It's really hard to describe Tree of Codes, it's the sort of thing you really have to see to understand completely--well actually you really need to feel it. But this video gives a very interesting glimpse of the process required to produce the book.
The book itself is so fragile; it's quite an engineering feat that they were able to pull the whole thing off! I've always been a fan of "behind the scenes" features on the world of filmmaking, but I think this was the first time I saw an equivalent inside look at the publishing industry.
And this next video is just for fun: reactions to the book from people on the street!
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Tree of Codes
Painstakingly
cut from the fabric of an English translation of Polish author Bruno
Schulz's work, The Street of Crocodiles,
Tree of Codes is a
unique and compelling novel of dark poetry and heartbreak by Jonathan
Safran Foer. The book follows the “luminous journey” of
the protagonist as he searches for independence and the ability to
cope with his father's madness and death (p. 84). The storyline is primarily an interior examination of a deteriorating
life, and Foer explores what happens when the fine line between internal
psyche and external reality grows even finer as nightmares climb out
of dreams to enter the real world. Fans of Foer's
earlier work, such as Everything
is Illuminated, will recognize his introspective tone, and Tree of Codes also shares his earlier interest in the intimacies of family dynamics.
The
coolest thing about the book is probably its experimental structure which wholeheartedly
embraces the physicality of books: format and content are beautifully
and inseparably linked through a seldom used die-cut technique. Foer
has literally carved away Schulz's words to create a new story out of
their pieces; because of this method the text is quite light on each
individual page, but another consequence is that the sentences,
though often short, are spaced irregularly and are not always
straightforward or easy to follow. A phrase, such as “the calendar
is a moment, a colorful lie,” spread out across the page may
deliver a powerful visual or sensation, but its meaning is more
difficult to interpret in the context of the plot (p. 122). Another
effect of the physical form of the book is the visual depth created
through the die-cuts; between the cut-outs in each page, a glimpse of
the words to come is revealed. And even though these previews might
not make any literal sense, they still set the tone of the novel by
foreshadowing emotions and images to come. The beautiful poetical language and
metaphorical details are some of the signature aspects found in Tree
of Codes. Foer's construction of
“dialogue swollen with darkness” often reads like poetry, and it is
not only his choice of words, but also his use of blank space that
contributes to the complex and sophisticated style; in the novel Foer
writes that “the silence talked,” and so too does Foer find a way
to speak through the emptiness on the page (p. 14).
The novel has received a lot of mixed reviews since it came out a little more than a year ago: some critics hailing it as genius and others degrading Foer to an English grad student with an exacto blade and a recycled idea. While genius is a bold term to assign to anyone, I'm tempted to say that in this case, Foer deserves it. The book is just plain cool. And if Foer owes a lot to the beautiful language of The Street of Crocodiles and Bruno Schulz, he has still created an unusual visual artifact and through it given us an extraordinary reading experience.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Bench of Thought
Another stylish piece of literary furniture perfect for a cozy reading room.
Spanish artist Alvaro Tamarit (fyi: site is in Spanish) created this functional sculpture entitled Bench of Thought (Banco del Pensamiento).
Via Recyclart.
Spanish artist Alvaro Tamarit (fyi: site is in Spanish) created this functional sculpture entitled Bench of Thought (Banco del Pensamiento).
Via Recyclart.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Metadata's Social Consequences
Continuing on yesterday's theme of the everyday person pitted against the information professional, I came across this example in a reading for class.
"In the mid-2000s, the Chinese government began a process of modernizing nationality identity cards, which required storing citizens’ names in a computerized database (Lafraniere, 2009). Given the wide breadth of characters in Chinese, the people implementing the system decided to limit the characters that could be used. The implementation covered over 32,000 of the 55,000 characters in the language, leaving many characters out of the system.
"The result of this simple decision about what information could be stored had a significant impact: some people had names with obscure characters that could not be entered into the new government database. For many people, the best alternative was to change their names to something the system could handle. In this case, metadata had a social consequence" (p. 14).
