Author Archives: Patrick Smyth, PhD

Public key

Inspired by the paranoia of this week’s readings, I’ve created my first public key using GNU Privacy Guard, which uses PGP. Feel free to sign and return. (Though not until you’ve verified that this post was created by me. Some malefactor could have taken over my computer!)

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Futures Past Archive

Project Outline

The purpose of this project is to create a series of timelines that contrast the presentation of technology in fiction with real-world developments in science. The project, which will take the form of a web app or CMS, will be organized into broad areas of technological development such as lighter-than-air travel, nuclear power, and sound recording. On visiting the FPA, users will be presented with a series of images or glyphs, each of which will represent one of these areas. After selecting a category, users will be able to simultaneously view two timelines, one showing fiction or nonfiction works which imagined future developments in that area and another showing historical advances in that technology.

Purpose

The Futures Past Archive is designed primarily with teaching in mind, but may also be useful for researchers who wish to view broad trends in the relationship between speculative writing and real-world advances. As a teaching resource, the FPA will provide an accessible overview of the literature in a given speculative area, such as germ theory or telegraphy. These can serve as starting points for student research or inspire deeper examinations of the wider relationship between imagination and invention. Alternatively, the timelines presented in the FPA could suggest new ways of examining current discourses of technology, creativity, and invention.

Crowdsourcing

Ideally, the FPA will have a crowdsourced component where researchers will add to the various categories, possibly taking responsibility for a category and receiving attribution for its stewardship. However, a great deal of information will need to be present on the site before crowdsourcing becomes a possibility. For my categories, I will look to resources such as Wikipedia for lists, images, and other information on imaginative works and historical technological developments, which will constitute a kind of second-hand crowdsourcing. At this stage, the value of the project will lie primarily in the arrangement of the timelines and the “distant reading” component of the visualizations.

Minimal Viable Product

I intend to create the FPA using Flask, a web framework for Python. I will also use Javascript to create the timelines that will appear on each page. Initially, I will choose a small number of technologies (5-10) to present, and can expand the selection once those have been implemented. My MVP will have these components:

  1. A home page with stylized images of technological categories.
  2. Two timelines for each category.
  3. Information pages on the theoretical basis for the project.

To achieve this, I will need to scrape data from Wikipedia and other sources and store it in a structured way, and for this I will use Python and mySQL, respectively.

Larger Scale Project

Ultimately, I would like to see the Futures Past Archive benefit from the crowdsourcing efforts of scholars and enthusiasts of both science fiction and science writing. It may be too much to hope that contributors will congregate organically, but one way to begin small-scale crowd sourcing might be to reach out to domain experts in certain technologies, such as experts in the Victorian railway or the Napoleonic semaphore, and have them curate a category. These scholars would receive attribution on the site, and with some grant funding, the FPA might even be able to offer small honoraria for these efforts.

Eventually, I would like the FPA to be a comprehensive resource for the comparison of science fiction, speculative nonfiction, and real-world scientific developments. Such a comprehensive tool might give some insight into the relationship between scientific writing and scientific practice, or at the very least show the messy back-and-forth of cultural supposition and practical technological advancement. I would also like the FPA to be visually appealing, making it more attractive to students and the interested public rather than a small set of specialized historians and literary scholars.

Critical Digital Edition: Memories and Adventures

Memories and Adventures is a 1924 autobiography by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the late-Victorian writer most famous for his creation of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a physician, a Spiritualist, and a prominent public figure. His autobiography describes his adventures whaling in the deep Arctic, his experiences in medical practice, his religious epiphanies, and his efforts as a British apologist during the Boer war. Although Holmes is a figure of central interest to scholars concerned with fin de siècle culture, fan studies, and the literature of detection, Doyle’s autobiography has received relatively little critical scrutiny, and the majority of the scholarly attention it does receive is in introductions to collections of Holmes stories as a source of biographic material. To an extent, this is unsurprising—Doyle’s Spiritualism, for example, seems incongruous, given the empirical tendencies of his most famous creation. However, the book holds some special appeal from a history of science perspective, and an annotated edition, backed up with letters, images, and historical background, would provide an original biographical perspective on the complex figure who conceived the Great Detective.

Memories and Adventures

Memories and Adventures

Minimal Viable Product

 Memories and Adventures is an ideal length for a scholarly edition, and creating such a work would be a worthwhile contribution to Holmes studies. However, the creation of a digital scholarly edition could also be limited to the initial release of a small set of annotated Holmes stories rather than a full critical edition of Doyle’s autobiography, a move that could provide a proof of concept. Thus, my MVP could be a set of critically annotated Holmes stories presented on an existing cross-platform publishing platform, such as iBooks or an open-source alternative.

