I was pointed to this exchange between Vinton Cerf and NEH Chairman Bruce Cole because it has a nice little back-and-forth about Everything Bad, but the rest of it is even more interesting.

Cerf: I stand in the middle of my personal library trying to remember which book it is that had a particular phrase and I have no way of physically going through these books in the library to figure out which one it was. Even if I couldn't read them online--I mean we're concerned about intellectual property protection, as we should be--but even if I couldn't read them online, if I could just find which one it was and what page it was on, I would be happy to go turn to my personal library or the public library or the bookstore to get the copy of the book. Having things online is vitally important for making knowledge accessible to everybody.

This is exactly I how I feel right now, trying to put the endnotes together for The Ghost Map.

Comments

[Steven Shaviro]

Yes, precisely! In my own work, I am constantly making use of Amazon's look inside the book, and Google Books, when they are available, just in order to find the pages I am looking for in the physical copy of the book that is sitting right there on my desk next to the laptop. Having this available in some cases has been an enormous help to my research; I wish it were available universally. The opponents of projects like Google Books never even seem to imagine that anyone might want to use the service in this way.

[John Branch]

When I'm reading a book, I mark notable and quotable passages with a pen, then stick a little Post-it flag on that page, or turn down the corner of the page if I'm out of those flags. When I finish reading, I sit down at my computer and type in all the passages that still strike me as worthy, along with the exact title, author, and page number. (They go into my all-purpose monthly journal file but could just as well go into reading-notes files.) Reviewing them and actually typing them helps fix them in my memory somewhat, the same way taking notes in a class made it easier to remember a lecture later. But the main value is that I can use Spotlight (and before that, find-by-content indexing) on my Mac to locate these things as long as I can remember part of a quotation accurately, or even just what book it was in. Of course, I have the same problem everyone else does when it comes to things I read long ago.

Which reminds me: in case Steven is able to answer here, I wonder if he could remind us/me of the name of the software that he wrote about for the New York Times Book Review.

[Rob]

As an editor, I can second Steven Shaviro's comments. Along with some proprietary databases, I use both Google Scholar and Amazon's "Search Inside" feature whenever I need to check on a quotation that's missing a word or doesn't read quite right. Half the time, I'm out of luck, which means I have to email the author, who has to check out the reference, and so on, until it's all straightened out -- one or two days later. But when it's really just the difference between, say, "imminent" and "immanent," having access to full-text versions of books and articles really lets me get my work done a lot more quickly.

I wonder, too, whether the increasing availability of digitized, searchable sources will lead to the development of programs that can identify the kinds of plagiarism that this Harvard student recently committed. I've read where universities use software to sniff out suspicious syntax and diction in undergraduate writing, but how effective those programs would be on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose, I don't know. Viswanathan's plagiarism is visible in phrases, and at times even in paraphrases. Were they available, full-text searches of works in the same genre would probably have flagged the similarities prior to the book's publication. More interestingly, such programs might also extend the discussion of what actually counts as plagiarism.

[Nora Abousteit]

Dear Steven,

couldn't find your email - so using this way - sorry!

Am in NY at the moment (based in Munich) for the GEL conference (staying till SUN). Burda Media is one of the biggest German publishing companies. We organize DLD (www.dld06.com) and other events.

Would love to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes to spare?

Am out all day, my phone no.: +49 172 3550356.

Hope to see you?
nora

[John Branch]

To Nora, in case you check back at this page: Look in the right-hand column under the heading "The Basics" and you'll find an email address for Steven.

[eddie alfaro]

i had fun reading
thank you for the nice site.
maybe you can check out mine.

eddie