Caveat Lector

Mixed bag

So, let’s see… when we left Renate, she’d just taken her friends dancing.

(The whole thing about dancing… okay, let me try to explain in brief. Rien’s enigma is his alter ego, nicknamed “Trancey,” who comes to the fore to kick butt and take names whenever Rien’s in trouble. Rien has reason to loathe Trancey, not least because he can’t control or even remember what Trancey does, but he can’t do away with Trancey because he has few usable defense skills of his own. On dancing night, Trancey treated Renate to a spectacular dance-floor turn, and somehow managed to let Rien remember the whole thing. Rien was most thrilled.)

The struggle to keep the Lan’yarian mafia (known as the Ruido Grande) out of Ilium has turned into a several-front war. On the one hand, we have the Thieves’ Guild trying to keep its anti-Lan’yarian elements from getting assassinated. On the other hand, we have the Black Sheep gang trying to hold back the Toy Soldiers gang, which has gone over to the enemy in a major way. On the third hand, we have the Cosmic Arrows and Ultra Box gangs, the former being swayed by a flashy Ruido Grande swordsman willing to teach them some tricks, the latter being proselytized by Ruido-Grande-affiliated demon missionaries.

So Renate’s been kinda busy, the last few days.

Two assassinations have been prevented. Rien and a chance-met new ally are trying to bring the Cosmic Arrows down a few pegs. Aryk, along with his old seminary buddies, is doing a bit of Ultra Box proselytization. This involved a rap competition that was absolutely, positively, laugh-till-your-lungs-bleed funny. (It also showed that Aryk has a long way to go to understand the workings of privilege, not that that’s surprising.)

And Renate had to go beg for some time from the Black Sheep’s leader, a nouveau-titled vampire in negotiations with the Ruido Grande. (Which led to an absolutely priceless aside from the GM: “I'm going to get a vampiress to help me fight a gang war and I haven't a THING to wear!”)

Current situation: The Black Sheep are rampaging against both the Toy Soldiers and the Ultra Box; Renate may have to try to rein them in, as their leader insisted upon same. Exactly where the seminarians stand with respect to the demon missionaries isn’t quite clear, nor do we know what’s happened with the Cosmic Arrows. Aside from preventing another assassination, the Thieves’ Guild has been quiet. And Renate has to present two victories to the Black Sheep’s leader within a week if the Sheep are to keep fighting—if the Sheep do not decide to dump their leader, as a tantalizing rumor has it they are considering.

On tap: regrouping and figuring out where our efforts are best placed next.

On a personal level, Renate is deeply uncomfortable with the ethics of all this. She doesn’t like working with gangs and grifters, though she admits that they have been the sole organized opposition to the Ruido Grande’s conquest, and she knows full well that they cannot be eliminated without serious social upheaval. Unbeknownst to her, the Thieves’ Guild has paid her and her allies for the assassination preventions; when she does find out, her share of the money will be returned.

There may be a ray of hope in the Black Sheep’s defection; that remains to be seen. In the main, though, Renate is planning with a quaking heart to put the whole ugly story in front of the Ilium public via her contacts in the newspaper world—and that done, she’ll take her lumps for her part in the entire mess.

On the plus side, Renate managed to find Rien/Trancey a valuable new friend. Ren is rather intimidated by Rien/Trancey, though being a loyal little soul, she does her best. The mere strangeness of it is bad enough, though in her country-girl way she recognizes that the entire world is pretty gosh-darned strange and why should Rien/Trancey be any different? But his troubles feel a little overwhelming at times, so she’s very pleased to have found a way to share them with someone else.

Go go Google speller!

So I wanted to wish somebody a happy birthday, and I wanted to do it with Wol’s famously misspelled admonition from AA Milne.

Only I couldn’t remember how to spell it. So I asked Google for “wol bthuthday,” and darn if it didn’t ask me “did you mean to search for wol bthuthdy?”

On that topic, by the way… I have been meaning to mention Language Log’s fantastic use of Google as a corpus-checker for odd locutions. (Search ’em for “eggcorn” to see the kind of thing I mean.) A few moments’ search yields fascinating (and to my eye, pretty darn solid in comparison to the average linguistic research paper) data about language usage. (And those guys can write really lovely rants, too. Ranting is a fine art. They’ve mastered it.)

Think about trying to test for eggcorns in a print corpus. You’d have to limit yourself to an exquisitely small corpus, to begin with, because the human eye can only do so much, and there are only so many concorded works out there. And even that limited corpus would require hours and hours of tedious searching. And even then things would be missed.

