Library Infographics: 1930's style

posted by: Michael Lieberman

 Nowadays, the visualization of data is all the rage. It seems each new study or piece of research is turned into an image.

I'm not so sure this was as common in the 1930's and 40's when these visual aids were printed.

The series of 28 posters were produced under the supervision of noted librarian Ruby Ethel Cundiff for the Library School Course in Teaching the Use of the Library at the George Peabody College for Teachers.

These examples were salvaged by Char Booth from a throw-away pile at her library school in 2003 and were digitized by Gabriel Jaramillo at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

from: Book Patrol

Say what you see: How language is being transformed by the way we type - rather than the way we speak

The rise of social media has put "conversation without speech" at the centre of millions of lives, as Tom Chatfield explains

by: Tom Chatfield

Where once speech was the driving force behind language change, we are moving into an era where writing – or, more precisely, the act of typing on to screens – is a dominant form of verbal interaction. And this has brought with it an accelerating transformation of not only the words we use, but how we read each others' lives.


Consider the emoticon: a human face sketched from three punctuation marks. Born during the course of an early online discussion in 1982, courtesy of computer scientist Scott Fahlman, it addressed one central absence of onscreen words: a human face able to indicate emotional tone.

Fahlman coined two basic expressions – "happy" and "sad" (signalling "joking" and "not joking" respectively) – but further variations almost immediately began to spring up, stretching today into many thousands. Aside from bewildering ingenuity, one thing all of these share is that they are unpronounceable: symbols aimed at the eye rather than at the ear, like an emotionally enriched layer of punctuation.

There's nothing inherently new about such effects. In 1925, the American professor George Krapp coined the phrase "eye dialect" to describe the use of selected mis-spellings in fiction signalling a character's accent without requiring a phonetic rendering of their speech. Mark Twain, for example, used just a handful of spelling variations to convey the colourful speech of his character Jim in Huckleberry Finn (1884), such as "ben" for been and "wuz" for was.

The "z" of Twain's wuz might have a strangely contemporary feel to some readers, courtesy of the so-called "internet z" – a common typo for the letter "s" that has taken on a new life in typed terms such as "lulz", denoting an anarchistic flavour of online amusement via the mangling of the acronym "laughs out loud" (LOL).

While he was a master of visual verbal effects, Twain wouldn't have recognised the strange reversal of traditional relationships between written and spoken language that something like LOL represents. For, where once speech came first and writing gradually formalised its eccentricities, we're now typing some terms and only then learning to speak them.

LOL itself features increasingly in speech (either spelt out or pronounced to rhyme with "doll") together with its partner in crime, OMG (Oh My God!), while some of the more eccentric typo-inspired terms used in online games (to "pwn" someone, meaning to subject them to a humiliating defeat) can't even be said out loud. And if that lies outside your experience, consider the familiarity with which almost all of us now say "dot com" or talk about a "dotcom" business: a web-induced articulation of punctuation that would have inconceivable in any other era.

These may sound like niche preoccupations but, in the past few years, the rise of social media has put what you might call "conversation without speech" at the centre of millions of lives. Every single day sees more than 100 billion emails and 300 million tweets sent. Video, audio and images are increasingly common, too, with more than 72 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Yet almost all our onscreen exchanges still begin and end with words, from comments and status updates to typed search queries and the text message.

There's something magnificent about our capacity for cramming emotional shading into even the most constricted of verbal arenas, and making them our own. From text messages with more punctuation appended than most standard paragraphs to tweets with startlingly elaborate subtexts spelled out via hash tags (#gently- selfmocking), our creativity knows few bounds – together with our ability to read between the lines and convert even the unlikeliest sequence of 140 characters into a human story.

Similarly, the democratisation of written words is an astonishing thing, not least because it gifts permanence to so much that has historically been lost – and supplants those speaking on others' behalf with an opportunity to directly encounter every individual's words.

Yet there are hazards and seductions within our ingenuity. As writers, our words belong to the world rather than simply to us, and they can be both read and used in ways we cannot foresee – not to mention aggregated, shared, copied and analysed for far longer than we ourselves may exist.
Then, too, there's the fact that we cannot see or know what the faces behind typed words are actually doing; or what the grand performance of social-media selves conceals as well as reveals. We are, in this sense, vulnerable precisely because of our lavish linguistic talents. We cannot help but read our own meanings into everything we see, forgetting the breadth of the gulf between words and world.

"The man who does not read," Twain once wrote, "has no advantage over the man who cannot read." What might he have made, though, of the man who only reads, or does not know how to listen?

Professionally and personally, we live in an age where the messy self-exposure of speech – of even a conversation by phone or Skype – can seem at once too self-exposing and ephemeral to be useful. Onscreen, typing, the world seems clean and comprehensible; ripe for copying, pasting, sorting and – if necessary – for the most careful construction of even the most spontaneous-seeming quip.

We have never been more privileged as readers and writers, or more finely attuned to the subtexts that can lurk within even a single letter. Yet conversation is an art that must not be supplanted, not least because it reminds us of what the screen cannot say; and of the constant fiction between what is thought, written and understood, and whatever truths lie behind these.

Tom Chatfield's book, 'Netymology: a Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World' is published by Quercus

from: Independent

Toronto Public Library has revealed the titles of items people complained about in 2012.

by: Steve Kupferman

Every year, Toronto Public Library releases a report with a list of items that Torontonians tried to have removed from library shelves over the previous year. (The library term is “request for reconsideration of library materials,” which is a very diplomatic way of putting it.)


You may be heartened to know that, by and large, Torontonians don’t lodge many complaints over library materials. There are generally only a handful in any given year. Also, the library rarely actually withdraws an item in response to a complaint.

In 2012, however, according to a just-released report on last year’s complaints, there was one item that library staff did withdraw.

Date Rape: A Violation of Trust, an educational video made in 2007, was brought to the library’s attention by a patron who found it “racist.” Library staff determined that the video, “while well-intentioned,” did reinforce stereotypes. Also, according to the report, “information on date rape is confused with stranger rape and is inconsistently presented.” The video is gone now, and we’re guessing all the high school students that might have been subjected to it won’t be too bummed out.

The library also had complaints about these three items, all of which were retained in the collection:

•Woyzeck, a Werner Herzog film. (“DVD cover depicts violence against women and might be seen by children.”)

•Hard and Fast, a gay romance novel. (“Pornographic.”)

•The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), an educational book for lazy people. (“Promotes Islamophobia.”)
from: Torontoist

Toronto library study aims to put a dollar figure on their value

Economic impact study funded by donations will help prove to skeptics that public libraries are worthy of strong support.

by: David Rider

The U of T’s Martin Prosperity Institute will tell Toronto, in dollar figures, the worth of its public library system.


The economic impact study, a first of its kind in Canada, will be funded by the Toronto Public Library Foundation with contributions from TD Bank Group and the estate of Norman G. Hinton. No city money will be spent.

Councillor Paul Ainslie, chair of library board, said the idea crystallized for him during 2013 budget debate as community groups used economic multipliers to demonstrate the wisdom of city funding.

Ainslie noted the system’s 19 million users borrow 32 million items annually. Some patrons are job-seekers using computers, while others are students doing research.

“Can we get somebody to look at the library and come up with some kind of economic validation for what we do?” Ainslie said he wondered. “It’s also useful when we go back to the city at budget time and say, ‘We need more computers, because they are at 90 per cent capacity, or we need to build more branches or hire more staff’.

“We can sing the praises of being the highest-per-capita used library in North America but if we can show the economic impact of benefit of having a library, that will help us persuade council.”

Most of the library system’s $180 million annual budget comes from the city. The foundation quickly volunteered to fund the study, which is expected to be completed by fall, he added.

Kimberly Silk, a data librarian at the Martin Prosperity Institute, part of the Rotman School of Management, said the study will produce a dollar value although it’s important to acknowledge there is more to libraries than that.

“We’re in an economic climate where everything that we spend on the public good needs to be valuated,” Silk said.

She said the institute will question, among other things, whether libraries’ economic impact is greater in so-called priority neighbourhoods, where incomes are lower and recent immigrants and others rely heavily on public facilities.

The issue of the economic value of libraries — beyond other considerations — arose in 2011 during budget deliberations, when Councillor Doug Ford opined that he’d close his neighbourhood branch “in a heartbeat.” A flurry of appalled condemnation from Toronto’s library-loving public — including literary icon Margaret Atwood — followed, leading to tens of thousands of signatures on a petition, lengthy deputations and ultimately, a strong affirmation of support for the library system.

from: The Star

What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out

by: Lynn Neary

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you'll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren't assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.


At Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., the 11th-grade honors English students are reading The Kite Runner. And students like Megan Bell are reading some heavy-duty books in their spare time. "I like a lot of like old-fashioned historical dramas," Bell says. "Like I just read Anna Karenina ... I plowed through it, and it was a really good book."

