30 July 2005
Level 60 del.icio.us player
I might not be that hot in AIM Fight terms, but I'm no. 175 of the 'Top 500 Taggers' at Collaborative Rank. This is a nice follow up to my inclusion in HubLog's Gatherers of the Month. I must, like Matt suggested last night, be a 'level 60 del.icio.us player'.
Collaborative Rank (via Smart Mobs) is a del.icio.us search engine:
Users on del.icio.us who give meaningful tags to helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently doing the same) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings.
Along with 'socialsoftware', 'games', 'puzzles', 'rss' and 'women', one of my key areas of expertise is 'toread'...
See also: A draft paper by the developer, Amir Michail of the University of New South Wales, CollaborativeRank -- Motivating People to Give Helpful and Timely Ranking Suggestions (pdf).
Posted at 12:06 PM in Collecting, Games, Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
18 July 2005
Girlguiding as a serious game
While researching around playful knowledge networks for teens, I discovered that Girlguiding describes itself as a serious game these days:
What is Guiding?
Guiding is a game - with a purpose. It provides opportunities for girls and young women to be challenged by new adventures and experiences and achieve a sense of pride in accomplishment and teaches them to understand and learn about the world, its people and cultures.
Makes sense. There are lots of basic game design patterns evident in Girlguiding: from learning by doing, to levelling up, trading, socialising, and collecting...
Pictures pilfered from here.
Girlguiding UK is also piloting a piece of safer social software: a moderated discussion forum carefully limited to Girl Guides and Girlguiding staff.
It can't be long before they get into alternative reality gaming - it's a perfect fit. (Ditto for the Scouts and Duke of Edinburgh Award.)
Posted at 03:03 PM in Children and teens, Collecting, Games, Social software | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
20 February 2005
Uncanny toys
When I first came to understand RFID, at the Digital ID World conference in 2003, I became excited about how it could be used to create things that tell you stories. I was mostly thinking about books and other items that people collect, and some way of communicating the lifecycle, or social life, of those collectables. What I didn't think about at all, and certainly wouldn't have expected to see so soon, was RFID's use in mass-market toys. WorldChanging reports on two new toys that bring the uncanny world of animate toys closer:
Naoru-kun, a new doll by Bandai... speaks 150 phrases and responds when it's shaken hands, hugged, petted, etc. But when Naoru-kun gets sick, kids have to use one of the items including "syringe," "candy" and "medicine." The doll reads RFID tags embedded in these items and responds accordingly.Little Tikes has a series of toy kitchens full of interactive technology. The MagiCook Kitchen, for example, comes with pretend food embedded with electronic tags that can be read by sensors on the stovetop which then respond with the appropriate comment.
Freud taught us that "children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects" and that "children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it", so seemingly animate toys make a lot of sense. Do you think they're more likely to be broken by children following that "first metaphysical stirring" described by Charles Baudelaire in The Philosophy of Toys:
The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul?
See also:
Posted at 03:25 PM in Children and teens, Collecting, Identities for things, Mimicry, Toys | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
27 January 2005
Flickr Squared Photo Collaborative Poster project
phyllo_rings_licensed_3145_1k
Originally uploaded by jbum.
This would have to be the loveliest and most persuasive information visualisation I've ever come across. jbum, a member of the always-delightful squared circle group on Flickr has created a series of mosaics from the images sent to the group's photo pool.
The image above was made by "compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones" and then overlaying the current licensing status of each image: "The red band indicates unlicensed photos. The purple band indicates photos which are licensed, but have a 'No Derivatives' clause. The photos in the center are useable."
jbum wants to produce a poster of his mosaic but first needs the contributors of the original images to re-license their work. Here's his call to action.
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
And wow.
(Via Paul Key on Pixelbox, who introduced it thus: "Insanity squared on a flickr tip. Prepare eyes for infinity.")
Update: Apparently they've gone from 1437 to 1894 licensed photos in less than a week.
