Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
November 12, 2009
The chart thing, I mean. Choose your own adventure. Thanks to Matt Frost.
November 11, 2009
Thanks to Ari Schulman for the link. As always, click on the photo for a larger version.
November 11, 2009
This post by a student who’s frustrated by professorial use and misuse of PowerPoint got slashdotted and as a result has a boatload of comments. The best/saddest/most intriguing of them is this one: I’ve been a computer science professor for many years at a very good university, and in most of my classes I try to *only* use...
November 11, 2009
If that’s your goal, you need this device, don’t you? But read these thoughts from Nicholas Carr first: Think about it. When people originally started talking about Twitter, the first thing they’d always mention was the 140-character limit that the service imposes on tweets. So short! Who can say anything in 140 lousy...
November 10, 2009
Covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s books, designed as specimen boxes in homage to the author’s second career as a lepidopterist. Gorgeous.
November 10, 2009
When she says this, anyway: If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps...
November 9, 2009
The Lord of the Rings (etc.) chart I posted the other day is not as good an example of my chart-fascination as the John Bunyan chart that came before. The LOTR timeline is an Edward Tufte-ish kind of chart: what Tufte calls “the visual display of quantitative information.” And Tufte’s explorations of how quantitative information...
November 6, 2009
November 4, 2009
Gentle readers, I’ll be traveling for the next few days and will probably be unable to post. However, the occasional tweet may be forthcoming, so check out the Text Patterns Twitter widget to the right of this entry — or, better yet, follow me. Um, not literally, just on Twitter.
November 3, 2009
I’ve written elsewhere about my discovery of irony, but today I wish to remember my discovery of criticism. Unfortunately, this requires me to disclose that one of the first LPs I bought was by Grand Funk Railroad — their first “greatest hits” recording, appearing when they had been around for about three years. I had...