TED To China: An Inside View

in Language Lessons, Media, TED Talks | June 1st, 2009

Today, we’re fea­tur­ing a guest piece by Tony Yet, a Chi­nese stu­dent, who is help­ing lead an effort to bring TEDTalks to Chi­na. This is part of a larg­er TED Open Trans­la­tion Project, which wants to move  TEDTalks “beyond the Eng­lish-speak­ing world by offer­ing sub­ti­tles, time-cod­ed tran­scripts and the abil­i­ty for any talk to be trans­lat­ed by vol­un­teers world­wide.” Tony speaks very elo­quent­ly about how he got involved with this project and what he hopes to achieve, and how the con­nec­tions between East and West can hope­ful­ly become clos­er. Take it away Tony and check out his web site TED­toChi­na…

I have been watch­ing TEDTalks for near­ly three years. I orig­i­nal­ly found them by serendip­i­ty on iTunes. The very first few talks (notably from Al Gore, David Pogue and Sir Ken Robin­son) grabbed me like a mag­net, and I could­n’t resist watch­ing them again and again. There were quite a few sen­tences and phras­es in each of these talks that fell on a deaf ear for me, as I could­n’t quite under­stand some slang Eng­lish. I worked with the TED videos at home with a com­put­er and a note­book. And yes, I’ve got to admit that I am tak­ing each TED screen­ing as a valu­able learn­ing expe­ri­ence, and they did help me in broad­en­ing my hori­zons and enrich­ing my under­stand­ing of the world.

Then, in the sum­mer of 2008, I decid­ed that mere­ly watch­ing was not enough, at least not enough in com­ing to a full under­stand­ing of the talks, as many of the mean­ings are hid­den in the seman­tics. Thus I embarked upon a project to trans­late TEDTalks into Chi­nese. I start­ed with some famil­iar ones, like Erin McK­ean’s talk on redefin­ing dic­tio­nar­ies, and Alex Stef­fen’s talk on a bright green future. It proved to be a mind-enrich­ing expe­ri­ence. Before mak­ing any attempt to trans­late a talk, I would probe into the depth of the back­ground of the speak­er and rel­e­vant con­cepts and ideas. This was a great learn­ing process. It helped me build up a clear pic­ture of the talk and its sig­nif­i­cance, and also reshape my under­stand­ing of many ideas across the whole spec­trum of arts and sci­ence.

As I was push­ing for­ward with my endeav­or, I found that it would be bet­ter if we can have more peo­ple join­ing in this joy­ful jour­ney of intel­lec­tu­al min­ing through trans­la­tion. So I post­ed the mes­sage on a com­mu­ni­ty web­site for trans­la­tors. Then it start­ed to get kicked off. Peo­ple jumped in the boat and offered help. It was a most grat­i­fy­ing expe­ri­ence to know that your efforts in spread­ing the idea of TED gen­er­at­ed so much ener­gy and so rich a wel­com­ing response. (more…)

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Getting Hired and Fired by The New Yorker, As Told by Tweets

in Media, Random | May 14th, 2009

After 17 years of climb­ing the lad­der, Dan Baum final­ly land­ed his dream job at The New York­er. But things did­n’t work out quite as he planned. On Twit­ter this week, Baum tells the sto­ry of his rise and fall. You can read a con­sol­i­dat­ed Twit­ter-style tran­script here. A pret­ty intrigu­ing look at what hap­pens inside the mag­a­zine world.

