Thursday, May 7, 2009
Final Post
The semester is almost over, and the reading assignments are all complete, so this blog will no longer be active. I invite my classmates to find me on Facebook if they are so inclined.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Reading Post: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch9-10
As the end of the semester draws closer, we finally wrap up with Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. I know this book wasn't particularly popular with my classmates, but on the whole I rather enjoyed it.
Examples are difficult to come by for what amounts to a lot of concept and with very little practice, but I really enjoyed chapter nine, "Messiness as a Virtue". I agree with the notion that the Semantic Web - something I've been hearing about off and on for some time now - isn't going to be the protocol that ushers in the new era. It's not a bad idea, but that doesn't mean it's a good one, either - it seems like it would have been a wonderful notion to introduce ten years ago, but now it's way too late. The chaotic nature of the internet today is resistant to any attempt to introduce the kind of order that relies on authority, such as the proposed relationships of the Semantic Web. As Weinberger says on page 192, it uses "includes and describes but not owes money to or hates the smell of." What he doesn't really get in to is how well standard HTML works for that purpose, in the grand scheme. He notes in the next chapter that the system as it stands allows anyone to link to any page with any comment they please, but he doesn't mention that Google reads all these links when it indexes, and that's how it defines search terms. It's what gives us the ability to make Google bombs, and it's what makes Google so powerful - they don't return the results that they handpicked, they return the results that we the people defined for them.
One side note: On page 186, Weinberger talks about averaging the outlines of chairs and furniture, but I don't think he does a very good job explaining that this is something we can actually do. The example that stands out in my mind is the averaging of Playboy centerfolds by decade. (As you might guess, that link contains vaguely iconic representations of naked female forms; whether or not that's safe for work is up to you. I would not describe the images as at all explicit.)
As to chapter ten, "The Work of Knowledge", I just don't have a lot to say. I think he's completely correct in that we've redefined knowledge. Information on a topic is no longer limited by how important the topic is, but by how passionate people are about it (and about informing others about it). I think it is a great thing, and it is one of the reasons that makes the third order of order work. But it also has a tendency to undermine the credibility of some collaborative projects - consider the oft-mocked Wikipedia entry on Darth Vader, in all its absurdly lengthy glory, for an excellent example.
Still, I think it's an important aspect of the future of our cultural knowledge, and much like Weinberger himself, I am extremely excited to see where such things as Wikipedia and photo tagging will take us in ten years.
Examples are difficult to come by for what amounts to a lot of concept and with very little practice, but I really enjoyed chapter nine, "Messiness as a Virtue". I agree with the notion that the Semantic Web - something I've been hearing about off and on for some time now - isn't going to be the protocol that ushers in the new era. It's not a bad idea, but that doesn't mean it's a good one, either - it seems like it would have been a wonderful notion to introduce ten years ago, but now it's way too late. The chaotic nature of the internet today is resistant to any attempt to introduce the kind of order that relies on authority, such as the proposed relationships of the Semantic Web. As Weinberger says on page 192, it uses "includes and describes but not owes money to or hates the smell of." What he doesn't really get in to is how well standard HTML works for that purpose, in the grand scheme. He notes in the next chapter that the system as it stands allows anyone to link to any page with any comment they please, but he doesn't mention that Google reads all these links when it indexes, and that's how it defines search terms. It's what gives us the ability to make Google bombs, and it's what makes Google so powerful - they don't return the results that they handpicked, they return the results that we the people defined for them.
One side note: On page 186, Weinberger talks about averaging the outlines of chairs and furniture, but I don't think he does a very good job explaining that this is something we can actually do. The example that stands out in my mind is the averaging of Playboy centerfolds by decade. (As you might guess, that link contains vaguely iconic representations of naked female forms; whether or not that's safe for work is up to you. I would not describe the images as at all explicit.)
As to chapter ten, "The Work of Knowledge", I just don't have a lot to say. I think he's completely correct in that we've redefined knowledge. Information on a topic is no longer limited by how important the topic is, but by how passionate people are about it (and about informing others about it). I think it is a great thing, and it is one of the reasons that makes the third order of order work. But it also has a tendency to undermine the credibility of some collaborative projects - consider the oft-mocked Wikipedia entry on Darth Vader, in all its absurdly lengthy glory, for an excellent example.
