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Computers and Culture
Just to add to what Kevin says here someone should tell Harold Bloom that computers, especially when connected to this Interweb thingy, are actually an excellent resource for high culture. Check out Project Gutenberg if huge quantities of free books is something you'd be interested in, or Bibliomania if you'd like somewhat fewer free books but with more bells and whistles. If you've got access to a good university library, this stuff probably isn't going to be so useful to you, but for the rest of us this stuff can be quite cool. And some technophilic literature lovers put together neat stuff with annotations like this hypertext "The Waste Land" which would be even better if someone put it together with contemporary web design standards.
And, of course, it's not just literature. The other day I came across Pre-Raphaelites.com which isn't as good as a visit to your local museum, but is a lot more comprehensive than any particular one. Magritte.com, dedicated to my favorite painter, used to be one of my most-beloved web sites until the intellectual property police made them take down all the art, but the same folks still run a good Renoir page, among others. So if Bloom's really concerned about boosting America's cultural literacy, he should stop bashing-computers and get to work. The Western Canon is just begging to be transformed into a free, public domain hypertext document with links to the works under discussion and so forth.
July 11, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
Questia Fee service, somewhere under $25 a month; but you always just buy a month or two; or buy a book for $2.95
Searching for Harold + Bloom: 6078 books( a too broad search, but 621 journal articles Example:#1,"War of the winds: Shelley, Hardy, and Harold Bloom."
Martin Bidney, Victorian Poetry, Vol 41, 2003
Harold Bloom is a very ignorant man.
....
ARC
Omigod. 29500 high-res, finescan representational paintings. Free. Downloaded 50 by Thomas Eakins yesterday.
....
Online Books There are many much smaller online libraries than Gutenberg; some specialized; this is the central database;includes some journal articles
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 11, 2004 9:40:50 AM
For MY
Tigertail, Magritte
Tigertail wants a $25 donation per year (bandwidth costs) for larger scans...the dude has put in some effort
Magritte
Czech;older and not maintained; don't tell anybody
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 11, 2004 9:54:07 AM
I think that Blook is just being gassy. The much better critic Hugh Kenner was a pioneer techie geek who made his own computers from kits back in the day. He wrote for one of the geek magazines for awhile. Just Google "Hugh + Kenner + Geek".
In medieval studies the internet is a major research tool. A lot of very obscure texts have been posted for easy reference.
Beowulf, for example (and this is just one example, there's a lot more): Electronic Beowulf
Early Church fathers, if your taste runs to Tertullian:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm
What Bloom is really whining about is the demotion of the old liberal arts in the face of pop culture, science and tech, and business. But his response is incredibly vain and clueless.
Posted by: Zizka | Jul 11, 2004 10:13:30 AM
"Magritte.com, dedicated to my favorite painter."
Ouch.
Posted by: John Isbell | Jul 11, 2004 10:40:01 AM
I'm with Zizka for most of this, especially in memory of Hugh Kenner. But there's a little something to Bloom's argument. That's to say, it's not *access* to materials which is problematic about computers as a learning aid, but the often-crippling experience of writing directly onto a computer, where you can delete with ease, shift paragraphs, get your spelling checked... but can't get a sense of the work as a whole.
Ted Hughes wrote about judging an annual story contest for British kids, and noted that in the years following the popularisation of home word processors, the entries got longer, more convoluted, and invariably more dull. There's less 'resistance', he argued, when writing on-screen. And I know of a few authors who continue to write in longhand because it allows for a greater command of their material. (Though in some cases, such as Bill Clinton, it doesn't seem to have worked so well.)
That's to say, the blog posting or the 700-worder (Matthew-sized pieces) are possibly the optimal size for writing directly to a computer screen. Anything longer, as I found when writing my own doctoral thesis, and it becomes necessary to create some distance. Direct composition doesn't cut it. There's still both a freedom and an order to writing pen-on-paper (the ability to scribble, the ability to see everything piled up in front of you) that the computer can't match.
Similarly, I'm going to break with my friend Cory Doctorow and say that reading long works on-screen really doesn't cut it. If there were better tools to turn Gutenberg texts into well-set books that can then be pencilled over with annotations, that would rest my mind a little. The one-off BookMobile isn't quite there yet.
