Kathryn Cramer

Just Played with Marquis Who's Who on the Web

I just played with Marquis Who's Who on the Web, the online Who's Who database. (You can get a free 1-week trial membership. It's pretty cool. I could spend many happy hours being nosy doing research in there. You can, for example, search by zip code and find out which famous people live near you.

I love my Ancestry.com subscription, which I use a couple of times a day as a phone book and such. Marquis is in the process of putting all the bios from their many publications into one big, searchable database, and they're also including the historical books. So this is much better than having copies of the books. I haven't jumped yet, but I'm thinking about getting a subscription.

It's not perfect. It took me three tries to find my own listing. First Name = Kathryn, Last Name = Cramer didn't do it. A search by zip code didn't do it either, but did pick up my husband's listing (plus a long list of people around here I might want to get to know). But searching on Cramer by itself did the trick, picking up both my dad's listing and my own.

Also, one can now pay them an annual fee to put your own listing on the web if you want it to be publicly available to the ordinary Internet user. This seems to be a very new service, since a Google search of the site where these are hosted turned up only a few dozen entries; when I inquired about pricing, there was some confusion about how much it costs. But in these days when anyone can become your biographer whether they know anything about you or not, it looked to me like a useful service.

How to Write an Author Bio: A Tutorial for Wikipedians & Others

We write three kinds of author bios in this household:

1. short story introductions for year's best collections (which have tight wordage constraints);
2. longer author notes for our larger historical anthologies. (A complete set of our author bios from The Ascent of Wonder is available online.) These give more detail on the author and are also usually used to carry on the overall argument of the book.
3. And the occasional longer biographical essay, which usually ends up in some form in The New York Review of Science Fiction.

Because of my recent experience with Wikipedian "editing," I am considering releasing the complete set of author bios from the anthologies of both David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer to the Internet under Creative Commons in order to raise the level of author bio discourse. (There is a certain amount of hard labor involved in this, and I haven't figures out how to do it yet. Suggestions welcome.)

Since our story notes usually go with a particular story, I'm going to skip the discussion of how to position the story in the note, and instead focus on what information needs to be assembled about the author.

Here are the basic pieces of info we collect before writing a note:

• The author's correct name and any known pseudonyms
• year of and place of birth and death (if deceased)
• where the author lives and minor family details
• the URL of the author's website. Failing that, the URL of the best tribute site. If the author has a blog, the URL of the blog.
• A brief summary of the highlights of the authors career and life. This may or may not include a summary of awards.
• An interesting quote from the author, usually taken from online interviews but sometimes elicited in correspondence. Do collect listings of interviews,  the more the better.
• The author's three most recent books, with brief descriptions (I love Amazon as a source for this info!)
• The author's three most important books or stories
• Relationships to others in the field or other notable people (Greg Bear is married to Poul Anderson's daughter; Rudy Rucker is the great grand son of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; etc.)
• The authors significance in terms of trends within the science fiction field (Bruce Sterling was the chief spokesman for the cyberpunk movement)
• Other interesting aspects of an author's life. Other areas of achievement.
• I suppose I should add "in the tradition of . . ." but that is such a tried cliche of flap copy that we usually leave it out.

Lists of authors' awards and complete bibliography are usually available elsewhere. Link to them. But if the usual sources are inaccurate, provide better info. And finally, cover good new writers and cover people no one knows much about.

The most important thing to understand about writing an author bio is that this is a form of literary characterization. Details that enhance the bio by making the author a more rounded character may be crucial even if not otherwise relevant.

A Proposal: SF Author Bios Should Be Moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki

Preface: In the olden days, before the invention of sliced bread and the can opener, those of us seeking info on science fiction authors on the Internet used to get it from the Internet Science Fiction Data Base (ISFDB). It was absolute hell when we anthologists were working on deadline writing story notes for a book and the ISFDB went down. And one of the things they used to have sometimes were author bios. And this was good.

