For the next year or so I’ll be here:
http://marshpenman.wordpress.com
All the posts from here are already transfered.
I’ve rebuilt the tower pc on my desk every couple of years since the 90s. Everything’s been replaced including the case, so depending on your philosophical bent it may or may not be new, rather like the Ship of Theseus. I’ve always done it just behind the technology curve and this has had some great benefits, like allowing me to experience cutting edge tech at a fraction of the usual cost:
As ever, XKCD understands.
The problem is that in a franken-puter one can rarely do a decent job of acoustic engineering. In 2001 that didn’t matter; I could almost cool the beast by radiation and gentle convection[1]. Now I have a motherboard crammed into a case not really designed for it. It has big fans to keep the PSU, processors and GPU cool. The air is genuinely steered and prevented from closed-circuiting by drilled holes and duct tape. I tested the air routes using joss stick smoke.
I love what the machine can do, and Ubuntu gave it a new lease of life and made it fun afresh. Even so I actually unclench when I turn it off each night; only then do I realise how constant and almost-intrusive the noise is. The noise isn’t damaging physically – I used to work managing health and safety, so I’m careful about stuff like that. But I dodn’t think I took as much notice of my acoustic environment before my son was born (he’s profoundly deaf). This is a small, noisy, terraced house and the noise is too much. Now I find it’s also going to be my full-time office, I have to tackle the issue.
My first instinct was to rebuild the bea(s)tbox. Typical systems-engineer thinking: ‘I could replace the enclosure for one with proper airflow and good damping, get quiet fans or fanless cooling, add a secondary enclosure…’ But this is stupid. The cost and effort are too great. I had the answer when I caught myself considering using my eeepc more. I just don’t need the spec I have on my desk. I have a beefy processor used for work on OpenOffice. I have an nVidia 8800 GPU used mainly for playing I.F, MUDs and roguelikes. (What I really need is one of these!) And an ATX tower has a bloody huge footprint.
At this point I got yet another pleasant slapping from modern computing technology. The spec I actually need can be silent. Not ‘quiet’. Completely inaudible. And it costs less to have someone send it to me, nifty and tidy, than the cost of my time building it a bit shoddily. Having shopped around I settled on the D1 from Aleutia with the optional solid-state hard drive. After I’ve sold some of the hardware in the old pc to defray the cost, this office should become a place of Vivaldi and contemplation. We shall see in the inevitable review.
[1]Historical Footnote: I used to work at Harwell AERE. The basic historical induction claimed that the first reactor on site, being air-cooled, showed a notable reduction in power when the doors were opened at each end of the hangar where it was housed. I’m unsure about this to this day.
Update 28 July 2010: I’m now leaving the OU to work elsewhere at the end of the month. This post remains here for interest only. mamp4
I’m running for a seat on the Council of the Open University. This is my 100 word election statement.
In straitened times the Open University needs quick minds and strong voices on the Council, and it needs a Council willing to fight for the University’s survival while holding it to the ideals of openness, equality and diversity.
I know and value the University. I was an undergraduate student when I came to work here; I’m a postgraduate student and UNISON representative now. My professional background is in dispute resolution and rights negotiation. Council members are required to put aside constituency aims while representing the university and its stakeholders; I can do so without losing sight of my colleagues’ values.
Please vote for me if you’re eligible to vote. I’m happy to answer any questions ahead of the ballot – if you’re eligible to vote you’ll be able to reach me by internal email.
I want to jot down a nifty little stack I’m using just now, in case it’s of use to others. Especially those who, like me, are organisationally-challenged.
Tomboy has come with all the Linux distros I’ve used. I never gave it much thought, because it didn’t look useful. It’s unfortunate Tomboy looks like post-its in icon and layout. That gives the impression of an application for making linear, unlinked notes of the type that are best made in GEdit, or in a blog where they can be tagged, or anywhere really. In fact Tomboy turns out to be far more useful than I thought.
Notes can be tagged, arranged in groups called Notebooks, and linked in a simple, intuitive way to make a hierachy like a personal wiki. The perceptive will spot that Evernote does this too. But I can’t get Evernote running on my Linux desktop.
Tomboy notes can also be synced. That can be done the awkward way (ssh-fuse or webDav-fuse) or the simple way. It’s simple to do if you have a folder accessible from all machines. This is where Dropbox comes in.
