A Quick Look at Penultimate 4

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PenultimateEvernote released Penultimate 4 late last week. (Unfortunately, it’s only available for iOS 6 at the moment, though support for iOS 5 is expected in the next update. Penultimate is currently not available for Android, though they’re apparently working on that.)

Heather and Ethan have mentioned Penultimate in this space before, and we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink over Evernote itself.

There are two major features to this release of Penultimate:

  • Automatic synchronization with Evernote (to which the user must deliberately opt in; it isn’t forced) and
  • Handwriting recognition within the application itself, not just within Evernote (though this feature does require Evernote sync).

The app is free, so it’s definitely worth checking out. As I experimented with it, though, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work well for me.

The automatic synchronization with Evernote works flawlessly. If you make quick freehand sketches or take short handwritten notes that you want to be searchable and backed up automatically, Penultimate may be just what you’re looking for (and you certainly can’t beat the price tag).

In my case, the problem is that I take lengthy notes that are handwritten — quite a lot of them. Handwriting recognition seems to work best (at least in my experience) with printed letters. I write longhand. My penmanship is decent, but Evernote doesn’t seem to recognize it very well. Handwriting recognition, though nice, isn’t an essential for me, so that in itself isn’t a deal-breaker. But there are two other difficulties that mean Penultimate isn’t the app for me to use on a regular basis:

  • The application doesn’t have continuous scrolling. To add a new page when the current one is full, you need to tap the lower right corner (or upper right, if you’ve moved the toolbar to the top of the page — which I’d recommend doing to avoid accidentally selecting tools you don’t want while you’re writing).
  • There’s no zoom/focus that enables you to write normally in a window at the bottom of the screen, while what you write appears in smaller form above the area where you’re actually writing (Notes Plus and Notability both have this feature; neither is free, but neither is high-priced, either). It makes writing more difficult than it needs to be, and results in filling each page very quickly.

Penultimate may not be particularly useful for me, but for other usage scenarios it may work very well. So let us know in the comments: What kinds of things do (or would) you use an application like Penultimate for? If you’ve tried it, how well did it work for you? If you’ve tried other applications, what did you think of them?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by deburca]

Mea Culpa: on Conference Tweeting, Politeness, and Community Building

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The following is reposted from my personal blog. The post generated lively conversation, on Twitter and in response blogs, and seemed to me likely to do the same in the ProfHacker community, especially given how often we discuss Twitter.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s post “If You Can’t Say Anything Nice” post about public shaming on Twitter came at a timely moment for me. Describing the culture of Twitter commentary, she writes:

You get irritated by something — something someone said or didn’t say, something that doesn’t work the way you want it to — you toss off a quick complaint, and you link to the offender so that they see it. You’re in a hurry, you’ve only got so much space, and (if you’re being honest with yourself) you’re hoping that your followers will agree with your complaint, or find it funny, or that it will otherwise catch their attention enough to be RT’d.

I’ve done this, probably more times than I want to admit, without even thinking about it. But I’ve also been on the receiving end of this kind of public insult a few times, and I’m here to tell you, it sucks.

I read this post while at a conference, and as I read it realized that I’d been guilty of just this kind of ungenerous commentary earlier in the day. I’d disagreed strongly with one of the presenters and written a series of critiques on Twitter, which many in my community found pithy and retweeted. Let me say: I absolutely believed in what I wrote, and I don’t retract the ideas. But in the Twitter exchanges around those posts, some of the conversation got more personal. The presenter—a fellow academic and human being named Elaine Treharne, not some nameless person‐read those exchanges after the panel and was deeply hurt by them. She was right. I was wrong. I tweeted an apology, but the entire affair, coupled with Kathleen’s post, kept working on me. I ended up chatting with Elaine for several hours yesterday evening about electronic fora, professionalism, and valid critique through channels such as Twitter. I think we both learned quite a bit; I know I learned quite a bit. We still don’t entirely agree on the substantive points from her presentation, but I hope we’re now friends as well as colleagues. She agreed to let me use her name in this post.