For bandwidth reasons, I gather, the ISFDB abdicated this function to Wikipedia. I  think this was a serious mistake which needs to be corrected. From the ISFDB FAQ:

The old ISFDB had a place for author biographies; where did they go? The ISFDB database layout is great for well-structured data like titles, series names, and ISBN's. It doesn't work so well for free-form text like an author biography. The ISFDB author biographies were always an area of great churn, and mediating submitter differences could be difficult. We're now relying on Wikipedia as the location for author biographies, and we formally support linking an author's bibliography to their Wikipedia biography.

Proposal: I propose that science fiction author bios be moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki.

After a brief experience with Wikipedia, its editors strike me as a pack of officious trolls whose main concern is to make sure that you don't actually know the people you are writing about. The science fiction field doesn't work that way. I know hundreds (maybe over a thousand) science fiction writers, editors, and fans. Many, many of them could be described as my "associates."  Am I connected to most members of the professional science fiction community in some way? You bet.

I've helped run a Hugo-nominated SF semiprozine for a couple of decades, I edit two year's best volumes, and am married to one of the most eminent editors in the field. But this connectedness holds true of really a lot of the people doing the actual biographies: Perhaps their connections are not so visible or so obvious, but the SF field is like one big extended family. We've all slept on each other's couches. We've bought each other drinks. We marry each other's daughters. . . . It's Clan Fandom.

And of those creating biographies that don't know their subjects, what they are mostly doing is lifting the ISFDB bibliographies wholesale and transplanting the content over to Wikipedia.

So lets have a revolution. Let's take the SF and fantasy bios over to the ISFDB Wiki and pull out of Wikipedia. Can we do this?

Or have I misjudged the Wikipedia sysops? Are they really reasonable people who will let people who actually know what they are talking about write there?

SEE ALSO: Jed Hartman's mediation on the state of affairs at Wikipedia: Wikipedia and sf. He provides an excellent example of exactly what I'm talking about:

Somewhat similarly, [Teresa Nielsen Hayden] wrote a great article at Wikipedia a while back, about Roger Elwood, that consisted mostly of personal anecdotes. It was well-written and full of personality (like some of the old Britannica articles by major authors once were), and I couldn’t bring myself to attach a note to it saying “This is, unfortunately, not the right style or approach for Wikipedia.” But, sadly, it wasn’t. And the article has subsequently been rewritten to fit Wikipedia better, though the current version (last I checked) contains a link to TNH’s version. The Talk page for that article is a perfect example of clash of Wikipedia culture with sf culture: TNH gave a long and impassioned and compelling argument in favor of her version, but unfortunately her approach was wrong according to established Wikipedia policy.

According to the rules and standards explained to me last night, none of the great living critics (TNH being one) ought to be allowed to write about sf writers.

Also, since ISFDB now has a Wiki, it makes sense to move the Wiki entries on its writers closer to the source from which many of the SF writer bios are lifted.

SEE ALSO, John McDaid:

Let's take a concrete example, an icon of the sf field, Damon Knight. A driving force in the Golden Age of science fiction, author, editor, founder of SFWA and Clarion, I mean, you just can't overestimate his impact on the field. Here's what he gets in Wikipedia.

What's not there is precisely the kind of insight offered by people who knew Damon.

See also Evil Genius Chronicles: Science Fiction Authors, Revolt from Wikipedia!

Although there is a lot to be said about the value of Wikipedia, the one time I got a glimpse into its governance, I was pretty shocked. When my bio was removed from there, the key question was whether or not Dave Slusher the podcaster was the same guy who did the radio show Reality Break in the 90s. The issue was solved when one of them concluded “that fact was not possible to determine.” Of course, the “above the fold” link from this blog (which hosts the podcast) to the radio show or the fact that searching in my search box turns up posts about me doing the radio show didn’t matter, that fact was not determinable. Umm, OK.

I guess I should add that I have two kinds of vested interests in the matter of where the authoritative author bios in SF reside on the web and that they are any good.

1. First of all, material generated by this household, in the form of story notes, essays of our own, and essays published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, is often the source of the source of the source of what factoids about authors end up on Wikipedia.
2. Secondly, because we regularly use the Internet as a research tool when composing such things, we need there to be author bios by people who actually know something about the people who they're writing about, not just bios by people who know how to Google. (I know how to Google, too!)

