A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

Today the Opinion section of the Al Jazeera Web site ran an article with the primary headline “Learning to trust the internet again” followed by the secondary headline “Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.” Given the recent beating that the very concept of truth has been taking, not only in the domain of politics but also, more recently, in that of health care, one might think that this article would be a breath of fresh air. Then the reader may proceed below those headlines to discover that the author of the article was Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia twenty years ago. So the article amounts to a “birthday party” for Wikipedia with Wales as the Master of Ceremonies.

Those who read this site regularly know that Wikipedia has been a valuable tool for me. Where music history is concerned, the best resource in English remains what is now The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is now available through the Oxford Music Online Web site. However, that site is not available without charge for general public access. My own ability to use it comes from the fact that I can get into the site once the San Francisco Public Library Web site has validated the identification code on my library card. As a result, I almost never provide hyperlinks into the Oxford site, since I prefer not to lead my readers into a paywall.

Instead, I provide hyperlinks into Wikipedia. When it comes to nuts-and-bolts data about composer biographies and lists of their compositions, I have rarely been disappointed. Indeed, in accounts of more arcane topics, such as the diversity of tuning systems, I have been just as satisfied; and, where ethnomusicology is concerned, it would not surprise me if Wikipedia was a better source than Oxford. My guess is that these assets of Wikipedia are due to a great abundance of contributors, probably consisting of graduate students and junior faculty members, that have been writing such content for other reasons and then appreciate being able to upload it to a site for the benefit of others. As one reads the Al Jazeera article, one quickly realizes that this is the world that Wales wanted Wikipedia to sustain.

However, it is important to acknowledge what Wales took (and continues to take) to be Wikipedia’s greatest asset:

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and that means that hundreds of thousands of people are also involved in the integrity of protecting the knowledge that we find on it.

While this may be true of the global community of music scholars, we all know that they amount to a rather small minority of the community of “citizen editors” that sustain Wales’ project. The fact is that, as recently as 2008, Wales’ ideal vision was taking a serious beating.

In February of that year, Mary Spicuzza wrote an article for SF Weekly, which was published in print as “Wikipidiots” and can still be found archived on the SF Weekly Web site under the title “Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco.” By way of endorsement, I wrote an article of my own on this site in which I offered my own take on Wales’ idealization of “citizen editors:”

While it is true that Plato tried to enhance the readability of his dialogs by providing his “characters” with (often contentious) personalities, I doubt that he would have appreciated the extent to which the discussion of entries in a would-be encyclopedia that has become a major Internet resource has assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!

Hopefully, at least some of my readers were able to observe that my hyperlink pointed to a Wikipedia page!

To be fair, things have improved since then; so I have no desire to rain on Wikimania 2021, Wales’ “all-virtual celebration” of the efforts of all those writers and editors that contributed content on a strictly voluntary basis. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the current century has emerged as one in which marketing has prevailed over truth in ways that those of my own generation could not have imagined, let alone anticipated. Wales’ ideal is one of “a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers;” but, in the “real world,” the very concept of “informed action” is on life-support and has been for longer that we would like to admit. So, while I can thank Wales with providing me with a tool that has become essential to my current work, I am more than a little skeptical that his ideals will be realized.

Elizabeth Hardwick on the Computer

The latest issue of The New York Review has a “preview” of the introduction that Darryl Pinckney wrote for The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, which will be published by New York Review Book this coming October 17. One sentence about Hardwick leapt out at me:

She blamed the computer for finishing a lot of books that ought not to have been.

This reminded me of a more humorous essay that Calvin Trillin wrote for The Nation when the phrase “word processor” was just entering our working vocabulary. Trilling wrote about his first experience with this software, marveling at how many more words he was processing compared with his past work with paper and pencil or at a typewriter. Those of us who could appreciate Trillin’s characteristic tone agreed that this would be one of those cases in which a tool for office efficiency could have unexpected consequences (not necessarily desirable) in other settings.

To be fair, I do all of my writing from a keyboard sitting in front of a computer screen. Nevertheless, I both understand and sympathize with the joint stance taken by Trillin and Hardwick. Indeed, I once had to review a book in which a large section of content had been copied and pasted, the result being that this extended passage appeared in exactly the same way in two different chapters. For that matter, even when word processing software was just moving out of research laboratories into the commercial sector, I was already suffering from reading doctoral theses that could be boiled down to only a few pages but, thanks to “word processing,” had been inflated to 100-page tomes.

Hardwick could be a notorious grumbler; and one of her favorite grumbles was, “Nobody knows how to write any more.” She died in 2007, by which time she probably realized the extremes to which that grumble could now be taken. Still, Pinckney’s recollection was a gentle nudge for me to consider my own habits.

The name “The Rehearsal Studio” was originally coined with more than the performing arts in mind. I saw it as an opportunity to “rehearse” the many ideas what were knocking around in my consciousness in anticipation that those ideas might eventually find their way into a book. Since then I have prepared any number of different chapter outlines for what that book might be, never making very much progress in fleshing any of the outlines into readable prose. Given the extent to which the very reputation of the book and the service it can provide has degraded, even over the lifetime of this site, I no longer feel bad about my procrastination.

