts like photographs, music, and film? And what of more modern digitally created media? Images and video are shot directly in digital formats and stored on flash media. Music is recorded in 24-bit, 192kHz digital resolution onto massive hard drives. All these files exist in various codecs, formats, and file systems; on spinning magnetic platters or in solid state NAND flash. How do we preserve these files for future reference, study, and appreciation?

Anthony Bannon, a director at the George Eastman House, wrote in the forward to 500 Cameras that "collections manage time." Collecting, documenting, and managing a collection of objects—in Bannon's case, cameras, photographs, and other photographic ephemera—gives us insight into our history, and can lead us in new directions. Such collections bring value when they are organized, interpreted, and shared.

"But we must care for them, say their names, and notice what they consign," Bannon writes. "So we take responsibility for our collections with gratitude. The collector, whether individual or institutional, engages with the object to recognize the light of its value and hold the spark, to take on the responsibility of its meaning and make sense of it."

"One of the biggest challenges in the field of digital librarianship is simply trying to evolve as fast as technology," Pike said, "because we need to also keep up with emerging file formats and software systems to read those formats. We need to think of ways to preserve them and make them accessible either through emulation, or migration to a different format or system."

"We are the custodians of what has been created, and are enabling access—ideally free and unlimited—for the future," Pike said. "No matter what is created and where it is created, if it is important, some librarian, archivist, or records manager is capturing it and saving it for the future. In addition to saving the digital objects, we need to make them accessible so people can use and reuse the materials."

""Mind the Gap" is a story told by four young women from the Caribbean — Jamaica and Guyana — about cultural encounters and tensions in their neighborhood, Crown Heights. They're curious about, and a little afraid of, the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish community in their neighborhood, and start exploring the misconceptions and stereotypes they have about Judaism, first through their teachers at the High School for Global Citizenship, and then through the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center. In the process, they explore the challenging history of Lubavitcher/Caribbean relationships in Crown Heights, dating back to three days of riots that erupted in 1991 after the child of Guyanese immigrants was struck and killed by the motorcade of the Lubavitcher Rebbe."

"I love the format of the story: a mix of text, image, video and narrative that provides a rich picture of the neighborhood in question. And I'm excited to read a story that takes on the challenges of a cross-cultural encounter in a way that's hopeful, but not saccharine, and far from any happy endings."

Text takes time. It takes time to read, it takes time to write, and it takes time to reproduce. Throughout the history of text production, people have been searching for ways to distribute the costs of producing text—financial, temporal—more evenly across a system. This search led a former goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, to develop and refine his system moveable type by the 1450s, which eliminated the laborious book-copying process used previously by monastic scribes. And with Gutenberg’s system in place, Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius was able to quickly popularize printed books by the late 1400s.

But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

I'm a journalist because I'm really, really into demystifying the "others" in our world: Other people. Other experiences. Other truths.

The "non-article" isn't about re-inventing the article and it sure as hell isn't about replacing it.

We have an opportunity to invent new ways of telling stories and new ways of connecting people through those stories.

If you are old school and hearing "journalism" and "storytelling" together makes your blood boil, that's a problem for your cardiologist.

Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.

We know the rules of community; we know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world? We human beings have often been referred to as social animals. But we are not yet community creatures. We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival. But we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self-awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community. It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals, babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries. It is our task--our essential, central, crucial task--to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed.

It's seen by many as the front of the site, the focal point where people arrive and choose what they want to do. But according to Cohn, only 13 percent of visits to TheAtlantic.com start on the homepage, which "suggests the homepage is overvalued as a mechanism for generating visits to interior pages".

So although it sounds counterintuitive, featuring something on your front page is only one way - and not always the most effective - to boost traffic and get your content in front of the right people.

Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many. More music and less bullshit. Better recommendations and you can start listening right away.

There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

We haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but they have. We are crying but they are having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.

Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

We’re living through a much more radical shift from narrative and stories and reporting to entirely different and entirely unrelated ways of sharing knowledge.