But Zizka's right about how textual scholars are exploiting the technology for good; and the web is breaking the back of the moribund journal industry. So I'm confident that things are moving in the right direction.
Posted by: nick | Jul 11, 2004 10:49:19 AM
Don't forget the Artchive. Not always the highest quality scans, but still a pretty great resource.
Posted by: Tom | Jul 11, 2004 11:53:56 AM
Bloom is worried about computers as a source of distraction. For every reader who uses technology to further his study of literature, ten would-be readers (Bloom thinks) will fritter their time away with porn, Grand Theft Auto, and limitless other time wasters.
It isn't about reading text off a screen (close reading can't be done that way, but that's what the printer is for). Rather, it's about the sheer inexhaustibilty of essentially throw-away media. When Bloom was a kid, there wasn't as much junk: just Fibber McGee and Molly and Mickey Spillane. An intelligent person would tire of that stuff pretty quickly, and then it would be on to Hart Crane.
But now, there's such a variety of, again, throw-away culture that one needn't ever tire of it. That's what Bloom is on about.
>>>The much better critic Hugh Kenner
Kenner was a second-tier New Critic. His influence is not in the same league as that of Bloom, who while irrelevant and annoying now was crucial through at least Agon.
Posted by: son volt | Jul 11, 2004 11:57:36 AM
I just want to add to the chorus of links with one to the Milton Reading Room.
Posted by: arthegall | Jul 11, 2004 12:12:39 PM
Somehow I doubt that the good Dr. Bloom is at all jazzed about Magritte paintings on the internet. History stopped a long time ago for that man.
As for the concerns about computers, the Tablet PC and the coming of digital paper ought to make all of those moot.
Posted by: praktike | Jul 11, 2004 12:14:00 PM
>> Kenner was a second-tier New Critic.
Oh, bollocks to that. Kenner is not even close to New Criticism. Primacy/integrity of the text? Intentional fallacy? Unified form? Not a sniff of it in Kenner's work. Perhaps you're talking about the whole 'Western tradition' thing, but even by that index, Kenner's not close, with his use of Buckminster Fuller and others.
Anyway, Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' is on the wane, as are many of his more dogmatic works; Kenner's work on Pound isn't going anywhere.
Posted by: nick | Jul 11, 2004 12:22:04 PM
I've read a couple of old novels online. I find that it's ok as long as you set the font size really really big.
Posted by: godoggo | Jul 11, 2004 1:07:27 PM
That ARC site is really great (though somewhat monomaniacal), Bob. I'd never heard of it before -- thanks for the link.
Posted by: Walt Pohl | Jul 11, 2004 2:12:09 PM
In his prime, Kenner coulda whipped Bloom with one hand tied behind his back. He coulda made Bloom's skull into a beer mug.
Posted by: Zizka | Jul 11, 2004 2:43:18 PM
From Don Norman's 'Design of Everyday Things':
"The widespread availability of computer text editors has produced other changes in writing. On the one hand, it is satisfying to be able to type your thoughts without worrying about minor typographical errors or spelling. On the other hand, you may spend less time thinking and planning. Computer text editors affect structure through their limited real estate. With a paper manuscript, you can spread the pages upon the desk, couch, wall, or floor. Large sections of the text can be examined at one time, to be reorganized and structured. If you use only the computer, then the working area (or real estate) is limited to what shows on the screen. The conventional screens display about twenty-four lines of text [i.e. in 1988]. Even the largest screens now available can display no more than about two full printed pages of text. The result is that corrections tend to be made locallly, on what is visible. Large-scale restructuring of the material is more difficult to do, and therefore seldom gets done. Sometimes the same text appears in different parts of the manuscript, without being discovered by the writer. (To the writer, everything seems familiar.)" [p. 211]
Although this piece was originally written in the days before WYSIWYG and large-resolution monitors, it's still basically true. At least, it was true for me when I wrote my doctoral thesis a few years ago. And I'm not sure that even tablet PCs will change that paradigm.
Posted by: nick | Jul 11, 2004 2:59:36 PM
http://www.literature.org/
I had already linked to Project Gutenberg. Here is another site that has some other interesting writers of early American styles.
Gotta love Edgar Rice Burroughs. Still appeals to the unwashed masses even in this day and age.
