Household Opera

In search of the elusive Nesselrode Pudding, or, menu digitization rocks!

How much do I love the New York Public Library's What's on the Menu? project? Inordinately, that's how much. They're dealing with a fairly common problem among libraries with digitization projects: a big collection of image files of interesting documents; the need to capture the text from those documents into a usable, searchable form; the impossibility of just OCR-ing it all; and the immensity of the work of transcription. So they built a transcription program with a super-simple front end, and invited the world to help them transcribe the collection. (See also the Transcribe Bentham project, and Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders initiative.)

The result is surprisingly addictive: you pick a historic menu from their constantly-updating list, start clicking on the names of dishes and typing transcriptions into the little box, and before long you're thinking "Hey, I should go back and look at all those descriptions of restaurant meals in The House of Mirth and figure out how pricey they actually would have been for someone in Lily Bart's financial straits." And then you marvel at the fact that travelers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1901 could order a caviar sandwich in the cafe car.* And then you start surfing the still-growing database of dishes from the menus and wondering when, exactly, broiled plover on toast went out of style.

Which brings me to the other thing I love about this project: food history is the coolest thing ever, and I'm adding "food historian" to the list of things I would do if I had whole other lifetimes to do them in. And I also love how, when you look at the pages for individual dishes, you're presented with links out to recipe search sites, book search sites, Wikipedia, and even Flickr and Twitter. The NYPL folks evidently realized that this project could appeal to lots of people: food historians, fans of retro cookery (Gallery of Regrettable Food,** anyone?), random passersby curious about what Nesselrode Pudding was,*** home cooks who might be inspired to replicate some of the dishes on the menu.

It's a really lovely instance of making primary sources accessible to an audience that's both academic and non-; it's also a lovely example of simultaneously opening up library collections to a wider audience and involving that audience in improving the collections. As a librarian and an alt-academic (and as a foodie), I approve. And I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with the data.

 

 

* I confess that, however much of a delicacy they were considered at the time, the idea of caviar sandwiches makes me gag a bit. Which is another thing I love (well, not the gagging): the glimpses these menus offer into one area of the past that looks, in some ways, like the present, and in other ways, like those caviar sandwiches and plovers on toast, notably different.

** If you haven't yet discovered the Gallery of Regrettable Food, go now. Just be aware that it'll probably make you laugh until your ribs hurt.

*** Apparently it's a molded chestnut ice cream. I kind of want to try my hand at making it now.

Fun with Google Books Ngram Viewer

When Google's Ngram Viewer appeared on the scene last month, I (like half my Twitter feed) went a little crazy feeding search terms into it and looking at the results. For any of you who missed the news, the viewer lets you search language corpora generated from Google Books and display a chart of the frequencies of search terms displayed over time. Dan Cohen has a good post on it, in which he concludes (and I agree): "Digital humanities needs gateway drugs. Kudos to the pushers on the Google Books team."

Given Google Books' well-known metadata issues and the inevitability of OCR errors in the data, I wouldn't use the Ngram Viewer to make any substantial claims yet.* I don't think it's reliable enough to use as evidence. But I do suspect this is the first incarnation of the kind of tool that we'll be seeing a lot more of, hopefully in more sophisticated versions backed up by corpora with more reliable date and publication metadata, and with more features for access to the corpora themselves.

And in the meantime, I still find it well-nigh irresistible. Consider the first Ngram I generated, a chart comparing the usage of "scrapbook" and "commonplace book" in the 19th and early 20th centuries:

Thanks to my background research on the commonplace book project, I already knew that "scrapbooking" (as we now call it) took off in the mid-19th century and eventually became a more popular pastime than the keeping of commonplace books; the graph suggests something of the rise of one format and the fall of the other. 

Or here's another one for Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti:

I like how you can see Christina Rossetti's reputation start to overshadow her brother's in the early years of the 20th century, but they still track together throughout the subsequent decades.

So: it's not a perfect tool, it's not as transparent as one would like, and ideally it should lead to questions we don't already know the answers to, like my commonplace vs. scrapbook search above—but I'll be very curious to see what develops out of it in a few years' time.

