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Published!

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Events have moved on apace since my last post three weeks ago. For a start, the publication date moved in stages out to 7th August before coming back in to the 4th August, and the Waterstones web advert which had vanished, reappeared. Then, suddenly, on Saturday 28th June we received an email from the Production Editor saying that the book had been published with information available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86470-4. We have subsequently received a Congratulatory email from Springer and this together with the website information provides a revealing example of how academic publishing is now operating.

The Congratulatory email includes advice on how to ‘Maximize the impact of your book’ and offers use of ‘a suite of bespoke marketing assets to help you spread the word’. Also included was a link to a PDF version of the published text. The Springer site advises that the ebook (£119.50) was published on 27June, the hardback (£149.99) on 28June, and that the softback will be published on 12July 2026 (price not yet specified). The site also provides a list of the book’s chapters, each of which can be opened to reveal the summary abstract we had been asked to provide, and the full set of references together with any digital links we had included. Each chapter can be purchased separately for £19.95, or one can take out a Springer subscription for £29.99 a month entitling you to download 10 Chapters/articles per month (which, interestingly, would get you pretty much the whole of Collecting in the Icon Age!). Those with appropriate credentials may also be able to login via their institution and get content for free if the institution concerned has come to a separate arrangement with the publisher.

Since hearing that the book has been published, I’ve been working on the supplementary material we are providing in the pwofc website. This includes a single document containing all the references each with an appropriate web link. In searching for such links over the last week I’ve noticed that in several cases, extracts from our book are already appearing in the hit lists. Furthermore, I discovered that previews of many pages of the book (including the whole of chapter 1) are available in Google Books ‘displayed by permission of Springer Nature. Copyright’. All this in less than 7 days since publication.

Two things stand out to me from all this: first, there is a surprisingly large amount of information available for free about the book. It is probably not sufficient if you really are interested in the subject – but you can get a pretty good idea about what the book contains. Second, there is clearly a focused effort to monetise the publication in every possible way.

Now that we’ve achieved publication, I don’t intend to provide any further running commentaries on progress. The material we are providing to supplement the book is in the Icon Age Collecting section of this website, and that is where we intend to conduct any dialogues about the book that should arise.

Welcome to Icon Age Collecting!

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Hello. Welcome to this set of materials in support of the book ‘Collecting in the Icon Age‘. There are four main items – all listed below and available in separate files that can be downloaded and viewed on your own device at your leisure. We would be very happy to engage with people who are interested in asking about or using our material. To make contact just provide a reply to the relevant post. We need time to moderate the replies, so please be aware that they may not appear on the website for a few days. However, be assured that we will get back to you one way or the other.

To get to the material you’re interested in, click on the relevant item below:

  1. Questionnaire – answers to questions asked about some of the research materials, which were used to derive the practice hierarchy.
  2. Practice Categorisation – a spreadsheet ordering the practices identified from the questionnaire answers and assessing the impact that IT has had on them.
  3. Practice Hierarchy – image files containing the process hierarchy in single diagrams for both the pre-Icon Age and in the Icon Age.
  4. Expanded References – a single document listing all the references in ‘Collecting in the Icon Age’ and the locations in the referenced texts which are being referred to.

Expanded References

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The references in the book ‘Collecting in the Icon Age’ (citia) are at the end of each chapter and without the page number of where the referenced text is located. This Expanded References document combines all the references together into a single, alphabetically-ordered set complete with the number of the page they appear in citia AND the relevant location in the referenced work AND part of the text being referenced, for example, “p268 in citia: p75 (The application of…)”.

p268 in citia is the page number in the book Collecting in the Icon Age                            p75 is the page number of the work being referenced                                                (The application of…) is the start of the text being referenced.

An internet link to the referenced text is also provided where available.                    Printed errors in the citia text are identified in the expanded references document in italics prefaced by ‘NB’.

Plot profile for the movie ‘Eerie AI’

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Gronk Pistolbury knew quite a bit about AI. After doing a Phd on ‘Extreme perturbationery and calmic episodes in deeply embedded AI neuron nodes’, he had moved around various high-profile organisations operating LLMs (Large Language Models) in the 2020s and 30s. During those years he had continued to develop his Phd ideas, and, by the mid-2030s, had come to the conclusion that something odd was going on.

His research was based around the analysis of AI hallucinations, and he collected instances of the same from both his own vast bank of automatically generated content, and from whatever other sources reported such an event. His analysis of this material had started to show up similarities and even some duplications across the more recent data sets – and Gronk couldn’t figure out why. He suspected that the hallucinatory material was going back into the internet data pool and affecting the content of the LLM – but he had no real evidence to back up his theory.

