Rob St. Amant's Open Salon Blog http://open.salon.com/user.php?uid=1487Mon, 9 Dec 2013 13:12:22 -0500I'm less than a tenth the writer Thoreau was <p style="text-align: justify"><img id="cid_4000777" src="/files/11349264566.jpg" alt="Books" hspace="5px" width="485">&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: justify">Oxford just sent me a box of twenty books. Each one has my name on the spine of the dust jacket.</p> <p style="text-align: justify">Opening the box<span>&nbsp;was a gratifying moment. And then I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau, whose first book didn't sell many copies. He wrote, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."</span></p> <p style="text-align: justify">So at this point I'm less than 2.8% the writer Thoreau was. I'll settle for that.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: justify">&nbsp;</p> http://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/10/03/im_less_than_a_tenth_the_writer_thoreau_washttp://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/10/03/im_less_than_a_tenth_the_writer_thoreau_wasWed, 3 Oct 2012 07:10:42 -0400How to write a popular science book <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px"><div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">I'm being a little presumptuous with this post. My book,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Computing-Ordinary-Mortals-Robert-Amant/dp/0199775303">Computing for Ordinary Mortals</a></em>, won't appear until the fall. And it's my first book. So I might end up retitling this post "How to Write a Popular Science Book that Nobody Reads," or (the happier but less likely case) "The Secret to Writing a Popular Science Best Seller." We'll see.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Here are a few things I kept in mind as I was writing.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Choose your audience.</strong>&nbsp;When I sent the completed manuscript (or so I thought) to my editor, she said, "You need an introduction to tell people what they're getting into." Won't readers find out by reading the book? Sure, in principle, but you want to set up the right expectations. You've probably come across one-star Amazon reviews that say, "I picked up this book thinking it was about&nbsp;<em>this</em>, but it was really about&nbsp;<em>that</em>!" or "This book would be okay for beginners, but it's pretty useless for experts," or "The author didn't explain enough." That's part of what an introduction should do--tell readers about where the book is going, and explain who might enjoy the journey. I'd had an audience in mind the entire time, but I needed to tell potential readers that<em>they</em>&nbsp;are part of that audience.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Find a topic with enough room for a new book.</strong>&nbsp;Maybe the world needs another book on string theory or undirected evolution or cognitive science and design, but Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, and Don Norman have set a very high bar for books on these topics. Mark out your own territory</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Ideally, you want someone to say, "If you read only one book on this topic,&nbsp;<em>this</em>&nbsp;is&nbsp;that book." When I started writing my book, in 2009, I found almost no competition on the popular science shelves.</span> </div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">But it's now 2012... Here are a few titles that have been released in the meantime:</span></div> <ul style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 2.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 2.5em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial"> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Peter J. Bentley,&nbsp;<a href="http://apps.peterjbentley.com/Blog/"><em>Digitized: A New History Of The Computer Science Revolution</em></a>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Carlos Bueno,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.laurenipsum.org/"><em>Lauren Ipsum</em></a>&nbsp;(2011)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Brian W. Kernighan,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://kernighan.com/">D is for Digital: What a well-informed person ought to know about computers and communications</a></em>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Jeremy Kubica,&nbsp;<a href="http://computationaltales.blogspot.com/"><em>Computational Fairy Tales</em></a>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">John MacCormick,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://users.dickinson.edu/~jmac/9algorithms/">Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers</a></em>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Paul S. Rosenbloom,&nbsp;<em>On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain</em>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> <li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; text-indent: 0px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-align: left; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Ian Watson,&nbsp;<em><a href="http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/">The