The second Shelley Jackson maintains a website called Ineradicable Stain, which includes a rundown of other Shell(e)y Jacksons. Though two Shelley Jacksons who are Brooklyn-based novelists and illustrators would surely get mixed up a lot, this list pointedly does not include the first Shelley Jackson.

The second Shelley Jackson is, as it turns out, the same person as the first Shelley Jackson; at any rate, the author photograph of the first Jackson looks just like Jackson #2.

Steiger, an ad-agency CEO, has an adman’s approach to the story.

Creating great stories regardless of medium is expensive. This means content creators need seed capital, which can be repaid either by transactional revenues from selling content -- not too effective on the Internet -- or from advertising, which works well. But until the net proves itself able to attract a large audience to great content built expressly for the web, advertisers will continue to be difficult to bring aboard to underwrite that content.

This sounds good, but of course it’s complete nonsense. Storytelling seldom requires much seed capital. Novelists and screenwriters work in garrets, they write on kitchen tables. Painters work in attics and basements and garages. The garage is the proving ground of rock and roll; when the band’s prosperity permits, perhaps it will rehearse in a disused light industrial space. Steiger is simply wrong on the facts.

And, as Greenfield points out nicely, he sees no stories on the internet because his eyes are shut. Greenfield reminds us of Joyce’s wonderful story afternoon, which turns 25 this year, and points to wikis and MMRPG and home-made net videos for inspiration.

]]> Thu, 3 Jul 2008 10:54:11 -0400 http://markbernstein.org/Jul0801/Daybook.html http://markbernstein.org/Jul0801/Daybook.html “But She’s A Girl…” — a biologist who teaches at Birmingham — gives us a detailed look at her Tinderbox-based daybook.

I’ve tinkered with various ways of keeping a record of the various things I do, people I talk to or ideas I have throughout the day, including a simple little plugin I wrote for Textmate to keep a journal in a plain text file. That worked quite well, but it wasn’t as easy as it might have been to find things again.

Her approach emphasizes simplicity — the DIY ethos of trying with the simplest thing that could possibly work and getting on with the job.

Once I’d been using the setup I described above for a few days, I realised that it would be nice to collect my notes on articles I’d read in a separate place so that I could find them more easily. The infinitely flexible structure of notes meant that I didn’t have to create a different kind of note to do this, or even go back and edit my previous notes on reading. When I make notes on a paper I’ve read, I tend to first paste in the reference and the link to the entry from the Papers application, so that I can find the original article easily from my notes. So all I had to do was create another agent called ‘Reading’ which searched for notes with the string ‘papers://’ in them, which is the start of the Papers URI format.

In a rare example of productive comments, the first commenter is also a biologist who is using Tinderbox to build Grinnel-style field records. “Although the overall system is tedious”, he says, “Tinderbox might remove some of the tedium.”

]]> Thu, 3 Jul 2008 10:39:16 -0400 http://markbernstein.org/Jul0801/ManofTwoTribes.html http://markbernstein.org/Jul0801/ManofTwoTribes.html

Can Arthur Upfield truly be out of print?

Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is half Abo, half white-Australian, and has risen to be Australia’s top detective. Upfield writes well, and with a certain sensitivity: when Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie touched on race, what remains is a blemish, while Upfield says his piece well and dexterously. I think Upfield’s influence on Hillerman is very clear, for example; compare, for example, Man of Two Tribes with Hillerman’s Thief of Time. Another reminder in this surprisingly-fresh 1955 procedural proves instructive: at one point, our hero finds himself in a tight spot with a group of assorted murderers who, having been spared the gallows and served long terms in prison, are now on parole. They are led by a psychiatrist who was condemned as an abortion provider.

George Landow’s talk on Moving Beyond The Hammer is a great introduction to the impact of Web 2.0 ideas on scholarship — and on the invisible machinery of the printed book. And J. Nathan Matias’s discussion of Ethical Explanations made an extremely interesting connection between the way we describe laws (in his case, documenting the procedures of rules of order) and the ethics of software documentation.

Lots of good discussion in the breaks. What do the cosplay images in my NeoVictorian slides mean, exactly? And why are there so many Asian women?

I don’t pretend to fully understand cosplay. The simple answer is that ground zero of cosplay is in Tokyo, and that I was able to find more images of women (often images they took themselves) than men, and that they make a good illustration of NeoVictorian programming as something new, not just nostalgia for old technologies. The ways in which cosplay is not authentic — is better than authentic — are fascinating: cosplay is all about the rules of decorum, design, ethnicity, and class.

Even better were the discussions of the workplace. Who has fun in the mill? The mechanic — the fellow who fixes stuff! But software maintenance is ghastly, and operations is worse: can this be fixed? Would our workplace be better if we insisted on using our own tools: if it were a worker’s right to own and use her laptop, and to replace it when she sees fit with whatever brand of computer (and whatever software) lets her produce the best work? Should designers demand the right to sign their software, and writers insist on their right to be credited for — and to show prospective employers — the documents on which they work? Above all, do workers have a right to publish a professional blog?