The Chronicle covers the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress this week. Overall, it’s a strong article, though with a pretty unfortunate headline.

There’s much I’d like to post about, but there’s only been steadfast, nose-to-grindstone work today, in part because I’m feeling that last week running through the hourglass mighty quickly, but in part because I spent the weekend with Harry Potter, both in print and on film. No spoilers here, I swear; just two quick non-spoily observations, given that my print experience was the Brit edition and my film experience had French subtitles:

1. The French have translated a lot of proper nouns. Like “Hogwarts,” which becomes, if I’m remembering correctly, “Poudlard,” which at least suggests “hog” through its bacony reference, but within which “poud” doesn’t seem to mean anything. (Unless it’s “powdered bacon,” and then I’m even more bemused.) And “Crookshanks,” which becomes “Pattenrond,” which seems like a sort of Germanified “round feet,” which makes a certain sense, I guess, but, I don’t know, loses something in the translation.

2. There sure seems to me to be a lot more “blimey!” in the Brit edition, despite the U.S. editor’s insistence that “there are virtually no differences in the texts of the last few books.”

And with those utterly beside the point but non-secret-giving-away comments, back to work….

I got sucked into a conversation last night over at Unfogged that started out with ogged’s annoyance over what he refers to as the “bitchy whine” at the Washington Post about how Harry Potter basically demonstrates the end of literacy as we know it. Ogged wisely noted that the general claim that no one reads anymore always masks a more specific claim that no one reads anything good anymore, but that because that “anything good” goes unspoken, we’re never required to have the conversation about what “good” means, and where those values come from, and why they should be supported, or undermined, as the case may be.

Wisely, I say, as this argument is at the heart both of my last project and the new one as well. But also wisely because ogged provoked the conversation, comment after comment about the value of literary reading, as compared with the value presented by other forms of reading (including that form of interpretation that one brings to bear on non-textual media such as television). It’s a fascinating conversation, and one that seems to me to demonstrate by example the utter wrongness of the sense that only texts written according to a particular set of conventions, printed on sheets of paper which are collected into signatures and then bound between covers, have cultural merit. The article I’ve just finished writing, which I’ll be posting for comment soon, claims at one point that the deep purpose of all publishing is conversation, of some variety or another, whether the casual discussion among a book group, the formal discussion of a class, or the slow and painstaking discussion (stretched out over decades) of scholars, though the institutional structures that have risen up around reading over the last five centuries have gradually attenuated that social purpose. Here’s a conversation, however, and a great one at that, provoked by a one-paragraph blog entry. So under what definitions would this not qualify as “good”?

One of the speakers at the “New Structures, New Texts” summit in early June was Michael Jensen, the director of web communication for the National Academies, as well as the director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press. His talk was the one that most captured my attention of the course of the day, intersecting as it did with MediaCommons’s key interest in redefining the processes and purposes of peer review.

The talk was based in part on two articles of his, one in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and one that was published shortly after the summit in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s this latter piece that I’m most interested in, at the moment, as Jensen here lays side by side the authority models of traditional scholarship (which are based, as he points out, on an assumption of information scarcity) and of “web 2.0″ (which are based on information abundance), and attempts to project what the values of “authority 3.0″ might be, how it might be computed, and, most crucially, what scholars and institutions need to start thinking about in order to be ready to participate — as authors, as researchers, as evaluators — in such a model.

As Jensen points out, most people talking about things “3.0″ today are focused on creating modes of algorithmic filtration and other forms of artificial intelligence in order to cope with increasing information abundance; these technologies will no doubt have powerful effects on the ways that authority — whether scholarly or otherwise — is measured. Included amongst the factors that “authority 3.0″ algorithms will likely take into consideration, Jensen indicates, are:

- Prestige of the publisher (if any).
- Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
- Prestige of commenters and other participants.
- Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
- Raw links to the document.
- Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
- Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
- Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
- Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what’s its authority status?
- Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
- Quality of author’s institutional affiliation(s).
- Significance of author’s other work.
- Amount of author’s participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
- Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
- Length of time a document has existed.
- Inclusion of a document in lists of “best of,” in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
- Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

I’m particularly interested in the inclusion of “peer prereviewers” — and in particular the specification of “pre” in that designation — as only one in a long list of other metrics, and a caveated one (”if any”), at that. MediaCommons is, as we discussed at some length at this spring’s editorial board meeting, interested in the development of a mode of “peer-to-peer review” that would take into account both a qualitative assessment of the comments made on a scholarly text and more web-native metrics such as links, downloads, tagging, and so forth. Implicit in this model, however, is a sense that the most important thing we’ll be working on, in developing peer-to-peer review, is a schema for “reviewing the reviewers,” for determining not just the authority of a text but the authority of the commentary on that text.

