Seven Lions

Son of the Great River has been out for two months now and I’m happy to report the reviews have been solidly positive so far.  Book reviews get scattered all over the Internet, and it’s a rather maddening trap to start googling yourself and your book, so I’m sticking with what was posted either on GoodReads or Amazon.com.  Here’s a sample of what people are saying about it:

This is an enjoyable tale that reminds me of a quaint mixture of Pocahontas, White Fang and the Horseclans Saga. Plenty of primitive splendor comingled with an epic adventure rich in people and interesting places. I cracked open this novelette with an open mind and was pleasantly surprised. The story has some excellent illustrations to aid in the spinning of this yarn. In conclusion I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in some light reading.

(4/5 Stars)

Young adult novel set during the Bronze Age. Two teenage boys leave their homes, and find different adventures; both growing up along the way. There’s plenty of action, and a bit of romance thrown in as well. I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed it considering the YA genre isn’t usually my thing. Once I started it though I found it hard to put down and zipped through it in a few hours (it’s very short). I would recommend for fans of historical fiction, or readers of YA fiction.

(4/5 Stars)

Incredibly entertaining, and a very quick read. Action scenes are spectacular, historical detail spot-on, and characters interesting. This work is as pure an example of fairy-tale as there is; it teaches without being moralistic, is about juveniles but is never sophomoric. Because the four protagonists must deal with adult issues–how to “leave the nest” and become autonomous, how to negotiate corruption without losing purity, how, in short, to be both child and adult simultaneously–Son of the Great River is perfect for the young-adult who, by virtue of that transitional state, is struggling (without necessarily knowing it) to integrate multiple, oftentimes conflicting selves. Some of the characters succeed, some don’t. According to Meeks not all of us make it. But because of the familiarity of the characters, any modern young adult who reads will have no trouble recognizing him or her self in one of the protagonists, and so be able to relate. The illustrations by Hajra Meeks are subtle and beautifully sketched, providing template for young readers and their imaginations without imposing scenario or how characters are supposed to be seen. A fantastic, must-read book for all, most especially for boys who claim they hate reading.

(5/5 Stars)

Slow to start, and full of mystery but a nice and slow way to pass time, just like the mountains and the river.
Not for those who like conflict through and through.
But the ending (especially the last twenty pages) really came alive and every new page seemed to offer something different.

(3/5 Stars)

This last one was actually one of my favorites, even though it was the lowest rating numerically.  It’s one of the vicissitudes of grading that we begin to expect grade inflation, but a first time author should be happy to receive 3/5 stars by an impartial reviewer, and the meat of the review is quite positive.  Now, go out and buy a copy so I’ll have something to quote the next time I do this!

I got to put on my Author Hat and meet with a bunch of 4th, 5th and 6th-graders and discuss the process of writing, the story in Son of the Great River, and numerous other topics, not least of which was Edward Cullen and Stephanie Meyer.  When I was told that Son of the Great River was best suited for intermediate audiences, I blanched at the prospect, because I thought it meant the book was overly simplistic.  After visiting a class full of small, precocious people, and the brave souls who teach them, I realized that I couldn’t think of better company.  I think if we play our cards right, these kids might end up saving the world (Unlike their facebook and twitter-addled older siblings that I teach at university).

It’s remarkable how young people resemble and diverge from their cynical, gimmicky elders.  There’s such a sharpened idealism and awareness that you feel the weight of responsibility on you with every topic you address, so I took full advantage of it.  I spoke about my book, of course, but just like any audience, they didn’t just want to buy a book, but also an author, and I was happy to play that role, too.  I got to explain in gory detail how the editing process works (With pantomimed slaps and imaginary editors shaking their heads in disdain for my over-exuberant comma use) and why my earlier books weren’t published (“Because they weren’t any good.” a 5th-grader said under his breath, to which I smiled and pointed and exclaimed “Exactly!” and after that simple act, he watched me with rapt attention) but also how they’d be growing up in a completely different world of content delivery.  Now, I didn’t use those words, instead I talked about the Espresso Book Machine and amateur actors, directors and cartoonists using YouTube to build their audiences.  And they’re not just content creators but fans, critics and reviewers, like Grady Harp, whose voices can outweigh their local paper or television station.