July 2005 Update: The Flickr Collaborative Posters are now available to order. Choose from Flickrverse, Day In the Life Of..., Squared Circle Peach and Squared Circle Phyllotaxy.
Posted at 02:47 PM in Collecting, Creativity, Social software | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
05 September 2004
Materialism in The Sims
One thing that has been kind of ironic about The Sims is that a lot of people play it for a while, like 4 to 6 hours, and they walk away thinking it's very materialistic. But the ones that have played it for 20 hours realise that it's the opposite. If you buy stuff in The Sims - every object has some sort of traits - it can go bad, or break, or need maintenance, need to be watered. If you sit there and build a big mansion that's all full of stuff, without cheating, you realise that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when all these objects had been promising to save you time. So they are kind of time-bombs in a literal sense. And it's actually kind of a parody of consumerism, in which at some point your stuff takes over your life. But because it's fairly subtle, and you have to play the game for that long - half the players don't even see it's a parody. They think, "oh, it's so consumerist."
From SimSmarts: An Interview with Will Wright, in Brenda Laurel's Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
Posted at 02:42 PM in Collecting, Games | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
13 July 2004
Bookplates and blog banners
^Golfwidow's Ministry of Silly Walks
As the title of this site suggests, I'm judging these blogs by their covers. Am I really that shallow? For the purposes of this project, the answer is yes. This showcase is specifically for blogs and specifically about pure visual greatness. If you are concerned with CSS only sites, check out the CSS Vault or CSS Beauty. If you want complete web standards compliance, check out the Web Standards Awards. It's not that I don't support these things, because I do: this site is standards compliant and coded with CSS. But I'm choosing a different focus: beauty and blogs. No commercial sites, just blogs.I started this one as a holding place for designs I liked. Bloggers are fickle people, and many change their designs at the drop of a hat, so I needed to create a museum of sorts to hold the designs I deemed beautiful, lest they change overnight.
When books were scarce and precious, an owner used a book-plate (ex libris) to identify his/her ownership. Conceived as a functional object, the bookplate has become a self-sufficient work of art, an attractive collector's item and an object of research.
Posted at 10:15 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
09 July 2004
del.icio.us phrenology
You just have to love the strangely productive play of the blogosphere.
While I was out cycling, Matt spent a sizeable chunk of a sunny Helsinki Sunday visualising his del.icio.us tags in Illustrator, "by multiplying font size by number of entries per tag, then placing them without much care." (I don't believe that last part is strictly true). This was enough to inspire Kevan to "knock together a bit of script to generate messier equivalents in CSS, for any username". Enter extisp.icio.us:
extispicious, a. [L. extispicium an inspection of the innards for divination; extra the entrails + specer to look at.] Relating to the inspection of entrails for prognostication.
My extisp.icio.us looks like this:
I was not at all surprised to see collecting and children writ large but some of the other word sizes surprised me. extisp.icio.us is to geeky blogs what quizilla is to LiveJournal. Or, to put it in Mattspeak, extisp.icio.us is phrenological, an opportunity to read the bumps in bloggers' outboard-brains.
I think Clay's going a bit far when he asks for the visualisation to become social software. I can't see how much sense could be distilled from either 'concatenated users' or 'inverse mapping', and inverse mapping potentially triggers a nonsensical link-collecting competition. In some ways it also misses the point. extisp.icio.us is a glimpse of individual obsessions. You combine Clay and Seb and 'social software' might get bigger. You key in 'social software' and Clay and Seb might have the biggest names...
But back to the productive play of the blogosphere. Matt stayed in to visualise his del.icio.us tags; I went cycling and got a surprising visualisation of my own del.icio.us tags a couple of days later. The moral of the story? I dunno. Maybe that it pays to know interesting people who sometimes stay indoors more than they should. We're going camping in Hanko Porkkala this weekend, so our bumps will be more about things in the night than phrenology.
