Being bibliophilic in MTL: a tour of 514 bookshops

by Jacob Siefring, MLIS ’13

As I wrap up the year, I bequeath this final post to MLIS students who will be returning next year, and to future and incoming MLIS students. Thanks to my fellow students, from whom I learned quite a lot. Best of luck to everyone! Tonight is my last night in graduate school, goodbye graduate school. Soon, goodbye Montreal, where I’ve lived five years. In Ottawa I shall live by mid-summer.

If you’re anything like me, then you require to be surrounded by books. Not just any books, either—new books, recently acquired books, recently purchased books. Pay no heed to Camus’s suggestion that “the more one buys books, the less one reads them” (Jonas ou l’artiste au travail). I cannot stop accumulating books, and even as I look for work I continue to read them. I address new and future residents of Montrealers, students in library-and-information science like, perhaps, you. How well do you know the bookshop scene in Montreal? Sundry fantastic bookstores dot Montreal’s map. And don’t forget thrift stores, especially the Salvation Army. May this be of use to some bibliophilic Montreal newcomer!

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Cheap Thrills (EN): You must visit this bookstore at least once because it is stellar. To their credit, Cheap Thrills manages to rival or undercut Amazon.ca’s prices (i.e., the combined amount of a cheap used paperback and $7 in Canada Post shipping). Relatively high turn-over for a used shop. In addition to being a vendor of concert tickets, also a vinyl hot-spot, a must-visit stop for vinyl lovers. Through the speakers the employees play arcane music I don’t know that suits my taste.

The Word (EN)(on Milton in the McGill ghetto): You must visit this bookstore at least once. Excellent stock and organisation, very knowledgeable staff. Readings happen there sometimes. Adrian, the owner of the Word, has been there since the store opened in the 1960s and is worth meeting (cautiously).

Argo (EN)(downtown on Ste-Catherine): You must visit this bookstore at least once because its stock is so interesting. New books, especially experimental, cutting edge, avant-garde literature. Relatively new? A very interesting bookshop with a lively ongoing series of readings.

Drawn & Quarterly (FR, ?)(Mile End): You should visit this bookstore at least once because it is awesome. Lots of graphic novels (BD, bande dessinée). Readings occur here regularly. Signings and readings occur infrequently (I think). William Gibson read there and signed Ian Roberton’s tattered copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Encore Books and Music (EN) (on Sherbrooke St in NDG: Good stock, nice genuine- feeling retro aesthetic and vibe. Doesn’t even feel retro, just contemporary. Because I am a resident of the neighbourhood I’m a little partial. A vinyl hot-spot, a must for vinyl lovers. Where I bought The Anatomy of Bibliomania.

Paragraphe Books (EN, ?)(on McGill College): Upstairs they have a showroom where they set books out for librarians to see what’s new and recommended. Paragraphe and other QC bookstores are fortunate to benefit from a statute in QC that publicly-/government-funded libraries must buy their books from provincial vendors.

L’Echange Mont-Royal (FR)(Plateau): Used books mainly, if not exclusively.

Le Port de Tête (FR)(on Mont-Royal on the Plateau): New and used. Avant-garde bent. Good selection of comics (BD (bande-dessinée)).

Concordia Co-op Bookstore (EN, ?): Recommended; I’m not too familiar with this one.

Atwater Library – Basement Used Book Store (EN, some FR)(open Wed-Sat, noon-3pm): Used. Small stock, but good stock, and dirt cheap.

Flammarion (FR)(on Saint-Laurent on the Plateau): New, good stock of French books. Costly paperbacks, I recall.

McGill University Bookstore (upstairs (trade/general books), downstairs (academic texts): Not bad for browsing. Expensive relative to Amazon and to used stores of course.Chapters (EN, ?)(Ste-Catherine near McGill)

Archambault (FR)(Berri)

Renaud-Bray (FR)(various locations)

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In the comments, readers: what bookstores do you love? Bouquineries? Who did I miss?

An interview with Stéfan Sinclair

By Jacob Siefring

In a class or elsewhere in the vast field of library-and-information-science, you might have come upon a reference to digital humanities. Digital humanities is basically an academic discipline concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional objects of scholarship (i.e. texts, artifacts, art works, historical data, etc.). The field is interdisciplinary and vast, and also highly collaborative.

Earlier this week, I paid a visit to Stéfan Sinclair, who is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in McGill’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Since he received his Ph.D. in French literature, Professor Sinclair has worked on numerous projects designing digital humanities text visualization tools, often in collaboration with other scholars. He was most generous and open in responding to my questions as we sat in his windowed office overlooking the intersection of rue Sherbrooke and rue University.

I noticed that it’s kind of common in the digital humanities to start giving a talk by stating how you got into it, because it’s kind of a hybrid field and everybody takes a kind of circuitous route or ends up there in a different way. I know you have a background in French literature. But were you drawn towards programming and computers prior to your work in the humanities?

