Harvard University Press Blog

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

Addressing the Internet's Dark Side

A central paradox of the Internet as we know it is that there’s no privacy unless you’re there to invade someone else’s. Indeed, while living our lives online has effectively signaled the end of privacy for people as subjects, it provides a veil of anonymity for anyone who wants to use it. The Internet lets people bully, badmouth, berate, and spread misinformation without having to show their faces or sign their names. The resulting effects of the Internet on speech, privacy, and reputation are the subjects of The Offensive Internet, a new collection of essays edited by Saul Levmore, William B. Graham Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

From the book’s introduction, written by Levmore and Nussbaum:

“The speed with which reputations can be made and altered is just one way in which the Internet has changed everything. It surely is the case that most of the changes are for the better but, sadly, the Internet is a curse when one is the subject of negative information, whether self-presented, and then indelible, or communicated by others. And yet the Internet has changed nothing, which is to say it has returned us to the world of the village.”

From there, Levmore and Nussbaum explore the similarities and critical differences between the small villages of times past and the “small village” created by the Internet. In either situation there is the sense that everyone knows everyone, that all information is public. The crucial difference, though, is that when one’s reputation was attacked or privacy invaded in a village, there was recourse. Everyone knew the identity of the speaker, and so could take their credibility into account. And so the subjects of slander in a village could challenge the speakers, or, as a very last resort in the case of a ruined reputation, simply leave the village. On the Internet, where rumors, gossip, and malicious speech can quickly gain momentum, there is little chance of challenging an unknown speaker, and the Internet is a village you can’t really leave.

The editors and contributors, a group that includes Daniel J. Solove, Cass R. Sustein, and Jeffrey R. Stone, among others, cover a lot of ground across the book’s thirteen essays, and not all of the writers agree on how anonymity on the Internet should be addressed. The organizing principle, though, is that we should no longer allow the Internet to be an untouchable forum for the sort of offensive speech that would be legally actionable in any other venue. As contributor Brian Leiter explains on his blog, the general theme of the book is that “ordinary tort law, whose constitutional status isn't in doubt, should apply in cyberspace. Current law, remarkably, exempts cyberspace from large parts of tort law (but not from copyright law, oddly).”

Again from Levmore and Nussbaum’s introduction:

Reading in the Year of the Device

Unless the professional soothsayers, the book industry navel-gazers, and the technological evangelists have all been proven wrong (impossible!), lots and lots of you are ringing in 2011 with the brand new ereaders that you received as gifts last month. A Kindle? A nook? An iPad? A smartphone? One of each? Lucky!

Whatever you got, if you’re planning to use it for ebooks, we have you covered. Not every Harvard University Press title is available as an ebook, but quite a lot of them are, with more and more added nearly every day. Below is just a very short list of HUP titles that are currently available as ebooks from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the Google eBookstore (which, by the way, lets you finally buy ebooks directly from some of your favorite independent booksellers – check here for a list of participating indies).

This (again, very short) list contains recent releases, backlist treasures, perennial course adoption titles, and some of this blogger’s personal favorites. A word of warning, though: some of the ebook vendor sites aren’t yet so good at handling searches (Google is maybe being ironic?), so try including both the author and the title in your search terms if you have trouble finding any of these ebooks.

In no particular order:

Stealing Lincoln's Body, Thomas J. Craughwell

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Venkatesh

Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz

China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Minxin Pei

Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, David Tyack

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton

The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael J. Sandel

Inside Deaf Culture, Carol A. Padden and Tom Humphries

Why People Die By Suicide, Thomas Joiner

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova

The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, Irene Maxine Pepperberg

White Teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, Richard A. Posner

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie E. Smallwood

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, Michael A. Lerner

Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Marjorie Shostak

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence Levine

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Stephen Mihm

The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, Thomas Borstelmann

The New Gay Teenager, Ritch C. Savin-Williams

Biophilia, E. O. Wilson 

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, James M. O'Toole

Worst-Case Scenarios, Cass R. Sunstein

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, John Rawls

That should be good to get you started.  Happy New Device!

Everything After Amazon

The last couple of weeks have been not so hot for Amazon.com. The online retailer got heat from both sides of the political spectrum when it dumped WikiLeaks from its servers, right on the heels of its own tepid reliance on a first amendment defense for the sale of a “pedophile's guide to love and pleasure.” The Washington Post reported that Amazon has been charging its customers for Kindle versions of ebooks developed and distributed for free by Project Gutenberg. Google has finally launched its long-awaited ebookstore, which is seen by many as a major challenge to Amazon’s ebook dominance. And, maybe most damaging from a PR perspective, the company’s bullying methods were the subject of a long, thorough cover story for the Boston Review by Onnesha Roychoudhuri.