These days I focus on writing about in-the-moment experiences with the intention of rendering in words my own in-the-moment impressions. Once those impressions have been established in my mind, I know how much background I need to provide to translate them from private feelings to public assertions. I have discovered that, over the years of doing this sort of thing, the practice has become relatively easy to me, even to the point that I can often frame an entire presentation during the half-hour swim I take shortly after waking every morning.

Mind you, I shall be the first to admit that I wish an editor were “in the loop.” I am sure that Hardwick would have been merciless in taking apart anything I have written. I would like to think, however, that she would then direct me on a path towards building things up again. On the other hand my own grumble still prevails: In an age in which content is limited by a cell phone screen, almost no one has the patience for anything that strives to be an essay. (Hell, I’m not sure that the current generation even has the patience to follow a shaggy dog story!)

Probably I should just fess up and acknowledge the recreational value of what I do. It may amount to little more than making mud pies at the beach, but probably less than I would have liked. Still, Alfred North Whitehead once told Suzanne Langer that the joy of making mud pies comes from sharing them, in which case putting them out to share seems like the best thing I can do!

Memorializing Robert Silvers

As a reader of The New York Review for more decades than I recall, I did not have to be reminded of the significant role that Robert Silvers played in editing the content of that "paper," as he called it. Indeed, I had mixed feeling about reading all the memorial encomiums in the latest issue, even when they were by some of my favorite contributors. Nevertheless, one sentence by Zadie Smith struck me as worth singling out of attention:

He [Silvers] was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least it came at the price of a readable sentence.

This may be the best diagnosis of the current backlash against expertise that I have encountered thus far. Yes, Michael Gove was probably on to something when he declared, "We've had enough of experts;" but, like many who make such sweeping generalizations, he could not distinguish the baby from the bathwater. Rather, he was incorrectly generalizing expertise as the work of a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it in making fun of rabid Wagner fans. Indeed, the last time I invoked Russell's turn of phrase was in a reaction to a full-page advertisement by the Harvard University Press (in The New York Review, no less) touting the number of "experts" they had published.

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the feeling that, while I believe in the "readable sentence" as much as Silvers and Smith do/did, it is hard to avoid feeling that it is an endangered species. Ultimately, it is being driven to extinction by the proliferation of tweets, suggesting that the Darwinian process may be as applicable to mindsets as it is to organisms. Put another way, we now live in a world in which our very resources of information, broadcast media as well as the Internet, no longer required the "readable sentence" as a useful too for communication. Indeed, those who even care about "readable sentences" are probably, themselves, doomed to extinction over the next decade or so. How else are we to explain the dangerous expressions of extremism that we encounter wherever we choose to look, even at the ballot box?

Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s Just-so-Stories about Current Music-Making

At the beginning of this past February, University of California Press released the book Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. The first thing a visitor to the Amazon.com Web page for this book is likely to see will probably be the following sentence:

Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era.

This turns out to be a prescient symptom of what anyone who commits to reading this book is likely to identify sooner rather than later, a plethora of inaccuracies that most likely are the product of the deadly embrace of poor writing and poor editing. Using that Web page as a point of departure, the inquiring mind will quickly discover that Seth Brodsky’s book From 1989 or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious jumped that gun by about a week or two, which might be attributed to statistical insignificance, were it not for the fact that Brodsky’s book was also published by University of California Press! However, those interested in a wider margin will find it in Jonathan Kramer’s Postmodern Music Postmodern Listening, which was first released in hardcover by Bloomsbury Academic in August of 2016. Furthermore, most of the book had been written before Kramer died in 2004 and the task fell to Robert Carl to edit a readable text.

None of this should be surprising when one considers Rutherford-Johnson’s primary thesis, which is that the prodigious innovations of technology that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the emergence of a “music culture” heavily dominated by the marketplace. Note that Rutherford-Johnson never explicitly mentions that the “fall” of his title refers to the Berlin Wall. Indeed, he never really says very much about any fall. I ran a few spot checks with some young people who are just beginning to try to rev up a career in music. I showed them the cover of the book and asked if they could make the connection between the year 1989 and the word “fall” in the title. None of them could.

That thoroughly unscientific test discloses an issue about the dominant marketplace that Rutherford-Johnson never considers. Jürgen Habermas’ magisterial The Theory of Communicative Action includes a lengthy chapter in which the author pulls together a “diagnosis of the times” based on multiple sources of the writings of Max Weber. His analysis concludes that a capitalist society whose value system is based only on market value is fated to suffer two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom.

This is an insight that reaches far beyond the study of social science as an academic discipline. One has only to read Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original to appreciate how much freedom Monk lost after he signed with Columbia. As to loss of meaning, Rutherford-Johnson’s book can easily stand as a case study.