Yes. What I can recall is that, during the early part of my undergraduate studies, I liked fiddling with computers and doing some programming. At that point, I was especially playing with Visual Basic. I was home-brewing beer, and I had built an application that would allow me to manage time, and various settings, and fermentation and so on. At that time, it was really about building things for my own interest. I had done my first couple of years of undergraduate taking courses from all over the place, everything actually except French literature. Then in my third year I decided that I would do French literature as something that seemed more specific, leveraging my background as a francophone, Franco-Albertan, and so on. I loved literature, but not enough that my first instinct was to know that I was going to go into undergraduate studies and take literature. I was more interested in philosophy and religious studies and all sorts of other stuff. There happened to be a course—I can’t remember if I was in my third or fourth year—on computer applications in French at UBC. That’s sort of the moment where it clicked. This very unusual, very rare course that was in the French department made me realize that I could combine these two interests that I had probably never thought of as merging at any point. There’s something very empowering and magical about getting a computer to do something that you build it to do. That I think was a big motivation for any of the programming that I was doing. I’d almost put programming in quotes, because it wouldn’t be programming by computer science standards, it would just be sort of hacking, scripting—except that it wasn’t really scripts, it was Visual Basic. Anyway, this course made a connection for me between literature and computing. From there I started thinking about and building tools where my work in literature would be supplemented, augmented by some of the tools that I wanted to build. And it sort of kept growing from there. Over time, the balance has shifted. Initially, I was doing a bit of programming and computers to complement the literary side. Over time, it’s sort of gone the other way, where I’m mostly doing programming and building stuff and relatively little literature, though I hope to do more. So I don’t know if that really answers your question…

I think that’s very interesting, because a lot of the time those narratives aren’t the ones that get relayed, and yet they’re so important in determining how we end up where we do.

It seems so natural now that this is the direction that I took, and yet I recognize that it’s really an enormous coincidence. I didn’t go to UBC because this person prof, Bill Winder was there. I didn’t know he was there. Part of the experience has also been not only that very serendipitous first experience that made the connection that I probably wouldn’t have made if this course hadn’t been there, but also a willingness to kind of ignore what… if people had given me academic advice at that point it would have been to not do computing stuff because that was just too weird, and too fringe, too marginal. But it’s what I was interested in. So it’s hard to say what lesson to pull out of this except that I happened to have been extremely lucky because I did sort of do what interested me and it ended up working out.

Can I ask what your dissertation work was on?

Sure. There’s a group of primarily French mathematicians and writers called the Oulipo and they’re interested in formal constraints in literature and the idea that all forms of literature—be it a sonnet, a play or theatre, whatever—what determines that it’s that genre are is a set of rules. And so by formulating new rules they think they open new forms of literature. It looks like a constraining act but in some ways it’s an opening-up act. I became interested in whether or not that formalized aspect might be a good foothold for computational methods, and so I became interested in the Oulipo and Georges Perec in particular. Georges Perec wrote a three-hundred page novel in French without the letter e. So my dissertation was primarily on La Disparition, on this novel; that was half of it, and the other half was using a text-analysis tool that I built called HyperPo that was meant to help me in examining some of the things that I wanted to examine about the text. So it was a very hybrid project, but again, I was fortunate to have support for it where I was so that it worked out.

Do you still follow contemporary French literature?

Umm… that’s a good question. I will say with some degree of shame and regret that not really. Except for the fact that I tend to still read contemporary French literature for pleasure.

Well yeah, that counts, that counts!

But I don’t turn my attention to analysing it and doing literary criticism, which is a big part of my intellectual upbringing. It’s just more for the interest of reading.

Wouldn’t reading be less fun if you had to analyse what you read?

Yeah, I guess in some ways it would be. I actually do find it a lot of fun to analyse texts as well, so it’s a very different kind of experience. But I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. As I did with La Disparition I thoroughly loved reading it as a novel, as literature, and I thoroughly enjoyed analyzing it as a piece of digital text.

I want to ask about Voyant Tools, which you developed with Geoffrey Rockwell. You’re probably able to see from the site stats what kind of use that tool’s getting, and maybe even where it’s being adopted, where geographic use is coming from. What does that look like?

Yes. I would say it’s gotten, for an academic project, moderate traction. It gets in the thousands of hits per week. The way it’s structured is that there’s a landing page where you can do some things, and it’s also a Web application, so that doesn’t really count the multiple pages that people might be consulting within the site. What it does count, though, which is misleading and also interesting in other ways, is that Voyant Tools has this mechanism where you can embed any of the tools into a blog or Web page, just as you would embed a YouTube clip on a blog or site. An example of this is a German site on Narratology that happens to have embedded Voyant. I know that a good part of the traffic comes from there. My own blog and various other sites that have embedded the tool contribute as well. Part of the traffic is people going to Voyant to use it as a tool, and that tends to spike whenever someone’s doing a workshop or something. That does happen increasingly, which I think is another way of measuring and understanding the traction of the project. Beyond that, it gets regular steady use but not an enormous amount of use, not yet.

As I mentioned to you in a Twitter conversation, I found it very helpful for a project I was doing which was in a class called “Knowledge Taxonomies.” The assignment was to redesign the taxonomy and the navigation tool for a website. So we selected one, 3QuarksDaily. It’s a large aggregator blog with probably over twenty posts per day. So we started with the word frequencies as a way to see what some of the hottest and most frequent topics were.

Cool.

I don’t know how we would have proceeded without that, but that was definitely the best way to start our content audit.

So what were some of the limitations and frustrations?

We applied the Taporware words, and then we manually went through the frequency list, and then clustered the terms… what’s that process called, topic modelling?

Right, so you did topic modelling separately?

Topic modelling, if I’m not mistaken, would refer to an automated process. We were doing it manually in a group by consensus. So that consisted of accounting for stemming changes as well as ruling out insubstantial terms, like colors. That wasn’t a real challenge, it was just a bit of work that we had to do as part of our process. I think we didn’t go that far down into the word frequencies either. We were fairly satisfied that what we were seeing was comprehensive in terms of the topics at least.

