The Arts and Empathy: Update

I previously wrote about my participation in a fascinating panel discussion regarding the arts and empathy, organized by the Roots of Empathy foundation. Thanks to my fellow panelists, Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival) and Martha Durbin (Chair, Board of Trustees for the Royal Ontario Museum), as well as the moderator (Mary Ito, CBC), we had a very stimulating discussion of how exposure to all formats of artistic expression might relate to empathy and understanding. The full video of this discussion can now be viewed on the Roots of Empathy website. I would be happy to elaborate or clarify any of my comments from this discussion, just post your questions below in the Comments section.

Quick Hit: The Library Passport

The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is one of the largest public library systems in North America and the world's busiest urban library. It’s not only large, but also one of the most diverse and creative libraries as well. Branches offer not only books and magazines, but also loan out DVDs, CDs, pedometers for measuring your steps, and even time on a 3D printer! A full suite of online services is also available, with library users able to borrow eBooks, online magazines, stream music and movies, and make use of free accounts for online learning sites like lynda.com. Expanding to the online realm hasn’t diminished the importance of the brick-and-mortar locations by any means, with physical branches providing important services like mortgage workshops and even the occasional speed-dating night. New branches continue to be built, with the system as a whole adapting well as new neighborhoods blossom across the city. With winter approaching, why not task yourself with visiting all 100 branches of the good old TPL as fun winter activity? Designer Noah Ortmann has created The Toronto Library Passport to help you find each branch and record your experiences. It’s a beautiful document, featuring gorgeous typography. It also contains useful information like opening hours for each branch to ensure that you don’t encounter shut doors, along with a map. This would make a wonderful present for any lover of books, libraries, or the city. It’s also such a great idea that it would be nice to see this expanded to other city library systems. If you’re a fan of the TPL, please also consider donating to their foundation to help support this vital part of our city. 

Quick Hits: President Obama and Penny Books

President Obama

The U.S. president Barack Obama interviewed the novelist Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books. The first part of that interview was published a couple of weeks ago, but it is this second installment that has attracted a great deal of public press attention based on Mr. Obama’s statements regarding the importance of reading. More specifically, the importance of reading for fostering empathy and shaping his sense of what it means to be a proper citizen in society. The relevant quotes can be found in this article in the Guardian newspaper (quoted below) and dedicated readers of OnFiction should recognize these arguments as paralleling the themes of the research discussed on this site. 

when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels…It has to do with empathy… It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of greys, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.

The audio of both parts can be found here.

Penny Books

Ever see a used book for sale for a penny on Amazon.com and wonder how it could be that the seller makes any money? The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about this new industry of penny booksellers and how they operate. In brief, it involves a large volume of books and some rather complicated software.

Quick Hit: eBooks Show No Sign of Replacing Print Books

In case you missed it, the New York Times published an interesting article yesterday on how the sales of eBooks has begun to dip, whereas print sales remain steady. Bad news for all those who prognosticated the "Death of the Book" once eBooks and eReaders were developed. 

Quick Hit: The Saddest, Littlest, Bookworm

You may have already seen this video of a child terribly upset whenever a book ends, but if you haven't it's worth a minute of your time. I'm sure many of us can sympathize with this feeling!

Quick Hits: Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, How to get children to read during the Summer

Many of us grew up on the books of Franklin W. Dixon (The Hardy Boys) and Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew). But as we grew older, we soon realized that these weren't real people and that the books must have been written by someone else. Who did write these books? How did it all work? This article in The Atlantic magazine solves the mystery. 

Elementary school students who don't read over the Summer fall significantly behind their peers who do. This is just one reason why many have fretted over how to create a love for reading. How can we encourage students to read on their own time? This article in the Washington Post provides a great summary of research that points toward an enticingly simple solution: stop assigning books and let students choose their own.

Quick Hit: Plotting the Reception of a TV Show Across Seasons

I'm sure that a lot of us have wondered whether the Simpsons has declined in quality over its 26 seasons. A new resource, developed by Kevin Wu, called GraphTV plots viewer ratings of episodes from IMDb and then calculates a regression line to explore linear trends. You can click on individual data-points (i.e., episodes) to explore shows that were particularly highly rated, or panned. It's a really fun way to explore the arc of an entire series and a clever use of crowd-sourced data that's been visualized to be more accessible. And yes, it appears that most agree that the Simpsons just isn't as good as it used to be. In contrast, The Wire appears to have gotten better each season. What would be really interesting would be to use different curve-fitting models to explore nonlinear associations (e.g., shows that get better, peak, then decline).   

Quick Hits

Some notable pieces from elsewhere:

Kurt Vonnegut was deeply interested in the practice of writing fiction and the nature of narrative. This Washington Post article includes a video of his famous (and famously hilarious) lecture on narrative that includes his drawing of the "shapes of stories." The graphs of typical story structures are also re-drawn and presented in the article by a talented graphic artist name Maya Eilam.

The Guardian has published this piece by Stephen Marche in which he discusses his experiences having read a couple of text more than one hundred times: Hamlet and The Inimitable Jeeves. Such frequent re-reading creates an entirely unique experience in the reader, but one that illuminates the experiences that many of us have to other forms of narrative such as a favourite film or television episode.

Quick Hit: British Library Book Requests

This video the British Library released showing book requests by users over a 10 minute period is strangely compelling. Watching books enter and leave the system allows you to imagine the people who might be reading these books. 

(Click on the bottom right-hand side to make it full-screen.)