Still, I think it's an important aspect of the future of our cultural knowledge, and much like Weinberger himself, I am extremely excited to see where such things as Wikipedia and photo tagging will take us in ten years.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Reading Post: Banks
This week's reading was "Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment", from the book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, by Adam J. Banks.
Since this is going out to the internet, let me preface my statements by issuing a disclaimer that by all rights should be obvious (but we all know how internet people can be): As an upper-middle-class white male taking a higher education class called "Writing in a Digital Age", I have zero credibility when it comes to making statements on this topic. While reading the following, please keep in mind that I am aware of that - were this not a required post for the aforementioned class, I would probably just keep my mouth shut.
That said, my primary reaction to this article is that considering the Digital Divide as an issue of race is best described as treating a symptom. This is not to say that the Divide does not fall along racial lines, as clearly it does. But the core of the issue is not which races don't have access, it's that underprivileged, i.e. poor, children don't have access. And right now, in this country, we can draw the line between 'poor' and 'not poor' squarely along racial divides, and we all know it. Sure, there's crossover in either direction - and God knows the current recession is working hard to make paupers of everybody but the really really rich - but throughout the technological revolution we are experiencing, schools with a primarily Black population have had less money than schools with a primarily White population. This, to me, seems to be the core of the issue.
Now, 'treating a symptom' is not entirely appropriate here, because I think treating this particular symptom might well have a mitigating effect on the root cause. To wit - consider what the country would look like if every school had equal technology. New computers, internet connectivity, adequately trained teachers churning out adequately trained students, I think we'd start to see that line in the sand move. I'm not foolish enough to think we would obliterate it - I can't see how a capitalist system could avoid having poor people - but if we could blur it, and/or shift it, maybe we could obliterate the correlation of 'poor' and 'disenfranchised'.
But then, I'm an idealist. And as time goes on, I'm beginning to think I'm just a damned Socialist. I'll go ahead and quote West Wing here: "[E]ducation is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."
But again, this is an etic perspective, and I get that Banks considers the repositioning of the Digital Divide as a class issue rather than a race issue to be obfuscation. So maybe I'm just missing the point.
I will note one thing that took a while to sink in. At the top of page 30, he references "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)face" by Beth Kolko, an essay which posits that the supposed racelessness of the MOO/MUD interface created "a definitively White user". My first reaction was denial. I was there, you see - I spent years huddled in front of my computer with MOOs, MUDs, MUSHes, even the occasional MUCK. I lived for that sort of thing, back when, and I still have a sort of loyalist knee-jerk reaction to people criticizing it. But it's true - not only were most of us White, the mental picture of other users inevitably defaulted to White unless they specifically made a point of telling us. Once the WWW became more popular (and less 1400-baud), we started assembling pictures of ourselves yearbook-style, and you'll note that with a handful of exceptions that is indeed a pasty group. I have to add that this phenomenon hasn't really stopped since we left text-based VR behind for the greener pastures of multimedia. I'm reminded of a LiveJournal under the username 'blackperson', and the story of how that came about.
To recap, because I feel like I went about this argument backwards, the Digital Divide is real, and it does fall along race lines, but it looks to me like it really is a class issue - race is involved because you can't separate class and race at this point in America. But as noted above, I might be very wrong.
Regardless, I'm in favor of doing whatever it takes to put technology in everybody's hands - if we're throwing away billions on paying "retention bonuses" to AIG employees who aren't being retained, let's spend a few billion on computers (and computer teachers) for our students - all our students.
Since this is going out to the internet, let me preface my statements by issuing a disclaimer that by all rights should be obvious (but we all know how internet people can be): As an upper-middle-class white male taking a higher education class called "Writing in a Digital Age", I have zero credibility when it comes to making statements on this topic. While reading the following, please keep in mind that I am aware of that - were this not a required post for the aforementioned class, I would probably just keep my mouth shut.
