2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

visual storytelling

I just finished reading Bone — all 1300 pages of it. It was okay, I guess. The usual cod-Tolkienian stuff, with the slight twist that the hobbits are Pogo characters. Well-enough told, but . . . meh. I’ve been reading a number of comics-slash-graphic novels, and too many of them are trying to do in comic form what word-only forms...

open letters and closed ones

So far three friends of mine have signed up for letter.ly, and are producing newsletters that I can sign up for. I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I want to support my friends, and I know that it’s hard to write (or do any other skilled labor) for free. Heck, I’ve even thought about signing up for letterl.ly...

ad (non)sense

Micah White is upset: The vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that many people claim not to notice them anymore. Ads line the top and right of the search results page, are displayed next to emails in Gmail, on our favourite blog, and beside reportage of anti-corporate struggles. As evidenced by the...

cutaway

cutaway

Jonathan Safran Foer made his forthcoming story Tree of Codes by cutting words and phrases out of Bruno Schultz’s story “The Street of Crocodiles.” A very three-dimensional object results. Take that, e-readers!

what digital humanities is and isn’t

On Twitter, Tim Carmody says that “Digital Humanities can be a methodology for doing history, but it can also be a methodology in other disciplines too.” My first response was to say that DH is not a methodology but a set of questions and concerns in search of a method, but now that I’ve thought about it, I would revise...

nature as information

Via Clay Shirky, some really important thoughts from Mike at The Aporetic: A woman in a farm kitchen had a LOT to consider – just making a cooking fire took constant attention, and information about the kind and quality of the wood, the specific characteristics of the cook stove, the nature of the thing being cooked. The modern cook...

amplified authorship

Chris Meade writes — and please forgive the length of the quotation — The amplified author doesn’t wait for a publisher to decide if his or her work deserves a readership or not. Before considering sending a manuscript to a traditional publisher, the writer may have tested out their ideas on a circle of readers via a blog, drawn...

the relative value of innovation

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From is primarily about innovation — about the circumstances that favor innovation. Thus, for instance, his praise of cities, because cities enable people who are interested in something to have regular encounters with other people who are interested in the same thing. Proximity means...

oh, for the good old days

You know, the good old days when I could safely sneer at people who hadn’t read the Officially Approved Books of my social cohort: I lived through a time when it was great to read. There were so many books that you just had to read, which would have been read by everyone you knew. Not merely read, though, but digested and...