Week 41: Do you have any questions?

what’s up with the book blob and other nagging questions

Dec 09, 2021

Welcome to the new readers who join us from my mom’s Facebook promotion of this newsletter. Thanks for being here! I just finished a mega series about representation & organization, the fundamental concepts of information work. In these eight issues (33-40, excluding our book break), we covered hand-press (33) and machine-press (40) book description, subject headings (34-34A) and assignment (35), thesauri (36) and controlled vocabularies (38), and metadata application (39). If you want to get a sense of the general vibe of the newsletter, I recommend starting there, though the photo in the below tweet provides a pretty good summary (from the introduction to Lisa Maria Martin’s Everyday Information Architecture):

Actually, @eaton

this is the best opening to a technical book the world has ever seen and i will fight anyone who says otherwise

The introduction to Lisa Maria Marquis' book, Everyday Information Architecture. It begins: "Walter Plecker was an asshole."

Plecker, a 1920s bureaucrat in Virginia, used his position in the state's Vital Statistics agency, to codify his views on race and whiteness in the state's official racial taxonomy — dramatically restricting many Virginians' rights and legal agency.

Quoting LMM:

"Changing a label is a design decision—one calculated, in this case, to disenfranchise specific human beings.

Now, most of us don’t have Walter Plecker’s job. We are, instead, designers, developers, copywriters, strategists. We work on the web, and we may not think our work carries that same weight.

I’m here to argue that it does. Whatever our role, we are designers of information. Our choices alter the presentation and flow of human knowledge. We control how people find, understand, and use information in every facet of their lives."

Anyways, I think we’re all pretty exhausted from that behemoth of a series, so as the semester draws to a close and I prepare for a few weeks break from classes and my jobs, I’m going to try something slightly different: I have three unplanned weeks for this newsletter ahead (Weeks 46-48ish), and I’m opening those up to lingering questions that you have about:

anything I’ve written (or not written!) this term,
curiosities you have about what I do or do not do,
the terms I keep using,
anything in the book world or library world or information world,
whatever comes to mind.

I often receive email responses to each issue, and you all have such wonderful questions to share. I want to give more time to each of them, so please respond to this issue with your thoughts and queries, either via email or in the comments, and I will answer them—or point to people who can answer them better—over the beginning of the winter season.

In the meantime, I want to point out this fabulous article that answers the question: whats up with the book blob? (Spoiler: It’s a design trend.)

Housekeeping & birdseeking

house

What I read this week: Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So for Roxane Gay’s Book Club. I’m looking forward to reading his posthumous Songs on Endless Repeat, which includes material from his unfinished novel and nonfiction essays.
What I’m currently reading: Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. From “The World I Live In,” in Felicity (2015), and pertinent to Issue 38:

I have refused to live / locked in the ordely house of / reasons and proofs. / The world I live and believe in / is wider than that. And anyway, / what’s wrong with Maybe?

No bird this time, just Mary Oliver.

More later.

Dispatch from the Sunroom

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