From:		"James G. Robinson" (james.robinson@nyu.edu)
Sent:	  	Wednesday, January 19, 2005 6:07 pm
To: 		Clay Shirky (clay@shirky.com)
Subject:  	Re: Word on the street is...

Hi Clay, I'm still battling a fever and jetlag but here goes:

"The focus on text-based digital archives to this point has been one of
aggregation, not distribution or dissemination. (Witness Google's race
to archive academic texts, books, etc.) Thus, while millions of words
have been digitized, the technology used to view and interact with those
words has limited users for the most part to a browser interface -- a
elegant yet unsatisfying hack that limits those words' reach, their
living potential in the real world.

In this thesis I hope to explore the problem of the "last mile" as it
pertains to text. Must words still be resigned to the ghetto of the
library, albeit a digital one? Or can technology serve to liberate these
archives so that they can bring meaning as living parts of our daily lives?

This question is not altogether radical. Numbers faced a similar
dillemma before the invention of the pocket digital calculator. They
were the provenance of experts, geniuses, accessible and malleable only
by those who had the magical ability to calculate algebraic sums in
their head. The great ideas embodied in those archives are similarly
magical and inaccessible. I wonder if words can be democratized; if they
can become the coin of everyday life and not just the ivory tower; of
public, not just private spaces."

This is very rough, I know, and leaves out a lot of interesting
tangents. But I think it gives some sense of the field I hope to play in.

Best, James