Miskatonic University Press

CAST:

• David Mamet
• Lou Costello (wearing a suit and short wide tie)

SCENE: A booth in a Chinese restaurant.

DAVID MAMET is sitting quietly, drinking a scotch.

LOU COSTELLO enters, sees MAMET, and reacts with his catchphrase: Heyyyyyyyyy, Mam-met!

MAMET: I'm here. I'm here. Don't, the shouting. Don't.

LOU sits down in the booth.

LOU: You're running a baseball team now, right?

MAMET: I won the, in a poker game. I won the team in a poker game.

LOU: In a poker game? A baseball team?

MAMET: I had three kings. He had two aces. [Beat.] He lost the thing that matters most to him in the world. Now he has nothing. Now he goes back to work. That's what a man does. He works.

LOU: Well, I never met the guys on the team, so you'll have to tell me their names, and then I'll know who's playing on the team.

MAMET: The names? The names, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, but--funny names. Peculiar names.

LOU: Peculiar?

MAMET: Who's on first, What's on second, and I Don't Know is on third.

LOU: You're the owner?

MAMET: Yeah.

LOU: And you're--

MAMET: And the manager.

LOU: The manager.

MAMET: And the ...

LOU: The ...

MAMET: The coach. I'm the coach. The coach too.

LOU: And you don't know the fellows' names?

MAMET (angrily): You're saying I don't know their names? I own the team and I don't know their names? I manage the team and I don't know their names? I coach the team and I don't know their names? What am I? What am I?

LOU: Hey, hey, all I'm saying is--

MAMET: I know their names. I'm telling you their names. Are you listening? I'm talking. I'm telling your their names.

LOU: I'm saying, who's on first?

MAMET: Yes.

LOU: The guy on first.

MAMET. Yes.

LOU: I mean the fellow's name.

MAMET: Yes.

LOUL: The first baseman.

MAMET: Yes. Are you listening? Are you hearing me?

LOU: I'm hearing you.

MAMET: No, no, no, listen. Listen. We're talking here--

LOU: We're talking.

MAMET: We're talking. We're talking about the baseball team.

LOU: We're speaking about the team.

MAMET: Speaking? Speaking? The hell? The hell? We're speaking about the team now? Are we actually speaking about it? Or are we just talking?

LOU (hands up, placatingly): We're just talking. We're just talking.

MAMET: We're just talking.

LOU: All right.

MAMET: All right. All right. Jesus. We're talking.

LOU: But who's on first?

MAMET: Are you hearing me? Are you hearing me. I don't think you are. We're sitting here and I'm talking but you are not [pause, then more calmly] hearing me. Jesus. Yes. Who is on first.

LOU: That's what I'm asking you!

MAMET: I'm telling you.

LOU: Who.

MAMET: Yes.

LOU: Who is on first.

MAMET: Yes.

LOU: How often do you pay the players?

MAMET: Every week.

LOU: When you pay the first baseman, what name do you put on the cheque?

MAMET: Cheque? I don't pay them with a cheque. I use direct deposit.

LOU: What's the name on his bank account?

MAMET: Who.

LOU: The first baseman.

MAMET: Yes.

LOU: Yes?

MAMET: Yes. Yes.

LOU: Yes is the name on his bank account.

MAMET: What do you, what do you, what is this? I mean what is this? Why do you care how he gets paid? Murray got the account number off a blank cheque. What do I care about his account?

LOU: What was the name on his blank cheque?

MAMET: No, What's on second.

LOU: I'm not asking you who's on second!

MAMET: Who's on first.

LOU: I don't know.

MAMET: He's on third.

LOU: Fuck you.

Anyone with any of these last names must, I believe, acquire a Ph.D. or M.D. in order to be addressed as "Doctor:"

• No
• Strange
• Love
• Strangelove
• Funkenstein

I need a shell server because I filter my email with Procmail and then read it with Alpine. I've been doing this since I got on the Internet in 1993 (though back then I used Pine) and I don't feel any need to change. That's the kind of fellow I am: the kind who uses a now-obscure text-only Unix email reader, and writes grumpily on his web site about it. I use Thunderbird for work email but for personal use the simplicity of Alpine is exactly what I want. I certainly don't want Google handling my mail.

My old shell server provider wasn't cutting it any more, so late last year I moved to VPSVille. It's been about a month and so far everything's fine. My shell server has been up 100% of the time and my support questions are answered promptly and helpfully. Once someone recognized my domain name and made a joke about Cthulhu, which has never happened before.

