In her latest email newsletter, Mandy Brown expresses this idea (and others) far, far better than I did.
But to come back to the question of whether or not our platforms should privilege authors over publications or the reverse: well, what if that’s the wrong question? What if what we’re asking about isn’t taxonomy and authorship but money? In other words: let’s stop pretending that the question at hand is about art, and admit it’s economics.
The output generated can theoretically be uploaded straight to CreateSpace for use in a 5.25″ × 8″ sized bound book. (I have yet to actually try this, but the PDF does meet all their requirements.) I plan to add options for a few other book sizes and designs in the future.
Since this effort happens to be geared towards created printed copies of blogs, we’ll have each blog post correspond to a chapter in the book.
Blog posts are a little different than normal book chapters, though. Book chapters usually have numbers, but posts are more commonly marked by the date on which they were posted. I had a hard time finding examples of LaTeX chapter styles which featured a date within the chapter heading itself, so I came up with my own solution.
My preferred starting point was memoir’s “dowding” chapter style, in which the chapter number appears above the chapter title, and both are centered. I copied its definition and changed it so that, instead of printing automatic chapter numbers in numbered headings (e.g., “Chapter One”) it instead prints whatever text I supply:
\makeatletter
\makechapterstyle{dowdingdate}{%
\setlength{\beforechapskip}{2\onelineskip}
\setlength{\afterchapskip}{1.5\onelineskip \@plus .1\onelineskip
\@minus 0.167\onelineskip}%
\renewcommand*{\chapnamefont}{\normalfont}%
\renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\chapnamefont}%% Remove the word "Chapter" before the date (where the chapter % number would normally be)
\renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{}%% Print the contents of \chapterDesc in place of the chapter number% (except in appendices, where a simple [roman] numeral is printed)
\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\centering\chapnumfont
\ifanappendix \thechapter
\else \chapterDesc\fi}
% (Original, for reference:) % %\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\centering\chapnumfont % \ifanappendix \thechapter% \else \numtoName{\c@chapter}\fi}%
\renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\itshape\huge\centering}%
\renewcommand*{\printchapternonum}{%
\vphantom{\printchaptername}\vskip\midchapskip}}
\makeatother
Then I define a couple of new commands that allow me to pass an additional string of text to be used in place of each chapter’s number:
\newcommand{\setChapterDescription}[1]{%
\def\chapterDesc{#1}%
}
\newcommand{\ChapterDate}[2]{
\setChapterDescription{#2}
\chapter{#1}
\setChapterDescription{}
}
% define as empty to prevent an error the first time
\def\chapterDesc{}
But it does shock me to see what a religious world I inhabit online: a world of dogmas and excommunications, of Huguenots and Catholics, of certainties and casus belli, of inquisitors and the church-goers eager to revel in their (usually) flattering verities and then spill out into the streets parroting them as revelation. Everyone wants to tear down temples. The moralization of artifacts from apps to art reminds me of nothing so much as those religious texts which assert God’s position on minor matters like tattoos and silverware; and searching the world and all who live in it and all their utterances for evidence of whether they conform to one’s beliefs has seemed to me wildly anachronistic, which, as I said, only shows how stupid I am. Form never changes, only content.
I’m trying to automate the process of taking a blog (or any collection of plain text and images) and producing a printed book, for reasons that will be stated elsewhere. These are my notes on doing so.
Working backwards: I’ll be using CreateSpace to print and bind the book. CS’s main inputs are 1) a PDF of the book’s cover and 2) a PDF of the book’s interior. I’ll figure out how to automate the creation of the cover later; for now I’ll focus on the book’s interior. I’ll be using pandoc to convert HTML or Markdown into LaTeX, which can then be used to generate the PDF. Most of the work will be in creating a suitable LaTeX template.
On my Mac, I set up the development environment for this by installing MacTeX and Homebrew, then installing pandoc from the command line with:
$ brew install pandoc
As a simple test, I took the plain tex of one of my own blog posts and saved it to simplepost.txt. I also manually added some meta-data to the top (as described on pandoc’s user guide), like so:
---
title: Imagination and Self-Doubt
author: Joel Dueck
date: July 18, 2014
---
# Imagination and Self-Doubt
...
Marco Arment writes about how blogs “aren’t dying, but are in significant decline,” likely because everyone who used to read (and write) blogs is now constantly snacking on social media and apps. He paints a depressing picture1, and then tries to tack on some constructive advice at the end:
“If we want it to get better, we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next.”
Besides being too vague to be useful2 this advice completely misrepresents “the trend” and the problem it presents. It suggests that if we organize some petitions and online awareness campaigns, maybe do some creative coding, we bloggers can get things back on track — i.e., persuade individuals to use the web in healthy, creative ways and revitalize the web from the ground up. In other words, it presents “the trend” as just the pattern of our individual habits, nothing more.
But the “trend” we are talking about here is that people are being trained to use their attention spans as little as possible. This is not an “internet habits” problem, nor even a technology problem; it is a political problem. It has to do mainly with the kinds of services and companies we collectively allow to exist, the things we reward and penalize legally and economically.3
If a school, for example, makes policies that reward teachers for handing out cotton candy and that penalize students for bringing their own food, maybe you could try to help by persuading the students to suck it up and live healthy lifestyles anyway. But you’d be better off throwing out those stupid policies and starting over, weighting the environment to assist good behaviour.
We may individually resolve to stop wasting our time on social media, or to continue creative pursuits — sure. I’m not trying to minimize our individual agency here; I’m trying to say that a broad solution depends more on our collective political will. And that begins with a drive towards popular recognition that 1) we have an entire economy weighted towards producing systems and material that appeal to people’s laziest instincts in order to optimize profits; 2) creative pursuits and self-development are penalized in America (the internet’s driving economy), rather than rewarded; and 3) this is bad for our society.
As dour as his diagnosis sounds, Marco actually betrays what seems to me to be unmerited optimism throughout. Consider his choice of metaphor:
“Social networks have powerful benefits and are here to stay. But like any trend, we’ve swung too far in that direction for our own good, as both producers and consumers. I hope the pendulum starts to swing back soon, because it hasn’t yet. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.”
Alas, we have no evidence that a swinging pendulum is what we’re observing here. The trend in attention spans we see across internet-saturated cultures has never “swung” in any direction but one. ↩
E.g.: “pushing back” meaning what, exactly? And what is meant by “modernizing” blogs, if not the very shortening, trivializing and click-baiting that we’re lamenting in the first place? When we set out to “build what we want to come next,” what kind of thing might we be discussing here? ↩
For example (this is a very narrow case), I’m not sure that a company like Facebook, which sells detailed personal information to advertisers, should be legally allowed to exist. But I would be willing to consider other possibilities, such as a 90% tax on revenue derived from targeted advertising. ↩
The above approach has proven extremely reliable, but it was, after all, a workaround borne of necessity. Thanks to recent developments, it will soon no longer be needed.
The Flash-first approach may still be useful over the next year or so in order to ensure compatibility with Mac users who use Firefox and aren’t updating. But anyone still using Flash for audio embeds should consider phasing it out in 2016 at the latest.
I’m sorry, but that’s complete BS. Iannis Xenakis was a demonized ‘well-educated white man’ that has culturally enriched the music scape. Beethoven had many benefactors that ensured his well-being, a polar opposite of Mozart’s poverty-stricken life. John Cage? Copland? Bernstein? The Medici family?
Talent lies not in status; causation can be easily struck down with any introductory history lesson.
