Household Opera

Book-scraping

Via several of my Twitter contacts: The Times Online has developed Book Scraper, a literary text analysis tool with 126 books in its database so far, from the 16th through the early 20th centuries. You can look at word clouds and lists of unique and particularly long words for each text (check out the long word list for Ulysses); you can compare two texts and see how much vocabulary they share, accompanied by a Venn diagram; and you can search individual words and see graphs of how often they appear, in which texts.

It has its flaws. As one friend commented on Twitter: "More books! And where's the API?" And the text analysis isn't perfect: it's clear from the Shakespeare page that stage directions and older spellings affect the statistics somewhat. But I like the word graphs, even though they're a bit skewed by the relatively small sample of texts in the database. Look at the graph for "amiable": a smattering of early 17th-century uses, mostly Shakespeare; then a set of giant bubbles from early- to mid-19th-century novels, with the heaviest concentrations in Jane Austen. I once wrote a short paper for an undergraduate Austen class on the word "amiable" in Emma. The Book Scraper graph is an interesting confirmation of how often that word shows up, not only in Austen, but in her near contemporaries as well.

It would be nice if the text set were big enough to do some higher-end data mining. But it's intriguing to see this kind of thing being done for an audience outside of academia. I wonder if this is a sign of literary data-mining going mainstream?

Five years

This coming Monday will be my five-year blogging anniversary. (Five years?! Time flies, et cetera et cetera.) When I started my old blog, I intended it to be primarily about my transition out of academia. Around the time I started the blog, I had the "I don't think I want to do this anymore" conversation with my dissertation adviser; he didn't have any more ideas than I did at the time about what kinds of "alternative careers" might work for a fugitive English literature Ph.D., but he said he thought that whatever I ended up doing, I'd be doing something really cool in five years' time. And he turned out to be right: here I am, having reinvented myself as a librarian, about to start a great new job, with four years of highly varied and very interesting experience under my belt. In some ways I haven't wandered all that far from academia — I did end up as an academic librarian, after all, and I'll be putting my subject knowledge to good use as a liaison to the English department — but in other ways, the distance between who I was then and who I am now is immense.

The biggest change is that, while I still follow what's going on in English studies to some extent (albeit less than I used to), my relation to the field is much less personal. When I scan the contents of new journal issues, it's for professional awareness as a librarian more than for my own research. And when I do read something in one of my areas of interest, I don't feel obligated to stake out my own position in the critical debate unless I really want to. There's a whole other set of professional debates to join instead. And I don't define myself as an academic before anything else, the way I used to when I ate, slept, and breathed my (former) profession. My identity no longer hinges on my being a Literature Person, although that part of me is certainly still there. I think, on the whole, that this is a very good thing for my sanity.

It's like standing at the fringe of a group of people at a party. In the past, I'd have been desperately trying to join the group, to say something clever, to change the course of the conversation, to get the rest of the people to accept me (because if they didn't, it would mean I was an abysmal failure), and to avoid revealing how ignorant I really felt. Now, I'm much more relaxed; I can join in if I want to, or drift off and talk to someone else. My sense of worth isn't bound up with joining that one group. I've already been welcomed into a different group, a big friendly heterogeneous one with lots of interesting topics of conversation, and I'm no longer worried about winding up alone in a corner.

Where I am as a blogger is a trickier question. If my referrer stats are any indication, people are still reading, but not in the same numbers as they used to. I don't know if this is due to my mixed-topic blogging (part library, part literature, part opera, part random outtakes from daily life), or what. But I don't think I'm in any danger of shutting up any time soon. To all of you reading this, thank you for coming back!

Proof that the LOLcats model is universally adaptable

How on earth have I gone all this while without knowing about the existence of the LOL Manuscripts blog? Its motto: "Everything could use a little LOL. Especially the Renaissance." Technically they're LOL woodcuts, but, as the author of the blog, a graduate student who makes frequent use of EEBO, puts it, "LOL Early Modern Printed Materials didn't have the same ring to it." My favorite so far: "UR dueling it wrong." My inner early modernist is vastly amused. (Plus, I feel exactly the same way about black letter.)

Niceness in libraryland: some scattered thoughts

According to Steven Bell in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks ago, "academic librarians are the nice guys of higher education." We agree with each other too much. Instead of engaging in any kind of intellectually rigorous back-and-forth exchange on controversies in our profession, we avoid sounding like we disagree.

I'm of multiple minds on this. I'm all in favor of intellectual rigor, especially if it means fewer dull articles to read and more excitement in the biblioblogosphere. But I agree with Rochelle Mazar: there's a certain set of gender issues at work here, namely that women are socialized to be non-aggressive, and people react much more negatively to an aggressive woman than to an aggressive man. And I think her question — "Why must we be aggressive in order to be seen as rigorous?" — is completely on target. Indeed: why? (Go read the whole thing. It's a great post. Oh dear, I'm being too nice.)

