September saw the death of one of the unlikely triumvirate who have done perhaps the most to envisage and engineer our transition from print to digital text: Michael S. Hart, doyen, founder of Project Gutenberg which now operates at 36,000+ free-etexts-strong -- disparu September 6 at age 64.
As for the other two -- the creative corporate maelstrom involving Larry Page & Sergey Brin & two sisters named Wojcicki & the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project & Marissa Mayer's stopwatch, & called "Google" or the "Books" part of that anyway --
http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/history.html
-- and Amazon.com's amazing Jeff Bezos -- well, both of those other two still are very much alive and thriving and busy building their respective World's Largest Libraries Of Digital Texts So Far. And I earnestly hope Project Gutenberg will persevere now, too, in spite of its loss -- along with the massive efforts of HathiTrust, and Gallica, and the millions of other digital text repositories all blossoming now... sprouting on every institutional hard drive, and soon surging forth on or via every individual's mobile...
Michael personally, though, will be missed. His refreshing naïveté -- every effort needs one pioneer, at least, who believes fervently in a world without money -- Hart's particular vision balanced the more worldly realisms of the other two undertakings well. Every pioneering effort needs a variety of flavors, and online digital text has benefited greatly from his.
What follows below here, then, is an excellent and interesting eulogy of Michael by Hervé Le Crosnier, translated by me from the latter's elegant French which also is included -- online digital text has been a trans-national and cross-cultural effort, as Hervé's observations here and his own long involvement in all of this both attest --
[* version en américain, see version in french below]
"Project Gutenberg is Orphaned: the death of Michael Hart"
by Hervé Le Crosnier, translation by Jack Kessler
Michael Hart died on September 6 at the age of 64. He will hold his place in the history of digital culture as the founder of Project Gutenberg, a major cooperative undertaking dating from the beginnings of the Internet, which created a gigantic database of digitized books made available to users on a shared basis.
It was forty years ago, in July 1971, that the young Michael Hart received his pass for shared-time use of the Xerox computer at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus. With just a normal math background, Hart wondered what he might usefully accomplish using such a tool, one at that point limited to a single all-capitals character set and very slow by comparison to today's computers.
He used his time to make a copy of the US Declaration of Independence, all the while dreaming the dreams of universal bibliography launched by the founding-fathers of digital information such as Vannevar Bush, Joseph Licklider and Ted Nelson. The file which resulted was only 5kb -- but he was forced to abandon his original idea of sending the text to the 100 or so users then possessing an Arpanet address, as that would have choked that entire network.
So he stored it on a server and made it available for free downloading -- with no hypertext links, forty years ago those hadn't been invented yet. Even though only six users took him up on his offer, the first electronic book of the digital information era had seen the light of day. This was in any event the most expensive digital book in history -- Hart calculated his computer-time for its production and estimated the cost of that at one million dollars.
Hart continued with his effort to make the greatest possible number of digital books available. Even though the first texts were difficult to read, lacking typography, showing only capitals, with no page formatting... He never strayed from his initial aim of making the works available to all. To this end he drew upon an essential characteristic of digital text: reproduction and distribution on the networks costs nearly nothing, and it costs even less and less as the machines and communications channels grow better at what they do.
As Hart wrote last July, "One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air". And he anticipated future uses beyond just reading, such as textual analysis, word-comparison, fulltext search, and linguistic and stylistic studies all computer-assisted.
For a long time Hart's credo was "plain-vanilla ASCII": he avoided all page-formatting so that texts might be accessible to all machines, and all users. This led Project Gutenberg volunteers to adopt a strange system of accents, placing those next to the letters they affected. Hart's nonconformity regarding HTML, however, disappeared when the Web became the principal means of distributing digital texts: the texts follow now-accepted standards via their markup -- particularly the use of UTF-8, the character set standard which enabled composition in most world languages.
As with his project, and his vision, Hart was generous and inspiring; he possessed a grand sense of conviction, a sound grasp of the organization needed for his radical project -- he knew how to assemble millions of volunteers to accompany him on his adventure of digitizing the knowledge in the world's books. These were volunteers who began by hand-typing their texts, then by scanning and using optical character recognition, always pressed to make a careful transcription.
We often stand amazed before the giant industrialized projects of digitization. But let us reflect on the capacities offered by a coordinated mobilization of millions of volunteers. The construction of an open commons where all can share is a dream of many -- a project on which each can participate, each at their own level, in the construction of something greater than them all.
In the magazine Searcher in 2002, Michael Hart described this situation as a true change of paradigm: "It's the power of one person, alone in their basement, being able to type in their favorite books and give it to millions or billions of people. It just wasn't even remotely possible before...".
The personal will-power of Michael Hart enabled him to pursue his great project throughout his life. Even though it was 1994 before the hundredth text was available -- the Complete Works of Shakespeare -- just three years later the Divine Comedy of Dante became the thousandth. Project Gutenberg, with its 37,000 books in 60 languages, is now one of the principal sources of free digital books accessible in current formats -- epub, mobi... -- for readers, tablets, smartphones, and of course for the Web.
The assembled and reformatted texts are distributed free-of-charge and for any use. The free charge is only one aspect of the book access provided by Project Gutenberg: the texts also may be transmitted, re-edited, re-formatted using different tools, used in teaching or in other activities... This is the "public domain" in its full sense: not just a guarantee of "access" -- it is even more, a full "use".
Which is also the best way to protect "free" access: among the re-uses, even if some of those are commercial, in the sense of involving some supplementary added-value, there also is at least the use which relies simply upon the free distribution.
That is a lesson to consider, for all the institutions which now are charged with the public distribution of works which are in the public domain. Digitization should not add additional barriers to the use of the text, certainly not commercial barriers... these are efforts which often offer an improved "rehabilitation" of classical or forgotten works...
At a time when the British Library is signing a contract with Google limiting certain uses of a data file thus-obtained -- or the Bibliothèque nationale de France is adding a mention of "propriété" to digital works in the public domain distributed via Gallica... -- some notice, of the line on all this taken by Michael Hart, would be a good idea.
Michael Hart's strong character, his work-ethic and his capacity for mobilizing volunteers around his efforts, remain in our memory. The journals which have announced his death justifiably write of the "creator of the first electronic book".
That however is too simple. It is above all Michael Hart who placed the book at the heart of the information-sharing model for the Internet. His is the clear conscience which insisted upon the protection of the public domain -- protection against the creation of new protected enclaves, by technical means or commercial contract -- in the creation of his Project Gutenberg. Michael Hart never ceased defending a vision of the book as an organizer of exchange, of knowledge and of emotions, among individuals -- he mobilized volunteers for this effort, the building of an information network for all who love to read and to share what they read.
Hervé Le Crosnier
Caen, September 10, 2011
Text distributed under a Creative Commons license
http://blog.mondediplo.net/2011-09-11-Le-projet-Gutenberg-est-orphelin (original posting, in french)
--oOo--
[* version en français]
Le projet Gutenberg est orphelin : décès de Michael Hart
Michael Hart est décédé le 6 septembre, à l'âge de 64 ans. Il restera dans l'histoire de la culture numérique comme le fondateur du « projet Gutenberg », un projet coopératif majeur datant des débuts de l'internet et ayant réussi à créer un gigantesque fonds de livres numérisés offerts en partage.
Il y a quarante ans, en juillet 1971, le jeune Michael Hart reçoit son sésame pour utiliser, en temps partagé, l'ordinateur Xerox de l'Université d'Illinois à Urbana-Champain. Peu versé sur le calcul, il se demande ce qu'il pourrait bien faire d'utile à la société à partir d'un tel outil, limité, n'utilisant qu'un jeu de caractères en capitales, et très lent en regard des ordinateurs d'aujourd'hui.
Il utilisera son temps pour recopier la « Déclaration d'Indépendance » des États-Unis, en songeant aux idées de bibliothèques universelles lancées par les « pères fondateurs » de l'informatique, notamment Vannevar Bush, Joseph Licklider ou Ted Nelson. Le fichier pesait seulement 5 kilo-octets, mais il du renoncer à sa première idée d'envoyer le texte à la centaine d'usagers ayant une adresse sur Arpanet, car cela aurait bloqué tout le réseau.
Il le mit donc en dépôt sur un serveur pour un libre téléchargement (sans lien hypertexte, une notion qui n'existait pas il y a quarante ans). Même s'ils ne furent que six à profiter de l'offre, on considère que le premier « livre électronique » du réseau informatique avait vu le jour. Ce fut d'ailleurs le livre numérique le plus cher de l'histoire, Michael Hart ayant un jour calculé une valeur approximative de son accès à l'ordinateur et l'évaluant à 1 million de dollars.
Michael Hart a continué sur sa lancée pour rendre disponible la plus grande quantité de livres possible. Même si les premiers textes étaient difficilement lisibles, sans typographie, en lettres capitales, sans mise en page,... il n'a jamais dévié de sa volonté de rendre les œuvres disponibles à tous. Pour cela, il s'appuyait sur une caractéristique essentielle du document numérique : la reproduction et la diffusion via le réseau ne coûte presque rien, et même de moins en moins quand les machines et les tuyaux deviennent plus performants. Comme il l'écrivait encore en juillet dernier, « à part l'air que nous respirons, les livres numériques sont la seule chose dont nous pouvons disposer à volonté ».
Et il anticipait sur les usages à venir au delà de la lecture, comme l'analyse du texte, la comparaison de mots, la recherche par le contenu, l'établissement de correspondances ou les études linguistiques ou stylistiques assistées par l'ordinateur.
Longtemps son credo fut celui du « plain vanilla ascii », c'est à dire de refuser toute mise en page afin que les textes soient accessibles à toutes les machines, par tous les utilisateurs. Ceci conduisait les volontaires du projet Gutenberg à un codage particulier des accents, placés à côté de la lettre concernée. Mais sa méfiance devant HTML a disparu quand le web est devenu le principal outil de diffusion des écrits numériques : l'universalité passait dorénavant par le balisage, et l'utilisation de UTF-8, la norme de caractères qui permet d'écrire dans la plus grande partie des langues du monde.
Comme son projet, disons même sa vision, était généreuse et mobilisatrice ; comme il possédait un grand sens de la conviction et de l'organisation et proposait un discours radical, il a su regrouper des millions de volontaires pour l'accompagner dans sa tentative de numériser le savoir des livres. Des volontaires qui ont commencé par dactylographier les textes, puis utiliser scanner et reconnaissance de caractères, mais toujours incités à une relecture minutieuse.
On est souvent de nos jours ébahi devant les projets industriels de numérisation. Nous devrions plutôt réfléchir à la capacité offerte par la mobilisation coordonnée de millions de volontaires. Construire des communs ouverts au partage pour tous répond aux désirs de nombreuses personnes, qui peuvent participer, chacune à leur niveau, à la construction d'un ensemble qui les dépasse.
Dans le magazine Searcher en 2002, Michael Hart considérait cette situation comme un véritable changement de paradigme : « il est dorénavant possible à une personne isolée dans son appartement de rendre disponible son livre favori à des millions d'autres. C'était tout simplement inimaginable auparavant ».
La volonté de Michael Hart lui a permis de poursuivre son grand œuvre tout au long de sa vie. S'il fallut attendre 1994 pour que le centième texte soit disponible (les œuvres complètes de Shakespeare), trois ans plus tard la Divine Comédie de Dante fut le millième.
Le projet Gutenberg, avec ses 37000 livres en 60 langues, est aujourd'hui une des sources principales de livres numériques gratuits diffusés sous les formats actuels (epub, mobi,...) pour les liseuses, les tablettes, les ordiphones, et bien évidemment le web. Les textes rassemblés et relus sont mis à disposition librement pour tout usage. La gratuité n'est alors qu'un des aspects de l'accès aux livres du projet Gutenberg : ils peuvent aussi être transmis, ré-édités, reformatés pour de nouveaux outils, utilisés dans l'enseignement ou en activités diverses...
Le « domaine public » prend alors tout son sens : il ne s'agit pas de simplement garantir « l'accès », mais plus largement la ré-utilisation. Ce qui est aussi la meilleure façon de protéger l'accès « gratuit » : parmi les ré-utilisations, même si certaines sont commerciales parce qu'elles apportent une valeur ajoutée supplémentaire, il y en aura toujours au moins une qui visera à la simple diffusion. Une leçon à méditer pour toutes les institutions qui sont aujourd'hui en charge de rendre disponible auprès du public les œuvres du domaine public.
La numérisation ne doit pas ajouter des barrières supplémentaires sur le texte pour tous les usages, y compris commerciaux... qui souvent offrent une meilleur « réhabilitation » d'œ'œuvres classiques ou oubliées. Au moment où la British Library vient de signer un accord avec Google limitant certains usages des fichiers ainsi obtenus, où la Bibliothèque nationale de France ajoute une mention de « propriété » sur les œuvres numérisées à partir du domaine public et diffusées par Gallica... un tel rappel, qui fut la ligne de conduite permanente de Michael Hart, reste d'actualité.
Le caractère bien trempé de Michael Hart, sa puissance de travail et sa capacité à mobiliser des volontaires autour de lui restera dans notre souvenir. Les journaux qui ont annoncé son décès parlent à juste titre de « créateur du premier livre électronique ». C'est cependant réducteur. Il est surtout celui qui a remis le livre au c.ur du modèle de partage du réseau internet. C'est la pleine conscience qu'il fallait protéger le domaine public de la création des nouvelles enclosures par la technique ou par les contrats commerciaux qui a animé la création du Projet Gutenberg. Michael Hart n'a cessé de défendre une vision du livre comme organisateur des échanges de savoirs et des émotions entre des individus, mobilisant pour cela des volontaires, le réseau de tout ceux qui aiment lire ou faire partager la lecture.
Caen, le 10 septembre 2011
Hervé Le Crosnier
Texte diffusé sous licence Creative Commons
http://blog.mondediplo.net/2011-09-11-Le-projet-Gutenberg-est-orphelin
--oOo--
And the following is a personal note about Michael which I myself sent out -- somewhat in shock, I am getting perilously-close to age 64 now too -- to the excellent Exlibris list of which I have been a member since its beginnings, where another member just had told the rest of us the sad news --
Re: [EXLIBRIS-L] Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg has died
Date: September 8, 2011 11:49 AM
From: Jack Kessler
To: [EXLIBRIS-L] Rare book and manuscripts
"Michael prided himself on being unreasonable..."
I must say, to all who knew him, that Michael Hart was among the most cordial of the various strong-minded people whom I have met and with whom I have corresponded, online.
