As a newly minted and fanatical follower of Eurovision, I greatly enjoyed Anthony Lane’s piece on the contest (“Only Mr. God Knows Why,” June 28th). My only disappointment is that Lane did not mention what has arguably become the most widely beloved phenomenon of Eurovision 2010. The saxophonist from Moldova known as Epic Sax Guy entranced millions with his white Wayfarers, thrusting hips, and muscle vest. Epic Sax Guy has claimed the hearts (and perhaps the minds) of new Eurovisionistas everywhere. He is Eurovision in precipitate form, with all else boiled away until nothing is left but hips and kitsch. Long after we are dead in the ground, Epic Sax Guy’s hips and horn will be thrusting throughout the digital Zeitgeist.

For those of you who’ve missed it:

The article is now up (and reproduced below the fold). Furthermore, I have a special announcement:

Today, I’m launched the Mapping Banned Books project. As you can read below, the project intends to create a grassroots, ground-up documentation of all the book bans and challenges that go on in the U.S. today. The website is still under heavy development – I’m rolling this out very quickly – but please, check it out, contribute what you can, and help us along the way. I’ll have more in the next few days.

The Brazilian state capital of Fortaleza sits snug along the northeast coast of the enormous South American nation. Its thrumming metropolitan area is home to more than 3.4 million people, and as with any city of its size, its bustling culture, cuisine, and commerce are darkened by crime.

 

In most places, residents learn about crime from police blotters, meaning they rely on a complex information chain of citizens, police, journalists to tell them about their world. And even if all those links in the information chain hold true, there’s still the problem of internalizing raw data on the pages of a newspaper and transposing it into the context of the physical world.

 

In Fortaleza, however, citizens have a choice. And that’s because a few years ago the Brazilian professor Vasco Furtado launched WikiCrimes. On the WikiCrimes Google Map, individuals can drop a pushpin near where a crime occurred and annotate it with a description of the circumstances – when, where, and how it occurred.

 

In other words, WikiCrimes does two things. First, it makes the invisible visible: it takes the data floating like jellyfish through the milieu and connects them to concrete places and times, making it easy to visualize trends and clusters out of previously abstract information. Second, it collects hitherto disaggregated information, revealing new patterns in the mental mosaic. It digests raw knowledge and turns it into useful information.

 

In August 2009, a friend of mine named Alita Edelman – about to begin her senior year at Smith College – spent a month volunteering at theAmerican Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFFE). ABFFE is a tiny organization that operates within the long shadow of theAmerican Library Association (ALA). Her job was to organize data on banned and challenged books across America. The ALA compiles these records, and every year releases a long list of what books were reported challenged where, by whom, and why.

 

The list is fascinating. It provides an incredible window into the psyche of those who challenge books in public libraries (according to ABFFE, one sex education book targeted at girls was challenged in Texas for being “happily nonphallocentric”).

But what it doesn’t do is provide a environment within the data can be understood and contextualized. It doesn’t allow for the abstract data (title, reason, result) to be attached to concrete touchstones like time and place. It doesn’t, in short, do for books what WikiCrimes does for crimes.

 

So I created a Google Map for Banned Books. I issued a strident call on my blog for contributors. My dream was that librarians everywhere – from the New York Public Library to Podunk Public – would begin placing pushpins every time a parent held a copy of Harry Potter in front of their face, demanding that this instructional manual for witchcraft and wizardry be burned like its practitioners. Of course, that didn’t happen, because I’m just some guy on the Internet, and not a media mogul with millions of eager readers with too much time on their hands. Instead, Alita and I began the arduous task of translating the hundreds of ALA records onto the map.

 

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2009 in a larger map

 

The pattern that emerged was as striking as it was surprising. One commentator on Huffington Post wrote that “[s]tick a pin in each place where there’s been a challenge to a school or library book, and you’ll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut.” And she was correct: contrary to expectations, the challenges and bans were spread across the nation, appearing to cluster not by political or religious affiliation, but rather by simple population density. “And Tango Makes Three” – a true story about two gay penguins at a New York zoo who adopted an egg – was the most frequently challenged book in America in 2008, raising the ire of parents in Virginia and California.

 

Is this map perfect? Not even close. I don’t actually like it very much. The model is all wrong. These data, which tell us so much about who we are as a people, and to what extent we believe in deliberative democracy, are too precious and fragile to pass through so many filters and failure points. I’m willing to bet that for every challenge reported to the ALA, a dozen more go unrecorded. There are holes in our mosaic. It’s a Magic Eye: the patterns are there, but distorted, visible only if you squint, and then only if you’re lucky.

 

So what can we do?

 

We can start by spreading the word to librarians and civil libertarians across the country. Before the ink is dry on an official challenge form, bibliophiles should be dropping pushpins onto a massive map, so that we can detect patterns in censorial sentiments as they arise.

 

We need to reverse the communications model that built this map. We shouldn’t be getting these data from the ALA: the ALA should be getting these data from us. Someone from Los Alamos shouldn’t have to go through Chicago to find out if a book was banned in Albuquerque. It’s time for we who favor free speech to converse amongst themselves, networking our knowledge of censorship like we’ve networked our computers and phones. I want a WikiCrimes for book bandits, documenting dangerous assaults against the free flow of information and ideas.

