Re: Curator’s Code

Marco Arment’s “I’m not a ‘curator’” offers an excellent analysis of Maria Popova’s Curator’s Code, a project that I learned about from a New York Times article yesterday. Curator’s Code proposes that those who write online use two symbols to acknowledge online sources: ᔥ for via, “a link of direct discovery,” and ↬ for hat tip, “a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.” Arment suggests that the ethics of attribution online are not best addressed by using symbols to acknowledge sources:

The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash.

That’s exactly right.

One point to add: The Curator’s Code project seems to me to misunderstand the meaning of via. Here is the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate on via:

1 : by way of
2 : through the medium or agency of; also : by means of

One quotes from, not via: “To be or not to be” is from Hamlet, not via Hamlet. What I think of as via is what Curator’s Code calls hat tip: an acknowledgement that one has found something by means of someone else’s work. The confusion of via and hat tip seems to me a problem with Curator’s Code that can be solved only with new terms. How about from and via?

[I disagree with Marco Arment about hat tips (or what he also thinks of as via): I think it’s appropriate, whenever possible, to acknowledge how one has come across an item of interest. Many an OCA post contains a via. Everything in this post though I found on my own.]

Toddler recites Shakespeare

A two-year-old recites William Shakespeare’s sonnet 18. Even if he drops lines, he deserves at least as many views as a three-year-old reciting a Billy Collins poem.

Update, March 13: Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. The video has been removed from YouTube.

A related post
xkcd: “Compare and Contrast”

[Thanks, Stefan.]

kennethkoch.org

A new website devoted to the work of the poet Kenneth Koch: kennethkoch.org.

If you think Billy Collins is a good poet, read Kenneth Koch. Koch is the real thing. There, I said it.

A “spect-op” in Los Angeles

From a New York Times article on Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder delivered to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

The scene on Miracle Mile was reminiscent of the excited and diverse crowd that has come out at night to watch the convoy as it zigged and zagged through the region. There were cameras, baby strollers, folding chairs, politicians and other people of every race and economic class. The was also a surfeit of rock puns: Someone was even playing “We Will Rock You” as the truck passed the La Brea Tar Pits.

In Long Beach the other night, people lined the streets and waited for hours to be rewarded by what Alexis Dragony praised as the “extraordinary and flawless maneuver of the rock” making a turn. “We cheered as it negotiated the corner — just flawless,” she said. “It was truly performance art.”

It was also a “spect-op.”

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

Word of the day: wirra

It’s the Oxford English Dictionary ’s word of the day:

Irish English. Expressing sorrow, distress, or regret: “alas!” “woe!” Cf. wirrasthru int. Freq. reduplicated. Chiefly preceded by “Oh”; cf. the etymology. Chiefly in representations of Irish English speech.

The word derives from the Irish Mhuire: “in a Mhuire (broadly) /ə wɪrə/ < a , vocative particle +Muire, the name of the Virgin Mary.” My favorite of the OED ’s six citations, from S.J. Weyman’s Wild Geese (1908): “‘Oh, whirra, whirra, what’ll I do?’ the Irishman exclaimed, helplessly wringing his hands.”

Why is wirra my word of the day? Because after lo these many years, I remember it from a Little Rascals short that I saw in childhood (again and again) on television. Oh, wirra, wirra, wirra, someone said. I think it was Alfalfa in drag.

Separated at birth?

Conductor, organist, and harpsichordist Ton Koopman and neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks.

Related posts
Amsterdam Baroque
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Elaine Hansen and Blanche Lincoln

[Photograph of Ton Koopman by Marco Borggreve, found here. The Oliver Sacks photo seems ubiquitous online.]

Stripes

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

This sign (on the side of a tractor-trailer) reminds me of the Italian cookies I have known from childhood as stripes.

Do these stripes map out what’s packed in the trailer? Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine, can someone explain these stripes?

Amsterdam Baroque

The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, under the direction of Ton Koopman, are on a short American tour, performing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Elaine and I were fortunate to hear them last night performing the Mass in B Minor. Such music, and such musicianship. I have no more words.

If you’re anywhere near Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Newark, New York, or Tucson and can go, go. Here’s a page with the touring schedule.

Media Matters on Limbaugh

Media Matters reports: Who’s Advertising On Rush Limbaugh? As of yesterday, forty-five advertisers had dropped out. Lots of PSAs in their place.

Media Matters also has a timeline of Limbaugh’s remarks re: Sandra Fluke. I think it’s fair to say that the sheer hatefulness of his remarks has been underreported.

3:25 p.m.: Now it’s forty-eight.

March 10: Now it’s ninety-eight.

Related posts
Homer and Limbaugh and epithets
Netflix and Limbaugh

Overheard

In a distant grove — or was it hallway? — of academe, a student complaining about an essay assignment:

“I mean, she wants an introduction, a thesis statement. I’m sorry: this is, like, too much.”

What especially strikes me about this complaint: the assumption that an introduction and thesis statement are one despot’s demands, not elements of a college essay, made explicit for a student’s benefit. What will “she” demand next: sentences? paragraphs? a staple in the upper-left corner?

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

[Thanks, Michael.]