What seemed like a long long book (though in fact only 450 pages) set in the devastated Confederacy of late 1864, with parallel narrative tracks following a wounded soldier returning from Virginia to his home of Cold Mountain in North Carolina, and the woman he loves who has waited for him. Lots of lush and graphic description of the physical and human geography; not a lot (apart from one political discussion) about the, you know, slaves; and I spotted the shock ending from some way off. I’m sure some people love it but I didn’t really.
Interesting Links for 19-11-2011
- @CarneRoss on the Leaderless Revolution | The Browser
How to change the world.
- Short guide to lazy EU journalism
Brilliant!
- Belfast in 1836
Fascinating account of the city in the early 19th century.
- rozk: Not a subtle poem
On the destruction of the #OWS library. Later reports are that some (but far from all) books were saved.
- Between Kant and Machiavelli: EU foreign policy priorities in the 2010s
This paper was personally recommended to me by a former prime minister today. (PDF)
- John Casimir Ehrnrooth – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Finn who became Prime Minister of Bulgaria.
- NYT: Afghanistan – what the anthropologists say
Three books reviewed, very interesting.
Unexpected encounter with an sf fan
[Locked entry]
I got frustrated waiting for the lift to bring me down to the opening session of the conference, and decided to walk downstairs. On the floor below me I found, waiting for the lift with two bodyguards, the Bulgarian foreign minister; and I rapidly persuaded him to walk down with me (we wrote a paper together in 2000, before his political career began).
What I had not realised is that he is also an sf fan – he complimented me on my bookblogging (which I suppose he follows via Twitter) and said that sf is his main leisure reading.
Maybe there’s a potential panel there for an sf convention, pulling together prominent political figures who are also sf readers (though not necessarily active in fandom)?
November Books 16) The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland
I got this off Bookmooch several years ago, and have now got around to reading it. I was really a bit disappointed. It was published in 1985, and rather shows its age. While there is a lot of useful detail, the system of two to six page essays with (unnumbered and confusingly referenced) notes placed in the middle gutter is not in fact very clearly structured. To get a sense of the full sequence and significance of crucial political developments, your eye has to dart back and forth across the columns. Norman Davies succeeded with the much bolder step of having what are effectively full-page footnotes.
I also found that the material did not scratch my own itches, and did not really live up to the title. This is a history of England, with a fair bit of Scotland and nods towards England and Wales. History began in 45 AD for those parts of the larger island conquered by Rome; it begins in the twelfth century for the rest. There are some honourable exceptions – Patrick Buckland’s piece on twentieth century Ireland is very good; Patrick Wormald (whose ex-sister-in-law worked for me years ago, in a bizarre bit of small-worldiness) brings the Celts into British history a bit ahead of the rest of the programme.
But my jaw really dropped when reading Keith Robbins’ complacent framing essay for the entire twentieth century. On decolonisation, he writes “The French experienced defeat in Indo-China and Algeria and the Dutch in the East Indies, but the British beat a dignified retreat – if we are prepared to overlook Aden and Cyprus… There was no major upheaval in a colony close at hand comparable to Algeria in the case of France”. I am not sure that Palestine or Rhodesia really qualify as ‘dignified retreat’ (one could also query the dignity of the British handovers in Kenya, Burma, and India/Pakistan). And I think there may also have been a British-ruled territory fairly close at hand whose internal upheavals had a certain impact on British politics. I accept that Algeria is very different from Ireland, but I think Robbins is lazy and dishonest not to even hint that there might be similarities.
The book closes with a historical Who’s Who of (I estimate) about 700 individuals, of whom 50-ish are women and 40-ish are Irish. (And none Irishwomen.) I really think this must have been a bit outdated even in 1985.
November Books 15) The Treason of Isengard, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Next in line of the series of books exploring the process by which Tolkien created TLotR. The most interesting point for me was that Frodo and Sam’s path to Mordor, and even back to the Shire, emerged in Tolkien’s thinking much earlier than the story of the others after the death of Boromir. He seems to almost make up the tale of Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn as he goes along, and I must admit it’s not the most satisfying part of the book (and was the most messed around with by Peter Jackson for the film). In the middle of this, however, the Treebeard chapter stands out as a coming together of long-simmering ideas for Tolkien, who was fascinated by trees and forests and had been dropping foreshadowing references to Treebeard into his drafts without really thinking them through.
