Fair Use Lab

Yorick Wilks is a researcher with the Companions Project. He envisions a future with “digital companions” (don’t call them robots) who have long and memorable conversations with us — knowing our wants and foibles, getting things done, telling us jokes, maybe even laughing at the jokes we tell over and over again.

According to the Companions Project:

This will be an agent or ‘presence’ that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and ‘knowing’ its owners preferences and wishes. It will communicate with the user primarily by using and understanding speech.

Yorick Wilks talked about the concept of digital companions on Radio Berkman, and a longer version of his Berkman lecture is available as a video.

I’ve written elsewhere about what I desire in a virtual assistant. I want one that can find and read anything to me, breaking down every barrier to accessibility. It would know as much as I do, if not more, about hacking text and code. It would know when to take out those noxious flashing scripts before I ever arrive at a web page. It would remember the floes and eddies of my attention. And unlike that stupid Microsoft wizard, it wouldn’t make me waste time trying to undo its unwanted prescience. Is that too much to ask? It’s certainly part of what I mean by re-imagining accessibility.

I was asked to speak on a panel last week that discussed the practitioner’s perspective on providing accessible educational technologies for learning with disabilities. I wasn’t sure how to translate my experience into the role of “practitioner” – disability is not my day job – then I remembered an essay I wrote 15 years ago that explained how my disability is my practice. There wasn’t enough time on the panel to explain this idea in detail, so I’ve revised the essay and posted  it in the Fair Use Lab. Disability as Praxis draws on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire’s influential 1973 book on literacy and liberation, to understand how the adaptations made and accommodations negotiated by people with disabilities represent a significant form of creative work and cultural production. The essay remains one of my clearest statements of what I know and believe about living with a disability.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s office is looking for people with disabilities to participate in a training video designed to educate poll workers about people with disabilities, how to accommodate voters with disabilities at polling locations, proper assistance, proper etiquette, accessibility at polling locations and a variety of other awareness information regarding the disability community. According to Brett Harbage, ADA coordinator in the Secretary of State’s office:

Our goal is to have people with various types of disabilities participate in this video to show poll workers a large cross section of disabilities that maybe coming to vote at polling locations during any given election.

The participation level in the video could vary from very short statements, to more involved dialogue, to being interviewed about your disability and/or explaining what accommodations/assistance you might need to cast your ballot on election day.  This could all depend on your comfort level.

If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this video, please contact Brett Harbage by Dec. 12, 2009 at (614) 387-6039 or via email at bharbage@sos.state.oh.us for more information.

I see red whenever I run into the pompous assertion that reading by listening to a book read aloud is not really reading. Then I ask (loudly, of course, to anyone who will listen), how did I read Ulysses (three times in as many decades) and Finnegans Wake (not quite once, completely)? How did I read À la recherche du temps perdu, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Was I deluding myself, or merely faking it?

Yesterday on NPR, I heard novelist Neil Gaiman ask, is an audiobook really a book? He paraphrased Harold Bloom on behalf of the naysayers: “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

Gaiman followed Bloom’s judgment with his own: “I find that astonishingly unconvincing. I think you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Then audio book director Rick Harris insisted that he wants the experience to be different:

It is not a book. An audiobook is a separate entity. A novel can be seen as many things, and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance. But it is another thing; it is an audiobook that has its own validity, its own limitations, its own strengths. The human voice is unquestionably the most expressive musical instrument there is. Combine those two and you get an audiobook.

To my great surprise, I found myself nodding at this like a Bobble-head. I think commercial audiobooks are something different, not just from printed books, but also from the books I read that were recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind. The production values that commercial publishers foist onto “audio performances” are, well, cheesy. The abridgments, the musical interludes with 101 strings, the histrionic characterizations by overwrought actors — such dramaturgy imposes interpretations on the text that cut the reader out of it.

So the litmus test for determining when a book is a book isn’t whether you see or listen. It’s whether your “relationship” with the text is really yours.

[See Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Rader for an academic perspective on how I read Thomas Kuhn’s  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.]

Joseph Esposito identifies himself as a traditionalist on copyright (“during the term of copyright, copyright serves the interests of the producer”), but he challenges the assertion that Google is “a taker, not a maker” in Publishing in the Google Ecosystem (The Scholarly Kitchen).  For example, Google made an API that enables publishers to add book search features to their websites that they were unlikely to create on their own. Esposito writes:

Whatever one thinks of Google (and all publishers think about Google), there is little doubt that in just a few years, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become the most influential people in the publishing industry, at least in the U.S., taking that distinction away from Jeff Bezos.

… Google is now the defining entity in the information landscape.  To flourish, as best as publishers can hope to flourish, it’s necessary to find a place within the Google ecosystem.  There is no world elsewhere, no little pocket of commerce beyond the reach of Google’s audience aggregation, no opportunity to erect protectionist barriers or to appeal to the legacy of one’s own institutions.  To those who resent Google’s huge bulk and ambition, it has to be said:  Get over it.

… With the invention of the motion picture by Thomas Edison, the book lost its place as the center of the media universe.  All other innovations, from radio to television to the Internet, helped to push the book out further.  Now we live within a media landscape that has no center, but which does have a dominant issue, and that is the matter of online discovery, for which search engines, and Google in particular, are the dominant modes.

For publishers, this is the Google century, or maybe just the Google decades, but either way, not to engage this extraordinary organization is likely to lead to obscurity. Read more

Thanks to Eric Rumsey (Seeing the Picture, @ericrumsey) for pointing me this post.