CM Volume 1 Number 6

Volume 1 Number 6

July 21, 1995

Table of Contents

Book Reviews

I Love to Play Hockey.
Dale Klassen, Illustrated by Rhian Brynjolson
Review by Dave Jenkinson
Preschool - Grade 2 / Ages 5 - 7

Everyday Science: Fun and Easy Projects for Making Practical Things.
Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone
Review by Joan Payzant
Grades 3 - 7/ Ages 8 - 12

Silly Science: Strange and Startling Projects to Amaze your Family and Friends.
Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone
Review by Joan Payzant
Grades 3 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.

Why Were All the Werewolves Men?
Richard Stevenson, Illustrated by Gail Mikla
Review by Harriet Zaidman
Grade 3 - 8 / Ages 8 - 14

Article

The Internet and the Future of Organized Knowledge
Part II
``...digital texts, though they maintain some of the basic features of printed books, should not be understood as if they were meant to fulfil the same task. We do not convert printed texts into electronic databases in order to read them better or more comfortably. For this task the book is and will remain unsurpassed."

Article by Luciano Floridi

News

Manitoba Fall Event -- ``Celebrate Manitoba" Children's Author & Illustrator Day

BOOK REVIEW

I Love to Play Hockey.
by Dale Klassen. Illustrated by Rhian Brynjolson.
Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1994. 42pp, paper, $9.95.
ISBN 0-921827-44-X. CIP.

Pre-school - Grade 2 / Ages 5-7.

Review by Dave Jenkinson

In this very simple picture book, two young boys, the un-named narrator and his friend Iain, play street hockey every day after school, and play in the occasional Saturday afternoon pick-up game with older kids at an outdoor rink. The quite straightforward text always appears on the right-hand pages, and is usually just a phrase or a single sentence.

The book has no real plot; instead, the narrator merely describes what he and his friend do as the two of them alternate shooting and playing goal. He also shares his dream of someday playing in the ``big leagues," and Brynjolson includes a dream sequence of illustrations showing the narrator, in Toronto Maple Leaf uniform, scoring on Iain, who is outfitted as a Montreal Canadien.

Though Brynjolson's colour illustrations capture hockey's action, they do not adequately reflect winter's coldness. Consistent with Pemmican's output, only the illustrations reveal that the book's characters are not members of the majority culture.

Recommended as an additional purchase.

Dave Jenkinson teaches courses in children's and YA literature in the Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba.

BOOK REVIEW

Everyday Science: Fun and Easy Projects for Making Practical Things.
Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone
Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995. 96pp, paper, $12.95.
ISBN 0-471-11014-0.

Grades 3 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.

Review by Joan Payzant

excerpt:

``Look around you. Science is everywhere. When you turn on a light, watch television, or answer a phone, you are influenced by science. Everyday things that we take for granted would have seemed like magic to people fifty years ago. Fax machines, laptop computers, and cellular phones are some recent science inventions. Can you imagine how scientific inventions will affect our lives fifty years from now? Will people have silicon chips placed in their bodies to provide medical information to doctors? Will we travel through phone lines instead of using cars or planes? Will you read a book like this one on a computer in your own home?"

Children, parents and teachers will be enthralled with Everyday Science. Although the authors state that ``you should have everything you need to perform the experiments right in your own kitchen," I venture to say that not many homes have iron filings, light emitting diodes, wires with alligator clips on each end, and washing soda all readily at hand. But these items are relatively inexpensive and most parents would willingly provide them to advance the cause of their children's interest in science, not to mention the pure entertainment value of the experiments.

The book is well designed, with an excellent table of contents grouping the experiments into five branches of science: light and optics, heat, earth science, chemistry, electricity and magnetism. Each experiment (illustrated with whimsical line drawings by Ed Shems) follows a set pattern under the following headings: You will need; What to do; What happened; Did you know?

There are some intriguing experiments such as making solar ovens, a desalination plant, a telephone, and shrunken heads (!).

An excellent glossary and an index complete this book which will provide hours of pleasure to both children and adults.

Recommended.

Joan Payzant is retired teacher/librarian in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

BOOK REVIEW

Silly Science: Strange and Startling Projects to Amaze your Family and Friends.
Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone
Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. 96pp, paper, $12.95.
ISBN 0-471-11013-2.

Grades 3 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.

Review by Joan Payzant.

excerpt:

Did You Know?

Fossil dinosaur bones are easily mistaken for rocks. One way to identify the bones is to touch them to your lower lip. The bones will stick to your lip and the rocks will fall off.

The largest meat-eating dinosaur was the Tyrannosaurus rex. This giant was first discovered in 1900 at Hell Creek, Montana. A T.rex could be up to 45 feet (13.7m) long and 20 feet (6m) tall and have a skull 5 1/2 feet (1.7 m) long.

The authors of Silly Science are well qualified to write this entertaining and educational book. Both of Vancouver, Shar Levine is the former owner of Einstein's book and toy store and is the co-author of ``Projects for a Healthy Planet" and ``Einstein's Science Parties." Leslie Johnstone, an elementary school teacher, is an editor of the B.C. teachers' journal, ``Catalyst." Together with illustrator Ed Shems (whose cartoon-like drawings enliven each experiment) they have produced a book that will attract a wide readership, with the added bonus of providing hours of worthwhile activities.