In the story, titled “Books After Amazon,” Roychoudhuri describes the company’s principal interest as simply “capturing market share,” and she details how they do it by ruthlessly underselling their competitors. They do that by extracting greater and greater discounts from publishers, through a variety of not-so-gentlemanly tactics. In laying out the story, Roychoudhuri offers a pretty effective narrative of the last few decades of bookselling, from when the indies were thriving, to when the big chains came to town, to Amazon’s impact. That history gives the article a bit of perspective that some of the anti-Amazon efforts these days lack – it’s easy to forget that just 12 years ago there were Tom Hanks movies about how the chain stores were ruining everything. Rather than letting off the heat, though, the long view lends a level-headedness that actually serves to make Roychoudhuri’s report on Amazon even more damning.

Amidst all of the tales of small publishers being literally threatened by representatives of Amazon, and of the questionable algorithms behind the company’s misleading recommendations and selective pricing, a single line in Roychoudhuri‘s story really stood out for me. She states matter-of-factly that Amazon has become the world’s largest retailer of books, and then, in emphasizing the company’s lack of interest in book culture, adds that: “it has done so as a software company that offers great deals on Vienna sausages as well as hardbacks.”

I saw that statement and wondered for the first time why we in the book world seem to act as if we’re the only ones being bullied. Maybe because we’re nerdy sorts, used to being picked on? Roychoudhuri’s thorough portrait of Amazon shouldn’t leave any room for doubt: the Vienna sausage makers are being bullied, too. As must be the appliance makers, the video game makers, the tool companies, the toothpaste guys, the sporting good manufacturers, the toymakers, and everyone else who produces the things that Amazon sells. Right? Could publishers REALLY be the only ones? Amazon must be putting the squeeze on the producers of everything that it sells, tightening the screws in ways that likely pose the same existential threats to aspects of those industries as they do to that of the book. Do we really think that Amazon smacks us around for better terms but just grins and bears the prices and discounts set by everyone else? Not a chance.

I did some searches to check out pricing on various non-book products, and routinely found that prices were actually unlisted, with the following explanation:

Ebook Sales - What's in a Number?

The New York Times made a mini-headline of its own this week, when it announced that it would begin to track and report ebook best sellers in 2011. This, says the Times, will also entail a redesign of the section of its Sunday Book Review that currently includes 14 other lists.

The variety of lists currently available gives a nice, sweeping picture of what’s selling (which is different than what’s being read), but it’s important to consider all of the factors involved. Distribution, for one, plays an enormous role in these statistics. A book by an independent press is not going to be available in anywhere near as many outlets as one published by Random House, and if it isn’t available, it can’t sell. The movie business has a way of accounting for this sort of disparity, with the reporting of per-screen or per-theatre revenues, so that one can compare the success of a film on hundreds of screens to that of a film that’s playing on thousands. This could just be my ignorance, but I don’t believe the book business has a similar metric.

The best seller lists also provide a sort of sociological window into American purchasing patterns. The hardcover fiction list, for example, presents us with the 15 best sellers in cloth. But what it means, really, is that these are the 15 books most popular right now with a cross-section of the population that either has the disposable income to drop $25-$30 on whatever they want to read this week, or has a relationship to literature that compels them to get it while it’s hot, regardless of the expense. Bless their hearts, in either case.

The paperback numbers are even more flush with insight, mostly because of the way that the trade fiction and mass-market fiction lists are presented side by side. Ever walk into a bookstore and see two versions of a single paperback book, right next to each other? One has a bigger trim size, but a slimmer profile, and nicer paper, and sells for $13-$16. The other has a smaller trim, meant for spinner racks, but is much thicker, on rougher stock, and probably priced around $6.99. The former is the trade, the latter the mass-market. If you bought both, and set them on your shelf for even just a year, you’d see that one’s meant to last, and one’s basically disposable. They represent different attitudes towards the value of books as objects, each perfectly valid. They also represent different supply channels – mass-market fiction is available at grocery stores and gas stations; trade paperbacks usually are not.

The paperback fiction lists in the NYT Sunday Book Review let us see how different books appeal differently to these different markets. On the list dated November 14th, 2010, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is #1 on the trade fiction list, but Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is #1 on the mass-market list. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, make the only two titles that appear in the top 20 for both trade fiction and mass-market fiction. What’s not clear from the list, though, is that only a very small selection of books is ever actually available in both formats. Number three on this trade fiction list, for instance, is Howard Jacobson’s Man Book prize-winning The Finkler Question, which is not available as a mass-market paperback.  Publishers decide which books to make available in which formats, and these lists both highlight and inform their decisions.  

Freedom to Hide: eReaders and the Bashful Academic?