Universal Machine: From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness</a></em>&nbsp;(2012)</span></li> </ul> <div style="text-align: justify"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Yikes! And they're all good, readable books. Fortunately, they're not&nbsp;<em>my</em>&nbsp;book. A couple are for younger readers (or&nbsp;<a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/06/21/fantasy_books_summer_reading_open2010/">adults like me</a>&nbsp;who enjoy good children's literature); a few frame a selection of ideas in the context of historical and current progress; some focus on specific areas of computing; some balance the ideas of computing with the practicalities. There's enough room, I think, for a book that tries to pull together the grandest, most important concepts in the field, to produce an understandable big picture</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">.</span> </div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Try to write well enough to carry the reader through the difficult bits. &nbsp;</strong></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">My favorite popular science books are written by scientists, but many great books have been written by journalists. Think of James Gleick. Or Bill Bryson; his early books are about travel and the English language. Obviously, there are two words in "popular science", and they're equally important.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Writing popular science is partly about getting the science right, but it's also about making it&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">understandable and enjoyable to read.</span><br><br><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">I think of a Washington Post blurb for one of John Barth's collections: "...the quick march of his verbs..." And George Orwell's rewriting of Ecclesiastes:</span><br><blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><em>Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.</em></span></blockquote> </div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Orwell was writing about political language, but typical academic language has many of the same flaws. Much of science (especially computer science) is about abstraction, and yet the language describing it should be concrete and vivid.</span></div> <br><div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Get the science right.</strong>&nbsp;This is hard, for what may be a surprising reason. It's relatively easy to make sure that you get the facts right (even though I've discovered that my memory has played me false in some cases). The hard thing is ensuring that you convey the right intuitions when you explain complex ideas, even if you can't afford to go into all the details. For contrast, one of my friends writes (slightly tongue in cheek) that the ideal reader of his latest book&nbsp;has "a solid grasp of the foundations and development of mathematics, classical and relativistic rational mechanics, quantum theory, logic, probability, the theory of computation, psychology, artificial intelligence, and mathematical, psychological, and political economics." A popular science book needs to be somewhat more accommodating of the wide range of knowledge and experience of its readers. It's not always easy to make sure that your high-level overview isn't leaving out something important.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Be ambitious.</strong>&nbsp;I mean "ambitious" in a specific sense. The best popular science books introduce readers to new ideas, and if some of those readers are scientists themselves, the ideas may change the way they think about what they do.&nbsp;Valentino Braitenberg's&nbsp;<em>Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology</em>, for example, sparked research on the emergence of interactive intelligence from the low-level behavior of vehicles; James Gibson's&nbsp;<em>The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception</em>&nbsp;established the field of ecological psychology; Richard Dawkins's concept of memes gave rise to a new (if controversial) field of study. My book isn't really ambitious in this way, except perhaps for an argument I make only implicitly: This is what&nbsp;<em>everyone</em>&nbsp;needs to know about computing. That's probably worth talking about.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span><br><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><strong>Realize that you haven't written the last word.</strong>&nbsp;In talking with other people in my field, I realized that if they'd started out with the same goals that I did, each would have written a different book. We all make judgments about what's interesting and important, and opinions differ.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span><br><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">Of course, I should generalize this last point--I've just described my own thoughts about writing. I'm sure there are other ways of going about it.