Referring again to the Amazon Web page, we read that “Rutherford-Johnson is a London-based music journalist and critic.” From this we can assume that he has written and probably continues to write about music in great abundance. However, the text of this book seems to indicate that his writing is, for the most part, based on artifacts. Those artifacts may very well include both audio and video recordings, as well as scores and other text documents by and about the composers covered in his book. However, there are few, if any signs, that he has ever written about the immediate experience of listening to a performance of any of the works covered in this book.

I do not make this accusation lightly. Thanks to performing groups like the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and a generous number of venues in this city which one may visit to go out on the “bleeding edge” of adventurous music making, I discovered that I had attended performances of more of the works discussed in this book than I had expected. In almost every one of those cases, I found it hard to believe that Rutherford-Johnson had enjoyed the benefit of a similar experience, leading me to believe that he was relying more on text sources (inevitably written for promotional purposes) than on the actual acts of listening. This left me questioning what he said about any of the composers examined in this book, hence my conclusion about loss of meaning.

Unfortunately, one does not have to dive deep into the repertoire of performances to find evidence of sloppy editing. My favorite blooper comes in the final chapter when Rutherford-Johnson confuses Florestan, the alter ego of Robert Schumann, with the heroic political prisoner in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio. One would have thought that anyone used to editing texts about classical music would have been able to spot this a mile away. Guess not.

Most likely this book as an unfortunate case of an author biting off more than he could chew. It would be interesting to see a collection of his published reviews. I would hope that he has the chops to provide coherent and readable accounts of his own first-person experiences. Trying to translate those experiences into some kind of hypothesis about a new world order, on the other hand, is definitely not in his wheelhouse.

The “Vanity Projects” of Yehudi Menuhin on DVD

It took over two months for me to go through the box of eleven DVDs that serve as a “video appendix” to Warner Classics’ The Menuhin Century collection. This was due, in part, to the fact that, because my highest priority is on listening, most of my time is spent either at concerts or with recordings. About halfway through the effort, I realized that, if I was going to see the light at the end of the tunnel at all, it would be best to focus only on the performances and dispense with the “documentary” content (scare quotes intended to suggest that what I did see of that content was not particularly compelling).

Overall, this is a rather unbalanced collection of performances. The basic organization is as follows:

1. Two DVDs consisting almost entirely of short (“encore” style) performances made by Paul Gordon and Bernd Bauer filming at the Charlie Chaplin Studios in 1947
2. One DVD of films and telecasts from Paris, about half of which involve Menuhin playing with his sister Hephzibah
3. Four DVDs of video documents of concerts given by Menuhin in the Soviet Union in 1987 and 1989, directed by Bruno Monsaingeon
4. One additional Monsaingeon DVD divided between Menuhin playing The Four Seasons with the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Opus 77 violin concerto of Johannes Brahms (along with two encores of Johann Sebastian Bach) with Kurt Masur conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

The distribution across these categories suggests something that probably occurred to many as soon as they opened the box enclosing all of The Menuhin Century in its entirety: This vast effort was very much a “vanity project” by Monsaingeon based on the desire to create a hagiographic account of Menuhin’s life based on 70 years of audio and video recordings. This may go down well with those harboring enthusiastically passionate memories of Menuhin in concert, on television, or on recordings; but, as accounts of the audio portion of this collection have suggested, those primarily seeking stimulating listening experiences are likely to find themselves disappointed.

Most interesting are probably the films made at the Chaplin Studios. In a filmed conversation with Humphrey Burton, Menuhin explained that he was approached by Gordon to make a series of films that would provide a concert experience in a movie hall. In many respects these films are the venerable ancestors of the HD videos that are now being captured in concert halls and opera houses around the world, many of which are projected in real-time to audiences seated in movie theaters. Gordon’s pioneering efforts are thus interesting simply for his having achieved them, even if many of them come off as awkward or even flawed.

Much of the content overlaps with those “Virtuoso” recordings that, as Menuhin himself explained, were based on listening to recordings of Jascha Heifetz. Indeed, it is possible that Gordon approached Heifetz first and without success. (On the basis of what we know about Heifetz’ personality, his reaction would not be surprising.) What is most important is that Gordon managed to pull off the project, regardless of who his soloist was.

Regardless, also, of the quality of Gordon’s techniques as a director, these short films provide a significant perspective on Menuhin as a performer relatively early in his career. That perspective also takes in other performers whose careers would rise during the second half of the twentieth century. My own interest was particularly piqued by opportunities to see Antal Dorati in action, both accompanying Menuhin at the piano and conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Hollywood (which may or may not have been a pickup group assembled for Gordon’s project).

If, from a technical point of view, the results are somewhat crude by current standards, they are still far more satisfying than those produced by Monsaingeon. This is were that motive of hagiography rears its ugly head. Through a series of performances of both concertos and chamber music, Monsaingeon’s capture and editing techniques linger over images of Menuhin as if they were sacred icons. In the concerto recordings, when the camera is not locked on Menuhin, it is locked on members of the orchestra staring at him in rapt admiration. Shots of what the conductor is doing are minimal and are sometime muddled by ill-conceived overlay techniques. The result is that anyone familiar with the video work of Jordan Whitelaw or, more recently, Barbara Willis Sweete will find it difficult to watch any of Monsaingeon’s videos without squirming.

