a post-literate society

From Cat and Girl. (Click image to enlarge.)

Editors were once the gatekeepers for content; the advent of the internet has made not only gatekeepers but also gates a thing of the past. Will the book's loss of privilege and the rise of the internet result in a post-literate society, or a hyper-literate one? Is the internet another advancement that democratizes literacy, like the printing press and the paperback, or does it signal its demise? What will the editor's role be in the future?

I don't think we've found a more efficient way to exchange information than through text, nor do I think clarity and accuracy are less important now than in the book's heyday. Language is organic and English orthography has always been fluid. In my view, literacy is becoming more, not less, important.

stress dreams

I had an interview today. Last night, I dreamt twice that I had overslept, once that I showed up to find that my interviewer thought it was a date, and once that all my hair fell out.

On the plus side, the interview went well.

Currently reading: Lots of things, including The Road, Second Person Queer, Five Hundred Years of Printing, and The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin (Oxford comma! The horror).

Currently knitting: Braided Riding Jacket, and I also have a secret incredibly late Christmas gift in the works.

the gender genie

I came across this tool today and gave it a few tries. It predicted that Gertrude Stein, Arthur Conan Doyle and I were male based on our writing and that Dan Savage was female. Based on a paper by Shlomo Argamon et al. suggesting that female writers use more pronouns and male writers more noun specifiers, the Gender Genie analyses the functional words in a passage of writing, assigning different weights to different keywords, and makes a prediction about the gender of the writer. The standard effects of socialization and gender performativity come into play here: women tend to compliment, apologize and talk about relationships; men's speech focuses more on objects and events than the speaker's relationship to the listener.

Assumptions are made that sex/gender (the words are used interchangeably in the paper) is natural, non-transgressive and public, and that gender is a binary. The paper is "progressive" insofar as it asserts that women's use of pronouns is a method of conversational control rather than the effect of subordination. Men's speech is discussed throughout the paper as default: women use relational and referential strategies to "personalize" discourse, while men simply relay new information. There are some interesting discussions of specific texts. Non-fiction examples suggest that although men and women both write in the first person, men use passive constructions and general statements to make grammatical person invisible while women more readily assert it.

Please note that the Gender Genie was based on research by Argamon, Koppel and others but not actually created by them. So, is the Genie more than an interesting conversation piece? Is it important to know the author's gender when reading or discussing a text? Is this tool useful for actually predicting a person's gender when it is unknown, or for discussing gender performance in writing when the author's gender is known, or both?

[Note: This post has a female score of 140 and a male score of 607].

the new year

2009 has come to a close and I'm so ready for 2010. Over the past year, some pretty exciting things have happened: In January, I started the last semester of my undergraduate career and in May, I received my BA. I also moved to a new apartment and began a job that could conceivably have been the beginning of a career track. I worked with some amazing kids and a great staff all summer and learned a lot. In September, I started my Master of Publishing program and met some of my future colleagues. We all survived the workload, the only casualty being my job. I knitted my first afghan this year (and a lot of other things, too). I took a yoga class, hiked a mountain or two, canoed for the first time in years, and improved my cooking skills.

The year ahead looks pretty good, too. I'll finish the academic portion of my degree in April and start an internship in May; in December, I'll graduate. I hope to start a new job this year. Some personal goals include being more active and taking some more steps towards being vegan. I want to read more non-fiction. I'll try to become tidier. I want to take at least one trip somewhere I've never been before.

I hope the new year is a good year for all of you!