Now, a skeptic’s question. Recently, Matt Jockers, who is a leader in the digital humanities in my opinion, tweeted the following message with the hashtag “overly honest methods”: “We deconstructed the text because we didn’t have any good ideas.” I wonder about this. We start playing around with texts with digital humanities tools, maybe without a particular question in mind, and it does end up yielding questions. But I wonder if having that really powerful tool kit at our disposal doesn’t in some cases impair us to have strong conceptual questions to begin with. Do you think that is ever the case?

I definitely think it can be. To say that it impairs us is also to say that we’re not willing to sit down at some point and work hard at trying to come up with the concepts and intuitions separately. Partly what it’s saying is, the tool and a certain number of methodologies are there, and it seems simpler just to start banging away at that than to really think about the text or whatever you happen to be looking at. And I don’t know how common that is. In a lot of cases you’re either working with text that you know already, and so you’ve probably gone through the process of thinking about it. What the tool does and can do very effectively then is to stimulate new ways of looking at and new representations of the text that you wouldn’t have thought of. It opens up new channels. In other cases, where you haven’t read the texts, and Matt will admit to this for some of the texts, it’s also a way of including and dealing with those texts that maybe you don’t have the time and the inclination to read. It’s an impairment in some ways except that maybe realistically you never would have sat down to read those texts and so it’s better than nothing. You know, at least you’re including them in some sense. It’s actually strangely, vaguely reminiscent of what Georges Perec says about constraints when he’s starting to write. He said that nothing scares him more than the blank page. In  other words, if he sits down and has to start writing something, he finds that terrifying. What the constraint allows him to do, when he sits down and he’s working on an Oulipian constraint like writing a novel without the letter e, that gives him a structure in which things can happen. It sort of removes that paralysis of the blank page. In some ways I wonder if in some cases with text analysis it can’t be similar. Sometimes you’re looking at a text and it can be very intimidating and paralyzing to say, now what am I going to do with this thing? In some ways working with text analysis methodologies allows for a breaking up of things and then you go back and you read it. It’s the reverse of how things are sometimes done. But maybe you start doing text analysis and then go back and start reading chunks of text more closely in a way that’s already been informed with some first observations that you’ve made or some intuitions that you’ve had. It’s a way into the text that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. I wouldn’t exaggerate that too much. I present that as one scenario. Another scenario is that you’re too lazy or too unmotivated to read the text and so you start deconstructing it, as Matt says, with the methodologies. In my experience the challenge has been that the more you practice some methodologies the more that can become a habit and a rut, and in some cases the challenge is finding variants of a methodology or new methodologies that would be more appropriate or more fruitful for a given text or corpus.

Yes, there are two really good metaphors that have come to me through you. In your interview with Adam Bluestein that appeared on Fast Company, you said something along the lines of, “When you’re holding a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.” The other is from Ted Underwood. When he was at McGill for a day of digital humanities presentations that you organised, he said, “You have to know when to get out of the jeep.” And he was talking about the limits of formal analysis and the toolkit. So those have stayed with me. I like that.

So do I.

What do you predict for the digital humanities in the next decade?

Hmm… I predict I’m a bad predictor of predictions. [pause] I think most people would agree that digital humanities has been enjoying momentum and administrative support and a willingness by some people to find out what it is, and so on. Some people think that has plateau-ed. I don’t think it actually has, but it will. I think what’s going to happen between now and then, though, is that some aspects of working with digital texts will just become more normalised, in the same way that most researchers will start googling and start looking in a library database and working with digital text. Maybe they don’t admit to that. I know that there are colleagues who would find quotations that are of interest to them in digital form, and then they’ll go look it up in the print version and cite the print version. What I would hope is that people don’t feel like they need to do that anymore, and that there’s a more gradual, iterative movement towards additional exploitation of the strengths of the digital text. Not doing things like topic modeling necessarily, but being able to search in a PDF for those words that you know are there, but would take forever to find in a print edition. That doesn’t seem like very interesting text analysis, but it can be a fundamental part of a research process. And it is significant in that maybe something that you feel like you wanted to say, and then you say, argh, it would take me forever to find that quotation that I was interested in, so I’m just going to drop it; what the digital text allows you to do is to go and look and to see if it would actually be that useful. So I’m actually not convinced that digital scholarship, the form it takes, will change all that much. But the process that leads to there will change. That’s sort of a behind-the-curtains kind of thing, so in some ways it may not seem like things change that much, but I think they really will. And especially the ability to try things out, to experiment. Malcolm McCullough, for example, writes about how the big breakthrough of spreadsheet programs for businesses in the late seventies was not so much in how quickly things could be computed. By the time you enter them it’s not that different from a calculator. But the speed at which you could try things—you know, what if I change this number, what happens to the worksheet number 18 in the cell 4A for example—is increased, and you can try things out very quickly, you can experiment. It’s an endless palimpsest that you can experiment with very quickly. And I think that maybe one of the most significant contributions from digital texts is the ability to try things out very quickly, that there’s a low cost to some paths that you might want to explore. I think that enriches scholarship in general.

I was recently reading a post that came out of the recent MLA digital humanities sessions about setting up a digital humanities lab, where there’s departments, or people from different departments, who say, let’s do this, it’s a great idea, can we do it? In digital humanities, McGill has you and Andrew Piper, and others. To what extent do you see it being practised, either now or in the future, among graduate students at McGill? I don’t want to ask whether or not it’s in McGill’s future to have what might be called a digital humanities ‘lab,’ because it’s so much of an ad hoc thing sometimes, and it’s not a physical space necessarily.

