MITPressLog

Authors on the Road

Lots of interesting author events this week!

Today, Professor William J. Mitchell will discuss his newest book, Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century, at 6:30 pm.  He'll discuss the decade long, billion-dollar building boom at MIT which produced major works of architecture by Charles Correa, Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Fumihiko Maki, and Kevin Roche.  The event will be at MIT 32-123, Kirsch Auditorium, Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street in Cambridge.  Directions and more information can be found here. 

In New York tomorrow, Urban Center Books will host a celebration of our Writing Architecture series, featuring a discussion by Giuliana Bruno.  Bruno, professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, will discuss her new book, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, which is just out. The event starts at 6:00 and more information can be found here. 

On the west coast, Julie Sze will discuss her recent book, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice at the John Muir Institute for the Environment at UC Davis tomorrow.  The event will begin at 4:00 pm in the East Conference Room of the Memorial Union.  Here is more information on this one. 

On Wednesday, John Maeda, author of The Laws of Simplicity, will speak at the Design Museum in London.  This talk will coincide with his first UK solo exhibition at Riflemaker.  Maeda will be discussing his processes of re-evaluating and questioning the digital landscape he has helped to create.

And on Thursday, David Joselit will speak about his new book, Feedback: Television against Democracy at the Yale University Art Gallery at 6:00 pm.

Hams save the day

Amateur radio operators – hams – are not always hobbyists tinkering away in their “radio shacks.” They can also be critical members of disaster response teams, creating essential communication links when other forms of communication fail. Members of organizations like RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) are volunteer hams who operate on behalf of a public agency during a declared emergency, including natural and man-made hazardous situations. While ham radio communications are usually supplemental to normal systems, at times they become the sole source of communication.

For example, volunteer ham radio operators were hard at work in the aftermath of Katrina, communicating with the Red Cross and at times providing the sole link between the state capital and the state EOC (Emergency Operation Center). Recently, the Boston Globe reported that the Governor of Maine, John Baldacci, is a licensed ham radio operator who got his license after he witnessed the Maine Emergency Management Agency rely on ham radio communications during the 1998 ice storm that devastated the state.

To read more about ham radio pick up a copy of Ham Radio’s Technical Culture by Kristen Haring.

Wednesday Blog Watch: Politics and New Media

What is the best way to learn about political candidates?  Over 75% of the 23 possible US presidential candidates for 2008 listed on the Washington Post website have written books.  This New York Times article discusses the phenomenon.  But the real story can be found in their websites.  100% of the potential candidates have political websites, and over the past few election seasons, web savvy has become increasingly important for them (remember the "factcheck.com" debacle of Dick Cheney?). 

If you'd to like to examine the recent history of political campaigning on the internet, Web Campaigning is a scholarly look at how political campaigns have utilized web resources since 2000. Written by Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider, the book also has a related website that includes hundreds of archived campaign websites from 2000, 2002, and 2004.  According to Foot and Schneider,

With the integration of the Internet into every aspect of society, the Web has become a realm in which it is necessary for all kinds of political actors to have a presence - at least in order to be credible among the growing population of Internet users in the U.S. In the words of a young citizen participating in a focus group on presidential campaign sites in 2000, "I expect the next leader of the free world to be able to pick an expert Web designer."

So how can web technologies help candidates reach their constituents, and what might hinder them?  Not unlike the Kennedy vs. Nixon televised debates of 1960, awareness of new media and how to take advantage of it can make the difference.  Since this is Wednesday Blog Watch, let's have a look at some campaign websites:

Among the 2008 campaign websites, both blogs and online contribution forms seem to be fairly common among the candidates, although Republican Ron Paul's sparse website is a notable exception.  Chris Dodd (D), Rudy Giuliani(R), Dennis Kucinich(D), John Mccain(R), and Barack Obama(D) all have online stores for campaign merchandise - unlike other candidates.  Most of the Democratic candidates' pages have links to their MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr accounts, while fewer of the Republicans seem to employ these web-based technologies.  Democrat John Edwards appears fairly web-savvy; his site also links to his accounts on 43things, Gather, Ning, Metacafe, Yahoo!360, xanga, livejournal, bebo, and many others.  His website even allows users to create their own grassroots website. Of the Republicans, Duncan Hunter's website employs the most web-based technologies, including Republican-backed eyardsign.  Barack Obama(D) has "BarackTV", Mitt Romney(R) has "MittTV", Hillary Clinton(D) has "HillaryTV", and Dennis Kucinich(D)'s site features ipod downloads.  Bill Richardson(D) is the only candidate who also links to Zanby on his website.

That said, using all of these web technologies may not necessarily help a candidate.  They need to be used effectively.  Good luck to the candidates!

Authors on the Road

This week, several of our authors will be speaking about their books.  Highlights include:

Tom Roeper will speak about his book, The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illumanites Humanism at the Amherst Bookstore tonight at 8:00 pm.  In his book, Roeper explores the creativity of mind through children's language - how the tiniest utterances can illustrate the simple but abstract principles behind modern grammar - and reveal the innate structure of the mind. 

Also tonight, George Saliba (Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance / 978-0-262-19557-7) will speak at Labyrinth Books in New York at 7:00 pm.  His topic will be Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance - The rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic science to European science during the Renaissance.