He and I discussed various topics, over the years. Michael always was receptive to, even curious about, another person's ideas. For a crusader this is rare, or for any unreasonable nonconformist, if that is what he was -- it accounts perhaps for his great success at attracting other people to his projects and getting good work out of them. Michael was really good with some people.
He certainly was with me. His Project Gutenberg was an early inspiration -- one of the earliest -- in a world which largely, at that time, never even had heard of "digital texts".
That we all take the phenomenon so much for granted, now, is due too often to our own blindness; that the new medium might offer a little high-quality content -- might tell good stories, preserve and perpetuate valuable memories, and do so inexpensively or even *gasp* "for free" -- is due greatly to the foresight and efforts of a very small set of early digital-texts pioneers, and Michael S. Hart definitely was one of those.
Jack...
--oOo--
And, finally, a Codger-Note:
Those of us who love books -- not instead-of but as-well-as and in-addition-to digital texts, also the Internet and book bindings and iPhones and mise en page and incunabula and the rest -- need to know and understand that nothing lasts forever... But it sure didn't seem that way, back when all this digital stuff began, not so very long ago, or it didn't about the brand new and shiny "digital" part of it all anyway.
Michael Hart was young, back then -- Sergey and Larry were even younger -- "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven" -- Bill Gates was young, Steve Jobs was young... If all this is to transition well to future generations, though, we need to acknowledge our own mortalities, make strenuous efforts to record the history, draw from our experiences the lessons we believe we have learned -- as Hervé has drawn them above, here, from Michael Hart and his fascinating Project Gutenberg -- in part because all that history is interesting, and at least so that the most egregious errors and cost and other overruns we have made, and there have been many, might not be made again.
It's all going to change. It has to. That is how Cerf & Kahn's tcp/ip and Hart's Project Gutenberg and GoogleBooks and Kindle and the iPhone and the Internet *cloud* all got to us in the first place: through change and by defying previous oldsters and their older paradigms, received opinions, conventional wisdoms.
But I've read somewhere that Google's gone and purchased their particular Palo Alto "garage"... the place where Sue Wojcicki rented space to Sergey & Larry for their early experiments... So, that's a Good Thing, I believe -- someday we'll all want to know, and be reminded.
And so I hope someone is holding onto what we have from Michael Hart and Project Gutenberg, too. It would be a shame if all our collective memory of this Digital Age's beginnings were to turn out to have been ephemera -- even worse than previous, this is likely to be digital ephemera, and for that it is far too easy to press a wrong button and *global delete*, and then the process of forgetting will commence.
Now, where did I put my glasses...
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
FYI France (sm)(tm) -- books and libraries and reading,
on the Internet and otherwise, all located in France
-- see also fyifrance.com, or Facebook Jack Kessler's Notes
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
FYI France : Front National resources update, digital+
FYI France (since 1992) -- http://www.fyifrance.com/Fyarch/fy110315.htm
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on July 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook.
The Front National appears to be on the march again politically, and readers and their libraries digital & other, everywhere, are wondering -- "Is this a new FN?", "What happened to the old one?", "Who is leading this current FN, and is it different and if so how, and what has become of the old FN and its leadership?" -- about this Extreme Right party which repeatedly has dominated the political headlines, if not necessarily the politics, of the past quarter-century in France.
Now, once more, the Front National's national poll popularity has bulged up, into the double digits: 18%, 24% -- its new and some say even more charismatic leader, daughter of the founder, is running to become political kingmaker and perhaps even president of France.
It always has been difficult to find, and to provide, good information on the Front National phenomenon. Even within the Hexagone there has been much disagreement: diabolization, blind dismissal, also blind adoration, both the invocation of history and the ignorance of it, and much fear and great hatred on both sides -- the party has been used to conjure up terrible nightmares of the European 1940s and 1930s and before, as well as for-some the equally-terrible specters of 21st century founderings now of civil society, of culture, of family structure, of all-that-is-good.
So, a list of new books about the Front National in France follows below, here -- supplementing, for historians, the far longer list which has been assembled on the FYI France website, URL address also below here, over the years -- read!... -- most things-political get written-about before they happen, it's just that too often we don't read about them until afterward --
-- publication information and other details regarding the above, including publishers' descriptions both in French and translated into English, may be found online at,
http://www.fyifrance.com/FN/fnbks.htm
And there are additional digital resources and other information about the Front National on the website, as well: see generally,
http://www.fyifrance.com/fnind.htm
-- on all of which I would greatly appreciate some help --
Much of my data there I have neglected, and it has grown out-of-date: I myself frankly never believed -- several times now, I admit -- that the Front National ever would be back. I thought this party would dwindle and disappear along with its then-already-elderly leader, beginning 'way back in the 1980s era of his most explosive effusions.
But it seems, for reasons I do not fully understand, that for at least some of the French the appeal of the FN transcends the lifespan of its leader... the Le Pen we knew before is now aged 82+ and apparently is fully-retired, but now the FN has located another Le Pen...
Any suggestions from readers here as to updates, then --- corrections, to my current FN data, and most of all new sources -- will be gratefully received, via email to kessler@well.com .
The more we all learn about this new or at least repackaged and apparently now more user-friendly Front National of daughter Marine Le Pen the better, I believe. France still is one of the leading nations of our geopolitical world, and she has been one of the formative forces of many of our various cultures -- friends in Vietnam follow the French, as do some in Ulan Batar, Dakar, Buenos Aires... It is important to all of us to know who leads the Front National, and who influences that leadership, and how and most of all why they do.
Print libraries, digital libraries, the demise of both the bookshop and the newspaper... The perennial problem of how-to-stay-current, in a new and fascinating and still-perilous albeit now-digital world...
Bonnes vacances,
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on July 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook.
The Front National appears to be on the march again politically, and readers and their libraries digital & other, everywhere, are wondering -- "Is this a new FN?", "What happened to the old one?", "Who is leading this current FN, and is it different and if so how, and what has become of the old FN and its leadership?" -- about this Extreme Right party which repeatedly has dominated the political headlines, if not necessarily the politics, of the past quarter-century in France.
Now, once more, the Front National's national poll popularity has bulged up, into the double digits: 18%, 24% -- its new and some say even more charismatic leader, daughter of the founder, is running to become political kingmaker and perhaps even president of France.
It always has been difficult to find, and to provide, good information on the Front National phenomenon. Even within the Hexagone there has been much disagreement: diabolization, blind dismissal, also blind adoration, both the invocation of history and the ignorance of it, and much fear and great hatred on both sides -- the party has been used to conjure up terrible nightmares of the European 1940s and 1930s and before, as well as for-some the equally-terrible specters of 21st century founderings now of civil society, of culture, of family structure, of all-that-is-good.
So, a list of new books about the Front National in France follows below, here -- supplementing, for historians, the far longer list which has been assembled on the FYI France website, URL address also below here, over the years -- read!... -- most things-political get written-about before they happen, it's just that too often we don't read about them until afterward --
- Goodliffe, Gabriel -- The Resurgence of the Radical Right in France : From Boulangisme to the Front National (2011)
- Le Pen, Marine -- Marine Le Pen à contre flots : autobiographie (2011)
- Fourest, Caroline ; Venner, Fiammetta -- Marine Le Pen (2011)
- Ménard, Robert ; le Duverger, Emmanuelle -- Vive Le Pen ! (2011)
- Kosciusko-Morizet, Nathalie -- Le front antinational (2011)
- Simon, Jean-Marc -- Marine Le Pen, au nom du père (2011)
- Liszkai, Làszlo -- Marine le Pen, le nouveau Front National ? (2010)
- Petaux, Jean -- Jean-Marie Le Pen : Front national (2010)
- Ellinas, Antonis A. -- The media and the far right in western Europe : playing the nationalist card (2010)
- Bornschier, Simon -- Cleavage politics and the populist right : the new cultural conflict in Western Europe (2010)
- Berezin, Mabel -- Illiberal politics in neoliberal times : culture, security and populism in the new Europe (2009)
- Berntson, Marit -- Joan of Arc's Daughters: Women in France's National Front (2009)
- Gautier, Jean-Paul -- Les extrèmes droites en France : de la traversée du désert à l'ascension du Front national, 1945-2008 (2009)
- Shields, James G. -- The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (Kindle, or Kindle App on Mac or PC, ebook edition!, 2009)
-- publication information and other details regarding the above, including publishers' descriptions both in French and translated into English, may be found online at,
http://www.fyifrance.com/FN/fnbks.htm
And there are additional digital resources and other information about the Front National on the website, as well: see generally,
http://www.fyifrance.com/fnind.htm
-- on all of which I would greatly appreciate some help --
Much of my data there I have neglected, and it has grown out-of-date: I myself frankly never believed -- several times now, I admit -- that the Front National ever would be back. I thought this party would dwindle and disappear along with its then-already-elderly leader, beginning 'way back in the 1980s era of his most explosive effusions.
But it seems, for reasons I do not fully understand, that for at least some of the French the appeal of the FN transcends the lifespan of its leader... the Le Pen we knew before is now aged 82+ and apparently is fully-retired, but now the FN has located another Le Pen...
Any suggestions from readers here as to updates, then --- corrections, to my current FN data, and most of all new sources -- will be gratefully received, via email to kessler@well.com .
The more we all learn about this new or at least repackaged and apparently now more user-friendly Front National of daughter Marine Le Pen the better, I believe. France still is one of the leading nations of our geopolitical world, and she has been one of the formative forces of many of our various cultures -- friends in Vietnam follow the French, as do some in Ulan Batar, Dakar, Buenos Aires... It is important to all of us to know who leads the Front National, and who influences that leadership, and how and most of all why they do.
Print libraries, digital libraries, the demise of both the bookshop and the newspaper... The perennial problem of how-to-stay-current, in a new and fascinating and still-perilous albeit now-digital world...
Bonnes vacances,
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
FYI France : Paris the City, histories real & digital
FYI France (sm)(tm) -- books and libraries and reading,
on the Internet and otherwise, all located in France
-- see also fyifrance.com, or Facebook Jack Kessler's Wall
Several points of interest, for anyone with curiosity about or a passion for Paris, particularly its history... for sojourns or for daydreaming, this summer or anytime... Not a complete list: the moveable feast enjoys many locations, forever shifting -- but the following make useful additions to any visit, en-chair-et-en-os or virtual --
** Crypte archéologique du parvis Notre-Dame
The Roman city, Lutetia, unveiled and explained, as-revealed beneath the great plaza in front of Notre Dame and generally: dramatically presenting the maps and the reasoning which drove the ever-rational Romans to fortify this particular place, for fording the Seine, girding Gaul, and building the city...
Having visited this you will be able to see in your imagination these roots of Paris -- forever afterward, as you study the city, think about it, walk around, enjoy it -- the great north-south cardo maximus axis of the rues St. Martin & St. Jacques, the tiny mid-river island with its defenses, the road southward climbing the gentle hills carrying legions to Aquitaine, later on troops desperate to aid Martel against the Moors, later still seashell-bedecked pilgrims to Compostela...
Civic life began, for Paris, at this little river-ford Roman Empire provincial town, now revealed a few feet down beneath the square in front of the magnificent but much later medieval cathedral. Paris had humble but tough and enduring beginnings.
Also, it's cool down there, under the ground, sheltered from the sun within the "Crypte archéologique du parvis Notre-Dame" -- the moveable feast gets hot, in the summertime.
adresses --
Paris, ville antique (in French)
http://www.paris.culture.fr/
Paris, a Roman city (in English)
http://www.paris.culture.fr/en/
A set of good "Crypte Archéologique" fotos on Flicker (texts in English)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytravelphotos/sets/72157603376622534/
Practical -- hours of opening etc. (in French, but websites generally are more dependable than print sources re. opening hours)
http://tinyurl.com/3v2q2vv
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/ crypte-archeologique-du-parvis-notre-dame/rub_6468_stand_19971_port_14628
Practical -- brochure (in English)
http://www.paris.fr/viewmultimediadocument?multimediadocument-id=83136
news --
"Et Lutèce devint Paris" (in French, but worth seeing by all for the illustrations & timeline & videos at the very least, both online at the link below and on-site in & beneath the City of Light)
[tr. JK] "'And Lutetia Became Paris'. May 13, 2011. A new exhibit in the Crypte Archéologique de Notre-Dame reveals the metamorphosis over time of what once was 4th century Paris."
http://tinyurl.com/6fkfyjw
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/expositon-et-lutece-devint-paris-a-la-crypte-archeologique/rub_6468_actu_96242_port_14627
** Musée de Cluny
The groups of pilgrims climbing the Mont Ste. Geneviève on the road to Compostela grew more numerous...
Paris in the Middle Ages grew, and changed: a monument to the transition as telling as the parvis Notre Dame's crypte, with its Roman town and Gothic cathedral, is the Quartier Latin's Musée de Cluny, with its Roman baths and Medieval townhouse.
"Outside the walls", both the latter were were... The baths, in their Roman era, were over on the Left Bank safely-distant from the superior officers who, originally perhaps and later, ordered and disciplined things on the more closely-regulated island -- and the officers were a safer distance too, from their own regulations, when they crossed-over on the bridge for a visit to the baths -- the thermae were a place to relax, then, to indulge, to misbehave a little.
The Medieval era country house, too... Nowadays it is little and low, compared to its towering modern central city surroundings. The location once must have been bucolic, though, looking out over yards and gardens and vegetables and even pastures... remembering that Passy and the Champs Élysées still were "champs", much later, when Franklin and Jefferson lived there...
The "green" medieval views from the Musée de Cluny's upper-storey windows now must be imagined in movies, but they are an important part of historical Paris. They're no longer available in the Sorbonne neighborhood by 1615, but they're very much in evidence still just down the road, surrounding St. Germain, per the wonderful Mérian map of that date which my "iPad app" of that map shows so clearly -- vegetable gardens & orchards & fields & windmills -- so the older faubourg, in closer to the Ile, must have enjoyed such amenities and their associated dangers, not so long before.
adresses --
This is the "Musée national du Moyen Age" -- known by everyone as the "Musée de Cluny" -- located at the southeast corner of the Boul'Mich / Boul'St. Germain crossing, just down the hill and across the little square from the Sorbonne -- all students who visit Paris see it from the street, too few go inside to look, but it's well worth a visit.
