jill/txt

Does anyone have any experience with Gorenje fridges? Yes, I just spent two hours researching fridges. I’m renovating, which is awesome, and I’m so looking forward to moving into my upgraded, modern, compact apartment, but for the meantime I’m stuck figuring out which fridge would be best. Because it’s a small flat with a very efficient design (my interior architect is brilliant) slimness is of the essence, so this Gorenje fridge, being merely 54 cm wide, seems a safer choice than the standard Siemens style I’d probably go for otherwise. Also it’s about 30% cheaper, and have curvy doors, which I’m having trouble visualising. And I’d never heard of Gorenje until this evening.

So, of course, I googled. It seems Gorenje is a Slovenian brand that’s only been on the Norwegian market for a few years. I can’t find any regular people talking about their Goranje experiences, but consumer tests done on models no longer for sale have Goranje fridges scoring well, only just under Siemens and Bosch, and above Whirlpool and various other brands. There’s a sentence in one of the tests noting that Gorenje fridges are very quiet.

Last time I bought household equipment I followed the old Norwegian rule: just make sure the engine’s German, and you’ll be fine. This brand new kitchen is being bought at IKEA (a third the price and people say just fine) and to get the built in things easily IKEA-fied, the stove, dishwasher and microwave are Whirlpools. That felt strange. It’s not German! Can anybody but the Germans build dependable household machines?

Scott asked whether there’d be an ice dispenser. Sorry, no! Europeans really don’t do — or even care about — ice the way Americans do. American fridges are fairly easily available in Norway now, which wasn’t the case a few years ago, but they’re still three times the price and way too wide for most kitchens.

Honestly. Fridges. The details one gets caught up in. But hey, at least I’m not wasting time considering the fridge with a TV in the door!

[Update: later that day. Goodness. Don’t you hate these “busier-than-thou” posts? Oh well, please forgive me, these things happen to the best of us… And I was feeling kinda guilty for not posting!]

Among the next few weeks’ all-consuming tasks are:

• Read two MA theses
• grade a 7 cm stack of undergrad portfolios from the web design and web aesthetics course (and that’s just the paper portion of their mostly digital portfolios)
• making sure all the teaching schedules for various courses this autumn are finalised
• writing a grant proposal
• write an abstract for a paper (due yesterday)
• all the little daily things

But on Friday I move into the corner office.

And in three weeks time my little girl and I are flying to New York! Summer holidays! Hooray!

The Bergen Festival’s on. There’s a sound installation in the greenhouse at Muséhagen up at the university, and resonanCITY is a performance tonight at Teatergarasjen exploring “live cinema” using sounds collected locally. More info on new mediaish performances available at BEK.

Today’s seminar includes a talk by Terje Hillesund on e-books and open access (”Web browsers are designed for browsing, not for reading!”), Claire Bélisle about how the materiality of books affects our conception of text and reading, and looking at how we can think about reading digital documents and Ludovic Frobert and Serge Heiden talking about their annotated, critical, online edition of a newspaper published by factory workers in 1831.
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For my presentation today I’m going to hand out the draft of the paper I just had accepted to Hypertext ‘05, about feral hypertext (yay!), but instead of discussing it directly I’m going to demonstrate the technology, which is I think less familiar to most of the world than to us bloggers.

My basic premise in the paper is that hypertext was developed as an intimate tool — Bush calls the memex “enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”, and although hypertext systems were developed on mainframes at first, researchers constantly discussed it in terms of individual usage. So hypertext was developed for personal, domestic use. Research on hypertext before the web stresses individual users and controlled authoring. Other methods of control included typed links (that is marking a link to a supporting argument as “supporting” and one to a definition as “definition”) and today the semantic web. The thing is, with the web hypertext has returned to the wild. It’s gone feral and we no longer have that kind of control over it. That is turning out to be pretty damn cool.

So today I’ll demonstrate how blogs work (Blogger.com, and how I post to my blog) and then how RSS works and how you can ping a category or use Technorati. I’ll show Wikipedia and the history function, and how easy it is to edit a page. And then Flickr (open API), to explain tags and folksonomies and how patterns emerge rather than being preauthored. Del.icio.us and CiteULike are logical next steps, followed by Technorati tags bringing it all together.

