Monthly Archives: April 2015

Did you Know?

European Union Literature Prize Winners Announced

The latest winners of the European Prizes for Literature, each worth €5,000, were announced at London Book Fair yesterday.

The winners are:

  • Carolina Schutti (Austria);
  • Luka Bekavac (Croatia);
  • Gaëlle Josse (France);
  • Edina Szvoren (Hungary);
  • Donal Ryan (Ireland);
  • Lorenzo Amurri (Italy);
  • Undine Radzeviciute (Lithuania);
  • Ida Hegazi Høyer (Norway);
  • Magdalena Parys (Poland);
  • David Machado (Portugal);
  • Svetlana Žuchová (Slovakia);
  • Sara Stridsberg (Sweden).

Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, said: “This is the only book award dedicated to the best up-and-coming authors from all over Europe, regardless of their country of origin or language. With this prize and our continued support for translations of literary works, we are helping literature cross borders and enabling readers to enjoy the wealth of writing talent we have. This is crucial: literature opens the mind, allowing us to come closer together and understand each other better, which is now more vital than ever.”

via Publishers Weekly (London Book Fair coverage)

Did you Know?

79 Theses on Technology

So here is a selection of the 79 theses on Technology

o    Everything begins with attention.

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”

o    To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.

[…]

o    Useful strategies of resistance require knowledge of technology’s origin stories.

[…]

o    Blessed are they who strive to practice commentary as a legitimate, serious genre of responsiveness to others’ thoughts.

[…]

o    Our current electronic technologies make competent servants, annoyingly capricious masters, and tragically incompetent gods.

[…]

o    This epidemic of forgetting where algorithms come from is the newest version of “I for one welcome our new insect overlords.”

[…]

o    Jaron Lanier: “The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart.”

[…]

o    Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.

[…]

o    On the internet nothing disappears; on the internet anything can disappear.

 79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation. | The Infernal Machine.

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2014 VIDA Count is now available

The 2014 VIDA Count has been revealed.

Vida represents Women in Literary Arts and undertakes an annual survey to profile the gender (and now race) of contributors writing for leading literary publications.

The results of last year’s VIDA Count from 2013 caused something of a furore, so poor was the representation of women in a number of prominent journals, most notably the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. The reactions from these publications also made headlines. This year, the organisation did three counts: the 2014 VIDA Count, the second annual Larger Literary Landscape VIDA Count (looking at smaller publications from across America) and the first annual 2014 Women of Colour VIDA Count. 

So what about the past year, have things improved? Is there anything to hope for?

Well, sort of.

Few surprises from the 2014 VIDA Count » MobyLives.

Did you Know?

Inside The Most Amazing Map Library That You’ve Never Heard Of

Within the campus of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is a geographer’s treasure trove: over a million artifacts from the American Geographical Society, one of the most incredible collections of maps, atlases and globes to be found in America.

But, ironically, the library is practically unexplored territory. When I asked for directions on campus many students themselves didn’t know it was there.

Inside The Most Amazing Map Library That You’ve Never Heard Of | Atlas Obscura.