Should this part of every contemporary article be curated and edited, almost like the piece itself? Should it have a name? Should it be formally linked to the original article or summarized at the top? By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers. (If a book isn’t read until it’s written in — as I was always told — then maybe an article is not published until it’s been commented upon.) Writers know this already. The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit — suitable for framing, not much else.

We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published — serving as some of the very first dictionaries in Europe.

According to an upcoming study from the Book Industry Study Group set to come out in a month, 95% of publishers have had the experience of creating their e-books with one set of metadata and seeing an altered set of metadata at the point of sale, online booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple*.

Twitter Ambrose is a platform for visualization and real-time monitoring of MapReduce data workflows. It presents a global view of all the map-reduce jobs derived from your workflow after planning and optimization. As jobs are submitted for execution on your Hadoop cluster, Ambrose updates its visualization to reflect the latest job status, polled from your process.

Though the larger wheel was useful to see the big picture, it was a bit overwhelming to really draw conclusions on a single topic. The breakouts by category helped reinforce the regional variation and to look at the complexity of each category. The same data was also shown in the the larger circle, but the regional multiples gave a moment of pause for interpretation without being overwhelmed.

Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a fantastic typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and ­­FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

Using OpenType features, simple strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The visualized data remains editable, allowing for hassle-free updates and styling.

But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick – the “side stick” – used in all Airbus cockpits.

A medicine man company would observe a given community, society, or even a whole civilization, and try to sense what's ailing it. Then, it would create technological interventions to counteract those ailments. It would use software as a kind of medicine, traveling into the world and subtly altering the behavior of people. A medicine man company would become a new kind of healthcare provider, helping people heal.

So then why act? Why add complexity? If any intervention will create both good and bad, then why intervene at all? Why not simply sit and watch?

We should act because the world is getting crazy, and beautiful interventions are needed.

These vignettes draw comparisons between software and medicine — in their dual capacities to heal and to hurt. They explore the nature of addictive technologies in relation to business, the power that software designers are presently wielding over the masses, and a new way of imagining companies: as medicine men for the species. I hope these vignettes will help to inspire the engineering community to adopt a common set of ethical principles to guide the evolution of software (which, in turn, will help to guide the evolution of our species).

"There's no point in beating around the bush. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is simply the best ebook about science that I have ever encountered. To me, it is the exemplar of what ebooks can be."

But publishers are complicators, and for the most part have never understood the Net or the Web. Nor have they fully embraced its inherent simplicities, with the remarkable exception of RSS (which Dave made into Really Simple Syndication — a purpose that could not possibly be misunderstood by publishers, and which now brings up 4,270,000,000 results on Google).

Our project started with the intention of building a digital archive; the Archive 2.0 nature of the project surfaced when we realised that in order to build a useful archive, we would need to engage multiple stakeholder communities. In our project this meant working with the cultural stakeholders, the Samaritans, as well as academic stakeholders, including Samaritan and Biblical scholars. Initially we thought that applying Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, image tagging, etc, to a digital archive would be our most important contribution to the project. As the project unfolded and we identified stakeholder needs more precisely however, we realised that our role was as much about balancing stakeholders' representational needs as much as it was about the application of Web 2.0 technologies.

While Web 2.0 technology helps mitigate stakeholder needs, we see the work of Archive 2.0 as more about questions of procedure, methodology, and field work.

the present situation could be described as a continuous increase in the amount of material being published only in electronic form, together with wide-scale conversion of paper-based material to digital formats. And this tendency will only intensify in the coming decades, covering more and more geographical areas, countries and language groups. More and more librarians, image-processing specialists, and metadata creators will be involved in this process. Information Science specialists will develop and propose new algorithms for e-resource description, information discovery and retrieval.

This project, from the outset, could be characterised as unique for Armenia in its scale, the novelty of the decisions involved and the hardware deployed. The lessons learnt during the project’s implementation and the solutions that were adopted as a result served as a sound basis for initiating other digitisation projects in FSL. During the lifetime of the project, many technical difficulties were resolved, a lot of practical finesses were teased out of our mistakes, and we hope that this article will serve as a guide for practitioners who are initiating similar projects in their own organisations.