I've heard great things about Linode and Slicehost, but VPSVille is one thing they aren't: Canadian. I want my email hosted here in Canada. I want all my data hosted in Canada. With VPSVille I can do that — in fact their servers are in downtown Toronto — but I also have the option to host something in the UK, which I've heard some people do to set up a proxy server so they can watch the BBC online.

Anyway, everything went fine getting set up at VPSVille. At first I went with some option where there's a control panel to the site, but that turned out to be pretty useless for me, so I just ordered a minimal Debian 6 and then installed everything I need. A lot of sudo apt-get install foo later I had what I needed. (And remember that dpkg --get-selections lists all the packages you have installed, and you can use that list on a new server to install everything you had on the old one.)

I ran into two small problems with email. I've never hosted my own email before and I was nervous about it, but it turned out to be easy. I went with Exim, and I was glad I could stay away from configuring Sendmail. Setting up Exim was simple; Debian has a menu thing where you answer a few questions and it makes the config file, and the only thing that slowed me up for a few minutes was not leaving one field blank to make it so email was accepted from any host. The first real problem was Permission denied: creating lock file hitching post errors, but changing the perms on /var/mail fixed that. The second problem was that my .forward file, which directed all mail to procmail, was causing errors. Turns out I didn't need it at all! Exim is smart enough on its own to see that I have a .procmailrc file and know what to do.

So now I'm using my shell server for reading email and for hosting some personal Git repositories. If all keeps going well I'll move some of my web sites over too. Right now I use Pair Networks for hosting. They are an excellent company, extremely reliable and with great technical support, but they're American, and I would like to host my sites in Canada. I'll see. I don't mind running my own server as long as I don't have to manage the hardware.

After returning home from the gym Denton showered, shaved and dressed. He put on a blue Viyella shirt from Stollery's, tan flat-front Dockers, argyle socks, and ankle-high leather kicks from Aldo. He felt good. He poured himself a glass of an inexpensive Argentine Malbec that had gotten a good review in Toronto Life a couple of months before. He had picked it up at that LCBO on Yonge around Summerhill, the big one in the old train station. He had an hour to kill before heading out for the evening.

Denton sat on the cream-coloured sofa he had bought at an auction over ten years before. It was looking a little worse for wear, and his cats had scratched the back of it, but no-one could see so he didn't mind. Sofa suited him fine, no need to go spending a lot of money just because of a few tears. It was comfortable. He liked that.

On the table was a copy of the new Pelecanos joint, The Cut, which he'd started reading the night before. Can't read Pelecanos without some music, he thought, and he put on the new Trombone Shorty joint, For True, that he'd picked up when he saw Shorty perform at the Opera House in November. Man put on a show. Played the trombone and the trumpet and sang and danced and worked the crowd. At the end of the show everyone in the band switched instruments and Shorty even played the drums. Damn, people were exhausted and sweaty just watching. Be good to see Shorty perform in his home town, New Orleans, some time, maybe on Frenchman Street. The music came through his speakers at a strong but reasonable volume and Denton relaxed.

Denton picked up the book after putting his Android smartphone on silent so that he wouldn't be disturbed. He'd admired Pelecanos's work for a long time. Even exchanged a bit of email with him years ago. Seemed like a regular guy, the kind you could have a beer with. Or a glass of Argentine Malbec. Man knew how to write. He'd staked out Washington DC as his own territory, but not the DC with the politicians and the rich people. The DC with real people, middle-class and poor. People who worked. Pelecanos told stories about trying to be a man, an honest man working hard, in a world full of hate and crime. King Suckerman, the DC Quartet ... those were some fine books. Seemed like he often told the same story, but he told it well, in a straight-forward style. And he always mentioned good music and movies and books. Denton liked that. When he knew the music and movies and books it made him feel good, like he was on the inside. When he didn't know them, he looked them up. Pelecanos had worked on The Wire and Treme, two of Denton's favourite television shows. Man was talented.

After an hour of reading the book, Denton was disappointed. Seemed like all the freshness was gone and all the man did now was list clothing labels and bands and streets and never really described people. The plots and characters were all tired repeats of previous novels. Pelecanos was getting into some new characters, and dealing with young veterans of the war in Afghanistan, but it didn't work like the old stories.

Damn, Denton thought, this shit isn't so tight any more.

A couple of months ago I submitted a paper to the Code4Lib Journal called "On Dentographs, A New Method of Visualizing Library Collections." The editors were interested in it and one of them, Gabriel Farrell (@g5f), was assigned to see the paper through the process and work with me on editing and improving the draft.

The last paper I did, Sarah Coysh and I started writing it in Google Docs and then moved it down to Microsoft Word and shared the file on Dropbox. We submitted the Word file and then worked with the editor using the comments and track changes features in Word.

