Information is many places along the way

UCBerkeley video: Cognitive Science C103 - Lecture 3 History of Information More

Remember Spain

Spain is definitely high on my personal "places along the way" list... read and experienced IRL...

James R. Martel (SFSU): What Equality Would Actually Look Like: Lessons from Anarchist Spain on Equality, Temporality and the Art of the Possible .... The Genius of El Cid: How the Spanish superhero — outnumbered and under siege — broke out of Valencia, crushed a Muslim army, and inspired Christian crusaders. 

An interview with Javier Fernandez Sebastian on the Ibero-american world as another political powerhouse for modernity during the Revolution Age, thanks to the analysis of the history of concepts in the English and Portuguese speaking Atlantic. 

.... Many will remember Spain’s socialist prime minister for his mishandling of the economic crisis, but his legacy in other areas — particularly social reform — is substantial. 

From Books and Ideas, Jeanne Moisand on protectionism and the birth of Catalanism .... A review of Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation: Gibraltar in the Modern Legal Context by Keith Azopardi. 

.... Atlas Obscura visits the Josep Pujiula Labyrinth, a wonderland replication in progress by one persistent man.

Read all of Remember Spain at Omnivore

On the Travelogue

The Significance of the Travelogue

It seems as inevitable that voyaging should make men free in their minds as that settlement within a narrow horizon should make men timid and servile. HG Wells, 1922

The first men were wanderers and their lives, if brutish and short, were a journey too, marked by constant movement and discovery. Unsettled and unencumbered, early man explored the globe. He left Africa 70,000 years ago. Thirty thousand years later, he reached Australia, and by the time a new man – the farmer – was sowing the Fertile Crescent’s first crops, the wanderer was navigating the Amazon River in a dugout canoe.

Agriculture brought settlement, cities and, six or seven thousand years ago, writing. Although man first wrote to keep account books, by 2600 BCE he was starting to inscribe his people’s tales in clay and stone, giving a stable, solid structure to narratives told loosely by earlier men. Writing made final what had been fluid before, which suited man’s new stability and the growing scale of his society, and like everybody who has sought a place in the world since, the first writers were primarily concerned with explaining their origins.

read the rest of On the Travelogue at Old World Wandering: A Travelogue

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Reading as an unrelenting vice

Books are places along the way just as reading is transportations as well as an unrelenting vice. Bora Cosic (an unfamiliar writer but one with whom I share reading habits and books and am now encouraged more like compelled to explore) writes about the reading practices of a number of writers, most if not all European, as well as interweaving comments about his own throughout.

But I am not alone. I have read books that no one else has read, says Paul Valéry. Books from technical disciplines, these interest me. Balzac systematically read dictionaries, not specific entries but from start to finish, as if following a narrative. How many interesting things there are to read, which at first glance might seem irrelevant and meaningless. One woman expected Erasmus to write something that would help her husband get a grip on himself, tells Roland Barthes. Or as Claudio Magris mentions, Montecuccoli wrote his aphorisms on the art of war in a Stettin prison, during his hiatus from the Thirty Years War. Were I a poet, I would dedicate the most beautiful poem to roux soup, admits Bela Hamvas. "A Meditation Upon a Broomstick" is the title of an essay by Swift. I would give everything to find out what a German wrote about a lemon peel, as Rousseau says, what Erasmus wrote to bring a neurotic man to reason, or Montecuccoli's "Art of War".

 

Reading has only recently become a silent act. Two hundred years ago everyone read aloud.

Bora Cosic: My unrelenting vice (05/09/2011) in signandsight

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A List Apart: Articles: The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

That's what I've been doing in one form or another as long as I've been online, well ahead of the buzz . Recognition is past due but I hope it doesn't ruin the fun for me.

The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I've watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can't help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web?

Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content.

Read the rest of A List Apart: Articles: The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

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