Posted at 12:30 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
17 May 2004
Vice cards
The practice of placing prostitutes cards in phone boxes is known as ‘carding’ and it is a particularly English phenomenon specific to London and the seaside resorts of Brighton and Hove where they serve a flourishing tourist trade...Carding started as a kitchen table industry with a handful of prostitutes and their maids cutting-out images, drawing their own illustrations, rubbing-down lettering and then passing it all over to a trusted printer. It developed in to an extensive, professional, well-organised and highly technical production process that utilised the latest manufacturing systems...
The first advantage to carding was that telephone boxes provided the means for a client to respond immediately to the advertisement. Even more important was free media space. Telephone boxes make it physically possible for the girls to place an advert without the knowledge or consent of the owner and without paying. This is not feasible with more traditional media such as newspapers, magazines or shop windows.
From an essay about vice cards as a cultural icon or typographic curio, found on the website of the St Bride Printing Library.
Posted at 01:10 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
16 May 2004
Giving up
Comics and Collecting I: Parting with my Collection
But not only am I going to start buying trades only and cutting back on the number of titles; I'm getting rid of my entire collection altogether. There's simply no reason to keep it. Throughout the past weeks, I've been going through, and reading as many stories as I can, and realising how unattractive the format is. Older books can't be read without fear of damaging them, and newer books go by so quickly, it just doesn't feel like they're worth keeping simply to read.I really loathe comics as a speculator's or collecting medium, and I don't see the need to continue spending huge amounts of money I can't afford on things I won't get too much of a return on.
Comics and Collecting II: Collecting for a Different Reason
When I was a kid, we collected comics to be able to read all the stories. Today, you collect comics as a means of achieving a status that only comic book fanatics can understand. That’s where my problem starts...Comics should exist to be read. It’s what they are. Comic books. A book is supposed to be read.
Unfortunately, we have some people who desire the image or status or whatever illusory state of mind they get from having these false relics, and if anything, it’s what keeps the industry from moving forward.
Because you see, when people buy comics to sell them, the industry starts responding. Instead of making comics to be read, they make comics to be sold.
Posted at 12:50 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
12 May 2004
On bibliophilia
When books were scarce and precious, an owner used a book-plate (ex libris) to identify his/her ownership. Conceived as a functional object, the bookplate has become a self-sufficient work of art, an attractive collectors' item and an object of research.
The Village Voice on the purpose of book signings:
Collectors collectively decided that a book with a dust jacket was more desirable, and hence worth more, than an unjacketed one. Indeed, only a jacketed copy was regarded as truly complete... Over the past decade, collectors have come to regard an unsigned book as similarly incomplete. "I have it," you'll hear someone say, "but it's not signed." If the author is still alive, the sentence ends a little differently. "But it's not signed yet," the collector will say.
The Guardian's review of Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading:
She began to realise that literary life had become swamped by its epiphenomena, that books' blurbs and author photographs had become more important than their content, that the industry was overrun by middlemen and women whom writers had to pay for, that bookstores resembled supermarkets whose fruit and vegetables had mutated and lost their flavour in favour of external appearance. She contrasts this situation with that of the torcedores, the cigar-rollers, in Cuba's tobacco factories, where they hire readers to read to the workers. "The listeners in my Cuban fantasy are not passive ... Their literary taste is as sharp as a razor, they react to every badly used word, to every false note."
Posted at 03:39 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
01 April 2004
Collectibles in games
The key, Schubert said, is that players like to be able to choose to collect, but do not like being forced to. This is why collecting items or game elements is, in so many cases, what Schubert referred to as an "opt in, lateral gameplay" -- a side-quest or adjunct to a much larger game.