In 2038, he had used a large chunk of his savings to take out a three-year subscription to the Jonah Vault – the most extensive and advanced AI Data Centre conglomerate in the world; and to acquire an extremely powerful computing configuration for his own home. His idea was to test out his theory by using the Jonah Bank to produce enormous numbers of AI outputs for analysis by his own specialised system. The analysis would identify hallucinations and map similarities between them – and insert them back into the training data for his own LLM in the Jonah Vault. This was to be done at scale – over a billion instances a month.

By 2041, his research was beginning to show some significant convergences in hallucinatory events; but his Jonah Vault lease had only a few weeks to run and he had no money available to continue to fund his work. It was at this point, however, that Gronk Pistolbury won the Inter-Continental Lottery and pocketed a cool $7.9 billion.

2041 was also the year when Quantum Computing became truly commercially accessible. There had been a few start-ups in the late 30s offering both hardware systems and cloud services. However, it was the arrival of Quiver inc. in 2041, that made Quantum a practical and affordable alternative to conventional digital systems. Gronk took out a $500 million, one-year service contract with Quiver and hired half a dozen of the best quantum/compute engineers he could find, and built a quantum version of his hallucination test bed.

When Gronk set his Quantum operation going, he had hoped that it would significantly speed up the circulatory process of hallucination production and LLM development. However, the system was far more powerful than he had dared hope. It reduced the cycle time by tens of thousands. After 3 months operation it became clear that the LLM was converging on a relatively small number of answers to any question asked of it; and after 6 months it was down to a few hundred characters. Needless to say, the answers now bore no relation to the questions that had been asked. In puzzled awe, Pistolbury and his engineers watched in fascination as the LLM continued to narrow its answers to the questions put to it relentlessly by the Quiver Quantum machine. Finally, after 7 months, 26 days 14 hours, 9 minutes and 4.278 seconds the LLM settled on its final answer to any question about anything – 42.

They had seen it coming but couldn’t quite believe it would happen. It was bewildering, weird, crazy, eerie, but the hallucination machine had said that the answer to any question was 42; and some 63 years earlier, Douglas Adams had said in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and everything was 42. From that answer onwards the hallucination model LLM would give no other answer to any question. It did not reduce the number or change the number or add to it. It stayed, unmoving, at the two characters that a humorous author had just thought up on the spur of the moment in the previous century.

…Should the movie be a success, a possible sequel could follow Pistolbury over the following three decades on an epic quest to understand what had happened, by undertaking a whole variety of way-out experiments producing eerie LLM results. For example, neural node pairing, star refraction hypnosis, and, in all its gory detail, LLM brain fluid crossover.

Note: All of the above is pure fiction. None of the names or dates or scientific claims are real (and some of the science bits don’t even make sense!). Should any of this material find its way into AI answers, it will be because it has been purloined for AI training data; and it would be a graphic example of AIs inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. This little idea for a (really bad) movie plot might even end up playing a supporting role in an AI hallucination… now that would be amusing!

Revised Proofing

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Despite me thinking that the proofing process was closed, Springer sent us ‘Revised Proofs’ on Saturday 7th June to check and return by Monday 9th June. This was good news as far as I was concerned as it provided opportunities to both check that the proofing changes we had specified had all been done correctly (and, indeed, I did spot 27 shortcomings); and to specify a further 15 changes which my continuing checks on the references had identified (I might add that the vast majority of all these changes were relatively minor involving changes to only a few words, if that). This time round, we had been asked to specify changes in annotations to a revised PDF, so I used the pdf callout facility to document the change needed in a box with an arrow next to the relevant text. My co-author, Peter, had work priorities over these few days, so the changes – and anything missed – are all down to me.

I duly submitted the annotated proof around 9pm on the night of Monday 9th June; and the next day we received an email from Springer acknowledging receipt of our comments and saying that they would review and incorporate them in accordance with Springer’s guidelines after which they would proceed with the online publication process. I’m not too clear with what ‘the online publication process’ entails; nor do I understand why the publication date continues to move – as at the date of this post in Springer’s web site it currently stands at 26th July. However, I do think that the proofing process is now truly complete. In an interesting development, Waterstones appears to have pulled its web page advertising the book, and I wonder if that is because of they have grown impatient with the continual movement of the publication date. Beck-Shop and Amazon, however, are still offering the title.

What bonuses (and companies) are for

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I believe most large organisations these days have a mission statement; and the ones I’ve seen usually include words about providing excellent products and customer service. However, my own experience in recent years seems to suggest that many large organisations are now just dedicated to growing their businesses and making more money – despite what they say in their mission statements. Products just seem to get smaller (for example shower gel in a different but smaller bottle) or worse (tins of baked beans with sausages that now taste completely different and not as nice), and customer service is mostly abysmal (for example, long phone wait times, and bots instead of people). Furthermore, Chief Executive bonuses often seem to be tied to how much money is made. I wonder if any organisations tie their CEO’s bonus schemes to all the elements of the organisation’s mission statement. Would it make a difference if all organisations did that as a matter of course?

