Sam (Schillace) has put me onto yellowarrow.org – a fascinating new project in mobile phone deep mapping. “yellowarrow” [noun] – a collective symbol for personal communication | [verb] – to leave and discover messages pointing out what counts choose – find a place that speaks to you, something you want to point out, a detail…
cultural politics
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter,…
the mission of contemporary Classics
– some thoughts on reading Sue Alcock … The past is manipulated by people who come after. Memories and re-collections – traces of the past – help make us what we are. The importance of the past is so clear in the spate of books and articles about the ancient Olympics and their relation to…
Greek Olympics?
An intelligent comment today in the NYT on the mismatch between modern and ancient Olympics [Link – “The Way We Live Now: What Olympic Ideal?” – Daniel Mendelsohn (Princeton)] (Thanks to Jody Maxmin for putting me on to this.) Main point – the Greeks were very different to how most people imagine them to be….
between prehistory and the stars – deadly litter
Bill Rathje on space junk I have been trawling eBay for the last month or so looking for old camera equipment for my Metamedia Lab – part of our explorations of media metarialities – getting away from the notion that new media are somehow immaterial data. Came across an item that I had forgotten –…
repatriation of antiquities
Latest in the concerns about artifacts as cultural property – [Link – BBC][Link – BBC] Aboriginal artefacts, including two early bark etchings, have been seized in Australia while on loan from two British museums. Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and…