It was amazingly fun, enlightening and, as if that wasn’t enough, I got to check my mail later and receive dozens of notes like these:

Dear Mr. Meeks, thank you for coming.  I thought your speech was really good.  You have inspired me to make my own story.  And I would be glad to read yours.

Sincerely, Nova

Dear Mr. Meeks,

Thank you for coming to our classroom. You inspired me to write a book of my own. I am not going to put pictures in it though. When I am done with it I am going to make copies of it and give it to my friends and family. When I go to my father’s house I am going to go online and go to your site. Tell your wife she draws very well. And I think it would be cool if she could come and talk about art.                                                                                                                                                                                    From, Gage

Dear Mr. Meeks,

My class and I loved hearing about your book you wrote and about publishing. It made makes me really want to write a book! We would all love to have your wife come and show us her art. I can’t wait to read your book!! Thank you for coming!

From, Lydia

Thanks for introducing your book!

Over the summer I hope to make a short film about your book. I would also like to draw some pictures to. I truly hope to read your book.

Elinor

Suffice to say, I’m bringing Hajra the next time, and I could care less if I ever sell another copy of Son of the Great River as long as I can have an effect like that.

I keep meaning to write something about poor Jared Diamond’s woes and the shadenfreude that the entire discipline of anthropology is currently feeling.  Other topics that should have already been thrown into the giant hopper but haven’t:

I’ve started racking up good reviews for Son of the Great River, including librarians and middle-schoolers.  I doubt I’ll be quitting my day job any time soon, but it’s nice to know that it wasn’t terrible.  Interestingly, when you speak to modern 4th-6th graders these days, it does restore a bit of your confidence in humanity.  If you think this blog is a rambling, off-topic bit of lunacy, you should see me linking deforestation to video games to YouTube to writing (And while you may not follow along with all the connections, I assure you they’re very brightly lit for 4th graders).  Web 3.0 is the 4th Grade and I’m glad to be a part of it.

I need to review books like I promised.  There’s a particularly rivetting review of Civic Agriculture that only exists in my head (And, as an environmental historian, I should be making some comment about Nature-Society interactions–can you believe I said nothing about the situation in Punjab??).  Confound the bonds of customary target audience hucksterism, I will review books at random times, especially when they have nothing to do with my PhD.

Art and Social Computing.  I want to join DeviantArt and show off my unit icons for Bughunter and my obscure flash games, but the wife won’t let me on account of it diluting her brand.

Then there’s all the review’s trickling in of Lih’s book on Wikipedia.  It sounds terribly superficial, I can’t wait…

But, really, I’m in the middle of trying to churn out dissertation- and conference-think, so the only bit of thoughtfulness I can give is a quote from someone else about digital map-based geographic locationally spatial media:

The rapid developments occurring at the intersection of geographic computing and web-based information technology cannot be identified with any single label, nor are they effectively described by any single body of academic literature. A variety of terms are in use for one or another aspect of this domain, including “web mapping”, “neogeography”, “social cartography”, “the geoweb”, “webGIS” and “volunteered geographic information”.

Now if you don’t mind, I need to call some 4th graders and find out about this Semantic Web thing.

Jurgen Appelo just bodychecked Web 2.0.

I should just repost the whole thing, but I’ll pick and choose the very best parts.  Everyone should simply go over there and read it.

Have you noticed that, with the exception of infants, rodents and blind people, the whole world has picked up the hobby of digital photography?

As an aside, Hajra is on DeviantArt, and a non-scientific but long survey backs up Jurgen’s claims.

It’s very different for software developers. Programmers are like novelists, movie directors, and traditional painters. The barrier to entry is high because the work is hard, complicated, and requires craftsmanship. Nobody among my friends is silly enough to “give programming a try”. It’s much easier for them to take pictures, write poems, or to empty a trash bin on the floor and call it modern art.