Tolkien took great care over names. It’s a bit jarring to read “Trotter” instead of “Strider”, “Ingolf” instead of “Aragorn” and “Ondor” instead of “Gondor”, but I think it’s not just familiarity with the final product – the eventually chosen names are genuinely better. There are a very few exceptions – Tolkien was not happy with “Osgiliath”, and I think rightly so, but didn’t find a good alternative. Irish readers find it amusing that one of Treebeard’s fellow elder Ents is named Finglas; this name is there in the very first draft.
I noted with interest that all the early examples of runes – basically Gandalf’s messages left at Bree and scrawled at Weathertop – use the good old-fashioned futhark, rather than what we came to know as the Cirth. The switch was made while composing the inscription on Balin’s tomb in Moria, and implemented consistently after that. The development of the runes shows off Tolkien’s deep knowledge of phonetics; you would expect him to have some familiarity with the subject as a philologist, but clearly it was a profound fascination. (Do you pronounce the ‘o’s differently in ‘Lord’ and ‘Moria’? I don’t, but Tolkien evidently did, going by his first drafts.)
Anyway, much enjoying this reconstruction of how the classic came to be.
Edited to add: amusingly, two people have responded to disagree with me on the vowels in ‘Lord’ and ‘Moria’, one saying that the ‘Moria’ vowel is longer, the other that it is shorter!
Interesting Links for 15-11-2011
- Why can I no longer import posts from my website to my Page’s notes? – Facebook Help Centre
– because Facebook is suicidal.
- Penser la Yougoslavie 20 ans après
Series of events coming up locally.
- Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Eric Idle tells us.
- Three things make a post, double meaning edition
A simple self-help technique.
- nostalgia_lj: Old Who Recs (a meme)
Rec one TV story per Doctor. Not neccesarily your favourites, but ones you think might appeal to newbies.
- some_stars: the nice thing about DW fandom is you never actually leave it
Another set of answers to the same question.
- calapine: Who Stories Recs Meme
And another.
- A Day In The Life – Doctor Who episodes rec meme
And another.
- nostalgia_lj: Anti-recs
Doctor Who stories that you SHOULD NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES start with.
- OccupyNYC – live streaming video powered by Livestream
Zucotti Park under attack by police right now, live on video
Zucotti Park under attack
Police moving in on Occupy Wall Street, live.
November Books 14) Doctor Who: The Prison In Space, by Dick Sharples (ed. Richard Bignell)
This is a beautifully produced edition of one of the most notorious lost Doctor Who stories, a Second Doctor adventure scheduled for Season 6, which had reached the point of casting and costume design before the production team pulled the plug on it. There are a number of other known lost stories out there, many produced by Big Finish in the last couple of years, but I think only two other published scripts, both from the very first season – Anthony Coburn’s “The Masters of Luxor” (a rather dull robot tale) and Moris Farhi’s “Farewell, Great Macedon”, about the death of Alexander the Great (accompanied by a single-episode story about an alien dying for love of Barbara, “The Yellow Arc of Fragrance”), which is much better.
Big Finish did an audio version of “The Prison In Space” a year or so ago, and I noted then that it is an absolutely terrible story, and we are very fortunate that it did not survive to blight the history of Who. The Doctor and pals land on a world (which seems to be a future Earth, though I don’t think this is anywhere stipulated) which is ruled by women; the Doctor and Jamie are imprisoned in the eponymous space prison, but manage to lead a successful revolt which overthrows female rule; Zoe meanwhile has been brainwashed into feminism, but is cured by a vigorous spanking from Jamie. Little more need be said.
Despite the awfulness of the story, fans of the Troughton era will be very well rewarded by getting the book. We get both Sharples’ original outline of the story and his near-final script, which shows some interesting aspects of the production process. We also get some in-depth analysis of how such a dreadful project came so close to being executed, and a review of the script by the former ‘Time Team’ of DWM. On top of that, we get two versions of Brian Hayles’ outline of another lost story, Lords Of The Red Planet (an Ice Warrior story which slightly misfired and which Hayles the replaced with The Seeds of Death), and finally a chronology of what was going on story-wise and cast-wise in the Doctor Who production office between January 1968 and mid-1969, which goes some way to explaining the numerous misfires of Season 6, and indeed makes one glad that things were not in fact worse.
(I’m not sure I can bear to go back to the Big Finish audio, but it seemed to me that the script here was slightly funnier than Simon Guerrier’s adaptation. Maybe it’s just that my appalled reaction to the basic concept has slightly worn off and I can see the humour more clearly.)