In this very exact case I can say yes, I really do believe it’s in McGill’s future to have a digital humanities lab, institute, centre, whatever. And that’s for various reasons. But you’re hitting on something more significant which is, how does that interact with existing programs, and how does that affect graduate and undergraduate teaching and that sort of thing, especially when you have at best a handful of people and it’s very difficult to build a program out of that. I think that the momentum in a university and an institution is a difficult thing to really predict, because some things happen very quickly that surprise you, and other things that you think would be quick are very slow. So in the meantime, I think the focus is to ensure that we’re starting to build a set of courses that have a strong digital humanities component, even if we don’t call it like that, but that do. That will build interest and a need, a desire for more. By filling my graduate and undergraduate courses, that sort of sends an indication that we could do more of these, and they would be well attended, that people are interested. When the English department, the grad society organises a panel or an event on digital humanities and lots of people show up, that’s sort of an indication that there’s an interest for it. There may be an interest in ways that warrant additional examination, you know, maybe there’s a curiosity, a sense of, what is this thing?, it’s not that I necessarily want to do it, I just want to know what it is; some students go because of that. So I think it’s a combination of things, where there are pure or primarily digital humanities courses that are taught—and I think there will be more and more of those—but also where more and more aspects of digital humanities manifest themselves in existing courses. I think that will happen. I think that some of our colleagues here are genuinely interested and would like to incorporate some of the methodologies. Truth be told, academics tend to be pretty busy and if it’s a prospect of learning a bunch of new technical skills, it may not happen. It’s not necessarily that it’s going to be primarily those people who teach it, but there’s a slow trickle-down effect where more courses mean that there are more students who have come through the system who have taught themselves as I did or who have courses that they take that help with the training. There’s the digital humanities summer institute in Victoria, there’s something similar in Maryland now, and there are things being planned in Europe. Some of those students may go on to academic jobs and those students will incorporate that digital methodology into their teaching. So we recognize that things don’t change as quickly in academia as they do in society. There’s a greater prevalence of digital aspects in society—the prevalence of social media—than you see in typical humanities courses. But there is a constant catching-up process that happens.

My thanks go to Professor Sinclair for taking the time to participate in this interview and for reviewing the interview draft.

A brief illustrated history of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre

By Jacob Siefring

This post presents a condensed history of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre. Sundry students from McGill’s School of Information Studies have gained library experience working there as volunteers, myself included. Historical information is taken from a fifty-page pamphlet published in the mid-1970s that is kept behind the circulation desk. This post was initially published on my personal blog, Bibliomanic.

Some background information about Mechanics’ Institutes is available from Wikipedia. During the 19th century in Great Britain and in North America, for enterprising young men who were often without means, Mechanics’ institutes were seen as a desirable alternative to the male drinking culture widely prevalent in saloons, taverns, and pubs. Starting around the end of the nineteenth century, institutes began to adapt to accommodate the wider population, including first women and then children, many eventually evolving (like the Atwater) over many decades into the public libraries we know today.

Atwater's arches 'then' and now, its skylight and atrium. Photos by Jacob Siefring.

The Atwater Library is the oldest lending library in Canada. The library was not always known by this name, nor was it always at 1200 Atwater Ave as it is today.

The Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal, later known as the Montreal Mechanics’ Institution, had its founding moment on November 21, 1828, when a meeting was held at the home of Reverend Henry Esson. Esson’s idea was to found an institute the aim and objects of which would be to see to the instruction of its members in the arts and in the various branches of science and useful knowledge. 

Books were marked as property of the Institute with a distinctive perforation. What's this method called, exactly? Does anyone know?

Slowly at first,  with the support of sugar magnate John Redpath and other enterprising members of the Montreal community, the institute gathered steam. In March of 1840 the members-elect approved the Constitution and by-laws and agreed upon the following scale of fees:

Life members: 5 £ in cash; or 7 £, 10 s. in books or apparatus

Annual subscriptions: 15 s.

Quarterly subscriptions: 3 s. 9 d.

Sons and apprentices of members: 1 s. 3 d. on a quarterly basis

Course offerings in reading, writing, arithmetic, French, and architectural, mechanical, and ornamental drawing were open to sons and apprentices of members. The institute’s motto was

To make a Man a Better Mechanic and the Mechanic a Better Man. 

Incorporation came in 1845. A short decade later, on May 21, 1854, the institute’s new building at the corner of Great St James St and St Peter St was opened.

Illustration of the former Montreal Mechanics' Institute

This building was known for its large lecture hall, known around Montréal as Mechanics’ Hall.

A drawing displayed in the stairwell of the library depicting a packed lecture hall at the library/institute's former location.

George DawsonJohn Henry Pepper, inventor of the Pepper’s ghost illusion, and many others spoke there in their time. Performer Emma Lajeunesse, later be known as Emma Albani, had her debut there at the young age of seven.

A new building was selected, purchased, and went into operation around 1920.

The Atwater Library and Computer Centre, located at 1200 Atwater Ave., in Westmount, Québec. Photograph by Jacob Siefring.

In 1962, The Institute changed its name and officially became the Atwater Library, as the name Mechanics’ Institute was ‘misleading to the present generation.’ Today the library is an active community hub and a vital resource for its members. If you’re in Montreal, stop by and have a look around. Or visit the library’s website — more on its history here.