A book on a train can be a powerful shibboleth. I see What You’re Reading, I know Who You Are. Right? Well, maybe not so definitively, but if you’re persnickety about books and the same about people, the books in the hands of the people provide a useful if cynical filter. Maybe on your commute you see somebody reading one of your favorites and it spurs you to strike up a chat. Or maybe you’re thinking of saying hello, then a book you’d never touch is brandished and you decide not to bother. We can wish that they didn’t, or even pretend that they don’t, but the books that we read say things about us, and, as the hilariously blunt Better Book Titles often points out, we might not always love what they’re saying.

This, of course, is old news. Books-as-signifiers came up again and again in those oh-so-recent yet clearly bygone early days of the Kindle, when every style section and book review back page bemoaned the eReader’s crippling attack on judgmental voyeurism. No longer could you so easily size people up by their reading material – no telling what they were working through on that maddeningly vacant device. The flip side of this loss for the watchers was the new privacy for readers, and it was assumed that traditionally stigmatized material would thrive in the new format. Those predictions proved accurate, of course – erotica and romance titles are thriving as eBooks.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about eReaders as possibly enabling the enjoyment of genres beyond those typically degraded. Or, rather, I’ve had occasion to consider the possibility of a broader spectrum of books about which one might be bashful. The spark initially, like that of much book chatter this fall, was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. It’s not lowbrow in any of the ways for which eReaders are said to provide cover. It is, in fact, the most celebrated piece of literary fiction in years. The annoyance for me is that it’s gone so far past celebration. There was the media fuss this summer over President Obama trying to buy the book ahead of release at a Martha’s Vineyard shop. The coverage of Franzen’s détente with Oprah. His private chat at the White House late last month. The kerfuffle over his European publisher printing and distributing the wrong version of the book, with Franzen himself making headlines and startling the supply chain by publicly announcing that all copies would be replaced. Cripes, the man’s eyeglasses were abducted and held for ransom. Seriously, they were.  

It’s more than a book, is the thing. It’s a spectacle. And, yeah, I should probably read Freedom, but I'd rather not be part of the spectacle for the month or two of commutes it’d take me to slog through. So, Freedom is the very first thing to make me sort of want an eReader maybe a little. Quick download, and then I could work my way through it on the train for as long as it took, and nobody would be the wiser. I’m almost ashamed to say that the very thought was liberating.

Now, believe me, I’m prepared to just chalk this urge up to my own grandiose, paranoid secrecy. But I can't help noting that the only time I’ve been tempted by the idea of an eReader has been to facilitate my reading of the type of book that even the general literati are usually proud to tote.

And now I’m wondering if maybe publishing as an industry has underestimated the variety of stigmatized literature for which eReaders could be a boon.  More specifically, could university presses be due a shot in the arm from ashamed fans of political philosophy, shy classicists, sheepish social scientists, reticent history buffs, and self-conscious literary theorists? Could eBooks do for nerdy nonfiction what they’ve done for Harlequin and the like? Are there closet academics who’ll find freedom (or Freedom) in the anonymity of eReaders?

I figured I should do some research, so I asked a friend if she’d ever had occasion to regret reading something scholarly in public. She scoffed at first, but then told me a story about having once ended up seated next to a favorite artist on a long flight, and wishing her nose was buried in something a bit more catchy than Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law.

That poll scientific enough for you?  The results are clear: very soon university press eBook sales will skyrocket, and smarties of the world will find privacy through eReaders. You heard it here first.

But, oh, wait. Privacy? On an eReader? Whoops...

Standing By The Book

Susan Wallace Boehmer, our Editor-in-Chief, recently took part in a forum on scholarly publishing organized by Bookbuilders of Boston. The text below comes from her talk, which she informally called “What’s Changing and What’s Not as HUP Goes Digital.”

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What I like about books are not the usual things people mention as they wring their hands about the world going digital. It’s not the smell of ink on paper, the tactile turning of pages, the lending and giving of your favorite books to friends and family, the practicality of books for beach reading (no worries about sand, water, batteries). It’s not the usefulness of books as coasters for a cup of hot coffee, or the social cachet that comes from having a well-stocked library in your home.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the physicality of books quite a lot—as an avid book owner. But as an editor, and more important a reader, what I like about scholarly books is something else.

More than anything, I like their length. I prefer ideas and opinions and narratives that are just too complicated, too nuanced, to fit into a New Yorker article, or a Wikipedia entry, or a series of public lectures. But at the same time, I like the boundedness of books—the sense you get at the end of 300 or 400 pages that you really have a good firm grip on the subject. This is of course an illusion—there are dozens of other books out there that grab the subject in quite a different way. But the feeling that you’ve mastered something—however fleeting—is what keeps me going back to books. What you feel at the end of a good book is kind of like a runner’s high—though I guess we should call it a reader’s high.