Incidentally, there's now an Ngrams Tumblr blog, with an ever-growing collection of examples, some serious, some charmingly silly (like "new kids on the block" vs. "New Kids on the Block": oh no, 80s flashback!).

* Geoffrey Nunberg, who wrote the piece on Google Books metadata that I linked above, also wrote a thoughtful article of the Ngram viewer and the kinds of scholarship it might lead to. Well worth reading, especially for its cautions about the limitations of the tools as they currently stand.

In praise of 750 Words

Thanks to a post about it on the excellent blog ProfHacker, I've become a big fan of the freewriting site 750words.com. It's a godsend for people like me who want to write more but have a hard time getting started or getting motivated. You log in and it gives you a blank screen and a daily goal of 750 words or more (about three typed pages), stores your words, and rewards you for reaching goals. If you hit the 750-word mark, a congratulatory message flashes up on the screen. If you hit it for three or five or ten or more days in a row, or write really fast, you get cute cartoon badges.

It's meant to be low-pressure, a brain-dump site rather than a place for polished writing. The total lack of any word-processing features means that I can't succumb to the temptation to mess with formatting, or go into Scholar Mode and add footnotes, or anything like that. It's just plain text, which somehow makes it less of a big deal, which makes it easier to get started and keep going. Today I used it to write my way out of an attack of paper-and-travel-planning panic by listing both the things I still have to do (which, written out like that, suddenly look doable) and scrutinizing my irrational fears about presenting the paper (which didn't hold up to the scrutiny). Other days I've used it to outline a story that's waiting to take shape in my head, brainstorm ideas for blog posts, and, if I'm in a bad mood, whine and vent in ways that I wouldn't do here or elsewhere on the open web. I'm already feeling like I'm getting out of my blogging slump.

I was skeptical at first, because I'd tried various other attempts at daily writing, ranging from pen and ink to Journler (which is nice, but doesn't push me to write in the same way), and none of them really worked. But I've been using 750 Words to get ideas for my conference paper out of my head and into sentences I can reuse elsewhere, and so far I've written 31,583 words in 33 days. When I get back from my travels, I might even sign up for the monthly challenge for August. I might finally write that short story. Or the next great campus novel. I might start turning the research into something booklike. I might even do NaNoWriMo this year.

When I was working on my dissertation and had all the time in the world, I used to write first thing in the morning, after I'd had coffee but before I'd had a shower, so it didn't quite feel like I was officially starting the day yet. And that turned out to be far and away the best way to take the internal pressure off so I could get words onto the screen every day. Now I can't spend my mornings lazing around in my pajamas, but the blank screen, the small daily quotas, and the enforced informality of 750 Words are the next best thing.

On walkability and how to measure it: part 1 of an intermittent series

I've been wanting to write a post about walkability for some time now, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it should be a series, because if I tried to say everything I wanted to say in one post, it would approach book length, and it's long enough already. So consider this the initial post in an occasional series on walkable urbanism, interspersed with your regularly scheduled poetry, opera, and bibliogeekery.

Among the myriad of nifty mappy things the internet has enabled in recent years, Walk Score is among my favorites. You type your address into it, and it gives you a walkability score based on your proximity to various necessities, which you can then view on a map. Pretty sweet. But when I moved from Philadelphia to New London, I started to notice some of Walk Score's flaws. It rates my previous address in Philadelphia at 89 out of 100: "very walkable" but not quite ideal. My address in New London, by comparison, gets a 92, "Walkers' Paradise." I actually think my current location is a good deal less walkable than my previous one: while I can easily walk downtown and avail myself of an organic food co-op, a couple of good coffee shops, a bunch of small boutiques, various art galleries, and the local arts center (all good things), there aren't really any large grocery stores within easy walking distance (Walk Score has an annoying habit of classifying small convenience stores as "groceries"; it also counts the local porno shop and a small "Christian bookstore" in a nearby church as "bookstores"), and other necessities of life are farther off.

