In late October, I went to Chicago to join folks from across the country for DexCon 2010, the First Chicago Neighborhood Digital Excellence Conference, a convening of activists and others interested in community technology in Chicago. The major organizers were Pierre Clark, Thom Clark and Michael Maranda. It was a full day at DePaul University […]
The Containerization of the World
Two weeks ago I toured the Port of Tacoma in Washington State during the annual conference of the Society for the History of Technology. Tacoma is one of the top ten container ports in the United States, but it also handles specialized cargo and cars. Commencement Bay, which is a deep-water harbor in southern Puget […]
“Meating” in WordPress
I know a lot of people who blog. Lately, I have been blogging on other websites, which I think is a delightful way of connecting. Kasalina Nabakooza is a photographer and a recent graduate in Comparative Literature from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn and began an exchange with me via email. Her website […]
BEE: Built Environment Education
I have been asked about integrating aspects of architectural history into K-12 curricula, which is something I did on a very small scale when my kids were in elementary school in the 1990s. I never went so far as to align the activities we did with state standards, but that’s because I worked closely with […]
Civility and Flying
I went to Washington, DC, to serve on an all-day review for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in early August. The idea was to fly in one evening and fly out the next, given that DC in August is not really a comfortable time of year and I was about to go on […]
Informatics and Airports
I just read the fascinating novel by Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist. This dystopic story of elevator inspectors set the tone for my recent foray into a whirlwind of airports, urban hotels, metro and taxis. The central character in Whitehead’s novel, Lila Mae, intuitively senses the mechanical state of the machines she inspects. As I ran […]
Bushell’s Case
In my previous blog post, I noted that I was dismissed from jury duty by the judge. Judge Richard Klaus had a series of standard questions that he asked of all the potential jurors. I had heard the questions during my first day of jury duty, so I had had a chance to think about […]
Jano Justice Systems and Jury Selection
I was recently on jury duty and did some informal inquiry and observation about the current ways in which Champaign County (IL) finds jurors. On a Monday morning, about 35 of us showed up at the courthouse in downtown Urbana and had a brief orientation. The staff handed us badges with bar codes and our […]
Digital Humanities 2010
Unfortunately I am not at the Digital Humanities conference in London right now. But I am following bits and pieces of it on Twitter #dh2010. Melissa Terra of University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities gave the plenary today, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon.” One comment of hers that gave me pause […]
Dawoud Bey at CAA
After a really crazy spring semester, I am finally cleaning my home office, finding tidbits here and there that I intended to blog about, but never did. Dawoud Bey was the keynote speaker at this year’s College Art Association conference. He teaches photography at Columbia College in Chicago, and runs a speaker series there. Bey […]