But most teens are not forging their way through Russian literature, says Walter Dean Myers, who is currently serving as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. A popular author of young-adult novels that are often set in the inner city, Myers wants his readers to see themselves in his books. But sometimes, he's surprised by his own fan mail.

"I'm glad they wrote," he says, "but it is not very heartening to see what they are reading as juniors and seniors." Asked what exactly is discouraging, Myers says that these juniors and seniors are reading books that he wrote with fifth- and sixth-graders in mind.

And a lot of the kids who like to read in their spare time are more likely to be reading the latest vampire novel than the classics, says Anita Silvey, author of 500 Great Books for Teens. Silvey teaches graduate students in a children's literature program, and at the beginning of the class, she asked her students — who grew up in the age of Harry Potter — about the books they like.

"Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' "

Those anecdotal observations are reflected in a study of kids' reading habits by Renaissance Learning. For the fifth year in a row, the educational company used its Accelerated Reader program to track what kids are reading in grades one through 12.

"Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning. Students participate in the Accelerated Reader program through their schools. When they read a book, they take a brief comprehension quiz, and the book is then recorded in the system. The books are assigned a grade level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity.

And Stickney says that after the late part of middle school, students generally don't continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.

Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.

Last year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were being assigned to high school students. "The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read," Stickney says, "has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level."

Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.

Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list.

Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, at a 10th-grade English class — regular, not honors — students say they don't read much outside of school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own. "I read The Odyssey, Tyler says. "I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read Hamlet. Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. "It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.

Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. "That's why we have great teachers that actually make us understand," he says. "It's a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it's a challenge."

But a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. "It gives us a new view on things."

Sandra Stotsky would be heartened to hear that. Professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they'll do in college. "You wouldn't find words like 'malevolent,' 'malicious' or 'incorrigible' in science or history materials," she says, stressing the importance of literature. Stotsky says in the '60s and '70s, schools began introducing more accessible books in order to motivate kids to read. That trend has continued, and the result is that kids get stuck at a low level of reading.

"Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more," she says. "You've got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You've got to do a lot more reading altogether."

"There's something wonderful about the language, the thinking, the intelligence of the classics," says Anita Silvey. She acknowledges that schools and parents may need to work a little harder to get kids to read the classics these days, but that doesn't mean kids shouldn't continue to read the popular contemporary novels they love. Both have value: "There's an emotional, psychological attraction to books for readers. And I think some of, particularly, these dark, dystopic novels that predict a future where in fact the teenager is going to have to find the answers, I think these are very compelling reads for these young people right now."

Reading leads to reading, says Silvey. It's when kids stop reading, or never get started in the first place, that there's no chance of ever getting them hooked on more complex books.

from: NPR

Focus on People, Not Tools | The User Experience

by: Aaron Schmidt

Librarianship has lost its focus—our professional concern for people has been eclipsed by a pre­occupation with collections and technology. This is understandable. Historically, libraries have been centered on bringing the world to our members through our collections. This problem of access was important to help solve, meeting a vital societal need. Likewise, our focus on information technologies and the web is natural, too. Throughout the years, these tools have presented some outstanding challenges, though generally they have aided tremendously in our mission to expand access to accumulated cultural knowledge and output. But our fixation on collections and technology is no longer serving us—nor our members.


Revealing roles

Let’s take a closer look at our attention to the web. Web technologies are tools, but we’ve been concerned with them as ends in themselves. “We need a responsive library site!” excited web librarians might say. What they mean is that the library needs to deliver information in a convenient way. “The library would benefit from a vibrant Facebook profile,” another librarian might say. This is probably true but only because having a vibrant Facebook profile can create conversation and community connections [for more on this kind of engagement, see “Social Media: Libraries Are Posting, but Is Anyone Listening?”].

Take a look at the debate on what to call the people who come into our institutions—patrons, customers, users, members, etc. I would argue that the rise of the ugly word user in our profession and others is, at least in part, tied to this shift in focus away from people and onto the tools they use, as if their tools define them.

Finally, our spotlight on tools can also be found in the titles of conference sessions and articles. Oftentimes, the technology functions as the subject, while the outcome—if it’s there at all—is the predicate. Our communities, again, if present at all, are unspoken direct objects. Here’s what I mean:

• Augmented Reality & Next Gen Libraries
• Top Technology Trends
• Gamifying Your Library
• 25 Mobile Apps for Librarians
• Circulating iPads

This is a subtle but meaningful difference. Focusing on the technologies rather than the outcomes changes the way we talk about these topics and the way we learn about them. When we aim for the outcomes, we’re more likely to think deeply about the problems we’re trying to solve and consider multiple strategies that speed us to our goals.

Let me be clear: I’m not downplaying the importance of technology in libraries or setting up a false dichotomy. As a profession, librarianship has developed many mechanisms to learn about technology and the web. This is important, and we need to keep learning about the broader world of resources that can help us efficiently deliver our services. But let’s shift our collective eye to learning about people first, so everything we know about technology can be put in service of supporting meaningful goals.

Shift the focus

Our collective focus on technology also prevents technology from being as deeply integrated into our libraries as it should be. When we fetishize technology, we can only look at it shallowly. When we depend on emerging technology librarians to be the ambassadors for relevant technologies, we take the rest of the organization off the hook.

In fact, if we put the emphasis on people, library technology will become even more important. Currently, it is all too easy to implement tech solutions halfheartedly, check the box that the project is complete, and more or less be done with it. Think of our websites, catalogs, and self-check machines. There’s plenty of room to improve these things, but since we can check the box of “yes, we have those” we don’t strive to do better. In the future, when we emphasize peoples’ needs and their ideal use of libraries, we’ll spend a lot of time ensuring our technology is useful, usable, and desirable. “What sort of checkout experience are we providing members?” is a much bigger and important question than “Are our self-check machines working?”

Once we shift our focus the right way, we can encourage larger efforts. For instance, in addition to the Library Information Technology Association, we need the Library & Community Knowledge Association. In addition to the conference Computers in Libraries we need the conference People in Libraries. A complement to the American Library Association’s (ALA) TechSource? You guessed it: ALA PeopleSource. When we focus on people, we can acknowledge that technology is an important but subservient tool that helps libraries meet the needs of their communities.

from: Library Journal

Further reading: how to put libraries back at the heart of communities

The Arts Council England explains how libraries can adapt to financial challenges and to changes in the way we consume information

by: Brian Ashley

Libraries have long been social gathering centres and provided sources of information for local communities. But how is this role changing with the financial landscape and changes in the way we consume information?


We published a report recently called Envisioning the Library of the Future. In just over a year, and after speaking to more than 800 people, we have a piece of research that demonstrates the vital role that libraries can play in the success and wellbeing of the communities they serve.

Writing this report was important to us because we wanted to bring the research in this area up to date. Our research has revealed that libraries are doing amazing work up and down the country. Look, for example, at the way so many libraries are embracing the Reading Well scheme to encourage people suffering from common mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression, to read as a form of therapy.

For libraries to remain successful in light of the many challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities they are facing now and will face in the future, our research has indicated that they need to develop in the following ways:

• They need to be positioned as the hub of the community.
• They will need to be at the heart of digital technology and creative media.
• They will need to become more resilient and sustainable.
• Library leaders and staff will need the right skills to meet these future challenges.

These four priorities are a guide for all bodies, organisations, staff and members of the public to help make real the ambitions set out in Envisioning the Library of the Future. This isn't something the Arts Council can do on its own. We are just one of a number of bodies charged with the responsibility of developing public libraries.

If we work together on these four priorities, we can all be ambitious about delivering the future for libraries.

We are already assisting libraries in developing around these priority areas through things such as our £6m grants for the arts libraries fund, our publication of research into the level of community involvement in public libraries, and our investment in the 13 libraries development initiative projects, which we are currently evaluating.

We are also working closely with key partners including the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Local Government Association, Society of Chief Librarians, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and the British Library. But it shouldn't stop there, and it is essential that we develop more new partnerships.

We always hoped that Envisioning the Library of the Future would energise the sector, looking beyond the immediate and important issues of funding and library closures towards formulating an approach that will ensure that libraries are seen as vital and relevant long into the future.

In the coming months and years, the aim is to see libraries at the heart of communities, helping us to understand ourselves, our place in the world, and the heritage of the communities in which we live.

This is not some distant goal. As Envisioning the Library of the Future has shown us through the numerous conversations that we have had with members of the public and library staff, libraries are valued and trusted spaces. With a concerted effort, and a collaborative approach, the library will be valued by generations to come because it will have remained true to its core purpose while adapting to the radical changes of the 21st century.

Brian Ashley is director of libraries at Arts Council England.

from: Guardian

Guilt Complex: Why Leaving a Book Half-Read Is So Hard .

by: Heidi Mitchell

Until very recently, Michelle Ginder, a transportation planner in Seattle, forced herself to finish every book she cracked open. An avid reader, she says she felt "like a quitter" for giving up a novel halfway. Then, while plodding through John Sayles's 2011 "A Moment in the Sun" and "still not knowing what it was about," she made a conscious decision to put down the book. She moved on to something more gripping, reading the "Game of Thrones" series.


