The collaborative artist team, Regional Relationships (RR), has just launched its first edition! Matthew Friday, the first artist commissioned by RR, has been working in southern Ohio with flooded mines. He writes of “interlocking networks of abandoned mines” that number about 12,000. A bacteria has colonized the flooded underground areas and, as part of their […]
Notes on “Archiving Memory in the Age of Digital Technologies”
I am still playing conference catch-up. Between September 23 and October 3, 2010, I went to two conferences, the Imagining America conference in Seattle, and the Society for the History of Technology conference in Tacoma. For now, I just want to share my notes on the keynote talk on September 24, 2010 by Diana Taylor […]
Reboot, Rebuild
On Saturday, October 30, about fifteen people who had gathered in Chicago for the Digital Excellence conference came together to brainstorm next steps for the community technology movement, with Michael Maranda doing the heavy lifting of organizing a space and guiding the discussion. Besides Michael, the group included Max Gail of LAP.org, Antwuan Wallace of […]
Digital Excellence 2010
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 […]
