About

This site is an effort to collectively annotate Cory Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother. It provides a copy of the book, with the ability to annotate it paragraph-by-paragraph. It is intended to be a resource for those discussing the book and interested in uncovering the facts beneath this piece of fiction.

Objective

The aim is, in part, an effort to “fact check” the book. Of course, the work is fictional, and so this may seem like an odd objective. However, as a piece of speculative fiction, it is built on the idea that the technologies and social events depicted are plausible. The aim, then, is to see whether these elements of the book rest on existing technologies, whether there are useful analogues, and whether the text reflects a deeper reality.

To borrow from Wikipedia, we are looking for cases where it seems a citation is needed. The afterwords and bibliography both suggest that Doctorow intends this to be a fiction firmly rooted in reality. Building on these existing efforts–as well as the teaching guide and companion “instructables”–this site hopes to provide specific references to technologies and other elements as they appear in the text.

How

This site uses a Wordpress plugin called digress.it. Click on any of the chapters on the left, and you will see a small icon next to each paragraph, with the number of annotations (if any) for that paragraph. To read the annotations, just click on the icon. You can then annotate as well, if you like.

Who

Anyone can annotate. Simply add your annotation. To reduce spam, all annotations are held for moderator approval. And you should read through the rest of this page (especially “What’s good” and “What’s bad”) and recognize that moderators are likely to delete your annotation if it is not well documented or does not serve the mission of the site.

What’s Good

Generally, we are trying to create footnotes for the story. That means, chiefly, citing material that supports the example, refutes it, or explains it further. For example, on the very first page, the novel deals with “leet speak.” A reader not familiar with cyberculture might assume that this is an invention of the author–invented languages being far from uncommon, especially in science fiction. A good annotation would be a link to the Wikipedia article. Even better would be a few words of explanation, and a link to Wikipedia article. Better still would be an explanation, a bit of a history, and citations to academic articles tracing the history of the practice.

Personal knowledge is not enough (unless you are a well-known expert willing to stand by your words). You need to link to materials that support your position.

In some cases, background regarding a referenced place, person, machine, or practice is needed. Do the descriptions of the effects of tear gas on a crowd jibe with how crowds have actually reacted? Do the strategies employed echo to historical examples of resistance? Which ones and how?

What’s Bad

While your personal opinion on the role of police in society, or a story about how you once hacked your own school’s surveillance network, are not really “bad,” they also don’t fit in with what we are trying to do here. It’s cool: you should put them on your blog.

Likewise, this is not intended as a work of literary criticism. If you love a passage or hate it, or think it “works” as part of the story or not, this isn’t the place for that. Again, such criticism certainly has its place, and I encourage you to set up a site for that purpose (putting together diggress.it and Wordpress is not difficult).

You should try to draw on credible sources. This means, in most cases, sources that are traditionally authoritative. Naturally, given that the novel deals with issues of authority, traditional authoritativeness may be a problem. Nonetheless, we expect the use of critical sources. When there are good academic sources, these are preferred to less scholarly work, for example. And new metrics also apply: if the source is trusted by lots of trusted sources, there’s a decent chance we’ll trust it too. The MIT Lockpicking Guide is not scholarly in the traditional sense, but has been around long enough and referenced widely enough to be considered a good source of information, for example.

Questions?

Those of us working on this–initially as part of a course at Quinnipiac University–are interested in your thoughts. At the very end of the list on the left, you will find a comments “chapter.”

- Alex Halavais, August 2009