"It felt so good," Ms. Ginder, 39, says. "There was so much guilt associated with quitting, but when I finally did it, it was liberating."

In the age of the e-reader, dropping a book has never been easier: It doesn't even require getting up to grab another off the shelf. But choosing to terminate a relationship with a book prematurely remains strangely agonizing, a decision fraught with guilt.

"It goes against how we're built," says Matthew Wilhelm, a clinical psychologist with Kaiser Permanente in Union City, Calif. "There is a tendency for us to perceive objects as 'finished' or 'whole' even though they may not be. This motivation is very powerful and helps to explain anxiety around unfinished activities."

The idea of stopping midway is stressful, but still, we do it. And even brag about it. GoodReads, an online community of readers that was recently bought by Amazon.com Inc., allows its 18 million members to rank the most initiated but unfinished books of all time; 7,300 members have voted. Top of the list: "Catch 22," Joseph Heller's American classic. Books in the "Lord of the Rings" series finished a close second.


Readers, age 16 and older, average eight books a year, according to Pew Research Center data, with the median 17. That's the pace Ms. Ginder used to read at. But using her new approach to reading, she says she is up to 31 books a year. She has about 10 books ready to begin on her shelf or Kindle at any time. When she drops one, she simply pulls up another in seconds.

Sara Nelson, editorial director of books and Kindle at Amazon.com, sees book abandonment frequently among Kindle readers. She believes that e-readers have given voracious consumers not so much license to stop, but the ability to dip in and out of books, depending on their mood. "So while you might stop midstream, you can also very easily go back to the book later," she says. She herself gives a book about 25 pages to enthrall her before putting it back on the digital shelf.

Leigh Haber, books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine, who suggests candidates to Oprah Winfrey for her consideration for the popular Oprah Book Club, says that while the obvious reasons for abandoning books are distraction and boredom, she attributes much of the behavior to a backlash against writing in which technique trumps storytelling.

Certain types of people are more likely to push through a book. Dr. Wilhelm theorizes that people with competitive, Type-A personalities might be more likely to abandon a book because they tend to be motivated by reward and punishment, and "if there are no consequences or public recognition, why finish?"

Conversely, he says more laid-back, Type-B personalities may never start a book they know they won't finish. The more important motivator of finishing a book, says Dr. Wilhelm, is social pressure, which is why book clubs are so good at getting readers to the epilogue.

Librarians like Mary Wilkes Towner, an adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, always gives readers permission to stop whenever they want, to disentangle the act from childhood associations of reading as a task. "I have found that people in their 30s, they feel guilted into finishing—just the same way that they were told to eat everything on their plate," she says. "If you want to be culturally literate, skim. But we all have to give ourselves permission to quit."

Choosing the right books lets people dramatically increase the number of books they can read in a lifetime, she says.

Some psychologists look at bailing on books on the spectrum of task persistence. Meena Dasari, a clinical assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine, works mostly with children in her private practice. She says that the ability to maintain a task even as any rewards and discontent fluctuate depends on what we attribute those feelings to. "If you say, 'I'm not smart enough,' then you're likely to give up," she says. "But if you say, 'This is just a difficult book,' you're more likely to complete it." Additionally, if your peer group or book club has finished the book, those outside forces can be powerful. "The time I finished the most books was when I was in a book club," Dr. Dasari says.

That said, some books, notes Ms. Haber at the Oprah magazine, are insurmountably difficult.

"If you come to a book at the wrong time, it won't connect," she says. She started and stopped Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" a few times before getting completely engrossed by it, and attributes her ability to finally finish the novel to trying it while on vacation. Reading it outside of her regular life, she says, gave the book new meaning.

"But there are also those magical books that you read differently at different points in your life," she says, adding that a young woman might be swept away by the passion of "Anna Karenina." A mother later in life might view the protagonist as selfish and irresponsible.

Publishers, says Ms. Haber, want readers to complete books so that they get hooked on the author and buy more of his work. But as a former book editor, she also understands the pressures on those inside the book industry to meet deadlines, and admits that many books need "more time in the nurturing process" of editing. When she gets to page 25 of a poorly edited book, Ms. Haber admits, even she will put it down. Like most of her friends and colleagues, she says she still feels guilty about it.

from: Wall Street Journal

DC announces choose-your-own-adventure digital comics

by: Laura Hudson

Less than two years after DC Comics began selling digital versions of its own comics on the same day as print, the superhero publisher announced two new digital comics formats: DC2, which will feature "dynamic artwork" that unfolds as the reader taps on the screen, and DC2 Multiverse, a choose-your-own-path format that will allow users to make decisions at key points that will unlock different storylines.


The DC2 format will debut with Batman '66, a digital comic from creators Jeff Parker and Jonathan Case based on the classic Batman television series. Rather than flipping through pages, readers will "tap on the screen to bring the next element of the story to life, whether it's a whole panel, or a word balloon or a sound effect," DC Entertainment Co-Publisher Jim Lee told Wired.com. "What's cool is that you really get to challenge the rules of traditional storytelling. You aren't beholden to a strict left to right western culture narrative. You can have elements that leap back and forth."

Lee says the format will play off many of the tropes of the fan-favourite Adam West show, with sound effects and meta-fictional elements that will appear and unfold in unique ways through the new format. Similarly, the DC2 Multiverse format will debut in Batman: Arkham Origins, a digital comic tie-in for the upcoming Warner Bros. video game where Lee says the ability to choose different paths through the story will "bring an aspect of gameplay to storytelling."


They'll also give the stories another quality familiar to gamers: replay value. "If you go back in the decision-making tree and replay other events or other decisions, you'll get a lot more reading experience and reading content," said Lee. And while readers will be able to interact with the story -- and have different narrative experiences based on the choices they make -- they may also have a hand in how the comics unfold in the future.

"We get feedback based on how readers navigate through these stories, and what story branches are most appealing to them," said Lee. "That'll give us meaningful input as we create additional chapters for the multiverse storyline, to the point where you can have people vote on the fates of certain characters. The interactivity isn't just on the screen itself; it's between us as publishers and readers as fans."

The idea of A/B testing stories -- and allowing the reader to shape their future -- is a complicated and potentially controversial one. On the one hand, plebiscite storytelling could be seen as a creative capitulation that would steer stories towards the middle and away from daring choices, and also calls to mind the infamous 1-900 number call-in vote on the fate of Batman's sidekick Robin (aka Jason Todd), which ended with the character getting beaten to death with a crowbar by fan fiat.

On the other hand, the idea of fans being able to choose their own adventure has a certain amount of appeal for anyone who ever loved reading books that let them turn to page 95 to see what happened if they attacked a wizard -- not to mention the pleasure of rereading that book over and over to find out what would have happened if they'd taken a different path.

DC Comics also announced that their digital comics sales increased 125 percent between 2011 and 2012, and has become what DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson called "an increasingly important and legitimate business for DC."

That wasn't the case in 2011, when Lee stood up at a comics retailer conference and held up a 22 x 28 cm piece of paper in one hand, and a piece of dental floss in the other. The width of the paper represented the sales of print comics, he said, while the dental floss represented digital comics. But times have changed. After two years of triple digital growth, Lee told Wired.com that the percentage of DC Comics sales coming from digital is now in the double digits.

"Just three years ago, we weren't in the business of digital publishing at all, or not meaningfully," said DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson. "Now there are a million downloads a month of DC stories from our digital publishing. It's not an insignificant business anymore."

from: Wired

Hip-hop straight outta ... Westminster reference library

UK producer Telemachus is launching his new album with a gig at a London library. Will Stig of the Dump and Foreign Beggars be following suit?

by: Rob Boffard

Westminster Reference Library no longer seems satisfied with just being a place to examine art books and dusty legal tomes. In recent years, the library's upstairs exhibition space has hosted acts such as British Sea Power, Polar Bear and – yes – Mr Hudson & the Library. It has even staged the odd, slightly awkward grime event, and a cameo appearance by Polar Bear collaborator Jyager.


But there's never been a dedicated hip-hop gig there. Certainly not an album launch, like the one that'll take place tonight when UK hip-hop producer Telemachus launches his new album, In the Evening.

With collaborators such as Jehst, Mr Thing, Con & Kwake and Rag N Bone Man providing backup, it's probably going to be the rowdiest event the library has ever seen.

"I just love the idea of playing loud music in a working library," says Telemachus. "The power that a library holds over people and in turn how they behave is amazing. I'm looking forward to flipping the script."

The launch party will have Telemachus taking the stage with a full band, including guitarist, drummer and sitar player. "I hope that my show will be a little more musical than your standard hip-hop gig," he says.


The strange thing is, a library is probably the perfect place to launch a Telemachus record. His lush, textured, instrumental hip-hop comes off as ever so slightly peculiar – I'd even go so far as to use the word "bookish". It owes as much to classic folk and jazz records as it does to regular hip-hop.