In terms of my ability to cite sources unacceptable to Wikipedia, I don't thing it would cut much ice in the troll cave to mention that I live in one of the best libraries of science fiction lit & crit in the country. We have -- you know -- books, actual books here. 30,000 of them.

UPDATE: So let's rally the troops and move it all to ISFDB Wiki if they'll take us back. Here's my favorite quote from the "editors" so far:

You shouldn't have created the page in the first place. If you are really notable, someone else would have done so.

This was a direct response to my complaint when she cut the citations to articles mentioning me in the NYT, Forbes, the BBC, etc.

UPDATE: See also the official blog of the Science Fiction Book Club and Mark Bernstein.

UPDATE: It is interesting to consider the issues raised by this situation in light of this blog post, Medias Bias vs. 'The Blog Mob', contrasting the main stream media and the blogging community. It discusses a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed attacking blogging. 

I imagine that’s one story the WSJ has been tempted to pull from their site - and the four comments they allowed through were likely just a smattering of the number they actually received in response to these elitist statements (my own at least, and those of several others I know, didn’t past muster). And, this is exactly where blogging has some substance and weight - as its very nature invites feedback. If technology has pulled people out of community town hall meetings, fostering television-fed apathy amongst its citizenry, then blogging technology is bringing them back.

If a blog has any kind of readership, incorrect or unbalanced reporting is quickly met with checks and balances, or even a scathing rebuke. If I put forward an unsound case, I’ll be dragged over the coals soon enough - having to reshape my views and restate my case. But that’s the aim - right? We live and learn.

[Link to the WSJ Op Ed., The Blog Mob  "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles." ]

This current Wikipedia situation essentially cast me in the role of a dour member of the main stream media and the Wikipedians in the roll of the blogger. This strikes me as deeply ironic, since the Wikipedians accosting me were deeply contemptuous of blogs and bloggers.

But what, after all, is Wikipedia but the world's biggest group blog?

A further interesting note: BoingBoing shares a letter from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to Rick Jeliffe who is at the center of the "Wikigate 07" (teehee) controversey:

I hope you will publicly reject [Mircrosoft's offer to edit Wikipedia for pay] as being unethical. Point out to [Microsoft] that people have been banned from Wikipedia permanently for doing what they are asking you to do. We consider it a grave violation of community trust, and Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for asking.

My personal take is that the Microsoft controversey, in which Microsoft attempted to engage Jeliffe to corrrect errors in Wikipedia on their behalf, reflects more on problems with Wikipedia than with Microsoft; Wales's own attitudes promote the kind of bureaucratic paranoia and suspicion of expertise I experienced.

In Wales's utopia, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The elite of the WIkipedia editors, entrusted with special powers by Wales et al. act as a form of secret police—or if that seems too harsh a metphor, anti-bodies in the midst of a raging autoimmune disease—and, of course, the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low. 

Truth is not the point. The point is control.

Joseph A. Cafasso: A Call for Information

Cafasso in Outfoxed (2004) about 34 minutes in.

I am interested in receiving information concerning the life and activities of former Fox News Military & Counterterrorism Editor Joseph A. Cafasso aka Joe Cafasso, Jay Cafasso, Gerry Blackwood, Gerard Pal Blackwood, Jay Mosca, J. Mosca, James Mosca, Joseph Mosca, Jay Anthony, Tom Adams, and Jake Adams.

He stole my computer and owes me about twenty grand.

Of particular interest are:

• other known aliases
• information concerning debts & unpaid financial obligations
• incidents involving computer equipment or credit cards
• medical conditions
• employment history
• documentation such as photographs, videotapes, audiotapes
• transcripts or other documentation concerning public events he attended
• documents he presented

Information can be provided to me via the comment section below, or via email to kathryn.cramer@gmail.com.

UPDATE: Many thanks to those of you who have written to me already. Your help is much appreciated.

FURTHER UPDATE: For the record, I have no connection with the various Jack Idema-connected disingenuous new attack blogs devoted to the subject of Cafasso. They display an alarming lack of empathy for both Cafasso's targets and his family.