Three principal stages evolved during the project:

photographing the originals using a high-quality digital camera;
saving the images on the high-quality DVD discs (producing 2 copies for each material - Preservation Copy and Access Copy), and;
mounting the images with relevant metadata on the Web for public access.

The most vulnerable part of the camera is its shutter. After several thousand shots (usually 70,000 – 100,000), the camera shutter must be changed, and when preparing a budget for digitisation projects it is important to consult with the hardware supplier on possible repair and maintenance costs, and include these expenses as a separate line.

VuFind is an open source discovery system originally created by Villanova University near Philadelphia [1] and now supported by Villanova with the participation in development of libraries around the world. It was one of the first next-generation library discovery systems in the world, made possible by the open source Solr/Lucene text indexing and search system which lies at the heart of VuFind (Solr also underlies several of the current commercial offerings, including Serials Solutions' Summon and ExLibris' Primo).

However, article discovery was not the whole story. Rather than reducing the number of interfaces library users had to learn - which was part of the intention in aggregating the data into a single discovery tool - we had actually increased them.

`Next-generation' discovery has never been clearly defined; it is a general direction of travel, rather than a specification (the initial definition was made I believe by Eric Lease Morgan in 2006; an elaborated version can be found in Next Generation Library Catalogs in Fifteen Minutes [8]). That direction may be inflected differently by different parties. `Web-scale management', `central provisioning', and `transaction transparency' are part of a widespread trend that began with the move to be `more like Google'. They can be seen as part of a logical progression from that starting point, which starts with an emphasis on discovery and exploration and a downgrading of `known item' search.

This article presents a summary of some results of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa [1] which was conducted to research perceptions of stakeholders and the public towards public libraries in six African countries. The study is closely linked with the EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme [2], which awarded grants to public libraries in developing and transition countries to address a range of socio-economic issues facing their communities, including projects in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia.

74% of library users talk about their experience of using a library, mainly with friends or adult family members. Maybe partly for this reason, the awareness of one’s local library is quite high - across all countries, about half (53%) of library non-users. The majority of non-users across all countries claim that being busy is a key barrier to usage of libraries (64%). Data indicate, that relevant books would be the key motivator to likely future usage as almost half (45%) of non-users cite this as a key determinant in their future use of libraries. Other important factors would be more convenient locations (36%) and longer opening hours (35%), more materials accessible online (29%) and more computer workstations (24%).

Despite their perceived shortcomings, libraries are valued and are seen as important both by library users and non users. Users appreciate the value of libraries to both the individual as well as the community while non users tend to see libraries as essential to the community but not necessarily to themselves.

In Ethiopia the situation is even worse as none of the librarians surveyed said they had a computerised catalogue, circulation system or ownership of a Web site though some libraries did have computers.

Libraries are seen as essential to the individual as well as communities in general. However, they need to engage with the community at a more tangible level that goes beyond just providing information, e.g. facilitating community inter-action with service providers of health, agriculture, culture and entrepreneurship. Going digital, which is currently a clear deficiency, would perhaps provide a new way for libraries to be seen as more dynamic and innovative.

Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created, the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point. Different systems can be involved at different stages: one of them may be a repository. To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they must therefore be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle. In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one system.

Ariadne is a Web magazine for information professionals in higher education, further education, archives, libraries, museums, and research in all sectors. Since its inception in January 1996 it has attempted to keep the busy practitioner abreast of current digital library initiatives as well as technological developments further afield.

The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

What’s different this time? The network seems to be taking a page from agile software development, the philosophy that products should be released early and iterated often. The shows are live (cheap) and/or adaptations of existing shows (easy), all produced in six- or 10- or 13-episode pilot runs instead of as permanent offerings. Listeners and local program directors are invited to help shape the sound of the programs, making it something of a public beta.

Ask Me Another, for example, is perfectly designed for social media (which, remember, barely existed when Bryant Park Project began). Because it’s a live show, every member of the audience is a potential Twitter or Facebook connection.