That said, my primary reaction to this article is that considering the Digital Divide as an issue of race is best described as treating a symptom. This is not to say that the Divide does not fall along racial lines, as clearly it does. But the core of the issue is not which races don't have access, it's that underprivileged, i.e. poor, children don't have access. And right now, in this country, we can draw the line between 'poor' and 'not poor' squarely along racial divides, and we all know it. Sure, there's crossover in either direction - and God knows the current recession is working hard to make paupers of everybody but the really really rich - but throughout the technological revolution we are experiencing, schools with a primarily Black population have had less money than schools with a primarily White population. This, to me, seems to be the core of the issue.
Now, 'treating a symptom' is not entirely appropriate here, because I think treating this particular symptom might well have a mitigating effect on the root cause. To wit - consider what the country would look like if every school had equal technology. New computers, internet connectivity, adequately trained teachers churning out adequately trained students, I think we'd start to see that line in the sand move. I'm not foolish enough to think we would obliterate it - I can't see how a capitalist system could avoid having poor people - but if we could blur it, and/or shift it, maybe we could obliterate the correlation of 'poor' and 'disenfranchised'.
But then, I'm an idealist. And as time goes on, I'm beginning to think I'm just a damned Socialist. I'll go ahead and quote West Wing here: "[E]ducation is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."
But again, this is an etic perspective, and I get that Banks considers the repositioning of the Digital Divide as a class issue rather than a race issue to be obfuscation. So maybe I'm just missing the point.
I will note one thing that took a while to sink in. At the top of page 30, he references "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)face" by Beth Kolko, an essay which posits that the supposed racelessness of the MOO/MUD interface created "a definitively White user". My first reaction was denial. I was there, you see - I spent years huddled in front of my computer with MOOs, MUDs, MUSHes, even the occasional MUCK. I lived for that sort of thing, back when, and I still have a sort of loyalist knee-jerk reaction to people criticizing it. But it's true - not only were most of us White, the mental picture of other users inevitably defaulted to White unless they specifically made a point of telling us. Once the WWW became more popular (and less 1400-baud), we started assembling pictures of ourselves yearbook-style, and you'll note that with a handful of exceptions that is indeed a pasty group. I have to add that this phenomenon hasn't really stopped since we left text-based VR behind for the greener pastures of multimedia. I'm reminded of a LiveJournal under the username 'blackperson', and the story of how that came about.
To recap, because I feel like I went about this argument backwards, the Digital Divide is real, and it does fall along race lines, but it looks to me like it really is a class issue - race is involved because you can't separate class and race at this point in America. But as noted above, I might be very wrong.
Regardless, I'm in favor of doing whatever it takes to put technology in everybody's hands - if we're throwing away billions on paying "retention bonuses" to AIG employees who aren't being retained, let's spend a few billion on computers (and computer teachers) for our students - all our students.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Reading Reponse: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 7&8
This week's reading consisted of information about social and implicit knowledge. I was pleased to see these addressed - Weinberger has been talking about tagging all along, but he hadn't yet gotten to the aspects of it that really make it a big deal - the inherent limitations, and how we're going to get around them.
In essence, sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are all about crowdsourcing. That's a buzzword making the rounds these days that means you're taking a task and throwing it out to the world to work on, a little bit at a time. It's especially functional when you're set up with tags - each user is going to bring their own particular perspective to any given item, and the words they use to reference it will reflect that. Once a few million people have tagged a few million items, a computer starts to dig through the cloud, and comes up with some interesting ideas about how to put things together. I can't escape the notion that this is what a reference library is going to look like in 20 years.
Of course, there's still a few bugs in the system. Take the Markov chainer. I don't pretend to understand Markov's laws, but this implementation is fascinating - you feed it a text, and it analyzes each pair of words in order, learning how to link things together. I've done some experimentation with these over the years, and I've seen some grow so big they can carry on conversations in perfect English. The only problem is the words only have relative context, so these sentences, despite being grammatically sound, are complete gibberish. The biggest challenge in turning a mountain of tags into an index is going to be making the results useful.
Fortunately, if we find a way around that, I think we'll reach a point where we don't have to worry about implied knowledge. Certainly picking up a jar of strawberry jam gives us more information than looking at a picture of it, but there's a certain question of how much of that knowledge is actually useful to us. It is possible that as this experiment proceeds, we'll learn that we work better when our minds aren't filled with useless trivia. On the other hand, it's equally possible that between our previously posited millions, we'll manage to capture every relevant bit of information, and it will all be presented contextually when we reference the aforementioned jar. Time will tell.