Those who make the entire journey through The Menuhin Century are thus likely to come away feeling that the journey had more to do with the cult of personality than with the underling arts and crafts of making music.

Our Illiterate News Writers

When it comes to watching local news on television, my wife and I seem to agree that ABC7 News is at least marginally a cut above the other networks. They seem to know how to keep the chatter-to-content ratio under control; and their reporters tend to be pretty good about convincing us that they understand what they are saying. The same, alas, cannot be said about what happens when those reporters create text for ABC7 Web pages.

Last night was a big local news night. A trial harvest of 850 pounds of Dungeness crab was about to be tested, first to determine whether the threat of neurotoxins had passed and second (and more subjectively) to assess quality and determine a fair price for product. Since Dungeness crab is one of my guilty pleasures, I have been following this pretty closely, more through the Web site than by watching television. Imagine, then, my surprise to encounter the sort of lead sentence that used to send the entire staff of The New Yorker into fits of uncontrollable laughter. The reporter was Melanie Woodrow; and, given current work practices, it is reasonable to assume that she typed this herself:

With their lively hoods on the line, crab fishermen are eagerly awaiting the results of a quality test that will determine the price set for crab.

Apparently, Woodrow is more accustomed to writing about fashion (What the well-dressed crabber is wearing?) than about quality of product. This would be a great excuse to joke about what happens when editors are no longer in the loop, but my guess is that neither Woodrow nor any of her colleagues care very much about the blooper that emerged from poor editing.

Second-Class Metadata

One advantage to viewing the world through the lens of an RSS reader is that you learn how negligent many information sources can be about their metadata. Where journalism is concerned, we readers already have to contend with a pathetic decline in editing quality. In the RSS world there is a good chance that editors have no idea that metadata sources exist, let alone that they might carry some significance for readers, as well as search engines.

For the rest of us, however, metadata errors may be treated like those little bits of editorial incompetence that The New Yorker collects for available space at the bottom of their columns. The RSS feed for ABC7 news in San Francisco turned up a doozy of a summary this morning:

At San Francisco International Airport federal agents found opium inside 66 bars of hallowed out soap.

I suppose it is possible that there was an editor who did not think this was erroneous. Perhaps (s)he just believed that opium was the religion of the people.

The Wikipedia Fight Club Goes to Congress

Back in March of 2008, it seemed worthwhile to call attention to the extent to which editing of the content of Wikipedia articles was succumbing to a "fight club" mentality. Things have calmed down considerably since then to the point that, when used properly, the whole idea of a wiki can actually prove to be a beneficial resource. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been more proactive in trying to detect and prevent malicious use of what would otherwise be a source of useful information.

I was therefore amused to read this morning the following lead sentence in an article by Technology Reporter Joe Miller for BBC News:

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

Of course reading this report would not be any fun without at least one example. My favorite would have to be updating the page for Donald Rumsfeld to describe him as an "alien lizard who eats Mexican babies." Miller makes it clear that this is more likely the work of Congressional staffers, rather than the Congressmen themselves (although there is always the possibility that one of those staffers basically takes an overheard remark and then tries to turn it into "Wikipedia truth"). Ultimately, this story is not so much about the integrity of Wikipedia as it is about the Congress as a workplace, since it carries the suggestion that the workplace is closer in spirit to Animal House than to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington!

Self-Editing and its Discontents

After reading yesterday's post, I found three sentences that needed to be corrected because they did not make any sense, reminding me, one again, that self-editing is an invitation to garbled communication (if not worse)!

The Latest Round of Illiteracy within the IT Community

I had to blink twice when I saw today's Virtually Speaking article by Dan Kusnetzky on ZDNet this morning:

Fusion-IO, flash cache and the importants of a good algorithm

My first reaction was to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was a cute way to abbreviate "important factors" in the interest of a shorter and snappier headline. Reading the article, however, convinced me that this was not the case. The appropriate word here would have been "importance;" but neither author nor editor (assuming there was one) seems to have caught this as an error to be corrected.

Even THE NEW YORK TIMES Commits Editorial Fumbles

It was a real pleasure reading Steve Smith's review on the Web site for The New York Times of the revival performance of John Cage's "HPSCHD" given in New York this past Friday (which was probably also the East Coast premiere of the composition). (The article is supposed to appear in print tomorrow.) It was an even greater pleasure to discover that Neely Bruce, who had played harpsichord at the world premiere at the University of Illinois, was one of the performers. Less of a pleasure was the caption of the photograph of his participation, which identified him as "Bruce Neely!" Apparently, editing is no longer take seriously, even at The New York Times.

