No Radar for New Ideas

?

What shows up on the world’s radar, and what does not?

I find it fascinating (and in this instance I suspect anyone interested in minority cultures, languages, or writing systems may find it fascinating) that a new idea, viewpoint, or approach may be invisible because certain algorithms simply don’t recognize it.

My new book An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets has just been released in the UK. (Publication in the US is November, for some reason.) It’s a book about minority scripts, why they are important to their cultures of origin, and why they are endangered.

The fact that this is an almost unexplored field has clearly left the Amazon algorithm, for one, utterly stumped. This is the algorithm, by the way, that is also stumped by innovative use of language: for weeks it refused to list my book Writing Beyond Writing because it assumed that phrase was some kind of syntactical mistake.

The idea of arranging my latest book in the form of an atlas is really just a way to help readers get a handle on a new and complex subject, but the Amazon algorithm, baffled by the topic, realized it could at least understand what an atlas is.

Consequently, Amazon’s best-seller ranking makes no mention whatever about minority cultures, endangered languages, or world writing systems.

Instead, it gives me a weird mix of pleasure and frustration to report that An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets is on the Amazon best-seller lists for Historical Atlases & Maps (Books), Alphabet Reference, and Atlases (Books) and has cracked the Top 100 in Geographical History, Teaching Aids for Geography, and Earth Sciences & Geography References.

Are people really buying the book as a teaching aid for geography classes?

More importantly, is anyone in my actual target readerships—linguists, anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, human rights and social justice advocates, and above all anyone interested in the astonishingly rich, new field of minority writing—actually aware the book even exists, given that the Amazon algorithm, for one, apparently has its radar pointed in other directions?

?Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project.

?