The producer himself is one of those slightly obscure figures who has helped British hip-hop move along more than most people will probably ever know. Born David Webb, he uses the name Telemachus only for his solo material – to the rest of the UK hip-hop universe, he's known as Chemo, a producer and mix engineer whose Kilamanjaro Studios in London have become a focal point for UK rap. In them, he's worked on projects with rappers such as Jehst and Kyza, dance DJs such as Calvin Harris and US heavyweights such as Roc Marciano and Sean Price .

"We like supporting acts who are not necessarily signed or being supported by big marketing campaigns," says Rosella Black, the library's events coordinator. "It's great to do be able to do that because we are, after all, a public service, not a commercial one. We like offering these artists a platform."

Admittedly, it might be difficult to imagine other UK hip-hop artists such as Stig of the Dump or Foreign Beggars tearing down the bookshelves. But it's good to know that there's a place for the slightly more scholarly hip-hop out there.

from: Guardian

How Uganda's female writers found their voice

A pioneering foundation called Femrite has helped a new generation of Ugandan women tell – or at least record – often harrowing stories of daily life in the country

by: Elizabeth Day

Beatrice Lamwaka was not yet a teenager when her 13-year-old brother, Richard, was abducted as a child soldier. The family lived in Alokolum, a town in northern Uganda, an area riven by civil war and brutal uprisings since the late 1980s, and Richard was snatched by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a militia group under the fanatical control of the murderous Joseph Kony. Under Kony's rule, child soldiers such as Richard were given automatic weapons and trained to kill. They were forced to commit atrocities against their friends and siblings. Those who attempted to escape were murdered.


Against all odds, Richard survived, returning home some months later. Yet he never once spoke about what he had endured. Nor did his family ever ask him what had happened. They didn't know how to tell him that in his absence, they had assumed he was dead and had buried his "tipu" – his soul.

Then, at the age of 15, Richard died of pneumonia. His mother couldn't find the words to grieve; she retreated into silence. Beatrice, too, knew not to say anything. Her childhood had been marked by violence. She grew so used to the sound of gunshot fire being exchanged between LRA rebels and government troops that she could distinguish when a bullet had hit a person and when it hadn't from the noise it made. The people in her village did not talk about such things. No one did. Silence was the only form of survival.

"They would talk about almost anything else," Lamwaka says now, more than 20 years later, sitting on her bed in her modest, single-storey home an hour's drive from Kampala. "But they wouldn't talk about what was going on around them."

It was only as an adult that Lamwaka found a way to express what she had been through and it came in the form of short stories. "The only way I could deal with it was to write the stories we hadn't been able to tell," she explains.

Lamwaka, 35, is one of a new wave of Ugandan fiction writers. Her work has been published in several anthologies and she has been nominated for several international prizes. The tale of her brother's abduction inspired a powerful short story called "Butterfly Dreams", in which a young girl is abducted by the LRA: "You caressed your scars as if to tell us what you went through," Lamwaka writes. "We did not ask questions."

Lamwaka says she has only had the confidence to turn her experiences into fiction because of the pioneering work of Femrite, an NGO established in Uganda in 1995 to promote and publish women's writing. Until that point, the literary scene in the country had been limited – publishing houses preferred to print profitable textbooks than novels that didn't sell – and what there was of it was dominated by men.

Femrite has changed all that. The organisation holds regular writing workshops and residential retreats, as well as running its own publishing arm, and is one of numerous organisations in developing countries working with Commonwealth Writers, a development foundation in the UK, which aims to unearth and nurture less-heard voices from across the Commonwealth; it also awards an annual prize for a best unpublished short story worth £5,000. The winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story prize will be announced this week by John le Carré at the Hay festival.

The aim, according to Lucy Hannah, the programme manager of the Commonwealth Foundation, is "to give a platform to emerging talent, often writing from difficult places and about difficult issues. We work with local communities to ensure these writers get the recognition they deserve and can make crucial connections with other authors and publishers at an international level. In doing so, we hope to encourage a new generation of storytellers whose fiction will open up a new world to readers who might not otherwise come across their work."

Back in Uganda, a light morning breeze causes the net curtains to billow into Lamwaka's living room. Along one wall, there is a bookshelf crammed tightly with dogeared copies of novels by Chinua Achebe, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One day, Lamwaka hopes her work will be there too. "It's so important for Ugandan writers to get international recognition," she explains. "We need role models."

The act of putting words on a page, of telling the truth through fiction, is a brave one for women in Uganda. It takes a particular courage to do so in a society riven by the kind of silent trauma described by Lamwaka and where the struggle for gender equality continues. In rural areas, the education of boys is still prioritised and many girls drop out of school to help in the home or to get married. As a result, they have a lower literacy rate than men. Domestic violence is high. According to figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2007, 68% of married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced some form of violence by their spouse or intimate partner. Most women do not report such abuse to the authorities through fear of social rejection and the police rarely intervene or investigate.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is in decline, but still a problem in the country's villages. According to Unicef, 1% of all Ugandan women aged 15-49 have been cut, leading to serious physical and psychological health issues. In 2009, Femrite volunteers travelled around the country to collect first-hand testimonies from women who had undergone female circumcision and who were, in many cases, illiterate and unable to write their own stories.

The resulting anthology, Beyond the Dance, makes powerful reading. One woman, Judith, recalls being circumcised without anaesthetic in 1976, then forced to walk 4km to a local nursing home, where she slept on a bare floor for a week before she was allowed to bathe herself.

"Unless a woman was circumcised, she would not get married," Judith says. "She would be subjected to all sorts of ridicule and, finally, she would be circumcised by force. Circumcision was not something a woman chose to do; it was what she had to do."

Judith is now paralysed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair, a situation she believes was triggered by the botched circumcision. Her husband left her because "he had no use for a crippled wife". Without Femrite, her story would never have been told.

In a bustling cafe in the Kisementi district of Kampala, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, a Femrite volunteer and poet, describes it as "the voice of silence": the inbuilt fear and shame that holds women back from telling their stories.


"In the villages, they feel it's a form of betrayal to express themselves because they're so used to silence, to just nodding without argument," she says. "They will think it's a betrayal of trust to their elders and society. But also they're scared. They think, 'If I tell the story of how this society turned against me and ruined my life through FGM, they will cast me out.' Femrite is really about creating a safe space for speaking out."

Traditionally, Ugandan women are the storytellers and keepers of the oral tradition but it takes a considerable leap of consciousness to become a writer.

"Some of these women have the basic talent to tell stories," says Goretti Kyomuhendo, a founding member of Femrite. "What is lacking is personal empowerment: self-belief, self-confidence and I think I would say they're suffering a kind of identity crisis. In many African societies, the woman's identity is constructed using that of another person: for example, if you're a woman with a baby, you become known as mama – it's a mark of cultural respect."

At one of Femrite's early workshops, Kyomuhendo recalls a woman writing "a beautiful story in the first person. It started, 'I was raped on my wedding night.'" When the woman returned the next week, she had rewritten the story in the third person, in the voice of a character called Angella. "It had no impact," says Kyomuhendo. "I asked her why she'd done it and she said, 'Because my husband said people would think it was me.' So the challenge is: how do you empower that woman to tell that story?"

In a bustling cafe in the Kisementi district of Kampala, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, a Femrite volunteer and poet, describes it as "the voice of silence": the inbuilt fear and shame that holds women back from telling their stories.


"In the villages, they feel it's a form of betrayal to express themselves because they're so used to silence, to just nodding without argument," she says. "They will think it's a betrayal of trust to their elders and society. But also they're scared. They think, 'If I tell the story of how this society turned against me and ruined my life through FGM, they will cast me out.' Femrite is really about creating a safe space for speaking out."

Traditionally, Ugandan women are the storytellers and keepers of the oral tradition but it takes a considerable leap of consciousness to become a writer.

"Some of these women have the basic talent to tell stories," says Goretti Kyomuhendo, a founding member of Femrite. "What is lacking is personal empowerment: self-belief, self-confidence and I think I would say they're suffering a kind of identity crisis. In many African societies, the woman's identity is constructed using that of another person: for example, if you're a woman with a baby, you become known as mama – it's a mark of cultural respect."

At one of Femrite's early workshops, Kyomuhendo recalls a woman writing "a beautiful story in the first person. It started, 'I was raped on my wedding night.'" When the woman returned the next week, she had rewritten the story in the third person, in the voice of a character called Angella. "It had no impact," says Kyomuhendo. "I asked her why she'd done it and she said, 'Because my husband said people would think it was me.' So the challenge is: how do you empower that woman to tell that story?"

Doreen Baingana, whose book Tropical Fish won the Commonwealth Writers prize for best first book in 2006, describes Femrite as "my literary home". "There are certain things in this society that are not meant to be said," she explains when we meet near her home in Entebbe on the Lake Victoria peninsula. "There are roles that women are not meant to play because of unspoken rules. Femrite provides a focus for those challenges because when we're together as women, we communicate differently."


