Vacuum

Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, Third Edition

Danny Goodman's Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (3d edition) is an exhaustive encyclopedia of all of the features and pitfalls that you have to deal with when you write Ajax applications in browsers.

As my friend JP says, "browser crap makes me cry".

Thanks to O'Reilley for the review copy. It covers CSS, the DOM, XMLHttpRequest, Javascript, and more.

One complaint: the glossary is not cross-referenced with the index, so if you find a concept there you still have to surf through 1291 pages to find it. This is a book that begs to be used with ORA's Safari so that you can look things up by content.

Technorati Tags: ajax, webdev, dhtml, firefox

Writing a novel on 3x5 cards (Alison Gresik describes Dorothy Bryant's system)

Writer Alison Gresik describes Dorothy Bryant's system for writing novels starting with 3x5 cards:

On Monday, my day off, I picked up Dorothy Bryant's book, Writing a Novel and reread the planning chapter. Bryant is the author of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You, among many other books, and she has a unpretentious approach to the mechanics of novel writing. Even though I've written short stories before, even a linked collection, I've been somewhat mystified about how to tackle a novel. How much should I map out ahead of time? How do I know when I'm finished planning and can start to write?

Bryant describes a system of planning that uses 3x5 file cards. She writes short notes for settings, character, and plot on these cards, and throws them all into a box. She reads through all the cards each day, and writes more, until she finds she's repeating herself and not coming up with new material. Then she categorizes the cards into piles. Putting all the cards together and shuffling them around shows her where there are holes in her plot or gaps in her character sketches. She writes more cards to fill these gaps, and then she's ready to begin her first draft.

Sounds promising - I have the book on order on interlibrary loan to see it in her own words.

UPDATE:

From the newsletter Holt Uncensored #312 in 2002:

Dear Holt Uncensored:

Could you please let those of us who would like to buy this Dorothy Bryant book about writing a novel where and how we can get it? I just talked with a wonderful woman at Kepler's (they're all wonderful, of course) who found the book and a 510 number of the publisher, but she was afraid it might not be available any longer. Bookpeople and Ingram do not carry it.

Debbie Duncan

Holt responds: "Writing a Novel" is still in print and available from Ata Books, 1928 Stuart St., Berkeley, CA 94703. Pre-paid order by check. $9.95, plus $2 shipping, plus .80 tax if you live in California. If you want ordering information on all of Dorothy Bryant's books, write to the same address. Phone 510 841-9613, FAX 510 548-9846

And the main Dorothy Bryant web site has more details and ordering information.

Guide to Miriam Hilton Papers, Northern Michigan University Archives

Guide to Miriam Hilton Papers from the NMU archives.

Collection Number: Univ Series 63
Volume: 2 boxes (.6 linear feet)
Inclusive Dates: 1949-1975
Prepared by Kim Shannon and Marcus C. Robyns

Biographical Note:

Miriam Hilton was born in Iran, daughter of John and Ruth Elder who were missionaries there. She received her BA from Wellesley College and her MA from the University of Michigan. In 1947, Hilton married Earl Hilton. In 1974, she authored the first book length history of Northern Michigan University entitled, Northern Michigan University: The First Seventy-Five Years. From time to time, prior to Earl Hilton’s retirement, Miriam Hilton taught adjunct courses for the Departments of English and History. Over the years, she has also become known for her very active volunteer service activities in both the Marquette community at large and in her church.

Scope and Content Note:

The collection contains the papers of Miriam Hilton. The collection mainly documents her research and writing of the book. The collection includes book drafts, notes, news clippings, alumni questionnaires, and transcriptions of faculty interviews (Meyland, Hedgecock, Wahtera, and O'Dell). Also included are records relating to Church Women United of Marquette and writings of Hilton's father, Dr. John Elder.

Processed, March 1995

Discardia season is nigh - time to fill a bag with books

Every three months comes Discardia, a floating holiday that celebrates letting go. This season's is just ended, though in the spirit of the holiday you can let go of precise date arithmetic too.

Dinah Sanders has a daily Discardian tip of the day. I'm looking at the one on filling up a bag with books you no longer need to own and eyeing the shelves.

Technorati Tags: discardia, discardian

Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins

Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins (full text Cognet pdf, free on some campuses, from MIT):

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "in the wild".

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that differ from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them.