Dropbox is another application I couldn’t see the point of before I tried working on Windows at the office and Ubuntu at home. It’s not open-source, I think. But it’s free, the free storage is adequate, and it works flawlessly. It’s replaced my USB stick full of files I might need. The FLOSS-guy side of me would just love it Ubuntu One worked as reliably and as unobtrusively, but it doesn’t.
The Dropbox synced folder is an ideal place to create a Tomboy folder for sync. I’ll come clean and admit I only just set this up, but it looks to be working fine.
Since the release of Ubuntu 10.04 the chat on the forums and podcasts seems to be crticism of the default interface. As someone switchng full time to Ubuntu from Windows for the first time, I feel justified in commenting.
‘It looks like a Mac.’
Does it? I have no idea. Frankly, if looking like a Mac means looking attractive and having a better interface than Windows, I don’t care. It enhances my ability to move over. As a switcher I don’t want something that acts in all ways like Windows, else why switch?
‘It lost the earthen, human colours.’
I looked in on every version before this and I liked those colours, too. They set Ubuntu apart. Their use in the default wallpaper in Hardy, especially, bowled me over and made me realise I was trying something interested in beauty and fun.
But the new colour schemes in Ambience and Radience themes are just as attractive. And in any event no Windows-switcher isn’t a power user; we’re not there in universal uptake yet. Everyone loads up a new OS and immediately changes the settings to suit.
What you miss isn’t the colours, but the statement they made. I get that. But I believe the new colours will turn off fewer would-be converts than the old ones.
‘The buttons are on the left. They have a changed order. (The world is therefore ending.)’
Really, who cares? At work my Windows machine has buttons on the right. My iPod Touch has them all over the place. Personally I’m a righty who uses my mouse in the left hand to save my arthritic right shoulder and elbow.* I love the buttons on the left. If you don’t like it just move them! One of the beauties of Ubuntu is its adaptability and accessibility. Why are lifetime-of-product users complaining about something I as a Windows-switcher can adapt to immediately and could just change in a trice? It just proves Ubuntu’s flexibility to me.
If it bothered me at all then I’d quickly be amazed that I’m using something for free and am worried not if the buttons will work, but if I can be bothered to change which side they’re on.
‘Mark S./Canonical Design changed our Ubuntu!’
This is what it’s about. You’ve been in this community, worked hard, and feel like Ubuntu’s being taken away from you. It’s really not. It’s just that some things need money, and design is one of them.
Lucid is different, but it’s beautiful. And with Compiz flying and just some minor modification to the o.o.b configuration, it makes Windows 7 users pretty envious (I know – I’ve baited them with it). And it’s the new design and feel that caused me to finally get rid of all Windows. That’s one new convert, determined to join your community, and to input where I can. Learn from happy-clappy Christians – they don’t mope about when they convert someone.
*If you’re a righty you should try your mouse on the left. Centre up your keyboard and see how much the num-pad sticks out. Isn’t that a pain, having a mouse way out there?
This weekend I installed both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Lucid Lynx LTS on separate machines. The comparisons and the relative strengths surprised me, so I thought I’d share. This isn’t a fan post for either, just comparison.
Why?
I’ve been using various flavours of Linux on my mobile devices for a long time now. Currently Jolicloud on my Atom-based eeepc and –before this weekend– CrunchBang on the laptop. I was running Windows XP on the desktop because I need at least one Windows machine (it’s what my Hoeg Computing customers use) and because of Apple.
Apple be damned. I loved my iPod Touch and couldn’t honestly find something better than iTunes for the business of syncing apps and podcasts. But I finally felt sick of Apple deciding what I can and can’t put on my hardware, that I bought with my money. Especially the dumb Flash embargo. And if they can’t even be arsed to make a Linux iTunes when they make a Windows one, then I figured I’d rather make-do, and replace the thing if I have to. (I won’t run iTunes in WINE).
When I’ve used Linux on the desktop I’ve always enjoyed it. I’ve long been convinced that the threshold where the pros outweigh the cons for everyday home users was approaching. But I have been since around 2000. And yet that tipping point kept just beyond reach. Two things may have changed that though – the arrival of Shuttleworth/Canonical/Ubuntu, and Windows Vista. Canonical have poured money into Linux while maintaining, even strengthening the community. Vista proved every flaw in a non-iterating, monolithic, monopoly-owned OS, then charged users through the nose to buy it, and again to be free of it.
Installation Media
Ubuntu failed spectacularly here, but MS ‘support’ did a good job of equalising things.