After that day’s experiences and conversations, I spent the evening considering my tweets over the past several conferences I’ve attended, including in the much-ballyhooed “Dark Side of DH” panel at MLA in Boston. Kathleen is absolutely right: our field needs to seriously consider both how our current Twitter culture developed, and how it might need to change moving forward. I need to seriously consider how I engage with colleagues on Twitter; I am not blameless and I need to reform. This post is my attempt to start thinking through both how the current Twitter culture came to be and where how we might change. The post owes any of its insights to Elaine’s generous willingness to talk seriously with me about these issues after being flamed by my community on Twitter.

Only a few years ago, DH digital humanities was still a fringe field, mostly ignored by academia more widely. DHers felt not like “the next big thing,” but like an embattled minority. The community was very small, and the worry at conferences was about how to convince our colleagues that what we did was valuable. How can we get hired; how can we get promoted? How can we persuade the field to pay attention to this work we find remarkable? DHers were overrepresented in online fora such as Twitter, though, which became a place to build support communities for DH scholars who felt isolated on their campuses and within the wider academic community.

Within that framework, the back-chatter on Twitter was a valuable support mechanism. I remember sitting in a conference panel in my disciplinary field—nineteenth-century American literature—a few years ago when an eminent professor described the utter vapidity of modern reading practices (uncharitably: “kids these days with their screens! and their ADD!) compared to those of 150 years ago. Around the room, heads were nodding vigorously, and in the Q&A many other prominent members of my field rose to concur.

In that room, I felt like the oddball. My intellectual interests were being dismissed out of hand by the very people likely to decide whether my work would be published (and thus, whether I would get a job, get tenure, &c., &c.). I disagreed with them vehemently, but as a junior scholar was hesitant to challenge the rising consensus in the room, for fear that would further isolate me. And so I turned to Twitter to remind myself that I did have a community who would welcome my ideas on these issues. I tweeted my frustrations—I conferred with my dispersed but friendly DH community—and found support and engagement. Perhaps this doesn’t excuse public snarkiness, but that snark was a way of building community—certifying the value of unpopular interests and opinions. None of the eminent panelists from that session I attended read those conversations, nor would have. Nobody got hurt, and I felt less embattled and more prepared to go on with my work.

But that was several years ago, when I had far fewer followers on Twitter, and when DH was not at the center of the academy’s attention. Today many more academics, including those not heavily involved in DH, are on Twitter. And rather than being an nearly-ignored, fringe element of the academy, prominent DHers are being looked to as gatekeepers into a much-desired field. Panelists know to investigate how their sessions were tweeted, and they care what was said about them online. What’s more, many of our colleagues now know how to find tweets about them even when those tweets don’t include their names or usernames. We cannot assume that anonymous tweeting will do no harm to the colleagues we discuss. Tweets are not semi-private, whispered conversations in the back of the conference room; our tweets are very public and could unfairly shape public perception of the colleagues we discuss in them.

Within this framework, the same kind of Twitter chatter that helped build DH communities only a few years ago can resonate with newcomers to the field precisely as that vigorous denunciation of “technology” resonated for me as a young nineteenth-century Americanist. In other words, Twitter chatter can easily read not as community building, but as insider dismissal and exclusion. Such exchanges belie claims that DH is an open field, instead alienating scholars attempting to engage with it. We are no longer the upstarts; we are increasingly seen as the establishment. While this perception doesn’t exactly line up with reality, it certainly shapes the way our Twitter conversations—and in turn the wider DH field—are perceived by newcomers to it. In Elaine’s case, she felt she was being dismissed out of hand by scholars whose work she knows and respects; we had convinced her that she didn’t belong in DH. This is a terrible outcome our field should be wary of replicating.