(Um, yep, been there, done that. Not with eggcorns specifically, but I have done that kind of intensive text-search.)

Yet Language Log can draw a bead on an eggcorn in two seconds flat.

This—precisely THIS—is what first made me think electronic text was cool. Vast corpora just waiting to be sifted through, with incredibly sharp and useful new tools. What’s not to love?

I do note that as the Web ages, Language Log (and the legions of linguists who will use similar techniques) will have to employ some date limits on searching if they really want a current (or, for that matter, historically bounded) dataset. Not so much a problem now; definitely a problem in fifty years. But a solvable problem, to be sure.

An exciting time to be a linguist, I must say. I can’t imagine how they all keep their noses in Chomsky, when there’s so much real language passing by begging for examination.

We are what we don’t say

A couple weeks back there was a flurry of discussion (pursuant to Gary Turner’s hanging up his keyboard) about turning oneself into a character and one’s blog into a narrative. At some point, it’s possible to feel that the fictionality of it all has gotten out of hand, assuming of course that fictionality was not the intent in the first place. It’s even possible to feel that one is using one’s blog to delude oneself.

(Not, incidentally, that this was Gary’s motivation. He appears to have been nervous about his blog leaking into his non-blog life. More on that in a bit.)

To which I respond, what’s unique about blogs? We humans are terrific deceivers, not to mention fantastically deluded as a matter of course. The blog certainly offers a venue for (self-)deception and (self-)delusion, but it is neither inevitably deceptive nor inherently reflective of delusion. Why blame the blog when the issue is the blogger?

(I mean, heck, if you believe everything you read in the average autobiography or memoir…)

In the absence of a panopticon, it takes real effort and will to be honest and whole. It’s dead easy to fragment oneself, or to tell lies, from little white ones all the way to gigantic whoppers. And even if you try to be honest and whole (I believe I’ve said this before, actually), you never get there. Or at least I haven’t, and I’m fairly sure I can’t.

The lapses, though, can be interesting. What we don’t or won’t say. The negative space between the parts of the sculpture.

For me, the negative space on CavLec clues me in to what’s bothering me. Traditionally I have relied on my RPG characters to do this, and they still do it, but CavLec turns out to be rather more reliable than they. (After all, they’ve all got their own concerns. CavLec doesn’t.) Obviously, CavLec readers can only guess at where the negative space is. I, on the other hand, know.

I’ve been a bit reticent about posting RPG adventures lately. The last time this happened, it was a great big neon sign flashing how badly I needed to get out of a couple of games that weren’t doing me any good (nor, I hasten to add, was I adding anything to the games).

This time? I know why. It’s because a heck of a lot of real-life librarians have been lurking about CavLec lately, and I’d just as soon not come across as a flake—because I’m nervous as a cat about the job search upcoming.

I know, I know, I’m borrowing trouble. I’ve set the beginning of spring semester, better than six months off, as the beginning of the official job hunt. I’ve even been doing everything else right; I have a fish or two nibbling at bait already. And—realistically—I know I’m needed.

So, you know, it’s no excuse. I am what I am. Heaven knows I wouldn’t want to work with the sort of people who can’t cope with a little roleplaying on my off hours. (It’s not as if I keep the Player’s Handbook on my desk at work! Reference question? Asker roll a WIS check to ask intelligibly, librarian roll an INT check to find the answer.)

But it does give me a chance to come to grips with the fear. And all from a little negative space.

I’ll talk about what Rennie’s been up to shortly.

All gone

Hm, thought I to myself. Wonder how David’s courses are doing.

Oh. That well, eh?

Yep. They’re full. Truthfully, I wasn’t expecting them to fill (if they did at all) until summer school starts up. But, hey, cool.

And David found his Library of Congress name authority listing. (I can’t link you directly to it because LoC does weird session stuff. So go to the LoC authority search page and look for him, if you’re interested.) He wrote me an email (I was in Indy) to ask if I could tell him what it all meant.

I asked him if he really wanted to know. The silence thus far is deafening.

But for the basic idea behind name authority, try this post.

Plea for help

Somewhere in the blogsphere there must be someone who reads Entertainment Weekly…

See, I know David was mentioned in a recent issue, but since I didn’t know when they were going to release said issue (the actual interview was well over a month ago), I didn’t grab a copy of it.

So if anyone did, and still has the copy, and wouldn’t mind sending it to me, I would be incredibly grateful. Scrapbook stuff, you know? Send me an email if you can help. Thanks.