Shifting Narrators, Shifting Pronouns

I happen to belong to a book group, which, after considerable deliberation and postponement, has finally decided to venture into the world of William Faulkner. Faulkner means a lot to me for a variety of reasons. When I was living in Israel, his texts were my primary link back to the power of the English language, both what it could express and how those thoughts could be expressed. More importantly, however, reading Faulkner has, for me, always been an invitation to research. Few (if any) of his texts allow for casual reading; and I find it impossible to read any of those texts without a pencil at hand. My reading of “The Bear” quickly descended into filling the margins until no room was left, after which I started constructing family trees on larger pieces of paper. It was only later that I discovered books (and now Web pages) that provide those family trees (with considerable annotation). These are helpful for post hoc consultation, but reading Faulkner is all about the sensemaking. If you do not figure these things out for yourself, you are missing out on the fundamental raison d’être for reading him in the first place.

One of my most treasured Faulkner volumes in The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley for The Viking Press. This is part of a Viking series, each volume of which was intended to introduce an author to the reader by a judicious selection of texts determined and organized by the editor. Because all of Faulkner’s texts amount to an extended (and highly subjective) history of the South from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Cowley made the bold move of organizing his selections in the chronological order of that history, rather than according to the published volumes from which they were taken.

Two of our book group’s selections come from the earliest years of that history, “Wedding in the Rain” from Absalom, Absalom! and “Was,” the first story in Go Down, Moses. There is also a second story from Go Down, Moses, “The Old People.” I cannot remember the last time I read “Wedding in the Rain.” I only remember that I read it in the context of Cowley’s synopsis of Absalom, Absalom! (prepared for his Introduction to The Portable Faulkner); and, at the time, I was focused almost entirely on “reading for the plot” (as Peter Brooks put it in the title of his book). However, one of the things I got out of Brooks’ book is the way in which Faulkner plays fast and loose with who the narrator is as the narrative unfolds. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, even in “Wedding in the Rain,” one encounters a major shift in narrator about half way through the story.

Now I find I have to deal with an editorial decision that Cowley made with “Was.” It turns out that, because this is the first story in Go Down, Moses, it has a three-paragraph “overture” (with no periods, by the way) that introduces a few of the names that the reader will then encounter. Following those paragraphs, the second word of the story itself is “he;” and the reader alert to Faulkner’s ways immediately reacts by asking “Who is ‘he?’” For better or worse, Cowley decided to help out the reader in his inclusion of “Was” in The Portable Faulkner, first by dropping the “overture” (probably for being too intimidating) and then replacing the “he” with “Cass Edmonds” (not that the reader would have any idea who this is, but at least “he” has a name).

This is the sort of thing that starts my research antennae twitching. I have decided to read “Was” from the Go Down, Moses volume. It’s not that I do not appreciate Cowley’s help, but I do not want him to spoil the fun. After all, having read “Wedding in the Rain,” I know that the referent of “he” may change abruptly when I least expect it; and I would rather take that as a challenge to my own sensemaking, rather than let an informed editor clarify matters for me!

Technology Discovers a Job it Tried to Eliminate

It is very rare to find advocacy for the human factor on a technocentric Web site. Nevertheless, last night Fox Van Allen filed a story for Tecca that actually used the phrase “professional editing” with absolutely no disparagement. It also began with the sentence:

Editors are pretty important people.

What was it that awakened Van Allen from his technocentric slumbers? The answer is Barnes & Noble (of course, of course). It turns out that B&N management has blocked any use of the work “kindle” in any text that is included in the Nook Book Store, since, in capitalized form, it is the name of a competing product. What happened was that a blogger named Philip Howard decided to try reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace on his Nook and encountered:

It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …

As Howard reported in his post, he eventually realized that “Nookd” had replaced the word “kindled.” Apparently what counts for editing over at B&N amounted to a Replace All operation on the full text with a case-independent “kindle” being replaced by “Nook.” Mind you, real editing would have involved a full review of the final text before it was released; and in this particular case we happen to be talking about War and Peace. What would that do to the overall efficiency of daily operations? After all, Barnes & Noble is a business, and a business has to have priorities!

Is Encyclopædia Britannica Really Ready for the Digital Age?

Today the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica used their blog to post the discontinuation of their print edition and establish themselves strictly in the online domain.  As I discovered in a post of my own from April of 2008, this is not the first time that Encyclopædia Britannica has tried to take on Wikipedia on the basis of quality of content.  Nevertheless, I suspect that Britannica has a long way to go, at least as far as my personal needs are concerned.

Once again, the editors are trying to lure eyeballs through a free access offer.  Once again, I have taken them up on their offer.  Bearing in mind that I always design particularly challenging tests, I still feel my first experience was a telling one.  Because I happened to be chatting about him last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I decided that György Kurtág’s name would make a good test case.  I used only his last name, typing it first without the accent.  The bottom line is that Britannica could not find a match for his name either with or without the accent.  What made this pathetic, rather than merely sad, however, is that the search without the accent turned up a Google Ad for CDs of this composer’s music available through ArkivMusic.com!

