My pleasure reading over the last couple of weeks has been W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the story of a man who is haunted throughout his life by his inability, or unwillingness, to remember his origins. Last night, I was reading Anthony Giddens for a class on memory and archives that I’m taking this semester, and I came across a passage that perfectly describes Sebald’s eponymous protagonist:

Giddens on ontological insecurity (click image for context).

Both Austerlitz and the anonymous narrator repeatedly remark on his feelings of disconnection from and aversion to the flow of time, and throughout the book Sebald makes the reader feel what it is to experience time as “a series of discrete moments,” as when he describes a massive clock in a railway station:

During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of the hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.

Giddens discusses the “ontologically insecure individual” as if he were a deviation from the norm, where normality is defined in terms of being able to sustain an autobiographical narrative. Certainly that is the assumption of narrative psychologists, who analyze the stories people tell about themselves and correlate mental health with tales of redemption, told in the third person. They would no doubt reward Austerlitz’s melancholy and fragmented first-person recollections with a cocktail of prescription drugs. But maybe Austerlitz isn’t such an oddball. Zygmunt Bauman contends that the linear, novelistic experience of time has been replaced in our current society by what he calls “pointillist time”:

Bauman on pointillist time (click image for context).

If Bauman is right, ontological insecurity is now the norm, and whatever autobiographical narratives we do manage to piece together function only retrospectively, rather than motivating our future plans and actions.

UC Berkeley I-School professor Paul Duguid is quoted in an article from tomorrow’s NYT about libraries rejecting Google’s digitization program in favor of working with the Internet Archive. The article focuses on Google’s clauses against allowing other commercial search engines to index the scans, but doesn’t mention another aspect of the deals which is worse: the OCR output of Google-scanned books isn’t made available to the participating libraries or to the public. Thus researchers who need digitized corpuses for developing information retrieval or natural language processing technology can’t make use of their own university libraries’ resources. This isn’t the case with books scanned by the Internet Archive, the OCR output of which are made available to everyone. Fortunately UC Berkeley is one of the libraries working with the Internet Archive’s scanning program, and the OCR output of those scans is proving to be very useful for my own research. As Clifford Lynch has written, providing access to library resources must go beyond simply making them available to human readers, toward making them available to be computed upon. Kudos to the libraries who are realizing this and choosing to work with the Internet Archive.

November 8, 2007 update: Some people have made the point that many of the library contracts that are publicly available specify that the libraries should receive OCR output. (Some of the the links on the Google Book Search Library Partners page lead to the pages that link to contracts, but you have to dig a bit.) So the contracts do mention OCR, but as I suspected they do not specify what the OCR output should consist of, because the libraries were thinking only of access to the digital files (i.e. people reading them), not computing on those files (i.e. machines processing them). Apparently (according to Peter Brantley) only UC had the foresight to think about that (and you can be sure that Google was thinking about it). So I stand by my assertion that the libraries that did not negotiate for the full OCR output made a mistake, and ceded a tremendous amount to Google.

I loved this review at the New Yorker of a book entitled Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. It discusses academic tradition, the history of academia, scholarly asceticism, eccentric faculty, and the decline of public funding for higher education. Very much worth reading.

I’ve posted a new version of my amazon2melvyl Greasemonkey script. This is a very minor change to handle Amazon’s new search-engine-optimized book links, which feature the book title in the URL. Click here to install, assuming you have Firefox and Greasemonkey already.