Musée national du Moyen Age (in French)
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/
Musée national du Moyen Age / National Museum of the Middle Ages (in English)
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/ang/index.html
Exposition, "L'Epée. Usages, mythes et symboles", au Musée de Cluny / Exhibition, "The Sword. Its use, myths, and symbols", at the Musée de Cluny
http://tinyurl.com/4y2f6ao
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Exposition-LEp%C3%A9e-Usages-mythes-et-symbole s-au-Mus%C3%A9e-de-Cluny/202613793104522
news --
a small sampling of "Musée de Cluny" daily activities, ongoing throughout the summer --
Mercredi 8 juin
10h30 Atelier enfants (2h) Le vitrail
14h30 Visite conférence (1h) Les thermes antiques de Lutèce et leurs galeries souterraines
15h45 Visite exposition (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles
Jeudi 9 juin
12h30 un mois / une oeuvre (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles Présentation de l'exposition par Michel Huynh, conservateur en chef, commissaire de l'exposition
18h30 un mois / une oeuvre (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles Présentation de l'exposition par Michel Huynh, conservateur en chef, commissaire de l'exposition
Vendredi 10 juin
11h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
Samedi 11 juin
10h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
10h30 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
11h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
11h30 Visite thématique (1h30) Sculpture romane et gothique (XIIe-XIIIe siècles)
13h00 Atelier en famille (45 mn) « Toucher la pierre, toucher le bois »
14h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
14h00 Visite en famille (1h30) Art, artistes-artisans au Moyen Âge
14h30 Atelier en famille (45 mn) « Toucher la pierre, toucher le bois »
15h45 Visite générale (1h30) L'hôtel des abbés de Cluny et les chefs-d'oeuvre du musée
16h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
Dimanche 12 juin
10h30 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
14h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
16h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
...
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/documents/semaine_6_juin_2011.pdf
** Musée Carnavalet
La ville radieuse: many have dreamed of "designing" Paris, and this museum has collected many of those designs and dreams and displays them well -- to the latest visionaries, who may wonder at how immensely-grand the dreams in the past were, also to the skeptics who shake their heads knowingly over the gargantuan reality Paris now has become, and how different that is from anything ever dreamt for it.
"Paris"... now 12+ million people, plus daily commuters from as far away as Chartres, 18% of the national population, more Parisian than French and more trans-national than France -- and nowadays branchée 24/7, plugged into our bright new digital world, networking with London, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai and other Global Cities, and the Silly Valley, and visiting formerly-nearby Lyon or Toulouse or Limoges only occasionally, and "en passant"... "Paris et le désert", plus ça change...
(Google's Ahmit Singhal pointed out -- only yesterday, at their "online search event", http://www.google.com/insidesearch/ -- that "mobiles" usage patterns, in global cities like Paris, increasingly reverse traditional work patterns -- that nowadays we use our "mobiles" to "seek knowledge" on our lunch hours, and at night, times when previously we would leave-the-office -- so some places & people truly have become a "24/7 world".)
adresses --
Musée Carnavalet -- Histoire de Paris (in French)
http://tinyurl.com/3qhg8f9
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/p6468brochure (in English)
http://tinyurl.com/3sp3b6z
http://www.paris.fr/viewmultimediadocument?multimediadocument-id=88163
Musée Carnavalet -- collections / départments (in French)
http://tinyurl.com/437bf6g
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/Portal.lut?page_id=6638&document_type_id=4&document_id=19798&portlet_id=15100
news --
[tr. JK] "'Eglise Saint-Sulpice, les coulisses d'une restauration' / 'The Church of Saint-Sulpice, backstage at a restoration'. May 18, 2011. Free Exhibit from June 1 through July 3, 1011. Salles d'exposition and salle 62. This exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet explains the important restoration project -- undertaken in 2006 and completed in December 2010 -- for the north tower of one of the largest churches in Paris..."
** Musée, Conservatoire national des arts et metiers
What really happened -- after the dreams, of the éclaircissement, what happened but had not been so clear, in the rationalist thinking which predominated back then -- industrialization, the great machines, the creativity, and the very different results of the confrontation of all that with "government" in 18th and 19th c. France as vs. Germany, and the UK, and the US and Japan and other places... although current events are suggesting that the jury may still be out on all those outcomes, it seems...
And for fans of Umberto Eco, the pendulum of Foucault still is there, masquerading its mysteries -- and the Statue of Liberty is there too, near its sister-sur-Seine -- in the little church which is the conservatoire's CNAM museum.
Be sure to make the trek upstairs, for the fabulous roof-beams, and the fascinating collection of scientific instruments -- Pascal's "calculating machine", for anyone with digital inclinations -- all displayed beneath the brave banner,
"avant 1750, l'état des lieux, l'homme prend les dimensions du monde / the situation pre-1750, Man sizes up the world"
-- the terrible twentieth century changed much...
And the story here is far older than Eco, older than Foucault, the story goes back to frankincense, see below...
adresses --
Practical -- (in French)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=31&lang=fra&flash=f
Practical -- (in English)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=31&lang=ang&flash=f
[tr. JK] "'Visite virtuelle du Musée' / 'Virtual visit to the museum'" -- you have to see this... particularly if you like Eco's book... (Flash App)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=1005&lang=fra&flash=f
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/visitevirtuelle/
[tr. JK] "'L'encens et la vapeur' / 'Frankincense and Steam'". The story of the Musée des arts et métiers of the CNAM site, from the 6th century, "From the Mérovingians to the Royal Foundation of 1059" -- to the end of the 20th century, "Modern Times"
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=122&lang=fra&flash=f
news --
summer events -- wild times, at the Musée des arts et métiers of the CNAM! -- all fun, mostly un-translatable -- "activiste codeur"(?)... -- so, if you will be in Paris en-chair-et-en-os, essayez-le --
Technologies au quotidien - 28 juin au 13 Juillet 2011
Le 5ème épisode du cycle proposé en partenariat avec la Gaîté lyrique invite l'activiste codeur américain Evan Roth / Graffiti Research Lab. Au programme : résidence, atelier et conférences...
Forum des utopies - Jeudi 23 juin 2011 de 17h à 21h30
Dans le cadre du festival Futur en Seine, le Musée des arts et métiers accueille le Forum des utopies, une programmation proposée par le Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire pour la Sociologie Economique, Lise (Cnam/CNRS). Depuis les expérimentations fouriéristes jusqu'aux utopies de la libre circulation du savoir d'aujourd'hui, comment nos représentations d'un autre travail possible ont-elles évolué ? Au programme : une table ronde sur la thématique Le travail : utopies d'hier et de demain, un parcours au travers des collections du musée L'homme augmenté : une utopie qui traverse l'histoire, ainsi que l'installation vidéo Cyborgs dans la brume réalisée par les artistes Stéphane Degoutin et Gwenola Wagon...
Fête de la musique : le parvis du Musée aux couleurs cubaines !
Pour fêter la Musique le 21 juin, le Musée reçoit l'orchestre cubain Wil Campa pour un concert festif sur le parvis. Une occasion inédite de découvrir la salsa cubaine dans la pure tradition des rues de La Havane et de Trinidad ! Composé de 14 musiciens et chanteurs et de 4 danseurs professionnels de la Grande Ecole de Salsa de La Havane, l'orchestre se produit pour la première fois en Europe. Pour l'occasion, Wil Campa a enregistré 3 titres de chanson française, dont deux chansons en hommage à Serge Gainsbourg pour la commémoration des 20 ans de sa disparition : "Elisa", "L'eau à la bouche" et "Déshabillez-moi"...
SUPRA* Vivez l'expérience Supra ! - Samedi 18 juin 2011 de 10h à 18h
SUPER HYPER MEGA SUPRA
Vivez l'expérience Supra!
A l'occasion du centenaire de la découverte de la SUPRAconductivité, venez découvrir les propriétés fascinantes des SUPRAconducteurs et leurs applications industrielles. Une fois refroidis à très basses températures, parfois jusqu'à -250°C, certains matériaux conduisent le courant électrique sans aucune résistance et sont capables de faire léviter les aimants... Ce sont les supraconducteurs ! 100 ans après la découverte du phénomène par Kamerlingh Onnes, les chercheurs des universités Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris Diderot, Paris-Sud, de l'ESPCI ParisTech, de l'ENS et du CNRS vous font vivre les grandes expériences de la supraconductivité et vous projettent dans un monde fascinant...
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=214&lang=fra&flash=f
** Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Bibliothèque national de France
Soirées... One entire aspect of Paris is its "evenings": its gatherings -- whether afternoons or evenings or very late into the night -- never mornings, for Paris soirées are alcoholic and exhausting and that doesn't match with mornings -- but Paris gatherings discuss and debate everything, they are where a young américain can learn about a previous "Vietnam War", and about Parisian women, and a young américaine about Parisian men, it is where the movies of Woody Allen are debated endlessly, and the oulipiènnes literary merits of Lady Gaga's poetry and évenements are dismissed and defended, "attitude" becomes a science, where conversation & communication are the reigning arts.
It is a very old art-form itself, in Paris, the "soirée" with its animated and occasionally-cruel and always-exciting conversations. The 19th century's version of it began right here, in fact, at the Arsenal -- Victor Hugo, see below...
adresses --
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal
http://fyifrance.com/fyi1pli3.htm#Arsenal (in English -- with that story about Victor Hugo...)
http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/sites/a.site_bibliotheque_arsenal.html (in French)
http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/anx_autres_sites/a.arsenal_salle_lecture.html (guided tours of la bib de l'Arsenal! -- in French)
** and, NEW!, Paris Ipad Apps...
Among many extraordinary Paris history online applications now, most interesting and some even useful, are several excellent iPad applications: and France has joined the iPad craze... needed-knowledge for that Paris soirée "cocktail", then...
The best Paris iPad app I've found so far is:
"DK Eyewitness Travel, Paris"
-- suitable for projection and classroom use, this -- one can view, through that beautiful little glass screen, very good photos and interesting descriptions, and nice maps, and often-beautiful site plan drawings of major Paris monuments -- good organization and very attractive mise en page... no reliure on which to comment, sadly, the era of "marocain" is grown-brittle and is fading...
** National Geographic Magazine, their February 2011 issue
In-print, on-iPad, also on-iPhone, plus there are online sur-la-toile extras -- the National Geographic has become very multimedia --
This American society's magazine, with their always-excellent visual sense, presents,
"Under Paris : you'll find bones, stones, miles of tunnels, and legal -- and illegal -- tourism"
[excerpt:]
" Getting There: It involves manholes and endless ladders.
" What to Wear: Miner's helmets are good.
" What to do: Work, party, paint or just explore the dark web of tunnels.
"By Neil Shea, Photograph by Stephen Alvarez
"The cab glides through Saturday morning. The great avenues are quiet, the shops closed. From a bakery comes the scent of fresh bread. At a stoplight a blur of movement draws my attention. A man in blue coveralls is emerging from a hole in the sidewalk. His hair falls in dreadlocks, and there is a lamp on his head. Now a young woman emerges, holding a lantern. She has long, slender legs and wears very short shorts. Both wear rubber boots, both are smeared with beige mud, like a tribal decoration. The man shoves the iron cover back over the hole and takes the woman's hand, and together they run grinning down the street..."
It's a view of Paris of which few who know and love the place, including native Parisians, ever really have heard... although they may have suspected...
I remember Fellini's scene in his "Roma", where he and the director of the new Rome subway works are riding together in a subterranean cart, the latter complaining that every time they dig they run into something new, something "Phoenician", or "Greek", or... his subway layout plan, it will look like a plate of spaghetti!
Paris has this about its past and in its bones and foundations, too. Victor Hugo loved it, remember his caressing descriptions in Notre Dame de Paris... Paris always reveals surprises, things you never knew were there, things which once were there but are no longer, things of which you've never dreamed or had nightmares -- and it's always in motion, ever-changing, the moveable feast.
The National Geographic piece evokes all this well, to the great surprise of many who thought they themselves knew all, about Paris -- see both the fascinating February 2011 print magazine issue, and their more extensive online digital version below --
adresse --
National Geographic -- Under Paris
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/paris-underground/shea-text
** And, finally, Paris walks -- an institution of European Culture since at least the Middle Ages...
The Left Bank -- begin at the BnF Tolbiac, see the Arènes de Lutèce, stop at the Musée de Cluny, the rue de la Huchette, St. Germain des Prés, the bords de la Seine, the Invalides, the Eiffel Tower... and,
The Quartier Latin -- by day
The Quartier Latin -- by night
The Jardin de Luxembourg -- on any hot Paris summer afternoon
The Champs -- see the tourists...
The boulevards -- flânez...
The museums -- a lifetime
The bibliothèques -- another
Visit every church -- yet another, and every one will offer a small concert series, in the summertime
Walk the canal, see the new Opera, and the old one, both for the buildings as much as the city walks
And hike up to Montmartre, early morning or late at night or both, and watch sunrises and sunsets from the grand steps up there
One way in which the digital never will beat the virtual, is city walks in Paris.
But... the digital does comes close, nowadays: on GoogleEarth -- and on GoogleMaps -- and WikiMapia does an excellent and very interesting job as well --
http://earth.google.com
http://maps.google.com
http://wikimapia.com
Each of the above now can be experienced in very interesting new ways: for example, drag the Google StreetView "little man" -- upper left hand corner of the map, in http://maps.google.com -- to the map, and try each of the walks mentioned above -- it is amazing how much more there is to know of Paris, via the virtual reality version of it available globally & anytime & online now.
Bonne route!
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
on the Internet and otherwise, all located in France
-- see also fyifrance.com, or Facebook Jack Kessler's Wall
Several points of interest, for anyone with curiosity about or a passion for Paris, particularly its history... for sojourns or for daydreaming, this summer or anytime... Not a complete list: the moveable feast enjoys many locations, forever shifting -- but the following make useful additions to any visit, en-chair-et-en-os or virtual --
** Crypte archéologique du parvis Notre-Dame
The Roman city, Lutetia, unveiled and explained, as-revealed beneath the great plaza in front of Notre Dame and generally: dramatically presenting the maps and the reasoning which drove the ever-rational Romans to fortify this particular place, for fording the Seine, girding Gaul, and building the city...
Having visited this you will be able to see in your imagination these roots of Paris -- forever afterward, as you study the city, think about it, walk around, enjoy it -- the great north-south cardo maximus axis of the rues St. Martin & St. Jacques, the tiny mid-river island with its defenses, the road southward climbing the gentle hills carrying legions to Aquitaine, later on troops desperate to aid Martel against the Moors, later still seashell-bedecked pilgrims to Compostela...
Civic life began, for Paris, at this little river-ford Roman Empire provincial town, now revealed a few feet down beneath the square in front of the magnificent but much later medieval cathedral. Paris had humble but tough and enduring beginnings.