As MediaCommons moves forward, we’re hoping to provide the tools for scholars to have a hand in developing such systems. Right now, we’ve got a number of “sociable” bookmarking buttons that appear beneath both blog posts and In Media Res entries, and we’re working on ensuring that various forms of metadata (including COinS) that will be important to tracking the life of electronic documents will be embedded in everything we publish. As with everything, however, we need significant user input, to ensure that the technological network we’re building develops in concert with the human network that it will serve. So: what are the metrics we need to include both in the review of texts and in the review of the reviewers? How should those metrics themselves be evaluated? What is at stake for members of the network (whether authors, researchers, or more casual readers) in the inclusion and contextualization of those metrics? And what do we need to do, now, to communicate to our institutions that this is, in fact, the future of scholarly authority, and is thus a model of assessment that must be taken seriously by hiring, retention, and promotion committees?

I’m currently reading Empire of Signs (one of the few books that actually went in the suitcase, which I’m trying to spread out enough to tide me over), which just presented me with the following:

The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue: the regional and social origins of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize. Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality. The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning. (Barthes 9)

I am fascinated, on the one hand, by the degree to which this captures my experiences abroad: caught in the swirl of chatter in another language, which I hear only as raw communication, without any sense whatsoever of what’s being communicated. All such overheard conversations give the sense of being about matters most serious, when no doubt some percentage of them are just as idiotic as those overheard in your local Starbucks.

On the other hand, I’m also fascinated by the transition out of this mode of existence in the midst of another, unknown language. I had a moment the other day of overhearing a conversation that I wasn’t paying attention to — just that level of background chatter to which one is not party, and not really meant to understand — when I suddenly recognized that I’d followed the entire thing without being aware of it. I think that’s the first time that’s happened to me — that I’ve understood something said in French without my having consciously decided to do so. It’s a different kind of vertigo than that to which Barthes refers, and perhaps more literally disorienting, as the “foreignness” of the language seems to evaporate, like the morning fog.

One of the greatest joys of summer, for me, is getting a brief glimpse of that seemingly long-ago period of my life when I used to Read for Fun. Which is something different from having fun while reading; it’s reading utterly divorced from utility, reading something that one intends neither to teach nor to write about (nor, for that matter, to use as a means of distracting the brain from work long enough to allow you to fall asleep), reading just for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s the kind of reading that I used to do as a kid, in which I’d immerse myself so deeply in the diegetic universe of the book that I’d be lightly dizzy when I looked up from it.

The good news is that I got to do a bit of that kind of reading week before last. I’d been stalling on reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, in large part because I wanted to enjoy it, to allow myself to experience it as a novel rather than as a piece of work. And I did; the nested dolls of the novel’s various narratives not only had me curled up on the bed reading during hours when I ought to have been doing other stuff, but also occupied my thoughts during those odd hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep. There are points, particularly in the last third, at which I found its narration to be a bit too on the nose, making darned sure that the reader wasn’t going to miss the point, but on the other hand, many of the connections among its narratives and characters are quite subtle. And the novel’s structure raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative diegesis itself, forcing the reader to think about what kinds of stories can fit into other kinds of stories, and what kinds can’t, and why.

The bad news is that I tore through the novel with something of the speed with which I used to read as a kid, and so the novel ended much too quickly. And, alas, that was the only novel I had with me; two others were in That Box. So I’m trying to read a little French fiction, but there’s no way I’m making that diegetic escape in another language. At least not yet.

Yesterday was the summer solstice, of course, the longest day of the year, which hereabouts began with the first bits of sun, sometime around 5.15 am, and ended with the last bits, well after 10.30 pm. Last night was also the Fête de la Musique, with live musical events of all genres taking place in squares and on streets throughout the city, stretching into the small hours. R. and I found ourselves at a café on the Boulevard Montmartre, watching a couple of bands playing on the back of a truck parked right in front.

I quite liked the first band, a very young jazz/funk combo that went by the unfortunate name of Funky Chicken. The second group wasn’t bad, but they were a little too hard-core for my tastes. Which is the point at which I realize that I’m old: I have no idea how to characterize the band’s genre. There was clearly an inheritance from punk, though without the speed, and the bass line had a bit of a funk edge to it. But there was something a bit drony about the guitar part that had me thinking trance, except not electronic, and then there was something screamy about the vocals, that brought me around to hard-core. Which is where I realized I was totally making it up, and had no idea what I was talking about. Whatever: they were pretty good, especially the vocalist, but I enjoyed the first band a good bit better.

In any event, it was a fabulous evening. These short nights aren’t helping with my ongoing sleep issues, but the city is helping everyone recover a bit from their fêtes by being quite grey and cloudy today. It may be the second-longest day of the year, but somebody’s thoughtfully turned down the lights a bit.