I bought my Win7 disc image through my workplace, where I’m also a student, on an education license. When I tried to install the license key wasn’t accepted. So I emailed MS to ask for help. They emailed back to say that my license key wasn’t being accepted because I had cookies turned off in my browser. (Yes, I know. I’ll even give you a moment to read that again. That’s actually what they wrote. Go on – re-read it and try not to choke on your coffee… Done? Right.) This got sorted, as I’ll explain below, but it nearly led to me not bothering.
Ubuntu’s media problem is pretty appalling: the cd image doesn’t fit on a cd. Nor will it boot properly from dvd. This is a known issue and such a trivial thing to fix that I think they’re crazed for not doing so. Just removing a few packages or even writing it as a ‘dvd image’ would fix the issue. Instead new users who haven’t the technical competence to write a bootable USB stick and configure BIOS to boot from it are just going to give up. Considering that what’s to follow after installation is so good, this is just stupid, stupid, stupid.
If you’re already a virtual monopoly, limited availability of media’s not too bad. If you’re trying to get people to try your OS for the first time it’s a potential disaster.
Installation
Like all wannabe-geeks I install a lot of Linux distros, but it’s been a long time since I installed Windows. Well, apart from the annual re-install of a broken XP. I was in for a real shock.
Windows installation hasn’t moved on in a decade. No live media to try the OS, no pretty ways of picking localisation, or typing boxes to test keyboard layout. It was *painful*. Not least there was was the aforementioned key issue. My version was an upgrade. But it turns out you can’t boot Win7 from a machine with no OS or Linux on it, then insert previous Windows discs to prove you own them. No – you have to install the older OS first even though Win7 will format the disc and over-write. If not, it just rejects the license key. I don’t pretend to undesrstand this dumbness. In fact it’s a retrograde step from Win XP and things didn’t get better once installed.
Once installed Win 7 behaved exactly like Linux distros of 7 years ago. No drivers for my sound or wireless cards. Video resolution problems. The wireless problem is so intractable I’ve given up for a month or two.
Ubuntu installation by contrast was as you’d expect for 2010. Live cd, so a chance to check everything would work. Found my hardware instantly and could work all of it, including drivers for my potent gfx card. Having tested all the features and liked it, I just clicked the desktop icon to install. The installer has the proper localisation and keyboard-checking options. It’s pretty, it’s fast, it makes Win7 look like a dinosaur.
Strengths
Windows 7 is amazingly lighweight, in a good way. When the laptop arrived it had Vista on it and could barely run. Since then I’ve had various lightweight distros on it, like #! And X/Lubuntu. I was dreading having new Windows on there, but it’s fine. Windows 7 seems prety intelligent about resource use. When you consider it’s fairly attractive and backwardly compatible by around a decade too, it’s impressive.
Ubuntu Lucid has too much good stuff to list. Social media integration is brilliant, cloud storage is built in, the repositories are stuffed with more cool software than I could ever use. I could pick a thousand things. But my favourite has to be the GNOME/Compiz eye candy. There’s no point me waxing lyrical about it – just google ‘compiz eye candy’ or ‘compiz cube’ or something. And then using the cube got me into using workspaces properly.
And the price. Ubuntu is free.
Support
I think we’ve already demonstrated what Windows support is like. The interaction above seems amazing, but it’s what I’ve come to expect over the years, on the rare occasions I have to deal with MS. Nice people, but not technically great. And too political for me – like when they once told a client of mine his Windows XP problem was caused by his SUSE dual-boot. It wasn’t.
I had to ask 2 questions about Ubuntu, so used the support forums. I got several instant responses, from people who really knew their stuff. What’s more, a year’s 24/7 phone support from Canonical costs the same as my student-license home-basic copy of Win7.
Conclusions
Win7 can’t be entirely discounted. It’s as good as some Linux distros. It makes Vista look like an insane junkyard. It makes XP look solid and well-developed, but dated. It’s friendly. But it didn’t work out of the box and it’s too tricky to bother fixing entirely. Ubuntu’s the better OS by quite some margin. Familiarity is keeping Win7 in the game.
If people could remember the difficulty hump they went over when they first adopted Windows, or if more people get to try an Ubuntu machine, Windows is really screwed.
Just as I predicted annually since 2001.
I’ve had great fun over the last few days examining textual variations in editions of Heart of Darkeness. Well, fun to me.