PS Find us on Twit­ter. We’re @openculture

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World Digital Library

in Art, Books, History, Media | April 22nd, 2009

wdl2Anoth­er big dig­i­tal archive went live this week. Backed by the Unit­ed Nations, the World Dig­i­tal Library wants to cen­tral­ize cul­tur­al trea­sures from around the world. Man­u­scripts, maps, rare books, musi­cal scores, record­ings, films, prints, pho­tographs, and archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings — they will all be absorbed into this grow­ing online col­lec­tion, and users will be able to nav­i­gate through these mate­ri­als in sev­en dif­fer­ent lan­guages (Ara­bic, Chi­nese, Eng­lish, French, Por­tuguese, Span­ish and Russ­ian). The col­lec­tion (to which Google con­tributed $3 mil­lion in 2005) now hosts about 1,250 arti­facts, a frac­tion of what it will even­tu­al­ly include. The ini­tial col­lec­tion fea­tures some gems. Take for exam­ple the Tale of the Gen­ji, a Japan­ese text from the ear­ly 11th cen­tu­ry that’s often con­sid­ered “the first great nov­el in world lit­er­a­ture.” You can also take a close look at some Ora­cle Bones from Chi­na cir­ca 1200 BC. Or how about these icon­ic pho­tos from The Great Depres­sion or these shots of the great Jack­ie Robin­son. To learn more about this new dig­i­tal archive, read this piece in The Wash­ing­ton Post.

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Web 2.0 to Book Deal in 3 Minutes

in Books, Media | April 21st, 2009

After Seth Har­wood got his MFA at the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop, he began pub­lish­ing in tra­di­tion­al mag­a­zines and jour­nals, as most young writ­ers do. But those pub­li­ca­tions were slow to launch his career. Things changed, how­ev­er, once he start­ed pub­lish­ing online. And they real­ly changed when he released his crime nov­el Jack Wakes Up as a free pod­cast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3) and dis­trib­uted it through social net­works. Web 2.0 broad­ened the reach of his work, attract­ed fans world­wide, and ulti­mate­ly land­ed Har­wood a nice book deal with Ran­dom House. (RH will be pub­lish­ing Jack Wakes Up in print ear­ly next month). In the short video above, Har­wood gives you a quick look inside the mak­ing of his pod­cast, and how it brings expo­sure to his work. If you’re an up-and-com­ing writer, there’s cer­tain­ly some­thing here to think about. You can find out more about Seth’s work at SethHarwood.com.

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Clay Shirky on the Demise of the Newspaper

in Media | March 15th, 2009

Clay Shirky, who does a lot of good think­ing (see his lat­est book) about the social and eco­nom­ic effects of inter­net tech­nolo­gies, has post­ed a new piece on the slow but steady demise of the news­pa­per. It’s an intel­li­gent, not entire­ly lengthy, piece. Here’s a quick quote to whet your appetite:

Round and round this [debate], with the peo­ple com­mit­ted to sav­ing news­pa­pers demand­ing to know “If the old mod­el is bro­ken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Noth­ing. Noth­ing will work. There is no gen­er­al mod­el for news­pa­pers to replace the one the inter­net just broke.

With the old eco­nom­ics destroyed, orga­ni­za­tion­al forms per­fect­ed for indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion have to be replaced with struc­tures opti­mized for dig­i­tal data. It makes increas­ing­ly less sense even to talk about a pub­lish­ing indus­try, because the core prob­lem pub­lish­ing solves — the incred­i­ble dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and expense of mak­ing some­thing avail­able to the pub­lic — has stopped being a prob­lem…

Soci­ety doesn’t need news­pa­pers. What we need is jour­nal­ism. For a cen­tu­ry, the imper­a­tives to strength­en jour­nal­ism and to strength­en news­pa­pers have been so tight­ly wound as to be indis­tin­guish­able. That’s been a fine acci­dent to have, but when that acci­dent stops, as it is stop­ping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of oth­er ways to strength­en jour­nal­ism instead.