Nevertheless, I remain firmly convinced that Twitter conversations can supplement and enrich academic conferences, providing a record of their proceedings, allowing scholars to engage actively with their presenting colleagues, and providing access to conferences to those scholars who cannot attend. But as a community, we need to think hard about how to retain the value of conference tweeting while mitigating the alienating effects of conference tweeting on our colleagues. This does not mean, I think, refraining from any critique on Twitter, but will mean remembering when crafting those critiques that there are real people on the receiving end.

Principles of Conference Tweeting

Going forward, I’m going to try to tweet conference panels following these principles.

  1. I will post praise generously, sharing what I find interesting about presentations.
  2. Likewise, I will share pertinent links to people and projects, in order to bring attention to my colleagues’ work.
  3. When posting questions or critiques, I will include the panelist’s username (an @ mention) whenever possible.
  4. If the panelist does not have a username—or if I cannot find it—I will do my best to alert them when I post questions or critiques, rather than leaving them to discover those engagements independently.
  5. I will not post questions to Twitter that I would not ask in the panel Q&A.
  6. I will not use a tone on Twitter that I would not use when speaking to the scholar in person.
  7. I will avoid “crosstalk”—joking exchanges only tangentially related to the talk—unless the presenter is explicitly involved in the chatter.
  8. I will refuse to post or engage with posts that comment on the presenter’s person, rather than the presenter’s ideas.

I am not calling for an embargo on conference tweeting, or for engagements exclusively devoted to agreement or confirmation. To turn conference tweeting into a tepid, timid echo chamber would not serve DH or the wider academy. But as the DH field grows and newcomers attempt to engage with it, we must consider the effect our chatter might have on them. I don’t want to make newcomers to DH feel as isolated as I felt in that room of eminent Americanists. Changing my public presentation on Twitter seems a small concession—worth making—if it will prevent that happening.

What ethics do you follow when tweeting at conferences? How might we cultivate a culture of lively engagement (including disagreement) while avoiding public shaming? Tell us your thoughts or share your principles for conference tweeting in the comments.

Creative Commons licensed photos by Flickr users digitalART2, exquisitur, and brx0.

Would You Announce Your Email Habits?

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laptop catHow much time do spend in your inbox? Do you check email on your phone, in odd bits of time throughout the day? Is your inbox always open in a browser tab? How much email do you have piling up that you’ve glanced at but not responded to or deleted?

If you have difficulty focusing on your priority projects because you spend much of your day responding to email, one of the best strategies to improve your processing of email and your focus on other things is to limit your handling of email to set times during the day. Batching your email processing allows you to better assess what is truly urgent, what is truly important, and what can be quickly deleted or archived.

Several years ago, I read Tim Ferriss’s post How to Check E-mail Twice a Day, in which he suggested that in addition to retraining your own work habits, you should add an autoresponder to your email that lets people know how frequently you will check email.

The idea behind doing this is that over time, you will retrain people’s expectations, so that they know you probably won’t be responding within the hour. Of course, an autoresponder does add to the other person’s email burden, and I’ve read more than one of Ferriss’s critics complaining about that fact.

Enter Calmbox.me, a low-footprint movement which encourages its followers to:

  1. check email only once in the morning and once in the evening
  2. announce this practice in your email signature.

A similar strategy is part of Courteous.ly, which sports the tagline: “if they only knew how much email you have.” This service (which is part of a larger research project by Eric Gilbert, at Georgia Tech) connects to your Gmail account and counts how many messages you receive. It calculates your email load (as high, normal, and light) relative to your inbox, rather than to preset numbers. Users get a personalized courteous.ly link that they can add to their email signature, encouraging their correspondents to click on the link following the phrase “My current email load is.”

Such announcements of one’s email habits seek to raise awareness of how email overload affects us and ultimately improve communication habits by encouraging people to stop and consider how necessary the email they are sending truly is.

Personally speaking, even though I mostly batch my email processing into a few set times per day, I haven’t started announcing my email habits in my signature line. Nor am I likely to, since I don’t see the need to clutter your screen with additional signature lines. But I’m observing this trend with some interest for what it suggests about a general wish for a more peaceful relationship with email.