Each experiment illustrates a scientific principle, forming a single chapter in the book. Each of these has the same basic format: a list of what is needed to perform the experiment, what to do, an explanation of what happened, and a ``did you know" section (see excerpt above) that enlarges on the scientific principle. Some of the intriguing chapter titles are: ``Genie in a Bottle," ``Glub," ``Electric Pencil," and ``Fast Money."

Guaranteed to whet a reader's appetite for experimentation. Glossary and index included.

Recommended.

Joan Payzant is a retired teacher/librarian in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

BOOK REVIEW

Why Were All the Werewolves Men?
by Richard Stevenson. Illustrated by Gail Mikla.
Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1994. 99pp, paper, $9.95
1-895449-30-8.

Grade 3 - 8/ Ages 8 - 14

Review by Harriet Zaidman

excerpt:

Yo! My man, homo s.
Come bend me an ear.
I gots me a song, babe,
you gotta hear.

Ain't gonna diss you,
Mister bipedal man.
Doan wanna kiss you
Nor bash you wid de pan.

Monsters have always captured the imagination of children. Vampires, werewoves, the Loch Ness Monster, and others are back in the limelight, partly due to recent movies, and partly due to the curiosity of the latest generation of kids. Death-bed revelations that Nessie was the creation of a gang of college pranksters haven't dampened people's imaginations, and the hunt continues for the ``truth" behind the legends.

Richard Stevenson has fashioned rhyming poems using contemporary forms for children and adolescents in this appealing book, Why Were All the Werewolves Men? Stevenson writes about the ``major monsters" as well as lesser known myths, such as the Cadborosaurus, Baal, the Mkodos of Madagascar, the Hodag, and others. The poems are bouncy, humorous and use words in a fun way that kids love, as in the excerpt above or:

Wherever the Whirling Whoompus moans
You'll see a trail of scattered bones
and measure death in megaohms.

The ``Not Yeti Blues" is set to the turn of ``Heartbreak Hotel" and ``Aliens" is set in diamante form. Stevenson's characterizations and the illustrations are made to appeal to the 90s type of kid, and while a few of the rhymes are a little awkward (hey, it's a difficult subject) the poems flow with a little practice. They will evoke a positive response from children and young adolescents.

This book can be used to augment a poetry collection, but its best use would be a part of a whole language unit on monsters or the supernatural, or as part of a poetry unit. The humour and rhyme in these poems can provide older children and YAs the incentive to let their own imaginations go, and write their own poetry.

Stevenson includes an appendix which explains the history behind each of the monsters he writes about, and reveals the truth about the gender of werewolves. The appendix is written in a friendly style, adding to the book's appeal.

Recommended.

Harriet Zaidman is a Winnipeg teacher/librarian.

ARTICLE

The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge:
Part II of III

by Luciano Floridi
mailto:floridi@vax.ox.ac.uk

[Note: we thank Professor Floridi for kind permission to reprint this material, which is a shortened version of a paper he gave at a UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995. Part I was published in last week's Canadian Materials; the final portion will appear next week.]

Part Two: Ideometry -- A New Way of Knowing

In the previous part of this article, I argued that the Internet can be understood as a stage in the life cycle of the ``Human Encyclopedia." As such, the Internet has already given rise to unprecedented innovations and to new fundamental problems, some of which are especially relevant to the future of scholarship and organized knowledge. In this part, we begin to examine these by developing the concept of ideometry.

The New Nature of Scholarship --

When considering the innovations that the Internet has brought to the field of the production and management of organized knowledge, one might think of the reduction of the time-lag between the production and the utilization of knowledge, the promotion of international cooperation and sharing of information among researchers and scholars, or the possibility of remote teaching online. Yet most such novelties are actually less radical than they seem, since they mainly make easier and quicker what we used to do anyway.

There are other possibilities, however, which do represent a more radical break with the past. For example, the global network is weakening the concept of specialization. The book era, providing a rigidly structured context, invited specialization. Especially the humanities became topic-oriented. The electronic Encyclopedia, on the other hand, promotes inter-disciplinary work, i.e. diatopic approaches. In fact, it's difficult to restrict oneself always to the same limited space when one can navigate so easily to and fro across the disciplinary boundaries.

Now, the most substantial of the radical innovations concerns our ability to acquire ever-more-easily further knowledge about the Encyclopedia itself. Consider once again the intellectual space of organized knowledge. We can distinguish between three different dimensions:What Derivative Data Is --

In the book age, primary data sets were collected and organized in structures which were necessarily rigid and unalterable. The ordering principles behind this organization actually limited the range of primary questions which could meaningfully be asked. For example, if the ordering principle stated that the primary data should be all the poetic texts of any time written in English, the final edition in several volumes of all English poems provided the means to answer properly and easily only a limited range of primary questions, like ``who wrote what when."

