Bram Stoker's New Book

I was surprised and amused to receive an email from Amazon today, announcing "Bram Stoker's New Book".  A little annoyed, too.  I find Amazon's attempts to second-guess what I will like on the basis of what I have bought or looked at in the past as annoying as my grandmother's habit of finishing my sentences for me.  It arouses my contrarian instincts.  This can only get worse as Google combines its billion-dollar busybody algorithms to get inside our heads.

But Amazon's message reveals something about the constructs made by these electronic curtain-twitchers.  Like their real-life equivalents, they lack the imagination to understand anything that is not within the bounds of "the normal", or strictly contemporary.  A new edition of a classic is released and it's hey, chick-lit fanciers, Jane Austen's got a new one out!  Well, no, actually.

I would encounter something similar when I used to train new cataloguers.  Even highly-educated people have generally not given much thought to the complexities of what we loosely call "bibliography" i.e. the business of texts, books, authors, and publishing in its full historical context. To most of us, the poems of, say, John Donne simply are.  He wrote 'em, someone published 'em, we read 'em -- simple!  Again, not quite.

Even the basic business of authors' names has to be approached with caution, and some historical and multi-cultural awareness.  Ask a programmer to design a database that includes names and, ten minutes later, they will generally hand back something based on the assumption that a name consists of a forename and/or initials plus surname.  The sophisticated ones will have presumed that the inversion of these elements is necessary ("Donne, John").  Fine, as far as "the normal" (i.e. the contemporary Western name) is concerned.

But what about a mediaeval writer like "Gerald of Wales" a.k.a. "Giraldus Cambrensis", or some aristo like the "Duke of Wellington" a.k.a. "Arthur Wellesley"?  Or a Chinese writer like "Mao Zedong" a.k.a. "Mao Tse-Tung", whose "surname" is actually "Mao"?  Or what about pseudonyms like "Sapper" or Victorian matrons like "Mrs. Humphrey Ward"? And what about so-called corporate authors, ranging from the "Home Office" (which one? the British, Australian, or Canadian Home Office?) to the "Starship Enterprise"?  Come to that, who did write the Bible? Come back in a couple of months, Mr. Programmer, and we'll see what you've got.

If you're worried about recent moves towards Big e-Brother (and you probably should be) I think complexity will be our ally in the resistance to "targeted relevance".  Yes, 80% of web users are simple-minded folk looking for the same stimuli again and again -- Google will have them covered.  But you and me, my friends, we are too multi-faceted, too restless, too unpredictable to be pigeon-holed by any algorithm.  Yes, last week I was looking at Arctic exploration, but this week I'm interested in old pseudo-reflex film cameras that could be adapted for digital TTV ("through the viewfinder") imaging.  I had never heard of TTV two weeks ago.

Who knows what I'll be looking for next week, but I can pretty much guarantee it won't be anything that could be anticipated by the patterns of my past behaviour.  So those "targeted" adverts will just amuse and annoy me, Google and Amazon, and I certainly won't be buying Bram Stoker's "new book".  Didn't you read my post about Dracula?