The Leisurely Historian…

I was writing a reply to Mills Kelly’s most recent post, and realized that my reply was long enough to constitute its own post. I suppose this is exactly what trackbacks are for.

The whole pre-press peer review process is based on a different model of the economy of publishing. Review after the fact can be better used online, where we have the ability to keep everything in a perpetual beta. (And I’d argue that there’s a difference between the feedback of blog comments– which one commenter aptly likened to responses at a conference panel– and an actual critical review, like one finds at the ends of most scholarly journals.)

But this brings one to the question of how post-publication review could best be disseminated, etc. More scholarly, critical reviews of online scholarship are definitely a must, but where would they best be published? To put them in traditional print journals gives some name-brand credibility and authority, which online scholarship could definitely use. But publishing reviews in such journals closes off the dialogical potentials of digital scholarship.

Blogs published by individual scholars would seem a good vehicle, but there are many scholars who might be capable of producing great critical review pieces who don’t have the time or the inclination to maintain a blog, to foster the audience that grants individual blogs status, etc.

And then there’s the option of online journals, which might resist some of the problems of the previously-mentioned formats, but bring up a lot of their own issues. Many (most?) are too new to have built up a sufficient academic cache, especially among those resistant to digital scholarship. Many online journals don’t benefit from being indexed in subscription-based journal databases, like JSTOR, rendering them invisible to less-net-savvy scholars. Moreover, the ability of an online journal to be responsive, dynamic, and dialogical– the very advantages they possess when compared to print journals– pose a further question: when would these things really be done? Some of the advantages of review articles– that they’re relatively quick and easy to write, for example, and thus good CV-fodder for newer scholars building their publication lists– would be lost if one had to perpetually update, constantly adjusting a review to the most recent revisions of the site’s content or design.

No answer is ideal. Perhaps best answer would be a new model, some format not yet in existence. Barring that, maybe we should think about how best to use all three in tandem. The AHA’s Perspectives has both an online and a print presence. Magazines and journals like that could serve as a good bridge, giving the prestige of print with the capacity for online revision.

By my friend Andre Collares, a graphic designer outta Florida.
Just thought it was cool and thought I’d share.

Dave Lester’s recent post on Polar Rose reminded me that I’ve had the draft of an entry on some interesting image search stuff saved here for over a week.

Image search technology just keeps getting cooler and cooler. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when there’s an image search site that allows you to draw a simple shape or symbol and search the web for other examples. That doesn’t seem to exist, but there’s still some exciting developments. The facial recognition search that Dave discusses in his post is a great example. Here’s two more.

I recently came across TinEye. It’s still in private beta, and has a fairly limited pool of images (although surprisingly large…), but the functionality is really exciting.

Tineye lets you take any image you come across on the web, and search for similar images elsewhere. They even have a nifty Firefox plugin that lets you search with just a single right click. TinEye’s search isn’t limited to finding the exact same image in multiple URLS, though– to quote their FAQ,

TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image…

TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.

All this got me excited, and I immediately decided to take it for a test run. I wasn’t disappointed.

I was trying to find images that were going to be all over the internet. My first thought was the classic poster for Star Wars:

I found many exact matches using TinEye. But as I got to the eighth page or so of matches, that’s when it really got interesting. Posters for Star Wars in foreign languages. Covers of books that used cropped versions of the art with writing in very different places. Even a picture of someone standing in front of a poster, an obstructed image that also cuts off the top of the poster:

This was pretty exciting, so I looked around for the image of the most beat-up copy of Action Comics #1 I could find. (It’s the first appearance of Superman, for those who didn’t spend their childhoods drooling over comic books like me.)

Tineye immediately brought up images of the famous cover in much better condition. But the most exciting hit was the cover of a later issue of Action Comics, from a little more than a year later, where artist and creator Joe Shuster rather obviously recycles the iconic image:

Pretty remarkable that TinEye could spot the similarities, given both the obvious similarities and how very different the images are.

I’d like to nominate TinEye to the long list of “Sites People Think Will Be The Next Google Acquisition.”