In other words Google Ads knows more about Kurtág than Britannica does!  Meanwhile, even with the inadequacies explicitly cited by the Wikipedia editors, the Wikipedia entry for Kurtág is as good a place to begin looking for background on this composer as any (unless, like myself, you can get access to Grove Music Online with your library card).  Yes, Britannica has a tradition of employing quality writers to provide material for their entries;  but, while I am not fan of crowdsourcing, I fear that, whatever their aspirations, Britannica just cannot keep up with the “knowledge explosion.”

Indeed, it would appear that Britannica cannot even muster editorial quality when presenting themselves.  Consider this “infographic” included on another one of today’s blog posts:

This is as sloppy as it is jumbled.  Would you really want to give these guys your eyeballs?

In Praise of IMSLP

I think I have Scott Foglesong of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to thank for first making me aware of the Petrucci Music Library at the IMSLP Web site.  For those unfamiliar with this service, here is the “About Us” text from the home page:

IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project. The logo [which appears at the top of the home page] is a capital letter A, taken from the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, published in 1501. Its author, Ottaviano Petrucci, is this library's namesake.

While working on an Examiner.com preview piece for a concert by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra featuring Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 (better known as the “Goldberg Variations”), I was delighted to discover that this site included a PDF file of a facsimile of the first edition of this music in Bach’s series of Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) publications.  This is not the sort of thing you are going to prop up on your piano’s music stand, but it is about as close as you are going to get to Bach’s own account of this body of music.  The Internet really is changing everything, at least when it comes to sparing those of us with limited resources from having to travel to distant libraries, where we then have to worry about handling anything from the stacks with extraordinary care.

Indeed, one could get lost just reading the “Featured” box on the IMSLP home page.  If BWV 988 is not enough, the autograph manuscript of the BWV 582 C minor passacaglia has recently been added to the collection.  For those with more nineteenth-century tastes, there are also autographs of Johannes Brahms Opus 90 F major symphony (his third), Camille Saint-Saëns’s Opus 22 G minor piano concerto (his second), and one of the great hits of bel canto opera, Gaetano Donizetti’s Emilia di Liverpool.  (Say what?)  The source pages for all entries are kind enough to provide both pages counts and file sizes, so you have a pretty good idea what you are getting into before clicking are a download.

The whole site is implemented as a wiki.  So, from a look-and-feel point of view, it follows the basic conventions that any Wikipedia reader (or contributor) knows and loves.  This also means that all contributions are the result of voluntary efforts, which implies the corollary that there are a lot of people out there (probably of varying levels of music scholarship) putting in generous amounts of time for the common good of those for whom “music” means something more than using iPod ear-buds to create “background insulation” from the harsh assaults of the “real world.”  It also appears that these volunteers are less inclined to the “fight club” mentality that has undermined the value of Wikipedia in certain subject domains.  It is nice to know that, where the sharing of scores is concerned, the community of those who both love and study music is a comfortably stodgy bunch!

Honoring the Editor

I have not been taking Reuters to task as much as I used to do, although every now and then I still seem to find a blooper that gets under my skin.  The fact is that I abandoned my Reuters RSS feeds some time ago;  so, if I encounter Reuters at all, it is probably during one of my rare ventures into Yahoo! News, whose blunders always seem to exceed any I found in Reuters by (at least) an order of magnitude.  As a result, when I encountered an instance of Reuters doing something right this morning, I could not say whether or not it was particularly new;  but it definitely deserves credit.

I encountered this “something” while reading a piece by Kristina Cooke under the headline, “China news agency leases plum Times Square ad space.”  At the very bottom of the article was the following parenthesis:

(Editing by Mark Egan and Eric Walsh)

This is the first time I have seen such a credit.  Usually that space is used to acknowledge other “contributors,” without making it clear what was contributed.  Given the extent to which the Internet has pretty much sucked the life out of any qualities that distinguish journalism as a profession, the idea of acknowledging by name those involved in the editing side of the profession is a rather astonishing bit of relief.  At the very least it is a gentle reminder that those who edit are as responsible for what one reads as are those who report.

You've Got Arianna Huffington!

The best way to approach this morning’s news about AOL and Huffington Post may well be through the first sentence of the story filed by Associated Press Technology Writer Michael Liedtke:

Internet company AOL Inc. is buying news hub Huffington Post in a $315 million deal that represents a bold bet on the future of online news.

However, those curious about just what the future behind that bet is likely to be will have to wade all the way through the Liedtke’s final paragraph, which basically tells you everything about Huffington Post that you need to know:

Huffington Post grew quickly from startup to online colossus. Over time, it launched city-specific pages and developed a roster of sections such as food and books. The work of its 70-person paid staff is augmented by content from news outlets and 6,000 bloggers who write for free.

In other words “the future of online news” is one of 6000 unpaid bloggers.  Put another way, online news will be “liberated” from professional journalism.  It is hard to imagine how a paid staff of 70 can effectively edit 6000 bloggers.  Those familiar with the Huffington Post know how this problem is resolved.  The paid staff is not responsible for editing.  Editing is a “community-based” undertaking, basically managed through comments submitted to articles, often with the style and substance of the “Wikipedia Fight Club.”  However, since the future of the press conference seems to be heading in the same direction, that just means that the future will be one of press conferences without journalists, just as those journalists will also fade from the platforms of online news.  In other words these are just more bricks in the wall of ignorance behind which the consciousness industry ultimately plans to isolate the American public.  After all, the uninformed voter is the demagogue’s strongest weapon!