In Philly, I lived two blocks from a post office, a drugstore, a hardware store, a dry cleaner, a couple of laundromats, many restaurants, a great coffee shop, and a wine shop. Within a ten-block-or-so radius were my favorite used bookstore, a Whole Foods, a small local grocery, a tiny farmers' market, and the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. What's more, I could walk all the way across the city, mostly on streets that weren't too wide to cross safely or too traffic-clogged to be enjoyable; many of these streets were shaded by trees and lined with lovely old brick and brownstone buildings. If I didn't feel like walking, there were three bus routes within a couple of blocks of my building, and I could get to regional rail and Amtrak easily. (I can walk to the train station here, and I use the bus system—but any bus system that runs once an hour, stops service at 7 p.m., and doesn't run on Sundays is all but unusable for most people.) When I was out and about in Philly, I saw my neighbors; here, I'm often the only person on the street. There's a whole subjectively perceived (but no less real) culture of walking (or not walking) that tools like Walk Score miss.

So I was pleased to see that there's now a project afoot for an open source use of the Walk Score algorithm. I've signed up to be notified when it's released; I hope it'll allow for citizen walk-score mappers to update their local maps, to re-flag misclassified businesses, identify streets where there are no sidewalks or many lanes of traffic or lousy snow removal, and offer some commentary as well as concrete data.

And I was even more pleased to find Walkshed, a tool rather like Walk Score but with fine-tuned controls you can adjust to specify your greater or lesser need to be near various amenities—so if you really want tree cover and parks but would rather not live near a bar, or if public transit is a must but you don't particularly care about hardware scores, you can adjust your map accordingly and it'll show you a nice "heat map" of your city, with the most promising areas shaded in green. And it takes street connectivity and barriers to walking (like highways and rivers) into account. Alas, it's limited to New York and Philadelphia right now, but I really hope the concept catches on.

Living room and fishbowl: On Facebook and semi-privacy

I have (for the time being, at least) a Facebook account. I signed up for it because all my real-life friends and acquaintances were on it, and because all of the people I'm closest to live at least a hundred miles away. Coworkers from former jobs in cities I've moved away from, college and grad school classmates, a far-flung handful of friends from the blogosphere — the great appeal of Facebook is that it's a low-energy way to keep up with people you don't see every day. After you use it for a while, email begins to seem clunky and archaic; it's so much easier to have a multi-person conversation with long-distance friends via status updates.

But the other great appeal of Facebook is, or rather, was, that you could limit access to what you posted. Matt McKeon has a fantastic visualization of the gradual erosion of privacy in Facebook's settings over the years, with more and more information being visible not just to Facebook users but to the whole web. It's based on this timeline from the Electronic Frontier Foundation; in a post at Wired, Ryan Singel spells out some more of the implications. To say that Facebook's disregard for its users' privacy is creepy and invasive is, if anything, to understate the case.

What Facebook founder Mark "Privacy? What does that word mean?" Zuckerberg completely fails to understand (or, perhaps, just doesn't care about) is that people want to be social online, but they often want to be social with a limited subset of other people. This blog is a public space; so is my Twitter feed. But just because I'm willing to say some things to the entire interwebs doesn't mean I want to say everything to everyone. For someone who spends a lot of time online, I have a fairly high privacy threshold; ideas and opinions are one thing, but when I want to talk to friends about my personal life, I want a restricted-access space to do it in.*

There's a moment in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition where Cayce, the main character, reflects the privacy of her favorite online forum: "The site had come to feel like a second home, but she'd always known that it was also a fishbowl; it felt like a friend's living room, but it was a sort of text-based broadcast, available in its entirety to anyone who cared to access it."** It's a feeling a lot of us probably recognize: the intimacy that comes from a good conversation with friends, combined with the awareness that potentially anyone can eavesdrop.*** There's a definite need for semi-public spaces where you can have the conversation but still keep the eavesdroppers out.

A while back, via Chuck Tryon on Twitter, I came across a nifty article by Lee Humphreys comparing microblogging to early American diaries, which (like Twitter) were full of telegraphically short entries on the minutiae of daily life, and which were also, interestingly enough, sometimes shared with friends and family. Which suggests that the desire to share details of one's life with selected people, but not necessarily the whole world, is nothing new.

