Accept no substitutes

Patrick’s Two Books and his Two Minds

Former ibiblian Patrick Herron has not one but two books out this past week.

First we have “Text Mining For Genomics-Based Drug Discovery” (VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller Akt.ges.&Co.KG, 2008) of which the publisher says:

The present book re-frames text mining as an approach to automate the generation of novel and interesting information, reviews successful exemplary text mining appli­cations, and examines a case study of a leading pharma­ceutical company within the book’s proposed novelty-generation paradigm. The present book is written for a wide range of professionals and scholars, not only for infor­mation scientists, industry analysts, and pharmaceutical executives, but also for those interested in innovation studies and the automated acceleration of discovery.

A bargin at about 57 cents per page.

The other book, a book of poetry, “Be Somebody” (Effing Press, 2008) is credited to a not quite altered ego of Patrick, Lester, a dummy of sorts, a literal literate wooden head. Poet and critic Ron Silliman says of “Be Somebody”:

Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are – it challenges our desire for the familiar (and nothing is more familiar than my pronoun, not even my name) & holds on like a pit bull with lockjaw for the entire trip, in this instance 58 pages.

Someday, someone is going to publish this book & then we will all have to deal with Lester’s intimate striptease of the self. Until then, it will remain – like the full-length version of Mark Peters’ Men – one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry. Lester has his website. But you have to read the book.

Is there higher praise?

Patrick serves as Research Analyst and Technologist for the Jenkins Chair at Duke University, where he studies innovation networks via the automated analysis of large document collections and teaches new media studies.

1 Comment

  1. Patrick Herron

    tnx Paul!!! w00t!

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