Is Reading Supposed to be Comfortable?

I rather like the amount of background provided by the BBC News report of the controversial new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  For those yet to feel the repercussions of this story, it concerns the editorial decisions of Alan Gribben, Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama;  and, as of this morning, I would guess that the level of controversy over his editing of Twain will be matched only by the reaction to the BBC describing him as a “Twain scholar.”  From my point of view, that phrase is not only an inaccurate description of Gribben but also an insult to Twain.

What has created such a stir has been primarily Gribben’s decision to replace all instances of that notorious N-word with “slave.”  Similar reasoning apparently prompted him also to replace all occurrences of “injun” with “Indian.”  The BBC account reports Gribben as saying that he has given many public readings of Twain, from which he observed that “when he replaced the [N-] word with ‘slave’, audiences were more comfortable.”

The BBC editors were rather clever in setting the light under which this remark would be read.  They preceded it with a quote given by Cindy Lovell, Executive Director of The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, to Reuters:

He wrote to make us squirm and to poke us with a sharp stick.  That was the purpose.

Not only do I heartily endorse Lovell, but also I wish to be bold enough to suggest that her remark applies to just about any author worth reading.  There is something infantile about reading only for the comfort of experiencing what we already know.  Reading matter that lacks any sign of that “sharp stick” is probably not worth the effort of reading.

This brings to mind not only what publishers are doing these days in the name of market share but also the recent advertising campaign for the iPad.  I am referring to all those billboards that show an iPad comfortably settled into a lap at the near end of a pair of outstretched legs, suggesting that the best place for your iPad is in the hammock in your back yard (even if your yard lacks a hammock or your home lacks a yard).  This may be an appropriate setting for a text that makes only marginal effort to engage with the mind (leading me to suggest that this explains why Decision Points has been such a popular Kindle gift);  but it has little to do with reading, at least in the ways that I hope our schools try to approach that activity.  From this point of view, my argument amounts to an extended elaboration on how The Times of London chose to describe Gribben’s edition:  They called it “a well-intentioned act of cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind.”  I wish I could have said it that well.

Solitary Professions

A high point in my (far from standard) television viewing over this past holiday weekend was definitely the Book TV broadcast of a discussion with Rick Atkinson on the occasion of his receipt of the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.  Atkinson gave his own take on the extent to which writing is a solitary profession, a proposition that was hardly new to anyone who takes writing seriously.  From my own point of view, I would certainly not contest that writing about music is a solitary profession, even if, as I wrote yesterday, both performing and listening are “behaviors that take place in the social world.”

I do not see this as paradoxical.  Rather it constitutes an elaboration on the extent to which listening is a matter of sensemaking (or, as Friedrich Hayek put it, bringing “sensory order” to the stimuli of sense data).  Those data originate in the objective world, which is why they can be captured through scientific instrumentation and subjected to analysis through scientific methodologies.  Nevertheless, those data are produced in the social world;  and, while there are any number of sophisticated analytic tools that may be applied to them, it is not necessarily the case that we can interpret what those tools tell us in ways that take the social world into account.  At the same time the listening itself is a subjective matter of what mind does in order to achieve sensory order, whether we model mind according to Gerald Edelman’s elaborations on Hayek’s speculations or on Ernst Cassirer’s approach to how we arrive at a capacity for symbolic expression.

Nevertheless, any sensory order that is achieved is like that tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it unless that subjective “I” is capable of giving an account (in the sense of Plato’s use of “λόγος” in “Theaetetus”) of what that order is.  This is where writing, particularly descriptive writing, enters the picture.  However, as Jacques Derrida put it, writing is far from a simple matter of putting marks on paper.  Rather, as Derrida’s translator Barbara Johnson put it, writing is “any differential trace structure … that also inhabits speech.”  In other words writing involves creating a system of marks (a “trace structure”) grounded in speech;  and, by being grounded in speech, writing is also grounded in the social world.  In other words we write in order to communicate;  and we communicate according to our speech practices (or, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, our “communicative actions”).

A key insight in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action is that any communicative action must, of necessity, “inhabit” objective, subjective, and social worlds simultaneously.  The writer must deal with the subjectivity of his/her sensemaking;  but (s)he must deal with it within significant objective constraints (most of which fall within the domain of grammar) on the “system of marks” that (s)he creates.  At the same time those marks are subject to the constraints of logic and rhetoric, both of which address the efficacy of speech practices in the objective and social worlds, respectively.  In other words the writer works within a formidable array of constraints;  and dealing with those constraints is basically a “too many cooks” problem.  The act of writing must be strictly between the writer and the marks.  Once the marks have been fixed, they may (and ideally should) be passed to an editor for feedback;  but the writing itself cannot be anything other than solitary.