The other site I wanted to mention, which I haven’t had as much opportunity to play around with*, is WhatTheFont. WhatTheFont lets you upload a logo, and will tell you what font or font family is being used.

It’s a remarkably useful tool for designers, assuming it works as well as advertised. the unofficial Google Operating System blog gives it good marks.

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*In part, I haven’t played with it as much because it doesn’t have the nifty FF plugin– something worth noting to anyone trying to design and promote a web ap– integrating search into the browser makes habitual users.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the first appearance of Superman. This means that it’s basically the 70th birthday of superheroes in general.

While I find the pre-WWII Superman very interesting– back when he couldn’t fly, didn’t have heat vision or x-ray vision, when he was just an enormously strong man who jumped around, and meted out social justice…

Superman gets enough attention already.

I want to talk about black superheroes.

Now, it’s no secret that comic books have, historically, been kind of horrible in terms of race. Even the great Will Eisner gave his detective character the Spirit a sidekick named Ebony White, who while he was quite human in his portrayal (especially later in the comic’s run), was little more than a manservant in blackface.

There weren’t any black superheroes for nearly thirty years of the genre’s existence. Eventually, in the sixties, black heroes started appearing. And they were very creatively named! In the next few years, you see the appearance of such heroes as the Black Panther, Black Goliath (especially creative, as he was a black man who took on the powers and costume of the superhero Goliath), Black Vulcan, and Black Lightning… More on him in a moment.

To add insult to injury, many of these black superheroes were not only ridiculously named, but were basically just patently ridiculous. In the competition for Worst Superhero Ever, two serious contenders come from this first wave of black superheroes in the late sixties and early seventies:

In one corner, you have Jack Kirby’s Black Racer, a black guy in a ridiculously colorful costume who serves as a harbinger of death. (And yet he’s not a villain.) Oh, and did I mention he gets around on cosmic skis?

In the other corner, you have the inimitable Mal Duncan, who has the dubious honor of being one of the few superheroes I remember thinking was stupid when I was five. Mal was an inner-city teen who became a member of the Teen Titans, basically the League of Superhero Sidekicks. Mal, however, wasn’t a sidekick. He didn’t have any powers. He didn’t have any demonstrable abilities, for that matter. Moreover, he didn’t even have a costume or a secret identity. He was just the Teen Titans’ token black friend, basically. Eventually, they gave him a magic horn, and he became the incredible Hornblower. Worst name ever. One of the worst powers. And still not much of a costume.

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But still, it could have been worse. I recently encountered this article in Neil Polowin’s The Hembeck Files!, reprinting a column by Tony Isabella, creator of Black Lightning, the first black superhero to have a solo book published by DC, the publisher of Superman and Batman.

The name’s a bit of a stinker, yeah, but Black Lightning had some things to recommend him. Electrical powers are pretty impressive. He kept most of his adventures in his neighborhood– he gave back to the community. Moreover, dude was a teacher! How cool is a schoolteacher superhero?

Moreover, he was a lot better than the original idea the editors proposed, the Black Bomber. I’ll just quote Isabella on this one, he says it better than I could:

I will say that I created Black Lightning after convincing DC not to publish another “black” super-hero on which they had started work. The Black Bomber was a white bigot who, in times of stress, turned into a black super-hero. This was the result of chemical camouflage experiments he’d taken part in as a soldier in Vietnam. The object of these experiments was to allow our [white] troops to blend into the jungle.

In each of the two completed Black Bomber scripts, the white bigot risks his own life to save another person whom he can’t see clearly (in one case, a baby in a stroller) and then reacts in racial slur disgust when he discovers that he risked his life to save a black person. He wasn’t aware that he had two identities, but each identity had a girlfriend and the ladies were aware of the change. To add final insult, the Bomber’s costume was little more than a glorified basketball uniform.

DC had wanted me to take over writing the book with the third issue. I convinced them to eat the two scripts and let me start over. To paraphrase my arguments…

“Do you REALLY want DC’s first black super-hero to be a white bigot?”