Nameless LeTTers

I’ve been digging around the internet in search of artists’ projects that involve books and libraries.  I came across  Nameless LeTTers, “a collaborative art project where people from all horizons leave personalized bookmarks in books with the goal of seeing other readers discover them.”  The process is simple– make a bookmark, scan it and send a copy to the website, then place the bookmark in a book somewhere out in the public realm.  The project’s creator/s have chosen to remain anonymous, handing the reins over to voluntary participants across the globe.

I’m attracted to the simplicity of the project, but I wish there was a traceable connection between books, participants, locations…… something.  The gesture doesn’t seem to extend beyond the creation and documentation of the bookmark.   Who, for example, is going to find these isolated bookmarks?  Will the finder notify the webiste when a bookmark has been located? Will they place it in another book for someone else to find?  What , if any, are developing between users, books and locations?  One such pattern, emphasized by the format of the website, is the fact that several people have chosen to create bookmarks for the same book.  In the Public Author project, I’m beginning to think of individual books as magnets for tags.  Some books are more attractive than others to begin with, but then there is the idea of popularity.  Once somebody has drawn attention to a particular book, others will follow.

The Nameless LeTTer site has a simple structure.  You can search for bookmarks in two ways.  First, by scrolling through a menu of book titles for which bookmarks have been created.  Secondly, by interacting with a google map of locations where bookmarks have been deposited.  The list of book titles leads to an image of each bookmark, while the google map is restricted to names of locations.

The Public Author’s site will have a similar structure.  Th site’s main page will be a running list of individual book titles.  Connected to each title will be user-generated tags and a keyword denoting the location from which the tags were sent.  Books will only exist on our website if they have been tagged by a library user.  I would also like to incorporate an interactive map which would provide an alternative means of browsing the site.  The map would allow you to view all of the books that have been tagged from a particular location.  Simple enough.  But beyond this initial framework I am interested in detecting and presenting various patterns that will emerge from the intersection of these three elements: books, users, locations.  For example, the book “Twilight” has been tagged by several users, resulting in several appearances of the book title on our site.  How can we map this popularity to create connections between users in various locations?  Ultimately, I think that we need to present a third means of accessing the information, perhaps a hybrid view that compiles locations with book titles.

Free Library Ahoy!

Charles Santore Branch, 7th and Carpenter, Philadelphia PA

Last night’s Junto was held in conjunction with the Free Library’s author event, this one featuring Adriane Tomine and Seth, both comic artists.  Alex and I decided this would be a great opportunity to kick-off the Public Author Project in style.  We brought a bunch of bookmarks and were ready to pitch the project to whoever might be interested.  (Secretly hoping to meet someone on the library’s staff.)

Thanks to Geoff DiMasi, founder of P’unk Ave and marketing consultant for the Free Library, I was able to talk to Siobhan Reardon, library President, and James Pecora, CFO.  Wow! I described the framework of the project, gave them a few bookmarks and they were pretty much on board.  They were really excited about the ways this project could enrich their library programming. Siobhan was particularly interested in the possibility of an exhibition, something I’ve been considering since I conceived the project in March 08.

With support of the Free Library we can begin to consider our project in relationship to the 54 branch locations throughout the city.  The element of location will allow us to create a stronger bridge between the physical and digital aspects of the project.

Cheers!

Project in practice

2,500 bookmarks arrived to my studio yesterday, ready to be distributed to libraries across Philadelphia.  This marks the shift from the project in theory to the project in practice, and I couldn’t be more excited to get started.

Alex Gilbert and I started working on the project a year ago, and although it might seem like we haven’t made light years of progress, a great deal of decision-making and design has gone on behind the scenes.  First of all, we decided that library users will be sending us messages that contain tags, rather than free-form comments, to describe books of interest.  The tags will be attached to a particular book and displayed on our website.  This may seem reductive, but it should allow us to create more structure on the website, and to connect up with other sites like LibraryThing.com.

We’ve also decided to request that our participants include a number of keywords in the body of their message.  The project keyword, publicauthors, will direct the messages to our project.  The ISBN number will allow us to locate the book title, and occasionally the cover art, for the book that is being tagged.  And finally the library keyword, contingent upon the library in which the bookmark was discovered, will allow us to associate particular messages with particular libraries.

There are plenty of uncertainties, but I think that’s what makes this project exciting.  We’re not sure how many tags we’ll receive by relying solely on library visitors to discover the bookmarks.  We’re not sure if the libraries will be eager to participate, or whether we’ll have to sneak the bookmarks into the books using guerilla tactics.  We think people might take it into their own hands to redistribute the bookmarks–there’s nothing binding them to a particular book– which means that we won’t be able to control the locations from which people are tagging the books.  And we cetainly can’t predict what’s going to happen once we do begin to collect some serious information.  Our hope is that we can begin to reconstruct the site to reflect the spatial distribution of books, tags and library users throughout Philadelphia, and possibly on a larger scale as well.

Next week I will begin the most physical aspect of the project, inserting the bookmarks into libraries across Philadelphia.  I’ll be installing in one library at a time, placing the bookmarks into a significant portion of the library’s holdings.  From there, its up to you guys, our collaborators, to get on board and tag some books. So, keep an eye out for some bookmarks in your local library!

Shapes of libraries.

I’ve been reading a book by Alberto Manguel, called The Library at Night.  The book is a kind of anthropology of libraries, and Manguel has organized his investigation around a series of metaphors–Libraries as Myth, Order, Space, Power, Shadow, Shape and so on.   The chapter that deals with the shape of libraries got me thinking about how information is given form in buildings and on the web.  The shape of the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, reflects the changing role of the library.  The stacks are arranged in an escalating spiral, which is contained within the center of a series of platforms dedicated to interaction, reading, work, and play.  Digital forms of information storage have allowed for a reduction in the space given over to real books, but the aura of these books is enhanced by the various new approaches to reading that take place in the library.

I’d like to think about how the Public Authors website could be developed as a spatial experience, where tags become a pseudo-architectural elements whose arrangement reflect real spaces.  As visitors to the site explore the tags and use them to jump between books and libraries, they will be contributing to the construction of new pathways and spaces.  It would be good to have some examples of websites that organize information spatially.  Any ideas?

One page at a time.

One thing that is curious to me is the fact that we are in the process of scanning millions of books from around the world.  For the most part, books are still being published in printed form and we are clumsily transcribing the haptic into the digital one page at a time.  Will the time come when books are only being published in the digital form?  Or, will we continue to see the publication of printedbooks, in which case libraries and bookstores will continue to collect and carry new titles.  We’re at a crossing here, and it will be interesting to see whether libraries settle into the role of the historical reliquary, or whether there is a social and intellectual need for the library as a physical space.

Book debates.

The public authors project will operate at the point of tension between the digitization and de-materialization of books and the libraries that continue to house books as physical objects.  I recently came across two articles from the NY Times that embody this debate.  In 2006 John Updike, in an article titled “The End of Authorship“, responded to a piece written by Kevin Kelly, “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, that heralded the coming of the universal library, a digital library that will gather the entire works of humankind into a single, searchable, and someday portable collection. At the core of the debate is the notion of boundaries.  Updike is attached to the idea of books as discreet works, attributed to a single author–

“The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village… Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.”

while Kelly’s vision entails a shift from the book as isolated island to books as  members of a vast archipelago.  Links and tags have freed the book from its covers, allowing for an associative reading process that jumps between books, media and ideas.

A “… tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book… When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”