Also, it's cool down there, under the ground, sheltered from the sun within the "Crypte archéologique du parvis Notre-Dame" -- the moveable feast gets hot, in the summertime.
adresses --
Paris, ville antique (in French)
http://www.paris.culture.fr/
Paris, a Roman city (in English)
http://www.paris.culture.fr/en/
A set of good "Crypte Archéologique" fotos on Flicker (texts in English)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytravelphotos/sets/72157603376622534/
Practical -- hours of opening etc. (in French, but websites generally are more dependable than print sources re. opening hours)
http://tinyurl.com/3v2q2vv
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/ crypte-archeologique-du-parvis-notre-dame/rub_6468_stand_19971_port_14628
Practical -- brochure (in English)
http://www.paris.fr/viewmultimediadocument?multimediadocument-id=83136
news --
"Et Lutèce devint Paris" (in French, but worth seeing by all for the illustrations & timeline & videos at the very least, both online at the link below and on-site in & beneath the City of Light)
[tr. JK] "'And Lutetia Became Paris'. May 13, 2011. A new exhibit in the Crypte Archéologique de Notre-Dame reveals the metamorphosis over time of what once was 4th century Paris."
http://tinyurl.com/6fkfyjw
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/expositon-et-lutece-devint-paris-a-la-crypte-archeologique/rub_6468_actu_96242_port_14627
** Musée de Cluny
The groups of pilgrims climbing the Mont Ste. Geneviève on the road to Compostela grew more numerous...
Paris in the Middle Ages grew, and changed: a monument to the transition as telling as the parvis Notre Dame's crypte, with its Roman town and Gothic cathedral, is the Quartier Latin's Musée de Cluny, with its Roman baths and Medieval townhouse.
"Outside the walls", both the latter were were... The baths, in their Roman era, were over on the Left Bank safely-distant from the superior officers who, originally perhaps and later, ordered and disciplined things on the more closely-regulated island -- and the officers were a safer distance too, from their own regulations, when they crossed-over on the bridge for a visit to the baths -- the thermae were a place to relax, then, to indulge, to misbehave a little.
The Medieval era country house, too... Nowadays it is little and low, compared to its towering modern central city surroundings. The location once must have been bucolic, though, looking out over yards and gardens and vegetables and even pastures... remembering that Passy and the Champs Élysées still were "champs", much later, when Franklin and Jefferson lived there...
The "green" medieval views from the Musée de Cluny's upper-storey windows now must be imagined in movies, but they are an important part of historical Paris. They're no longer available in the Sorbonne neighborhood by 1615, but they're very much in evidence still just down the road, surrounding St. Germain, per the wonderful Mérian map of that date which my "iPad app" of that map shows so clearly -- vegetable gardens & orchards & fields & windmills -- so the older faubourg, in closer to the Ile, must have enjoyed such amenities and their associated dangers, not so long before.
adresses --
This is the "Musée national du Moyen Age" -- known by everyone as the "Musée de Cluny" -- located at the southeast corner of the Boul'Mich / Boul'St. Germain crossing, just down the hill and across the little square from the Sorbonne -- all students who visit Paris see it from the street, too few go inside to look, but it's well worth a visit.
Musée national du Moyen Age (in French)
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/
Musée national du Moyen Age / National Museum of the Middle Ages (in English)
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/ang/index.html
Exposition, "L'Epée. Usages, mythes et symboles", au Musée de Cluny / Exhibition, "The Sword. Its use, myths, and symbols", at the Musée de Cluny
http://tinyurl.com/4y2f6ao
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Exposition-LEp%C3%A9e-Usages-mythes-et-symbole s-au-Mus%C3%A9e-de-Cluny/202613793104522
news --
a small sampling of "Musée de Cluny" daily activities, ongoing throughout the summer --
Mercredi 8 juin
10h30 Atelier enfants (2h) Le vitrail
14h30 Visite conférence (1h) Les thermes antiques de Lutèce et leurs galeries souterraines
15h45 Visite exposition (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles
Jeudi 9 juin
12h30 un mois / une oeuvre (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles Présentation de l'exposition par Michel Huynh, conservateur en chef, commissaire de l'exposition
18h30 un mois / une oeuvre (1h) L'épée : Usages, mythes et symboles Présentation de l'exposition par Michel Huynh, conservateur en chef, commissaire de l'exposition
Vendredi 10 juin
11h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
Samedi 11 juin
10h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
10h30 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
11h00 Atelier parents-bébés (45 mn) Qui es-tu ?
11h30 Visite thématique (1h30) Sculpture romane et gothique (XIIe-XIIIe siècles)
13h00 Atelier en famille (45 mn) « Toucher la pierre, toucher le bois »
14h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
14h00 Visite en famille (1h30) Art, artistes-artisans au Moyen Âge
14h30 Atelier en famille (45 mn) « Toucher la pierre, toucher le bois »
15h45 Visite générale (1h30) L'hôtel des abbés de Cluny et les chefs-d'oeuvre du musée
16h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
Dimanche 12 juin
10h30 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
14h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
16h00 Démonstrations d'escrime médiévale par la compagnie « De Taille et d'Estoc »
...
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/documents/semaine_6_juin_2011.pdf
** Musée Carnavalet
La ville radieuse: many have dreamed of "designing" Paris, and this museum has collected many of those designs and dreams and displays them well -- to the latest visionaries, who may wonder at how immensely-grand the dreams in the past were, also to the skeptics who shake their heads knowingly over the gargantuan reality Paris now has become, and how different that is from anything ever dreamt for it.
"Paris"... now 12+ million people, plus daily commuters from as far away as Chartres, 18% of the national population, more Parisian than French and more trans-national than France -- and nowadays branchée 24/7, plugged into our bright new digital world, networking with London, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai and other Global Cities, and the Silly Valley, and visiting formerly-nearby Lyon or Toulouse or Limoges only occasionally, and "en passant"... "Paris et le désert", plus ça change...
(Google's Ahmit Singhal pointed out -- only yesterday, at their "online search event", http://www.google.com/insidesearch/ -- that "mobiles" usage patterns, in global cities like Paris, increasingly reverse traditional work patterns -- that nowadays we use our "mobiles" to "seek knowledge" on our lunch hours, and at night, times when previously we would leave-the-office -- so some places & people truly have become a "24/7 world".)
adresses --
Musée Carnavalet -- Histoire de Paris (in French)
http://tinyurl.com/3qhg8f9
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/musees-expos/musee-carnavalet-histoire-de-paris/p6468brochure (in English)
http://tinyurl.com/3sp3b6z
http://www.paris.fr/viewmultimediadocument?multimediadocument-id=88163
Musée Carnavalet -- collections / départments (in French)
http://tinyurl.com/437bf6g
http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/Portal.lut?page_id=6638&document_type_id=4&document_id=19798&portlet_id=15100
news --
[tr. JK] "'Eglise Saint-Sulpice, les coulisses d'une restauration' / 'The Church of Saint-Sulpice, backstage at a restoration'. May 18, 2011. Free Exhibit from June 1 through July 3, 1011. Salles d'exposition and salle 62. This exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet explains the important restoration project -- undertaken in 2006 and completed in December 2010 -- for the north tower of one of the largest churches in Paris..."
** Musée, Conservatoire national des arts et metiers
What really happened -- after the dreams, of the éclaircissement, what happened but had not been so clear, in the rationalist thinking which predominated back then -- industrialization, the great machines, the creativity, and the very different results of the confrontation of all that with "government" in 18th and 19th c. France as vs. Germany, and the UK, and the US and Japan and other places... although current events are suggesting that the jury may still be out on all those outcomes, it seems...
And for fans of Umberto Eco, the pendulum of Foucault still is there, masquerading its mysteries -- and the Statue of Liberty is there too, near its sister-sur-Seine -- in the little church which is the conservatoire's CNAM museum.
Be sure to make the trek upstairs, for the fabulous roof-beams, and the fascinating collection of scientific instruments -- Pascal's "calculating machine", for anyone with digital inclinations -- all displayed beneath the brave banner,
"avant 1750, l'état des lieux, l'homme prend les dimensions du monde / the situation pre-1750, Man sizes up the world"
-- the terrible twentieth century changed much...
And the story here is far older than Eco, older than Foucault, the story goes back to frankincense, see below...
adresses --
Practical -- (in French)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=31&lang=fra&flash=f
Practical -- (in English)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=31&lang=ang&flash=f
[tr. JK] "'Visite virtuelle du Musée' / 'Virtual visit to the museum'" -- you have to see this... particularly if you like Eco's book... (Flash App)
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=1005&lang=fra&flash=f
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/visitevirtuelle/
[tr. JK] "'L'encens et la vapeur' / 'Frankincense and Steam'". The story of the Musée des arts et métiers of the CNAM site, from the 6th century, "From the Mérovingians to the Royal Foundation of 1059" -- to the end of the 20th century, "Modern Times"
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=122&lang=fra&flash=f
news --
summer events -- wild times, at the Musée des arts et métiers of the CNAM! -- all fun, mostly un-translatable -- "activiste codeur"(?)... -- so, if you will be in Paris en-chair-et-en-os, essayez-le --
Technologies au quotidien - 28 juin au 13 Juillet 2011
Le 5ème épisode du cycle proposé en partenariat avec la Gaîté lyrique invite l'activiste codeur américain Evan Roth / Graffiti Research Lab. Au programme : résidence, atelier et conférences...
Forum des utopies - Jeudi 23 juin 2011 de 17h à 21h30
Dans le cadre du festival Futur en Seine, le Musée des arts et métiers accueille le Forum des utopies, une programmation proposée par le Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire pour la Sociologie Economique, Lise (Cnam/CNRS). Depuis les expérimentations fouriéristes jusqu'aux utopies de la libre circulation du savoir d'aujourd'hui, comment nos représentations d'un autre travail possible ont-elles évolué ? Au programme : une table ronde sur la thématique Le travail : utopies d'hier et de demain, un parcours au travers des collections du musée L'homme augmenté : une utopie qui traverse l'histoire, ainsi que l'installation vidéo Cyborgs dans la brume réalisée par les artistes Stéphane Degoutin et Gwenola Wagon...
Fête de la musique : le parvis du Musée aux couleurs cubaines !
Pour fêter la Musique le 21 juin, le Musée reçoit l'orchestre cubain Wil Campa pour un concert festif sur le parvis. Une occasion inédite de découvrir la salsa cubaine dans la pure tradition des rues de La Havane et de Trinidad ! Composé de 14 musiciens et chanteurs et de 4 danseurs professionnels de la Grande Ecole de Salsa de La Havane, l'orchestre se produit pour la première fois en Europe. Pour l'occasion, Wil Campa a enregistré 3 titres de chanson française, dont deux chansons en hommage à Serge Gainsbourg pour la commémoration des 20 ans de sa disparition : "Elisa", "L'eau à la bouche" et "Déshabillez-moi"...
SUPRA* Vivez l'expérience Supra ! - Samedi 18 juin 2011 de 10h à 18h
SUPER HYPER MEGA SUPRA
Vivez l'expérience Supra!
A l'occasion du centenaire de la découverte de la SUPRAconductivité, venez découvrir les propriétés fascinantes des SUPRAconducteurs et leurs applications industrielles. Une fois refroidis à très basses températures, parfois jusqu'à -250°C, certains matériaux conduisent le courant électrique sans aucune résistance et sont capables de faire léviter les aimants... Ce sont les supraconducteurs ! 100 ans après la découverte du phénomène par Kamerlingh Onnes, les chercheurs des universités Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris Diderot, Paris-Sud, de l'ESPCI ParisTech, de l'ENS et du CNRS vous font vivre les grandes expériences de la supraconductivité et vous projettent dans un monde fascinant...
http://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee.php?P=214&lang=fra&flash=f
** Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Bibliothèque national de France
Soirées... One entire aspect of Paris is its "evenings": its gatherings -- whether afternoons or evenings or very late into the night -- never mornings, for Paris soirées are alcoholic and exhausting and that doesn't match with mornings -- but Paris gatherings discuss and debate everything, they are where a young américain can learn about a previous "Vietnam War", and about Parisian women, and a young américaine about Parisian men, it is where the movies of Woody Allen are debated endlessly, and the oulipiènnes literary merits of Lady Gaga's poetry and évenements are dismissed and defended, "attitude" becomes a science, where conversation & communication are the reigning arts.
It is a very old art-form itself, in Paris, the "soirée" with its animated and occasionally-cruel and always-exciting conversations. The 19th century's version of it began right here, in fact, at the Arsenal -- Victor Hugo, see below...
adresses --
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal
http://fyifrance.com/fyi1pli3.htm#Arsenal (in English -- with that story about Victor Hugo...)
http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/sites/a.site_bibliotheque_arsenal.html (in French)
http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/anx_autres_sites/a.arsenal_salle_lecture.html (guided tours of la bib de l'Arsenal! -- in French)
** and, NEW!, Paris Ipad Apps...
Among many extraordinary Paris history online applications now, most interesting and some even useful, are several excellent iPad applications: and France has joined the iPad craze... needed-knowledge for that Paris soirée "cocktail", then...
The best Paris iPad app I've found so far is:
"DK Eyewitness Travel, Paris"
-- suitable for projection and classroom use, this -- one can view, through that beautiful little glass screen, very good photos and interesting descriptions, and nice maps, and often-beautiful site plan drawings of major Paris monuments -- good organization and very attractive mise en page... no reliure on which to comment, sadly, the era of "marocain" is grown-brittle and is fading...
** National Geographic Magazine, their February 2011 issue
In-print, on-iPad, also on-iPhone, plus there are online sur-la-toile extras -- the National Geographic has become very multimedia --
This American society's magazine, with their always-excellent visual sense, presents,
"Under Paris : you'll find bones, stones, miles of tunnels, and legal -- and illegal -- tourism"
[excerpt:]
" Getting There: It involves manholes and endless ladders.
" What to Wear: Miner's helmets are good.
" What to do: Work, party, paint or just explore the dark web of tunnels.
"By Neil Shea, Photograph by Stephen Alvarez
"The cab glides through Saturday morning. The great avenues are quiet, the shops closed. From a bakery comes the scent of fresh bread. At a stoplight a blur of movement draws my attention. A man in blue coveralls is emerging from a hole in the sidewalk. His hair falls in dreadlocks, and there is a lamp on his head. Now a young woman emerges, holding a lantern. She has long, slender legs and wears very short shorts. Both wear rubber boots, both are smeared with beige mud, like a tribal decoration. The man shoves the iron cover back over the hole and takes the woman's hand, and together they run grinning down the street..."
It's a view of Paris of which few who know and love the place, including native Parisians, ever really have heard... although they may have suspected...