The Librarything tag cloud for this book right now says

anthropology(1) cog psych(1) Cognition(2) cognitive science(3) distributed cognition(1) ethnographic(1) interaction(1) learning(1) natural history(1) navagation(1) organisational learning(1) psychology(1)

Hutchins article on Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit has a good detailed example of this approach in use:

The excerpt of cockpit activity presented above is only approximately one
and a half minutes in duration, yet it is very rich. It contains within it
illustrations of many of the central concepts of a theory of distributed cognition.
We will present and discuss these concepts by going through the elements of the
example in chronological order and noting what the events in this example tell
us about the nature of this particular system and about systems of distributed
cognition in general.

Book cover image, from MIT Press:

Note taking as an art of transmission (Ann Blair)

Noted from Ann Blair's article of the same name in Critical Inquiry: Arts of Transmision

As the reader heaped historica under topical headings in a notebook, he or she accumulated material from which to write. Young, student readers were encouraged to take notes with no specific purpose. Older, savvier readers and authors tended to take notes targeted to specific projects. 42 Thus the only notebooks of Pierre Bayle's that survive date from before he started publishing; after that Bayle is presumed to have taken notes that were directly integrated into a text for publication--possibly by cutting and pasting them into a text for the printer, or by marking them up directly for publication, as he did with letters he received from which he wanted to quote. 43 A notebook well stocked in examples targeted to the topic of a book can explain the copiousness of many an Early Modern text. Bodin's Six Books of a Commonweale accumulates examples in such abundance that his argumentative points are at times obscured; in his Theatrum Bodin considers different aspects of a question in separate places and offers explanations that contradict one another without realizing the tensions within his abundant material. 44 It is likely that Bodin had followed his own advice on how to take notes on history and had accumulated this material under topical headings along with cursory moral judgments (good and bad, useful and useless behaviors). 45 The copiousness of Montaigne's Essays is similarly due to the numerous examples he strings together; in successive revisions Montaigne typically added more examples without removing any. Montaigne's choices of theme and example often seem startling and strikingly original, but his working method is not fundamentally different from Bodin's. As Francis Goyet has shown, Montaigne has assigned his examples to topical headings very thoughtfully, often revising the assignments in a later reading. 46 A few of Montaigne's examples have been convincingly traced to a printed collection of exempla, Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae, and many of them were available from more than one source to which he would have had access. 47 But commonplace note taking does not imply a commonplace product; Montaigne has certainly avoided the trite and oft-repeated, both in his choice of examples and in his use of them, precisely as Drexel recommended.

There's more from Ann Blair on note taking in Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book (JSTOR) from the Journal of the History of Ideas.

And more!

Blair, Ann 1961- "Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca.1550-1700"
Journal of the History of Ideas - Volume 64, Number 1, January 2003, pp. 11-28
University of Pennsylvania Press

Abstract

This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking.

Technorati Tags: notetaking

alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness

From The Summer Next Time By TOM LUTZ Published: September 4, 2006 in the New York Times

Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls “alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives.” Agricultural work was seasonal, interrupted by rain, forced into hyperactivity by the threat of rain, and determined by other uncontrollable natural processes. The force of long cultural habit ensured that the change from such discontinuous tasks to the regimented labor of the factory never went particularly smoothly.

In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers could never be counted on to do a straight shift’s work. They would “come down to the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars,” he complained to The New York Herald, “and then go to a beer saloon and play pinochle or some other game.” The workers would return when they pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then revisit the saloon, all told “working probably two or three hours a day.” Cigar makers in Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their right to leave the shop at any time without their foreman’s permission.

Tom Lutz is the author of “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America.” Here's a review of Doing Nothing in Portico, written by R J Keefe:

Nowhere is this paradox more concisely expressed that in the author's picture of his own daily life. As a teacher and a writer, he does not have to spend long hours in a workplace. He has a few classes a day, perhaps a few meetings a week, and he can write wherever he feels like writing. His time is, for the most part, his own. That he spends it largely on the comprehensive research engaged in by today's cultural critics does not, somehow, mean that he is working all the time. How can watching Office Space be "working"? Writing is difficult certainly, but it can be free, as when I'm thinking about what I'm trying to say, or wondering where I'm going to go with something, or it can be bound, as when I reflect that I have got to have something to publish tomorrow. On the best days, writing just flows out of me in a gentle but steady current. Is that work? It certainly doesn't feel like work. On other days, writing is nothing but work - and the worst thing about it is that I often have to discard what I've worked so hard on because the work shows. Happily, the nothing-but-work days are very rare.

