Category: Storytelling
-
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his…
-
My New “Sketchbook”
—
by
The WordPress blog admin “Dashboard”, where I am currently typing these words. If you look closely, maybe you can see what kinds of things I might be posting here in the future. I have what I fancy to be interesting ideas just about all the time, and usually when this happens I like to start…
-
A Tale of Two Libraries 2: The Morgan Library
I’m no architecture critic, but when I read the New York Times review of the just-reopened Morgan Library & Museum a few weeks ago (with words like “dazzling”, “mesmerizing”, and “triumph”) I knew I had to visit as soon as I could. So immediately following my class field trip the other day, I dismissed my…
-
A Tale of Two Libraries 1: Mapping and Thinking at the NYPL
Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved…
-
Review: Don Quixote
Today (amazingly the 410th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare) I’ve finished reading the classic Don Quixote Parts I and II. What an unforgettable journey, and what an eye-opener! A four hundred year old book (Parts I and II were published in 1605 and 1615) that in many ways…
-
Writing Technologies: From Cuneiform to Cyborg
In a previous post, I mentioned the “Technologies of Writing” show I saw during SXSW at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. Since then, I’ve had several occasions to think about the exhibit again. So I thought I’d go a little more into some of the highlights from the show and share some of the related thoughts…
-
IA Summit 2006: The Science (and Pseudo-Science) of Personas
I attended a fascinating IA Summit presentation by Molecular’s Steve Mulder called “Bringing More Science to Persona Creation“. Lately I’ve been pretty interested in how different companies approach user personas, so this was a must-see for me. I was impressed with Steve’s insights into user persona creation, but this was tempered by a fear that,…
-
A Spime is a Species
There’s a debate going on at Adam Greenfield’s V-2.org (and elsewhere) over Bruce Sterling’s neologism “spime”, a term he coined at Etech 2006 to refer to new technological/networked objects that emerge into human consciousness without a name or an apparent history. In 2001 a new mammal was found in China. This cladogram shows where scientists…