I remember Fellini's scene in his "Roma", where he and the director of the new Rome subway works are riding together in a subterranean cart, the latter complaining that every time they dig they run into something new, something "Phoenician", or "Greek", or... his subway layout plan, it will look like a plate of spaghetti!
Paris has this about its past and in its bones and foundations, too. Victor Hugo loved it, remember his caressing descriptions in Notre Dame de Paris... Paris always reveals surprises, things you never knew were there, things which once were there but are no longer, things of which you've never dreamed or had nightmares -- and it's always in motion, ever-changing, the moveable feast.
The National Geographic piece evokes all this well, to the great surprise of many who thought they themselves knew all, about Paris -- see both the fascinating February 2011 print magazine issue, and their more extensive online digital version below --
adresse --
National Geographic -- Under Paris
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/paris-underground/shea-text
** And, finally, Paris walks -- an institution of European Culture since at least the Middle Ages...
The Left Bank -- begin at the BnF Tolbiac, see the Arènes de Lutèce, stop at the Musée de Cluny, the rue de la Huchette, St. Germain des Prés, the bords de la Seine, the Invalides, the Eiffel Tower... and,
The Quartier Latin -- by day
The Quartier Latin -- by night
The Jardin de Luxembourg -- on any hot Paris summer afternoon
The Champs -- see the tourists...
The boulevards -- flânez...
The museums -- a lifetime
The bibliothèques -- another
Visit every church -- yet another, and every one will offer a small concert series, in the summertime
Walk the canal, see the new Opera, and the old one, both for the buildings as much as the city walks
And hike up to Montmartre, early morning or late at night or both, and watch sunrises and sunsets from the grand steps up there
One way in which the digital never will beat the virtual, is city walks in Paris.
But... the digital does comes close, nowadays: on GoogleEarth -- and on GoogleMaps -- and WikiMapia does an excellent and very interesting job as well --
http://earth.google.com
http://maps.google.com
http://wikimapia.com
Each of the above now can be experienced in very interesting new ways: for example, drag the Google StreetView "little man" -- upper left hand corner of the map, in http://maps.google.com -- to the map, and try each of the walks mentioned above -- it is amazing how much more there is to know of Paris, via the virtual reality version of it available globally & anytime & online now.
Bonne route!
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
Sunday, May 15, 2011
FYI France : Summer reading, Thinking Different about The Digital
Summer reading from the Hexagone: do some thinking outside-the-box -- "Libres Savoirs : Les biens communs de la connaissance -- produire collectivement, partager et diffuser les connaissances au XXIe siècle"
-- loose translation,
- Free Thinking : common cause for knowledge -- collectively producing, sharing, distributing, knowledge in the 21st century
-- a book of readings assembled by l'association VECAM -- Veille Européenne et Citoyenne sur les Autoroutes de l'information et le Multimédia, "A European's and citizen's vigil over the information superhighway and multimedia", founded 1995, http://vecam.org/ --
[tr. JK: description of the book --]
"A global look at the common cause for knowledge. Toward networking which foresees no progress without the sharing of information...
"Knowledge is a motor for the economy and for society. Nowadays it is digitized, and it is circulated and distributed and shared easily, enabling cooperation among different communities and the creation of new knowledge. The dynamic and collective emergence of these new common goods is overturning and updating our economic and political thinking.
"The common cause of knowledge thus constitutes a pragmatic utopia which offers new approaches to meeting the challenges of the 21st century.
"For this book, 'Libres Savoirs', l'association VECAM has asked 30 writers, from all the continents, to provide a global look at the common cause of knowledge.
"The diversity of the subjects, here -- from health to free educational resources, from software to scientific publishing, from plant seeds to legal questions -- is a reflection of the vitality in global production of the common cause of knowledge, and of the energy of communities which are producing it*."
"Contents
- "The common cause, a pragmatic utopia", by Valérie Peugeot
- "A manifesto for the recovery of the common cause", by Frédéric Sultan
- 1) "Research, Life, Networks: three pillars of the common cause of knowledge
- "The Commons of scientific research :
- "6 articles by : Charlotte Hess, Prabir Purkayastha & Amit Sengupta, Jean-Claude Guédon, Philippe Aigrain, Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam & Barbara Kirsop, Gaëlle Krikorian
- "To Nourish Humanity : seeds and native knowledge
- "2 articles by : Guy Kastler, Adelita San Vicente Tello & Areli Carreón
- "Cultural and Educational Content :
- "2 articles by : Ahrash Bissell & James Boyle, Hala Essalmawi
- "Sharing on an Open Network : the Digital Commons
- "3 articles by : Hervé Le Crosnier, Valérie Peugeot, Michel Bauwens
- 2) "The Knowledge Commons : getting things going in a globalized world
- "The public domain and common cause
- "3 articles by : Communia, Madhavi Sunder & Anupam Chander, Xuan Li
- "Liberty, Democracy, common cause
- "3 articles by : Peter Linebaugh, Claire Brossaud, Hervé Brédif & Didier Christin
- "Social Movements
- "2 articles by : David Bollier, Silke Helfrich
- "Postface
- "The Battle for the Commons", by Alain Rey
"For the full Table of Contents and a description of the book, download the .pdf --
"VECAM is an association founded upon the following principles:
- information, cultural property, and knowledge all increasingly are digital;
- the information networks increasingly blend their territories;
- all the forces which compose human societies are or will be affected by the combination of these elements.
"The role of VECAM is to give citizens the means of researching, understanding, debating, and mastering these transformations.
"More than just technical mastery of digital tools, it is to demystification -- political and social -- that the association tries to contribute.
"VECAM also assists in training by and for associations, citizen organizations, and individuals."
* The book is published by C&F Editions, Caen, 29 €, ISBN 978-2-915825-06-0, mai 2011
--oOo--
A Note:
One does not have to agree or disagree with these VECAM folks, to find their ideas interesting and useful -- particularly if the ideas are unfamiliar, as they may be to many readers here.
The ideas -- of Open Systems, Open Content, The Information Commons, of Shareware and Freeware and The Global Village and The Creative Commons, and of Non-Commercial and even Non-Governmental infotech applications -- are not new to the Internet.
Their appearance here, however, may serve as a useful reminder to some that such ideas still are alive.
Others will be interested to find how alive these ideas are "elsewhere" -- outside, that is, of the narrow commercial and governmental and security-minded worlds we all, increasingly it seems, inhabit.
Digital information has matured, perhaps too quickly and perhaps too much: from the Homebrew Computer Club and the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link we have progressed, perhaps, to some of the world's largest corporations, wielding immense social and economic and political importance, plus very large bags of money. But a "global village" age of innocence maybe has been lost, too, so that now, "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..."
Still others may be interested in another "elsewhere": in how people think, about these things, in France, and in Europe, and in Armenia and Afghanistan and Laos and Chile and all the other places and peoples to which and to whom they now have spread -- that people there might Think Different, about Things Digital, ought to go without saying, although the opposite too often is assumed, that the Others think Just Like Us.
I had a good time stunning an audience at XeroxPARC, long ago, with my tale of a digital information network which offered a) graphics, b) commercial uses, and, *gasp*, c) general public users, all long formally-illegal on the "NSF Acceptable Use Policies" US Internet: that miscreant was the French Minitel -- foreigners, doing this digital stuff and Thinking Different about it. At the end of my PARC talk the techies in the audience, bored, clapped politely and left; but the marketers stayed -- and there were many new marketers already, back in 1994 -- and they pummeled me with questions and excited emails which came in for years afterward.
The current New Yorker offers a great article on this theme written by Malcolm Gladwell, "Creation Myth" (May 16 issue), about the birth of the computer mouse, an invention famously stillborn at SRI, and then dead again at PARC itself, but which came alive later in the hands of genius sales-midwife Steve Jobs.
And there was Feynman, too, proving to the experts that O-rings would in fact freeze...
So try some outside-the-box Thinking Different, then -- this summer, again from the French.
Bonnes vacances,
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
FYI France : Indie Bookstores Fight Back
Our own favorite bookstore here in Noe Valley USA just closed -- finally and for good -- and I have nearly 200 digital "ebooks" stored somewhere out in my Amazon Internet "cloud", now...
The French approach: somewhat similar, somewhat by contrast --
"Indies online : coming to your home"
By Frédérique Roussel, "Libraires en ligne : ça arrive près de chez vous", in Libération, 4 avril
[tr. JK, excerpts:]
> It's what we needed... The web-portal of the independent French booksellers finally has lifted its iron curtain. Twelve years after the dawning of the idea, in discussions among French book dealers... Eleven years after the arrival of Amazon in France... After all the lost time, due to the Dotcom Bubble, the difficulty of uniting financial people, and the building of consensus within a shattered, overloaded, and above all very individualistic profession... There have been defections, and oppositions. There was the headache of dreaming-up a complicated technical platform. The task has not been easy. The imminent launch has been reported again and again. But "1001libraires.com", a name designed to enchant an internaute, finally is here.
> Behind this homepage lies a solid organization : solid financing -- 2.2 million euros, in the form of zero-interest loans from notably the Centre national du livre for 500,000 euros -- plus funds provided by 36 bookstores and associations of bookstores. At its opening, the website counts 65 bookstore members, with an objective of having 200 within three months...
> So, from today, the internaute can order printed and digital books from a catalog of 60,000 titles. He may receive them through the postal mail, within 24 hours, or he may reserve them at the nearest member-bookstore within two hours.
> Facing up to the big online sellers, such as Amazon or La FNAC... That is the point made by Gilles de la Porte, president of the corporation behind 1001libraires.com, and former owner of the bookstore la Galerne at Le Havre : he declares, "We remain in close contact with our readers, and our location services send buyers into physical bookstores." Across France 250 booksellers are designated, as of the opening of the service.
> A third feature of 1001libraires.com is designed to circumvent the traditional marketing system, using content generated by the booksellers themselves, in some very original programming, and involving the booksellers -- the 1001libraires.com service, M@gazette, offers seven monthly video and audio podcasts, for example "Quinzaine des libraires" partnering with the weekly "Quinzaine littéraire", also "Digitales sur le livre numérique", "Essai libre sur sur les sciences humaines", "Gonzo Bizarro sur la BD"...
> So, the independent bookstore in France makes its own Amazon...
> But this service emphasizes physical proximity and consultation, also that it will be around for the digital book, as well, where and when the paper train has left the station... "We must embrace these things," adds Gilles de la Porte, "the bookstore no longer will exist if we refuse to"...
> Detractors are numerous : some protest against all the money injected into a "machine", here -- others say the consultation services of booksellers might be better-offered via better techniques -- still others worry that this cooperative site removes the booksellers themselves to positions of being mere spectators. And there are those who worry over the fundamental purpose of 1001libraires.com : to outdo Amazon and others like it -- a message contained in its slogan, "The site which moves faster than the Internet" -- that remains to be seen, let's look again in 10 years.
URL for the Libération article : http://www.ecrans.fr/Libraires-en-ligne-ca-arrive-pres,12419.html
URL for 1001Libraires.com : http://www.1001Libraires.com
--oOo--
Note: speed kills...
The race is not always to the swift, sometimes it is to the wise...
France still has some indie booksellers, for example... In California, where I write this, indie bookstores are closing, in large numbers and rapidly. As I said initially, here, one of my own favorite "locals" disappeared just the other day.
In fact a youthful dream which I and my wife long cherished, to occupy and amuse our old age -- the management of an indie bookstore ourselves -- appears to be vanishing, in the USA. More likely nowadays we'd have to found and run herd on our own digital distribution empire, the way Jeff Bezos has, and worry more about profit-and-loss and cloud computing and gigantic server arrays and distribution centers, than about "children's rooms" and "poetry sections", and "small press" and "remainders", and whether to serve coffee and what to do about coffee spills, as we once imagined.
There still are some exceptions left in the USA, though. One store's loss is another's gain, perhaps...
Just around the corner from the indie bookstore here which closed, is another which appears to be doing fabulously well, and now may do even better. Perhaps this is, then, as the economists nearly always say, simply a consolidation & realignment, and not really a paradigm shift.
Perhaps there is opportunity in all of this, that is, for the few who remain: for a small indie bookstore which can find its own market niche, and which "gets" the Internet and digital, and which can figure out how to make money itself from e-books: a small indie which can find and understand new forms of publication, perhaps -- smaller distribution activities, maybe -- small press, local press, local news, academic publishing -- healthy arenas from which the big online retailers could not squeeze their "economies of scale", but which nevertheless could support a small shop and online service, or a few of them.
So many people people are writing and publishing now : everyone, now, everywhere, has a desktop or/and a laptop or/and a palmtop or/and particularly a mobile -- information overload quickly is becoming information inundation, a flood.
So in all of that there are new opportunities for people specialized in controlling or at least channeling such floods: for librarians and libraries, for indie booksellers and indie bookstores -- helped greatly, perhaps, by online services such as 1001libraires.com. As a customer, at least, I gladly would give much to find the camaraderie, and warmth, and easychairs and accompanying coffee and cookies, of the bookstores of my childhood, amid the so-far industrialized e-publishing of today.
They're getting there, with Amazon's "cloud", and Starbucks' "Mobile Card" barcode coffee purchasing, and everyone's Inter-networking of everything. But they're not there yet.
It seems to me too that the long-predicted "decentralization" direction of digital is reversing now, in fact, providing new bookstore opportunities. For some years we have had telecommuting and teleworking opportunites, provided by The Digital, moving many of us to suburbs and small towns and into extensive travel even overseas. Now, though, people appear to want again to live in, and spend more of their personal and professional time in, the Central City. Perhaps we've so automated the back office and routine functions of so much, using our new digital technologies so well, as firms like Amazon and Starbucks have, that we're now free once more to seek real face-time with one another: to live in the center of Big Cities where our friends are, to spend hours lounging around with those friends in city parks, and coffee shops, and in user-friendly bookstores again.
That is what the 20-somethings do now increasingly in San Francisco, anyway: the kids who work for Google and Facebook and Apple and the others -- those firms' large home offices are located down the bay from here, in Silicon Valley -- but their employees all live up here in San Francisco, where there is truly "social" life for them. They may take the GoogleBus down to Mountain View when they have to: the giant vehicles run every 15 minutes in the mornings from Noe Valley, a 45-minute ride, and legend says they have one plug for wifi and another for caffeine, at each seat on-board... But more and more of their work week is spent at and around home where their friends are, now, here in the city. This also is true perhaps, and perhaps increasingly as well, in Manhattan, in central London, in central Paris, all of which are inter-connected Global Cities -- per Saskia Sassen's and other urbanologists' musings about this -- seeing a renaissance of central city property values and services now. So maybe there is simply a new and increasing need, for a new kind of "bookstore", in such places.