Posted by: IXLNXS | Jul 11, 2004 4:19:48 PM
Nick, your quaint, Luddite ways are charming.
Computers are how people will write from here on out, with very few exceptions. The exceptions will become less and less as time goes on. In the beginning, there will be some problems with that writing medium that may not have been obvious -- they are becoming more obvious with every passing day. Kids that write bad stuff after the advent of word processors are the result of one thing: editors, teachers, and mentors that were not aware of the pitfalls of that writing medium. Now, several decades into the era of electronic text, that is becoming less and less the case.
Your comments about screen and large scale structure are nonsense -- a computer text is quite easy to print, at which point your criticism is moot. The document you cite may have some ephemeral point in the mid '80s, when 80x24 character-cell text display were the norm, and printer time was comparatively more expensive. They are of little to no relevance now.
You are expressing preference -- you liked some things about writing long hand. Good for you. Many don't. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of professional authors prefer the computer, I suspect. Further, something tells me that if you write long hand, unless you are already a Faulkner, your publisher is going to tell you to go piss up a rope. They will demand a typed (also going away) or word-processed manuscript -- which is just a new step for you to introduce errors.
And I guarantee you that there is not going to be any long-term degradation of the written word because of computers. Change, maybe, but that is not the same thing. Although legions of people are unable to distinguish the difference between change and bad change. Like Bloom. I actually know an English professor that thinks we are on the cusp of several major changes in literature and linguistics. But that change won't be realized until old curmudgeons without the ability to adapt (like Bloom) die off. I suspect he is right.
Posted by: Timothy Klein | Jul 11, 2004 5:40:05 PM
Anyone who thinks the old days were better simply wasn't there. Mass print media, such as the daily paper, is so much better than the 'old days' that it's almost a different product entirely. Even the right-wing homogenization of the media can't overcome the improvement.
Really good books have never been so common that you could detect a falling-off in quantity in a period as short as 30 years. There really can't be much doubt that the prolific good authors of the past, like Zola or Scott, would have taken to the computer like a duck to water.
But don't believe me- try a few weeks of the old days. Typewriter (manual) or pen and paper when you want to compose, and plenty of Reader's Digest or novels by Thomas Costain when you want to read. A little bit of how it was and you'll probably start to see the light.
Posted by: serial catowner | Jul 11, 2004 6:26:39 PM
Timothy: am I really such a 'quaint Luddite' when I've spent the last ten years juggling academic work in English Lit with, er, building websites? Wow.
I wrote a 100,000-word thesis (using LaTeX and XEmacs for control over typesetting, rather quaintly), and am currently revising it for publication, so I consider myself just a little bit qualified to reflect upon the problems of writing long, closely-argued works. Every potential problem cited by Norman was one that I have personally encountered. Now, you may have a different set of experiences. But when it comes to the subject of English Lit, I'm not going to put up with a swathe of condescending bullshit from a physicist.
:: Your comments about screen and large scale structure are nonsense -- a computer text is quite easy to print, at which point your criticism is moot.
Er, no. Even at the smallest resolution, Norman's contention remains valid -- that one can only see a couple of pages' worth of text on-screen at any one time. And this introduces an microscopic localisation to editing. It's much, much harder to gauge structure and keep track of potential repetition: one relies more upon memory to retain a sense of narrative or logical progression. The only consolation is that it keeps editors in work at the proofing stage.
:: Indeed, the overwhelming majority of professional authors prefer the computer, I suspect.
You suspect? I suspect you don't know that many people who fit that description, particularly in the field of English Lit.
And what do you mean by 'prefer'? Authorial preferences manifest themselves in different ways. Some authors compose to screen, then print, then edit by hand, then retype; some write in longhand and reserve the computer as a less cumbersome typewriter for the final draft. It's not an either/or question; but it's naive to deny that there aren't trade-offs in composing on-screen.
Since the rest of your comment is little more than a sequence of straw men, I'll just say that even now, computer-based writing applications are primarily driven by the demands of the office: the one-page letter, or the short, compartmentalised report. (Or, I suppose, the physics paper.) It took my recent move to Mac OS X to encounter the work of developers interested in coming up with genuine writers' tools; but for most authors who write long works for publication in book form, conventional word-processing software remains more of an impediment than an aid.