When we shift our atten­tion from ’save news­pa­pers’ to ’save soci­ety’, the imper­a­tive changes from ‘pre­serve the cur­rent insti­tu­tions’ to ‘do what­ev­er works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

And while I’m on this top­ic, let me also direct your atten­tion to a piece pub­lished on Mash­able by a recent col­league of mine, Woody Lewis. It gives you a good look at the 10 Ways News­pa­pers are Using Social Media to Save the Indus­try (assum­ing that can be done).

via Clay Shirky’s Twit­ter Feed

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The New Open Source Textbook

in Media | March 9th, 2009

A lit­tle rev­o­lu­tion is get­ting under­way. The state of Vir­ginia has pub­lished a new open source physics text­book under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed text­book was pro­duced in less than six months by a team of authors, which includ­ed “active researchers, high school teach­ers, and col­lege pro­fes­sors, as well as some retirees.” And it was launched on CK-12’s tech­nol­o­gy plat­form. Here comes the new world of text­book pub­lish­ing. Quick to press, vet­ted, easy to revise, pro­duced at a low cost by pub­lish­ers, free for stu­dents. What’s not to like … except if you’re in the tra­di­tion­al text­book pub­lish­ing busi­ness?

As a quick aside, you can find anoth­er free physics text­book (in e‑book for­mat) at motionmountain.net.

via ccLearn Twit­ter Feed (Open Cul­ture Twit­ter feed here)

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The New Kindle and the Audio Book Threat

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Media | February 27th, 2009

It took until Feb­ru­ary 26, but I final­ly got my back­o­rdered x‑mas present — the Kin­dle 2 (check it out here). There’s a lot to like about it. It’s thin & light. The screen is very read­able. It holds a ton of books (1500). It down­loaded War & Peace in a mat­ter of sec­onds. The bat­tery life is long. And as for the oth­er good stuff, you can read Wal­ter Moss­berg’s review in The Wall Street Jour­nal.

But noth­ing is per­fect, and I’m under­whelmed by the Kindle’s new text-to-audio func­tion­al­i­ty, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly turns any book into an instant audio book. The com­put­er­ized voice is rather painful to lis­ten to. The rhythms and into­na­tions are off. The sub­tleties of the human voice just aren’t there.  I doubt that this func­tion­al­i­ty will get much use. But it is not stop­ping the Authors Guild from com­plain­ing.

Ear­li­er this week, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild’s pres­i­dent, wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes (“The Kin­dle Swin­dle”) ques­tion­ing the legal­i­ty of the new fea­ture, and com­plain­ing that it deprives authors of rev­enue from audio book rights. Per­haps some day, when this tech­nol­o­gy dra­mat­i­cal­ly improves, Blount may have a point. But, for now, the Kin­dle does­n’t plau­si­bly pose much threat to com­mer­cial­ly-sold audio books. Indeed, you only need to remem­ber that Ama­zon bought Audi­ble, the largest provider of com­mer­cial audio books in the US, and has already inte­grat­ed Audi­ble into the Kin­dle. (Thanks Gideon for point­ing that out.) Is Ama­zon going to let text-to-voice under­mine its Audi­ble invest­ment? Not a chance. In the mean­time, I should note that you can test out Audi­ble’s ser­vice and down­load two free audio books along the way. Not a bad deal.

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Public Radio on the iPhone

in iPhone, Media, Radio | February 26th, 2009

Here’s a quick fyi for iPhone users: The Pub­lic Radio Tuner, a free app avail­able on iTunes, gives you (free) access to hun­dreds of pub­lic radio streams from across the US. Released in late Jan­u­ary, the Tuner brings togeth­er feeds from NPR, Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media, and PRI, among oth­ers. This is a handy way to lis­ten wire­less­ly to local news and cul­tur­al pro­gram­ming, plus many well-known shows (All Things Con­sid­ered, Fresh Air, Car Talk, etc.) So far, the app works like a charm. You can down­load it here, or vis­it this web site to learn more about this new ini­tia­tive.

Last­ly, if you don’t have an iPhone, then this page does a good job of aggre­gat­ing pub­lic radio feeds, and you can always lis­ten to them as pod­casts on your com­put­er or mp3 play­er. Def­i­nite­ly worth a look…

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