Digital Interactif

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

The other day I read in the Boston Globe that Philanthropist/Map Collector Norman Leventhal had donated $10 million to the Boston Public Library and loaned them 178 of his best maps.  So today I had a few free minutes and took a look at the Boston Public Library Norman B. Leventhal Map Center's website.  I can honestly say that I have officially found the coolest online historical resource ever!  check it out.

Essentially, you can scan thousands of historical maps in the online collection and you can sort them by location, subject, date, publisher, author, and mercator.  The site allows you to zoom in on the maps and the quality is superb.   There are 93 maps of Boston alone and there is even a map of my hometown, Andover, from 1882.   The online is pretty heavy on New England maps so this resource is great if you are from the Boston area. 

It's amazing to step back for a moment and compare this type of resource to Flash Earth and think about how far we as humans have come in recognizing where we are, literally, in the world.  How have our perceptions of self/neighbor/unknown changed as we have been given greater access to maps and knowledge of our surroundings?  The affect that the maps in this collection have likely had on societies and perception is unknown, but I am certain that it is definitely one of the cooler things I've stumbled across online is a long, long, long time. 

Cheers to you, Norman Leventhal.  You rock.

Found in the Blogosphere

A recent post by Rocket Kids alerted me to an article in today's Boston Glove, Lost in the Blogospere by Sven Birkerts, on literature in the blogosphere and whether it is different from traditional literature:

The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty -- some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well -- but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.

Proliferation -- the chaos of the endlessly branching paths -- is one crucial structural difference between the print and digital realms. Never mind that the Web has swallowed vast archives of print material; we are also seeing a significant shift in the nature of the discourse itself. Blogs and on-line journals do not simply transfer old wine into new bottles -- the wine itself is changing.

Sven ("I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises.") Birkerts accurately sees the Internet triggering a paradigm shift within the literary world.  But he is incorrectly attributing this shift to the conversation. 

The conversation in literature has always been wide and drifting, just take a look at the endnotes/footnotes of a literary critique.  The only difference is that if you want to follow up on an endnote found in print, then you must locate the book that is being referred to.  Blogs simply reduce the time needed to connect ideas together.  Yes, this is a major change but I would argue that a change in the speed of a conversation is not in itself a paradigm shift. 

The real paradigm shift, as I see it, is taking place in the diffusion of literature.  Daily Lit is a great example of the way that the internet will change literature.  Daily Lit is tearing down the walls of the castle.  The publishers, reviewers, and critics who once served as the gate keepers in the industry will no longer have the ability to limit a person's ability to distribute their work.  New novelists can distribute their books through RSS to great numbers of readers in a formal, non-blogosphere, manner.  Add a banner advertisment to each post on the RSS feed and you'll have a profitable site with none of the traditional costs of a publishing house.  Prepare to see more "Daily Lits" pop up in the years to come.

Additionally, sites such as Good Reads provide a forum for people to review books and share opinions with friends and other readers.  Personally, I would trust the opinion of 300 people over the opinion of Sven Birkerts and thus Good Reads works well for me.

Sven shouldn't be so scared of becoming irrelevant.  Literature in the blogosphere isn't changing the nature of literature itself.  There will always be  a market for professional/academic reviewers and critics.  The only real change taking place is the means in which literature and opinions are proliferated. 

Books Delivered via Email

Daily Lit is a service that will email you books or serve them up to you through an RSS feed reader.  You decide how frequently the chapter/excerpts are sent to you in order to work out a reading regiment suited to your schedule/life.

There is a nice selection of Charles Dickens books: Going Into Society(6 parts), Hard Times(130 parts), A Tale of Two Cities(170 parts), A Christmas Carol (30 parts), Bleak House(440 parts), David Copperfield(447 parts), ect...

There is also a great selection of non-fiction books such as The Crisis(Churchill), Dream Psychology(Freud), On the Origin of the Species(Darwin), The Prince(Machiavelli), ect...

  Here's a sampling of some of the updates that Daily Lit has made according to most recent Daily Lit Blog posting:

• Voracious readers can now receive longer emails or longer feed updates.
• Idiosyncratic readers can now choose any combination of days (e.g. only Wednesdays, or Monday and Thursday).
• Migrating readers can now change their email address.
• Waiting readers can now find out which books have been added via RSS.

Making the length of the excerpt customizable is a fantastic idea.  While the creators have done a great job, here are my suggestions for the site:

• There isn't a rating system for the books (An ideal rating system that comes to mind is Goodreads). 
• The site currently has forums where users can communicate with each other and discuss the books, but the whole 'forum' thing is very Web 1.0.  Where are the "Friends" and "Groups"? 
• When other users reply to one of my comments in a forum, I want to be sent an alert (preferably through RSS) that let's me know. 
• I also want to be able to follow forums via RSS. 

Rockin site.  I look forward to getting my lit on. 

And by the way, if you don't use an RSS feed reader, now would be a good time to start.  Personally, I use Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds.  It's really easy to use and if you already have a gmail account, you just have to sign in as oppossed to creating a new account.