Information Technology has transformed all this. It is now possible to query the digital domain and shape it according to principles which are completely different from those whereby the primary data were initially collected and organized. The structure of our particular set of digital data can be modified to fit an infinite number of requirements, and hence provide answers to secondary questions which were not meant to be answered by the original structure. The new patterns that emerge from the application of quantitative and comparative queries may turn out to be meaningful and interesting for reasons that are completely extraneous to the initial ordering principle.

What Ideometry Is --

Ideometry is the study of the significant patterns resulting from a comparative and quantitative analysis of the field of knowledge -- that is, of the clusters of primary data like data banks, textual corpora, or multimedia archives. Derivative data, the third dimension of the Encyclopedia, are the outcome of an ideometric analysis of whatever sector of organized knowledge has been subject to investigation.

An example will clarify the notions of ideometry and derivative data together. In 1994 Chadwick-Healey published a database of English Poetry on CD-ROMs. The structure of this digital collection is thoroughly flexible, and we can reorganize it at will. As a simple example, we might wish to study the presence or absence of the two popular figures -- Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, and Democritus, the laughing philosopher -- through the entire set of documents.

A quick computer survey shows that the joint motif of compassion for human misfortune and derision of human ambitions was very popular between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, as it is in this period that we find most of the poets using the philosophical couple as a literary device. This pattern becomes even more interesting once we notice that during the seventeenth century the two Greek philosophers were portrayed in many Dutch paintings. Through a quantitative and comparative analysis (an ideometric analysis) we have made the encyclopedia speak about itself (supply us with derivative data).

Ideometry and The Internet --

Now, to some extent this too is nothing so very new. Ideometry has been popular in many disciplines since the 1960s. Lexicography, stylometry, prosopography, citation analysis, bibliometric studies, econometrics, and quantitative history have all used forms of ideometric analysis for investigation. But scholars could perform ideometric analysis only on a limited scale and with enormous efforts. The trouble was, quite simply, that Information Technology was not yet up to scholarly expectations and needs. It wasn't that the Humanities were not sufficiently ``scientific" to allow the application of Information Technology tools, but rather that Information Technology was too primitive to be of any real service for the highly sophisticated tasks required by scholarly research.

The radical change brought about by the present age of Information Technology and the Internet is that an ideometric approach is becoming an increasingly easy option for any researcher. It is obvious that primary data need metadata in order to be manageable, so the second dimension of the encyclopedia can never be really separate from the first. Derivative data, however, are not so directly available, and the third dimension emerges only when large amounts of primary data are collected in digital form, are made easily accessible to the user, and can be rapidly queried and thus re-structured via electronic tools. Today all these conditions are being more and more adequately fulfilled by the Internet.

An Electronic Book Is Not A Book! --

Ideometry shows that digital texts, though they maintain some of the basic features of printed books and can therefore be used as surrogates, should not be understood as if they were meant to fulfil the same task. We do not convert printed texts into electronic databases in order to read them better or more comfortably. For this task the book is and will remain unsurpassed.

But we do not spend so much money only to create big electronic indexes either. Rather, we collect and digitize large corpora of texts in order to subject them to comparative and quantitative analysis and extract knowledge they contain only on a macroscopic level. What is revolutionary in an electronic bibliography, for example, is not that I can find a certain book in a few seconds, which is trivial, but that I can ask new questions: I can check when books on the history of Analytic Philosophy started to be written, for example, and discover how their number increased while the movement became more and more scholastic.

Thus, corpora of electronic texts and multimedia sources are the laboratory for ideometric analysis. And (this is where the Internet comes in) the larger and more accessible the domain, the better it will be, for the ideometric value of an extensive corpus is given by the product rather than by the simple arithmetical sum of the ideometric value of each single document. Once simple and economical tools for studying visual and acoustic patterns also become available, ideometric analyses will be extended to the entire domain of the enlarged Encyclopedia.

Thus, electronic collections of data and the Internet have raised the level on which we can deal with our data. But the Internet has also raised severe problems for scholarship; I shall talk about these in the third part of this article.

Reprinted with permission from the electronic journal TidBITS, #282. Email info@tidbits.com for more information.

NEWS

``Celebrate Manitoba"
Children's Author & Illustrator Day

Sunday, September 24, as part of the Manitoba 125 celebrations, the Winnipeg Children's Literature Roundtable, the Winnipeg Public Library, and the Canadian Children's Book Centre are sponsoring an event showcasing Manitoba Children's and Teen authors and illustrators at Balmoral Hall.

Designed to be a fun event, the day will give the public a chance to meet their favourite writers and artists giving individual 1/2 hour presentations. There'll be publisher's tables and the authors and illustrators will also be available for book signings. Jamie Oliveiro will host a wind-up celebration.

Featured Manitoba writers and artists include:

Sunday, September 24, 1995.
2-4 pm, Balmoral Hall
Admission $5.00 for adults; children and teens free.

For more information, contact:

Cheryl Archer
Manitoba Officer, The Canadian Children's Book Centre
130 Oakview Ave.
Winnipeg, MB
R2K 0R8
phone (204) 667-7032
fax (204) 668-1611

Copyright © 1995 the Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

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