 

So today, we’re launching the Mapping Banned Books Project We’ve created a new Google Map, one which is totally open to anyone to edit from the comfort of their local library and will rely upon concerned and active individuals to provide the critical data. The idea goes something like this: when a book is challenged at your local library, you get a copy of the formal documentation, scan it, and upload it. Then you drop a pushpin on the location of your library and provide a report of the book challenge, the reasons why it was challenged, and link to the documentation for verification. As more and more people begin to use the map, we’ll see more and more data, visualize new patterns, and learn new, wonderful, and terrifying things about the world around us.

 

It won’t be easy. The site is still under development, and we’re all busy people with too many things to do and not enough time. We’re going to have to get word out to all the people in big cities and rural towns who might be able to contribute to the cause. Such a massive undertaking won’t be easy, but here’s the good news: it’s easier than it’s ever been before, and we owe it to ourselves to give it an honest try.

 

 

Chris Peterson is an Associate at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. You can find his blog at http://www.cpeterson.org/

 

 

I contacted their letters editor, who today ran an edited version of my rebuttal bookended by a lengthier piece from the President of the ALA. Because their letters page is impermanent, I’m posting the full thing here below the fold.

Mitchell Muncy’s critique of the American Library Association (ALA) and its Banned Books Week misrepresented many facts. It is neither my duty nor my desire to defend the ALA. However, I would like to make a brief point about the “online censorship” map he mischaracterized.

I created the map that was the focus of Mr. Muncy’s anger. I have no affiliation to the ALA, and took my marching orders from no Manifesto, real or imagined.

Instead, I wanted to see which books were banned or challenged where, by whom, and for what reasons. I thought it would be interesting to visualize these reports rather than merely reading them, and was curious about what sort of patterns might arise from the chaos of data.

I created a free Google Map and began adding reports. Some of these were completed based on ALA records – but only because no one else compiles them. True, my map was prominently featured on the Banned Books Week website – but on countless others as well, since Google allows anyone to copy and paste its code without my endorsement or control.

Mr. Muncy and I disagree on many things. He seems to think that censorship can never come from private individuals, forgetting the populist conflagrations of Savonarola and the Philadelphia Nativist Riots. He argues that Banned Books Week could be “prior restraint”, a claim which lacks both legal and logical coherence: characterizing an attempt to raise awareness about censorship as censorship requires an incredible infidelity to reason.

Though these are issues about which reasonable people can disagree, one fact is inarguable. The map which moved Mr. Muncy to such profound distress was not some calculated attempt to mislead or misapprehend the American people by a scheming and secretive cabal of librarians. It was, instead, an attempt by a private citizen to facilitate the free flow of information, in the hope that individuals might access it and make decisions for themselves. And though the ideals of intellectual freedom may escape Mr. Muncy, I trust these are values that Americans everywhere – including readers of the Journal - value and understand.

I am, of course, devastated that the WSJ doesn’t think too highly of it. But I suppose you can’t please everyone.

If you want to celebrate Banned Books Week in style, please feel free to check out the eponymous website and, as IO9 advocates, do your part by filling your head with subversive filth today!

The question at issue was whether or not Twitter is a “revolution in communication.” And, as was to be expected from an Oxfordian debate, the resulting conversation consisted mainly in a shifting of the goalposts, with the sides continually redefining “revolution” to suit their purposes.

My position, as it was then, is still this: not yet.

For the record, the definition of revolution I adopted is the one promulgated by Clay Shirky last year when he said:

…the new things that are happening are breaking parts of society that had actually been incredibly stable over a period of in some cases hundreds of years. And that is really the mark of a revolution. It’s not just that some additional capabilities come into a society. It’s really that the capabilities of the new tool cannot be contained by society’s current institutions.

And, again for the record, I think Clay would disagree with me that Twitter is not a revolution, at least based on his extraordinary TED Talk on the subject. And he may be right. Our debate was held before Iran, and Iran changed a lot about how people thought and talked about Twitter in the popular consciousness.

The reason I thought – and still think – the answer is “not yet” is not because I don’t think Twitter is changing the content of our discourse, or the players, or its effects on society. The difference, I think, is that the emergent architecture of communication – in less airy terms, who talks to whom – aren’t revolutionary structurally.

I admit that Twitter is not my area of expertise, and I’ll happily defer to the experts on the subject. But all the data I’ve seen suggest this: a lot of people tweet a lot, and they are listened to by a lot of people, and there is a lot of parroting (retweeting) of those at the top, but not a lot of lateral discussion. The communicative hierarchies that empower certain individuals (and viewpoints) and disempower others in, say, television are still there in Twitter, it’s just sometimes different people doing the talking. This might mean the content or viewpoint of the discussion changes, but the structural nature of the communication doesn’t.

Maybe I’m setting the ‘revolutionary’ bar too high. But my sense is that Twitter is more of the same in the Internet context. More information cascades, more homophilous groups, more divergent viewpoints, less deliberative discourse. Twitter might be changing the world, but I’m not sure it changes how we communicate – at least, not for the better.