MITPressLog

Wednesday Blog Watch: Bookstores

Do you enjoy the atmosphere of a cozy independent bookstore while browsing through MIT Press books?  A recent article in CNN.com about bookstores listed some favorite "destination bookstores".  With so many independent bookstores closing down, maybe now is the time to "book" a world tour of indy bookshops.  Perhaps the "Bookstore Hall of Fame" website can help you with your itinerary.
If you've never visited the MIT Press bookstore, it is located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA - here's a Google Street View image - or you can browse vicariously through some Flickr images of the store: notably, this interior shot, or perhaps this image of the storefront.  And in fact, it seems that (not unlike the Tour Eiffel), the MIT Press storefront is perhaps one of the more popular backdrops for a classic tourist photo shot - see this photo in particular, or perhaps a more artistic angle here).  Happy browsing! (image is of El Ateneo Bookstore in Argentina)

Wednesday Blog Watch: Blog Peer Review Response

The blogging world is ablaze this week with discussions about Noah Wardrip Fruin's blogging peer review experiment.  The Info/Law blog, in the entry Can Crowdsourcing Beat Academic Peer Review, compares the experiment to one of Larry Lessig's:

Experiments in crowdsourced editing of academic work are known in the art.  Larry Lessig, one of the giants of the cyberlaw/IP field, turned to the Internet for help updating his landmark book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. The text of the first edition was posted to a wiki, where users could add their own contributions. A year and a half later, the result of the process was Code Version 2.0, which was published both online and in hard copy. In one respect, Professor Wardrip-Fruin is taking a more conservative route than Professor Lessig, allowing Grand Text Auto’s readers to comment on, but not to edit, his text.

ReadWriteWeb compares the experiment to Daniel Oran's use of the Kindle to beta-test his book in this article.  Scholarly Communication, though claiming that it's "unlikely that [this style of peer review] will replace the traditional peer review process -- at least not quite yet" , has an article here.  Sources and Methods makes some speculations in this post.  And the Voir Dire blog, in the post Celebrity Death Match: Blogs vs. Peer Review, seems to like the idea.

An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

An exciting experiment was launched today.  As Jeff Young reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education today, we've decided to do something a little different with a book, Expressive Processing, that Noah Wardrip-Fruin is publishing next year.  Working with the Institute for the Future of the Book and asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review. Why?  Well, in Noah's own words:

Blogging has already changed how I work as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences -- and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences. But, of course, that's just the beginning. We founded Grand Text Auto, in 2003, for an even more important reason: blogs can create community. And the communities around blogs can be much more open and welcoming than those at conferences and festivals, drawing in people from industry, universities, the arts, and the general public. Interdisciplinary conversations happen on blogs that are more diverse and sustained than any I've seen in person.

Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work. In fact, while writing the manuscript for Expressive Processing I found myself regularly citing blog posts and comments, both from Grand Text Auto and elsewhere. . . . I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto

The Expressive Processing peer review experiment begins today (the first actual manuscript section is here and more information on how it will work is here) and will run for approximately ten weeks and 100 thousand words on Grand Text Auto, with a new post every weekday during that period. At the end, comments will be sorted, selected and incorporated and the whole thing bundled together--we're still figuring out how that part will work, but we'll let you know. Please go over and take a look and if a thought is provoked, join the discussion.

Growing up with Synesthesia--a Response

MIT Press Author, Cretien van Campen has written a response to the Salon.com article The Letter E is Purple, written by Alison Buckholtz.  To hear more about Cretien van Campen's book, a free podcast is available. 

Alison Buckholtz has written a beautiful and moving account of growing up with synesthesia on Salon.com. She remembers her perceptual ability to see letters, numbers, and persons in color.  Initially this gave her pleasure as a young child (“I enjoyed my synesthesia, playing with it as a kitten would bat around a ball of yarn.”), was quite confused as an teenager when she realized she was different and faced the dangers of social alienation (“I decided I was a total freak.”), and finally discovered as an adult that synesthesia can be a practical tool in daily life. (“the gift of synesthesia”).

Her story has many parallels with the stories of synesthetes who I interviewed for my book The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science.  Most synesthetes discover their extra perceptual abilities during early childhood. For some it was stressing (like in sensory overload), but many persons developed it as a practical tool like in mental calculating with color or planning your diary in colors by heart. Synesthetic musicians report they use synesthesia in composing and scientists tell they use it to analyze complex formula.

In the media, synesthesia is well-known as a neurological phenomenon, but is has many social sides too, which have been neglected thus far by researchers. Synesthesia is not only something that happens in your brain, but is also something that affects your personal life. This week I posted a statement on “The Social Sides of Synesthesia” at the European discussion forum Yasmin,  asking synesthetes what does synesthesia mean for them. Would they miss it? What would happen to their daily and social functioning if they suddenly lost their synesthetic abilities?

 

Cretien van Campen

www.synesthesie.nl

 

 

Fat Tuesday

Take the challenge: Fit or fat? Live or die? You decide with FATWORLD! ITVS Interactive (Independent Television Service) and PBS’ Emmy® Award-winning weekly series, Independent Lens, has just published FATWORLD, an online videogame created by Atlanta-based independent game studio Persuasive Games (spearheaded by our own Ian Bogost) about the politics of nutrition. FATWORLD explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition and socioeconomics in the United States and is free to play.  Do you think it's a coincidence that FATWORLD is being released the same week that the chief executive of McDonalds UK is blaming videogames for childhood obesity?     

After you've played the game, read the book!  In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost looks at how games, like Fatworld, can mount arguments, make expressive statements about the world around us, and persuade us to  think about things in a different way. 

January Podcasts

A mid-month reminder about our January podcasts - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum discusses Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination then Catherine Brady talks about  Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA with interviewer Chris Gondek. 

Also of note, Matthew Kirschenbaum has just launched a blog of his own focusing on his new book.  It looks great.  Be sure to check it out. 

To learn more, visit our Podcast archive page.

Describing Inner Experience--Salon.com Review

Describing Inner Experience by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel was a featured review today on Salon.com. Gary Wolf, Wired Magazine editor, and contributor to Salon.com wrote the review.   

 “The premise is so ludicrous that it might seem impossible for anything to come of it, but this underestimates the skill of the authors, particularly Schwitzgebel, the philosopher, whose talent for straight-faced mischief has been displayed in his some of his other writing…. Hurlburt shows himself to be a watchful, experienced man, with a certain patient imperturbability. He is a collector of data, and the effect of his work is cumulative.”