Beyond The Meme Ooze. Some thoughts on the Google Book-O-Sphere Singularity

I have become a Google Book miner. Over the past few months http://books.google.com/books has become my online destination of choice. Google has given us an full-text search of every text it can acquire. This has been a dream since the beginning of the internet, the digital library. I find that it has opened a vast amount of social historiography to me.

Some thoughts on harnessing the GoogleBook-o-Sphere
  1.  I just use google-fu to narrow in on interesting social movements the 1840’s “free love” movement or radical pietism. 
  2. The point is to work iteratively to narrow down to the interesting books.
  3. use quotations around a phrase to keep it narrow 
  4. often an uncommon but specific term like owenite, prussianize or effeminist will pull up a vein to mine
  5. Historical figures like “Count Zinzendorf”, “Communist Church” or the Cockettes help
  6. A neighborhood (haight) or a city help to find a history which addresses the social movement I am interested in.
  7. I often experiment by adding a required intellectual landmark. Foucault and Habermas have each worked well because they have to be referred to when researching moral regulation or print-mediated publics, respectively.
  8. a technical term like governmentality works wonders, while “public sphere” has multiple meanings which produces a great deal of noise.
  9. a majority of Books have extensive section online as a Google Books preview.
  10. Sometimes I will also limit the search to recent books. They show lots of the original 1800’s books, but that is too in depth for know.
  11. I flip through the first 20 or so books in the search results and open up tabs for interesting books
  12. The books open the page with the search terms highlighted.
  13. By flipping between the open tabs, I weed out the books that are stating the obvious.
  14. If a book seems interesting I will search that one book for some unique term like chiliasm or “social discipline”.
  15. The in-book search gives all the different results in snippets.
  16. Reading through the snippets I find the juiciest pieces, and read that page and that area.
  17. Often I will find a few amazing books which talk about the phenomenon from different angle or perspectives. 
  18. by surfing in between these tabs, I get a contextually rich new set of historical understanding, with many different links into my existing knowledge.
  19. This method is very transversal. My method pulls in books which are in totally separate citation networks, disciplines and time periods. 
  20. Many of them are orphans, because the vision did not fit with the economics of academic publishing
  21. Most of these books and ideas circulate only within the parallel world of the academy.
  22. A great deal of the best scholarship was never published in the USA. 
  23. I add the best books to My Google Library. This keeps track since the titles are often very similar.
  24. The very best books I order through the Berkeley Public Library’s LINK+ inter library system. It is like netflix for books.
  25. often I turn out to be the second person who has ever read the book.
  26. Each book-o-sphere fragment supplies new questions to feed into the book-o-sphere search engine.
  27. I micro-blog screenshots of book fragments with short commentary and links back to the google books preview.
  28. This is a great way to share what I am reading, and put it into the context of my own learning process.
  29. The book-o-sphere fragments have a much higher cognitive and citational complexity that virtually anything written for the internet.
  30. Book-o-sphere micro-blogging ignores the boundary between academic and popular. It allows internet heretics like myself to find and knit together all of these amazing books which have been ignored or forgotten within academia.
  31. In reference to citizen journalism perhaps this should be called citizen historiography
  32. transversal reading between these texts has given me a new sense of types of history writing. by setting the texts next to each other I have learned to spot the economic reductionism of the so much recent writing or the gender reductionism of so much feminist history. 
  33. I have also seen how different decades have distinct blindspots.
  34. This is possible because google books pulls out the relevant fragment from a book and puts it next to the fragment from a different author. Google does in a few seconds what would have taken days or weeks previously.
  35. Google Books is a singularity-level technology. But, people create singularities, not machines.