There are some encouraging projects underway by people who want better privacy controls in their online social networks. In the meantime, the only reason I still have a Facebook account is because I started a page for MPOW and I feel obligated to maintain it. I've deleted most of my personal information from Facebook, and as soon as a viable, open, privacy-aware alternative comes along, I'm dropping Facebook entirely.

[Update: The people at The Onion, in their inimitable way, explain why you should be worried about privacy on Facebook:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids]

* I've considered starting a Livejournal and friends-locking everything, but I don't know if I have the writing energy to do that and maintain this blog. What I want is a platform where you can just post quick bits and specify who can see them. Which was what I liked about Facebook, originally. If any of you know of something like that, I'd love to hear about it.

** William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 2003), 65.

*** Incidentally, this is what a lot of the critics of Twitter get wrong: Twitter users aren't broadcasting what they (or their cat) had for breakfast because they really think everyone on the internet wants to know; in the words of one Twitter user, "people don't blog/tweet/etc because they think the whole world cares. They do it because some tiny, kindred subset might." They're just using a public forum to do it, and assuming that people will skip over the tweets they don't care about instead of pitching a hissy fit about Kids These Days and Their Web 2.0 Narcissism.

Encountering literature by walking through it

Over on the excellent BLDGBLOG, a new favorite and a recent addition to the blogroll, Geoff Manaugh has been speculating about augmented reality applications for buildings that never were, inspired by a new iPhone application for browsing visionary Manhattan architecture. He also suggests something that sounds a lot like what I've been trying to do with mapping applications and literature:

...back in 2008, in a post that now seems remarkably dated, I suggested that Google Maps should come with a "sci-fi layer" – that is, a layer that would document where in your city certain events had taken place or certain structures had stood in a work of fiction. For instance, the building that Robert Neville's dog runs into in I Am Legend or the trainyard from Escape From New York, the apartments from Make Room! Make Room!, the high-rise penthouse from The Day After Tomorrow...

Those are Manhattan-centric examples, of course, and drawn only from science fiction, but this could easily be expanded to include landscapes and structures elsewhere, from the deserts of the Empty Quarter to central Paris, and it could include other genres, from the poems of John Ashbery to Howl to The Great Gatsby.

You could even have a "mythology layer" – roaming around Scandinavia, tracking Thor or digging for the roots of Yggdrasil – or a "theology layer": you go to Israel and your iPhone short-circuits from the laminations of charged geography around it.

Read the whole thing, as they say. I still like the idea of map visualization as a way of analyzing the spatial dimensions in a poem or a work of fiction or an author's complete works, but the same principle applied to the iPhone (or whatever device we're using in 10 or 20 years' time) offers all kinds of appealing possibilities for encountering literature for the first time. Walk down a street in any given city and your mobile device tells you how the space you're moving through appeared in a novel or story or poem you've never read. Move into a densely "storied" area (Manhattan comes to mind again) and feel the layers and layers of narrative all around you.

And I would love to see an augmented reality application for Ashbery's poems. Are you listening, iPhone app designers?

Ideal cities, ghostly cities

A team of computer scientists at the University of Washington is creating 3-D virtual models of cities (Rome, Venice, and Dubrovnik, for starters) using nothing but downloaded images from Flickr. As they explain:

In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

I'm fascinated by the play between particular and abstract here: the hundreds and hundreds of tourist snaps people take in the Piazza San Marco, and the process that identifies what all those pictures have in common, sifting out the changing quotidian details of weather and pigeons and passers-by. The results are beautifully ghostly, and remind me a little of those ideal cities* that Renaissance painters sometimes invented.

When I read about this project, I immediately saw possibilities for a short story, half speculative fiction, half ghost story, maybe with a bit of New Weird in the mix: someone is working on a project of this sort only on a larger scale, and starts finding odd little blips, or inexplicable clouds of points, or something just very slightly off, in certain unobtrusive corners in the model: a dead end of a narrow street, or one side of the interior of a church, or a shadow that shouldn't be there next to a fountain. And they realize that they're seeing something that's barely visible in individual photographs, but when all the images are fed into the reconstruction, it turns out they've called up...something. Which then, perhaps, begins to appear in the real world. I don't know how it ends, but I want to write it.

