Timothy Erik Strom (Southern Cross): Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps. From Penn State, a series called the Geospatial Revolution Project. In the emerging field of “spatial humanities,” scholars are using mapmaking software to recreate vanished landscapes and envision history as it really happened. Mapmaking has a new challenge far more involved than depicting the traits of the physical world. A new world order of maps (Google and MapQuest) changes how we engage with cities. Creative Cartography: Here are 7 must-read books about maps. Restoring a 1770 map, found at the Brooklyn Historical Society, entailed boiling old books to get the right aged color. From Strange Maps, Fank Jacobs on Nazis up the Mississippi and other Axis invasion scenarios. From GeoJunk, while some artists use paint or charcoal, the artist Nikki Rosato prefers to make portraits of the human body using old road maps; and here is a brief history of maps. Ingenious Flat Earth Theory revealed in old map, with the Earth as an inverse toroid. From GeoCurrents, Martin W. Lewis on a key to map of geopolitical anomalies; delusional mapping: A review of The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen; and an article on microstates in cartograms. Maps with only words, known as “Typographic Maps”, are becoming increasingly popular (and more). Know your meme: “The World According to X” (a.k.a “How X Sees the World” or “The X World”) is a series of world map satires that are labeled with various geopolitical stereotypes and jokes to reflect the biased worldview of country X. Everybody, meet Kergolus: This little furry thing is a geo-mascot, shaped like the territory it symbolises. Mapping the human condition: What the empire of love has to do with the intellect forest and the bay of agoraphobia.
Monday, August 8, 2011
a new world order of maps
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Blogger Lit or Meet the Urbloggers
What Bloggers Owe Montaigne
November 12, 2010 | by Sarah Bakewell
The weekend newspapers are full of them. Our computer screens are full of them. They go by different names—columns, opinion pieces, diaries, blogs—but personal essays are alive and well in the twenty-first century. They flourish just as they did in James Thurber’s and E. B. White’s twentieth-century New York, or in the nineteenth-century London of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.
No end—but there was a beginning. The essay tradition blossomed in English-speaking countries only after being invented by a sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. His contemporary, the English writer Francis Bacon, also used the title Essays, but his were well-organized intellectual inquiries. While Bacon was assembling his thoughts neatly, the self-avowedly lazy nobleman and winegrower Montaigne was letting his run riot on the other side of the Channel. In his Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580 and later expanded into larger editions, he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation.
Without hesitation or combing through the classics (maybe later), I nominate Montaigne, essays published in 1580, as likeliest candidate for 'first among urbloggers.' Montaigne's invention, the literary form of essay, a short subjective treatment of a given topic, is the made-for-blogging genre, just as aphorisms are for tweeting.
Fast forwarding to the Enlightenment, salons and London Coffee House culture, writers there would have taken to blogging like second nature and put us all to shame.