Update: Donor found. Wow, that was fast.

The real pink number problem

I can’t help it. I get fatally amused when markup geeks confront problems I’ve known about for years from helping drag books and journals into the digital world.

In case you missed it, there has been a movement afoot in the blogsphere to add id attributes on the paragraph level of blogposts, to make linking to chunks of blogposts easier. In an HTML world, this means extending the permalink concept (a visible link to the permanent location of a blog post) to paragraphs, creating a visible character linked to an URL at which that paragraph can always be found.

As several bloggers have pointed out, that’s crufty and ugly and gets in the way of the reading. Simon Willison came up with some de-uglification, for which we may all thank him. Truth is, though, I’ve seen worse implementations of this notion than green hash-marks. A journal archive I looked at once stuffed not just green hash marks, but an entire table of paragraph-level metadata between paragraphs. Try wading through that amount of cruft to read an article start to finish; I dare you.

Mark Pilgrim took this to extremes, just to highlight the cruft factor.

With all due respect, Mark is missing the point. Not just one point, but several, even. Not that he’s alone. A previous employer of mine once scoffed at the notion that DOI standard allowed assignment of a DOI to any segment of an existing work, no matter how small, at the discretion of the publisher. “Who’s going to want DOIs on every frame of a movie?” he blustered. “What a waste!”

No, of course no one wants that. That’s not the point. The point is that someone might want to enshrine some random frame thus, and there’s no way to make any random frame point-at-able without making every frame capable of being pointed at. Moving back to the blogsphere, there’s no automated way to add callouts to one individual paragraph without adding callouts to all of them.

A more subtle explication of the problem: I could, if I chose, add individual id attributes to paragraphs on CavLec I thought especially worthy of notice. But who’s to say that my idea of noteworthy paragraphs meshes with any other blogger’s? Nobody, that’s who. (Not least because it’s an open question whether any paragraphs on CavLec are noteworthy.) The only way to ensure that anyone who wants to link to noteworthy paragraphs can do so is to assume that all paragraphs are potentially noteworthy.

Worse, even if I do add id attributes, there’s no way for a would-be linker to get at them for linking purposes except by inspecting my HTML code. Green hash marks may be crufty, but they address a genuine issue, one we might call “identifier invisibility.”

Might there be better ways? Well, yes, indeed there might. One such way would be to make id attributes unnecessary on the paragraph level, via a pointing/fragment-identifier mechanism capable of understanding “Gimme the fifth paragraph of the document at this URL.” We sorta have this already for XML (including XHTML) documents; it’s called XPath. Back in the day, PubStruct tried to build it for OEBPS documents via XPointer, in order to solve the problem of pointing to bits that haven’t necessarily been marked up, or that cross markup boundaries.

It can be done, in other words, if browsers would implement XPath and web authors would stick to X(HT)ML.

But, dang it, there’s still a UI problem here that nobody’s addressed, no matter what your solution-poison is. I mentioned it already: identifier invisibility. Whether there’s an id there or one is relying on X(Path|Pointer), there’s just no way to eyeball a fragment identifier the way one can eyeball, say, a page number in a print book.

The only fix I can think of involves browsers handling the heavy lifting. Right-click somewhere (or highlight a section of text), choose the “Gimme a link to this” option, browser sends an appropriate link to the clipboard. (Any decent XML editor worth its salt ought to offer the same capability, of course. But in the blogsphere, we need browsers to do it, because we tend to use browsers to author.)

The problem is less simple than that, even just in the blogsphere. If I point to something on the main page of a blog, what I really want is a URL that includes the post’s permalink, not its temporary front-page URL. Gonna have to be a damn smart browser to figure out what the permalink is, given the lack of consistency in how they’re placed and referred to in blogs generally. (Mine say “Permalink.” Some blogs use dates. Some use blog titles. Some use little hash marks.)

And ideally, one would standardize an algorithm for working out what the fragment identifier ought to be, because otherwise, a near-infinite number of identifiers can be generated for the same fragment. Very non-Semantic-Webby, that, but the larger problem is that it’s bad for scholarly citations, where it becomes genuinely important to establish that two links are or are not to the same bit of content.

All in all, though, this is a permutation of the indexing and hypertext problem I’ve talked about already. Over a year ago, goodness me.

Home again

I’m home again. Chicago traffic was murder, so I didn’t get home until fairly late, but I did get home.