But it would be wrong to assume that these writers are trapped in the past. While many Ugandan authors are doubtless influenced by their country's troubled history – the turbulent political upheavals and decades of civil war, the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin and his ruthless oppression of dissent – there are also those, including Baingana, who are keen to move on.

"I think we expect the African story to be one of tragedy and despair and how people overcame suffering," she says, sipping on her latte. "In fact, there are other stories. My experience growing up here wasn't horrific, even though Idi Amin was in power. For me, I just went to school and Entebbe was beautiful and green and peaceful like this." She sweeps her hand, taking in the acacia trees and the lush, verdant landscape.

The themes in Baingana's fiction are more universal – Tropical Fish is a series of interlinked short stories exploring the coming of age of three sisters – and are influenced by more recent developments in modern Uganda. In one chapter, sexually precocious oldest sister Rosa writes a letter to a former boyfriend who gave her HIV.

"Do you remember when exactly it got a name, became real?" Rosa asks. "How did we first hear about it? Rumours, whispers of strange symptoms in villages far away from us… Stories of its power spread and grew like tree roots, curling out of the ground; abnormal, ugly, strong."

Baingana says that the character of Rosa was directly influenced by her experience of university in Uganda in the late 1980s: "So many people were dying and we didn't know why. There was a period when it was a complete mystery. People said it was witchcraft. It started off with village people but then it moved and ran through all society. I wanted this story to be a record of those who died, especially those who thought it was a crime, who carried a social stigma because of a lack of understanding. In families, it was a silent disease. If a child fell sick because of it, no one would say."

Yet, despite an increased openness and awareness in the urban centres of Uganda, there are still some stories that cannot be told. Homosexuality, for instance, is illegal here. An anti-homosexuality bill currently being debated in parliament initially proposed the death penalty for those found guilty of "aggravated homosexuality", defined as when one of the participants is a minor, HIV-positive, disabled or a "serial offender". That was dropped in favour of harsher punishments for gay acts. Known colloquially as the "kill the gays" bill, it would also make it a crime not to report someone you know to be a practising homosexual, thereby putting parents, siblings and friends at risk. President Obama has described the bill as "odious".

Gay men and women face harassment, extortion, vandalism, death threats and violence on a daily basis. They can be sacked from employment if they are outed, forced to enter into heterosexual marriage and detained by the authorities without charge or access to a lawyer. In some of the worst cases, they can be subjected to "correctional rape".

Jo Jothams (not her real name) is a Femrite volunteer and a lesbian. She has known she was gay since she was 13 and developed a crush on a girl at boarding school. And yet, for more than 20 years, she has lied to friends and family about her sexuality for her own protection.

"I fear to tell my mother," Jothams says. "I think I love her too much to tell her because she might break down and be like the rest of them. People here think homosexuality is for people who are bad or evil."

The reality of being gay in Uganda is a terrifying one. Jothams talks in a low voice about a lesbian friend who was raped by a man she didn't want to marry, about her girlfriend, who was forced out of her rented apartment by the landlord and about the people she knows who have lost their jobs because of their sexuality or their perceived inability to fit in.

In the midst of this climate of paranoia and despair, Jothams has found a release of sorts in her writing. At Femrite, she has attended creative writing workshops and has been inspired to produce several short stories. She has ambitions to write a novel about her experiences, "so that people can understand", but, as yet, her work remains on her laptop – unpublished and unread by others. In the current climate, no one – not even Femrite – will print her words. It is too dangerous; the risk of reprisal is too high.

Yet the act of writing, Jothams says, is its own form of rebellion. It is necessary for her to put her story down, to show that it exists and to document what is happening. "I feel if you don't tell those stories, you are partly to blame," she explains. "We need to keep writing so that, some day, people will know the truth."

It is a gradual process but, word by word, these women are breaking through Uganda's voice of silence and making their own stories heard.

from: Guardian

Libraries look beyond the shelves

by: Neil Steinberg

Jeff Weisensel doesn’t have a job, not for the past 14 months anyway, since Kraft Foods restructured him out the door after 22 years.


But he does have a library — the $28 million Glenview Public Library, opened in 2011 — whose inviting lobby is part art gallery, part cafeteria — patrons are welcome to eat and drink there ­­— and part social center. No shushing librarian with an index finger to her pursed lips and her glasses on a chain here; instead, a sign on the wall encourages talking.

“Just hanging out, searching for a job, getting away from the house,” he said, pausing from chatting with a friend who came to the library to give his nanny space.


Times are changing in America, and if you want to see an institution trying to change with them, using every technological and conceptual tool it can, look no further than your local public library.

“It is a most exciting time for libraries,” said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association. “Books are still important, but libraries are also delivering content and experiences to their communities in new, very different and exciting ways.”

True, there aren’t more of them. New library buildings lag behind population growth. In the decade between 2000 and 2010, according to the library association, the construction of new libraries remained flat while population increased 10 percent.

The Chicago Public Library is mostly replacing old facilities; its new Edgewater branch, replacing a much smaller, older facility, opens June 22. Though it is opening a new branch in August.


Typically, it is existing libraries that are jogging to keep up with the times. Checking out ebooks is old news; though a significant number of publishers still resist allowing libraries to offer ebooks to their patrons, that opposition is weakening.

The latest reimagining of the library is as community center and business hub.

Arlington Heights Memorial Library just finished a $2.8 million renovation, expanding from four study rooms to 14, the biggest large enough for board meetings. One local nonprofit convenes its board there.

“We were having to turn people away,” said Jason Kuhl, executive director of the library. “They were originally study rooms, but what we were finding, there were more businesspeople coming in and using them.”

Libraries are shifting from places where you look up facts to places where you learn skills.

“We’ve really redesigned our space for the way the community uses the library,” said Deb Whisler, Arlington Heights’ director of communications and marketing. “Reference questions have dropped — we can all Google things on our phones — but what has increased are tech instructions. We have 40 to 60 tech classes, in Pinterest, in Twitter. We have a digital studio with all kinds of video equipment; businesses make their videos here.”

That’s happening across the country.

“One of the most interesting purposes of the library today is to be a place where people can go to learn new technology,” Sullivan said.

When Glenview built its new library, the public room moved from the basement to right off the entrance and nearly doubled in capacity, from 90 to 160 people.

“The library really is the anchor of downtown Glenview,” said Jennifer Black, communications director. “It’s a library, in its essence, but it’s also a community center and a cultural center. We do so much programming for all ages: adults, teens kids seniors. ... Books are still our primary business — books and ebooks now — but libraries have evolved into very special community resources.”

During the day, a library has three primary types of patrons: mothers with preschoolers, retirees and people doing their jobs or seeking employment.

“Like all libraries, it’s been a haven in this economy,” Black said. “For people out of work, you feel you have a place to go, to do research, write resumes, look for jobs.”

That’s nothing new. What is a more recent development is people with jobs doing those jobs at the library.

“Small businesses that can’t afford offices anymore use our study rooms,” she said. “We get a lot of journalists.”

Another big push for libraries has been in youth services, trying to offer cool spaces for kids to hang out, play games, and, occasionally, study.

The Chicago Public Library started its YOUmedia program three years ago.

“It challenges your assumptions about what a library ought to look like [with] a crowd of kids, playing video games, eating lunch,” said Brian Bannon, commissioner of the Chicago Public Library. “But it’s a fully engaged, interactive learning environment that connects kids through their interests to opportunities to learn.”

For instance, at Arlington Heights, students do more than use electronic devices; they build them, mastering electrical circuitry and soldering.

One concept big in libraries is referred to as the “maker culture.” “In its simplest form, there has been a resurgence in the concept of do-it-yourself, such as making jewelry, buttons or crafts,” Bannon said. “Many of us believe this is a new area of emphasis for our country, particularly as we look at innovation and invention.”

Toward that end, the Harold Washington Library in July is opening the Innovation Lab, an experimental space that will include a variety of tools, from laser cutters to a $2,000 MakerBot Replicator 3-D printer that can create solid objects using liquid plastic.

Innovation can involve putting public libraries in unexpected settings — in August, the CPL opens its 80th branch on the campus of Back of the Yards High School — the idea being that the public and students will use the facility.

Some of the improvements are purely technological. Just as libraries went from tracking books with cards tucked into pockets to scannable bar codes, they are shifting to radio-frequency identification chips that don’t have to be scanned at all. A stack of books can be checked out all at once by setting them on an electronic pad.

“We switched over our whole collection, 300,000 items,” said Jim Deiters, director of Oak Lawn Public Library. Not only does RFID speed checkout and allow patrons to check out their own books, but it allows them to get rid of cumbersome and expensive plastic security cases for CDs and DVDs because the RFID can be affixed directly to the discs.

Perhaps the most impressive piece of new library technology is found in the basement of the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago. There, 1.5 million books are stored tightly in stainless steel bins (or, for oversize books, shelving units) stacked five stories high, and five 50-foot-tall industrial robots race along tracks, grabbing the boxes and whisking them up to the Reading Room, a dramatic space of truncated columns (that cleverly hide air exchange outlets) under a soaring glass roof designed by Helmut Jahn. The system allows seven times more books to be stored than could in the same space open stacks. The library has room for 1.9 million additional volumes and is busily digitalizing rare archival material to make it available to the world online.