National Novel Writing Month: An interview with a veteran

Notice: This post initiates the academic year for this blog! Submissions to Beyond the Shelf are solicited and encouraged by MLISSA from past and current members of MLISSA. Submissions can be e-mailed to jacob.siefring@mail.mcgill.ca.

By Jacob Siefring

Did you ever want to write a novel? Then read on! National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s abbreviated, is a website (and more) dedicated to the goal of helping individuals achieve the realisable goal of writing a novel, defined loosely as a narrative of 50,000+ words. It’s run by the Office of Letters and Light, a self-described ‘tiny but mighty nonprofit.’ November is the original month for novel writing, but events also take place during June and August.

To gain an understanding of what it’s like to participate in NaNoWriMo, I submitted a brief questionnaire to a Andrea Black, a recent graduate of the School of Information Studies’s MLIS program. She generously supplied the following responses and advice.

Successful NaNoWriMo participants get bragging rights, improved writing skills, a draft of a novel they've written, and this emblem, commemorating their persistence.

1. How many times have you done NaNoWriMo? How did you first hear about it?

I’ve just completed my third NaNoWriMo event and am gearing up for my fourth in November. The main event is in November each year with smaller “Camp NaNoWriMo” events in June and August. I’ve done two in November and one in August so far. I honestly can’t remember when I first heard about it: it was probably two or three years before I decided to give it a try.

2. Prior to NaNoWriMo had you written much fiction? Short stories?

I wrote a lot – poems, short stories and one novella in addition to nearly daily journaling – up until about my second or third year of university. Around that time, I started to get so burned out from reading textbooks and writing papers that I basically stopped writing and reading for pleasure for the better part of a decade. It wasn’t until I decided to do NaNoWriMo that I got motivated to start writing again. It’s great because I’m such a perfectionist when it comes to my writing that I find it hard to even get started. With NaNoWriMo, you don’t have time to worry about editing: if you’re going to get out 50k or more words in a month, you need to ruthlessly squash your inner editor. You can always edit in December. I find that frees me up to be creative and just let my ideas flow onto the page.

3. What are the titles of the novels you’ve written?

I’d prefer not to answer this. They’ve got working titles but they’re sort of silly.

4. How would you describe them? (individually or considered together)

The first two are meant to be YA fantasy and the third is… some kind of mainstream/supernatural fiction that could pass as either YA or adult, depending on how I handle the editing stage. They’re not of publishable quality in their current form, but there’s enough there to form the skeletons of what could be pretty decent novels someday (at least I’d like to think so).

5. Have people read your novels? Who?

My mom and my grandma are the only people who have read them. I haven’t done any editing; they’re all still in the first draft stage and they’re really rough (typos; I altered a character’s personality partway through the first novel; in the second novel I changed from third person to first person perspective in chapter 10 because I decided it would work better, etc). I’d be embarrassed to let anyone else read them until I had a chance to edit. My mom loved them, but she’s biased. J My grandma is not a fan of fantasy, so she didn’t really get them. She still insists on reading them though, which is nice of her.

6. Do you write on a computer? Are you partial to any particular writing software?

Yes, I do my writing on a computer. My handwriting can’t keep up with my thoughts. Also, I can’t always read my own handwriting.

I’ve used Word, which wasn’t ideal, and I’ve used Scrivener, which I love. Winning NaNoWriMo (i.e. making it to 50,000 words in 30 days) is mostly about the satisfaction of winning, but you also get a printable certificate and discounts on writing software like Scrivener and Storyist – I bought Scrivener after winning my first NaNo. When I write the way I did for my last novel (unplanned, just sitting down and writing whatever came into my head), Word worked fine, but it’s not the best tool for organizing a novel. Scrivener lets you separate your chapters or scenes, keep notes, character sketches and research all in one place, and compiles your writing into an official manuscript ready for submission to a publisher when you’re finished. It also has a full-screen feature that helps cut out distractions while you’re typing and a split-screen option so you can view your notes while you’re writing. I’ve found it really flexible. It even has templates for papers in Chicago, APA and MLA styles: I used it a couple of times for that last year at school.

7. How do you organise your daily quotas? Do you map out a chapter/scene schedule to correspond to the month in advance?

If you write 1667 words every day, you’ll finish on November 30th (or 1613 words per day to finish on August 31st). For my first two novels, I ended up falling really far behind in the first week or two, and then the stress that caused helped me to really buckle down and write during the second half of the month. For my third novel, I actually finished a week early. Unfortunately, it seems that when I start out with a certain word count in mind, my story ends up naturally coming to a conclusion around that point. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll try aiming for 75,000 words on my next attempt: I know there are some rare and amazing people who exceed 100k. We’ll see. November tends to be a pretty busy month.

8. Do you know the ending of your novel when you begin it?

I planned out each of my novels very differently. For the first one, I had a very detailed outline before I started. I knew exactly where the story was going and had a basic outline of what would happen in each scene. For the second one, I had a very broad outline and really only planned a chapter or two in advance. I didn’t know how it was going to end until I found myself writing the ending. For the third one, I hardly planned at all. I had a basic premise and that was it. That strategy actually ended up working really well for me, except I had no idea how the story was going to end. The last four thousand words or so were really tough to write.

9. Do you feel that your handling of narrative elements like character, plot, and dialogue has improved with your continuing participation in NaNoWriMo?

I do. Practice makes perfect, as they say. I’ve deliberately chosen different styles (tense, point of view, etc) for my novels just for the experience, and I definitely think some facets of my writing have improved. I’d like to try to work more on character development in my next novel: in my last one I was very plot-focused.

