John Miedema

I’ve been looking at houses in the Ottawa area. The prices have been rising dramatically over the past year, so I was interested in an article by the CBC a couple days ago with the headline, “Housing bubble may soon burst”. The article cited a report by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, warning that Canada may be facing a U.S. style housing bubble. I read this article around noon. That evening I looked at the article again. By that time, the headline and story had changed. The headline now …

Clay Shirky has a new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In this book he makes an argument with which I agree. Much of the cognitive surplus we squandered on watching television has been put to better use on the web. I also agree that the potential is enormous. As Shirky observes, Wikipedia was built out of one percent of the hours spent watching television in a year. However, before the web, we also spent more time reading long-form books, shaping the capacity for complex cognition, …

Feed readers are old news for many active web users. Using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, a reader enjoys having the latest information from preferred sites all show up in one tool. I noticed that any site that did not have an RSS feed quickly fell off my radar. I asked, Does a site without RSS exist? Although many people still read the web the old-fashioned way of visiting bookmarked sites, I wondered if the new trend would cause non-RSS sites to fall off the map into …

OpenBook 3 is not far from completion: a few more small features to add, loose ends to tie up, and testing. Most recently I updated OpenBook to use Open Library’s server-side implementation of their Books API. This may sound dull but it will make a big difference for OpenBook in two ways.
Loads triple fast. Previously, OpenBook had to make two to three API calls to get all the book information it needed. The deprecated APIs needed separate calls for book and author information. If you supplied an ISBN, OpenBook …

I missed this positive review of Slow Reading in the September 2009 newsletter of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. It was reviewed by Jenny Bossaller, PhD, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, University of Southern Mississippi.
The title of the book might suggest a boring slog, but I found Slow Reading to be a quick, easy, and fun read. In it, John Miedema weaves his own reading and experiences through a thoughtful look at past and current trends in publishing and technology, couching personal …

I recently asked, “Where do you read?” The American Antiquarian Society has a wonderful online curated exhibition, A Place of Reading. Index (click the ‘Enter’ line). Introduction.
In highlighting the locations where individuals performed the act of reading in America, through the use of images and objects from the AAS collections, we hope to tell a story. It is not a definitive story by any means, but a story of three centuries’ worth of individuals ‘caught’ in the act of reading in homes, taverns, libraries, military camps, parlors, kitchens, and …

I was recently interviewed about Slow Reading by Gregory Lamb of The Christian Science Monitor. His cover story is online today. The print issue is dated today, July 26, 2010. Lamb jumps into a hot topic, “Are iPads, smartphones, and the Mobile Web rewiring the way we think?” Carr’s book, The Shallows figures centrally in the story. “I think it’s subtler than, ‘Is [the Internet] making us smarter or making us stupid?’ ” says Nicholas Carr. “It’s how it’s making us smarter or how it’s making us stupider that’s interesting.” …

Jeremy Dibbell is a Boston bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and reference librarian. His review of Slow Reading provides a nice summary of the chapters and some thoughts:
Perhaps more controversially, Miedema suggests that digital books have not evolved into anything other than a sort of metadata for print books (that they exist “only for evaluative purposes before the reader seeks out the physical copy”) (p. 37). I think it’s too early to say that this is the case; while the statistics aren’t in yet, it seems likely that many adopters …

A conservative defines a liberal as someone who sees a drowning man and throws him a rope only half as long as needed, calling out, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours.” Compromise. Mushy oatmeal. That is how people with polarized ideas, from either end of any spectrum, portray the people who prefer a middle ground. Sitting on the fence, they call it. Ever run into a fence? It is cataclysmic, a sudden dramatic disruption in pattern. No oatmeal.
Many middle zones are cataclysmic, marking a dramatic change that …

Surfing the web, pages loading, files downloading or uploading, even offline using resource hungry programs, how much time do you spend watching your computer’s hourglass spin, waiting? Unlike a book that everyone can read at once, the Internet is a stateless resource, requiring time and energy each time a request is made. If everyone requested a single page at once, the server would crash. So requests are queued, and we wait.
Sure, we have to wait with print resources too. If I am writing and need to look something up, …

Dan Bloom, a reporter in Taiwan, read The Art of Slow Reading article in The Guardian today. He sent me these two YouTube videos he created. The first is his whimsical musical obit for newspapers: “I just can’t live without my daily snailpaper.” The second describes his strategy for staying unplugged, and makes his case for reading on paper rather than reading on screens. He calls the latter “screening” and calls for studies to compare brain responses while using both methods. The term might catch. Thanks Dan.

I recently spoke with Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian about Slow Reading. His article, The Art of Slow Reading, is online today. Kingsley surveys the new and old sources that make up the emerging slow reading movement. He points to analysis by Jakob Nielsen: “many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion”. Nicholas Carr argues that “our online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information.” I was pleased to see the connection with Lancelot R …

Organized information is better than disorganized information, so it goes. Fast, relevant, digital, centralized. Google’s express mission is to “to organize the world’s information”. Information has been defined as the reduction of uncertainty. Certain, consistent, simple. All good things, I suppose. I am certain, though, that the reverse qualities of information are important too. Information that is …
Slow. It runs deeper.
Late, even, rather than timely and false.
Local, subjective, personalized, something my neighbour wrote, never found on a top-ten list.
Irrelevant, because it is selfless. This is the opposite of local, but …

How much thought do you put into selecting a setting for reading? Recently I have been thinking about the extended mind thesis. It states that our minds do not end with our brains but extend into the environment. A thought is partly a product of the setting. It makes sense then that where we reading makes a big difference in a reading experience.
Maybe you already do this. Many people read cookbooks in the kitchen, magazines in the bathroom, computer books while programming, or a bible or psalter in a …

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s just the way it is. The statement may sound too obvious, but it plays out in so many ways. You’ve heard the old joke about the drunk looking for his keys by a lamp post, not because he lost them there, but because that’s where the light is. Psychologists try to interpret the unconscious. Critical theorists try to reveal subtext. Physicists have uncertainty principles and mathematicians have incompleteness theorems. They are all limits to knowledge.
Economists have their own horizon, externalities. Given …