From Gamasutra's Postcard from GDC 2004: The Power of Collectibes -- Leveraging Your Player's Inner Obsessive-Compulsive
The Gamasutra report also feeds back suggested ways to implement collectibles that "would resonate more closely with the desires of the user":
Posted at 10:06 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
30 March 2004
People delight me
Dip pen: I love to write with this pen. It’s a little scratchy and there’s something very organic and wild about dipping it in ink. I never know entirely how the pen will react, whether it will stammer or buck and so it makes me draw in a very particular way. It’s my favorite thing for ‘calligraphy’ and turns any writing into a decorative element. I’ve saved a lot of boring drawings by scrawling with it. I’ve used various cheap nibs; this one is the most expressive. I hate italic nibs and think they should only be used by people who really know what they are doing. Otherwise, you look like some fancy 8th grader.
This person has produced an inventory of their pens, which are all "waterproof and under $10". Each entry has a brief personal description and a drawing done with the corresponding pen. Lovely.
(Via things magazine)
Disclosure: It's an improbably warm 7°C here in Helsinki today.
Posted at 09:55 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
15 March 2004
Archivists of the obvious
There are two kinds of collecting: the selective and the accumulative. In the first, the collector seeks to assemble only the best examples of a class of object (paintings, sculptures, porcelain). The collection improves as its quality, but not its quantity, increases. With this method, sacrifices may continually be made, as objects of lesser worth are sold to acquire more desirable items. The number of entries in the inventory may remain static over the years, but the collection is seen to advance through substitution, or through a process of "trading up"....In the second, accumulative type of collection, the significance of the individual object is seen to grow through its keeping company with such a large number of items of a similar kind: one Gabon stamp may be neither here nor there, but 50 Gabon stamps act as a spur to the acquisition of 50 more. And as the ceiling is reached, as all the Gabon stamps seem to have been tracked down, a kind of restlessness sets in - Cameroon suddenly becomes interesting and desirable from the collector's point of view. Soon it is no longer a matter of forming a collection. Multiple classes of object have begun to occupy the collector's attention...
To such pioneers, such archivists of the obvious, there is nothing that cannot be collected. The trick is to think of the category . . . and then to persist. Two such collectors, in an article I read not long ago, were driving on their way to make a purchase when one stopped the car and approached a hitch-hiker, offering him $25 for his cardboard sign. On the spur of the moment, he had conceived the plan to make a collection of hitch-hikers' cardboard signs.
The example illustrates the paradigm. The individual object is of no great worth on its own. It is only through accumulation, only by becoming one of a category, that it has any great chance of engaging our interest. And this particular case seems particularly unpromising. But one has to remember that all such ephemera, by definition, must once have seemed unpromising. The "Wanted" poster from the Wild West, which today would be such a find, or the printed advertisement for the slave auction, were once trash.
...So much that we admire today has passed through that period of disregard, that dangerous prelude to value...
From James Fenton's excellent New Statesman review (subscription required) of We Are The People: postcards from the collection of Tom Phillips.
(Do you still have those bus-transfers, Cory?)
Posted at 11:00 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
13 March 2004
Borrowing words
'Pod?''Yes, even their names were never quite right. They imagined they had their own names - quite different from human names - but with half an ear you could tell they were borrowed. Even Uncle Hendreary's and Eggletina's. Everything they had was borrowed; they had nothing of their own at all. Nothing. In spite of this, my brother said, they were touchy and conceited and thought they owned the world.''
From The Borrowers. Etymology is the study of word borrowing. So too is HP Labs' Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace
Posted at 06:23 PM in Collecting, Naming | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
04 March 2004
Social networks become collecting games
AJ Kim on Many-to-Many expands most usefully on the competitive aspect of social networks.
The drive to accumulate points and track accomplishments is so powerful that people will often 'make up' a game when one doesn't explicity exist. For example, social networks show you the number of friends you have, and the number of connections you've 'earned' by having those friends. This simple feedback mechanism encourages some people to think of a social network as a 'game' with the goal of 'collect the most friends with the greatest number of connections.' As with the Amazon top reviewers system, adding statistical lists of Top-Performers to a social network reinforces the sense that this is a game to be won, a 'skill to be mastered.'
Read it in full. (Plus AJ Kim's follow ups: Rules and rankings in social systems and Exploration and discovery in networked social spaces.)
