Decoded

JAY-Z: I think it was a really strong album. I mean, I champion any form of creativity and that was a genius idea to do it. And it sparked so many others like it. There are other ones that, you know, it’s really good. There are other ones that because of the blueprint that was set by him that I think are a little better, but you know, him being the first and having an idea. I thought it was genius.

TERRY GROSS: Did you feel ripped off by the fact that he used your music on it without paying for it or did you think it doesn’t matter it’s really good art.

JAY-Z: No I was actually honored that you know that someone took the time to mash those records up with Beatles records. I was honored to be on you know, quote, unquote, the same song with the Beatles. [Transcript]

In Decoded, Jay-Z explains that when he was a kid, most of his friends’ fathers had abandoned families – and record collections ripe for sampling.  – . “Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced. But we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.”

Jeremy Caplan summarized Johnson’s essential points in the WSJ Digits Blog:

“Textual productivity” is the Web’s most important feature.
When text is shared, remixed and recombined in new contexts, fresh value is created. Mr. Johnson calls that “textual productivity.” Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously remixed the Bible, leaving out the supernatural bits. Before the Web, it was more difficult to rejigger texts. The Web reinvented the sharing, spreading and productive adaptation of information in new ways that multiply its value. It’s vital that e-texts preserve that capability, Mr. Johnson says.

The iBook freezes text.
Web links can connect previously isolated ideas in many ways. That gives digital texts the power to add rich layers of meaning that printed texts cannot. But many iPad apps and Apple’s iBook software thus far limit the way words can be linked, Tweeted or shared. That suggests a step backward from the Web’s potential. Mr. Johnson contrasts the locked approach with the stance adopted by investigative nonprofit site ProPublica, which has a generous “steal our stories” policy to encourage the free dissemination of its articles for public benefit.

So will e-readers resemble glass boxes?
If digital devices lock texts under a glass screen, preventing readers from manipulating or sharing words in meaningful ways, we will miss out on some of the benefits of ideas that are mashed up and mixed together, Mr. Johnson says. If, on the other hand, companies such as Apple open up texts for linking, sharing and other Web-like usage, we’ll enjoy fruitful “textual productivity.” People once relied on books to store ideas for future inspiration. Mr. Johnson hopes the serendipitous sharing that enabled will serve as a model for more open sharing of digital texts. Are you listening, Steve Jobs?

Follow @stevenbjohnson on Twitter | Read transcript of talk | See more at CJS New Media blog

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.]

The essay begins with a hypothetical problem posed by Jack Goody which was hardly hypothetical for me:

Goody (1977) poses a problem that both intrigues me and stirs a lingering doubt about the nature of my own literacy. In a discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Goody asks this of his readers: “Imagine (though it is a fanciful task) Kuhn’s book as an oral discourse” (p. 49). Listening to such an oral discourse, Goody explains, would preclude a process essential to reading written texts visually. This process involves the recursive scrutiny of text to detect, compare, and resolve inconsistent meanings. It is a literacy skill that Goody and others regard as the cornerstone of critical thinking.

Close critical reading (and notation) of the book’s first edition led scholars to identify multiple, inconsistent usages of Kuhn’s seminal concept — the paradigm. Kuhn acknowledged and amended the inconsistencies in the book’s second edition. Goody maintains that, for the listener, such discrepancies in the text and the critical thought it represents would be “swallowed up in the flow of speech… the spate of words, the flood of argument, from which it is virtually impossible for even the most acute mind to make his mental card-index of different usages and then compare them one with another” (p. 49-50).

Goody’s fanciful problem haunts me sometimes because it is not fanciful for me. Listening to a recorded version of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is precisely how I read the book.

And the essay concludes:

When I first learned that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was available as a recorded book, I was thrilled. A book that I had heard about for years, a book which continues to enlarge the philosophy of knowledge in and beyond the sciences, was accessible to me. Access to information (in other words, decoding the text) is the first challenge to the literacy of blind people, and lack of access is the greatest barrier limiting that literacy. Access is not enough, however. Functional capability and social efficiency are not enough. A literacy acquired, maintained, and advanced through the oral-aural mode is capable of truly protean shapes; understanding their contexts and processes is the key to achieving a literacy without limits.

For the sake of my own literacy as well as the literacies of many other blind readers, I am pleased to report that the literate technologies available to us are far greater now than I could have imagined in 1994. Thank you, David, for bringing me back to this text.

[see the Reality Hunger website]

Bless you, Chris Anderson! In 35 years of reading by listening to talking books, this version of Free is the fastest access I’ve ever had to a newly published book. You have set the gold
standard for audio book accessibility.

Available formats: Buy the print edition of Free: The Future of a Radical Price. See the free text version on scribd (and if you know how to get it to read in a screenreader like Jaws or ZoomText, please let me know.). Listen on demand here or the original source. Or download an MP3 of the complete book (2.85 MB zip file opens into 287 MB folder with 21 files).

LegalTorrents™ – Digital Foundations Textbook master file including all files, links, images:

This zip contains all of the inDesign files used to publish Digital Foundations. A description (from the intro) is below. Digital Foundations: Introduction to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite integrates the formal principles of the Bauhaus Basic Course into an introduction to digital media production with the Adobe Creative Suite.

According to the book’s website:

Textbooks and software manuals on today’s market do not include art and design history or visual principles. This book synthesizes historical examples and traditional studio foundation exercises into smart, well-paced software exercises. See it for yourself in  Chapter 5, where we explore Illustrator’s Color Picker through Joseph Albers’ color exercises.

Digital media texts about Adobe Creative Suite, whether they are “Bibles”, “For Dummies” or “Classroom in a Books”, focus on tools and production tips. Digital Foundations is the only textbook that teaches visual skills through production tools. Look at our Table of Contents. It is organized by visual topics, including symmetry, line art, tonal scale, elements of motion, and more. Digital Foundations is not specifically for dummies or classrooms. It was made for self-learners, artists, designers, as well as classroom applications. We wrote this book for our classrooms as well as for our parents!

Bravo to  remix my lit and Sydney University Press for publishing this literary anthology in a free ebook in an accessible PDF format (1.45 MB) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence that encourages remixing!. Learn more about the project.

Not many books begin with a word of warning. Through the Clock’s Workings does. This anthology of literature is not some textual tome, frozen in time and space. It is alive, evolving organically in a constant state of flux. Why? Because each story is available under a Creative Commons licence, giving you rights to share and reuse the book as you see fit. This is a world first: a remixed and remixable short fiction anthology. Buy your copy here or download the electronic version.

The term ‘remix’ may be new but the idea itself is time-honoured. Remix is all about taking existing material and making something new out of it. It’s a familiar concept in music but extends to all creative content so why isn’t the literati getting amongst it? There’s no reason why writers can’t mix, match, push and pull content to create remixed works. And that’s why remix my lit exists. We don’t like buzz words, but if we had to use them we’d probably say we are a web 2.0 online collaborative space for creative people who want to get stuck up to their elbows in remixing!

Follow RemixMyLit on Twitter.

According to Wikipedia, “When O’Reilly Media published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under the Open Publication License.” [“Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.”]

Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?

Certainly not I. By the time Linux swam onto my radar screen in early 1993, I had already been involved in Unix and open-source development for ten years. I was one of the first GNU contributors in the mid-1980s. I had released a good deal of open-source software onto the net, developing or co-developing several programs (nethack, Emacs’s VC and GUD modes, xlife, and others) that are still in wide use today. I thought I knew how it was done.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.