“What we did before was we were just creating shows that occupied space in that larger circle without really paying attention to how well it connected to the inner circle. These shows are much more an attempt to have something that connects both to the larger circle and the inner circle as well.”

In this final part, we are looking at some other roles that guardian.co.uk tags play, including linking them to the wider web.

Every tag belongs to a site section, though in some cases a tag could belong to more than one section: Media law (Media or Law?), Social networking (Media or Technology?), Allen Stanford (Sport, Business or World news)?

If a person refuses to settle into one area of activity we sometimes find as neutral a place as possible for their tag (the Culture section is very useful for polymorphous polymaths like Russell Brand). Sometimes tags must be moved: cricket promoter turned Ponzi scheme operator, Allen Stanford, started in Sport and currently resides in World news (Business seemed too specific for such a colourful character). There was a dangerous moment recently when it looked like Wyclef Jean might have to take the long walk from Music to World news.

If a tag is set up in the wrong section, or doesn't reflect style, or clashes with our values, then we'll either delete the tag, merge it into another tag, or remake it completely. We have tools that allow us to move all the content associated with a tag onto another tag, setting up redirects and even replacing links across the site with the new tag.

Because these links are generated based on frequency of tags in common, they will change over time to reflect our output, without any editor ever having to intervene. Categorising travel keyword tags into "Types of trip", "Trip planning" and "Places" makes obvious sense, because users tend to browse travel content with very clear goals in mind.

We also use parent/child tag relationships in our tools to propose parent tags when a child tag has been selected. So if an editor picks the "London Evening Standard" tag, the tags "Local newspapers", "Freesheets", "Newspapers", "Press and publishing", and "Media" are all proposed and can be applied with one click, saving the editor from having to mentally climb a taxanomical tree and speeding up the process of adding tags.

While not being the most fun part of production, tags are an important part of our publishing platform, and drive a lot of the behaviour that users see on the website and other devices. In a series of posts over the next couple of weeks, we'll be looking at some of the features that tags deliver.

Then Amazon releases a simple and free GUI tool for styling reflowable epubs. Nothing fancy like iBooks Author or whatever Adobe is planning. It just gives them the ability to create really beautiful text-oriented ebooks. It imports ePub, doc, rtf, and HTML files. They can set the backgrounds, borders, and margins. Float some images here and there. Embed nice fonts. Add a movie or two. After that Amazon begins to add support for CSS font-feature-settings and updates the GUI tool to support it.

Most publishers of text-oriented books then face two choices: 1) A ubiquitous platform that supports exactly the features they want (floated images, full-bleed page backgrounds and borders, embedded fonts, opentype font-features). Cheap to develop for. Cheap to use. Has a most of their customers. Supported on all major devices and OSes. 2) A diverse set of heterogenous platforms that differ in a multitude of small ways (most of them non-technological, like B&N’s decision to override publisher stylesheets). A pain to test. Hell to develop for. Most of the tools will be either very expensive (Adobe’s) or proprietary to one platform (iBooks Author). The only way of getting the designs they want is to use a more complex spec that involves more work and isn’t supported by either web browsers or the Kindle. Together, these platforms have a minority of the market, but represent the majority of the publisher’s development costs.

Complex layouts, intricate flow, and extensive design capabilities aren’t a big concern for the makers of the kinds of ebooks that are easily over ninety per cent of the ebook market today. Text-oriented ebooks are the current ebook market and they are being abandoned by ebook vendors because they think they are commodities that neither need nor deserve any differentiation.

The problem is that ‘content’ – books – resists commodification. You can’t exchange Twilight, the Harry Potter series, or J.A. Konrath’s books for a generic slush-filler ebook during a sale and not expect an uproar.

If you think that Amazon is winning just because they were early to the ebook game then I can guarantee you that Amazon will eat your lunch.

