Category: words

“He has come forward and talked about supporting us and we will see how that plays itself out. There is nothing signed and delivered and so far it is just a conversation that we had.”

“Meet kamishibai – from kami, meaning paper and shibai, meaning play or theatre – the ancient Japanese storytelling tool that many librarians, nursing-homes and schools use in several countries around the world.”

Objectivity has totally failed, and we have to question whether there ever was such an animal in the first place. Christopher Lasch has brilliantly argued that it was manufactured by those who needed a sterile environment within which to sell advertising, and I don’t disagree. That sterile environment was also very useful for the selling of ideas, which is the role of public relations – the spin doctors.

Audible isn’t exactly a giant-killer yet, but it is putting out an intriguing mix of content, one that—if you squint a bit—resembles the work being done by the publishing houses Audible simultaneously is partnering with and competing against. Audible is emphasizing its strengths while essentially taking what it can get from big-name authors—it’s a smart, patient strategy that is yielding results.

“Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. … [Worse,] Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. … If we diversify our thinking away from the superficial field of journals and articles, and instead focus on the power of networked technologies, we can see all sorts of innovative models for scholarly communication.”

“The Fraternal Order of Police [lodge for metro Charleston] is objecting to two books on Wando High School’s freshman [summer] reading list” – The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds, both about police violence against black teens. Said the president of the union local, “It’s almost an indoctrination of distrust of police, and we’ve got to put a stop to that.”

“I had felt prepared for Vancouver. I was a Prince Edward Islander, sure, but one who had suffered under two decades of linguistic nitpicking from my (formerly) Ontarian parents. I never considered that the locals in my new town would even notice I was from out East. All of my parents’ hard work, and still I sounded like some backwater pirate?”

“I used to use them freely; now I don’t use them at all. And yet I like them: in other people’s writing they don’t bother me, even if instead of three dots I find 10 in a row. But at a certain point, my eyes started to fly over those dots, moving on to grab hold of the words as quickly as possible. And in my own writing I began to feel they were flirtatious, like someone batting her eyelashes, mouth slightly open in feigned wonder. Too many graceful winking suspensions, in short.”

A global community to coordinate and regain control – to develop a public open-access infrastructure – of research and scholarly communication for the public good is long overdue. The issues of governance and ownership of public research have never been clearer. Another isolated platform will simply replicate the problems of the current journal-based system, including the ‘publish or perish’ mentality that perverts the research process, and the anachronistic evaluation system based on corporate brands.

Good translators approach their work in all sorts of different ways. They have egos as big as successful people in any other arena, but the ones I respect are keenly aware of the difference between creativity and appropriation. They might see their work as akin to a curator’s, a librarian’s or a publisher’s. To such people works of art are entrusted — and part of that trust is that they do not alter the objects in their care with inappropriate intrusions of their own personality. There is no little art in mounting the successful museum show, but one would be rightly appalled to find the curator touching up the Rembrandts.