</span> </div> <div><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"><br></span></div></span> http://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/07/08/how_to_write_a_popular_science_bookhttp://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/07/08/how_to_write_a_popular_science_bookSun, 8 Jul 2012 21:07:32 -0400My publishing experience <p style="text-align: justify">In the spirit of Cranky Cuss's account of self-publishing (<a href="/blog/cranky_cuss/2012/04/19/my_self-publishing_experience_part_i">Part I</a> and <a href="/blog/cranky_cuss/2012/05/03/my_self-publishing_experience_part_ii">Part II</a>), I thought I'd write about my experience with a traditional non-fiction publisher. Not about writing the book, but about the process that surrounds the writing. This turns into an answer to the question, "Who moves a book along?" It's not always me.</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>Editors:</strong>&nbsp;Two editors at Oxford and one free-lance editor (a good friend) read the manuscript, in draft and in complete form, and nudged it in specific directions. <em>This paragraph is a bit patronizing.</em> Fixed. <em>Chapter X is hard to understand; it needs better motivation.</em> Okay.<em> There need to be clearer transitions between the chapters.</em> Done. <em>Tell the story!</em> I'll try...</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>Friends with writing chops:</strong>&nbsp;I've made a number of friends here on OS who write very well. I asked a few of them to read a chapter or two, and tell me what they thought. I wanted to learn something about whether my writing was solid and where it could be improved.</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>Friends with technical chops:</strong>&nbsp;I also asked people in my department with specialized expertise to judge whether I'd gotten anything wrong. (This is one of the typical benefits of being an academic--access to other experts.)</p> <p style="text-align: justify">&nbsp;<strong>A writing workshop:</strong>&nbsp;I attended one meeting of a writing workshop and read part of a chapter aloud. The feedback was helpful, but unfortunately I didn't have time to continue with the meetings.</p> <p style="text-align: justify">All of these interactions were personal, in a sense. Except for the workshop members, everyone who gave me advice is a friend or acquaintance; we know each other. That helps, because it means they already have an idea about my strengths and weaknesses, and they understand what I'm trying to do.</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>Anonymous reviewers:</strong> Half a dozen reviewers looked at the original book proposal, and another four read the manuscript. I don't know who most of the reviewers were. They had great feedback, some positive and some negative, which helped me understand what works and what doesn't work in my writing.&nbsp;(Are these reviewers just altruistic strangers? <em>I</em> think so. But a publisher can lessen the pain by offering a few hundred dollars, either in cash or in books, in exchange for a review.)</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>An illustrator, a cover artist, a copy editor, and production:</strong>&nbsp;I wrote most of the manuscript using a vanilla text editor (Emacs), the same editor I use for writing programs. I copied the text into a Word document for the publisher to handle. An illustrator turned all my crappy sketches (including a cell phone photograph of something I drew on a white board) into nicely hand-drawn illustrations; a cover artist produced an appealing cover; a copy editor fixed all my typos, punctuation errors, and grammatical idiosyncrasies (it turns out, for example, that I consistently misplace the adverb "only" in a sentence), and organized all the end notes; and a team of typesetters organized it all to look like a real book.</p> <p style="text-align: justify">So it started like this:&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><img id="cid_2342777" src="/files/screen-emacs1341614231.png" alt="screen-emacs" hspace="5px" width="485"></p> <p style="text-align: left">&nbsp;...and then it was converted into this:&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: left"><img id="cid_2342778" src="/files/screen-word1341614258.png" alt="screen-word" hspace="5px" width="485"></p> <p style="text-align: justify">&nbsp;...and it will end up looking like this:</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><img id="cid_2342782" src="/files/screen-indesign1341614540.png" alt="screen-indesign" hspace="5px" width="485"></p> <p style="text-align: justify">This is what galleys or page proofs look like. I'll go through two rounds of proofs, in which I look through something that's very close to a real book, to see if any last-minute changes are needed. Finally...</p> <p style="text-align: justify"><strong>People much more famous than me:</strong> When you pick up book in a bookstore, you'll often see text on the dust jacket describing the book: advance comments. Ideally these comments are from people you recognize and trust, and the comments encourage you to read the book. Where do they come from? <em>I had to ask those famous people to do me a favor.