In the meantime, then, we all wrestle now with e-text:
* auto-capitalization and auto-correction and auto-spelling and auto-other-things... On my iPad, the text I type, "within two hours", but this magically and invisibly and maddeningly becomes, "within two horsings" -- the race truly is not always to the swift... -- and mY caPitaLiZation does fuNny thiNgs -- and my French words become approximations en américain, while if I hit a wrong keyboard button the reverse just-as-mysteriously occurs; and
* e-text, the "words", themselves... I once was asked to review a book printed by a distinguished English press, and I found basic copyedit errors in every paragraph, in some paragraphs in every sentence, within some sentences several. The distraction was so great that I reviewed the editors rather than the text, and my review was turned down. But it made me keenly appreciate what has gone before, in publishing: that particular press long was known for its editorial excellence, and has slipped -- other presses which do this better, still, are that much more appreciated. No, digital e-publishing is not just a matter of throwing texts "out there", scanning and ocr'ing and seeing who salutes. And yes, publishers in the past have earned their keep: if not necessarily the 95% of proceeds which some have claimed, at least the 85% claimed by most -- good editing, among other publishers' significant contributions, is hard and important work; and,
* scanning : Amazon and Google and Gallica and others all do wonderful jobs, with their scanning. The imperfections of the process still show up in strange ways, though. To anyone who enjoyed a mature 20th century print publishing industry, working with ancient well-known texts which a 1950s copyeditor practically could recite by heart as he labored, nowadays it comes as some surprise to see Jane Eyre for example exclaim, "I shirted fields, anhedges", and we realize that the scanner simply slipped, or it tripped over old tiny type on yellowed paper -- this happens more frequently, now, not only because of tired copyeditors' eyes but because we are in the Age of Incunabula of e-text's new technologies, and mistakes will happen with new things.
So perhaps it's just nostalgia -- my longing for the old user-very-friendly bookshops in which I used to spend happy afternoons -- or perhaps it's the cusp of the newest wave, and the very latest changes. As the commentators are saying about Fukushima Dai-Ichi's new wave unknowns too, now, and about 1001libraire.com, we'll know in 10 years.
Happy reading.
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
The French approach: somewhat similar, somewhat by contrast --
"Indies online : coming to your home"
By Frédérique Roussel, "Libraires en ligne : ça arrive près de chez vous", in Libération, 4 avril
[tr. JK, excerpts:]
> It's what we needed... The web-portal of the independent French booksellers finally has lifted its iron curtain. Twelve years after the dawning of the idea, in discussions among French book dealers... Eleven years after the arrival of Amazon in France... After all the lost time, due to the Dotcom Bubble, the difficulty of uniting financial people, and the building of consensus within a shattered, overloaded, and above all very individualistic profession... There have been defections, and oppositions. There was the headache of dreaming-up a complicated technical platform. The task has not been easy. The imminent launch has been reported again and again. But "1001libraires.com", a name designed to enchant an internaute, finally is here.
> Behind this homepage lies a solid organization : solid financing -- 2.2 million euros, in the form of zero-interest loans from notably the Centre national du livre for 500,000 euros -- plus funds provided by 36 bookstores and associations of bookstores. At its opening, the website counts 65 bookstore members, with an objective of having 200 within three months...
> So, from today, the internaute can order printed and digital books from a catalog of 60,000 titles. He may receive them through the postal mail, within 24 hours, or he may reserve them at the nearest member-bookstore within two hours.
> Facing up to the big online sellers, such as Amazon or La FNAC... That is the point made by Gilles de la Porte, president of the corporation behind 1001libraires.com, and former owner of the bookstore la Galerne at Le Havre : he declares, "We remain in close contact with our readers, and our location services send buyers into physical bookstores." Across France 250 booksellers are designated, as of the opening of the service.
> A third feature of 1001libraires.com is designed to circumvent the traditional marketing system, using content generated by the booksellers themselves, in some very original programming, and involving the booksellers -- the 1001libraires.com service, M@gazette, offers seven monthly video and audio podcasts, for example "Quinzaine des libraires" partnering with the weekly "Quinzaine littéraire", also "Digitales sur le livre numérique", "Essai libre sur sur les sciences humaines", "Gonzo Bizarro sur la BD"...
> So, the independent bookstore in France makes its own Amazon...
> But this service emphasizes physical proximity and consultation, also that it will be around for the digital book, as well, where and when the paper train has left the station... "We must embrace these things," adds Gilles de la Porte, "the bookstore no longer will exist if we refuse to"...
> Detractors are numerous : some protest against all the money injected into a "machine", here -- others say the consultation services of booksellers might be better-offered via better techniques -- still others worry that this cooperative site removes the booksellers themselves to positions of being mere spectators. And there are those who worry over the fundamental purpose of 1001libraires.com : to outdo Amazon and others like it -- a message contained in its slogan, "The site which moves faster than the Internet" -- that remains to be seen, let's look again in 10 years.
URL for the Libération article : http://www.ecrans.fr/Libraires-en-ligne-ca-arrive-pres,12419.html
URL for 1001Libraires.com : http://www.1001Libraires.com
--oOo--
Note: speed kills...
The race is not always to the swift, sometimes it is to the wise...
France still has some indie booksellers, for example... In California, where I write this, indie bookstores are closing, in large numbers and rapidly. As I said initially, here, one of my own favorite "locals" disappeared just the other day.
In fact a youthful dream which I and my wife long cherished, to occupy and amuse our old age -- the management of an indie bookstore ourselves -- appears to be vanishing, in the USA. More likely nowadays we'd have to found and run herd on our own digital distribution empire, the way Jeff Bezos has, and worry more about profit-and-loss and cloud computing and gigantic server arrays and distribution centers, than about "children's rooms" and "poetry sections", and "small press" and "remainders", and whether to serve coffee and what to do about coffee spills, as we once imagined.
There still are some exceptions left in the USA, though. One store's loss is another's gain, perhaps...
Just around the corner from the indie bookstore here which closed, is another which appears to be doing fabulously well, and now may do even better. Perhaps this is, then, as the economists nearly always say, simply a consolidation & realignment, and not really a paradigm shift.
Perhaps there is opportunity in all of this, that is, for the few who remain: for a small indie bookstore which can find its own market niche, and which "gets" the Internet and digital, and which can figure out how to make money itself from e-books: a small indie which can find and understand new forms of publication, perhaps -- smaller distribution activities, maybe -- small press, local press, local news, academic publishing -- healthy arenas from which the big online retailers could not squeeze their "economies of scale", but which nevertheless could support a small shop and online service, or a few of them.
So many people people are writing and publishing now : everyone, now, everywhere, has a desktop or/and a laptop or/and a palmtop or/and particularly a mobile -- information overload quickly is becoming information inundation, a flood.
So in all of that there are new opportunities for people specialized in controlling or at least channeling such floods: for librarians and libraries, for indie booksellers and indie bookstores -- helped greatly, perhaps, by online services such as 1001libraires.com. As a customer, at least, I gladly would give much to find the camaraderie, and warmth, and easychairs and accompanying coffee and cookies, of the bookstores of my childhood, amid the so-far industrialized e-publishing of today.
They're getting there, with Amazon's "cloud", and Starbucks' "Mobile Card" barcode coffee purchasing, and everyone's Inter-networking of everything. But they're not there yet.
It seems to me too that the long-predicted "decentralization" direction of digital is reversing now, in fact, providing new bookstore opportunities. For some years we have had telecommuting and teleworking opportunites, provided by The Digital, moving many of us to suburbs and small towns and into extensive travel even overseas. Now, though, people appear to want again to live in, and spend more of their personal and professional time in, the Central City. Perhaps we've so automated the back office and routine functions of so much, using our new digital technologies so well, as firms like Amazon and Starbucks have, that we're now free once more to seek real face-time with one another: to live in the center of Big Cities where our friends are, to spend hours lounging around with those friends in city parks, and coffee shops, and in user-friendly bookstores again.
That is what the 20-somethings do now increasingly in San Francisco, anyway: the kids who work for Google and Facebook and Apple and the others -- those firms' large home offices are located down the bay from here, in Silicon Valley -- but their employees all live up here in San Francisco, where there is truly "social" life for them. They may take the GoogleBus down to Mountain View when they have to: the giant vehicles run every 15 minutes in the mornings from Noe Valley, a 45-minute ride, and legend says they have one plug for wifi and another for caffeine, at each seat on-board... But more and more of their work week is spent at and around home where their friends are, now, here in the city. This also is true perhaps, and perhaps increasingly as well, in Manhattan, in central London, in central Paris, all of which are inter-connected Global Cities -- per Saskia Sassen's and other urbanologists' musings about this -- seeing a renaissance of central city property values and services now. So maybe there is simply a new and increasing need, for a new kind of "bookstore", in such places.
In the meantime, then, we all wrestle now with e-text:
* auto-capitalization and auto-correction and auto-spelling and auto-other-things... On my iPad, the text I type, "within two hours", but this magically and invisibly and maddeningly becomes, "within two horsings" -- the race truly is not always to the swift... -- and mY caPitaLiZation does fuNny thiNgs -- and my French words become approximations en américain, while if I hit a wrong keyboard button the reverse just-as-mysteriously occurs; and
* e-text, the "words", themselves... I once was asked to review a book printed by a distinguished English press, and I found basic copyedit errors in every paragraph, in some paragraphs in every sentence, within some sentences several. The distraction was so great that I reviewed the editors rather than the text, and my review was turned down. But it made me keenly appreciate what has gone before, in publishing: that particular press long was known for its editorial excellence, and has slipped -- other presses which do this better, still, are that much more appreciated. No, digital e-publishing is not just a matter of throwing texts "out there", scanning and ocr'ing and seeing who salutes. And yes, publishers in the past have earned their keep: if not necessarily the 95% of proceeds which some have claimed, at least the 85% claimed by most -- good editing, among other publishers' significant contributions, is hard and important work; and,
* scanning : Amazon and Google and Gallica and others all do wonderful jobs, with their scanning. The imperfections of the process still show up in strange ways, though. To anyone who enjoyed a mature 20th century print publishing industry, working with ancient well-known texts which a 1950s copyeditor practically could recite by heart as he labored, nowadays it comes as some surprise to see Jane Eyre for example exclaim, "I shirted fields, anhedges", and we realize that the scanner simply slipped, or it tripped over old tiny type on yellowed paper -- this happens more frequently, now, not only because of tired copyeditors' eyes but because we are in the Age of Incunabula of e-text's new technologies, and mistakes will happen with new things.
So perhaps it's just nostalgia -- my longing for the old user-very-friendly bookshops in which I used to spend happy afternoons -- or perhaps it's the cusp of the newest wave, and the very latest changes. As the commentators are saying about Fukushima Dai-Ichi's new wave unknowns too, now, and about 1001libraire.com, we'll know in 10 years.
Happy reading.
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
Sunday, March 20, 2011
FYI France : Oradour sur Glane, Bibliothèque
FYI France (since 1992) -- http://www.fyifrance.com/Fyarch/fy110315.htm
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on March 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook-Jack Kessler's Wall-http://tinyurl.com/4fz5ty4
Somewhat in need, this week, of examples of honorable people doing wise things, I come across one of many sterling websites offered by the French -- and offer it here as a prime example of how physical and digital sites combine well, in digital library information services nowadays --
--oOo--
* Oradour sur Glane, Bibliothèque
W3: http://www.oradour.org/index.php?rubrique=8
[See links to both the following at the URL below:]
GeoRef: 45|55|52.45| N,01|01|58.40|E(GoogleEarth)
GeoRef: (WikiMapia)
[tr. JK] "Around 2000 works and 300 periodicals are available for consultation in the library. This includes historical reference works and numerous personal accounts of the Second World War. The library also holds books on contemporary wars, reflections on violence and on memory, a notion increasingly considered in close relation with historical writing. Research works in German and in English also are available. The catalog is being digitized. It is anticipated that the catalog will be available online."
* Fonds ouvert : "This collection is composed essentially of copies or archival works from institutions such as the Musée Nationale de la Résistance, the Musée de la Résistance et de la déportation à Toulouse, the Archives départementales de la Haute-Vienne, or the Archives municipales de Limoges. One also can find documentation, books and book copies, news clippings and periodicals. Several 'original' archives also are contained in the collection."
See : Centre de la Mémoire d'Oradour-sur-Glane, Centre de Documentation, Archives, Fonds Ouvert, Études et documentation rassemblées, Depuis 2001, Répertoire numérique détaillé provisoire (Mars 2007) Mise à jour effectuée par Céline Deveaux.
http://www.oradour.org/telechargements/File/fonds_ouvert_modif.pdf
* Fonds privé : [Remarkable finding-aid descriptions online here of the personal side of life under the Occupation. JK]
La série FP regroupe tous les fonds privés (dons de particuliers):
1 FP : Pièces isolées
2 FP : Fonds Marguerite Simon
3 FP : Fonds Léopold Rechossière
4 FP : Fonds Haïm Wajnberg
5 FP : Fonds ANFMOG / Association nationale
des familles des martyrs d'Oradour-sur-Glane.
6 FP : Fonds René Besse
7 FP : Fonds Laurent Taveau
8 FP : Fonds Jean Henry
9 FP : Fonds Georges Magnane
10 FP : Fonds Erich Flogaus
11 FP: Fonds Jacqueline Pinède
The above now is installed, complete with interactive links and texts, at the following address:
http://fyifrance.com/fyi1pli3.htm#OradoursurGlaneBib
--oOo--
A Note: about earthquakes & tsunamis & radiation & memory --
My thought is that the sheer nobility of what is commemorated above, here, will be of interest to some -- also the controversy, as the appreciation of Les Lieux de Mémoire of modern France, of which Oradour sur Glane is one of the leading examples, has changed several times, over 50 years, and deserves consideration once again as always -- every nation has its Scoundrel Times, occasionally, and it is nice to remember that occasionally there have been genuine heroes too.
And, simply from a bibliographic point of view, that such a cultural monument should nowadays be so accessible... I was greatly moved, when I first read the accounts of the Second World War and of the Résistance, as a young boy back in the 1950s -- and then when I saw some of the real evidence of "all that", during my first personal visits to Europe a decade later -- that these memories have been kept alive, but also now made so accessible, to so many, is one of our modern marvels now 60 or 70 years later, I believe. So much gets forgotten, so quickly and completely.
There are "written" and "digital" resources, then -- also profound physical evidence -- at "Oradour sur Glane". View the website on GoogleEarth, visit the physical place, read the "written" record, dial-up / log into the "digital" -- there are many ways to "remember" a thing, and so many more of them are available, now, than there used to be.