10. Do you seek to publish your novels?

No. However, I like the idea that if I do decide to become a published author some day, I’ll have several manuscripts to work from.

11. Can you share any tips for balancing the demands of work and/or school with your daily writing sessions during NaNoWriMo?

Warn your friends and family ahead of time that you will have virtually no social life for a month.

Figure out what your priorities are. If you need human contact but don’t want to sacrifice writing time, find a “write-in” in your area or enlist a friend to write with. Schedule time to do homework, grocery shop, etc. I didn’t clean my apartment or exercise for a month.

There may be days you ask yourself: “What am I doing?” Keep in mind that even if you don’t ‘win,’ you at least have more of a start to your novel than you might have otherwise, and it’s great writing practice. Hitting 50k words and finishing a novel is an incredibly rewarding experience: it’s definitely worth it.

Thanks go to Andrea Black, MLIS ’12 in Librarianship,  for supplying responses to my questions. If you see her, congratulate her and wish her luck as she gears up to writes her fourth novel!

All the world’s memory

By Jacob Siefring

Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. — W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 261

Stills are all taken from the short film 'Toute la mémoire du monde,' directed by Alain Resnais, included on 'L'Année dernière à Marienbad,' distributed by the Criterion Collection.

Around the same time I discovered Last Year in Marienbad, I fell upon reference to Toute la mémoire du monde. Both films were directed by nouvelle vague director Alain Resnais. The simplest way to describe Toute la mémoire du monde is to say that it’s a short documentary film of the setting and institutional practices of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as they were in the late 1950s. But, at just twenty minutes in length, Toute la mémoire du monde is much than this short description can convey. This remarkable document of a place was produced and released by Les films de la Pléiade as the fifth installment in the series Encylopédie de Paris. Dark, ominous orchestral music and pompous, hyperbolic commentary, composed by Maurice Jarre and read by Jacques Dumesnil respectively, complement the stunning cinematography of Resnais.

The film begins in the basement of the library, where gross heaps of documents are consigned to a process of slow degradation. Parce que leur mémoire est courte, les hommes accumulent d’innombrables prosthèses, Dumesnil announces. [Because its memory is short, mankind accumulates limitless prostheses.]

This annunciation is representative of the estranged viewpoint of the film’s commentary that is to follow. Witness:

Books, delivered to readers for consultation in the Salon de lecture, are ‘torn from their world to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects.’

Confronted with these bulging repositories, man is assailed by a fear of being engulfed by this mass of words. 

These readers, each working on his or her slice of individual memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end.

The periodicals section must digest 200 kg of paper daily.


This film is recommend viewing to anyone, provided that it’s not too much of a pain to track down. (It’s sometimes available in the special features of Last Year at Marienbad.). Students and practitioners of library and information science as well as enthusiasts of French new-wave cinema will however find this film especially deserving of their attention. How many other films are there like it, documenting so thoroughly an institutional context? Enriching and utterly engrossing, the 20-minute film is a fine example of Resnais’ superb cinematography, which makes the film entertaining for anyone, even my three-year-old daughter.

 

A note on the director: Alain Resnais made visually beautiful films. He was known as the ‘dolly king’ because of his frequent use–and total mastery–of steady tracking shots, an effect that impressed itself indelibly into my memory: the beauty of pure uninterrupted tracking motion. Hiroshima, mon amour is Alain Resnais’s most known film in North America, it would seem. But Marienbad is just as masterful and compelling as Hiroshima. Both films resulted from Resnais’ collaboration with French nouveau roman figures, Alain Robbe-Grillet (Marienbad) and Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima). It’s on the special features of this Marienbad that you’ll find Toute la mémoire du monde. Don’t take my word for it–seek these out.

'Last Year at Marienbad': eerily, human figures in the courtyard cast shadows, but statues and trees do not...

 

Thoughts on Internet distraction, pt. 2

By Jacob Siefring

If you descend from the Mont Royal hillside on which the McGill School of Information Studies building is situated and traipse through central campus to arrive at the Schulich Engineering library and go into the stacks at QA 76.9 C 66, you’ll be looking at a strange welter of sensational and dystopic-sounding titles of books. These titles include:

Trapped in the Net; Life on the Screen; The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace; Silicon Shock; The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet; Technobabble; Digital Diaspora; Cyburbia; Slaves of the Machine; Moths to the Flame; High Noon on the Electronic Frontier; Monster or Messiah?; Digerati; War of the Worlds.

Before this smatter of classificatory wonder I found myself, having come in search of Theodore Roszak’s The Cult of Information: A Neo-Liddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, first published in 1986 and later revised. The book is, of course, hopelessly outdated technology-wise but nevertheless an impassioned, thoughtful, and even touching defense of humanistic values (the ‘art of thinking’).

One passage in it I found absolutely critical, and a complement to all of the points raised by The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Here’s Roszak:

Introducing students to the computer at an early age, creating the impression that their little exercises in programming and game playing are somehow giving them control over a powerful technology, can be a treacherous deception. It is not teaching them to think in some scientifically sound way; it is persuading them to acquiesce. It is accustoming them to the presence of computers in every walk of life, and thus making them dependent on the machine’s supposed necessity and superiority. Under these circumstances, the best approach to computer literacy might be to stress the limitations and abuses of the machine, showing the students how little they need it to develop their autonomous powers of thought. (242)

The last line in bold rings truest. Given that technology is “limited” and prone to “abuse”–read, overuse–parents and educators need to be responsive to this potential.