I'm not sure contentiousness is the answer to the problem of uninspired professional discourse. I've seen contentiousness for its own sake back when I was planning on becoming a faculty member. I don't think it's productive. Probably because I saw so much of the kind of disagreement-for-the-sake-of-disagreement that comes from knowing that you have to contribute something new to the conversation (or you won't get tenured), and there are only so many positions to take, so you'd better make sure you distinguish yourself from the other people who write about your little subfield, and the easiest way to do that is to rip into the other people. I don't think that's what Steven Bell means, but I'd still hate to see librarians adopt the "must ... say ... something ... combative ..." mindset. And I don't think intellectual rigor necessarily means constant disagreement.

In the end, "niceness" is kind of a slippery concept: I'm having a hard time, even in my own head, keeping track of whether it means politeness or stifling one's potentially dissenting opinion or agreeing with other people. I think Bell's overall point is that librarians shouldn't feel obligated to hide their disagreement, which is fine by me — as long as we don't feel compelled to disagree, either.

Next up: I have some not very nice things to say about that Vanishing Shakespeare report.

Still here

I'm still here, in case any of you were wondering. Life (specifically, where I'm going to be next year) is still uncertain, and I'd rather not post about it until things are a lot less up in the air. And plans for next year constitute a lot of what's been on my mind; hence, fewer posts. But blogging is good for cutting through both the dullness-of-brain and the anxiety of times like this. So, a few things I've been looking at and bookmarking lately:

LibraryThing is a perpetual source of things to post about. On the LibraryThing blog, Tim Spalding suggests a bunch of topics, including books you share with only one other person, books only you own, and the top X books you share with others. Happy to oblige! Here are my top 10 most-shared (numbers in parentheses are how many people share the book):

1. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (it's translated into Italian, but it still counts, right?) (2172)
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1686)
3. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1374)
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1064)
5. Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (917)
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (900)
7. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (893)
8. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (890)
9. Strunk and White, The Elements of Style (869)
10. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (817)

"Lonely books" are harder to list. A search for them led me to spend way too much time combining separate copies with slightly variant titles. Tinkering with works is nearly as addictive as cataloging my collection was, and fills my bibliogeekish heart with joy.

43 Folders' "Inbox Zero" series has inspired me to get rid of several hundred outdated messages, and I feel much lighter every time I look at my inbox.

Jane Dark's Rome blogging is making me miss Italy so much it hurts. Next year I'm going back there, come hell or high water.

BibliOdyssey, a gorgeous visual blog on illustration, book arts, and book history, is a brand-new favorite of mine. Check out the cyanotypes. (Did you ever have one of those home cyanotype kits? I did, but my results never looked that good.)

Blog at your own risk

Like a whole bunch of others, I found this Chronicle article ("Bloggers Need Not Apply," by "Ivan Tribble," 7/8/05) ... puzzling, at best. Professor Tribble, who's served on a search committee that didn't hire several blogging candidates, wonders why anyone applying for an academic position would keep a blog:

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor.

The article concludes, "Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know 'the real them' -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more."

Hmm. I don't think I'd want to join Professor Tribble's department, even if I were still looking for academic jobs. It sounds like people who have interests outside their jobs, or even people who admit to having personal lives, aren't all that welcome there. (And I'm not even going to say anything about the way Professor Tribble dubs the candidate with the personal blog "Shrill.") What bothers me about this article — apart from the way the search committee seems to think it's fine to hire a candidate without knowing "the real them" only to discover, too late, that they don't like "the real them" — is the way Professor Tribble's disapproval of the few examples of legitimately Bad Blogging Behavior (the candidate who misrepresents his research, for instance) drifts into a general disapproval of the sharing of any "inward thoughts" with the reading public.

Blogging during a job search is a risky business. I'm fully aware that potential employers are probably going to Google me, and they may well end up here. That knowledge is always in my head when I'm composing new entries; I revise a lot, I try to stay away from excessively personal topics, I worry about whether my political posts are too ranty and whether my jokier posts are too silly.* People I know from professional contexts do read this blog from time to time (hello, all of you!) and have had nice things to say about it so far (thanks!). But I'm still wary of what should and shouldn't be said in the presence of people who currently work with me or may do so in the future. And I'm all right with that. After all, "don't forget that you have an audience composed of actual people rather than imaginary phantoms" was one of the main principles I tried to teach my students when I taught college writing.

But the idea that candidates, during the job search, should avoid giving any impression of a personality or outside interests or opinions — that seems a little on the absurd side. To answer Professor Tribble's initial "why?" question: for me, at least, blogging is a 21st-century variation on the 18th-century salon. It's conversation, sometimes very intellectual, sometimes not; it's a social activity, but one that's mediated through the written word. It's not the same thing as publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, nor should it be. It's an opportunity to test out new thoughts, but in a forum where others are present to discuss, join in, go off on tangents, be snarky or serious, and make connections to what other people are saying. And if being interested in carrying on that kind of conversation disqualifies me in the eyes of potential employers, I might not be a good "fit" for them, and vice versa, in the first place.

(See also Timothy Burke, Dorothea Salo, Ancrene Wiseass, and Matthew Kirschenbaum.)