That all worked well for that situation, but on my own I avoid Word as much as I can, and anyways it just doesn't feel right to do something Code4Lib-related in a proprietary system. Because a C4LJ paper ends up being HTML, I decided to write it in Markdown. Markdown is plain text, with very limited and unobtrusive markup, nice and simple. It keeps all the cruft out of the way and is mostly meant for conversion into HTML but can also be turned into other formats. Emacs's Markdown and outline modes help. I made a little Makefile so that with one command I could regenerate a fresh HTML version of the paper and publish it to my site if I wanted.

After Gabriel got assigned, he asked if I was interested in working together by sharing the draft files through a distributed version control system. He'd done it before and said it worked well. I said sure.

The result: a GitHub repository of the draft of On Dentographs.

dentograph-paper.markdown is a plain text file (GitHub renders it as HTML; click raw to see how it really looks) that is, in effect, the source code of the paper. Gabriel has forked the project and when he has a change to make he will edit his copy of the file, commit it to his repository, and then send the suggested changes to me in a "pull request." He's submitting patches to my source text, same as if we were working on a software project together he would submit source code patches. I get notified and can accept, modify or reject the patches.

I'd never heard of this being done (perhaps it's not uncommon?) but I think it will work very well. If you're interested, you can watch the project and see how the editing goes — submit a patch of your own if you want, and I'll consider it. The final draft will be in by the end of the month and if they accept it it'll be online in final form at the end of January.

P.S. I have these lines in my .emacs so that .markdown files work how I want:

;; markdown-mode
(autoload 'markdown-mode "markdown-mode.el"
  "Major mode for editing Markdown files" t)
(setq auto-mode-alist
  (cons '("\\.markdown" . markdown-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook 'turn-on-outline-minor-mode)
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook 'turn-on-visual-line-mode)

In the spirit of Feminist Ryan Gosling and Biostatistics Ryan Gosling I thought that Information Literacy Ryan Gosling might work:

"Would you care for some cheese and sandpaper?"

Web-scale discovery services for libraries are search engines that allow people to search not just titles of books and videos and journals but to dig deeper down into the articles inside journals, and chapters inside books, and more. In theory they bring the full power of a search engine like Google to all of the content a library holds — and in practice they pretty much seem to do that. They're not perfect, and it's a complicated question as to who the right user is for such a system, but they are solving the problem of how stupidly, unutterably, pants-wettingly difficult it can be to find an article in a journal.

Example of such systems:

• Summon (from ProQuest)
• Primo (from Ex Libris)
• EBSCO Discovery Service (from Ebsco)
• WorldCat Local (from OCLC)

Notice there are no prices on any of those sites.

Traditionally libraries have been very secret about how much they pay for things. The vendors want that and build it into contracts. They want to have lots of freedom to cut deals, to make side arrangements and to negotiate, and they can't do that if the Freedonia Public Library announces they just paid N thousand dollars for their system. The Ballygobackwards University Library system next door, that last year paid three times that for the same system, would be royally cheesed (even though their collection is larger and they had more finicky details to be ironed out).

I'm curious, though: how much are libraries paying for these systems? If you know, even roughly, let me know. I won't attribute any sources. If it's rumour, that's OK. I won't mention the library system. I'm wtd@pobox.com and @wdenton on Twitter.

(Updated 10, 11 November 2011; 5 December 2011) Various people have reported:

• Ebsco Discovery Service: $30,000 - 35,000 per year (Australia)
• Ebsco Discovery Service: $35,000 for one year, going up by 3% the next two years (US)
• Ebsco Discovery Service: "about $150,000" (Canada, probably just rumour)
• Primo: $40,000 - $45,000 per year (Australia)
• Primo: $30,000 per year (US)
• Summon: "high five figures" which I took to mean $75,000 (Canada)
• Summon: "twice that" which I took to mean $150,000, for a three-year contract, i.e. $50,000 per year (Canada)
• Summon: $40,000 per year (Europe)
• Summon: $45,000 - $60,000 per year (Australia)
• Summon: $50,000 per year (US)
• Summon: $55,000 per year (US)

(I'm leaving this in Canadian dollars, but Canadian, American and Australian dollars are all around par right now.)

Some people have mentioned implementation fees ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 for different products. Vendors may offer other products as part of the deal, but those costs aren't broken out.

On Saturday 22 October 2011 I attended THATCamp GTA, where THAT = The Humanities and Technology and GTA = Greater Toronto Area. I thought I'd post a quick summary and some links, though be warned, this will be nothing like as well written or thoughtful as A Walk with Love and Data, Peter Binkley's memoir of his time at Access 2011 in Vancouver.