Technorati Tags: work, leisure, idleness, gtd

Kerrytown BookFest, September 10, 2006, Ann Arbor MI

Kerrytown BookFest is Sunday September 10, 2006 in Ann Arbor, MI. Featured event is the Grand Conclave of the Miniature Book Society, celebrating books no bigger than 3"x3".

Full press release after the jump. Thanks to Bill Castanier for forwarding it along.

Links for August 2, 2006

Inbox is down to 26, in part because I'm blogging it here while I look at it.

The Midwest ISO has declared an Energy Emergency Alert level 2 for the afternoon. Power pricing map for the region (requires SVG) shows how congested the grid is.

Marshall Poe interview in the Atlantic Online on the marvels and pitfalls of Wikipedia.

Doctored orange juice from Everfresh / Home Juice in Detroit, a story of father vs. son. (via Metro Times)

The Michigan Ohio CHI group (MOCHI) has a blog. including a report from CHI 2006 on tagging and folksonomy.

Tuesday was an Ozone Action Day. Don't fill your car with gas during the day, and don't mow the lawn (as if that's a high priority when it's 95 in the shade). National maps from Airnow (EPA).

There was a 3 foot by 3 foot Federal Depository Library logo graffiti stenciled to the side of the State Theater in Ann Arbor visible during Art Fair; it's gone now. (via GOVDOC-L, and MSHS '87 grad Noa Kaumeheiwa)

Google Book Search made some small changes to their page layout and URL structure,
and now you can link to books there by ISBN. I fixed the Google Books Linky on superpatron.
(thanks to Laura Pope-Robbins from Dowling College, who noted that you just need to
change @class='title' to @class='btitle' in the source).

Beinhocker's "Origin of Wealth" suggests wealth creation is
a function of a three step process, or so says the review (tracking
down a copy now): 1. Differentiate. 2. Select. 3. Amplify. (4. Profit!!!) (via value-networks)

Untapped niche: translate Japanese productivity books for the American GTD market.

UC Berkeley is putting an Internet and Communications Technology for Development
graduate certificate program into their new School of Information curriculum. (Noted by Steve
Jackson)

Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell has been ordered for the Ann Arbor District Library collection. Cataloged under "Internet addiction - economic aspects". (I love it when the library orders my suggestions)

The Askwith Media Library at the U of Michigan has over 25,000 titles in closed stacks of DVDs, CDs, video tapes, 16mm film, and laserdiscs. The core collection of what is now the Askwith Media Library was established in 1939 as the University Extension Division’s “Visual Education Bureau”. (thanks Jake)

The Socrates Cafe meeting for this month is going to be on Thursday, Aug 31st, 7.00PM -8.30PM, at the main Branch of the AADL at the Freespace, which is located on the 3rd Floor. The Socrates cafe is based on the concept of asking Socratic questions, and is affiliated with the Society for Philosophical Inquiry, started by Christopher Phillips, author of the book "Socrates Cafe". (thanks Sid)

Clickstream heat maps show how Ajax and new web technologies are changing user browser and focus behavior. (via Web Site Optimization and Andy King) And eye tracking and thermals show user behavior at a variety of ages on SirsiDynix designed pages (via Stephen Abram and WILS World)

Pew report on blogging - surprise, surprise, most users report on personal experiences, not politics. (thanks Stephen Abram)

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager, filmed on location at the Willy Street Coop in Madison, WI. (via Boing Boing)

You Gotta Teach This Essay! weblog

A group blog that came out of the 2006 AWP conference, You Gotta Teach This Essay is a resource for teaching the art and craft of literary nonfiction writing. It's also a great series of stories with capsule reviews. Some recent listings include:

• John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens", found in his book
  "Pieces of the Frame" (John McPhee)
• Reg Saner's "The Road's Motion" road essay
• Gregory Martin's "Macular Degeneration"
• Adam Gopnik's "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli"
• Phil Gerard's "What they don't teach you about hurricanes"

Another good resource along this theme is Creative Nonfiction, "The journal devoted exclusively to the creative nonfiction genre".