How does the Storycuts series – an overarching brand to sell short stories and as singles out of their collections – fit into this theory? Well, adhering like it does to the iTunes sales model of songs versus whole albums, I think the digital short story can (and should) be the pop music of literature.
That’s not to say that it’s an inferior form compared to the paper novel – many would argue a three minute Beatles song matches anything Brahms composed. A story, like a great pop song, creates a rich interior world within its own parameters. What’s exciting for me is that the impulse to spend 99p or so on a short story (or bundle of stories) to download might open up a new market for stories, much like iTunes and song downloads opened up albums to a more casual listener.

The STORYCUTS series launches with over 250 digital short stories from across the Random House Group.

The series takes stories out of their parent collections and makes them available as singles or small bundles, along with a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find stories.

Taking a range of our best writers, across multiple genres, it’s an exciting new digital brand and a new era for the short story form.

I’m very interested in how reading behaviours operate across the two platforms, but to call interactive thingumabobs ‘books’ makes the same mistake that mired us in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation dead-end for fifteen years. In fact, that’s largely why I get a sense of disquiet about calling them books – that’s remediative, reductive thinking and it gets everyone nowhere. Take a look at what’s worked in recent months – Random House’s Story-cuts – short, lovely, well conceived incursions into a digital-led realm, that address the particular branding and design principles that are required to exploit the app store. It’s not remediation, it’s not transfer, it’s transposition, and that’s important.

The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open source reference book for anyone interested in the emerging field of data journalism.

This demo is an experiment in augmenting video with additional information [in the sidebar].

Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and

The passage has a solid base of Old English words mixed with a variety of French, Latin and Old Norse terms. Middle English makes an appearance in the form of a few words and suffixes while American English is found solely in the list of items Tom Sawyer collects from his friends. Two of these American terms (“fire-crackers” and “door-knob”) are hyphenated words built from Old English and Scandinavian components. (Several of Twain’s other hyphenated words apparently didn’t make it over the hump into full-fledged Americanisms. However, it should be noted that Twain was often the first author to record usage of U.S. slang of the era.)

In this environment, I think generation beats recitation. I have a whole meta-riff on this—in some ways it’s as much a moral case as a practical one—but really, more than anything, it’s just that media is already full of recitation. So, for the moment, I think you get a real competitive advantage if you can show and share the process of creation. It’s an opportune time to make music without a mask.

It’s media as high-wire act. It’s immediacy—which is not coincidentally one of the eight things that are better than free.

What that made me realize is that if you designed a publishing enterprise to support scholarly communication de novo, aggregating content from a range of sources but also developing direct publishing and reader/writer services, you could do it with very different constraints than Muse, JSTOR, and other platform providers have to grapple with. A new entrant, not unlike the Public Library of Science, could actually turn its back on existing publishing practice and design a direct-to-faculty or direct-to-discipline infrastructure that was wholly divorced from existing players.

The coming change in how we publish the humanities and social sciences, and in fact, what we can publish, could be even more transformative than the re-invention of STM. Building a new digital humanities infrastructure will mean interacting with visual interpretations of historical sites, hearing ancient or less common modern languages in linguistic treatises, and grappling with philosophical quandaries in a gaming environment with virtual goods. Ultimately this may reshape how faculty think about doing their research, as well as how it is communicated.

The publishing and ebook industry is completely in reaction mode. Publishers reacted to Amazon by colluding to set up the agency system. Kobo and B&N reacted to Amazon by mimicking its strategy. Even the IDPF’s EPUB3 and FXL standards are reactions to the runaway train that is HTML5 and Apple’s format extensions, respectively. Google’s publishing plans seem about as coordinated and planned as a piece of driftwood’s path through a hurricane.

I’m already on record as believing that ebook distribution and retail should be based on a modular ecosystem, open file formats and standardised services. I should be able to buy a book from any retailer, have it automatically download to any ereader (app or device), have that ereader use any bookmarking/note service I want, and have that service sync my notes on to Simplenote or Dropbox.