Comparing the printed versions against their copy-text was instructive, and also easy, since the editors all named their copy-text in the apparatus. More challenging was tryingto identify a CT for one of the Project Gutenberg editions I’m using, PG526: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/526
In many respects it resembles the plates of the ‘Sun-Dial’ text that the Oxford World’s Classics edition uses as CT, with all their errors and introduced punctuation. But it differs in enough important respects to tell me a different, earlier CT was its base.
I was unable to get hold of Judith Boss who first hand-keyed the file back in the 90s. But the PG editor David Widger, who’s run it through an extensive clean-up and proofing process as on several occasions, was very helpful.
With a knowledge of what PG’s software is likely to have done, and with access to earlier editions, I think I finally figured it out. It was a number of inches that got me started…
I know CT for PG526 must be the First American Ed. by McClure and Phillips, 1903. For example: ‘eight-inch guns’ is only in the first Serial, first English and first American eds. But Serial and English eds. have ‘particularised’ where PG526 has ‘particularized’. It also has, for example, ‘vermouths’ with an ‘o’, which the Serial and English eds. don’t.
Typing of the words ‘The horror’ is out of place for this edition, the capital being an obvious correction and one the PG cleanup reg-exp engine may have made. (I’ve seen a detailed description of its workings.)
An interesting error in this is ‘next beat of the float’. Only the Sun-Dial and later uses of the same plates like “Kent” make this ‘boat’. Watts corrects it back to ‘float’ for the Oxford edition. But both PG texts have ‘boat’. It must have been in one and introduced to the other.
I’m in the mire a bit. I keep forgetting that I’m not supposed to be learning this subject, I’m already supposed to be an expert and I’m supposed to be making my own, new argument. As a result I’m reading broadly, following up interesting asides and making discursive notes.
I’ve got to keep coming back to my thesis and its central arguments. I’ve got to read quickly and bore in to the arguments which support or oppose mine. Here’s my metaphor of the day: ‘If I think there’s oil in Oxfordshire, I need to drill holes to find oil, or rock, or spring water. Wandering around looking at all the wildlife is fun, but tells me nothing.’ (It makes sense to me, alright?)
This is the University-accepted version of 2010′s research, posted for the folks at Gutenberg, LibriVox, and to keep me honest.
WordPress will do horrid things to the formatting, for which I apologise in advance. It’ll also mess up the MHRA-styled referencing, for which I apologise not at all.
Thesis
A shift in the nature of the production of literary texts occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century. All culturally-important, public-domain literary works became widely available in electronic form. This revolution was made possible by three factors: an increase –and accelerating rate of increase– in computing power and availability; a rapid decrease in the cost and size of electronic storage; and growth in the capacity and utility of data transfer. But what caused this revolution was people’s desire to digitize, prepare and distribute texts.
In this dissertation I will make three arguments. First I will argue that each new electronic text is a new edition. Second I will argue that text-object theories of editing cannot be fully applied to the new editions. Third I will argue that social-process and unstable-readerly-text theories of editing cannot be fully applied to the new editions. I will then synthesise an editing model which accounts for observed practice.
Materials
As primary texts I intend to use multiple editions of two literary works. They are Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Editions will be studied and compared for examples of the processes I wish to describe. In each case I will use traditional scholarly editions, multiple electronic editions prepared from different copy-texts and audio editions created by both humans and by machines. The texts have been chosen by several limiting criteria; they are: rich in editing history and debate, available in many editions and formats, and from the period prescribed by the sponsoring Open University department.
A third text, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, has been selected in case one of the two first-choice texts proves unsuitable. It has been selected for the same reasons as Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, but is not intended for use in the dissertation except in unexpected circumstances.
I have managed to contact the editors and performers of some of my chosen editions and may quote their comments on the work in progress or their answers to my questions.
Secondary material will include a large number of academic works on the practice and theory of textual editing. I will use articles about the specific editing history of each text. The ties between editing and literary theory cannot be ignored and certain important essays and chapters of literary theory will be examined.
Chapters of Four Thousand Words
Freely-available electronic texts, including audio files, are editions in their own right. The publication of those editions adheres to simple models and will not be explored in depth. The reception of the texts is a complex enough subject to warrant a separate, larger study incorporating sociological research. But no satisfactory model exists to describe the collaborative process of editing these editions; this dissertation will work toward that aim. The research is complicated by the fact that those editing these editions might not think of themselves as engaged in textual or scholarly editing.