Posted by: nick | Jul 11, 2004 6:56:35 PM
Nick, I was aiming (badly, it seems) for sarcastic humor, not condescension. As for my writing, interestingly enough, I have written the majority of my stuff in the field of English Lit. (with LaTeX).
Er, no. Even at the smallest resolution, Norman's contention remains valid
Valid how? Like I said, if it really is of some value so see a whole bunch of pages at once, print the darn thing. Editing is micro-editing. Anything beyond paragraph size and it must be held in your head, not on paper, if one wants to 'edit' as a unit. I can lay out a hundred pages on my office floor -- so what? That gains me nothing except the ability to look at the superficial appearance of the text as a whole. Editing generally is a local process. When it is not, it is done in one's head -- it is of no aid to me to be able to 'see' 20 pages at once. Because you can't 'see' 20 pages at once except in the most superficial and useless way. Thus this entire criticism of computer text strikes me as empty. Maybe I am missing the crux of the argument.
As for typesetting a physics paper, no, word processing software is most certainly not designed for that task. Not at all. You have one choice for real typesetting of equation heavy text that won't drive you crazy -- TeX/LaTeX.
but for most authors who write long works for publication in book form, conventional word-processing software remains more of an impediment than an aid.
Every tool we have for turning an idea into a published work is an impediment. That is the nature of the beast. All of them have problems -- but the longhand method has a bigger share of problems than others. My statement about professional writers used the word 'suspect' for good reason: I have never taken a survey of a representative sample to see if they use word processors. Have you? But disliking your word processor is not evidence that it is worse than writing longhand. If it were, then people would be writing their stuff long hand. By and large, in my experience, they are not. But again, I've never done the study to know for sure. Hence, the qualification on the statement.
I wasn't trying to be snide, just disagree. And are you talking primarily about getting ideas onto paper/bits, or document layout? I am assuming the former. There are sticky issues with the latter, but they have nothing to do with what I was thinking about. The computer has blurred the distinction. Today many authors fret endlessly over layout issues that are rightfully in the domain of their publisher. That has nothing to do with writing on the computer. Notepad or VI is all you need to write on the computer. Word, et al. get one involved heavily in the typesetting end of things. But that is separate from getting the idea into written form. LaTeX was specifically created to try and patch this problem.
Posted by: Timothy Klein | Jul 11, 2004 7:39:33 PM
[Hoorah, Matthew enabled HTML...]
First of all, we're totally in agreement on the problems of WYSIWYG and the poison chalice of layout control. I used Word for my masters' thesis, and that experience led me to LaTeX.
Maybe I am missing the crux of the argument.
Perhaps just a little. The problem with on-screen composition and editing -- even in a plain text editor -- is that it lulls you into judging whether, say, a particular paragraph fits with the preceding (and/or following grafs): that is, the ones that are visible. There's a limited capability to 'glance back' and retain focus; so, from experience, it's very easy to head off on 'mad-lib'-style tangents. You often can't see the wood for the trees. Outliner-style editors are sometimes useful in this regard, but they tend to suit more compartmentalised writing, such as that found in scientific or technical fields.
As for authorial preferences, I can only draw from anecdotal experience -- primarily, the coffee-room complaints of frustrated doctoral students, many of whom I tried to convert from Word onto LaTeX. What those discussions suggested was that while composing directly on-screen works just fine for more pedestrian passages, when the going gets tough -- especially at the re-drafting stage -- the pen and scratchpad come out. Perhaps that's because we're still a generation for whom handwriting remains a more 'natural' artifice, whereas the next generation will be weaned on the keyboard. But I suspect (that word again!) that it's more to do with the confined environment of the text/document editor, as opposed to the free-form environment and greater real estate of the notebook.
The days of writers submitting longhand manuscripts to the publisher are more or less gone -- Bill Clinton got special privileges there. But that shouldn't be taken as a sign that authors embrace computers in the composition process. Donna Tartt notes here that she still composes in longhand; in fact, when I met her about five years ago she explained how she'd type up final drafts onto a computer -- with a little Buddha stuck on top of the monitor for good luck -- but did so as a kind of copy-typist, having taught herself never to change a word, because that lured her into the kind of 'all too easy' microscopic editing I mentioned earlier.