Anyway, well done to Richard Bignell and Nothing at the End of the Lane for making a surprisingly silken purse of this pig’s ear.
Interesting Links for 13-11-2011
- Top court overrules German rules for European elections
5% threshold struck down. From @LWvdLaan.
- How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Great piece.
- Documentary focus on unique deviant burial find
Irish vampires!
- Saving Fitzbillies
A Cambridge landmark resurrected.
- The memory of sexist abuse online
“if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
- Alan Turing, by Alan Garner
“He killed himself when an ignorant and uncouth judge gave him the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration; and I was overwhelmed by fury at the salacious, gloating humiliation imposed on my friend, and by a sense of guilt that I did not, could not, help him”
- G1000: Belgium’s Citizens’ Summit
Hugely encouraging experiment, observed by David Farrell.
- The G1000 | Citizens summit for a better democracy
More on the G1000. An excellent idea.
Gibbon Chapter LXVII: The Beginning of the End
In this chapter, the carefully negotiated union of the eastern and western churches does not last, but the pressure on Constantinople is relieved for a few years by the Hungarians, to the north, and Scanderbeg and the Albanians, to the west. We end with Constantine Palæologus on the throne; but not for long. See also my notes on Siberian shamanism, life in India, transliteration, and Albanian geography.
November Books 13) Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe
I’ve had a run of excellent reading over the last week or so, and thoroughly enjoyed Moll Flanders, or to be more precise The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, etc. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Her life is indeed one of “continu’d Variety”, as she lurches from exploitative marriage to disastrous marriage to unwitting incest and back again, before breaking successfully into the business of petty theft, in the end being arrested almost by accident for a crime she had not yet committed. Defoe has her turn moralistic only at the very end, when she and the fourth husband (I think – I lost count) return to England “where we resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived”, and I sort of forgive that because one can read it as partly tongue-in-cheek, and also though a weak-ish ending it is stronger than the ending of Robinson Crusoe so obviously he was learning. I must also admit that she is rather unrealistically sanguine about the fate of her children, of whom we hear very little.
It’s a fascinating pen-picture of England in the early seventeenth century, where urban social networks were small and intimate enough that you could steal from a shop at one end of town and sell your loot to their competitor at the other; where constables were aware enough of the rights of citizens under the law to be easily intimidated by a sharp-witted suspect; where people would invest wealth not only in hard cash (“which every one knows is an unprofitable cargo to be carried to the plantations”) but also in jewels, silver plate, cloth and easily portable luxury goods. One thing that hasn’t changed, which she reflects on bitterly in the gap between husbands two and three (I think – again, I had already lost count) is the differential social power between women and men, even allowing for economic factors; Defoe verges on feminism in a couple of passages.
Anyway, very strongly recommended, if you like “continu’d Variety”; and who doesn’t?
November Books 12) The New Face of Digital Populism (Demos study)
This short book, published by Demos and mostly written by Jamie Bartlett, Jonathan Birdwell and Mark Littler, presents the results of a large and detailed survey of Facebook supporters of populist far-right movements in various western European countries, including the EDL and BNP in the UK and Vlaams Belang here. (Hungary’s Jobbik was included in the original project but dropped for reasons not really explained.) The results are interesting in various ways. Supporters of such groups tend to have much less trust in the judicial system, their own government, the European Union and the mainstream media than most people do. But they also tend to have a belief in the political process (which is I suppose why they are in organised groups in the first place), usually motivated by concerns over immigration and perceptions of Islam. I wish (and I think the researchers wish) that they had also included a question or questions about the use of political violence; Norway was added to the list of countries surveyed after the Breivik attacks in June. There is an interesting discussion in the appendix of the methodology and ethics of conducting research among Facebook users, and also how to spot trolls and remove their answers. Worth a look.
November Books 11) The Demon Headmaster, by Gillian Cross
Gillian Cross was a new writer for me; I enjoyed this children’s story of sinister headmaster with supernatural powers planning to Take Over The World, a blended family, commentary on children’s TV game shows, and knowing winks to Nineteen Eighty-four. Will look out for the sequels if F enjoys it too. Thanks to
November Books 10) Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
This is a brilliant account of the 2008 US presidential election, concentrating particularly on the Obama/Clinton dynamic (since that turned out to be much more important and durable than the Obama/McCain dynamic). The authors claim to have got detailed accounts from campaign insiders of key conversations and exchanges right up to the level of the candidates, and it rings true without revealing anything about the two key personalities that I had not already guessed. (It seems to have been published as Game Change in the USA.)