Speaking of useless trivia, during the chapter about implicit knowledge, did anyone else flash on the episode of Scrubs when Dr. Cox is carefully explaining each character's comedic role to Carla? That's always been one of my favorite bits of meta-commentary.
In essence, sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are all about crowdsourcing. That's a buzzword making the rounds these days that means you're taking a task and throwing it out to the world to work on, a little bit at a time. It's especially functional when you're set up with tags - each user is going to bring their own particular perspective to any given item, and the words they use to reference it will reflect that. Once a few million people have tagged a few million items, a computer starts to dig through the cloud, and comes up with some interesting ideas about how to put things together. I can't escape the notion that this is what a reference library is going to look like in 20 years.
Of course, there's still a few bugs in the system. Take the Markov chainer. I don't pretend to understand Markov's laws, but this implementation is fascinating - you feed it a text, and it analyzes each pair of words in order, learning how to link things together. I've done some experimentation with these over the years, and I've seen some grow so big they can carry on conversations in perfect English. The only problem is the words only have relative context, so these sentences, despite being grammatically sound, are complete gibberish. The biggest challenge in turning a mountain of tags into an index is going to be making the results useful.
Fortunately, if we find a way around that, I think we'll reach a point where we don't have to worry about implied knowledge. Certainly picking up a jar of strawberry jam gives us more information than looking at a picture of it, but there's a certain question of how much of that knowledge is actually useful to us. It is possible that as this experiment proceeds, we'll learn that we work better when our minds aren't filled with useless trivia. On the other hand, it's equally possible that between our previously posited millions, we'll manage to capture every relevant bit of information, and it will all be presented contextually when we reference the aforementioned jar. Time will tell.
Speaking of useless trivia, during the chapter about implicit knowledge, did anyone else flash on the episode of Scrubs when Dr. Cox is carefully explaining each character's comedic role to Carla? That's always been one of my favorite bits of meta-commentary.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Reading Response: Understanding Comics (ahem: chapter six)
Earlier this semester, when asked what I thought of McCloud, I ranted for a while that he seemed entirely overrated to me. "He shows up at all these conventions and talks about comics like he's the grand master, but what has he done?" Well, the answer is this, apparently, and several other works like it. So I retract that misinformed bit of punditry with apologies. (I maintain what I said about Spiegelman, though.)
As you may have guessed by now, I liked this book. I liked this book enough that when I thought I had to read the whole thing (oops), I bought it. I like this book enough that now realizing I only needed to read chapter six, I don't feel like the purchase of the book or the subsequent reading were in any way a waste. For anyone interested in comics (or maybe a little obsessive about them) this book is an excellent guide to a deeper understanding.
Chapter six is one that specifically resonated with me, because I've put a lot of thought in to the mechanics of thought over the years, and I'm the kind of person who thinks in all manner of formats interchangeably. I have long suspected that this might be why I enjoy comics so much. The interplay between the words and the pictures is one of my favorite parts to analyze, and when used effectively they make for some of the best comics. It's a large part of what I enjoyed the most about The Sandman - the artist changed regularly, sometimes every few pages, and the art styles would vary wildly between them, which works really well for Gaiman's writing style.
I should probably cite a few linkable examples, so let me see what I can come up with. For strips dominated almost entirely by words, we should take a look at Dinosaur Comics, a dailyish six panel strip that uses the same artwork in every strip, or Partially Clips, a three panel strip with the same piece of clip art in each of the three panels. A slightly more experimental take on that would be Fugue, 'drawn' by a man who freely admits he can't draw - it's basically more of a short story with abstract illustrations to drive home the words. (Fugue was a miniseries that ran for a few months and then ended; it's also adult content, though the visuals don't reflect that.)
For art-focused strips, we can take a look a Dresden Codak, specifically these two strips, or Copper (see here and here), which are two of the most visually stunning strips I've ever encountered. (Sadly they're also two of the least-often updated, which is probably due to the complexity of putting out that sort of content on a regular basis.) There's also the Owly books, which aren't online, but if you follow that link you'll see some mini strips in the right column that capture the essence very well.