A much lighter outlet for our need to compete is offered by Buzznet's My Pet Is Cuter Than Yours! (found via dog-poor Matt and dog-rich Caterina). Is this the unspoken dynamic at play in Dogster?
Posted at 12:08 PM in Collecting, Social software | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
28 January 2004
eBay again
Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless — and sometimes just careless — sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.They do get bidders, but rarely very many. Often the buyers are those who troll for spelling slip-ups, buying items on the cheap and selling them all over again on eBay, but with the right spelling and for the right price.
From The New York Times' In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash
Posted at 08:47 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
27 January 2004
eBay 'addicts'
"You know one of the things I really like about eBay? The packages arriving. Opening them up." Who doesn't like packages arriving? Just as the nerve endings on fingers and mouth play a part in the addiction to smoking, this is just one of the delights that play a part in the eBay addiction.
From a light account of collecting and eBay in Prospect Magazine (current edition, subscription required). It gave me a nice new word for the day, too: completionist.
Posted at 03:08 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
25 January 2004
Big Garden Birdwatch
Today is the last day of this year's Big Garden Birdwatch:
All you need to do is watch your garden (or local park if you don't have a garden) for an hour on either Saturday 24 or Sunday 25 January 2004. Note down the birds you see and tell us the highest number of each species you see at any one time (by doing this you won't be counting the same birds twice).We also need to know where you did your birdwatch and how many people took part. This information means we can make a useful geographical analysis of the information everyone has collected.
Download the Identification Sheet (pdf) and start watching. Apparently 314,000 people took part last year.
I'm in Helsinki so I'll have to miss out. (We're going to the Helsinki Zoo International Open Ice Sculpture Competition this afternoon instead.)
In a rather different spirit, America's first genetically engineered pet has gone on sale: a tiny zebrafish with a gene from a sea coral that makes it red in normal light and causes it to glow under ultraviolet light.
The GloFish, as they are called, have opened a new chapter in a long-running rift between aquarium owners who favour only natural fish and those who find any technique acceptable in their quest for the colourful and the bizarre, including crossing unrelated species, breeding for traits like bulging eyes or even injecting artificial colours into fish."You have your hard-core hobbyists who say it's fish like this that will degenerate the hobby, and you have novices who are into colour, and they want what's the latest out there,'' said Brian M. Scott... [from] Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine.
From The New York Times
Posted at 11:36 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
24 January 2004
Unpacking my bookcase
Today I've been unpacking my bookcase, which was almost entirely responsible for the 6 tea chests I shipped from London to Helsinki. While adding my books to our shelves here, I've been setting aside doubles (books both Matt and I own) to be released, via BookCrossing, around Helsinki as an act of appeasement.
Our release queue so far includes A Lover's Discourse, Faster, No Logo, The Fall of Public Man, The Language Instinct, and The Meaning of Things; an odd assortment of books that represents the surprisingly small number of overlaps in our collection.
I have ordered a Release Kit and BookCrossing Stamp and plan to start registering our books next week. Already, just by ordering the kit, I have acquired wings on my profile, or 'bookshelf'.
I am not very good at giving books away. When I loan my books to friends, I always ensure their return and when I give books as gifts they're almost always books I already own - and have read - myself. And this is the first time I've ever fused my book collection with another.
BookCrossing is very good at easing the pain of giving away books for bibliophiles like me. You lose the book, but you gain bookish paraphernalia and build a digital bookshelf. Each book is uniquely identified (or catalogued) and the hope is that the book you release will go on to gather stories to itself. Even the Bookplate Labels are very finely tuned: they're specially commissioned and limited edition; a nice fetish to distract your attention from the pain of giving away.
Having said that, I'm still only able to give away books I have multiple copies of. One step at a time...
Posted at 05:39 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
10 January 2004
Finders but not keepers
I'm delighted by this account of Japan's meticulous lost and found system and want to know more. I'm most struck by the way the finders' honesty and effort seems motivated by their sympathetic storytelling about the finds:
"I always hand in something I find, like purses," said Ms. Sasaki, who had come to claim the money after waiting half a year. "I imagine that a person might be in trouble, losing money or a purse."...