A writer should be able to open up a Scrivener or Word document – one that has been thrown back and forth between the writer and the editor until both are satisfied – click on something like “Export to EPUB” and have a ready-made EPUB file that works everywhere. Maybe have a bit of preferences and stuff to adjust but no fuss. No rendering errors. No worries about whether that blockquote is too long or whether the margins on that list will disappear for no reason. Maybe a quick conversion with kindlegen, but even that can be done automatically.

A tool that is unlimited by media, supports print design, iPad magazine app design, ebooks, ebooks with layout, etc., is a tool that will drive you to drink and suicide through frustration. These apps do deliver on the power and flexibility they promise but their complexity and expense will make that power a lot less useful than you think.
A tool that only works for one ereader app on one device type is amazing to use and fills you with joy, all of which is drained away once you realise that only people with iPads can read your work.

Digital media are transforming literacy, scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities. Information technology is an integral part of the intellectual environment for all humanities faculty members, but for those working closely in new media it creates special challenges and opportunities. Digital media have expanded the objects and forms of inquiry of modern language departments to include images, sounds, data, kinetic attributes like animation, and new kinds of engagement with textual representation and analysis. These innovations have considerably broadened notions of language, language teaching, text, textual studies, and literary and media objects, the traditional purview of modern language departments.

While the use of computers in the modern languages is not a new phenomenon, the transformative adoption of digital information networks, coupled with the proliferation of advanced multimedia tools, has resulted in new literacies, new literary categories, new approaches to language instruction, and new fields of inquiry. Humanists are adopting new technologies and creating new critical and literary forms and interventions in scholarly communication. They also collaborate with technology experts in fields such as image processing, document encoding, and computer and information science. User-generated content produces a wealth of new critical publications, applied scholarship, pedagogical models, curricular innovations, and redefinitions of author, text, and reader. Academic work in digital media must be evaluated in the light of these rapidly changing technological, institutional, and professional contexts, and departments should recognize that many traditional notions of scholarship, teaching, and service are being redefined.

Faculty members who work in digital media or digital humanities should be prepared to make explicit the results, theoretical underpinnings, and intellectual rigor of their work. They should be prepared to be held accountable to the same extent that faculty members in other fields are for showing the relevance of their work in terms of the traditional areas of teaching, research, and service.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a newspaper observed that “The ‘Dabbler in Black Art,’ the ‘Famous Prestidigitateur,’ the ‘Marvellous Illusionist,’ the ‘Modern Wizard,’ as he fondly and variously styles himself, has in the past couple of seasons been reaping a fat financial harvest.” Another newspaper article proclaimed that “The American public loves to be mystified. This is proved by the large audiences magicians and illusionists succeed in getting together.” The overwhelming success of the magical profession was generally viewed as merely symptomatic of a vague American tendency to delight in recreational confusion. But magicians knew better than to attribute the explosion of demand for modern enchantment to anything so vague.

However, since the magicians were linked not by locality but by an eccentric and highly individual profession, a traditional club complete with meetings and refreshments would have been an ineffective initial organizing device. Instead, a niche publication emerged onto the scene. Titled THE SPHINX: A MONTHLY ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO MAGIC AND MAGICIANS, it served as a structuring mechanism for the burgeoning ranks of magicians. It was the de facto clearinghouse for all information regarding magicians; in effect, it created the magical community. This structure, in organizing professionals, also built the bodies of knowledge, resources, and connections necessary to attract and absorb what turned out to be the most lucrative group of all to the magical industry: the wealthy, would-be amateurs for whom magic was a fantasy hobby.

The democratization of magical knowledge through THE SPHINX made parlor magic an even more popular pursuit for the particularly industrious man. In place of a secret society, it created a society of secrets.

Last week's blog entry on Amazon's ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor's ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good move. Last week they asked me to explain, in detail, just why I thought abandoning DRM on ebooks was a sensible strategy for a publisher. Turns out my blog entry on Amazon's business strategy didn't actually explain my full reasoning on DRM, so here it is.

The voracious 20-150 books/year readers are a small but significant market segment.