The only issue I’d take with this excellent, acerbic posting is that I “give programming a try” all the time.  I did it back with XConq (C++ and whatever loonie scripting language it used), Bughunter (PHP), the Song Digital Gazeteer (SQL) and, lately, with Flash (Here’s yet another example that I won’t even explain).  I think that barriers to entry have always defined the peer-produced media process, and while I agree that universal access to digital cameras reduces the novelty of photographs, it also allows for some pretty low-cost profile modeling.  With the growth of beautiful vector graphics packages–And by that I mean Inkscape–which will finally provide low-barrier Turing complete functionality to the masses, as well as more and more intuitive (Though resource-hungry*) programming languages I think software development will  steadily fall into the Poetry and Modern Art realm, and that should be a generally good thing.  Except for those guys who still know Machine Language and insist we never needed to develop anything after COBOL.  For them, it’ll suck, and they’ll probably take up residence next to the candlemakers and the film developers and complain about how today’s code doesn’t have that hand-crafted feel to it.

*But who cares?  I’ve got processes to burn!!

How interesting…  Infosthetics just pointed out Google’s new toy, an entry in the realm of visualized search.  I just stumbled on FaceSaerch which promises a different kind of visual search experience.  I wonder how long it will be before we have a search engine that doesn’t require any text whatsoever…

It’s always of concern when a journal article opens with a vague statement.  So when What does Google Earth mean for the Social Sciences? opens a claim that cave painting can be equated to maps, then one has to wonder about the explantory power of the word “map”.  Is it a representation of geography, of ecology, of political boundary?  I’ve never seen a cave painting that could be classified as a map, unless we’re going to so broaden the definition in both symbolic and analytical ways so that we might as well include any image of any thing.  I realize it’s a throwaway intro remark, but the lack of specificity is worrisome.  The article points out that hierarchically invested geographies have theoretical consistency in urban, political and environmental fields, and then goes on to describe Google Earth.  But when it comes to Google Earth, all I can focus on is the simplicity of the tool itself, which seems to enforce a methodological simplicity on its users.  Sure, you can build kmls till the cows come home, but the “lack of analytical functionality in Google Earth” means one can do little more than display data.

The difference between discrete objects and continuous fields underlies Google Earth’s orientation toward an audience interested in looking at a map that is a static spatial reference point for various phenomena to be placed upon.  The map exists, as a classic map, underneath the data, and is considered an external, agreed-upon norm for the purpose of discussing the really interesting subjects, which exist on top of the map.  Whereas in GIS the raster or continuous field data is as easy to manipulate and analyze as the point and polygon data, in Google Earth it is the points and polygons where any manipulation will occur.  Doesn’t sound so bad, really, until we start to think beyond the surface of the Earth being simply topographical.  Land use change, environmental change and all those transportation and urban networks represented by Google Earth have an effect on what is presented as static data.  Deforestation areas, available as polygons, or sites of past flood levels, available as points, in reality overlap these and raster data areas, either periodically or permanently, and Google Earth reinforces a worldview wherein this is not the case.  You’re using a static tool consisting of overlays to represent an acknowledged dynamic socio-political/socio-environmental object whose various (arbitrarily mediated) fields are in constant interaction and do not sit neatly upon one another, without mixing (Are there miscegeny laws against the interaction of different data from different disciplines, did nobody tell me?).

This doesn’t mean Google Earth is trash, of course.  You can still examine the horizontal and vertical spatial relationships of point and polygon data.  And you can see how census laws get circumvented by certain coastal California cities.  But, ultimately, and as with most consumer products, its assumptions reinforce an ontology that may hinder knowledge generation by unnecessarily limiting the scope of questions asked or relationships examined.  Maybe that’s why the current crop of spatially-informed peer projects is so, well, bad.  Wikimapia seems little more than an application waiting for a meme bomb; there’s still no Wikimaps or Wikiatlas (and why would you even propose a Wikiteer when Wikipedia already contains its wealth of geo-referenced information in gazetteer format?).  I’m sure I’ve mentioned that Hypercities is terrible, but it bears repeating.  Open Street Map seems to have the community support, but rather pedestrian (if you’ll pardon the pun) aims.  I realize not everyone has the time or inclination to pick up a copy of ArcGIS and start creating hillshades, but isn’t there a middle ground in the manipulation and collection of spatial data between the superficial and the highly technical?