Would you announce your email habits to every person you email? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Justin Dolske]

Medical Emergencies in the Classroom

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While we have written posts about various kinds of classroom disruptions, until now ProfHacker hasn’t covered what to do in the event of a medical emergency in the classroom. How would you deal with a student who has an epileptic seizure in class? What if a student passes out, or she suffers a severe allergic reaction? I generally think of myself as prepared in the classroom, but when one of these situations happened to a student in one of my classes, I realized that being prepared academically and pedagogically is not the whole picture. When it came to being prepared for a medical emergency, I was anything but. But how do you prepare for the unexpected?

While absolute preparation is impossible (unless your Magic 8-Ball is a heck of a lot more accurate than mine), there are a few easy things we can all do to minimize disruption for all of our students and get help quickly if it is needed.

First, find out whom to call in the event of a medical emergency on your campus. It might be Campus Safety or it might be another number, but whatever it is, program it into your cell phone and bring your phone with you to class.

If you teach in a space with unreliable cell service, know the location of the nearest landline–it might be an office down the hall from your classroom, or it might be a floor (or more) away.

You might consider taking a basic first aid and/or CPR class. Many public universities offer discounted courses for students and employees. If yours doesn’t, the local Red Cross or YMCA are other possible options.

In the event of an emergency, dismiss the class and clear the room if possible. Be aware that the student in distress may well feel very self-conscious about what has happened. If they have a friend in the class, it might be helpful to have that person remain behind. If an ambulance, medical professional, or campus safety officer is coming to help the student, have one student meet them in the parking lot or entrance to the building and guide them to the classroom. It is also a good idea to pack the student’s belongings for them so that they don’t lose their materials — e.g. their wallet, their laptop, their books…

My student’s situation turned out to be a minor one, but it still served as a wake-up call for me.

Do you have other advice for how to deal with medical emergencies in the classroom? Please share in the comments.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by gwire]

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The Kindle Paperwhite Reviewed: Device and Ecosystem

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A few weeks ago I did something which surprised my wife, and which surprised me: I bought a Kindle Paperwhite. Even more surprising, I like the Kindle a lot, and I find myself doing most of a certain kind of reading on the Kindle.

Here is a not-so-brief review of the device itself, followed by a few thoughts on the Kindle as an e-book ecosystem.

The Device

Size. First, the Paperwhite is light and small — less than half a pound, about the height and width of a small trade paperback, but a lot thinner. At that size, I never think about whether to bring the Kindle with me or not: the benefits of having it with me for the odd moment during the day outweighs the space and weight it takes up.

Screen. The Paperwhite’s screen is an e-ink display, like all of the Kindles except the Fire, and like e-readers such as the Barnes & Noble Nook. The advantage of the e-ink display over an LCD display on a tablet is that it’s easier on the eyes because it’s more like paper and ink. I’ve certainly found that to be true. I can’t read comfortably for any length of time on my phone or my wife’s Kindle Fire (reviewed by Anastasia), but I don’t feel any discomfort reading on the Paperwhite.

The screen on all the other Kindles I’ve ever looked at seemed dingy to me: gray text on a gray background. But the Paperwhite’s screen has two improvements. The light, which is on even in daytime, makes the screen white and so improves the contrast. More important, the Paperwhite’s screen has a 212 PPI resolution, whereas the earlier Kindles have resolutions of 167 PPI. The bump in resolution means that text on the Paperwhite is appreciably sharper — not as crisp as text in a printed book, which I think is usually around 300 DPI, but crisp enough.

I bought the Paperwhite fully resigned to not being able to read PDFs on it, which was previously an essential qualification for any e-reader I considered. But I was surprised to find that the Paperwhite does an adequate work of reading most PDFs, as long as the type isn’t too small and as long as you put the Kindle in landscape mode. I’ve read a number of journal articles, white papers, and a few 19th-century books from Google Books on the Paperwhite.