* That second painting is my favorite thing in the Walters Art Museum. A poster of it has accompanied me from apartment to apartment for years.

What is the sound of one melancholy wave withdrawing?

My new absolute favorite thing on the web is FreeSound, an archive of Creative Commons-licensed sound files uploaded by users, like an aural version of Flickr's Creative Commons pool. They're tagged with keywords, and some of them (to the delight of someone as map-obsessed as I am) are geotagged so that if you want to hear what a hot spring in Iceland sounds like, you can browse for it on a map of the world.

My first thought, when I found the site, was that this would make a wonderful source of chill-out background sounds. One could download a whole set of sound files of cats purring, or rain falling, or birds singing at dawn, or whatever; assemble them into an album in iTunes; turn on one's computer or plug in one's earphones; and ta-da: instant de-stressification. (I've been working on various solo projects at work that require concentration but still make me want to listen to something in the background. All of the above fit the bill admirably. I especially recommend the cat purrs.)

And my second thought was "Ooh, one of their top recordings is a nightingale singing. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever heard a nightingale. I've always wondered what all those poets were talking about. Wait a minute — someone should totally put together a set of sound files to go with the Norton Anthology of Poetry! Think of all those students who've never heard a nightingale or don't know what a dulcimer sounds like!" And I still think it's a rather good idea. I mean, imagine the possibilities:

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window...

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring...

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination....

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Who else wants to build an open-source multimedia poetry anthology? I think it would be really cool if such a thing existed.

In search of a better to-read list application

I read more books, or at least it feels like I read more books, when I can keep a tally of them somewhere. I also read more books when I have a way of tracking all the books I want to read — the ones that friends and colleagues have recommended, the ones I read intriguing reviews of, the ones that come through my selection queue at work and make me think "Hmm, I'd like to read that after it gets here." I started off with just a series of pen-and-paper lists (books to read, books read) in the small notebook I use almost entirely for lists of things; it's a decent solution, but until I attempt to index the notebook, it's a bit tricky to find the lists.

So I started looking for a digital equivalent to the paper lists. There for a while I was tracking my reading with a Facebook application called, simply, Books, which has the advantage of integrating to-read, currently-reading, and finished-reading lists. The main drawback is that you have to be a Facebook user to use it or see it. LibraryThing, which has been my home library cataloging application of choice for years now, has added to-read list features in recent months; I tried that, too, but in the end I think I'd rather keep LibraryThing as a catalog of books that I own. (A lot of the books I either want to read or am currently reading are books I borrow from the library. Surprise surprise.)

The latest thing I've tried is bkkeepr, a service that lets you track your reading via Twitter. You send it direct messages containing each book's ISBN and some simple metadata: "start" or "finish" to indicate when you've started or finished reading something; page numbers to signal how far you've read. You can even use it as a note-taking application if you message it with a page number and a text note, as long as it all fits Twitter's 140-character limit. I like its elegant, simple interface, the fact that I can update it from any number of devices, and its potential as a tool for keeping track of my thoughts while reading. If only it had a to-read list option, it would be ideal for my purposes.

So, readers: do any of you have a preferred application for managing the to-read list? Is there anything I'm missing?

Craigslistlieder!

A few days ago, someone on Opera-L mentioned Gabriel Kahane's Craigslistlieder, a song cycle based on, you guessed it, personal ads from Craigslist. (One of them, the wildly funny "Neurotic and Lonely," can be heard on Gabriel Kahane's MySpace page; or you can listen to them all here).

Tickled, I promptly tweeted about it. At which point a couple of Twitter friends pointed me to Sam Krahn's Missed Connections Song Cycle, this one based on Chicago's Craigslist and first performed at the Green Mill.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has been assembling found poetry from Craigslist, and a Google search turns up a few more examples. (Personally, I think Craigslist poetry sounds best when set to music.) Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time is evidence of the Next Big Thing?

Obviously, the next step is for someone to write some Twitter lieder. Or, perhaps even better, Found Magazine lieder or Passive Aggressive Notes lieder. I'm only half joking. Actually, I'm not joking at all. Any composers out there want to try it?