I had a very good week. Time to think about a few things. Time to sort out what the deal was with Egeria (turned out to be actual problems, the sort of thing one must actually think about how to solve—sorta fun). Time to rethink the Historical Society page header (I have a new idea for that, but it’ll take me some vile bad cursing to implement). Time to watch truly mindboggling amounts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—quite enjoyed the Faith arc.

(There is actually a very role-playing-friendly vibe to Buffy. I’m not surprised it got made into an RPG.)

And credit where it is due—I left a house somewhere between “piled higher and deeper” and “slime pit” and came back to House Beautiful, or at the very least House Picked-Up and Vacuumed. (My turn. I think I’m going to spray the deck, if it stops raining long enough this weekend. And then there’s the groanworthy front yard… time to try out the new weedwhacker.)

And my keyboard is back. I cannot possibly tell you how much I missed that thing, except to note that I am bloody well calling the doctor again today because I hurt and I’m tired of hurting. Kinesis put a new cord on it, de-cat-haired it, put a new label on my E key and replaced the serial-number label, put new firmware in it, and sent it back looking downright spiffy (except for grungy keys).

I’m still behind on things, I’m afraid. I wanted to be further along with the Historical Society stuff than I am, but at least I know what the next steps are—merging a bunch of linklists (in progress; it’ll just take time) and contacting the woman in charge of them to see if they can be seriously weeded. I’m hoping so, because as things are I don’t see how anyone can find anything. I need to go in armed with a few replacement links to omnibus reference pages, I suspect, to overcome some resistance.

(Of course, that assumes that the state employment office has better information architecture than the WHS, and I have the uneasy feeling that may not be the case. Well, we’ll see.)

I owe email in seventeen directions, but me being me, I suspect that’ll get blown off.

And then there’s the Extreme tutorial, which I have three or four weeks to put together handouts for. I think the word there is “yeek.” I think the plan is to do background reading in the SLIS library after management class sessions.

Management class starts Monday. I looked over the reserve-reading list; nothing too unexpected. If I can spare some time this weekend, I may dig into the more interesting-looking bits.

But I’m home. And it’s good to be home.

People who wear diamonds

On my right hand, I wear a diamond ring that my grandmother gave me. It was her engagement ring, only she was given it several years into her marriage because, well, she and Grandpa had come from the Ukraine with nothing, and it took him a long time to be able to buy it.

When he could, though, he bought her what must have been the biggest darn diamond in the store. This thing is unmissably huge, and it's set in a curious sort of post-Art-Deco swirly platinum band with teeny diamonds in the channels. So you don't miss the point, I guess. D-I-A-M-O-N-D.

It's mine because I am the first -- well, all right, the only -- granddaughter of my grandmother to be married. This is not quite how it appears; my sister and I are my grandmother's only granddaughters, the Rovners having run to boys. I wear it because it was hers, because I like the story behind it, because I want to honor the kind of love that gives such gifts.

I get many complimentary reactions on the ring, from the sort of person -- invariably female, thus far -- who notices diamonds. Sometimes it's like being accepted into an exclusive club. Women Who Wear Large Diamonds. The only thing that seems to confuse them is that I wear it on my right hand, not my left; the sapphire engagement ring over the wedding ring on my left hand being quite small by comparison. Diamonds come from men, in this particular sorority's estimation, and are always worn on the left hand.

Still. It's a large diamond. Due attention must be paid, it seems.

The Women Who... sorority reclaimed my notice the other day on the city bus going downtown to pick up the bus to Chicago. A sorority member looked me over, wasn't quite sure what to make of the stained tan backpack over the gypsy-green dress and the gray wool shawl -- then saw the diamond. Suddenly I was worth talking to, and the shawl was an elegant fashion accessory, to be compared with the contents of her own closet.

She flashed her own sorority symbol, duly left-handed. I think she was mildly confused over my lack of reaction. I may bear the symbol, but I don't know the passwords or the secret handshake. She told me with a slightly shopworn flounce that of course this was her first time on anything so vulgar as a city bus. I nodded. The city bus is how I get places.

And a few moments later, she betrayed herself, mentioning how she'd learned the city-bus etiquette of leaving from the rear door. First time. Right.

I'm not quite sure what ran through her head when she left the bus, what she would think of me if we happened to run into each other again. The sorority has rules, etiquette, worldview. I don't follow the rules, am ignorant of the etiquette, and don't share the worldview. Yet it seems I am still a sorority member, by virtue of my grandmother's ring. Is that really how these things work?