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I was recently asked for links on the subject of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and, hunting around, came across http://fweet.org/, the utterly bonkers Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, a collection of over 78,000 notes on the Wake, gathered from numerous written sources. Very easy to get lost in.

It reminded me of another great resource for comprehension: HyperArts’ excellent Thomas Pynchon site, which has grown dedicated wikis since I last visited, in addition to the most useful concordance to Gravity’s Rainbow:

White Visitation
34; former mental hospital located in the fictional town of Ick Regis on the coast of southern England; now part of SOE; location of PISCES; D-Wing still has “loonies”; “devoted to psychological warfare” 35; “they’re all wild talents–clairvoyants and mad magicians” 40; 72-74; described, 82-83; D-Wing, 230; 533; 627

I was also, just this morning, researching a favourite phrase of my Father’s: “‘Tis a poor heart that never rejoices.” He’s always attributed it to Wodehouse, but I uncovered several older sources. Dickens uses the phrase in Barnaby Rudge:

‘What happened when I reached home you may guess. … Ah! Well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’
[1841 Dickens, ‘Barnaby Rudge‘ iv.]

but it appears that Captain Marryat is the originator, using it in several books:

‘Well,’ continued he, ‘it’s a poor heart that never rejoiceth.’ He then poured out half a tumbler of rum.
[1834 Marryat, ‘Peter Simple‘ I. v.]

“You had a drop too much, that’s all, and what o’ that? It’s a poor heart that never rejoiceth. Rouse a bit, wash your face with cold Thames water, and in half-an-hour you’ll be fresh as a daisy.”
[1834 Marryat, ‘Jacob Faithful‘ I. v.]

“Tis a long while since I have sung, but it’s a ‘poor heart that never rejoiceth.’”
[1848 (posthumous), Marryat, ‘The Little Savage‘]

There’s also an occurrence in an 1844 text in Oxford University Library, called Hampton Court, or, The Prophecy Fulfilled, so the phrase appears to date from around this time.

My personal favourite site, however, is Bartleby’s edition of Brewer’s peerless Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which is endlessly rewarding:

Tom O’Bedlams.
A race of mendicants. The Bethlem Hospital was made to accommodate six lunatics, but in 1644 the number admitted was fortyfour, and applications were so numerous that many inmates were dismissed half-cured. These “ticket-of-leave men” used to wander about as vagrants, chanting mad songs, and dressed in fantastic dresses, to excite pity. Under cover of these harmless “innocents,” a set of sturdy rogues appeared, called Abram men, who shammed lunacy, and committed great depredations.
         “With a sigh like Tom O’Bedlam.”
         Shakespeare: King Lear, I. 2.

Frazier’s Golden Bough is pretty great too, but Brewer’s, originally published in 1870, and highly idiosyncratic in style and frequently venturing into trivia and apocrypha, seems made for the web. Old reference works are joining journals and epistolary novels - like recent web editions of Pepys and Swift - in finding new audiences, hungry for information.

So, what a surprise. Amazon has announced that it’s starting a Lulu-type POD system, through its wholly-owned subsidiary CreateSpace, which has been churning out self-published CDs and DVDs for several years now. The difference to Lulu being that products of said service will be searchable and buyable through the mighty Amazon.com, making them much more discoverable than stuff on Lulu, which is mostly only linked to from authors’ homepages.

There’s a bigger story here though, and it’s linked to this announcement:

The National Archives and Records Administration, the federal government’s official archivist, has entered into an agreement with CreateSpace, an Amazon.com subsidiary, to digitize the motion pictures in its collection. CreateSpace will digitize movies chosen from NARA’s collection of more than 200,000 motion picture titles, most of them public domain. Amazon.com will then make the DVDs available in a DVD-on-demand service ($19.99).

Creating better access to archives is unquestionably A Good Thing, but this way of doing things provokes a number of questions. The NARA claims they can’t possibly afford the costs of digitisation, and so getting Amazon to do it benefits everyone, as they get free, new copies for their archives. Charging for DVD hard copies on Amazon’s part is also justifiable, but what about electronic copies?

The reported trigger for the NARA’s decision was an earlier partnership with Google, which saw a trial run of 101 films made available through Google Video. From 200 requests for the hard copies in the previous year, the movies were seen over 200,000 times when available on the web - a clear indication that the interest was there, but not the availability. Hence the Createspace project. The NARA and Amazon executives have made the fascinating and fantastic statement that the material will remain in the public domain, meaning you can copy your Createspace DVD as many times as you like—but will they cut out the middleman and make the whole, Createspace-digitised archive available online through Google Video or similar?

The question is particularly pertinent because this is exactly what concerns me about Google Book Search: entering into partnership with libraries and archives to digitise public domain content, but not honouring the spirit of that public domain status by making the texts fully available and downloadable (including, particularly, being indexable by other agents). The Amazon/NARA partnership seems almost too good to be true, but public-private partnerships make me nervous (if you live in London, like I do, you’ll know exactly what I mean), and when rights and digital access are involved, I get very nervous indeed.

Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source]

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen in the papers for a while: National Archive project to avert digital dark age.

First of all, it makes me nervous that Microsoft is a verbose partner in this. Isn’t the reliance on one or two companies’ proprietary formats what got us into this mess in the first place? MS are renowned for their distaste for open and accessible formats (witness their approach to web standards embodied in Internet Explorer, or the furore over the BBC’s MS-powered iPlayer), so while it is probably necessary that they should be involved to rescue these files, let’s hope the Archives have learnt their lesson and are moving towards the use of open, extensible, standards-based code.

I’m going to point again to this article about validation, because I think it says a lot of things very well about the importance of using this kind of code:

This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think. There are no paper backups of the web. Every day we put more on it that we’re not putting in our traditional medias. If we don’t use extensible code, then our current history evaporates with the next minor tech change. We’ve never had this problem before. Before a mark on a page could go centuries; there’d always be daylight to read it by. This is a new problem and it required a new solution. [Source]

This is as important in publishing as it is in other fields. As we move inevitably towards ebooks and beyond, it’s very easy to imagine a situation, twenty, thirty years from now when a decade-old literary work becomes inaccessible because it was composed on a computer, revised on others, and encoded in an obsolete, proprietary format for distribution - and never once written down on paper.

The solution, I’m afraid, is not to write everything down on paper - there’s too much of it now, and it’s wasteful and irresponsible to boot - but to make sure that we use the best, most open, most public formats right now, for everything we do.

Large sections of the music industry are already moving away from DRM-based systems (e.g. the latest version of iTunes) and publishers should take note, and not go down the bad old routes, which, experience is beginning to show, don’t help anyone in the long run. The International Digital Publishing Forum published the latest version of their XML-based Open eBook Publication Structure Specification at the end of last year, and it scored its first victory a few weeks back with its inclusion in the new Adobe Digital Editions (although this still lays open the possibility of DRM).

Yes, we need to find ways to make sure that authors and others are paid for their work, but we also need to make sure that their works - as well as those pension records and that nuclear waste data - are accessible to future generations. We owe them that.

Image detail from Illuminated by Chronicity, reproduced under CC Licence.