Really Bad Timing

There seems to be a grim undercurrent of irony in the chronology of events associated with the Skype systems crash.  Word seems to have come first to CNET News by way of The Digital Home, Don Reisinger’s contribution to the CNET Blog Network (with the implication that he is not a CNET employee).  Reisinger first put up his post yesterday at 8:58 AM (Pacific time) and then added time-stamped updates as follows:

Skype appears to be suffering an outage.

Twitter users around the globe are taking to the social network to report that Skype is down for them. The tweets started hitting Twitter this morning and continue as of this writing. Users are also reporting that their mobile applications, including those on Android and on the iPhone, are inoperable.

I tested the Skype app on my Mac and it is down as of this writing. My Skype iPhone app is also down. CNET's Rafe Needleman had been experiencing outage issues this morning, but said that his service was soon restored.

Update 9:18 a.m. PT: Skype wrote in an e-mail to CNET this morning that it's "assessing the matter now and its extent. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users."

Update 11:12 a.m. PT: Skype then followed that up with a blog post shedding more light on the outage.

According to the company, it "noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn't typical or expected." After investigating the issue, Skype found that "a large number of supernodes," which act as the service's phone directory of sorts, "were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype."

To fix the issue, Skype's engineers are currently "creating new 'mega-supernodes'" that should get the service running normally in "a few hours." Skype's group video chatting feature could take even longer to be fixed.

Update 2:27 p.m. PT: As promised, Skype says that its service is "now returning to normal." However, the company also noted on its Twitter account that it could still "take several hours for everyone to be able to sign in again."

We will continue to share details as we hear more.

This morning, at 6:46 AM, Reisinger put up a new post to update the progress in which he estimated that the traffic level was still only 30% of the normal amount.

Going back to yesterday, however, note that Skype sent its first “official” notification to CNET some time before Reisinger’s 9:18 AM update.  Meanwhile, at 9:58 AM Bloomberg ran an analysis story about Skype prepared by Joseph Galante and based on an interview with CEO Tony Bates conducted on December 20.  As one might guess, the content was primarily promotional and therefore highly upbeat:

Skype Technologies SA Chief Executive Officer Tony Bates will fuel growth by adding corporate partnerships and hiring engineers to build new products as the company readies for an initial public offering.

Bates, who joined the Internet calling company in October from Cisco Systems Inc., said in an interview Dec. 20 that agreements with other companies will be an increasingly important part of Skype’s development. He plans to hire as many as 500 people next year, most of whom will be engineers, to focus on new products and make sure that consumers have the same experience using Skype on their phone, desktop or television.

“More and more of us are living in a world of mobility that started off as convenience but now is becoming a richer form of communication,” said Bates, 43, at the company’s new 90,000-square-foot office in Palo Alto, California. “What we think is most powerful is not one modality -- it’s how multiplatform you can become. Consumers want choices.”

Bates faces the challenge of building new sources of revenue and coaxing money out of Skype’s more than 560 million users, of which only 1.4 percent pay for the service, according to a regulatory filing. Skype, which started as a way for consumers to chat for free, is developing premium services such as group video calling, pursuing corporate accounts and plans to raise $100 million in an IPO.

“Companies like Skype have a tremendous amount of opportunities,” said Bates. “You have to focus on the things that matter.”

The timing could not have been worse, raising the old Watergate question about the service outage:  What did Galante and Bloomberg know, and when did they know it?  Fortunately, when we read “below the fold” we find the answer.  Under the subheading “Growing Pains,” Galante wrote the following:

Today, some Skype users had difficulty logging on to the service, a matter Skype said it was investigating.

To be fair Galante may not have appreciated the magnitude of the problem Skype was experiencing;  and, on the basis of Reisinger’s chronology, it would be fair to say that Skype itself had not yet assessed that magnitude.

Nevertheless, the chronology reminds me of one of the rules I was taught when working at the MIT campus radio station (back in the days when MIT had the rights to the call letters WTBS, which, at that time, stood for Technology, rather than Turner, Broadcasting System).  Even though we only ran commercials on our closed-circuit AM system, the rule was that, if news breaks about any kind of air crash, all advertising for airlines gets pulled for at least 24 hours.  No one wants to hear an ad about flying to Bermuda right after a report of a plane crashing, regardless of where the crash took place.  By that logic it is hard to imagine anyone (particularly someone for whom Skype has become a major tool for doing global business) considering serious investment in Skype at a time when their service is on the fritz in a really big way.

If Bloomberg was in a bit of a bind over whether or not to run Galante’s story, the same cannot be said of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose Business Report section now draws heavily on Bloomberg sources (explicitly credited as such).  The Chronicle ran the story, pretty much as it had originally appeared, this morning, which is to say at a time when just about anyone following digital technology news knew about the Skype outage and may even have been a user whose service had not yet been restored.  Was this really the best time for the Chronicle to shuttle the story into print (next to a color photograph of a smiling Bates)?  Who made this call in an editorial capacity?  Enquiring minds want to know!