Odyssey Online

…the revised Google Book Settlement is due out Friday. I will be driving across Vermont’s pleasant hills and greenswalds on Friday, but trust me I’ll blog like a son-of-a-gun on this next week. In the mean time here are a couple of posts offering preliminary analysis based on what has been leaked so far:

• Electronic Freedom Frontier offers a fairly optimistic take on the revised settlement, although notes concerns over Fair Use Guidelines and Google Books, as well as “one interface to rule them all” worries…
• Karen Coyle–whose writing about the Google Book deal as been excellent so far–articulates concerns about what Google Book means, or pointedly doesn’t mean, for libraries…

More next week…

…the BBC web site ran an interesting piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on Google’s new feature Dashboard. The article is titled My Life Online–Time to Delete? and ponders uploaded information.  Dashboard allows one to see what information that one has uploaded to save is associated with what Google feature. Ergo, what you’ve given Google to mind and where Google has put it.  It’s a fine check, but as Cellan-Jones reflects, it’s your information out of your hands and in Google’s…forever?  Does on want all of one’s online discourse (like this blog post) saved forever?

…the article mentions Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,  which is an extremely well written study of the social utility of forgetting, set against the new digital storage technologies. Well worth the time to read it…

…whilst somewhat off topic for Odyssey Online, Atlantic Magazine is reported that the recent congressional election in NY-23 has yielded a new bit of political slang: Scozzafavaed.

…our collection of slang dictionaries can be searched out by the subject heading English Language–Slang–Dictionaries, ready resources all for charting the fluid nature of the English Language…

…today, November 5th, is Guy Fawkes Day. And what would Guy Fawkes day be without a couple of good books in the SLU Libraries on the man and on the tradition:

• Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser
• Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day by James Sharpe

POETRY READING

…reported from the Atlantic, both Firefox and Chrome continue to elbow into IE’s share…

“Have You Seen A. Lincoln? Searching for Old Abe in the National Archives”
Presented by Dr. David Gerleman, Assistant Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln

Thursday, November 5
4:30 p.m.
Josephine Young room, ODY Library

Sponsored by the History Department, ODY Library, and the SLU Sophomore Initiative

Hope to see you there!

…with actors from the American Shakespeare Center offering performances here on campus through the weekend, it seemed like a good moment to do a little early Friday Blogging, and suggest some of the most recent titles we have on Shakespeare:

• Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide by Samuel Crowl
• Shakespeare and Modern Culture by Majorie Garber
• Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare by Nigel Smith
• Cooking with Shakespeare by Mark Morton and Andrew Coppolino
• Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare by Angus Fletcher
• New Wave Shakespeare by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe
• Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttal
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace by Mark Thornton Burnett
• Why Shakespeare by Katherine Belsey

…the play’s the thing with which we’ll catch the conscious of a king…

…recently Derek Thompson put up an interesting post at Atlantic.com titled Where is the E-Reader Revolution Leading Us? which argues that e-readers are pushing technologies toward a Swiss Army Knife model: a mobile technology that can do many things.  It actually seems to me that the e-reader (with all thy faults I love thee still…) is more akin to Donald Norman’s idea of an information appliance, well articulated in his book The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products can Fail, the Personal Computer is so Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. Norman makes a convincing case for what an information appliance could be and could do…

…his book The Psychology of Everyday Things (subsequent editions are titled Design of Everyday Things) is essential reading on the day-to-day implications of design…

…this being National Potato Day we can direct the SLU community to the wonderfully named John Reader’s wonderfully titled book Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

…also, on the broader topic of our relationship to information (if not potatoes) Jessica Hagy on her blog Indexed has a really very simple and very striking visualization of the relationship between confusion and information…