“The future is very bright,” said Judith Nadler, director and university librarian.

The neighboring Joseph Regenstein Library has a staffed tech help center, the “Techb@r,” that not only has experts available to consult on electronic issues, but a range of equipment ­— iPads, laptops, cables, cameras — students can check out.

The bottom line is that libraries are listening and trying to give their communities what they want in ways big and small. For instance, because so many patrons are in book clubs, which descend, locust-like, looking for multiple copies of hot books, Glenview offers “Book Club in a Bag,” 12 copies of the same popular title, plus a discussion guide, ready to go in a canvas carry-all.

Bannon points out that libraries are just doing what they have always done: adapting to new technology, whether by offering records and videotapes decades ago, or ebooks and computer terminals now. The Chicago Public Library offers 2,500 public computer terminals, which is the most available free in the city.

“The role of public libraries is creating spaces that connect people to information and ideas,” Bannon said. “It’s still a really powerful message and mission we need to continue.”

Another way to look at it is that libraries have always been the place where children went to get help with their homework, and where once that might have been making a shoebox diorama about the Civil War, now it is often something more sophisticated.

“Fourth-graders have to turn in videos,” said Kuhl, explaining the genesis of Arlington Heights’ production space, The Studio, with its three editing suites where patrons record videos, music and podcasts. “We have parents coming in saying, ‘Our elementary-school kid has to make a video. We don’t have tools, don’t have knowledge.’ The library steps in and helps just as they’ve always done. If you ask, ‘Hey, is this the role of the library?’ Yes! Libraries are still doing what they’ve always done, we’re just doing it in a new way with new technology for new times.”

from: Chicago Sun-Times

The Truth About Snapchat: A Digital Literacy Lesson for Us All

by: Hiten Samtani

The idea of Snapchat is simple, delightfully so. Take an image or a video, send it to a friend or paramour. Ten seconds after the receiver opens the file, it self-destructs, and the sender can rest assured that no trace of the message remains. Signed, sealed, delivered, deleted.

But that’s not quite true. In December, Buzzfeed reported on a security loophole in the app, which allows one to permanently save a Snapchat file without notifying the sender. The expectation of privacy and impermanence that makes the app irresistible to young users is thus deeply flawed. And yet it remains wildly popular, ranking in February as the second-most popular free photo and video app for the iPhone, besting even Instagram.

Gary Price, author of the information industry blog INFOdocket, says Snapchat illustrates an important lesson in digital literacy: the Internet never forgets.

“If you make something available on the Web, you can never be sure it will ever be 100 percent be gone, even if you work to remove it,” Price says.

The problem, he says, is two-pronged. First, users of such services seldom take the time to understand and research their inherent risks. If they did, they’d be less likely to share material that could come back to haunt them.

Second, providers of such services often shirk their responsibility for full and visible disclosure. With Snapchat, for example, the only mention of images and videos potentially becoming available for longer than specified is in the company’s privacy policy, a document that users often gloss over—if they bother to read it all. “The Snapchat FAQ makes no mention of any of the concerns or potential problems in general,” Price says.

Citing the motto of now-defunct clothing store Syms: “An educated consumer is our best customer,” Price says, “If you think about that in the Web age, I’m not sure that that’s really true.”

Earlier this month, the Washington, DC-based public interest research center EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Snapchat, for what it termed “deceptive business practices.”

The lack of transparency in how services like Snapchat function also concerns Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a technology reporter at social media news site Mashable. “Those services where you don’t know what’s going on, you have to trust them blindly,” says Franceschi-Bicchierai, who has written extensively about online privacy. “But you should always ask yourself: Am I comfortable showing this to someone I don’t know?”

The best way to get young users thinking about the risks of sharing sensitive information online, he says, is through horror stories. “There are so many stories of kids posting something embarrassing on Facebook and then not getting accepted to college. You always think, ‘it’s not going to happen to me.’”

Gwyneth Jones, a librarian at Murray Hill Middle School library in Laurel, MD, says that she doesn’t believe in “Internet safety,” only “Internet awareness.”

The biggest privacy concerns nowadays don’t stem from strangers, says Jones, but rather from people within a child’s circle. “It could be the older brother of the kid down the street, or even a classmate, who tells a 13-year-old girl, ‘why don’t you show me a picture of your cleavage?’”

This is why, she says, education about the use of Google and social media is as essential to children as sex education. “You know they’re going to do it anyway,” says Jones. “Better to do it with knowledge, discernment and ethics.”

And parents, teachers, and librarians need to become allies in helping kids understand the risks of technologies such as Snapchat, she says, a belief echoed by Price, who says that as a parent, it’s his responsibility to understand the tools that his child is using on a daily basis.

Increased awareness, education, and transparency then, are what will allow a service like Snapchat to keep delivering value without damaging the trust naive users often put into it. After all, as computer scientist Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget (Random House, 2010), says, “information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way.”

“Sure, you’re only sharing Snapchat material with friends who also use the app,” says Price, “but sadly, your friend today might not be your friend tomorrow.”

from: The Digital Shift

Bulgakov’s Ghost

by: Emily Parker

Over the past year, dozens of activists have been arrested in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent. The blogger Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent opposition figure who is on trial as of this writing, faces a possible sentence of 10 years. Nonprofit groups that receive financing from abroad are now required by law to identify themselves as “foreign agents.” The need for a robust literary outcry would seem as great as ever. But what has happened to Russia’s famous tradition of dissident literature — and to its readers?


A former Soviet dissident, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, told me books once gave him air to breathe. Yet now that he can find any book he wants, he hardly reads at all. Books, he explained, no longer have the power to change his vision of the world. I heard a similar sentiment from Dmitry Ravinskij, a senior researcher at the National Library of Russia, whom I met in a cozy St. Petersburg cafe. Ravinskij, born in 1950, has white curly hair and a gently sorrowful expression. He described seeing hopelessness in today’s Russia, a point sadly illustrated when, in the midst of our conversation, someone lifted my wallet from my shoulder bag.
Ravinskij’s mood brightened when he talked about reading back in the days of the Soviet Union. “The publication of ‘The Master and Margarita’ was a great event in the life of my generation,” he told me. Though Mikhail Bulgakov’s work was written in the 1930s it wasn’t published until 1966, when the magazine Moscow began serializing it. Its satirical portrait of Stalinist Russia veered far from the usual state-sanctioned material.

In a 2002 Bomb magazine interview, the novelist Victor Pelevin, author of “Generation P,” said it’s impossible to explain Bulgakov’s effect to those who didn’t live through Soviet times. “ ‘The Master and Margarita’ didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet, yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.”

Bulgakov’s work helped people recognize one another. “Many people began to speak by sentences from this novel. It was a language,” Ravinskij told me. “There were people who had read ‘The Master and Margarita,’ and people who had not read ‘The Master and Margarita.’ It was two different groups. It was a cultural difference, and at some point it became a political difference.”

Ravinskij also read books that were secretly written and circulated (known as samizdat) and especially prohibited works that were published abroad (known as tamizdat). In 1983, one of his friends informed on him for reading a forbidden book, and he lost his teaching job.

Yet today Ravinskij no longer reads serious literature. “Reading for me is not as fascinating as when I would read a forbidden book at 2 a.m. because I have to return it in the morning,” he explained. Nor is literature a central focus of the new generation of dissidents. Since late 2011, tens of thousands of Russians have taken to the streets to protest the Putin government. Aleksei Navalny told me in 2011 that he read a lot. Yet when I asked if any particular book had influenced his thinking, he said there was nothing in particular. Rather, newspapers were what moved him, as did the first television shows of the post-Soviet era.

While radio and newspapers today are more open than state-controlled television, in recent years the Internet has been the most free space in Russia. Now authorities may be clamping down. Still, just as “The Master and Margarita” once did, the Internet has already helped create a community with its own shared language and understanding.

Oleg Kashin, a journalist and opposition activist, told me that rather than books, “the Internet is more important for the opposition and for society in general.” Authors still make statements, but not necessarily through their work. Kashin pointed to the novelist Mikhail Shishkin, who in March refused to attend BookExpo America because he didn’t want to represent a “criminal regime.” “This declaration generated such a number of articles and responses on social media,” Kashin said. “Not one of his books caused as big a stir as Shishkin’s small comment.”

Recent protests, largely organized via social media, have tended to be diverse and decentralized. The novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya told me in an e-mail that last year’s demonstrations included “anarchists, fascists, the National Bolsheviks, Communists, right, left, democrats, monarchists and other most exotic groups.” Once again, it is through their protests, rather than the written word alone, that writers are making themselves heard. Last year, 12 writers led a march around Moscow. Participants included the crime writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, who writes under the name Boris Akunin, and the poet Dmitry Bykov.


