TROUBLING INFORMATION

In the age of the computer the writer's office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business.

-- Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 150.

A Pioneer Press article (local pdf) about Alicia Conroy (July 25, 2006). Alicia's book is Lives of Mapmakers. She has a webpage at the University of Minnesota.

MoCA: Museum of Chinese in the Americas. Bad Beijing architecture. Drawings by second graders of the human body. A huge collection of Photoshop tutorials. The British Library’s Database of Bookbindings. Stephen Downes’s Index of Logical Fallacies. Kevin Sherry’s Sweater Project. Jason Patient’s cycling images. Edward Tufte’s argument against PowerPoint presented as a PowerPoint presentation.

Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” (2002). C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1959). Lion Kimbrough, How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (2003). A treasury of Tom Swift texts. An infinity of George W. Bush speeches. NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Christian Bök’s Eunoia. The 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Awards. Seymour Hersh’s address to the ACLU (July 8, 2004) on the unfolding story of American war crimes. People write exactly one hundred words a day and leave them at a website. Discussions among testy copyeditors. An outline of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A scientific method FAQ. The 1,000 Journals Project. A chronology of the secretarial profession. US Presidents’ inaugural addresses and state of the union messages from George Washington to the present. Online books at Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com. 100 top American speeches, most with links to .mp3 audio versions. Online book directories: The Online Books Page at The University of Pennsylvania, links to collections and archives at the University of Adelaide, and a collection of links at The British Columbia Digital Library.

The newsgroup comp.publish.prepress on Google Groups. A plaintive page about curly-quote character encoding confusion. Jack Lynch’s Guide to Grammar and Style and his Resources for Writers and Writing Instructors. On the long history of they/their/them as ungendered singular pronouns. The copyediting_l style FAQ, including some interesting prevailing wage data for freelance copyeditors (how obsolete is it?). Ben Yagoda on adjectives.

Jukka Korpela on footnotes and endnotes in webpages. You can use OpenOffice.org, which records linked notes in its HTML-editing mode just fine. Don’t forget to count the words in footnotes.

The Text Encoding Initiative: “TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.” Jeffrey Veen on accessible design, with links to examples. Position Is Everything: a CSS site with an emphasis on designing around browser quirks (good links, too). CSS column layouts compatible with Netscape 4.x (and more here, too). How to use CSS to make line spacing consistent when using superscript and subscript characters. Design Detector pulls an extreme CSS stunt.

How computers cause bad writing. A gallery of "misused" quotation marks. The Apostrophe Protection Society. Links to citation style guides at the University of Iowa. The online stylesheet for Convergence Magazine. Relics of the Post Age: "Rescuing the handwritten letter from extinction." Open Brackets, a weblog often about translation. Rudy Limeback’s guidelines for writing.

warblogging.com. Wealth Bondage. UFO Breakfast. Ask Edward Tufte. Jorn Barger’s elegantly neglected Robot Wisdom pages. The Dreyfuss Report is an Iraq-and-national-security-issues weblog. Editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light weblog. Rebecca Blood. Coudal Partners. Die Puny Humans. Languagelog. Plasticbag.org. Thingsmagazine.net. Thinking while Typing. Moonmilk. Jill/txt.