Wheelchairs and crutches were harder to explain, though Nobuo Hasuda, 54, and Hitoshi Shitara, 47, veteran officials of the lost-and-found system, had well-rehearsed lines.
"I wonder what happened to the owners," Mr. Shitara said.
Mr. Hasuda said with a smile, "If they didn't need them anymore because they got better, it's a good thing."
Found via boingboing
Posted at 01:29 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
03 January 2004
Why people hoard things
The New York Times article, So Much Clutter, So Little Room: Examining the Roots of Hoarding (found via boingboing), offers an account of the motivations behind hoarding. Apparently hoarders tend to be "unusually intelligent" and see more connections between things, so value them more.
It also suggests that they attach emotional significance to a wider variety of things. And that for some, it is all about preserving their identity; they believe that what comes into their ownership becomes a part of them, so if they throw too much away they'll lose themselves. Finally, throwing something away can make hoarders feel unsafe because their clutter offers a sense of home, or nesting.
See also: The Social Psychology of Objects
Posted at 10:15 AM in Collecting, Identities for things | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
01 January 2004
Do children still collect things?
BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour recently treated us to Why don't children collect things anymore?; a wonderful conversation between Irving Finkel, an expert in ancient children's games, and Noreen Marshall of the Museum of Childhood.
Some of the best insights came from the interviews with children that started the programme:
"It's a long story but all it is, like - collecting - is to impress mates. They can collect things to impress you, and you can collect things to impress them.""This is my animal collection and I got a shark fish's egg and I got some quail eggs and a collection of feathers... This snowy owl feather, my friend Janie found it... A hawk feather which I found in America... I enjoy collecting animals' stuff because I like animals and it's fun looking for them."
"I keep them in my bedroom as ornaments."
"I like old things... some day they'll be worth quite a lot of money."
"Collecting's really, really fun. When you've got a lot you can share them with your friends and they can share their things with you."
"Collecting things sort of shows what the person's like. It gives an insight on the person."
"I think parents think it's a waste of space, a waste of time and a waste of money."
The conversation between Finkel and Marshall centred on the decline of more traditional behaviours like stamp collecting, or bird nesting.
Finkel argued that the commercialisation of collecting, through products like Pokémon cards, has devalued the experience: "What's really exciting about collecting is looking for things that you can't find when you want them. All you need to find [mass market collectibles] is the money. The real thrill is lost."
And, that these products might be branded as 'limited edition' or 'rare' but this is manipulated rather than spontaneous. I noticed this recently in Forbidden Planet, which has lucky-dip style vending machines for pocket-money priced toys, and trading cards on the counter. Reading both the pitches and disclaimers reminded me more of gambling than collecting.
Noreen Marshall explained that our culture sends very clear messages to children that we amass things, so maybe children need to go through collecting as a way of starting this somewhere. And that children are often not allowed - now - to do things like go out and collect pressed flowers, so these commercial collectibles fill a gap. Marshall and Finkel also conceded that some of what was acceptable in the past (e.g. bird nesting) is no longer.
Finally, Finkel argued that the art of collecting - the concept of it and value of it - is not appreciated. That ours is not a culture where collecting as such is regarded as desirable.
When asked what people should be collecting, Finkel suggested diaries "because people throw them away". Maybe LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad et al are engaged in a great act of cultural salvage.