Three aspects of the narrative really struck me.
First, that the candidates themselves tend to be pretty flawed human beings. Successively the Edwards and McCain campaigns crashed to disaster largely because of the personalities of Edwards and McCain themselves, unwilling to adapt to the discipline necessary to keep their teams motivated and to avoid gaffes to the press. Both Obama and McCain suffered serious wobbles in the last few weeks before the election due to the indiscipline of their running-mates. All of those individuals had previous won elections for public office, so it is surprising that Edwards and McCain were not able to deal with the demands of the presidential campiagn. I can cut Biden and Palin a bit more slack, as the vice-presidential slot is much more peculiar, and perhaps Edwards is explicable because he was in complete denial about the state of his marriage. But McCain’s behaviour is just bizarre.
Second, and linked to the first point, the peculiar desire of the media – particular the US media – for spectacle rather than story means that any electoral campaign is vulnerable to a single killer moment. Occasionally – as with Hillary Clinton’s tearful interview in New Hampshire, which it is pretty clear won her the primary there – it works to the candidate’s advantage. Much more often, of course, it reacts to their disadvantage, as Rick Perry is discovering.
Third, and also linked to the first point, the fact that the US system is so very candidate-based rather than party-based makes the professional campaigner’s career much more volatile and much more based on personality. That has consequences for how campaigns work internally. Staffers are jockeying not only to get the credit for getting their candidate elected, but also for positioning in the victorious candidate’s administration and/or for a better-paid role in the next campaign. It can also be much more difficult to tell the candidate home truths about their own performance, compared to the situation if both candidate and staffer are beholden to a political party structure rather than staffers being utterly dependent on the candidate’s whim. It also feeds into the dependence of the campaigns on continual fund-raising.
In the end, Obama won because his fundamentals were sound; he had a good narrative in the first place, he was disciplined about sticking to it, and he was fortunate in both the character of his opponent in the general election and the economic circumstances which made Republicans unelectable in 2008. Clinton was unlucky in that her narrative was almost as good and her discipline equal to Obama’s, but her campaign team was less coherent (for the reasons given above) and she carried unfair negative baggage in the shape of her husband. McCain lost because he deserved to. (The authors are surprisingly sympathetic to Sarah Palin, and blame McCain for choosing her without sufficient forethought and exposing her on the national platform without adequate preparation.) An excellent book from which I learned some interesting things.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
November Books 9) I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett
As I had hoped, an excellent novel rounding off the Tiffany Aching series, with a surprise appearance from someone we last saw much earlier in the Discworld stories. It deals with some pretty heavy subject matter in Pratchett’s trademark combination of humour and profundity. Some day soon I shall go back and read all four Tiffany novels in sequence.
Excellent final quote from the author on the importance of history:
It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.
The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown
Interesting Links for 11-11-2011
- Desperation of hope
Encounter with a carjacker in Karachi.
- watervole: Happy Music
Certainly cheered me up – thanks, Judith!
- The Marianas Trench
The Marianas Trench is deep. Really deep. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly deep it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to the Marianas Trench.
- UUP leader rejects Tory merger plan – Politics, News – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk
“The leader of the Ulster Unionists has rejected a Conservative Party proposal that they disband and become a Northern Ireland wing of the Tories.” – an extraordinarily tone-deaf offer, incomprehensible.
- bearing responsibility. | meg fowler
The best post I have read about the Penn State scandal.
Interesting Links for 10-11-2011
- Graphic portrayals: Northern Ireland, graphic novels and the peace process « Slugger O’Toole
Gordon Gillespie tells all.
- 1978 Tom Baker school visit footage
Belfast gets a visit from the Fourth Doctor. “Time Lords do not acknowledge sectarian divides. This is a simple fact.” “A Time Lord came and visited us at a very bad time.”
- 539 – Vive le tweet! A Map of Twitter’s Languages | Strange Maps | Big Think
Fascinating – Belgium and Switzerland invisible, Thailand way more prominent than its neighbours.
- WHSmith have pulled off a publishing coup
I wonder what they are charging?
- Google+ had a chance to compete with Facebook. Not anymore.
The failure of Google’s attempt to capture social networks.(I check in on my Google+ account maybe once a week.)