As a parent of a three-year-old, I confess that I’m terrified of the technological “gray” territory that lies ahead. How will my partner and I define and fix boundaries? Such as: At what times is it appropriate (and not appropriate) to use an electronic device? At what age should my daughters first acquire wireless electronic devices? Six? Five? Eight? Seven? How closely will my partner and I have to police our daughters’ use of their devices–for what activities? What would a ‘reasonable’ time allocation look like for such activities as gaming, texting, and video streaming? In brief, I feel as though I were staring off a cliff into a fog, or peeking into the box of some Pandora as yet unseen.

After calling for children to be educated for an awareness of the limitations and abuses of computing power, Roszak cites Sherry Turkle’s book, Life on the Screen (1995), and speaks of the importance for children of experiencing nature and observing the behavior of wild animals. This almost strangely feels like a non sequitur, but I don’t think it is. Unless we situate our understanding of technology relative to the continuum of human experience, we risk failing to grasp what its proper use might be.

As for classification tier QA 76.9 C 66: that’s in the section of the Library of Congress classification outline (QA 75.5 – 76.95) defined by the parameter “Electronic computers. Computer science.” I would add that we’re looking at something like Computers, their (dystopic) effects on individuals and on society. It’s a remarkable grouping of books and ultra-relevant for our time; that much is certain. Such recent titles as discovered iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (Larry Rosen, 2012), Digital Diet: The 4-step plan to break your tech addiction and regain balance in your life (Daniel Seeberg, 2011), and Cyber Junkies: Escape the Gaming and Internet Trap (Kevin Roberts, 2010) indicate the rising visibility of our problematic relationship to our computing technologies. (Sieberg’s book I actually read, after finding it in the ‘new books’ section of the Atwater Library and Computing Centre, where I volunteer. It contains some sage advice you might find helpful if you want to curtail your electronic attachment. Through it I learned about RescueTime, a tool that provides weekly analytic reports on your online behavior.)

Final note: This blog is currently seeking submissions from any student, current or former, of McGill’s School of Information Studies. Tell your peers about your summer job/practicum/internship; reflect on the degree you just completed; rant about how hard it is to find a job; or tell us what you’re reading that’s good (or bad). Direct commentaries to jacob.siefring@mail.mcgill.ca. Here at Beyond the Shelf I will not be very active, but will occasionally do some cross-posts from my blog, bibliomanic, where I will be posting regularly.

From the McGill Archives

By Jacob Siefring

Back from the Life Sciences Library, I’ve some knowledge nuggets with which to distract you from the grueling last two weeks of this semester’s group projects and final papers.

McGill’s Life Sciences Library, also known as the Osler Medical Library, is located on the third floor of the remarkably annular McIntyre Medical Building. The Medical Library was established in 1823, and it’s the oldest and first of the McGill University Libraries. The pictured building was completed in 1965.

I went in pursuit of a reference to a certain George Mines of McGill University that appears in “Inner Rhythms,” a chapter of Chaos: Making a New Science (James Gleick; 1987). Circuitously I was pointed in the direction of “Sudden Cardiac Death: A Problem in Topology” by Arthur T. Winfree, an article that appeared in Scientific American in 1983. Therein Winfree relates the following piece of esoterica:

On November 7,1914, George Ralph Mines was working in his laboratory in McGill’s School of Medicine. Because it was Saturday, there were few observers to notice Mines’s presence. A 28-year-old physiologist, Mines had been studying fibrillation, a radical disorganization of the heart’s pattern of contraction. He was a pioneer in his discipline.

“Mines had been trying to determine whether relatively small, brief electrical stimuli can cause fibrillation. For this work he had constructed a device to deliver electrical impulses to the heart with a magnitude and timing that could be precisely controlled. The device had been employed in preliminary work with animals. When Mines decided it was time to begin work with human beings, he chose the most readily available experimental subject: himself. At about six o’clock that evening a janitor, thinking it was unusually quiet in the laboratory, entered the room. Mines was lying under the laboratory bench surrounded by twisted electrical equipment. A broken mechanism was attached to his chest over the heart and a piece of apparatus nearby was still recording the faltering heartbeat. He died without recovering consciousness.” (Winfree, p. 144)

Fibrillation causes the deaths of several hundred thousand people annually in the U.S. alone, and — the defibrillator’s invention notwithstanding — its causes are still not well understood. Mines’s work on the heart was pioneering, because was “the first to demonstrate that fibrillation can develop after a relatively small electrical impulse if the impulse is applied to the heart at the right time.” (Normally, after an electrical impulse is applied to the heart, the cardiac rhythm is momentarily disturbed, but returns immediately to normal. Fibrillation — that violent and disorganized activity of the heart during which the heart may feel to the hand like a “wad of writhing worms” — does not occur in most instances of shock application.)

A.T. Winfree. When Time Breaks Down. Princeton UP, 1987. 42.

Apparently, the name given to that small but ever-critical interval during which an electrical stimulus will wreak utter havoc on the rhythmically synchronised functioning of cardiac cells — this critical time period is known as “the vulnerable phase.” For the sake of interdisciplinarity, I propose this term — “vulnerable phase” — as an apt descriptor of the time we’re now going through, the end of the semester. If you feel stressed, just think of George Ralph Mines, who died so unexpectedly “in the line of duty.” R.I.P., George Mines. Beware of electrical stimuli; long live research.