Poor, poor beleaguered experts. How can one possibly survive the onslaught of the unwashed (and uncredentialed) blogospheric masses?

Thanks to Aunt B. for the reference, and for the citation, as well. It’s no accident that the first chapter of The Anxiety of Obsolescence cites Schickel’s article on the death of film, but I hadn’t realized that we were also facing the imminent death of film reviewing…

I’m quite behind the times on this (appropriate for mon état, quand je souffre du décalage horaire), but the talk of the lefty blogosphere a couple of weeks ago was the much that was being made of W’s having been spotted drinking what his advisors insisted was a non-alcoholic beer (and, of course, the Beeb’s somewhat tickled connection of that beverage to the “stomach bug” that apparently knocked him out of commission the next day. One might also note the gleeful reminder of H.W.’s stomachal gift to the prime minister of Japan back in 1992).

Here, however, what’s being circulated with equal schadenfreude is the video of an apparently drunken Nicolas Sarkozy in a G8 press conference. His advisors insist that Sarko never drinks, and that he simply wasn’t used to the long hours and late nights of negotiating, and that lack of sleep produced his wooziness. It’s hard, however, to imagine a late night with Vladimir Putin that could conceivably end in sobriety.

On the other hand, if I’d been asked to give a morning press conference yesterday, I might have looked much the same. Today, after a full night of sleep (though one admittedly produced with a bit of prescribed assistance), I’d be a little more on my game.

I suddenly find myself with about a dozen things I’d like to write about, which is a remarkable change from the blankness that I’ve experienced when pondering the blog. At least a couple of these things I’m quite behind the curve on, given our recent preparations for travel, and our travel, and our adjustments to travel, but I’m operating in the spirit of better late than never today, which seems only appropriate to my pitifully jet-lagged state.

So, the first of those things: the finale of The Sopranos. Folks have weighed in on this everywhere (so everywhere, in fact, that I’m not going to bother linking), but I found the episode’s ending compelling enough that I want, however belatedly and repetitively, to record my reaction to it. For propriety’s sake, I’ll note that one should stop reading now if one is among the three people left in the country who don’t know how the episode ended.

I understand that some folks were really perturbed by what seems like the series’s non-ending — the sudden cut to black in the midst of not very much happening. Not least of these, my mother; my phone rang four-point-three seconds after the credits started rolling, and when I answered, all she said was “I don’t get it.” The good news is that we’d watched the east coast feed, rather than waiting for the west coast, so I could give her my sense of what had just happened, at least as it was then developing.

That sense is this: the scene is filled with a very intentionally constructed and uncertainly located though not in the least vague sense of menace, a menace which emanates from some expected places, like the hinky guy at the counter who keeps looking at Tony over his shoulder and the fairly tough-looking guys apparently scouting the jukebox in one of the last shots, but also from some unexpected places: the man sitting with a table full of Cub Scouts; Meadow’s repeated inability to parallel park. The scene pays just a bit too much attention to the small details of what’s going on around Tony, encouraging us to begin guessing what’s going to happen: the hinky guy at the counter is going into the men’s room to get a gun hidden there, à la Godfather, or he’s just given a signal to the toughs at the jukebox, who are going to open fire; the Cub Scouts are going to get caught in the bullets’ path; Meadow is going to be a horrified late witness to the scene that’s just unfolded. Or, perhaps, Meadow is going to get caught in the crossfire, and the Cub Scouts are going to be horrified onlookers.

Or perhaps none of that. As Tony and Bobby Baccala discussed earlier in the season, probably you don’t even hear it when it happens, and so it’s very likely that the cut to black is that end: the shots that Tony never sees coming. But on the other hand, perhaps what’s after the black isn’t carnage, but just more of the same, and this last scene is just allowing the viewers to enter into the world that Tony will, as long as he lives, continue to inhabit: a world filled with unlocalizable menace, in which every moment could well be the last.

For both of those reasons — that you don’t hear the bullet that gets you, but that if you think it’s coming, you hear it everywhere — the only way that the series could conceivably end was simply to end, precisely because, as Steve Perry reminded us, “the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on.” And that, I’ll confess to thinking, was a brilliant choice, and evidence of the show’s impact: “Don’t Stop Believin’” finds itself, 26 years later, at number 22 on iTunes.

The world’s going to be a bit different without The Sopranos, but on the other hand, the world’s radically different for their having existed. There could have been no Six Feet Under, no Deadwood, no The Wire, no The Tudors — or, for that matter, no turn toward complexity in network television, either — without The Sopranos leading the way. It’s an appropriate end, I think, for the series not to end, but rather to go on in imagination and discussion and argument. Not a big fuck-you to the fans, as some have accused David Chase of delivering, but one last thing worth thinking about.