Standard procedure, really, hopefully jammed into 20 minutes, and hopefully illustrated in a way that experts on XML and metadata who are used to editing and authoring (rather than supporting the emergence of) digital critical editions can find things that will be useful to them. And hopefully I’ll be able to put some of the ideas in my paper out there.

There are more and more wonderful Norwegian blogs by literary people. I particularly enjoyed a recent post by Øystein Vidnes criticising Norwegian book design: you see, most hardbook novels are designed so the author’s face is right at the left of the lefthand fold of the dust cover, so the author stares at you the entire time you read the book.

I hadn’t actually noticed this. I suspect, though, that my lost innocence will prove irretrievable. I’ll forever more have to take the dustcover off before I can read.

Sorry, I guess now you will too, eh?

This is fun: brand new words invented yesterday. The Norwegian Newspaper Corpus scrapes newspaper content from online versions of Norwegian newspapers, matches all the words against words used previously in this and other electronic corpuses (corpi?) they have access to, and lists words never used before. Norwegian, like German, uses compound words, so while the English “jazz festival” is two words, in Norwegian it’s “jazzfestival” — so lots of the new words are freshly created compounds. Some are misspellings, others are anglicisms. (from Gisle Andersen’s presentation — this is a Bergen-based project.)

Stephen Shimanek is talking about creating a digital version of Alexandre Dumas’ journal Le Mousquetaire (work he’s doing with Sarah Mombert), and I’m struck by how much these early newspapers or journals might have had in common with blogs. Funny how many things seem related to blogs if you’re used to thinking about blogs… Anyway, this is a phenomenon I didn’t really know about, here’s a digital version of some of Le Mousquetaire (the link just leads to a description of the journal.)

Newspapers were very widely read in the 19th century, and they were collectively read and so reached many more people than actually bought copies of their own. They were often read aloud in groups, and it was even possible to rent newspapers by the half-hour from libraries. Because most newspapers were published collectively, with most articles being written anonymously, they never received the patina of “noble literature” given to noble works by lauded poets and authors, and there are few if any reprints or critical editions of these texts. Some literary figures published their own newspapers, and Mallarmé’s La mode derniere is an example of a newspaper that actually has been reprinted, largely because of the famous author. Dumas’ Le Mousquetaire:

The top left of the page is the most important from the editor’s point of view - the editorial - but the bottom of the page, which is where the serial novels were printed, were the most read.

Philippe Régnier mentioned a controversy between the French national library and Google’s scheme to put books online. “You’ve probably heard about it,” he said, and the French people all made sounds of recognition, but I hadn’t heard of it at all. So I googled it, of course, and found this:

France’s national library has raised a “war cry” over plans by Google to put books from some of the world’s great libraries on the internet and wants to ensure the project does not lead to a domination of American ideas.

Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads France’s national library and is a noted historian, says Google’s choice of works is likely to favour Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language.

He wants the European Union to balance this with its own program and its own internet search engines.

I can’t imagine a EU search engine is the solution to this - on the contrary, you’d think that making sure that googlers find French literature as well as Anglo-American literature would be wise. This newspaper article is from February, so presumably more has happened since, but my mulittasking listening to the presentation about the digital Wittgenstein archives is becoming strained so back to listening fulltime now.

Today there have been talks on the history of critical editions and the political economy of digital critical editions, about the Wittgenstein Archive, a digital edition of all Wittgenstein’s notebooks developed here in Bergen, about digitalisation of early French newspapers and newsletters, about the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus which scrapes content from online newspapers, about the many variants in Flaubert’s work and how to make a digital edition that actually shows that rather than doing the traditional thing of presenting a definitive text given by god, about the Ibsen project, which is a grand vision of publishing everything Ibsen ever, ever wrote both on paper and electronically, including a rather disturbing argument that the electronic edition might be used more if it’s sold than if it’s freely available online!! (more…)

Today and tomorrow I’m going to be attending a seminar here in Bergen with Norwegian French scholars of digital scholarly editions. It’s a bit off the track of my main research, but it’ll be interesting to catch up with this field. My first job after my MA involved using A Midsummernight’s Dream as a basis for a MOO for teaching English literature, and along with it, creating an annotated hypertextual edition, which I rather enjoyed, really. My real interests have not really lain in the rigour of XML, DDTs and the Dublin Core, though for that project no doubt they’d all have been useful.