What we need is a serious, peer-collaborative, spatially-oriented agent-based model.  It’s not as crazy as you think.  First off, people are familiar with modeling, they just don’t realize it.  People just call them games, especially the sandbox games.  Given a space to play in and describe the interactive, dynamic processes that define our existence, I think we’d do wonders for improving general human knowledge (Which can’t be bad).

It should start small, with established principles, by creating a commons-based model of the Earth’s environmental systems.  Scientists have been building these for years, and creating a scaled-down (But not dumbed down) visually rich version that anyone can play with (And, more importantly, contribute to, which would require a MediaWiki version of some scripting system to design the logic for your particular actor or process) and then slowly integrate geologic processes (Imagine a world where every child has access to an animated explanation of the formation of the Andes), economic processes, migration, political change, you name it.  Since I already described Web 3.0 as the Hybrid World, I’m going to call the commons-based peer collaborative agent-based modeling Web 4.0, or maybe Web4 or Web4D or Axxiles.  No, if it has to be a Greek, it should be Antikythera.  The hardest part is getting the name right, after that everything else should simply fall into place.

Just to update, because you should never write anything about spatial matters without first looking at Very Spatial and Vector One, take a look at this procedurally-generated city and tell me we can’t build a beautiful model of world systems and processes with a low barrier to entry.

Michelle Obama just gave an excellent speech this afternoon, calling upon the latest crop of graduates to remember that they were lucky, and it is the responsibility of the fortunate to look out for the unfortunate.  So, naturally, like all of you, I thought it was apropos to talk about WordPress and “people” in Guy Fawkes masks.  Oh yes, it’s that tangled a web of flimsy connections, so let’s see if I can unravel it.

So it may seem strange that in listening to the speech I thought about folks looking like goofy late 16th century terrorists from a terribly dull graphic novel, but let’s review a recent statement from the WordPress Dev Blog:

WordPress is an open source project, successful because of the community that both develops and uses it. At the same time, some people find it difficult to become involved in the project, and are unsure of how to engage with the core team and community at large. The channels listed above can be overwhleming to someone just joining the community, and/or frustrating to longtime community members who feel like they used to have more influence. We need to fix this. The WordPress project needs to be welcoming, easy to navigate as a contributor, and provide useful feedback to help grow the expertise of its community members.

And compare that to the First Lady’s statements, putatively directed toward the non-digital world (Putative since there is, I would argue, a pure digital world but I doubt you can find a place on Earth anymore that doesn’t have some connectedness to the connected world) but directed toward that open-source, peer-collaborated project known as “life”:

So, whenever you get ready to give up, think about all of these people and remember that you are blessed. Remember that you are blessed. Remember that in exchange for those blessings, you must give something back. You must reach back and pull someone up. You must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future.

As advocate and activist Marian Wright Edelman says, “Service is the rent we pay for living…it is the true measure, the only measure of our success.”

Maybe the 100º heat addled my brain, but it reminds me of a particular identity crisis that a certain cat-and-anime obsessed web-site went through a little while back.  Reports of the Anonymous anti-Scientology protests stressed their real life nature, in contradiction to the pure digital social power that members of sites such as 4chan and Something Awful represent.  It’s an interesting orthodoxy that develops in these communities–whether it’s in the creation of open source software, peer-production of knowledge, or photoshopped sharks about to ironically eat various persons–and it’s the same orthodoxy of which Michelle Obama was reminding the students of UC Merced:  You didn’t just get your degree because of your hard work, you got it because you were lucky enough to get the opportunity and because the system wasn’t closing its doors to you.  WordPress found itself with a bunch of stuck and locked doors, Wikipedia finds itself with similar problems, 4chan found itself with a whole new wing of the house being built, complete with all new doors that led to places they weren’t sure they wanted to go.