The Light. The light is one of the main features of the Paperwhite. The light is designed to illuminate the text through reflection, rather than by shining a light in your face. I find it perfectly good for reading in complete darkness, though I do prefer a lamp when I read. I rode an airport shuttle through sunlight and tunnels, and didn’t have to adjust anything about the device to keep reading through the changes in light. The light does illuminate the page unevenly at the bottom, as a number of reviews have pointed out. It doesn’t bother me, but the severity of the problem might vary from device to device.

Battery. The Paperwhite’s battery life makes it unlike any other device I’ve used: I never think about whether it’s going to need a charge or not. Amazon’s specs claim a battery life of eight weeks, based on half an hour of reading with the light at full power. My own experience confirms that claim. I waited two weeks to recharge the Kindle for the first time, using it during several flights and lots of time waiting around an airport or hotel, plus time reading each evening. Even after the two weeks, there was still charge left for several days. Since then I’ve gone several weeks at a time before charging the device.

Storage. The Paperwhite has 2GB of storage, the equivalent of 1,100 books, according to Amazon. It can certainly hold a lot of books and periodicals in Kindle format — more than you’re ever likely to read between chances to connect to the internet. But PDFs or Word documents will fill up the Paperwhite much faster than Kindle e-books. The limited storage space is something to keep in mind.

User interface / operating system. The user interface is straightforward. It’s easy enough to highlight sections in the text. You can type notes and get them off through a USB connection or online; it works adequately if not very well. You can search through books. As you’d expect from Amazon, buying new books is very, very easy. There are no physical buttons to turn the pages, but most of the touch screen serves to advance the pages. If you’re used to the instant responsiveness of a phone or tablet, the e-ink screen’s refresh will seem sluggish at first. But after the first hour of using the device, the page refreshes don’t seem like a distraction any more.

One downside to using an e-reader is that you can’t tell where you are in the book. Amazon has solved this disorientation by putting small indicators at the bottom of the screen. The lower right corner always tells you what percentage of the book you have read. The lower left hand corner can alternate between telling you how many minutes it will take to read the current chapter or the rest of the book. The Paperwhite learns to calculate these times as you read; I’ve found them to be reasonably accurate.

Network connection. I have the WiFi version of the Paperwhite, and it connects to the internet to download books and documents just fine. I can’t see paying extra for the 3G option unless you really travel a lot and are away from WiFi frequently.

Other features. The Kindle Paperwhite has no other features. It won’t play music. It won’t read books out loud to you. It does have an “experimental” web browser, but browsing is so painful that I can only assume it was intentionally designed that way: the pain makes you feel glad that you’re not on the internet. The lack of features is the point: this is a device for reading books, not for storing books while you check Twitter and e-mail.

Price. The base price for the Paperwhite is at the edge of reasonable. (Do remember that a graduate student is writing this review. Also keep in mind that the first Kindle sold for $399 in 2007.) The regular Paperwhite costs $119. You can shell out an extra $60 to get the 3G model, but the extra price doesn’t seem worth the advantage to me. The Paperwhite is nearly twice as expensive as the older generation of Kindle ($69), but it’s easily twice as good a device. Yet there are two caveats to the base price. First, the entry price gets you a Kindle and a USB charging cable, but not an adapter that lets you plug the cable into an outlet. The adapter will cost you another $10. This is not such a big deal: you might have an adapter around already (any USB adapter will do), and you can also plug the Paperwhite into a USB port on your computer, since you’ll be charging it so infrequently. But still. The maddening part about the base price is that the Kindle comes with “special offers.” That means ads will appear on the screen when the device is powered down (bad enough) and on the home screen (really bad). You can turn off the ads for $20, and despite your best intentions, someday in a fit of rage $20 will seem less valuable to you than freedom from the “special offers.” And if you don’t pony up to turn off the ads, you’ll probably spend even more than $20 at Amazon because of them. Amazon isn’t making any money off the Paperwhite’s hardware — their low-margin profit comes from the e-books — but this “special offers” model is bad customer relations. I’d rather add the $20 to the base price than feel like I was being taxed to free my device.