Another thing I like about scholarly books is their table of contents. When I was a developmental editor, I’d sometimes tell authors that I wanted them to write three things for me. The first one was an ad: 250 words that would persuade readers that of all the books in all the bookstores in all the world, this is the one you must read next—buy it! Of course the true purpose of this writing exercise was to get authors to focus their own minds on what their book was all about.

The second thing I asked authors to write was a novel. Needless to say, I didn’t really want them to write a novel, but this was my way of telling authors that every book, nonfiction as well as fiction, must tell a good story—and they should never let an irrelevant truth get in the way of that.

The third thing I asked my authors to write was a poem. And this is what the table of contents is: it’s a little piece of verse that signifies and anticipates all kinds of mysterious, enlightening things to come. A table of contents, like a poem, has to be aware of meter and form, metaphor and echo, alliteration and allusion. It has to be lyrical. It has to sing.

The table of contents leads to another thing I like about nonfiction books, which is their division into chapters. Chapters are not like essays. Essays—in a magazine, let’s say—relate to one another sort of the way out-of-town first cousins relate at a family reunion. They have polite conversations, and maybe you’ll notice a little family resemblance, but mostly they come together briefly and then they go away to live their separate lives. Chapters in a book relate to one another the way siblings do: every one of them is looking around at every other one, all the time, sizing them up and figuring out when to play together and when to get out of the way. A book with chapters is a tight-knit little family: there’s tension in every relationship, but they’re still all in it together.

Facebook vs. Evolution

The Facebook movie is upon us.  "The Social Network" was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club") and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing"), and by all accounts it's among the best work either has done. The review aggregating site Metacritic has it with a pretty staggering Metascore of 97 out of 100. 

The film is about the founding of the social networking-cum-world conquering site Facebook, which currently boasts over 500 million users around the world, most likely including you. Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the story has the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, making quite a few enemies for himself on his way to helping us all make more friends. So, is it working? Is it useful? Really, how many friends does one person need? 

150. 

That’s not me talking. That’s evolution. 

The number 150 has come to be accepted as the limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships. You may know it as “Dunbar’s Number,” named for Robin Dunbar, anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Dunbar describes the figure as the upper limit to the number of people with whom humans can actually form relationships strong enough to rely on. Put another way, it’s the circle of people who will do you a favor. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain a greater number of relationships at the level of complexity required for a bond to be “real.” 

Dunbar arrived at the number by working outwards from the social intelligence theory of why primates have such large brains. The theory holds that the complex social world in which primates live spurred the evolution in brain size. Basically, primates are more dependent on their social bonds than other types of animals, and those bonds are also more complex and socially informed. This hypothesis, according to Dunbar and others, is supported by a strong correlation between the size of a group (and hence its social complexity) and the relative size of the neocortex. Dunbar examined these correlations, plotted the sizes of various primate brains against the sizes of their social groups, determined the relationship, plugged in the size of the human brain, and got 150. 

Brand new HUP website!

Great news today - HUP has a brand new website! It's the result of many months of hard work on the part of our colleagues, so we congratulate them. In addition to the appealing design sense, new features include improved browsing and search capability, simpler ordering, and a new ease in discovering the many treasures of our backlist.

Here's what the front page looks like:

But the best way to get a taste is to browse yourself - just click here or point your browser to http://www.hup.harvard.edu.

The Cultural Logic of Computation

Do computers by definition set us free? Advocates make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, their widespread use constitutes a fundamental shift in our orientation towards established power, and by their very existence they effect positive political change in an “open,” “democratic” direction. Just keep in mind that the people who hold real power are probably OK with you thinking that.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, software-design veteran turned Professor of English, Media Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Virginia, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers enable the exercise of already-existing power much more fully than they provide the masses with means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has ossified into an ideology, nearly invisible in its ubiquity, that Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that shapes our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation establishes a forceful and considered corrective to the glib, uncritical enthusiasm for computers that dominates the popular cultural discourse around them.

A couple of quick takes on the book:

Golumbia's argument is that contemporary Western and Westernizing culture is deeply structured by forms of hierarchy and control that have their origins in the development and use of computers over the last 50 years. I look forward to pressing this book on friends and colleagues, starting with anyone who has ever recommended The World is Flat to me. (Lisa Gitelman, author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture)

The Cultural Logic of Computation is a fascinating and wise book. It takes us with great care through the history of the computational imagination and logic, from Hobbes and Leibniz to blogging and corporate practice. Its range includes the philosophy of computation, the ideology of the digital revolution, the important areas of children’s education and education in general and glimpses of brilliant literary insight. Required reading for the responsible citizen. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

||| The Cultural Logic of Computation is available now.