Slashdot reports this morning that PDF is being submitted as an ISO standard. Of course, PDF is a de facto open standard — I have literally dozens of open source implementations of PDF tools (including such amazing apps as pdftk, without which my life would be meaningless), and none of them would have been possible without the open format.

But having PDF be a de jure standard is very good news, as far as I'm concerned. I love PDF, because my favorite way to create documents is to typeset them lovingly in LaTeX, export to Postscript, and then export to PDF (I have not willingly used a word processor in over ten years).

If PDF is approved as an ISO standard, it will mean that the standards zealots among my circle of friends (yes, these are the kinds of friends I have) might back off and not insist that absolutely everything be in XML.

I'm not knocking XML, mind you. I drank the Kool-Aid on that one years ago. But when it comes to creating beautiful documents for people to read, LaTeX/Postscript/PDF is hard to beat.

This article has been making its way through the text-analysis episteme over the last few days. The article itself is unremarkable (it's just a rundown of President Bush's remarks on energy policy during Tuesday's State of the Union Address). But if you scroll down a bit, you'll see a clever set of balloons showing how frequently various keywords were mentioned. Enter a term in the search box, and you get a more elaborate version.

It's a lovely interface, and it's actually quite interesting to play with. I wonder, though, why this particular technique is so much more interesting with ordinary expository prose (and, in particular, political prose) than it is with, say, literary texts. I've done similar things with various novels and poems, and they always seem to me far less enlightening than one might expect. I will say, though, that the techique does become interesting when you begin to do this with all of, say, Jane Austen's novels. Then things begin to shake out.

Of course, we all know that the authors of political speeches (particularly speeches with as much moment as the State of the Union) pay very close attention to which keywords are used, how often, and when — almost performing a kind of reverse text analysis, which is in turn immediately analyzed with applause meters and so forth. This also seems to me to be one of the few contexts in which the colorized indication of "where" a keyword occurred becomes useful. Past attempts to do this with literary texts have produced nothing other than mildly interesting eye candy.

I hope the New York Times continues doing this sort of thing. In fact, I hope they eventually adopt nora and start making it a normal part of the online reading experience. We shall see.

Ludologists and broad thinking digital humanists will want to check out Matt Kirschenbaum's new blog entitled Zone of Influence.

Matt (among his many other talents) is a gifted explicator of gaming culture, and this one focuses on the old-school hex-and-counter wargames, for which Matt has an enduring passion.

Particularly delightful is Matt's essay I Was a Teenage Grognard, in which he describes his rediscovery of board wargaming several years ago. Touched a chord with me, since I had a very similar experience with Interactive Fiction. Perhaps I need to write, "I Was a Teenage Infocom Fanatic."

It's so strange to revisit this kind of thing after getting a Ph.D. in literary study. But of course, part of me is always on the lookout for a good geeky tangent. And this one is really a lot of fun.

The syllabus for ENGL 8/478: Electronic Texts is now available.

I'll be teaching digital humanities at UNL this semester. Here's the course description:

This course is a broad introduction to the use of computers in humanistic study. We will survey the field of humanities computing from computational analysis of style to meditations on the cultural impact of computing in scholarly research and publishing. We will also study several specific technologies in detail — web technologies, the UNIX operating system, and relational database design — with an eye toward becoming proficient creators of digital scholarship.

As I usually say on the first day of this course, "The bad news is that this course is hard. The good news is that I'm a sweetheart and I'll do just about anything to help you learn the material."

Why is the course hard? Mostly because it demands a style of studying and learning different from that to which most humanities students have become accustomed. The technical portions of the class demand some attention to detail, a willingness to experiment, and a certain calmness in the face of frustration. It does not demand any kind of innate technical acumen or anything of that sort. I have lost track of the number of students who came to college or grad. school in open flight from anything resembling an engineering discipline who discovered in this course that they are exceedingly "good at computers" — including very technical aspects of the subject. Some have even gone on to specialize in digital humanities.

Why is the professor a sweetheart?  Well, mostly because I am a student of the humanities.  And despite all the geek cred, I still believe that digital literary study is more about literary study than digital anything.  I well remember sweating my way through all of this when I started out in the field, and I have a very good handle on where students get tripped up.  I also firmly believe that in our wired world, it's essential that we all gain some control over the technology that increasingly pervades our lives.  It gives me great joy to usher students across the boundary separating users of technology from builders and developers, because with that transformation comes an enormous level of empowerment.  Being able to fix your car when it breaks down is a tremendous skill to have.  Being able to bend computers to your will is even more so, since here we're dealing with information technology — a medium of thought and communication as vital to the transmission of ideas as the ability to use a pen.

I therefore have every intention of raising an army of hacker/scholars at UNL.