What I like about webcomics, though, is how often the visuals and the text work together, often in new and unusual ways. A Softer World is an excellent example - sometimes the photos fit the text perfectly, sometimes it just provides a weird background for a brilliant thought. Digger, on the other hand, seems to have used every single one of the combinations that McCloud talked about, all to good effect. And of course there's always xkcd, which usually manages to convey more complexity with stick figures and a few speech bubbles than some teams of genius artists and genius authors could ever hope to achieve.
'In conclusion, webcomics are a land of many contrasts.' Seriously, though, McCloud hits on some excellent points that are very relevant to this class - in a medium where we can put images (or video, or schematics, or interactive flash games, or etc etc) in the midst of our text, it's important to consider how that's going to work, and it doesn't always just have to be 'this picture illustrates my point'. This is important to consider as we finish our website design.
As you may have guessed by now, I liked this book. I liked this book enough that when I thought I had to read the whole thing (oops), I bought it. I like this book enough that now realizing I only needed to read chapter six, I don't feel like the purchase of the book or the subsequent reading were in any way a waste. For anyone interested in comics (or maybe a little obsessive about them) this book is an excellent guide to a deeper understanding.
Chapter six is one that specifically resonated with me, because I've put a lot of thought in to the mechanics of thought over the years, and I'm the kind of person who thinks in all manner of formats interchangeably. I have long suspected that this might be why I enjoy comics so much. The interplay between the words and the pictures is one of my favorite parts to analyze, and when used effectively they make for some of the best comics. It's a large part of what I enjoyed the most about The Sandman - the artist changed regularly, sometimes every few pages, and the art styles would vary wildly between them, which works really well for Gaiman's writing style.
I should probably cite a few linkable examples, so let me see what I can come up with. For strips dominated almost entirely by words, we should take a look at Dinosaur Comics, a dailyish six panel strip that uses the same artwork in every strip, or Partially Clips, a three panel strip with the same piece of clip art in each of the three panels. A slightly more experimental take on that would be Fugue, 'drawn' by a man who freely admits he can't draw - it's basically more of a short story with abstract illustrations to drive home the words. (Fugue was a miniseries that ran for a few months and then ended; it's also adult content, though the visuals don't reflect that.)
For art-focused strips, we can take a look a Dresden Codak, specifically these two strips, or Copper (see here and here), which are two of the most visually stunning strips I've ever encountered. (Sadly they're also two of the least-often updated, which is probably due to the complexity of putting out that sort of content on a regular basis.) There's also the Owly books, which aren't online, but if you follow that link you'll see some mini strips in the right column that capture the essence very well.
What I like about webcomics, though, is how often the visuals and the text work together, often in new and unusual ways. A Softer World is an excellent example - sometimes the photos fit the text perfectly, sometimes it just provides a weird background for a brilliant thought. Digger, on the other hand, seems to have used every single one of the combinations that McCloud talked about, all to good effect. And of course there's always xkcd, which usually manages to convey more complexity with stick figures and a few speech bubbles than some teams of genius artists and genius authors could ever hope to achieve.
'In conclusion, webcomics are a land of many contrasts.' Seriously, though, McCloud hits on some excellent points that are very relevant to this class - in a medium where we can put images (or video, or schematics, or interactive flash games, or etc etc) in the midst of our text, it's important to consider how that's going to work, and it doesn't always just have to be 'this picture illustrates my point'. This is important to consider as we finish our website design.
Friday, March 20, 2009
a note on the upcoming reading
Update 3/31: Yeah, okay, I'm an idiot. We only need to read chapter six.
A word of warning to my classmates: I know we pushed McCloud back a week, but I took a peek at it in the library today anyway, and it's not what I'd call a quick read. You should budget at least an hour for it, probably more like two. (I don't know what the policy on renewing reserves is, so that latter option could be problematic.)
