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There are some websites that are so interesting and extensive they are known as “black holes” or “time sucks,” because once you get started, you may not be able to escape. Wikipedia is near the top of the list. Even more perilous to your workday than reading is joining Wikipedia as an editor. Before you decide to take that step, you might want to learn something about the culture of Wikipedia editing. The Awl looks at the editing history of one provocative entry:
Since 2001, the Wikipedia entry on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has been edited 2,303 times. It’s a popular entry, too: of approximately 750,000 Wiki articles out there, it ranks at 2,075 in traffic.
In the past ten years, the entry has grown from the four-sentence description, shown above, to the detailed, 6,000-plus-word monolith of today. The two Lolita films now have their own pages, while the entry on the novel has expanded to include sections on such subjects as Lolita’s Russian translation and its literary allusions. An edit is made, on average, about every other day.
Not only is the entry constantly edited, but those edits are discussed among editors. The road to the perfect entry is long and involved, and sometimes resembles sausage making. Link -via Boing Boing
Here’s a law that strikes home here at Neatorama. There have been times when I’ve proofread, edited, and corrected the same thing ten times, but somehow a typo appears in the published version. I blame extraterrestrials. John Bangsund of the Victorian Society of Editors coined the term Muphry’s Law in 2003. It states:
1. if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;
2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
3. the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and
4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent
The law also goes on to state how readers will see these errors instantly. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user Squid Ink)
Novels, movies, cartoons, tattoos… everything is better on the second draft.
1. THE CATCH IN CATCH 22: The Edit that became an idiom
In 1961, author Joseph Heller finally submitted his manuscript for Catch-18 to his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Although Heller had spent seven years perfecting the story, Gottlieb saw room for improvement. The editor taped the pages to his office wall and restructured the novel, giving more emphasis to the now-famous Major Major character and instructing Heller to delete entire 60-page sections. But most importantly, Gottlieb wanted to change the title. Earlier that year, writer Leon Uris had released Mila 18, and Gottlieb didn’t want any confusion between the two books. What followed was an exchange of frantic letters in which Heller and Gottlieb considered and rejected various numbers for the title. They decided 11 didn’t work because of Ocean’s 11; 14 was an “unfunny number;” and 26 just didn’t feel right. “I’ve got it!” Gottlieb blurted out one night in a eureka moment. “It’s Catch-22! It’s funnier than 18.” The edit stuck, and a major, major idiom was born.
2. AN AFFAIR TO FORGET: The Edit that Changed Hemingway’s Life
Hadley and Ernest Hemingway in 1922
The turmoil of Ernest Hemingway’s personal life continued long after his death thanks to the publication of his autobiography, A Moveable Feast. Released in 1964, three years after his suicide, the book was uncharacteristically poignant and sentimental. It even included a tender apology to his first wife, Hadley, whom Hemingway had cheated on with his second wife, Pauline. Yet, for decades, few people knew the apology existed. That’s because it was edited out of the text by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary.
As the author’s literary executor, Mary prepared the work for publication, and she removed the apology out of spite. Mary had always resented Hadley for being the literary giant’s favorite spouse, and Hemingway confirmed that belief in A Moveable Feast when he wrote, “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
Decades later, in 2009, Hemingway’s grandson Sean reinserted the apology into a new edition of the book. But that wasn’t the only serious edit he made. Sean also scrapped passages about his grandmother, Pauline, whom Hemingway blamed for ruining his first marriage. Of course, literary historians were quick to criticize Sean’s selective whitewashing. They claim that while Hemingway may have wanted to cut Pauline out of his life, he never intended to cut her out of his life story.
3. HALL MARKS: The Edit that Resulted in Two Masterpieces
more …
TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.” Redditor theshe works at a newspaper. She commissioned this cross-stitch for her boss, who is always trying to shorten wordy stories. These should be mass-produced for all bloggers to hang over their computers! Link
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A literary-technical tour de force, and the man behind it
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Philip M. Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is likely the most prolific.
Philip M. Parker is also the most wide-ranging of authors. The phrase “shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings” is not the half a percent of it. He has authored some 188 books related to shoes, ten about ships, 219 books about wax, six about sour red cabbage pickles, and six about royal jelly supplements.
To begin somewhere, let’s note that Philip M. Parker is the author of the book The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in the United States. This book is 677 pages long, sells for $495 and is described by the publisher as a “study [that] covers the latent demand outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders across the states and cities of the United States.”
Philip M. Parker titles include the following (this is a hastily chosen few, so they are probably not his most colorful):
Avocados: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide
Webster’s English to Romanian Crossword Puzzles: Level 2
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Golf Bags in India
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan
The 2002 Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Cataract Surgery
The 2007 Report on Wood Toilet Seats: World Market Segmentation by City
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen Asparagus in India
Professor Philip M. Parker, author of more than 300,000 books. Photo courtesy of INSEAD. |
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Philip M. Parker is the INSEAD Chair Professor of Management Science at INSEAD, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France.
Professor Parker is no dilettante. When he turns to a new subject, he seizes and shakes it till several books, or several hundred, emerge. About the outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders, Professor Parker has authored at least six books. There is his The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Japan, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Greater China, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in India, and also The 2007 Report on Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders: World Market Segmentation by City.
Amazon.com offers (on the day I am writing this) 85,761 books authored by Philip M. Parker. Professor Parker himself says the total is well over 200,000.
How is this all possible? How does one man do so much?
Professor Parker created the secret to his own success. He invented a machine that writes books. He says it takes about twenty minutes to write one.