Quick Hits: Daily habits of famous writers

Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings has a fascinating post on the daily habits of famous writers. By pulling relevant quotes from interviews published in The Paris Review, Popova manages to capture just how much diversity there is in approaching writing by these authors. Fascinated by this diversity in daily routine, she wondered whether there might be a relation between the sleeping habits of writers and their productivity. To explore this, she enlisted the help of an Italian information designer to create an infographic that visualizes the two variables. The full post is worth reading, so I won't ruin it for you. Both efforts reflect a desire that I think is common in writers. Since many struggle to write, we endeavour to understand just how the others manage to "do it." 

The interviews upon which she drew for this data include, as might be expected, many gems of advice. Take, for example, E. B. White's proclamation that "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." 

In ending this post, I will leave you with an excerpt from an interview with Maya Angelou, who left us so recently but will never be forgotten. 

"I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important."

Quick Hits: Books in Prison

In contrast to the UK government which recently banned the sending of books to prisoners in an attempt to implement an incentive scheme for good behavior, prisoners in Italy will soon have the opportunity to reduce their sentences by reading. Three days will be removed from a prisoner's sentence for each book read, to a maximum of 48 days per year (16 books each year). The books must be more than 400 pages in length and comic books will not count. Although the two schemes have been described as opposing, they do share some interesting parallels. In the UK, books are acknowledged to be a highly desired reward reflecting the powerful interest that prisoners have in book and reading. And in the UK, the scheme acknowledges the positive impact that books can have on prisoner's. It is indeed a powerful combination that books may yield, being both beneficial and attractive to those in need of rehabilitation.

Quick Hit: Teaching Blind Children to Read

The photoblog Humans of New York presents photographs of New Yorkers accompanied by a quote from the person. As you might imagine, all sorts of fascinating people are uncovered. One individual who appeared recently describes his initiative to help blind children learn how to read. "If a child isn’t proficient in reading by 3rd grade, their HS dropout rate is 4x higher. So I’m trying to develop a system to help blind children develop literacy as soon as possible." There are unique challenges to teaching children born blind how to read from an early age. Check out the post to hear his innovative approach. There is also a Humans of New York book available.

Quick Hits: Ann Patchett's Bookstore

Ann Patchett wrote an absolutely lovely article in The Atlantic magazine that describes how she came to own an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee called Parnassus Books. It's a touching tale of foolhardy serendipity, but also one about writers, readers, and what bookstores mean for a community. Well worth reading. A version of the piece also appears in her new book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which you can purchase online from Parnassus. Below is a short video by The Atlantic that gives you a peek into the bookstore.

Quick Hits: Project Bookmark

Project Bookmark Canada is a fascinating initiative to place poems and stories in the exact physical location where they take place. A passage from Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion was placed at the Bloor Street Viaduct here in Toronto, for example. The exercise raises a number of interesting questions regarding fiction and reality, and how fiction can shape our sense of place. It reminds me a bit of how avid filmgoers will sometimes make pilgrimages to places where a scene was filmed. Although New Zealand is not actually Tolkien's Middle Earth, there is something that makes that fantastical realm seem more real upon discovering these somewhat other-worldly landscapes here in our own world.

Quick Hit: The Internet and Deep Reading

In an opinion piece published today in the Guardian, author and journalist Steven Poole argues that the Internet isn't responsible for a decline in "deep reading," but rather it helps to foster it. It appears to be a direct response to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which attributes a waning attention span and growing inability to read long form text to the Internet. I would be interested in hearing from our readers on their opinion of both pieces. Does the Internet foster a superficial approach to text that relies heavily on skimming and skipping? Or does the Internet provide a new forum for a greater number and more variety of long-form pieces that cater to a broader wealth of interests? Are both true?

Monday Quick Hits

Due to some unfortunate (but not unduly serious) circumstances, there will be no regularly-scheduled blog post for today. Our normal posting will resume next Monday. In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy the following:

One of our earliest posts, from Keith Oatley, on Dante.
The Toronto Public Library's latest "Who's Reading What?" column, featuring an OnFiction editor.
The Underground New York Public Library.

Our apologies again for this disruption in service.

Quick Hit: Bibliomat

The Monkey's Paw, a unique antiquarian bookshop in Toronto (see sample stock here), now boasts a random book-dispenser known as the Bibliomat. Built by Craig Small, this vending machine delivers interesting titles, chosen randomly, for only $2. We rarely find ourselves in possession of a book that we haven't chosen, unless it is a gift. So in some ways this device is a marvellous way to treat yourself to a gift, given by a friend with exceptional taste.

Below is a video of the Bibliomat in action.

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

Quick Hit

The Guardian Newspaper hosts this interesting article on using the metaphor of friendship to describe our relationship with books and authors. A thought-provoking read.

Quick Hit: 2012 IGEL Conference in Montreal

The academic society with aims that are closest to those of OnFiction is the International Society for Empirical Research on Literature (click here). The society was founded in 1987, and it's usually known as IGEL, which is the acronym for the Society's name in German. It holds conferences every two years, usually alternating between Europe and North America. The next conference is in Montreal, Canada, between 7 and 10 July 2012. Recently the Society started its own journal, Scientific Study of Literature. If you are a researcher, please consider joining the Society, coming to the next conference, and contributing to the journal.

Quick Hit: In the Minds of Others

For those of you who like print magazines, the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, on the book-stands now, has an article about our research. The article is entitled "In the Minds of Others." In it, I show how the results of our research group (Raymond Mar, Maja Djikic, and me, with some other associates) indicate that reading fiction isn't as solitary as it seems. It's social interaction with people of the mind. It has psychological effects, which include understanding people better and enabling us to change ourselves.