‘A widget?’ I hear you ask. No, I didn’t know either.
But it seems that a widget is a clever little package of information, in this case about my book ‘Out of Silence’. Its publisher, Boydell Press, is embracing widgets as a new kind of promotional material. If you click on this link, the wonders of widgets will open before your eyes. By clicking on the little coloured icons along the top of the widget’s homepage, you can read excerpts from the book, look at pictures, listen to a sound clip of me playing the piano, link to social networks, recommend the book to friends, and order the book from the publisher.
The Schumann “Romanze” is utterly beautiful. Wish you would record a Schumann disc of just piano music . . . with Clara S., too.
The word “widget” long predates our information age. It previously was used to refer to any manufactured item, a generic, man-made thing, in conversations and writings by economists and industrial policy people. When used that way, it was not referring to any specific artefact or object, but to a generic one – in the same way that “a composition” refers to any piece of composed music, and not just the Moonlight Sonata, say, or the Jupiter Symphony.
In the last decade, the word “widget” has additionally come to mean a small computer program, typically running as an application on or alongside some other, larger program, designed to do just one or a small number of tasks.