Graphic novels about Northern Ireland
My old friend Gordon Gillespie gave a talk on this subject yesterday, covered by Slugger O’Toole here.
November Books 8) Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott
I had tried Ivanhoe several years ago and bounced off it;
Interesting Links for 8-11-2011
- Two EU Parliament committees reject EU-Morocco Fish Pact – fishelsewhere.eu
“European Parliament’s Development and Budget Committee both adopted an opinion calling on Parliament to reject the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement.” - Evil social networks
What’s wrong with #Klout
Sabotage on the railway line, 1943
In the early morning of 31 July 1943, our village's peaceful slumbers were interrupted by an explosion on the railway line to the south. The Resistance had successfully attacked a German troop transport, causing fairly substantial damage to the train itself and to the railway line.
(Pictures copied from this article.)
Although local legend speaks of 250 dead Germans, and reprisals prevented by a local cigar manufacturer who bought off the Nazi commandant with a barrel of cognac, the truth appears to be that five Wehrmacht and two local Belgian railway staffers were killed, a couple of dozen wounded, and twelve carriages and, most dramatically, the locomotive were derailed. The Resistance set off the bomb with electrical cables salvaged from the brief war of 1940, which were of English manufacture and therefore allowed the embarrassed Germans to pretend that British parachutists were responsible.
One sunny morning last weekend I decided to try and locate the bridge where all this happened. It is here, down a very overgrown lane, just about visible on Google Earth. I had difficulty in deciding if the train had fallen off the eastern or western side of the bridge (the line runs more or less north-south here); in the end I think it is the eastern side, partly because I think the sun may be on the left in the comtemporary pictures (though I suspect it was a cloudy day) and partly because the train was coming from Leuven at the time of the attack, and since Belgian trains presumably then as now were on the left track it would have been on the eastern side of the line.
Going back to the eastern side, I reckon this is the corner that features particularly in the first, second and fourth photos above (incidentally the fourth picture is clearly taken from an elevated standpoint, perhaps on top of the carriage visible in the second photo and being lifted away in the fifth):
And this is the eastern side from a different angle:
All very quiet and neglected now. But very odd to look at the scene of the attack sixty-eight years later.
November Books 7) Pack Animals, by Peter Anghelides
A Torchwood novel set towards the end of Season 2, with Owen already dead but still walking and alien creatures intruding on Earth via sets of game cards (so the ‘pack’ of the title has a dual meaning). Another good effort from Anghelides, reinforcing my view that the Torchwood novels are an insufficiently recognised literary achievement of the Whoniverse.
November Books 6) The Private Eye Annual 2008, edited by Ian Hislop
I hadn’t got around to reading this until now, and it was quite amusing to be submerged again in the long-ago world of 2008, when Gordon Brown had just become Prime Minister and the US presidential campaign was just getting under way. A lot of the humour is childish rather than undergraduate, but some of the barbs are still telling: an advertisement for putting your money Under The Bed (instant access twenty-four hours a day, but not regulated under the financial services compensation scheme), for instance. I love the list of made-up facts about the Queen and Prince Philip:
Although the Duke comes from Greek. Danish, German and English stock, he speaks none of those languages.
And the story under the headline Nationwide Fury Erupts As Archbishop ‘Converts To Islam’ is actually an acerbic deconstruction of the political / media rhetoric on Islam generally, with this cutting sidebar:
That Shock Lecture In Full – The Words That Shook The Nation
followed by a spoof of opaque theological commentary. I don’t always agree with the Eye’s target or line but I am glad that its sæva indignatio continues.
Gibbon Chapter LXVI: The Eastern Empire and the Popes
In this chapter, the successive emperors and popes of the early fifteenth century negotiate (again) union between the churches. The increased contact between East and West causes the Renaissance. See also my thoughts on kissing and the English, the filioque debate, the number of students at Oxford, how one might miss out on becoming Pope, Ancient Greek pronunciation, and the Renaissance.
November Books 5) Diana Wynne Jones, by Farah Mendlesohn
An excellent, thorough look at the works of the much-missed author, taking us through how Jones educates her readers subtly through her writing, which made me want to fill in the large gaps in my own reading of her works. By fortunate coincidence, the Diana Wynne Jones issue of Vector arrived just as I was finishing this, which gave me a chance to reflect on why Jones was such a good writer in from several other perspectives as well (also a transcript of a discussion in which the genesis of this book is explained). Very stimulating, even if I can’t find many words to write about it for now.