</em>&nbsp;It's nerve-wracking, asking people you barely know (or don't know at all) to read your book and write about it--for obvious reasons, you can't even offer them anything in return. Fortunately, everyone was generally very nice, even the people who were too busy to do the favor for me.</p> <hr> <p style="text-align: justify">You may notice a broad pattern. Traditional publishing involves a lot of collaboration to produce a finished book. At a rough guess, three dozen or so people have looked at parts of my book with an eye to improving the end result in different ways. It's a big effort; I'm keeping my fingers crossed.</p> <p style="text-align: justify">&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: justify">&nbsp;</p> http://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/07/06/my_publishing_experiencehttp://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/07/06/my_publishing_experienceSat, 7 Jul 2012 09:07:53 -0400Obamacare and its detractors <p>I've been reading some of the unhappy reactions from Republicans about the Supreme Court's decision on Obamacare. There's a silver lining for&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/25/news/la-pn-boehner-warns-no-spiking-of-the-ball-on-health-care-ruling-20120625">John Boehner</a>&nbsp;at least;&nbsp;no one on his side is in danger of spiking the ball in celebration.</p> <p>Here are a few of the reactions. <em>The Supreme Court will find Obamacare unconstitutional</em>&nbsp;didn't work out very well as a prediction, but still...</p> <p><em>Obamacare is unconstitutional anyway.</em> Or in the words of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-supreme-court-rand-paul20120628,0,4362194.story">Rand Paul</a>, "Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so." Paul doesn't explain why he thinks the U.S. government has been under this misconception since 1803, when&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison">Marbury v. Madison</a>&nbsp;established the principle of judicial review. Thomas Jefferson, at that time President, didn't seem to have much to say about it, even though the decision wasn't in his best interest. So much for the&nbsp;Tea Party's favorite founding father.</p> <p><em>Obamacare is socialism.</em> For example, "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It&rsquo;s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can&rsquo;t afford it." Oops, my mistake. That's&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2009/09/ronald-reagan-on-medicare-circa-1961-prescient-rhetoric-or-familiar-alarmist-claptrap-.html">Ronald Reagan</a>, in 1961, talking about Medicare.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/27/obamacare-socialism-louie-gohmert-steve-king_n_1383973.html">Louie Gohmert</a>&nbsp;says something similar, though: "How much more socialist can you get than a government telling everybody what they can do, what they can't do, how they can live?" Good luck convincing the 50 million older Americans on Medicare that they're socialists.</p> <p><em>Obamacare is&nbsp;too expensive.</em>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2012/06/28/republican-reactions-supreme-courts-obamacare-decision/">Jim Sensenbrenner</a>: "The health care law's taxes and mandates are making it harder to create jobs. Its budgeting gimmicks will bankrupt our country." For complex social and political reasons, as above, the U.S. has resisted universal health care, despite examples elsewhere in the world that go back to the late 1800s. Expense is part of it, but it occurs to me that this argument involves a failure of imagination. Some<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_coverage_by_country"> 40 European countries</a>&nbsp;seem to manage universal health care without difficulty. Or maybe we could just start fewer wars in the Middle East. That should cover it.</p> <p>The Republicans have their work cut out for them. (Democrats, too, to improve the system.) A bit of advice:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17151">"armed rebellion"</a>&nbsp;is probably not the best solution.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> http://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/06/28/obamacare_and_its_detractorshttp://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/06/28/obamacare_and_its_detractorsFri, 29 Jun 2012 08:06:52 -0400Justin Bieber is a Literary Giant <div><br></div> <div> <p style="clear: both; text-align: center; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal; font-size: medium; margin: 0px"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1aCLCLNqu0A/T9EvOf1jKlI/AAAAAAAAAIk/5DRcnX-891Y/s1600/badge.png"><img style="cursor: move" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1aCLCLNqu0A/T9EvOf1jKlI/AAAAAAAAAIk/5DRcnX-891Y/s320/badge.png" alt="" width="320" height="147"></a></p> <blockquote style="text-align: justify; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal; font-size: medium"><div style="text-align: left"><p style="margin: 0px"><em>End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.