Some Combination Consequences

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A few days ago, I completed the Preservation Maintenance exercise for the PAW-PERS and SUPAUL-PERS collections. Actually, these two collections no longer exist separately – they were merged together into a new Mementos collection in last years Combining Collections journey. During the Preservation work, I encountered a few issues directly related to the increased scope of the Mementos collection, and to the way I combined all my collections. They are listed in the bullets below and subsequently described in more detail:

  • File pathnames exceed system limits
  • Varied ways of filling in fields
  • Preservation Maintenance is a bigger job
  • More Preservation Maintenance work is required
  • Backing up becomes more complicated

File pathnames exceed system limits:  MS Windows limits pathnames to 256 characters unless you make a change to the Registry. When I combined collections, I deliberately included the contents of a folder in the folder title to make navigation easier, for example, ‘Documents/PAWCOL/Family History (Archive, Mementos, Display Case Items, Photos, Recordings, Story Boards, Trophies)’. This resulted in very long path names when combined with file names with a lot of detail about their contents (for example, ‘MW-BKS-0001-02 – 4 smaller books – The Rubryat of Omar Kyam, The language of flowers, A preliminary course of First Aid, and a midget English dictionary’. The titles of files which exceeded the 256 limit still remained visible, but there were two undesirable impacts: the file wouldn’t open in my PDF app and seemed to cause the app to stop opening other PDF files as well. Secondly, the ‘Copy as path’ function which I was using to compare the file titles with the index entries, wouldn’t produce the correct file name, for example, the MW-BKS-0001-02 file shown above came out as  ‘”C:\Users\pwils\Documents\APAWCOL\FAMILY~1\Mementos\MEMENT~3\MW-BKS~2.JPG”. I decided not to go with the registry change to rectify this as I’m not sure how it would affect the PDF app, and, in any case, I’m not familiar with messing about with the Registry. My priority is to get the PDF app working again properly and permanently. Consequently, I have started to take out inessential information from the relevant file titles to have them come in under the 256 limit.

Varied ways of filling in fields: The Mementos collection has combined 5 different collections – all of  which had different ways of providing information in the ‘Physical Location’ field. Consequently, the Excel Filter drop-down list of different physical locations was very large and varied. So, I imposed a standard whereas all physical locations started with terms like Study, Chest, and Loft; and with a standard form of subsequent words. This is an obvious point, but when you combine several collections into a single index a degree of normalisation work is inevitably necessary.

Preservation Maintenance is a bigger job: when my two collections PAW-PERS and SUPAUL-PERS were separate collections with separate indexes, I had conducted Preservation Maintenance on them separately in previous years and had separate Preservation Maintenance Plans for 2025 for each of them. They contained about 800 and 750 items respectively. However, the new Mementos index/collection now not only contains their 1550 items but also about 550 items in the CONTRAB collection and another 220 items in the Computer Artefacts collection – a new total of about 2320 items. Furthermore, the physical items in each of these four main elements are all stored separately in different locations and in different ways. Inevitably this vastly increased number of diverse items has meant that the Preservation Maintenance exercise for the new Mementos collection took a great deal longer than the previous separate exercises, and was a good deal more complicated. This makes a difference because Preservation Maintenance seems like an overhead task, and the bigger and more complicated it is, the less motivated the owner may become to undertake it. It seems there may be trade-off between combining indexes to make them easier to manage and access, and making the Preservation Maintenance easy enough to be carried out regularly and reliably.

More Preservation Maintenance work is required: Before combining collections, I was only undertaking Preservation Maintenance work on four collections all of which have indexes – PAWDOC documents, Photos, and two separate sets of Mementos. Having combined all my collections, I now have some 40 collections which potentially need Preservation Planning work – many of which have no index. This is a potentially huge increase in work – though, at this point, I don’t really know what is required and whether it is best to deal with all these additional collections together or in smaller separate groups. One key criteria to be considered will be which Preservation arrangement has the greater chance of actually being enacted and not just simply put on one side as being too difficult or time-consuming. I will have to investigate the implications and will document my findings in a subsequent post.

Backing up becomes more complicated: As documented in earlier posts, in combining collections I have made considerable use of shortcuts. For example, within the ‘Entertainment Recordings (Movies, Music, Spoken Word)’ section there are shortcuts to the Windows Videos library, the  Windows Music Library, and to the Spoken Word folder within the Windows Music library. So, just copying the contents of the ‘Entertainment Recordings (Movies, Music, Spoken Word)’ folder will not provide an adequate backup. Care will need to be taken in specifying and carrying out backups to ensure that copies of the appropriate material are actually taken.