These people buy lots of titles. They frequently have specialized interests which they pursue in depth, and a large number of authors who, although not prominent, they will buy everything by. They frequently re-read books, and they are disproportionately influential on other customers because they enthuse about what they've read. They're particularly common in genre fiction. Previously they bought paperbacks and hardcovers from specialist genre bookstores or, failing that, from large B&N/Borders branches. They will go to whatever retailer they can find online, and they find DRM a royal pain in the ass — indeed, a deterrent to buying ebooks at all.

Currently it's hard for many people to build up collections of books due to space constraints — nevertheless I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50-150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an iceberg once ebooks become mainstream; why discard an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years' time and it takes up no space?

This is actually one psychological driver for piracy — people who have paid for a book resent being expected to pay for it again due to an arbitrary-seeming lock-in onto an aging piece of hardware. From their point of view, honesty is being punished.

(Why this will support the midlist: currently Amazon have swamped the midlist among ebooks in a sea of self-published rubbish. It's impossible to find anything worth reading in the Kindle store that isn't a very obvious bestseller. This offers an opportunity for specialist bookstores to offer a curatorial role. I believe the voracious genre consumers are picky enough about what they read that they dislike Amazon's slushpile approach, and will preferentially shop in better organized outlets.)

To the extent that piracy is an issue, I think the horse is well and truly out of the stable and over the horizon; bolting the stable door and adding chains and padlocks hasn't worked to date, either in print publishing or in music and film publishing. However, I would recommend considering a switch to watermarking. Watermarking doesn't prevent copying, but makes the original source of a copied file easy to find, which is a deterrent to piracy. This appears to be the current best practice in the music industry (in the iTunes store, all music downloads are watermarked), and they're a few years further into the era of internet distribution than we are.

The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

If top-down approaches to the problem don’t work, then what about bottom-up approaches? Why do any of us publish papers in Elsevier journals? Let me answer that question in my own case. I have a paper in the European Journal of Combinatorics, which I submitted about 20 years ago, before I knew anything about the objections to Elsevier. And what’s more, I didn’t know it was an Elsevier journal until a few days ago. (Part of my reason for listing the journals at the beginning of this post was to make the second excuse less valid for anyone who reads this. A more complete list can be found here.)

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

Capital P is a new publishing venture; an adventure in the textual and textural.

The biggest change, of course, was the title. We talked—a lot—about what we had to offer in a crowded print and online magazine field, and why we felt it was important to publish the kind of stories we do. What we came to was this: there are few magazines that look deeply at the work coming straight from academia and other research centers, and even fewer that do it from the West Coast, home to seven of the world’s leading research universities, most of the world’s top technology companies, and the gateway to a rising Asia.
We aim to cover that terrain with a mix of short and long pieces—and quick, easily digestible blog posts—that showcase original research, foreground primary-source data of national importance, and, sometimes, are just fun to read.

“Images of a salacious nature have always included words,” he said. Those words may appear in headlines, captions and story text. That’s why, he said, porn needs editing like anything else.

I think the thing that people forget when they say that language is elastic is that it also pulls back the other way. There are many tensions pulling language in new directions and useages, but there's also considerable inertia, both from sheer mass and from people who for all sorts of reasons resist new trends.

It is no secret that social media has become mainstream in recent years, and its adoption has skyrocketed. As a result of its growing popularity, users’ online contributions and membership in online social networks have exploded. With a multitude of voices all talking at once on social media, finding interesting and influential voices among the masses can be difficult. The objective of this 2-day workshop is to bring together experts in social media and online social networks from both the academic and business worlds, to share ideas on the best practices around how to study the impact of social media on our society, and specifically how to measure influence on social media. The workshop will provide researchers in this area an opportunity to present and debate their ideas, and provide graduate students with the opportunity to build academic and professional contacts, present their research, and learn about latest research in this area from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Influential User Detection
Information Visualization in Social Media
Mobile Applications
Online and Offline Social Networks
Online Community Detection
Online Identity
Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
Political Mobilization & Engagement on Social Media
Scalability Issues and Social Media Data
Social Media and Academia (Alternative Metrics. Learning Analytics, etc.)
Social Media Mining
Social Network Analysis