So, perhaps humanity will do a better job of "remembering" its past, now -- perhaps not, as we are seeing this week, so sadly, in Fukushima-ken and Miyagi-ken and maybe even soon in Tokyo if the winds blow wrong -- but at least the French, at Oradour sur Glane, have made a good effort to remember, using all the old and new media available. One hopes that the rest of us will do the same now, regarding "nuclear energy" and the many other issues presenting themselves to all of us this week in Japan. Rarely do things happen for the very first time.
And it is not enough, to have simply a flood of digital "data" -- we need to add knowledge, to that data, so that it truly becomes "information" -- and then we need to add experience, to that, at least in memory and preferably hands-on, to transmute that information-overload flood into true "wisdom"...
We must learn, from our data and our science: we need good "information", and true "wisdom". We are not there yet, it seems, with nuclear energy; one hopes that we will get there soon.
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on March 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook-Jack Kessler's Wall-http://tinyurl.com/4fz5ty4
Somewhat in need, this week, of examples of honorable people doing wise things, I come across one of many sterling websites offered by the French -- and offer it here as a prime example of how physical and digital sites combine well, in digital library information services nowadays --
--oOo--
* Oradour sur Glane, Bibliothèque
W3: http://www.oradour.org/index.php?rubrique=8
[See links to both the following at the URL below:]
GeoRef: 45|55|52.45| N,01|01|58.40|E(GoogleEarth)
GeoRef: (WikiMapia)
[tr. JK] "Around 2000 works and 300 periodicals are available for consultation in the library. This includes historical reference works and numerous personal accounts of the Second World War. The library also holds books on contemporary wars, reflections on violence and on memory, a notion increasingly considered in close relation with historical writing. Research works in German and in English also are available. The catalog is being digitized. It is anticipated that the catalog will be available online."
* Fonds ouvert : "This collection is composed essentially of copies or archival works from institutions such as the Musée Nationale de la Résistance, the Musée de la Résistance et de la déportation à Toulouse, the Archives départementales de la Haute-Vienne, or the Archives municipales de Limoges. One also can find documentation, books and book copies, news clippings and periodicals. Several 'original' archives also are contained in the collection."
See : Centre de la Mémoire d'Oradour-sur-Glane, Centre de Documentation, Archives, Fonds Ouvert, Études et documentation rassemblées, Depuis 2001, Répertoire numérique détaillé provisoire (Mars 2007) Mise à jour effectuée par Céline Deveaux.
http://www.oradour.org/telechargements/File/fonds_ouvert_modif.pdf
* Fonds privé : [Remarkable finding-aid descriptions online here of the personal side of life under the Occupation. JK]
La série FP regroupe tous les fonds privés (dons de particuliers):
1 FP : Pièces isolées
2 FP : Fonds Marguerite Simon
3 FP : Fonds Léopold Rechossière
4 FP : Fonds Haïm Wajnberg
5 FP : Fonds ANFMOG / Association nationale
des familles des martyrs d'Oradour-sur-Glane.
6 FP : Fonds René Besse
7 FP : Fonds Laurent Taveau
8 FP : Fonds Jean Henry
9 FP : Fonds Georges Magnane
10 FP : Fonds Erich Flogaus
11 FP: Fonds Jacqueline Pinède
The above now is installed, complete with interactive links and texts, at the following address:
http://fyifrance.com/fyi1pli3.htm#OradoursurGlaneBib
--oOo--
A Note: about earthquakes & tsunamis & radiation & memory --
My thought is that the sheer nobility of what is commemorated above, here, will be of interest to some -- also the controversy, as the appreciation of Les Lieux de Mémoire of modern France, of which Oradour sur Glane is one of the leading examples, has changed several times, over 50 years, and deserves consideration once again as always -- every nation has its Scoundrel Times, occasionally, and it is nice to remember that occasionally there have been genuine heroes too.
And, simply from a bibliographic point of view, that such a cultural monument should nowadays be so accessible... I was greatly moved, when I first read the accounts of the Second World War and of the Résistance, as a young boy back in the 1950s -- and then when I saw some of the real evidence of "all that", during my first personal visits to Europe a decade later -- that these memories have been kept alive, but also now made so accessible, to so many, is one of our modern marvels now 60 or 70 years later, I believe. So much gets forgotten, so quickly and completely.
There are "written" and "digital" resources, then -- also profound physical evidence -- at "Oradour sur Glane". View the website on GoogleEarth, visit the physical place, read the "written" record, dial-up / log into the "digital" -- there are many ways to "remember" a thing, and so many more of them are available, now, than there used to be.
So, perhaps humanity will do a better job of "remembering" its past, now -- perhaps not, as we are seeing this week, so sadly, in Fukushima-ken and Miyagi-ken and maybe even soon in Tokyo if the winds blow wrong -- but at least the French, at Oradour sur Glane, have made a good effort to remember, using all the old and new media available. One hopes that the rest of us will do the same now, regarding "nuclear energy" and the many other issues presenting themselves to all of us this week in Japan. Rarely do things happen for the very first time.
And it is not enough, to have simply a flood of digital "data" -- we need to add knowledge, to that data, so that it truly becomes "information" -- and then we need to add experience, to that, at least in memory and preferably hands-on, to transmute that information-overload flood into true "wisdom"...
We must learn, from our data and our science: we need good "information", and true "wisdom". We are not there yet, it seems, with nuclear energy; one hopes that we will get there soon.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
FYI France : Digital tortoise or digital hare?
FYI France (since 1992) -- http://www.fyifrance.com/Fyarch/fy110215.htm
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on February 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook-Jack Kessler's Wall-http://tinyurl.com/4z2q2dn.
Regarding the "orphans" -- the legally and financially dispossessed, of the 20th c. and future digital worlds -- the books / texts no one claims, or their cousins no one wants either, hidden in the vast library treasuries now being digitized by so many...
The French today, le 10 February 2011, announced their approach to these problems, see below -- it is a brave declaration, well worth reading, as much for its "vive la différence" aspects as for what it both says and does not say.
Some comment:
* Approaches: "top=>down" very much versus "bottom=>up"
The above fairly characterizes a fundamental difference in approach, between the US and the Rest of the World Including France, in these and many other matters. And it is a difference best remembered on both sides, although often glossed-over, forgotten, or even never-known.
The French here are looking to their highest levels -- their august national library, their publishers' association, their national and supra-national governments -- for leadership, in digitization. This is regulation-before-invention, rationality-before-impulse -- "all is forbidden which is not permitted", perhaps, as the oldest saying about all this goes...
The US approach could not be more different: "over here", instead, two young Stanford graduate students, gangs of free-wheeling "venture capitalists" operating far outside the bounds of State-regulated "banking" -- a virtual and real and very expensive maelstrom of inventive activity, conducted by a horde of mere kids (think of young Hewlett & Packard, Jobs & Wozniack, Brin & Page, Doerr fresh from college, Gates before he'd even finished, Zuckerburg ditto) all of them far too young at the time to have come up against any real "State regulation", yet, more serious than a pot bust or a parking ticket anyway, then many hectic deadlines and midnight sessions and much "labor rights" insecurity, "only the paranoid survive", and tremendous excitement... There is no "business as usual", in US hitech innovation: little of the "regulation" or "rationality" which the French so value, and absolutely no "métro, boulot, dodo".
China is different in all this, from the US, Japan is different, India is different although more like the US than some of the others are, perhaps. So thinking of France, a nation so like the US and yet so different, may help us to appreciate how un-like the US all the others really are, too -- may enable us to take such differences less for-granted than we often do, in the hitech marvels currently pouring forth from the US and out upon the rest of the world, now.
* Marketing
If there is one characteristic of the US approach really not understood or even permitted, in most "foreign" places, it is "le marketing". In US usage, the term describing and encouraging the private "corporations", such as Google and Apple, which lead in these digitization efforts, is "marketing-led": in a US firm, per the US "business" schools, marketing must be everything -- if you can't "sell" it you shouldn't "do" it -- it's a way of characterizing the customer's input, or the manipulation of same, in design and operations and all aspects of the firm, an outgrowth of the "customer is king" mantra of the older Horatio Alger commercial generation in the US.
But nothing could be more "foreign" to the French approach, here or generally. Digitization of their precious texts is motivated not by "marketing" but by various forms of altruism -- history, philosophy, notions of the value of "reading" and the necessity of "education" -- mention "marketing" and the folks in France involved in these matters literally will not know what you mean, as to them that is merely an instrumental, operational idea, more like "typing", or "filing", the idea that "marketing" could be central or a motivation or an end-in-itself, to the French is very foreign and the very strangest...
* Money
Unless it's "monetize"... The French are no strangers to either term -- Paris houses one of Europe's best and biggest international business schools. But in France, as in most non-US places, it's not "marketing" or "money" which drive book digitization efforts, for example, but "patrimoine culturel".
Whereas in the US, "it's the money"... The younger Venture Capitalist Generation's mantra, this time, chanted repeatedly into the ear of the even-younger Graduate Student Corporate Founder, "Monetize! Monetize! Monetize!"...
To foreigners this preoccupation is a mystery, while in the US it is the essence: "The business of America is business", as one US national president put it succinctly.
* Floods and Famines
Now then comes the problem, though: there must, it seems, be room for more than one approach.
Because things have Globalized, now: like it or not, for both us and the French, and the other Europeans, and the folks in India, and the teenager in Urumchi in China, doing research for her term paper & texting her friends & shopping at Victoria's Secret, all via her cellphone...
Also because there is a new flood of all this on its way, now...
The "information overload", predicted from the "computers" of the 1980s and 1990s, was just "Flood 1.0" -- an initial inundation, one coped-with, moderately well, by then-new tools such as "personal computers", and by hypertext and information search & retrieval and The WorldWideWeb, and by Jerry's List, then Yahoo, Google's infamous algorithm, and decades of hitech development.
Now, though, from outside of the "computer" world and to a great extent unanticipated by it -- "from Left Field", to use the US baseball-analogy -- comes the newly-Globally-omnipresent "mobile" telephony, and its possibilities for communicating via Internet. The "power of many" just got graphic demonstration in the images from Cairo, repeating Teheran, and the Obama and Dean campaigns, and Manila's "People Power", and so many other recent instances.
The use of "mobiles", in finding and retrieving and using and creating raw "data" -- and then, hopefully, useful "information" too -- is the information overload "Flood 2.0" just-now breaking.
However many "computer" users there are now or ever will be, Globally, there are far more "mobile" users now -- and the two digital worlds, "computer" and "mobile", now are merging, into user networks capable of producing virtual firestorms of data, and many unpredictable consequences.
As all of us who followed Cairo events on Twitter et al. over the last few weeks can attest...
Typical GoogleSearch retrievals of i.e. "3,439,000 results" are about to jump a thousand-fold, then -- already we don't really understand at all why "#1" floated to the top, of our particular retrievals-heap -- Google says their algorithm knows, but that she's just not telling -- imminently, though, soon retrieving 1 out of "3,439,000,000+" instead, we'll _never_ be able to find or evaluate or use anything, if we don't start thinking outside of our old "computer"-era boxes pretty soon.
* Of Tortoises and Hares
Which brings us back to the French, here, and to their "different" approach -- one which, I am suggesting, stands for similarly-"different" approaches to be found elsewhere, all over the newly-Globalizing world in fact...
Plenty of sterile debate takes place, in hitech, about who was "first" and who is "fastest": sterile because most of it is circular -- where knowledge is additive, identifying origins is an arbitrary matter of deciding where to draw the line -- whether at a certain coffee shop in Silicon Valley, or at John von Neumann or Lady Lovelace, or at the invention of the "zero".
But the French have held their own, in this history: for instance their Minitel offered "online graphics", and "commercial applications", and "general public access", all long before the US Internet did -- back when all these activities still were illegal on the Internet, in fact. Early French contributions did not end, or even begin, at Descartes...
And one of the first among non-anglophone nations to try at least to adopt the early and still-anglophone ASCII-only Internet was France: this despite the many battles -- over "accents aigüs" and "OSI protocol wars" and "droit de copie" and the fascinating "droit moral", through which M. Victor Hugo still "owns" a slice of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" to the eternal mystification of Americans, and now over "Google the phenomenon" -- the battles have been part of the process, educational for all sides.
So now, increasingly, comes governance: who will "call the shots" and how, as the digital scales up to Globalized applications -- to a Globe where governance generally is done mostly in a very non-US way, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Egypt as we recently have discovered, and really everywhere else, in places far more "different" from the US than France and the French ever have been?
The French have been "first", in this, in many senses, and they very often have been very "fast" -- they have been "en avance" of the US even in some hitech arenas, for example, in spite of there having been a "retard français" in others -- always, however, they have offered usually-friendly although not-always-noticed clues, to us their US friends.
So in this "governance" instance, perhaps the French can help again. Their "top=>down" approach, and other aspects of the way they intend to do their book digitization -- for "orphans" and "out-of-print" and other things -- may be very different, from the way these ideas are thought of in Mountain View, or Manhattan, or Washington DC.
But they are more representative of the rest of the non-US world -- and that is where the US wants to sell its own products and services, now, in a Globalized economy -- marketing's Golden Rule, "know thy customer..."
Worth-a-journey, then -- the French, on caring for digitization's "orphans", below -- definitely worth-a-study, at least.
--oOo--
[Original version in English -- translation not by JK -- see also the original version in French, below]
* Paris, 1 February 2011 -
"Signature of the framework agreement for the digitization and online exploitation of out of print French books of the 20th century"
Frédéric Mitterrand, Ministry for Culture and Communication, René Ricol, Commissioner-General of investment attached to the Prime Minister, Bruno Racine, President of the National Library of France, Antoine Gallimard, President of the French Publishers Association (Syndicat national de l'Edition, SNE) Jean-Claude Bologne, President of the French Society of Literary Authors (Société des Gens de Lettres, SGDL) have signed a framework agreement reflecting the will to give new life, through digitization, to copyrighted out of print books of the 20th century. The aim is to digitize and make available for sale online, a corpus of 500 000 books within five years.
This agreement, fruit of the past year's reflection and cooperation, enables the project to be taken one step further with the launching of a detailed feasibility study within the coming months. It stresses in particular the fact that digitized books through « Investments for the future » will be exploited by means of a common management guaranteeing publishers and authors, equally, a fair remuneration in line with intellectual property rights. As a result, copyrights law will be modified.
Digitization will rely on the legal deposit collections stored at the National Library of France. The latter will be entitled to possess a digital copy for its own use. The website Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) will display the complete enriched bibliographical records, provide a possibility to access excerpts and redirect users towards online retailers in order to buy a digital copy.