When the authority (in this case the Chinese government) creates a system that isn't able to adequately meet its users' needs, the users are the ones who suffer but the designer of the system is the one at fault. At first glance this situation seems pretty crazy; a government identification system that forces people to change their very names because it can't deal with unusual or obscure words! But then you realize, wait, that actually seems a little familiar... because a lot of "difficult" names were changed when immigrants arrived in the US more than a century ago. As information professionals, of course it's important to build accurate, usable, and consistent systems, but the most efficient system in the world is not a good one if it does its users a disservice.
Greenberg, Ryan, Kimra McPherson, and Matthew Mayernik. (2010). Metadata: Storing Descriptions. In The Discipline of Organizing, edited by Robert J Glushko.
"In the mid-2000s, the Chinese government began a process of modernizing nationality identity cards, which required storing citizens’ names in a computerized database (Lafraniere, 2009). Given the wide breadth of characters in Chinese, the people implementing the system decided to limit the characters that could be used. The implementation covered over 32,000 of the 55,000 characters in the language, leaving many characters out of the system.
"The result of this simple decision about what information could be stored had a significant impact: some people had names with obscure characters that could not be entered into the new government database. For many people, the best alternative was to change their names to something the system could handle. In this case, metadata had a social consequence" (p. 14).
When the authority (in this case the Chinese government) creates a system that isn't able to adequately meet its users' needs, the users are the ones who suffer but the designer of the system is the one at fault. At first glance this situation seems pretty crazy; a government identification system that forces people to change their very names because it can't deal with unusual or obscure words! But then you realize, wait, that actually seems a little familiar... because a lot of "difficult" names were changed when immigrants arrived in the US more than a century ago. As information professionals, of course it's important to build accurate, usable, and consistent systems, but the most efficient system in the world is not a good one if it does its users a disservice.
Greenberg, Ryan, Kimra McPherson, and Matthew Mayernik. (2010). Metadata: Storing Descriptions. In The Discipline of Organizing, edited by Robert J Glushko.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
FRBR
An entertaining video from Xtranormal
by: j.weinheimer
The video is a little long, but it's an amusing perspective on the user--librarian information gap and the importance of maintaining a user-centered mindset. It demonstrates the problem that's probably at the root of a lot of the issues people have with libraries today. Library users and librarians think about library materials, and how to organize, arrange, and describe them, very differently.
It is still important to keep track of the intrinsic "details" of a book--to some extent at least--which includes basic semi-invisible metadata like publisher, page count, ISBN number, etc. But we also have to keep track of the details that are meaningful to users, things such as table of contents, illustrations, and plot summaries. Making everyone happy may result in a lot of information to log into library catalogs and bookstore databases, but if everyone is able to find and use the information that they are looking for, wouldn't it be worth it? And with the capabilities and independence of automated processes increasing, it may not be that much work after all.
P.S. What is FRBR? FRBR stands for "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records," and is an entity-relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions that defines a vocabulary rule set for library catalogers. Under FRBR, an item is an exemplar of a manifestation which is an embodiment of an expression which is a realization of a work. They even have a blog.
by: j.weinheimer
The video is a little long, but it's an amusing perspective on the user--librarian information gap and the importance of maintaining a user-centered mindset. It demonstrates the problem that's probably at the root of a lot of the issues people have with libraries today. Library users and librarians think about library materials, and how to organize, arrange, and describe them, very differently.
It is still important to keep track of the intrinsic "details" of a book--to some extent at least--which includes basic semi-invisible metadata like publisher, page count, ISBN number, etc. But we also have to keep track of the details that are meaningful to users, things such as table of contents, illustrations, and plot summaries. Making everyone happy may result in a lot of information to log into library catalogs and bookstore databases, but if everyone is able to find and use the information that they are looking for, wouldn't it be worth it? And with the capabilities and independence of automated processes increasing, it may not be that much work after all.
P.S. What is FRBR? FRBR stands for "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records," and is an entity-relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions that defines a vocabulary rule set for library catalogers. Under FRBR, an item is an exemplar of a manifestation which is an embodiment of an expression which is a realization of a work. They even have a blog.
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