On the other hand, I've ordered a copy from Amazon which I should have (and have finished) when we come back from break - so in theory I could loan it to two people, one from Tuesday to Thursday, then someone else Thursday through Tuesday. (Although anyone who borrows it should note that, like any proper nerd, I'm rather obsessive about the condition of my graphic novels.)
FYI. :)
On the other hand, I've ordered a copy from Amazon which I should have (and have finished) when we come back from break - so in theory I could loan it to two people, one from Tuesday to Thursday, then someone else Thursday through Tuesday. (Although anyone who borrows it should note that, like any proper nerd, I'm rather obsessive about the condition of my graphic novels.)
FYI. :)
Reading Response: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 5&6
Okay, let's see. We're back to Weinberger, and this week's reading focuses mostly on how important tagging is. I found it amusing when he was going on about the Getty Thesaurus, because I love tagging so much I can't help but think how neat it would be if you could use the designators created by the system to tag each aspect of a work of art - using the leaf metaphor, I was picturing someone gluing leaves, painted with numbers, to a canvas as some sort of collage item ... which I think is something that was only funny in my head. However! I suspect that this is the wave of the future of institutionalized categorization systems like the thesaurus - instead of putting each item somewhere on a branch, we define a set of tags, and categorize the tags, and then allow any given item to have as many tags as appropriate. I realize that the power of public tagging is that we can put as many words as we want on something, but as Weinberger pointed out, 'SF' and 'San Francisco' may not always result in the same searches. So while I want to continue to tag my del.icio.us bookmarks as I see fit, I don't hate the idea of libraries putting secondary Dewey Decimal numbers on books to aid in searching, even if the primary number still determines where the item will be placed on the shelves.
I particularly liked his point about how metadata is really just 'the data you remember' these days. Case in point is my last entry - I could not remember where that Google article was. I thought I might have gotten it from Digg, but I can't say for certain, because I couldn't find it when I searched Digg for 'Google'. What I wound up doing was searching for was '"i feel lucky" people like google', which turns up that article as the second item. (I think it might have been the first item when I searched last week, but that's not really the point.) So I find it very convenient that any given part of an item is now part of its metadata.
It seems like the moral of the sixth chapter is that we need to come up with some better ways to categorize things like books, and we're going to need to do that soon. I know there's always someone trying to rant about how change is both imminent and inevitable, but we're doing things we never used to do, even with something like books. Consider Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you aren't familiar, someone has taken Jane Austen's novel, which is public domain due to its age, and inserted some nice gory zombie moments. (Yes, really. And yes, there's already a movie in the works.) How would you categorize that? I mean, sure, fiction, that's easy, but beyond that, how do you talk about it? It doesn't belong on any given shelf. If you put it in horror, Jane Austen fans might never find it. If you put it with the Jane Austen, horror fans might never know about it. In both cases lovers of satire might remain ignorant - but if you try to shelve it next to Dave Barry, you miss out on the first two audiences. This is the kind of thing that can only be properly categorized in multiple places, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years.
I particularly liked his point about how metadata is really just 'the data you remember' these days. Case in point is my last entry - I could not remember where that Google article was. I thought I might have gotten it from Digg, but I can't say for certain, because I couldn't find it when I searched Digg for 'Google'. What I wound up doing was searching for was '"i feel lucky" people like google', which turns up that article as the second item. (I think it might have been the first item when I searched last week, but that's not really the point.) So I find it very convenient that any given part of an item is now part of its metadata.
It seems like the moral of the sixth chapter is that we need to come up with some better ways to categorize things like books, and we're going to need to do that soon. I know there's always someone trying to rant about how change is both imminent and inevitable, but we're doing things we never used to do, even with something like books. Consider Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you aren't familiar, someone has taken Jane Austen's novel, which is public domain due to its age, and inserted some nice gory zombie moments. (Yes, really. And yes, there's already a movie in the works.) How would you categorize that? I mean, sure, fiction, that's easy, but beyond that, how do you talk about it? It doesn't belong on any given shelf. If you put it in horror, Jane Austen fans might never find it. If you put it with the Jane Austen, horror fans might never know about it. In both cases lovers of satire might remain ignorant - but if you try to shelve it next to Dave Barry, you miss out on the first two audiences. This is the kind of thing that can only be properly categorized in multiple places, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years.
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