(Digression on humanities: there's a building in Toronto that used to be called the Medical Arts Building and is now called the Jackman Humanities Building. The old name was carved above the door in mock Roman lettering: MEDICAL ARTS BVILDING. When the University of Toronto took it over and renamed it they kept the same style, so now it says JACKMAN HVMANITIES BVILDING. I wonder if there is much DIGITAL HVMANITIES going on inside.)

I'd never been to a THATCamp before but from all I'd seen online they were exciting events with smart and interesting people, where @dancohen and @nowviskie briefly confab with @eosadler in the hall and whoosh, a Zotero/Blacklight hybrid is born and two weeks later we're all running #zotelight (or possibly #blackero), a Ruby on Rails discovery layer and collaborative scholarship tool implemented as a browser extension, and everyone's Twitter feeds are drenched with chat about it.

This one wasn't quite as exciting as I'd hoped (it was more yackfest than hackfest), but I'm glad I went, and it was definitely filled with smart and interesting people. I think that because it had more humanities professors than programmers it was less solution-oriented than I'm used to: academics habitually problematize, while geeks at hackfests want to solve a problem by the end of the afternoon and then head out for beers. I would have liked some more concrete next steps, but I certainly enjoyed it as it was.

We started off in a very nice room down at Ryerson University in the centre of Toronto, on the seventh floor with a great view of the skyscrapers. There were perhaps fifty people there. Ryerson prof @jasonaboyd introduced things, and then we began, as unconferences often do, by writing down ideas for possible sessions and posting them for people to see, discuss, and vote on. We ended up with three streams of four sessions each, with some sessions being a glomming of several proposals. That often happens at unconferences like this, I think, and it means more people at the sessions, which can be good, but also that they can be watered down or a bit unfocused. I chatted with @adr, @scriptavore, colleague @timothybristow, and others.

The first session was about digital humanities and libraries. Good discussion, with a mix of people, including professors from various disciplines and librarians and archivists and library school students. I didn't make any notes, and I can't remember the details, but I remember recommending that people use version control tools like GitHub and that people be ready to host their projects on domains they run, so they have flexibility and control, because at most institutions, as much as the library wants to help, it can't be as flexible or fast as people will need.

The second one I went to was about augmented reality. Good discussion, and I learned about some platforms I didn't know, like Qualcomm's platform and Unity, and I talked a bit about Layar and BuildAR, which look more immediately usable.

At lunch a few folks went to The Queen and Beaver, a very nice pub a couple of blocks away. I was with @deantiquate (my archivist colleague from York), @devonelliott, and @electricarchaeo and his student @mtl_zack, all of whom are doing very cool work. I didn't expect to run into an archaeologist who had done his dissertation on Roman brick stamps and then later used NetLogo to write software agents that tested a model of information transmission in the ancient world, or a historian who was looking at how information was managed and transmitted by early twentieth-century magicians (and fabbing old tricks), or a fourth-year student who was modelling who attended feasts in ancient Greece, but there we were, sitting around at the pub, chatting away.

It's times like that when I'm reminded of how much fun this business is.

We got back to lunch a bit late, so I missed some of a session about computer programming and the humanities. The last session was about timeliness and mapping. Someone whose name I missed had some interesting data about Tibetan monks that she wanted to visualize, along the lines of SIMILE's Timeline, but she wondered if there was any way not to use the old standard time slider widget. We ended up all shooting the breeze and throwing around some fun ideas (what if she froze time and made sliders for spatial dimensions? Whoa, man!) but no-one had actually ever done anything with timelines or much with mapping, so we didn't get too far.

Then it all wrapped up with a discussion about how to keep Toronto-area digital scholars in touch with each other through GTA Digital Scholarship and generally how to continue all the good things that had happened that day. I chatted with two people who finished their PhDs at York this year, @jburnford and @ianmilligan1. A bunch of people went to what sounded like a really fun hardware hackfest (and where @williamjturkel would appear in person, his name having come up many times through the day even in his absence), but I missed it because I was off to see I Send You This Cadmium Red.

Some links I noted:

• The Digital Text, ENG 287
• Dead Men's Eyes: Augmenting Reality and Heritage
• Play the Past
• Ontario Augmented Reality Network
• Total Impact, "uncovering the invisible impacts of your research"
• GIS Cloud, GIS stuff ... in the cloud
• Gephi, an info viz tool, "like Photoshop but for data"
• The Map of Early London
• Electric Archaeology, Shawn Graham's site
• Visualizing Statues in the Late Antique Roman Forum
• Visual Complexity