Ersatz engagement IS numbing — from sports on television (except, perhaps, with a crowd of fans who share your passion) to pre-cooked meals.
The entire purpose of a true liberal arts education is to awaken us to the pleasures of understanding and appreciating that which takes time to accustom one’s self to: fine art; good writing; [...]
Gina Trapani’s post on Flashbake led me to Cory Doctorow’s discussion:
Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes [...]
Mol, Annemarie, & Law, John. (2004). Embodied action, enacted bodies: The example of Hypoglycaemia. Body & Society, 10(2-3), 43-62.
This article draws on the same study as Mol’s Logic of Care, but makes a somewhat more straightforward argument regarding the way our culture conceives of bodies. Instead of seeking objective knowledge (like what we know of [...]
I’ve long been quoting Johnson’s Tool for Thought essay on his use of DevonThink as a research database. I’ve just come across a post he made to BoingBoing updating the approach he outlined earlier. After collecting all his snippets of text and quotes, he drags relevant ones into chapter folders, creating a first round of [...]
Also tagged research, writing processRead this post on if:book today re: using Heidegger to contest Birkerts’ arguments against the Kindle. Not too interested in that argument, but Heidegger’s terms here resonate somewhat with me. The idea of “readiness-to-hand” and the way all tools exist in a network/environment connects with Gibson’s idea of affordances. Here’s Piepenbring’s gloss on Heidegger:
In his [...]
Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog : Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007.
Video screencast of a writer discussing their use of OneNote for draft management. This video underlines my growing dissatisfaction with this program–the writer is essentially overtaken by the binder metaphor, and ends up thinking of it explicitly like a file [...]
Alex Reid has been posting some really interesting work on his blog lately, and a post today really caught my attention. He points out that older folks assume that radical poetry of the 1960s is necessary for current radicalism but miss the idea that such poetry was an emergent form at its time, like Twitter [...]
Also tagged emergent media, TwitterNo time to delve or comment on these things, putting them here as a way of committing myself to looking at them in more depth and giving them their own post tomorrow [note: most of these are from Rob Walker's blog]:
“Creating a New Craft Culture Conference.” From the site:
Is craft creating a new culture? The [...]
Also tagged craft, indie craftersTracing some of the breadcrumbs from Mol’s book led me to Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, partly out of curiosity as a dog owner myself and partly out of interest Haraway’s work on technoscience. A quick read (the book is more of a pamphlet) with some interesting nuggets in both respects. One quote in [...]
Also tagged dogsIn looking for ways to frame my research on wrist pain and ergonomics w/r/t typing and computing (for my upcoming Computers and Writing presentation), I ran into this slim book by Annemarie Mol. Familiar with her work in Actor-Network Theory, I was interested to see how she’d use those insights in a work clearly aimed [...]
Also tagged health