Or there's Günter Grass: Proud of his origins as a draughtsman, he says he likes the direct contact between hand, pen and paper. After frequent crossings-out and re-drafts he sits at his portable blue Olivetti typewriter to compose a legible version for his editors. "I've resisted the personal computer," he grins.
Or Martin Amis, who switched to a computer (instead of a manual typewriter) when composing his memoir Experience, but talks about returning to longhand for his subsequent novel:
I won't do it [compose onto the computer] for the novel, though, because it would feel wrong. There is something sensual about writing fiction [in longhand] that has to do with a slightly painterly feel -- I mean, you can do this with a computer -- but it's that you can see your crossings out and with a computer you've erased them. When you cross it out, that word is still there, and maybe that word was the right one. I do a lot of arrows and I like to write on the left-hand side of the page [the] things I've got to get into the scene, so longhand seems right for fiction.
[I'd recommend you read the rest of the interview: it's fascinating.]
When writing my thesis, I used RCS to track deletions, and commented out grafs rather than delete them outright. At times it was essential. It's still not the same as being able to scribble over and out and draw arrows and box out and see what you've deleted, and until software can mimic that (perhaps in tablet form) computers will remain a Procrustean bed for long-format composition.
That said, I am impressed by the effort of a number of Mac developers to challenge the word-processor paradigm and offer less restrictive environments for on-screen composition. One that comes to mind is Ulysses, which offers something close to the kind of 'glancing' capacity that even the much-loved XEmacs can't quite manage.
Posted by: nick | Jul 11, 2004 9:32:13 PM
O for heavens sakes. Most of us, presenting a comlex idea, will need to have an outline we can compare with our ms. to see if we've said what we thought we'd said. If you think the computer will magically improve your spelling or vocabulary, think again.
However, most of our great literature was written before the light bulb was invented. A fair amount of it was written before paper was available. Some of it was even written before the advant of ink as we know it. Would anyone seriously suggest that "real writers" would do without lights, paper or ink?
Of course they would! Undoubtedly, even as we read, someone is grinding their own pigment to write something on parchment before the light of the day fades.
So, you pays your money and makes your choices. So what else is new?
Posted by: serial catowner | Jul 12, 2004 11:43:00 AM
If you think the computer will magically improve your spelling or vocabulary, think again.
You said it...
Actually, I'm saying the opposite: computers should be able to help writers more than they currently do. I want that to happen. I want to be able to compose on-screen without feeling constrained. I want to be able to use a free-form database to store and organise and index my research materials, instead of a set of 7x5in notebooks. And believe me, I've tried pretty much everything that's out there, and even had a pretty crappy attempt at writing something myself.
Would anyone seriously suggest that "real writers" would do without lights, paper or ink?
I spy a bit of argumentum ad absurdum. The electric light is an evolution from the oil lamp and the candle; the ballpoint is an evolution from the fountain pen (sorta) which is an evolution from the dip pen and the goose-nib. The nice bound journal ain't that much different from the paper that Gutenberg used. And that's not radically different from vellum, parchment or clay tablets. These are evolutionary steps. They don't substantially alter a set of mechanical and intellectual processes that are taught early and honed over a lifetime. (And I don't see kids being taught to type before they can write for a good few years.)
The age of the insufferable human library (a la Bloom) is more or less gone. Access to texts and scholarly materials has improved immeasurably thanks to the web. But computers don't do deliberate messiness all that well, and all writing -- and all literary research -- starts out messy.
Posted by: nick | Jul 12, 2004 12:05:17 PM
This is my last comment here, as I'm hogging the thread: see this and especially this on the 'affordances' of paper in all sorts of compositional scenarios.
Can you imagine Pound's corrections done with MS Word's 'annotations' feature? Me neither. Actually, I should try to do a mockup and see what it looks like...
Posted by: nick | Jul 12, 2004 12:21:47 PM
When television was introduced, many extolled its potential as an educational device for the public. It only took a couple of decades for educational content to be pushed aside to make room for cheap, vulgar entertainment.
It's going to be same with computers - already is, in fact. Kids don't visit online art galleries. They use computers to play video games and chat about movie stars.
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