</em></p></div></blockquote> <div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 6pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal; font-size: medium"><p style="margin: 0px">That's James Joyce, of course, in&nbsp;<em>Finnegans Wake</em>. Compare with a set of tweets by Justin Bieber:</p></div> <blockquote style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal; font-size: medium"><p style="margin: 0px"><em>what the heck is barley water? #london&nbsp;</em><em>Everyone back home... push #ALLAROUNDTHEWORLD to #1 on ITUNES and #BOYFRIEND back up the chart! WE CAN DO IT!! #AlwaysUnderdogs #muchlove&nbsp;</em><em>@heidiklum see u and Germany soon&nbsp;</em><em>LONDON IS CRAZY!! LOVING IT!! Off to Germany tonight. Berlin get ready&nbsp;</em><em>didnt understand anything you guys were saying but always fun. thanks for having me @chattyman&nbsp;</em><em>#BIEBERBLAST !!!!</em>&nbsp;</p></blockquote> <div style="text-align: justify; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: normal; font-size: medium"> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt"> <p style="margin: 0px">&nbsp;</p> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify"><p style="margin: 0px">We see the same grand range of time and space, the playful&nbsp;neologisms, the eccentric orthography; it's a celebratory passage. Bieber is darker than Joyce, here. Note the faux naivete, which subtly allows for mockery of English tradition (in the form of a soft drink) and more broadly of English agrarian culture (cf. John Barleycorn). Is Justin Bieber the heir of James Joyce?</p></div> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify"><p style="margin: 0px"><span>The words of noted literary critic&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif">ProudSwifty</span><span>&nbsp;are compelling: &ldquo;#ALLAROUNDTHEWORLD PEOPLE WANT @justinbieber 's LOVE!! :P He may never notice me but Imma keep #BIEBERBLASTING the song to #1 on iTunes!!!&rdquo;</span></p></div> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify"><p style="margin: 0px">Indeed.</p></div> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify"><p style="margin: 0px">Okay, I'm kidding. I've made all this up. The&nbsp;<a href="http://iwl.me/">I write like</a>&nbsp;Web site explicitly warns us that an analysis of tweets is not reliable. (And it actually says that Justin Bieber's tweets are closest to Kurt Vonnegut; I fiddled the output.) That's not to say that the site's analysis of ordinary text is any more reliable. My&nbsp;<a href="/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/05/19/through_the_computer_screen_and_what_alice_found_there">Alice pastiche</a>&nbsp;is judged to be like Lewis Carroll, and a short science-fiction-ish fragment in my book is supposedly like Ursula K. Le Guin. Should I be pleased? Another passage I wrote is said to be like Cory Doctorow. But when I pasted a&nbsp;Guardian article actually written by Doctorow into the site, it told me that Cory Doctorow writes like H. P. Lovecraft.</p></div> <p style="margin: 0px">But this is just for fun. Serious work can be done in analyzing style in text, and computers can help us do better than airy speculation.&nbsp;Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace produced some of the earliest results that came to public attention, in&nbsp;<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BYR7qCBnr_YC&amp;pg=PA53&amp;lpg=PA53&amp;dq=mosteller+federalist+papers+computer&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=pTgM_Oc2WW&amp;sig=513fv_Niin3dmT4zrTszsqbPmCY&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=pajaT4nuMKLa0QH25a2iCg&amp;ved=0CEkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=mosteller%20federalist%20papers%20computer&amp;f=false">their statistical analysis of the Federalist papers</a>. 85 articles were published under the name Publius in the late 1700s, by Alexander Hamilton (51 of the articles), James Madison (14), and John Jay (5), with three articles produced by a collaboration between Hamilton and Madison. That leaves 12 articles without a clear attribution. In the 1960s, Mosteller and Wallace carried out several detailed statistical analyses of the unattributed articles, looking for similarities to the attributed articles--were they written by Hamilton or Madison? (Word frequency analysis is still popular today; for example, Hamilton used the word "upon" much more often than Madison.) In the end, all 12 articles were attributed to Madison.</p> </div> <div style="margin-bottom: 6pt"> <p style="margin: 0px">This is of special interest in recent years, because Google has released a tool for analyzing&nbsp;the millions of books it has digitized, books going back to the year 1800. The&nbsp;<a href="http://books.google.com/ngrams/">Ngram Viewer</a>&nbsp;lets you see how the popularity of specific words and phrases has changed over the past couple of centuries. Some scientists have begun to explore the evolution of styles and other information that can be extracted from the historical data; we're seeing the emergence of a new area of scholarly work: the Digital Humanities.</p> <div><br></div> </div> </div> </div> http://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/06/15/justin_bieber_is_a_literary_gianthttp://open.salon.com/blog/rob_st_amant/2012/06/15/justin_bieber_is_a_literary_giantFri, 15 Jun 2012 07:06:37 -0400
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