See also: BadFads Museum
Posted at 11:06 AM in Children and teens, Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
02 December 2003
Bagpuss and things that tell you stories
I started trying to think of other articles which could give scope for some interesting songs and stories. I couldn’t possibly just think of such things. I had to find them, or rather, somebody had to find them or, better, make them…The pattern worked surprisingly well. Once we had a suitable article, the ideas about it seemed to come by themselves. The Ballet Shoe was found in a cupboard. It was obviously old and worn. Also, as Professor Yaffle pointed out, one ballet shoe was not a lot of use except perhaps to a one-legged ballet-dancer. Madeleine suggested that shoes could be lived in – there was an old woman who lived in a shoe. That was the cue for the mice to pump up the Mouse Organ to show pictures of the old woman who lived in a shoe, while Madeleine sang the song…
But of course the essential key to unlock each episode was the article to be found. To locate these I would range about the place, picking things up and putting them down, scraping my brain for ideas about their history. This was quite hard work, but in fact far less daunting than sitting in front of a blank piece of paper with absolutely nothing in one’s head. At least the things found were tangible and their very existence stimulated speculation about their provenance.
We didn’t always have to find or make real things; we could look into our memories. I remembered having once seen an ivory Chinaman that rocked…
From Matt's copy of Oliver Postgate’s Seeing Things: An Autobiography
See also: The delightful Bagpuss Titles (thanks Deborah)
Posted at 08:18 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
25 October 2003
Finding forgotten books
You can now find books at amazon.com by searching for any word inside them, not just author names and title keywords. This should help readers tracing dimly - but fondly - remembered books from childhood. Great for those times when you remember a character's name, or a phrase, or place, but not a title or author.
I wonder how many of BookSleuth's pleas for help I could now answer? Let me try one..
I'm looking for a picture/story book... I used to read it as a child about 20 years ago. It is a square book with a yellow cover and is a modern day version of Alice in Wonderland. A girl called Tuppence (with long blond hair) gets to a secret world through a magic cabinet. Once there she meets a man who looks like Stan Laurel wearing a long green coat and who keeps kippers and porridge in his pockets. She also meets some very big spiders.
Hmmm, a search on 'Tuppence and Magic Cabinet and Kippers' doesn't turn up anything promising. But Amazon has only (did I say only?) indexed 120,000 books so far, so some of the quirkier books might still be difficult to find.
It is already extremely useful for more academic research. I often remember, and want to get my hands on, essays I read at university but don't always remember what book or collection they're from. This allows me to search for an essay - e.g. Donna Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto - and find books on Amazon that reference it. Very handy.
Posted at 03:29 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
17 October 2003
DIDW: The social life of objects
I find RFID infinitely interesting and exciting (and am considered something of a freak by my more privacy-concerned colleagues), so I enjoyed Mark Roberti’s RFID: Platform for change. All of his examples were situated in manufacturing and retail and the military, though, and what really interests me is how RFID might attach history and bring sociability to objects – particularly books (or other artefacts that are collected).
Books already come with an ISBN number - e.g. "0-43-253422-0" - which is a unique machine-readable ID. It references information about the cover art, title, author, and category. But this number only identifies a specific product, not every physical instance of it.
This is where BookCrossing steps in to give us 'a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever more!'.
The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing:
Read a good book (you already know how to do that) Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!
This is a lovely application of identities for things but not as automated or rich as it could be... with an injection of RFID. I'm very keen on the idea of user-initiated RFIDs for objects with emotional investment (like books and vinyl LPs) that can be killed or blocked by a recipient if they value their privacy more than the game.
This is a really interesting, emotive 'supply chain'.
And while the RFID investment required by a Boots, which ships millions of lipsticks a year, is probably still prohibitive at $0.50 per tag, an individual with an abiding interest in natural history books or Motown vinyl or Australian stamps would likely be prepared to invest $0.50 in a cherished object’s future. Particularly if it allowed them to connect with future and past owners/collectors of that object, track its travels and recall forgotten details or annotations some time later. They are interested in the social life of objects.
Imagine a book that can say ‘I have been read by 36 people before you - in 3 cities (London, Sydney and Helsinki) - and all of them paused on page 132. I once spent 5 days in the lift at the British Library, just travelling up and down, after being released by a BookCrosser.’
Imagine a book that can tell its own story as well as the one contained within its pages.