‘Intentional’ views of editing such as those espoused by McKerrow, Greg, Bowers and Tanselle were undermined by the rise of New Criticism on the grounds that they made authorial intention too important. These models cannot be used to describe the collaborative editing of freely-available electronic texts, but not for the reasons they were at odds with the New Critics. In fact the editors of my chosen electronic texts often consider authorial intention very important. But these theories could not have foreseen the types of copy text that might be used, nor how editions would be prepared. More importantly these theories have a vested interest in privileging the work of the lone, trained scholar in an academic setting.
It is true that a subset of editing theory already considers electronic texts and readerly texts. Jerome McGann has discussed ‘The Rationale of the Hyper-Text’.1 Others have suggested that electronic texts embody literary theories which view the text as a social process not a product, and each new reading as the creation of a unique edition.2 I will argue that these models are no better than restrictive text-object models to describe the studied editions. They do not properly describe the systems by which our studied editions are produced – socially but with regard to copy text and authorial intention. Nor do they properly describe the systems whereby our chosen editions are stored – in hypertext-indexed archives but as separate and whole editions. Hypertext and cladistics-based archives of certain famous texts are being generated by universities. These are often proprietary and do not reflect the mass of feely-available electronic literary texts as readers will encounter them.
A description of the editing of these texts must account for the editors’ aims, their actions and their eclectic theoretical underpinnings. I will describe their work in theoretical terms. In doing so I will consider why these groups often do not consider themselves editors, why they maintain such high regard for authorial intention and how their work both draws on and deviates from other editing practice.
Conclusions
I expect to conclude that the work of these editors is shaped most by the traditions of intentional editing. I expect to conclude that this is because the editors view themselves primarily as readers and recipients of texts of the sort they are preparing. I expect to conclude that more technically advanced, more readerly but less-used text-archives are a minority interest, produced by and for the vested interests of academics.
Indicative Bibliography of Primary Sources
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/526/pg526.html> [accessed 10 March 2010]
Several electronic editions will be used, all in the public domain and from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. by Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1988)
Luoma, Kristin, LibriVox » Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad <http://librivox.org/heart-of-darkness-by-joseph-conrad/> [accessed 10 March 2010]
Human-read, electronically recorded audio version of the text.
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2489/pg2489.html> [accessed 10 March 2010]
Several electronic editions will be used, all in the public domain and from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007).
Muller, Frank, Moby Dick (Unabridged) (Recorded Books LLC, 2003)
‘Power Moby-Dick, the Online Annotation’ <http://www.powermobydick.com/> [accessed 10 March 2010]
Wills, Stewart, LibriVox » Moby Dick, by Herman Melville <http://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/> [accessed 10 March 2010]
Human-read, electronically recorded audio version of the text.
Indicative Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Chernaik, Warren, and Oxford University Computing Service.;University of London., The Politics of the electronic text (Oxford [England]: Office for Humanities Communication Oxford University Computing Services with the Centre for English Studies University of London, 1993)
Cohen, Philip, Devils and angels : textual editing and literary theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991)
Greetham, D, Textual Scholarship : An Introduction (New York: Garland Pub., 1994)
Greetham, D, Scholarly editing : a guide to research (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995)
Greetham, D, Theories of the text (Oxford [U.K.] ;;New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Harrison, Stephen, Texts, ideas, and the classics : scholarship, theory, and classical literature (Oxford: Oxford university press, 2001)
Hewitt, Douglas, English fiction of the early modern period : 1890-1940 (New York ;London: Longman, 1992)
McGann, Jerome, A critique of modern textual criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
Millgate, Jane, and Conference on Editorial Problems, Editing nineteenth-century fiction : papers given at the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 4-5 November, 1977 (New York: Garland Pub. Co., 1978)
Regan, Stephen, and Open University., The nineteenth-century novel. (London: Routledge, 2001)
Richard Finneran, The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
Walder, Dennis, and Open University., The nineteenth-century novel. (London: Routledge, 2001)
Bibliography – This Proposal
McGann, Jerome, ‘The Rationale of HyperText’, orig. in Electronic Text, ed. by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html> [accessed April 2008]
Graham, M., ‘From New Criticism to Structuralism’ in A Handbook to Literary Research, ed. by Simon Eliot and W. R. Owens (London: Routledge, 1998)
Chernaik, Warren, and Marilyn Deegan, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of the Electronic Text, ed. by Warren Chernaik and others (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993)
1Jerome McGann , ‘The Rationale of HyperText’, orig. in Electronic Text, ed. by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html> [accessed April 2008].
2Warren Chernaik and Marilyn Deegan, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of the Electronic Text, ed. by Warren Chernaik and others (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993), pp. 3-8 (p. 6).