Ulitskaya said it’s “hard to imagine any one book that could unite this Noah’s ark.” Yet there are still novels that inspire the opposition. Yury Saprykin, a journalist and opposition activist, points to the work of Ulitskaya, Eduard Limonov and Zakhar Prilepin. Another common point of reference is Pelevin, who satirizes post-Soviet Russia’s consumer culture. In a blog post titled “Purely Pelevin,” Navalny documented how someone took the logo of his Web site RosPil, which tracks government corruption, and put it on a chocolate label. Vladimir Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik” is also cited by critics of the Kremlin. The novel, set in 2028, takes place in a Russia that has become a high-tech surveillance state ruled by wandering thugs.

Yet this new wave seems to have little in common with dissident classics like “The Gulag Archipelago,” whose bleakly realistic depiction of Soviet labor camps helped shatter illusions about Communism. In contrast, Pelevin and Sorokin couch their critiques in dystopic satires. Such books don’t deal with “ethical choices or moral problems,” Saprykin, the opposition activist, said — nor do they offer a road map for resistance. The journalist Katya Parkhomenko added that these novelists “do not fight or struggle; they just invent a world which somehow reminds us of ourselves.” Perhaps it’s as the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya says: a writer can change reality, “but the reality also changes the writer.”

The experience of reading has seemingly changed as well: “I remember in the late Brezhnev era riding the metro and reading the forbidden ‘1984,’ ” Sorokin told me. “It was an unforgettable feeling, Orwell’s characters were sitting all around me! I was raising my head and looking around, as if to confirm the text: here it is, here it is!” “1984” may not have the same impact today, but in other ways, Sorokin says, the past is not dead. “Most nauseating is the smell of Soviet stagnation that increasingly wafts from the Kremlin. It is that same smell that led to the collapse of the country in 1991. It appears that history will repeat itself.”

Russia may need good protest literature more than ever, according to Sorokin. “Especially at these times, one wants for a writer to sit down, take a steel quill pen and, dipping it in his left hand, write a great novel in blood.”

But then, would Russia’s opposition even read it? The journalist Maxim Trudolyubov, editorial page editor at the Russian business daily Vedomosti, told me plainly: “Books are for adults, revolution is for the young.”

from: NY Times

Computer, Find Me a Book

by: Betsy Morais

On an overcast weekend in May, several dozen publishing wonks welcomed their Web-developer counterparts to a Midtown high-rise for the first-ever publishing hackathon. The objective was to spend thirty-two hours there, toiling away on “book discovery”—the creation of a kind of virtual P.A. system to beckon shoppers into the book aisle.


Just as authors sit hunched over computers across New York City, tending to their ambitions, hackers occupy the same coffee shops, writing lines of code that often go unrecognized. Many of them attend hackathons—marathons for software developers and designers—on the weekends, looking for the right project with which to launch a career, or at least to tinker with a start-up. The theme of book discovery seemed to resonate with them. The hack was to begin on Saturday morning, but the first arrivals showed up eagerly on Friday evening, around six o’clock, and spent the night. They crept through the passageways of AlleyNYC, a sixteen-thousand-square-foot communal workspace for start-ups—or, in tech’s vernacular, an “incubator”—that hosts at least one big hackathon a month. Its cruise director was Jason Saltzman, adorned with arm tattoos, a newsboy cap, and Drew Carey glasses. “It’s the usual suspects,” he said, as developers, laptops in hand, squeezed past him into a large, open room with lime-colored walls. “They’re searching.”

By ten o’clock on Saturday, the event’s organizers, Rick Joyce and Joanna Stone Herman, greeted two hundred incoming participants. Joyce, the chief marketing officer of Perseus Book Group, looked like an accountant on a field day: he pulled a blue hackathon T-shirt over his button-down and black slacks. Stone Herman, a petite, bubbly woman who is working on a social e-reading start-up called Librify, was stationed in the entryway. She was surrounded by developers, many of whom towered over her—especially Igor, who paced back and forth in neon-green running sneakers.

Igor and the rest took their seats in white folding chairs arranged auditorium-style. Joyce launched into the weekend’s agenda, assisted by Richard Nash, the founder of the book start-up Small Demons, and David Riordan, of the New York Public Library’s Labs division. They explained that book discovery is a crippling problem for publishers (as data has shown). “We would not need a publishing hackathon if we were not in the age of abundance,” Nash said, getting up out of his chair. “When we have all the food in the world, what happens? We become obese. When we have too much of something, we don’t know what to do with it.” The coders typed notes as they listened. Joyce advised, “If all we do is make books discoverable to people looking for a book to read, then we haven’t really rocked it.”

The developers lined up to propose their ideas and find teammates, an exercise Stone Herman described as “half junior-high dance, half matchmaking.” The most striking suitor was a middle-aged gentleman known as V, who was dressed in a military outfit and had more hair hanging down from the sides of his head than on top. “He comes dressed for war every hackathon,” Saltzman said.

V, who was laid off from his job as a security specialist and taught himself software engineering, attends two or three hackathons every month. At fifty-seven, he was one of the more senior participants. “Hackathon is my idea of partying all weekend, all night, and partying hard,” he said. V wasn’t drawn to this one for its literary sheen, though. “Books? Um, not necessarily books as such, but books as part of an ecosystem that includes pamphlets and multimedia,” he said of his interest in the publishing angle. “I hate crap. But I understand crap is a part of culture. So the question is, how do we organize all that crap?”

They got to work. Igor played around with Instagram, and created an account, called Mrs. Meme, on which he posted a photo of a cat with a line from “Anna Karenina”: “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” He figured this would be the best way for books to go viral. A six-person team constructed Captiv, a recommendation engine that mines personal tweets and world events for keywords, and drops off a pertinent quotation from a book on your screen. Another group built KooBrowser, which makes title suggestions by scanning through the data in your Web browser. “We believe that your browser knows you best,” its developers told the hackathon’s judges.

On Sunday afternoon, thirty teams gave demonstrations. The six finalists would have ten days to work out the kinks before Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s Fashion Week, which takes place from May 29th to June 1st. The hackers behind the winning project will get ten thousand dollars and a pitch meeting with the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel. Captiv and KooBrowser made the cut, as did proposals for geolocation-based book-recommendation services, a cover-browsing system, and a hub for character profiles from young-adult literature. The most promising ideas involved data-swiping—calculating a formula to match books with readers based on their preferences and online habits.

But the romance wasn’t lost entirely. Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times reporter who founded Plympton, a digital publisher for serial fiction, tossed out her idea for a literary hook-up app, Booklvrs, saying, “We should combine Grindr with books.” The judges laughed nervously. “I’m actually not planning to do this app, but somebody should take this idea and run with it,” she said. A voice called out from the side of the room, “There was actually another group that made a book-porn app, but they didn’t submit in time.”

After the demos, everyone headed toward the beer coolers. “It’s a mix of interesting ideas and sketchy implementation,” Joyce told me, before ducking into the judges’ deliberation room. Stone Herman and Saltzman hovered in a narrow hallway. Stone Herman was gushing. “The publishing industry has been really insular,” she said. “There are people here from totally different industries—like someone from defense technology!”

A tall, stringbean-skinny kid stumbled over in a happy daze. Saltzman gave him a high five. It was Aaron Landy, a seventeen-year-old high-school student with braces and a yarmulke. Landy had developed a reader-generated review site called Meadows over the past two days. He looked exhausted. This was his first hackathon, and he slept at the Alley on Saturday night. (He called his parents the next morning to let them know.) “I love books,” Landy told me. “I read George R. R. Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’ before they even announced they were making a series.” Landy did not become a finalist, but it wasn’t a wasted weekend. “I made a lot of friends here,” Landy said, sticking two thumbs up. “It was cool.”

from: New Yorker

Letter from Delhi: A Bookstore of Safety

by: Siddhartha Mitter

For the past four years, the best alternative bookstore in Delhi has crouched in an awkward, elongated space in Hauz Khas Village, a warren of narrow pedestrian lanes that dates back to the thirteenth century and has become one of the capital’s bohemian—and increasingly gentrified—enclaves. Parks, medieval monuments, and a reservoir surround the village, which has a single entrance at the end of an access road where cars must park and auto rickshaws drop their passengers. Yodakin, the bookstore, occupies a ground-floor space in a building close to this entrance, which insures decent foot traffic.


The shop’s front door is up a few steps from the lane, with a tiny landing that Arpita Das, Yodakin’s owner, optimistically calls a veranda. The set-up is inconvenient, but the décor is pleasant and almost airy. The books, all from small presses, sit neatly grouped by publisher on well-lit shelving made of reddish wood, alongside pretty posters of cover illustrations. When Yodakin hosts events, which deal with poetry, art, politics, and sexuality, the audience quickly overspills the minute space and backs into the hall, from where it is impossible to see (or properly hear) anything. Others dangle from the mezzanine, where Das has her work area, and where she lets students who visit the shop but have no money to spend hang around and read.