There arises the question, “Why?” The patent (U.S. #7266767), which describes a “method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing” and which Professor Parker wrote in the traditional, pre-Parker, non-computerized way, answers this question.
The answer appears on page 16. Professor Parker quotes a 1999 complaint by the magazine The Economist that publishing “has continued essentially unchanged since Gutenberg. Letters are still written, books bound, newspapers mostly printed and distributed much as they ever were.”
“Therefore,” says Professor Parker in this patent document, “there is a need for a method and apparatus for authoring, marketing and/or distributing title materials automatically by a computer.” He explains that “Further, there is a need for an automated system that eliminates or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labor, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel.”
We asked Professor Parker how he manages this Herculean output. He replied:
I started back in 1992 with the idea. Had a lot of failures, then succeeded in 2000 when I filed the patent. I have amassed huge linguistics databases (I am an avid dictionary collector, since I was 18), and have a background in mathematics, and computer programming, so I have approached this from a management science perspective. Everything is organized by genre, and within genre by topic, and within topic by sub-topic, etc., for all languages. It is a matter of organization.
The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book — a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products, or maybe a patient’s guide to medical maladies. Then one hooks the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information or maladies. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.
Professor Parker estimates that it costs him about 23 cents to write a new book, with perhaps not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA or a physician might produce.
Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy, typically via an online automated bookseller. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.
Professor Parker’s patent document includes this schematic overview of the automatic authoring process. |
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Among Professor Parker’s best-selling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.
His fifth-best seller is Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.
No. 6: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Ferrous Metal Waste and Scrap Excluding Waste and Scrap of Cast Iron and Alloy Steel in United Kingdom.
No. 21: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Seaweeds and Other Algae in France.
No. 25: Oculocutaneous Albinism—A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients, and Genome Researchers.
No. 44: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Fresh or Chilled Whole Fish in Lithuania.
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan, mentioned above, is Professor Parker’s 66th-best seller.
This graphic overview shows
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In the 93rd spot comes The 2007 Report on Cat Food: World Market Segmentation by City.
Rounding out the list, at number 100, is The 2007-2012 Outlook for Edible Tallow and Stearin Made in Slaughtering Plants in Greater China.
Professor Parker is also enthusiastic about books authored the old-fashioned way. He has already written three of them.
The books are in a way just the beginning. Professor Parker also plans to use the same method to produce video programs—thousands upon thousands of them—and video games. He tells us:
If I am lucky, this will allow the creation of content (educational material, books, software, etc.) for languages (or for subject areas) that simply do not have enough speakers, or economies that can support traditional publishing or content creation. For example, in health care, some diseases have fewer than 1,000 people who get the disease worldwide per year. Of those, only 1 or 2 might want a reference book. Using this method, the break even for a book is 1 copy, with no inventory cost (all books are either printed on demand, or distributed via ebook). Some languages have only 100,000 speakers, so no “Hollywood” producer would envisage creating programming to such a narrow audience, etc. This approach allows for this level of production (I am starting with an educational game show, and 3D personal computer games).
This flowchart, part of the patent document, discloses
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For a vivid introduction to Professor Parker and some of his works, see the video he has put online.
For a few more of Professor Parker’s memorable books, see the article “May We Recommend: Parker Titles,” elsewhere in this issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Also elsewhere in this issue is “Dr. Parker’s Latent Library and the Death of the Author,” a discussion of the philosophical implications of Professor Parker’s accomplishments.
(Thanks to Peter Carboni for bringing the first toilet brush outlook book to our attention, and to Chris McManus for alerting us to the several hundred medical books.)
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The article above is from the March/April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
GoPro HD – Skimboarding In A Storm! from Patrick Lawler on Vimeo.
High riptide warning, watercraft advisory, flash floods, tons and tons of rain, extreme danger! These are all words that David doesn’t really pay attention to…
In Patrick Lawler’s video, aside from the fun attempts at skimboarding some decidedly unskimmable water with mixed results, there’s a scene at 1:08 where the camera’s monopod (which was crafted from a broom handle) does something amazing, and I can’t quite figure out how they did it, but it rocks.
Here is quite an amazing and beautifully rendered video shot in Tokyo by Samuel Cockedey.
Shot over the span of a year with Canon DSLRs (mostly 350d), processed with Lightroom (raw files color adjustment and resizing)/VirtualDub (deshaker/deflicker filters)/Sony Vegas (editing). Original rendered in 1080p.
Also, check out some of his other work on his website which are also just as fascinating as this. As well, I highly suggest you check the video out in HD.
Link – Samuel Cockedey’s Website
TGIF!
Even though this is an ad for the ADG Conference the underlying message is very neat. To be a freak maybe different but then again we are all different so does this make us all freaks in the end?
What Lasse Gjertsen did for beatboxing is what this YouTube user named MysteryGuitarMan did for guitar tabs.
The video clip is difficult to describe – but you’ll agree that it’s cool as soon as you see it. I’ll leave you with this quote from the maker, as you watch the video in awe:
“Over 1000 cuts. 6 hours of guitar tabbing. 1 hour of shooting. God knows how much editing. I know. I was bored.”
– via uniquedaily
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Jake.
Montage-maker Paul Proulx’s work has been featured on Neatorama before, but I just couldn’t resist myself again: Proulx has recently put together a 2-minute clip that features moments from his 100 favorite films. At first I didn’t feel like this clip was particularly creative but as I watched it more, I realized that aside from the juxtaposition of similar beats/events/lines here, there’s a rhythm to the way these moments are edited together…and I like it. What do you think?
Also, can you name all the films?