So what does it mean?  I think this is Web 3.0–the Hybrid World–where the pure digital begins to do more than reproduce itself physio-socially in the form of T-Shirts but instead rebounds upon sociological and historical knowledge creating the Community Activist who worries not about access for the poor to a college education but access for the intimidated to the dev-channel of WordPress, or for newbie Wikipedia contributors to be treated as well as 10,000 edit veterans.  And the reverse, already more prevalent, the savvy use of the digital not as a gimmick or addendum but as a true asymmetrical ruleshift.  While everyone’s desperately anticipating RFDwhatever and the end of silos (like the web is really siloed to any meaningful degree–isn’t that just a bit too much hyperbole–I mean, I’m sure you could claim the data doesn’t have any way of interacting, but you’d have to posit the nonexistence of people, in which case I’m glad the World Wide Internets are not, for one, ready to welcome our AI overlords) or really-we-swear-the-Semantic-Web-is-almost-here optimism, there’s a growing permeability between the concept of on-line community and traditional community, and if you think it’s old news than I’d say you’re mistaking the extrinsic for the intrinsic.  There are a lot of orthodoxies on the digital side that will need to be thrown down before it’s complete (Ironically typified by a guy who injected himself into the real but insists that there’s a “firewall in between” real life and internet life).

Two states, grown in isolation, merge slowly and with pain, and with orthodoxy fighting from both sides.  But unification (Re-unification, really, it’s just that our life-in-letters was temporarily replaced with our “Internet Life” and we all pretended that it was a real distinction and not compartmentalization grown ossified) or synthesis, if you prefer the dialectic, is where this is all going.  Cross-pollination continues and I expect to see both creepy and beautiful, fertile hybrids as a result–as well as some useful, but stiff-minded mules.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a presentation on digital history as part of the big commencement celebration coinciding with the visit by first lady Michelle Obama. Along with giving me an opportunity to talk about the importance of using digital tools in the study of the humanities and integrating environmental systems into historical systems, it gives me the chance to show off some majestic cattle.

UC Merced students often complain about the cows, which is a shame, given the respect our ancestors gave to the animals.

Just finished reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s article in the excellent Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change.  Wallerstein is the founder of World Systems Theory, which focuses on the processual links between societies as an explanation of historical events, though the theory has grown far beyond Wallerstein’s capitalism-oriented, modernity-constrained initial description.  Without getting too arcane, there’s a movement in the academy toward integrating environmental systems into the study of history, and to do so you need to systemitize history to make it feasible.  But Wallerstein’s essay–the final one in the book–doesn’t focus on understanding extractivist culture or divining proxies for deforestation, but rather on the collapse of the modern world.

Pretty heady stuff.  According to Wallerstein, the systemic failure of the current system is already a given, and it’s only a question of whether the enlightened aristocracy of Davos ends up controlling the next great system or the Wikipedia-like, distributed (and chaotic) peers typified by the World Social Forum.  For those of you, like me, who are unfamiliar with the WSF, their meetings sound like the equivalent of a real-world Wikipedia:

Other people that were not coming from Latin America were unconsciously excluded from the forum, as there were no interpreters at the forum at all, and it was very difficult for people who were coming from outside Latin America to follow speeches or activities that were taking place in the forum from day one of the forum. It was made clear that it was not the responsibility of the organizers to organize interpreters for people, it was people’s responsibility to organize their own interpreters and it was very difficult for us to get that as there was no prior arrangements made. This was a pity. In our struggles in South Africa we have many different languages but our movements always take responsibility for organizing translation – especially for visitors. Of course the NGOs in South Africa want to do everything in English but not the movements.

Of note is the growing importance of academics and Non-Governmental Organizations in the ranks of the WSF, which runs afoul of an anti-expert bias like that typically associated with Wikipedia (And philosophical Daoism, but that’s way off topic).  Contrast this with the expert-driven and much swankier World Economic Forum and you start to see an almost uncanny resemblance between the state of these two groups and the state of the university and the growing connected-world knowledge bases.  The World Economic Forum is about to be underway, and it’ll even include celebrity Twitter interviews as well as a host of externally accredited experts, thereby limiting the number of participants to a modest two and half thousand, versus the tens of thousands who show up for the WSF.