:-)
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Posted at 03:41 PM in Collecting, Identities for things | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
29 September 2003
Scrapbooks
Test has a thoughtful post about scrapbooks as a 19th century equivalent of blogs, inspired by Ellen Gruber Garvey's 'Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating' in New Media: 1740-1915.
Scrapbooks were a 'coping' strategy for old media at a time when distribution via railroads and cheap printing processes led to an overwhelming surplus of popular magazines and newspapers. Garvey describes them as "a new subcategory of media - the cheap, the disposable, and yet somehow tantalizingly valuable, if only their value could be separated from their ephemerality".
Garvey draws on Michel de Certeau's notion of 'reading as poaching' to describe the cutting and recompiling of published texts, but takes issue with the aggressive, macho overtones of de Certeau's 'poaching', as the scrapbook maker seeks to recombine and redistribute as well as to reclaim.
She introduces the term 'Gleaning', taken after the practice of picking up that which is consciously left behind.
From Test: Gleaning, Exchanging and Vernacular Media (Thanks Matt)
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Posted at 11:21 AM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
17 September 2003
Copiers?
In a nation that flaunts its capacities to produce and consume, much of the culture's heat now lies with the ability to cut, paste, clip, sample, quote, recycle, customize and recirculate.
It is tempting to ascribe the Culture of the Copy to college students, but its values run deeper. The United States economy shed 44,000 manufacturing jobs last month, continuing a long-running trend away from production. Since the 1980's, when liberalized trade laws made it easier to "outsource" manufacturing to subcontractors in the developing world, companies like Nike or Tommy Hilfiger have competed in what Naomi Klein, in her 2000 book "No Logo," described as "a race toward weightlessness," in which production is a hindrance, not an asset. In the brand market, value lies not in making things but in copying one's logo onto as many of them as possible...
D.J.'s, file sharers, handbag cloners, student plagiarists and some bloggers simply do what brand companies do: they reproduce work made elsewhere at lower rates, adding their own signature and mix. The legal ramifications may be different, but the action is the same.
Copied from Beyond File-Sharing, a Nation of Copiers
Is this copying or might it instead be collecting, and bloggers the web equivalent of the 19th century natural history collectors? Blogging is - at its most basic - the collecting, describing and displaying of digital objects.
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.
Susan Sontag, quoted in Columbia World of Quotations on Bartleby
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Posted at 10:56 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
08 September 2003
Scoring friends
Mike Nguyen admits he's addicted. Nearly every day for the past five months, the 27-year-old in Tysons Corner has logged on to count his friends and the friends of his friends. And their friends. At last check, he was up to 210,185 in all.
"It helps you quantify how popular you are," said Jen Chung, a 26-year-old New York marketing strategist who has 432,475 friendsters. "People get bent out of shape if someone they don't think is as cool has more friends."
From A 'Friendster' Counting Culture: Site Becomes Who-Knows-How-Many Contest (via Many-To-Many)
Posted at 07:10 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
01 September 2003
Most curious and peculiar
Ooooh, the Insect Company - an online catalogue of 'oddities and rarities' - is a lovely browse (thanks Cait) but given the flippancy of its 'submit freak' button, I'd much rather see these beautiful specimens handled by someone with the sensitivity of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger.
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger trained in scientific illustration but now creates watercolours of misshapen insects collected in the surrounds of nuclear facilities.
I started in Seasdale next to the stone ring, and found 28 insects, bugs, beetles and flies, four of which had deformations on the feelers and wings of uneven lengths... I recorded the worst deformations on one bug larva of the soft family Miridae, which had a heavy deformation on the right wings, a seven point ladybird with wings of uneven length, and a leaf hopper which had a hole between the head and the thorax...
In spite of the heavy winds, one could detect that the places with the highest incidence of deformities were in the areas close to Sellafield, or in the main wind directions: such as Seascale, Drigg, Calder Bridge and Ponsonby.
From Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's The Future's Mirror
Vaguely related:
Posted at 11:43 PM in Collecting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