Das is in her late thirties, a warm, direct woman with an air of authority and also a refreshing irreverence that surfaces quickly in conversation. When she opened Yodakin, in 2009, it was not out of any passion for retail but rather a desire to experiment with vertical integration. Her publishing company, Yoda Press, was seven years old, and she was having trouble placing its books—an eclectic range of essays, mostly in elegantly designed paperback editions—in Delhi’s established bookstores. Other alternative presses, representing feminists, outsider-art specialists, translators of vernacular literature, and so on, faced the same problem, and Das suggested they join her in stocking a dedicated store.

“I wanted to see for myself if it was really pointless to run an independent press, in market terms,” Das told me, over Skype. “I realized it was not ridiculous. People were really looking for these books.”

Das was not making money, exactly. She had sunk her own funds into designing and building the store’s interior. She was making sales, but the rent was creeping up, too. Meanwhile, the store—the only one of its kind in Delhi—quickly garnered a following among the city’s growing arts, media, and activist communities: they appreciated it as much for its sheer existence as for the books it carried and its value as a physical meeting point. “I’ve been taken by surprise how much Yodakin has come to mean to people who not just visit but inhabit the city—even people who have never come to the store,” Das said. “It stands for something that reassures them.”

Reassurance is a scarce symbolic commodity in Delhi. The metropolis has made a warp-speed transformation from a bureaucratic seat, shunned by India’s artistic and financial élites, into something vast, vibrant, and—in some good ways and some very bad—out of control. Since India’s economic reforms in the early nineteen-nineties, rampant real-estate development and speculation has driven prices sky-high in the city’s center and its desirable southern districts. Enormous satellite cities have sprung up from fields and industrial zones, with forests of apartment blocks—from the deluxe to the instantly decrepit—and the offices of technology firms. The influx of service workers and a vast number of unskilled laborers to build, cook, clean, drive, and serve everyone else has swelled the National Capital Region, as the resulting megalopolis is called, to an estimated twenty-two million inhabitants. Twenty years ago, people came to Delhi to study or to work in government. Now they come to hustle.

The result is a city with a dynamic cultural and creative scene—its art galleries, for example, now rival those of Mumbai—but also with an air of aggression, pollution, and anxiety. Sexual violence, in particular, is epidemic: the city is thought to have India’s highest rates of rape and molestation (though it’s difficult to prove, since many incidents are not reported). That reputation was underscored last December, when a young woman was gang-raped and tortured on a private bus and later died from her injuries. The crime caused global indignation, national anguish, and, in Delhi, a public outcry and several days of demonstrations that turned destructive—an uncustomary response for a city that usually seems numb to sexual violence. Delhi has become cosmopolitan, but the atmosphere remains patriarchal, and not particularly hospitable to critical discussions of power, gender, and sexuality.

Even as the city’s queer, feminist, and other oppositional cultures have grown in heft and confidence, they face pressure to keep themselves scattered and small. India excels at manufactured outrage with violent overtones; self-appointed invigilators, often backed by local politicians, are on constant patrol. Often these volunteer censors come from the Hindu right wing, with its militias; sometimes they are Muslim clerics. Harassment is rife—in person, through police complaints, and on the Internet. “The city is constantly restraining you,” Das said. “It’s not a city given to experimentation; it’s given to regimentation. It’s an unsafe city. This neighborhood, and Yodakin, is a safe space, not just to sit and read, but also to experiment.”

At Yodakin, Das has hosted events that range from alternative to, by Indian standards, transgressive. “We held a celebration of Husain’s work without being vandalized,” she said, referring to M. F. Husain, the contemporary artist, who spent his final years away from India after Hindu chauvinists protested his paintings that depicted goddesses in the nude. “We’ve had the Pleasure Project, which talks about how sexual fantasy makes sex safer, and where we’ve had people’s personal sexual fantasies being read out. For many months we hosted a group of young queer college students—our loft was that safe space for them. We’ve had a discussion of Palestinian poetry that went into Kashmir azadi writing”—the work of authors who support Kashmir’s independence from India. “I don’t think there are too many places in the city where we could have these discussions.”

In January, I attended an evening discussion on masculinity and sexual violence at a jam-packed Yodakin, moderated by Rahul Roy, whose illustrated “A Little Book on Men” is published by Yoda Press. It was exactly one month after the rape of the woman on the bus, and two and a half weeks after her death. The city was still seething. The suspects were in prison; editorials called for national soul-searching; a commission, led by a retired Supreme Court Justice, was working on proposed changes to the laws against rape. Protesters and television talking heads called for castration of rapists or the death penalty. Politicians kept a low profile, surfacing occasionally to make retrograde comments about women’s outfits or their need to get home before dark. Spin-off controversies had erupted, one to do with a Punjabi rap star named Yo Yo Honey Singh, whose songs included “Main Hoon Balatkari” (“I Am a Rapist”) and the earlier “Choot” (“Cunt”). Meanwhile, the harrowing stream of daily news items carried on: gang rapes; child rapes; rapes of middle-class women and domestic workers; rapes of men; rapes with murder; rapes with mutilation; rapes on auto rickshaws, at construction sites, in private homes.

The gathering was the Yodakin crowd’s first chance to “think together in a safe space,” as Karuna Nundy, a progressive lawyer who argues before India’s Supreme Court, put it. Poets read cathartic new poems. Activists drew attention to under-reported sexual violence in rural Haryana, outside Delhi. People in the audience—standing and seated every which way on cushions, small stools, and the floor—shared stories of workplace harassment. And people wrestled with the bus rape and the response to it. Many factors contributing to Delhi’s sexual violence were all too well-known, and needed little restating: the myriad disincentives to report rape, from humiliation at police stations and hospitals to the stigma affecting the families of victims; the corrupt police; the city’s sprawl and empty spaces; the selective abortion of female fetuses, now producing a surplus of adolescent males; the especially entrenched patriarchal mores of the regions where most migrant laborers came from; the derisory attention paid to street harassment and groping, still known in India by the euphemism “eve-teasing.”

All this was a given. What was new was the response, which seemed ugly yet contained an unexpected hope. In her anonymity, the woman on the bus had proven to be a universal figure. “We did not know who she was,” said Nivedita Menon, a feminist writer. “No one knew who she was. She was a woman on a bus at 9:30 P.M.” As details of the woman’s circumstances had emerged, they had not particularized her, but rather increased her everywoman appeal: she had been urban, yet from a migrant rural family; a student, but in a humble paramedical field—a Delhi striver, not quite arrived.

But the story of her rape and its aftermath also spread unusually far across the city. It stretched from the Select Citywalk mall, in the south, where the woman and a friend had watched a movie, to her family’s working-class home in Dwarka, in the west. It included the Munirka bus stop, where they got on the bus, and Safdarjung Hospital, where she was treated, both of them quite close to Hauz Khas. It also took in the monumental landscape of Delhi’s administrative center, where demonstrators had gathered outside the President’s residence and at the iconic India Gate. These places had become sites of protest and commemoration, throwing up an alternative map of Delhi that, for a moment, transcended the city’s stifling class and neighborhood boundaries.

This felt like an opening, an opportunity. “What connected us was a collective fury,” said Deepak Mehta, a sociologist. As someone in the audience pointed out, it had mobilized even recalcitrant organizations like the notoriously stodgy resident welfare associations that govern Delhi’s semi-gated residential “colonies.” Now, Mehta said, the task at hand was to “think about the city in progressive ways. What does it mean to inhabit this city? What does it mean to inhabit this incredible culture of cruelty and impunity?” The answer, at that moment, was unclear, but the way the protests and political arguments had devolved into arguments between men offered a clue as to where to begin, one not lost on the men in the room. “The only way it can become a feminist issue is when some men take actual position against the patriarchy in those settings,” Roy said. “That is something we need to bang our head against.”

A few weeks ago, Yodakin’s landlord informed Das that he was doubling her rent, forcing her into a sudden and unwelcome recalculation of the store’s costs, commercial prospects, and all the intangible value it has generated—value that is unquantifiable and doesn’t keep the lights on or pay the staff. Hauz Khas Village is going through what happens to all hip neighborhoods around the world, only at an accelerated pace. Restaurants and bars are moving in; artists and offbeat shops are being pushed out.

For a few days, Das said, she considered closing Yodakin altogether. Any move, even to a cheaper space, would be costly. “But it would be a letdown to completely shut it down,” she said—to the community and to herself. She decided to take a new space in Hauz Khas Village. It will be even smaller, and a good ten-minute walk from the entrance. Foot traffic, for now, is minimal. “But I’m hoping that my regulars will find their way,” Das said. Some of them have launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the move. Das is anxious about the transition but determined. “It will be difficult to do retail after Yodakin,” she said. “I want to stick around a little longer. I’m not yet done with all the experimentation.”

Siddhartha Mitter is a freelance journalist and consultant in New York City. He is an arts correspondent for the Boston Globe and the former culture reporter for WNYC public radio.

Photograph by Sanjit Das/Bloomberg/Getty.

from: New Yorker