Wallerstein posits these two organizations as emblematic of the two paths toward the “Next System” (Some kind of post-capitalist/post-Marxist future means of economic organization) and wonders, as I did in my last post, how the current instability will play out.  It is interesting to note that there is some kind of dichotomous self-organization occuring across various realms, with a peer-collaboration expression on the one side (WSF is criticized, like Wikipedia, as being Communist at its core) and an expert-oriented version acting like a Zoroastrian neccessary-opposite.  Strangely enough, these various evil dopplegangers seem to be unaware of their placement within a putative Pantheon of Global Social Conflict:

Wikipedia, Open Source Software, World Social Forum

vs.

Academia, Proprietary Software, World Economic Forum

Since I can’t think of a simple dichotomous relationship to posit Local Community / Global Multinational without expanding on whether I’m talking about services, products or agriculture, I’ll leave it out.  I realize there’s no strict alignment between these forces, and that you have academics supporting Wikipedia and Apache being used by major corporations, but there’s already a growing sense that the local organic farmer (or bookshop owner) should be using Linux and supporting Wikipedia and taking part in the WSF.  Not sure how the social networking sites figure into this, they don’t seem to skew or splinter along ideological lines, but that could just be a sign of my own unfamiliarity (and extreme disdain) for them.  What’s extremely strange, at least to me, is that there is a definite dualistic nature to our modern world ideological system, and yet it seems that we’ve fractured into more ideological bantustans than ever before–due in part to the remarkable ability of the Web to break down communication and organization costs and therefore allow for Mao’s thousand-flower continuum.  The bantustans are natural conflict-absorbers, because they make disagreements, like modern art, seem so subjective.  To paraphrase a quote that may or may not have come from Kissinger, you can express vicious disagreement precisely because of the very low stakes.  But this masks a very real, distinct dichotomy of ideology that permeates global culture and which seems to be expressing itself in every new endeavor.

Another interesting point raised at Akahele (The cautious site with the beautiful name) highlights the problem of crowds: the concern for peer-produced data in an environment where some of those peers want to insert malicious, propagandistic or otherwise known-flawed results into a system.  But the problem isn’t limited to peer-produced knowledge, and it seems that El Sevier, the publisher everyone loves to hate, is just as happy to game the system in an entirely expert-driven manner.  The cynical part of me has always argued that the criticisms of Wikipedia result from a naive vision of knowledge production in traditional spheres, and this seems to back it up, but I think it’s more problematic than that.  We seem to be moving into a post-post-modern period where it’s not just the critics who think that meaning and truth are malleable but also the consumers and creators of knowledge.  It’s like 1984 but instead of just Big Brother manipulating the facts, imagine if Winston Smith was also manipulating the facts in his own personal life and on common peer resources.  The journal industry in academia has been oft-criticized as of late, concurrent with the criticism of academia itself, and I think if we’re not careful we’re going to see the El Seviers and Wikipedias of the world meet in the middle, where only the most mundane of facts are agreed upon and, like modern news agencies, anyone will be able to point to their favored experts (or non-expert encyclopedias) to support whatever malicious intention they have.  Doubly worrisome is the effect this must be having on the traditional citizen, who according to Enlightenment theory requires their proper understanding of the world (known as education) to make informed choices in directing the course of their political system.

Nowadays, with ready access to expert and non-expert knowledge that supports every side of every debate, we’re faced with an extremely public social surgery, and all indications are that amputation or leeching will come back in vogue.  Whatever your stance on creationism or globalization or climate change or Islam or Tibetan nationalism, you can now find experts, news outlets, journal articles, &c &c to support you.  This does not seem to be a sustainable system.  But what’s the solution?  Will the backlash be a clamoring for a restoration of aristocratic control or a pulsing anarchy of rival ideologies?  History tends to describe the latter as too unstable to last for long.  I don’t know.