The state financial support will be provided within the framework of the program « Development of the digital economy ». This euros 4.5bn scheme is one of the main components of the euros 35bn mobilized by the government for the « Investments for the future ». This includes euros 750m earmarked for the development of new ways of promoting and digitizing cultural, educational or scientific content.
[And the following is the original version in French -- with a few ISO 8859-1 character set symbols added-in here, only, by JK.]
* Paris, le 1er février 2011
"Signature de l'accord cadre relatif à la numérisation et l'exploitation des livres indisponibles du XXème siècle"
Frédéric Mitterrand, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, René Ricol, commissaire général à l'investissement, Bruno Racine, président de la bibliothèque nationale de France, Antoine Gallimard, président du Syndicat national de l'Edition et Jean-Claude Bologne, président de la Société des gens de lettres, ont signé un accord-cadre traduisant la volonté de redonner une nouvelle vie, sous forme numérique, aux livres sous droits du XXème siècle n'étant actuellement plus commercialisés en librairie. Un corpus de 500 000 livres pourra ainsi être numérisé et proposé à la vente à l'horizon de 5 ans.
Fruit d'une année de réflexions et de concertations, cet accord-cadre permet d'aborder une nouvelle phase dans la mise en oeuvre de ce projet avec la réalisation d'une étude de faisabilité détaillée dans les prochains mois. Il rappelle notamment que les livres numérisés au moyen des Investissements d'avenir seront exploités dans le cadre d'une gestion collective assurant aux éditeurs et aux auteurs, représentés à parité, une rémunération équitable dans le strict respect des droits moraux et patrimoniaux. Le code de la propriété intellectuelle sera modifié en conséquence.
La numérisation des livres sera effectuée à partir des collections du dépôt légal conservées à la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Celle-ci pourra conserver une copie numérique pour son usage propre. Le site Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) présentera l'intégralité des références bibliographiques enrichies, avec une possibilité de feuilletage, et renverra à des sites marchands pour l'acquisition des livres numériques.
Le soutien financier de l'Etat s'inscrira dans le cadre du programme « développement de l'économie numérique ».
Ce programme doté de 4,5 milliards d'euros est l'une des principales composantes des 35 milliards d'euros que le gouvernement mobilise pour les « investissements d'avenir ». Il inclut un volet de 750 millions d'euros visant à développer de nouvelles formes de valorisation et de numérisations des contenus culturels, scientifiques et éducatifs.
[* Both versions are from the "Press Release" distributed via email on February 10, 2011, by the BnF.]
--oOo--
Tortoises are said to have better track records than hares, long-term -- and, besides, it is not always entirely clear who is the "hare" and who the "tortoise", until the end of the race.
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
--oOo--
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us -- Archive copy of an issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on February 15, 2011 -- and, a little later, here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com/, and at Facebook-Jack Kessler's Wall-http://tinyurl.com/4z2q2dn.
Regarding the "orphans" -- the legally and financially dispossessed, of the 20th c. and future digital worlds -- the books / texts no one claims, or their cousins no one wants either, hidden in the vast library treasuries now being digitized by so many...
The French today, le 10 February 2011, announced their approach to these problems, see below -- it is a brave declaration, well worth reading, as much for its "vive la différence" aspects as for what it both says and does not say.
Some comment:
* Approaches: "top=>down" very much versus "bottom=>up"
The above fairly characterizes a fundamental difference in approach, between the US and the Rest of the World Including France, in these and many other matters. And it is a difference best remembered on both sides, although often glossed-over, forgotten, or even never-known.
The French here are looking to their highest levels -- their august national library, their publishers' association, their national and supra-national governments -- for leadership, in digitization. This is regulation-before-invention, rationality-before-impulse -- "all is forbidden which is not permitted", perhaps, as the oldest saying about all this goes...
The US approach could not be more different: "over here", instead, two young Stanford graduate students, gangs of free-wheeling "venture capitalists" operating far outside the bounds of State-regulated "banking" -- a virtual and real and very expensive maelstrom of inventive activity, conducted by a horde of mere kids (think of young Hewlett & Packard, Jobs & Wozniack, Brin & Page, Doerr fresh from college, Gates before he'd even finished, Zuckerburg ditto) all of them far too young at the time to have come up against any real "State regulation", yet, more serious than a pot bust or a parking ticket anyway, then many hectic deadlines and midnight sessions and much "labor rights" insecurity, "only the paranoid survive", and tremendous excitement... There is no "business as usual", in US hitech innovation: little of the "regulation" or "rationality" which the French so value, and absolutely no "métro, boulot, dodo".
China is different in all this, from the US, Japan is different, India is different although more like the US than some of the others are, perhaps. So thinking of France, a nation so like the US and yet so different, may help us to appreciate how un-like the US all the others really are, too -- may enable us to take such differences less for-granted than we often do, in the hitech marvels currently pouring forth from the US and out upon the rest of the world, now.
* Marketing
If there is one characteristic of the US approach really not understood or even permitted, in most "foreign" places, it is "le marketing". In US usage, the term describing and encouraging the private "corporations", such as Google and Apple, which lead in these digitization efforts, is "marketing-led": in a US firm, per the US "business" schools, marketing must be everything -- if you can't "sell" it you shouldn't "do" it -- it's a way of characterizing the customer's input, or the manipulation of same, in design and operations and all aspects of the firm, an outgrowth of the "customer is king" mantra of the older Horatio Alger commercial generation in the US.
But nothing could be more "foreign" to the French approach, here or generally. Digitization of their precious texts is motivated not by "marketing" but by various forms of altruism -- history, philosophy, notions of the value of "reading" and the necessity of "education" -- mention "marketing" and the folks in France involved in these matters literally will not know what you mean, as to them that is merely an instrumental, operational idea, more like "typing", or "filing", the idea that "marketing" could be central or a motivation or an end-in-itself, to the French is very foreign and the very strangest...
* Money
Unless it's "monetize"... The French are no strangers to either term -- Paris houses one of Europe's best and biggest international business schools. But in France, as in most non-US places, it's not "marketing" or "money" which drive book digitization efforts, for example, but "patrimoine culturel".
Whereas in the US, "it's the money"... The younger Venture Capitalist Generation's mantra, this time, chanted repeatedly into the ear of the even-younger Graduate Student Corporate Founder, "Monetize! Monetize! Monetize!"...
To foreigners this preoccupation is a mystery, while in the US it is the essence: "The business of America is business", as one US national president put it succinctly.
* Floods and Famines
Now then comes the problem, though: there must, it seems, be room for more than one approach.
Because things have Globalized, now: like it or not, for both us and the French, and the other Europeans, and the folks in India, and the teenager in Urumchi in China, doing research for her term paper & texting her friends & shopping at Victoria's Secret, all via her cellphone...
Also because there is a new flood of all this on its way, now...
The "information overload", predicted from the "computers" of the 1980s and 1990s, was just "Flood 1.0" -- an initial inundation, one coped-with, moderately well, by then-new tools such as "personal computers", and by hypertext and information search & retrieval and The WorldWideWeb, and by Jerry's List, then Yahoo, Google's infamous algorithm, and decades of hitech development.
Now, though, from outside of the "computer" world and to a great extent unanticipated by it -- "from Left Field", to use the US baseball-analogy -- comes the newly-Globally-omnipresent "mobile" telephony, and its possibilities for communicating via Internet. The "power of many" just got graphic demonstration in the images from Cairo, repeating Teheran, and the Obama and Dean campaigns, and Manila's "People Power", and so many other recent instances.
The use of "mobiles", in finding and retrieving and using and creating raw "data" -- and then, hopefully, useful "information" too -- is the information overload "Flood 2.0" just-now breaking.
However many "computer" users there are now or ever will be, Globally, there are far more "mobile" users now -- and the two digital worlds, "computer" and "mobile", now are merging, into user networks capable of producing virtual firestorms of data, and many unpredictable consequences.
As all of us who followed Cairo events on Twitter et al. over the last few weeks can attest...
Typical GoogleSearch retrievals of i.e. "3,439,000 results" are about to jump a thousand-fold, then -- already we don't really understand at all why "#1" floated to the top, of our particular retrievals-heap -- Google says their algorithm knows, but that she's just not telling -- imminently, though, soon retrieving 1 out of "3,439,000,000+" instead, we'll _never_ be able to find or evaluate or use anything, if we don't start thinking outside of our old "computer"-era boxes pretty soon.
* Of Tortoises and Hares
Which brings us back to the French, here, and to their "different" approach -- one which, I am suggesting, stands for similarly-"different" approaches to be found elsewhere, all over the newly-Globalizing world in fact...
Plenty of sterile debate takes place, in hitech, about who was "first" and who is "fastest": sterile because most of it is circular -- where knowledge is additive, identifying origins is an arbitrary matter of deciding where to draw the line -- whether at a certain coffee shop in Silicon Valley, or at John von Neumann or Lady Lovelace, or at the invention of the "zero".
But the French have held their own, in this history: for instance their Minitel offered "online graphics", and "commercial applications", and "general public access", all long before the US Internet did -- back when all these activities still were illegal on the Internet, in fact. Early French contributions did not end, or even begin, at Descartes...
And one of the first among non-anglophone nations to try at least to adopt the early and still-anglophone ASCII-only Internet was France: this despite the many battles -- over "accents aigüs" and "OSI protocol wars" and "droit de copie" and the fascinating "droit moral", through which M. Victor Hugo still "owns" a slice of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" to the eternal mystification of Americans, and now over "Google the phenomenon" -- the battles have been part of the process, educational for all sides.
So now, increasingly, comes governance: who will "call the shots" and how, as the digital scales up to Globalized applications -- to a Globe where governance generally is done mostly in a very non-US way, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Egypt as we recently have discovered, and really everywhere else, in places far more "different" from the US than France and the French ever have been?
The French have been "first", in this, in many senses, and they very often have been very "fast" -- they have been "en avance" of the US even in some hitech arenas, for example, in spite of there having been a "retard français" in others -- always, however, they have offered usually-friendly although not-always-noticed clues, to us their US friends.
So in this "governance" instance, perhaps the French can help again. Their "top=>down" approach, and other aspects of the way they intend to do their book digitization -- for "orphans" and "out-of-print" and other things -- may be very different, from the way these ideas are thought of in Mountain View, or Manhattan, or Washington DC.
But they are more representative of the rest of the non-US world -- and that is where the US wants to sell its own products and services, now, in a Globalized economy -- marketing's Golden Rule, "know thy customer..."
Worth-a-journey, then -- the French, on caring for digitization's "orphans", below -- definitely worth-a-study, at least.
--oOo--
[Original version in English -- translation not by JK -- see also the original version in French, below]
* Paris, 1 February 2011 -
"Signature of the framework agreement for the digitization and online exploitation of out of print French books of the 20th century"
Frédéric Mitterrand, Ministry for Culture and Communication, René Ricol, Commissioner-General of investment attached to the Prime Minister, Bruno Racine, President of the National Library of France, Antoine Gallimard, President of the French Publishers Association (Syndicat national de l'Edition, SNE) Jean-Claude Bologne, President of the French Society of Literary Authors (Société des Gens de Lettres, SGDL) have signed a framework agreement reflecting the will to give new life, through digitization, to copyrighted out of print books of the 20th century. The aim is to digitize and make available for sale online, a corpus of 500 000 books within five years.
This agreement, fruit of the past year's reflection and cooperation, enables the project to be taken one step further with the launching of a detailed feasibility study within the coming months. It stresses in particular the fact that digitized books through « Investments for the future » will be exploited by means of a common management guaranteeing publishers and authors, equally, a fair remuneration in line with intellectual property rights. As a result, copyrights law will be modified.
Digitization will rely on the legal deposit collections stored at the National Library of France. The latter will be entitled to possess a digital copy for its own use. The website Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) will display the complete enriched bibliographical records, provide a possibility to access excerpts and redirect users towards online retailers in order to buy a digital copy.
The state financial support will be provided within the framework of the program « Development of the digital economy ». This euros 4.5bn scheme is one of the main components of the euros 35bn mobilized by the government for the « Investments for the future ». This includes euros 750m earmarked for the development of new ways of promoting and digitizing cultural, educational or scientific content.
[And the following is the original version in French -- with a few ISO 8859-1 character set symbols added-in here, only, by JK.]
* Paris, le 1er février 2011
"Signature de l'accord cadre relatif à la numérisation et l'exploitation des livres indisponibles du XXème siècle"
Frédéric Mitterrand, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, René Ricol, commissaire général à l'investissement, Bruno Racine, président de la bibliothèque nationale de France, Antoine Gallimard, président du Syndicat national de l'Edition et Jean-Claude Bologne, président de la Société des gens de lettres, ont signé un accord-cadre traduisant la volonté de redonner une nouvelle vie, sous forme numérique, aux livres sous droits du XXème siècle n'étant actuellement plus commercialisés en librairie. Un corpus de 500 000 livres pourra ainsi être numérisé et proposé à la vente à l'horizon de 5 ans.
Fruit d'une année de réflexions et de concertations, cet accord-cadre permet d'aborder une nouvelle phase dans la mise en oeuvre de ce projet avec la réalisation d'une étude de faisabilité détaillée dans les prochains mois. Il rappelle notamment que les livres numérisés au moyen des Investissements d'avenir seront exploités dans le cadre d'une gestion collective assurant aux éditeurs et aux auteurs, représentés à parité, une rémunération équitable dans le strict respect des droits moraux et patrimoniaux. Le code de la propriété intellectuelle sera modifié en conséquence.
La numérisation des livres sera effectuée à partir des collections du dépôt légal conservées à la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Celle-ci pourra conserver une copie numérique pour son usage propre. Le site Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) présentera l'intégralité des références bibliographiques enrichies, avec une possibilité de feuilletage, et renverra à des sites marchands pour l'acquisition des livres numériques.
Le soutien financier de l'Etat s'inscrira dans le cadre du programme « développement de l'économie numérique ».
Ce programme doté de 4,5 milliards d'euros est l'une des principales composantes des 35 milliards d'euros que le gouvernement mobilise pour les « investissements d'avenir ». Il inclut un volet de 750 millions d'euros visant à développer de nouvelles formes de valorisation et de numérisations des contenus culturels, scientifiques et éducatifs.
[* Both versions are from the "Press Release" distributed via email on February 10, 2011, by the BnF.]
--oOo--
Tortoises are said to have better track records than hares, long-term -- and, besides, it is not always entirely clear who is the "hare" and who the "tortoise", until the end of the race.
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
--oOo--
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