And tomorrow, Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi will speak about The Future of Europe: Reform of Decline at the Dante Alighieri Society in Cambridge, MA  at 7:00 pm.   Here Alesina and Giavazzi argue that unless Europe takes serious action soon, its economic and political decline is unavoidable, and a clear statement of the steps Europe must take before it's too late.

Save Book Reviewing

On the heels of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to eliminate their book review section, the National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing.  They are conducting a blog series featuring posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q&As. Recent posts include comments from Rick Moody and Stewart O’Nan and an interview with David Ulin, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, about how their book section was recently “folded into the opinion section and given a few online columns.”   Critical Mass, the NBCC site, also includes a petition to help save the book section at the AJC and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections matter.  We’ll keep you posted on news as it develops and as other writers and critics post their thoughts. 

Wednesday Blog Watch: Colophonics

How many MIT Press colophons can you find on this page?  The word colophon, in publishing, can be used to describe a publisher's logo.  The MIT Press colophon (shown here on the left) is a series of vertical lines representing the letters MITP.  It was designed in 1963 by pioneering graphic designer Muriel Cooper.  Read a bit more about Muriel Cooper in this 1994 Wired tribute or these notes from David Reinfurt, who is currently researching her work. 

Our colophon is occasionally mistaken for the logo of the band Black Flag - read this comment from author Jeffrey Lewis, or this story about a T-Shirt mix-up from Larry Hosken's blog (scroll to the middle of the page). 

The Black Flag logo:

Brett L. thinks the colophon looks like the Manpower Inc. logo.  That's a good point.

One of our designers has likened our colophon to that of the fire hose reel symbol.  Here's an example of one of those:

Let's hope we avoid confusion with that one!

But today our hats are off to Takashi Okamoto, the blogger of MudLog (presumably no relation to Mudman) who has created a web tool called MITPTyper. Type in any word or phrase, and it will convert it into your very own MIT Press-like colophon! 
Here is the logo it created for the Wednesday Blog Watch.  Perhaps a bit too unwieldy?

The answer to how many MIT Press colophons are on this page:  11.  Let us know if you find a different result.

Oh, and if you're interested in buying a black MIT Press colophon t-shirt ($9.95), you can contact the MIT Press bookstore here.

Step It Up for Climate Change

This weekend, on April 14th, all across the nation, groups of people gathered to express their concern over climate change and demand that congress take action. From a rally on the melting glaciers near  Juneau, Alaska to underwater protestors at the endangered reefs near Key West, Florida to students here at MIT showing there support in Boston, the message to congress was clear: reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050. The program, known as Step It Up, was initiated by writer and activist Bill McKibben (a contributor to the MIT Press book Writing the World: On Globalization), who invited individuals to take part in local actions to demand national change.

This fall, MIT Press is publishing two important books about climate change and its impact on our world and future generations. Check out Climate Change: What it Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren ed. by Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela M. Doughman and What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emmanuel for more information on this important issue.

National Poetry Month: Digital Poetry

Our recent book New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, is an indepth look at how poetry is being transformed by digital technology, computers, and the internet. The world of digital poetry challenges readers to interact with the words on the page or in the digital realm, and allows the shifting and manipulation of the written word to be a form of expression in and of itself. New Media Poetics contains a poignant collection of essays by writers and poets on this burgeoning new media form. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

“The reciprocal and complementary aims of this book are to extend the work of understanding the computer as an expressive medium by adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, intermedia art, and other digital art forms, to showcase a series of visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic examples of this kind of writing, and to consider some of the ways in which these examples reconfigure the familiar filed of poetry by bringing back into view vital but marginalized lineages of print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist and/or utopian communities formed by emergent poetics.”

 

You can check out several of the poetry projects that are analyzed and discussed in this text, online, such as Stephanie Strickland’s Vniverse, John Cayley’s riverIsland and overboard, and Jim Andrew’s Arteroids 3.1, as well as archives and databases of digital poetry, such as Ubu Web.

Loading Dock Sale

"a feeding frenzy for the brain"

The Spring 2007
MIT PRESS BOOKSTORE LOADING DOCK SALE
---------------------------------------
DAY:    Saturday & Sunday
DATE:    April 14th & 15th
TIME:    10:00am to 7:00pm
ROOM:    MIT E38, 292 Main Street, Cambridge
MAP   

On April 14th & 15th The MIT Press Bookstore will hold its legendary Loading Dock Sale. Literally *tons* of books will be on sale at drastically reduced prices - up to 90% off their original retail price. Can't come in the morning? Don't worry - new items will be added throughout the course of this two day extravaganza.

For parking or event information call 617 253-5249, email [email protected], or check here.

Wednesday Blog Watch

What is in a blog post?  Blogger Christopher D. Sessums explores the subject after reading Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams.  Sessum writes:

After writing in a weblog for two years, I realize that what I write is often a version of something I’ve written or read before. That echo chamber that is the edu’sphere is merely what Dennett might refer to as a multiple drafts theory of consciousness, a mutation of previously used material being recombined over and over. 

We might consider a blog post to be simply a “best of” version of what is being thought aloud, frozen in time. Dennett suggests that this what we do “when we tell others – or even our later selves—about our conscious experience” (p. xi).

Read further musings on Sessum's website about Dennett's theories of consciousness, cognition, and also zombies.

In multimedia this week, the University of Alberta Libraries has made available an audio recording of a recent forum featuring Dr. John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle.  Willinsky speaks about "Open Access: The Sea Changes in Scholarly Publishing".