* Perhaps job-seeking bloggers need someone like the Colonel from Monty Python's Flying Circus to indicate when things are getting too silly?

Idea

Watching the "If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it..." meme spreading, I find myself with the thought: someone should devise a way of automatically tracking blog-memes and visualizing the results. Between Technorati, del.icio.us, and Bloglines, there ought to be a way to extract the information, no? I'm envisioning something like the TouchGraph Google Browser, part family tree and part network, with some way to show the direction of linking. You could make it display a meme's progression over time. Then you could figure out the points where different sectors of the blogosphere connect — where the bridges between one interest group and another are.

It sounds a bit trivial (after all, nobody really cares who posted their "Which Tarot Card Are You?" quiz result first*), but I bet you could use it to investigate all kinds of questions about social networks, and degrees of separation, and small world theory, and whether Malcolm Gladwell is right about tipping points and the epidemic model of change.

Of course, someone with much more geek cred than I have has no doubt had this idea already, implemented it, and posted the results months ago. I just haven't come across it yet. Which shows some of the boundaries of my own online social network. I'm not enough of a geek to jump from the lit-crit / humanities / operaphile sector to the internet-culture / technology / social-software / semantic-web sector. Not yet, anyway. (But I did re-locate the Google Browser project site after completely forgetting where I'd originally seen it, and I did so via a combination of hitting a few likely blogs and guessing at del.icio.us tags, which says something in itself about the usefulness of such networks for locating information even if you're only peripherally connected to them, and I should really close this parenthesis now.)

Thoughts?

* I'm still the Hermit, last I checked. Time to look into getting a vial of Hermit perfume from BPAL.

MIT weblog survey

(What I want to know is, why isn't "Because I like to write" one of the choices for the section of the survey where you check off reasons why you blog? And like Lynn, I wish MIT knew about culture blogs. But if the current set of survey results are any indication, the infamous and exceedingly tiresome "Where are all the women bloggers?" question can be answered with numbers the next time it comes up: 28,000 of us and counting.)

Library blogosphere roundup

An accumulation of links from my library-related Bloglines folder...

Via The Shifted Librarian, a fabulous use of podcasting: Who Said? A Literature Game, in which you listen to a snippet of a novel read out loud and then guess the novel, the author, and the character. (I've been listening to previous snippets, and was chuffed to recognize a passage from Mrs. Dalloway.) For everyone who likes fiction, mystery quotations, being read to, or podcasts.

Dorothea Salo offers meta-librarian-blog commentary on academic librarian bloggers and why defining "academic librarian blogger" as "one who posts on one topic, all the time" is both silly and riddled with gender issues. As a grab-bag blogger myself, I tend to agree. And belated congratulations on the awesome new job, Dorothea!

Lorcan Dempsey posts about Nick Hornby on the subject of how our books reveal us, and on how that connects with social networking via book recommendations. Which reminded me of a favorite Borges poem:

Mis libros (que no saben que yo existo)
son tan parte de mí como este rostro
de sienes grises y de grises ojos
que vanamente busco en los cristales
y que recorro con la mano cóncava.
Non sin alguna lógica amargura
pienso que las palabras esenciales
que me expresan están en esas hojas
que no saben quién soy, no en las que he escrito.
Mejor así. Las voces de los muertos
me dirán para siempre.

[My books (which do not know that I exist) / are as much part of me as is this face, / the temples gone to gray and the eyes gray, / the face I vainly look for in the mirror, / tracing its outline with a concave hand. / Not without understandable bitterness, / I feel now that the quintessential words / expressing me are in those very pages / which do not know me, not in those I have written. / It is better so. The voices of the dead / will speak to me for ever.]

— Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Alastair Reid)

(I confess to being a compulsive scrutinizer of other people's bookshelves whenever I first visit their houses, so I like the idea of using tastes in books to connect kindred spirits — though I'm leery of the connection with Amazon on account of not wanting to give the massive commercial retailers too much detailed information about myself.)

Notebook travels and leather-clad dancing boys

The Wandering Moleskine Project weblog. What an absolutely brilliant idea. I may sign myself up to contribute. Via Space and Culture, which in turn is via Caterina.

Also, vilaine fille has rapidly become one of my favorite new blogs. Look at what she has to say on the subject of why opera isn't just for stodgy diamond-encrusted people:

[I]sn't it astonishing that opera is so powerfully associated with social preening, dramatic blankness, and blue-haired irrelevance that it scares people away? Opera is big and bad and dangerous. It tells pulse-quickening tales of incest (Die Walküre), whoring (La traviata), and wanton libido (Don Giovanni, Le Comte Ory); of insanity (Orlando, Lucia), adultery (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, L'incoronazione di Poppea), and sedition (Ernani, Don Carlos); of the deformed (Rigoletto), the despised (La Juive), and the marginalized (Carmen, Otello). It depicts orgies (Samson et Dalila, Moses und Aron, The Fiery Angel); and when we're very, very lucky, it features dancing boys in leather butt-thongs (NYCO's Platée and the Met's 1973 staging of Les Troyens).

Word! As they say, read the whole thing.