Bergen has lots of people working on digital editions. All of Wittgenstein’s nachlass has been digitalised and tagged in the Wittgenstein Archive. Apparently this involved encoding piles and piles of little “postit notes” he scribbled stuff on. There are projects to digitalise norse literature and diaries and letters and huge corpuses of newspaper material and so on, too. A lot of this is adjacent to work I do, so it’s good to keep in touch with it.

Today’s seminar is part of a rather nice EU project that’s supposed to foster collaboration between France and Norway. So this week French scholars come here, and in September, a group of us will go there - to Lyon. In theory we’re supposed to be writing papers together, but so far I think it looks like we’ll be writing papers individually and discussing them together.

My paper about XML metatagging of electronic fiction has not happened, given as I know heaps about electronic literature but very little about proper uses of XML. I doubt it will ever happen, at least not written by me. Instead I’ll be presenting a paper on feral hypertext, a paper that just got accepted for Hypertext ‘05 (they sent me out of the room when they discussed it) and that started from a stray sentence in the French peoples’ initial notes where they referred to the Wikipedia as an example of “textes sauvages”. Wild texts. Text gone feral. Feral hypertexts.

I’ll write more about the feral hypertext thing soon. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it!

I have this idea that somebody wrote something about the interface of hypertext fiction as a kind of narrator. You know, like the little navigation bar in afternoon, a story, or, I suppose, though this wouldn’t have been in the article, the sidebars of a blog. Actually I thought it was Raine Koskimaa, in his PhD thesis, but I can’t find it there. Do you know what I’m thinking of?

So the Electronic Literature Organisation just got a freshly designed version of their website, built using blogging software so it’ll be far more frequently updated, and with a really nice showcase of electronic literature.

It will be fascinating to see the memorial building at the site of the WTC in New York (sorry, New York Times link, free registration required. You could try username jilltxt, password jilltxt). I’m absurdly proud that it’s designed by Norwegian architectual firm Snøhetta and find it rather surprising that they’d choose non-Americans for such a symbolic strcutre. Everything about the project drips with symbolism, of course, starting with its name, “Freedom Center”. The American insistance on “freedom” as basic tenet of their nation is astounding, and apparently entirely unironic. To me “Freedom Center” sounds rather like the sort of name the Soviet or maoist China would have chosen for a memorial. But I think Americans hear and use the word “freedom” differently than I do.

The New York Times reporter does, in fact, use the word “Orwellian” about the building, but not (as I would) about its name.

But the experience soon becomes Orwellian. The center’s upper-level galleries will be arranged in a spiral around the central light well. Under the current design, visitors will have to ride an elevator to the top and then walk back down along the spiral on a so-called “Freedom Walk.”

Martin comments on this with an analysis that seems convincing to me:

I think it’s interesting that the NY Times critic is highly skeptical of the fact that, after taking the lift to the top of the building, one is forced to take a long, spiraling walk down a spiral path inside the building’s light well. He thinks of it as a removal of freedom of the visitor, and even calls it “totalitarian.” I think the symbolism of this walk is highly appropriate. I read it as being simultaneously a criticism of the erosion of civil rights and the respect for human rights under a US administration which claims to celebrate freedom (a spiraling descent into unfreedom caused by the fall from the top - that is, the fall of the towers), and a reminder of the neccesity of - and conditions for real freedom: work, dedication and having the ability to think and work in the long term. The building seems to say that freedom is not easily won, which seems appropriate.

Interesting, too, that the New York Times reporter calls the building “a theme-park view of American ideals in an alluring wrapper” and also deplores the lack of bi-partisanality in the choices made — apparently only republicans have been allowed to determine the politics of it all. Towards the end of the article, the reporter writes that “the Freedom Center is bound to be viewed by much of the world as a jingoistic propaganda tool. What is missing at ground zero is a sense of humility.”

It sounds like a building full of ambivalence and self-contradiction. And beauty. Rather like the USA.