Interesting Links for 6-11-2011
- McDonnell faces immediate questions and longer term dilemmas
@bbcmarkd on the new SDLP leader. - Air Space – a trip through an airport detention center – Boing Boing
What being on the TSA watches is like.
Klout and influence
There was an interesting discussion on Twitter yesterday between Charlie Stross and Pat Cadigan about Klout.com, which I vaguely knew of as one of those sites that attempts to measure how wide and effective your use of social media is, attributing to me expertise and authority on subjects about which I know little and tweet less. Klout had further annoyed me by unilaterally changing their algorithm to decrease my Klout score and then demanding that I change my behaviour to increase it back again, which didn't interest me at all.
@cstross made the excellent point that Klout's data-mining of our Twitter and Facebook accounts is ethically dubious and its opt-out rather than opt-in practice is actually against EU law (ah, how I remember the days of lobbying the European Parliament on that one), and that was sufficient to move me to opt out.
Later in the day, Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party elected its new leader. Delegates chose the Member of Parliament (and of the Northern Ireland Assembly) for South Belfast, Alasdair McDonnell, whose candidacy I had endorsed in a blog post on Wednesday (reprinted on the popular site Slugger O'Toole on Thursday). I doubt that more than a couple of dozen SDLP delegates read my piece in either place, and I would be very surprised if I changed the minds of more than a very few (and McDonnell's winning margin was a healthy 36 votes out of almost 350). I can tell you that Livejournal thinks that 75 people looked at it as their point of entry, compared with 53 for the preceding entry about the beards of Democratic Party candidates for the US Presidency and 149 for the following entry about Tintin. It was tweeted by two people who both have fewer followers on Twitter than I do, but probably are more connected to the Northern Irish social media world than I am – one is the communications officer of a prominent Belfast NGO, and the other is, er, Alasdair McDonnell MP. None of the other half-dozen pieces on Slugger about the SDLP leadership attracted fewer comments than mine.
I think Klout – or any naive data-mining algorithm – would have real difficulty in assessing whether or not that piece was influential, let alone whether I am influential, just from the numbers. To give another (and rather appropriate) example, my re-posting of the graphic of Where Should You Post Your Status?, which had been doing the rounds on Facebook, got 100 distinct views on Livejournal, but was also tweeted by five other people (and retweeted by a sixth), only one of whom I actually know, so the others put it into completely new networks, thus increasing my "deep reach" for that particular post (which however is probably of less historical import than the selection of the new leader of the SDLP). For another example of "deep reach", my reaction to the Stross/Cadigan discussion caught the attention of Rosi Sexton, whose twitter following probably doesn't have a lot of overlap with mine, let alone the two sf authors', and so the Klout discussion is brought to the attention of a whole new audience. But I suspect that the "deep reach" of a single post is normally pretty ephemeral; even if it can be measured, it is only a very small part of a bigger picture.
I like looking at attempts to tease structure out of the sea of information that we are all providing online. But I think any attempts to reduce one person’s impact to a single number should be treated with suspicion, and further efforts to make money out of such a dubious process should be treated with disdain and shunning.
SDLP leadership
For the record, the results were:
| Alasdair McDonnell | 127 | 140 | 188 |
| Conall McDevitt | 105 | 131 | 152 |
| Patsy McGlone | 70 | 76 | – |
| Alex Attwood | 46 | – | – |
Attwood's transfers went 26 to McDevitt, 13 to McDonnell, 6 to McGlone (1 plumper); McGlone's transfers went 48 to McDonnell, 21 to McDevitt (seven non-transferable). (Figures from @KenReid_utv.) Congrats to McDonnell; commiserations to the other candidates.
Ian Parsley jokes that I am responsible, but I rather doubt it!
November Books 4) Autumn Mist, by David A. McIntee
When I posted three years ago about appearances of Belgium in Doctor Who,
Interesting Links for 5-11-2011
- Scottish Conservatives elect gay leader
Aged 32, she joined in 2009 and fought first election this year. - Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Tom Shakespeare on the nonsense poet and landscape artist who also had epilepsy. - BBC Breakfast – Sadie Miller interview – YouTube
Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter on the new posthumous autobiography. - Laurie Penny: A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet
“Many commentators, wondering aloud where all the strong female voices are, close their eyes to how normal this sort of threat has become.” - Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Approach Earth on November 8, 2011
400m wide rock coming closer than the Moon.