Larger Scope Project

A more substantial version of the project would be a Holmes digital archive or Doyle omnibus, which would be a much more substantial undertaking. Alternatively, I could focus more on the platform, rather than using preexisting tools to create a larger book-length commentary. This would actually be timely, since as of now there are actually few satisfactory or comprehensive alternatives for publishing critical editions online—most current platforms are focused on textbooks or lack features that make them attractive on tablets. (I’m looking at you, Scalar.)

Whether I go with the short stories or the full edition, an intertextual, archival, and multimedia approach built on a modern distribution platform would enable the digital edition to go beyond critical commentary to include some of the elements of an archive. A digital edition constructed around the capabilities of the modern tablet could incorporate high-resolution images and illustrations, “tours” of prominent locations, interviews with Doyle scholars, facsimiles of original editions, and other materials usually reserved for an archive.

 

 

 

 

Zen and the Art of Not Being Microsoft

The 37 Signals manifesto was definitely written to get individuals and small teams fired up and ready to get to work. The book is an interesting artifact. It reminds me a bit of Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing. The short chapters give it a meditative aesthetic that is surprisingly persuasive when combined with a strong vision,

People have sometimes objected to the term “maker” because of its generality. A maker could be a cryptographer or a whittler, a writer or an artist. But Getting Real suggests a holistic approach to…well, making, one that embraces a unified approach to product design, prototyping, customer interaction, copywriting, internal communication, and community engagement. They’re a small group of specialized generalists, difficult to peg to traditional roles but comfortably at home in their own design niche.

My sense was that Microsoft lurked between the pages of this book like some ghastly haunt from the past (i.e., 1992). While 37 Signals mentions Google by name, Redmond is simply the unnamed opposite of everything they recommend. Microsoft is bloat. Microsoft is Silicon Valley. Microsoft is the gold-mastered CDs in shrink wrap. Microsoft is the dark side of Metcalf’s Law. It’s an appealingly stark dichotomy, and a persuasive reason to ditch the waterfall and go agile.

Takeaways

If I had to take away only two concepts from Getting Real, they would be:

  1. Start with the minimum.
  2. Build the frontend first.

There’s an inherent appeal to simplicity. Google used to know that. (And still kind of does.) It’s actually surprisingly difficult to stick to a simple vision of a thing, especially when you’re working with content management systems and frameworks that automatically tack on timestamps, metadata, and poll widgets. More is not necessarily better.

Building the frontend first forces another kind of discipline: it makes you look at your product from the perspective of your customers. (Or, to be more academy, the project from the perspective of its users.) This fits in with the concept of persona we discussed last week. As far as your users are concerned, the UI is the app, so don’t make it an afterthought. So I’ll put together the front steps before I work on the back parlor.

Shameless plug

I’ll conclude with a plug for the responsive design workshop on Wednesday. We’ll be using Bootstrap to create designs that change based on the width of the screen. (It’s actually pretty cool when you see it in action.)

See you all Wednesday!

 

Bio: Patrick Smyth

I’m a third year English PhD student studying the history of science in the 18th and 19th centuries. I also have an interest in new media, particularly new ways of approaching the ebook in general and the scholarly edition in particular. As a Digital Fellow with CUNY DHI, I work on digital initiatives around the GC. The Digital Fellows site is here. We have a blog, Tagging the Tower, and our workshop schedule should be going up soon.

Both my project ideas have to do with the aesthetics of science, including how science is portrayed in literature. The first idea is for an online archive or database of technologies as they appear in various works of science fiction. Visitors could view books by technology and see when new technologies were first introduced in literature. Ideally, they could also compare the advent of technologies in fiction with the real-world development of those technologies. I envision this database as primarily crowdsourced. Not sure how I’ll build it, though I’ve been experimenting with Django, a Python framework for building web apps. I also have some experience working with the Drupal content management system, although for various reasons I’d prefer not to build this project with it.

My second idea is a digital scholarly edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s memoir, which is titled Memories and Adventures. The book is interesting from a history of science perspective because of the contradiction between Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and his fascination with spiritualism, psychical phenomena, and the occult. I’d like it to be something of a linearly curated archive, where readers could branch off the central text to explore information about  Doyle, Holmes, the Boer war, and other subjects covered in the book.

I’ve researched a lot of platforms and systems for publishing on the iPad, and most have pretty big drawbacks. I’d have to either bite the bullet and pick one of those frameworks or try to come up with something on my own, which might be tough going.

It’s been great to read about everyone’s background and scholarly interests. Looking forward to class tomorrow evening!