You can see the Amazon specs for more details. If you want a more thorough review, you can read the reviews at Engadget, The Verge, or CNET.

The Ecosystem

E-books have problems . . . Look, buying e-books is terrible. I’m no expert, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions. Publishers are basically incompetent, and they’re at the mercy of a very small number of content distributors. Amazon and Apple are the biggest players, and they’re not playing the market to the benefit of consumers. (To wit, the antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin Group, which Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have all settled with the government.) The amazing promise of digital technology is the possibility of virtually limitless, priceless copying of information; indeed, copying data is how computers do everything they do. But e-book sellers have books locked down with DRM and, in the case of Amazon, constrained to their own proprietary formats. When you buy a print book, you can do almost anything that you want with it, thanks to the doctrine of first sale. When you buy hand over money for an e-book, all you get is a license to use the book in very constrained ways. The e-book market doesn’t have to work this way, but it’s the mess we’ve got.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve stayed out of the e-book market for so long. If you want to read e-books as a consumer, I think you’ll have to console yourself with two ideas.

First, practical openness matters more than theoretical openness. By that I mean that it would be amazing if e-books could be open access in open formats: but for the kinds of e-books that I buy, it matters more that I can read a Kindle book on my Paperwhite, on any kind of smart phone or tablet, on a Mac or a PC, and in a browser. Compare that to an e-book that you buy from Apple, which is in an open format, but which you are welcome to read on your iPad or iPhone only.

Second, you have to think of e-books as a format with particular affordances that fits into a range of options that includes paper books. While the strength of e-books should be their ability to be copied, but isn’t, they do have the strength of portability and even disposability. (I got this idea from an article published recently in the Chronicle, but I can’t find the citation.) The first Kindle book I bought was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. (Sorry, Jason, Ryan, and probably the rest of the ProfHackers, but I didn’t like it.) I’ll never read it again, and so I’m glad that I don’t have a physical copy. I’m also reading John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and enjoying it, but I’ll probably never read it again either. I read a couple periodicals on the Kindle, and I don’t miss disposing of the paper copies. But William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience I bought on paper, in the nicest edition I could find, but it’s a book I read and use all the time for my work. In other words, e-books are ephemera, but I’ve come to realize that I don’t mind a certain portion of my reading being ephemeral.

. . . But Amazon’s ecosystem is pretty good. With those caveats in mind, Amazon has the best ecosystem for e-books, hands down. Almost any book that you can find as an e-book, you can find as a Kindle e-book. Usually the Kindle version can be had at a discount, often a steep discount. For ephemeral reading, cheapness matters more than durability. Amazon also has many periodicals available in Kindle edition. It’s nice to have those periodicals appear on your Kindle when they’re released. The downside is that you are Amazon’s customer, not the publisher’s, so deals like access to a publication’s back issues are usually not available.

I’ve been able to find quite a few e-books through my local public library and through the Boston Public Library. These are general interest or fiction books, not books for my work as a historian. Amazon also has many free books that are out of copyright, such as classic novels. You probably wouldn’t do literary criticism on these editions, but they suffice for pleasure reading. In addition, if you do find a good academic book in your library’s e-book catalog, the Kindle format offers you an advantage that you don’t have in paper library books: the ability to highlight text and see your highlights even after the book itself has been returned.

For the social features of the Kindle, you can see Erin’s post on the topic.

Overall, I’ve found the Kindle Paperwhite to be a great little device for certain kinds of reading. The proof is that for those kinds of reading, especially for pleasure, I’m reading a lot more.

Have you tried the Paperwhite? Do you use a different e-reader?

First image from Amazon’s website. Second image Creative Commons licensed by Flickr user paz.ca.