Thoughts on Internet Distraction

By Jacob Siefring

In June, 2010, W.W. Norton published The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Because I frequently read book reviews, I was aware of and interested in this book for some time before I got around to it. What gave me a sense of urgency to read it was seeing Jonathan Safran Foer’s high praise of Carr’s work. He basically called it the book of the year. The book develops ideas advanced in Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, published in The Atlantic (Jul-Aug. 2008). Before that, Carr published two books on technology, notably Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. He’s a former executive editor for the Harvard Business Review.

Carr believes — and shows, using lots of evidence drawn from research in neuroscience and cognitive science (the book is shelved in McGill’s Osler medical library) — that our interlinked computing technologies pose a serious challenge to deep thought, hampering our capacity to reflect and contemplate in meaningful ways. This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking claim; at least, not for anyone who has had the experience of, while piloting a web browser, being unable to focus for any length of time on the task at hand, or who has found their attention increasingly diverted and distributed through a web of hyperlinks. Figures of speech to describe our computerized, information-saturated mental state abound: popcorn brain, mental obesity are among the most apt. Forget information overload.

I think we’ve most all of us felt an inkling of suspicion that web use might influence thought patterns and micro-behavior. Why Carr’s book is important is because it culls together enough scientific research, present-day information, and historical context to show us that — beyond the shadow of a doubt — the net is rewiring our neural circuitry and impairing our intelligence (that is, at least insofar as high-level intelligence used to mean the ability to grapple with and dissect complex problems, as well as to remember lots of information). If you’re skeptical of this claim, I encourage you to read Carr’s book. Nevertheless, for the hurried, here are a few of what I retain as its most salient points.

  • Developers of automation-technologies and decision support systems are often motivated by the desire to relieve ordinary people of the burden of executing routine, mundane tasks. They want to make life easier for everyone; so, they advocate outsourcing decision-making to computers and the writing of algorithms to assist in search retrieval (namely, Google’s PageRank). These evangelists of technology often share the view of Wired writer Clive Thompson, who refers to the Net as an “ ‘outboard brain’ that is taking over the role previously played by inner memory. […] He suggests ‘by offloading data [from our brains] onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely “human” tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming’ ” (Carr 180). But this conception of the brain, and the well-intentioned idea that technology will allow our thoughts to become more serene and lofty, are dead wrong, Carr shows. Unlike a computer, the human brain does not have a limited storage capacity; experts on memory affirm that “the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full.” “The amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory is virtually boundless” (192).
  • We tend to forget that our interaction with technology is always bidirectional, not just unidirectional. Human intentions may determine behavior, but, as Carr reminds us, tools and media exert a powerful shaping force on consciousness and behavior — especially once they become dominant or integrated into daily routines. This is well summed up in John Culkin’s formulation, “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” And every tool, every medium has its specific limitations — from the map, to the typewriter, to the power loom, to the clock, as Carr shows (209-211). The searchable internet’s limitations include its isolation of facts and information from their various contexts; and the sprawling, heterogeneous character of the information that’s found there. But enough.

For Carr’s critics, his points are bitter pills to swallow, and many have dismissed them outright. His argument has been called “defeatist” and “reductionist.” From my personal experience, I tend to agree with Carr. The internet has changed the way we think, and, for the most part, not for the better. But at least there’s good news. Exposure to Carr’s book has made me more self-aware of my overuse of the internet and of its insidious effects on my thought patterns. Since having read The Shallows, I’m less inclined to take a laptop with me now when I go out. Even as I write this, I have used the internet-restrictive application Freedom (available for a free five-use trial period!) to curb my forays into the hyperlink jungle, where my thought wanders away and my will atrophies. I think I can even hear myself think. Can you? Hear me? Hear yourself think? Not get distracted?

Role models for librarians

By Jacob Siefring

Do you know “Dead Germans and the Theory of Librarianship” by Sydney Pierce? It was listed as a required reading on the Information and Society fall 2011 syllabus. The short journal article’s point was this: LIS doesn’t have a distinctive, illustrious, or particularly rich history. It’s here, there, and everywhere. It’s a field with roots in many other distinct areas of inquiry. And, indeed, it’s a field that only really came into its own towards the start of the last century.

This is in contradistinction to the humanities and social sciences. Whereas the theoretical foundations of such fields as sociology, psychology, and philosophy are bolstered by sets of writings (respectively, to cite the key reference points, those of: Weber and Simmel; Freud and Jung; Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Benjamin) that provide a common ground covered by students everywhere, forming a large chunk of the core curriculum, the historical foundations of LIS are often summed up in a single lecture during a given course, with little depth or context provided.

Of course, LIS does indeed have a rich history that should receive our attention. What prevents that history’s investigation is that it would mean countless furloughs and tangents into other disciplines, and into the past, not the future, where everyone likes to believe we are heading. Anyways, this blog can be used as a place to draw attention to areas of interest, historical or otherwise, that may be left out of course curricula. (I hope to do so shortly with a discussion of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, so check back if you’re interested.)

But back to Pierce’s article. By asking head librarians and LIS profs for suggestions regarding who the “dead Germans” of LIS might be, Pierce kept hearing the following names mentioned on numerous occasions:

John Cotton Dana;

Ralph Shaw; and

Jesse Shera.

At least ten other names were dropped, but none besides these three received a double or a triple mention. If you’re in the librarianship stream, you might have already heard about these three guys in detail. If you don’t know them, have a glance at their Wikipedia entries. Their biographies are interesting, and their efforts to advance their professions and society are admirable. Even if their writings aren’t listed on any syllabus (or are they?), these dead Americans deserve a mention and maybe even a read.

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