Philip has pointed me at blather – an extraordinary concatenation of fragments of text – the remains of thoughts, imputed conversation, remarks, ruminations, pontifications – the mess of everyday discourse … As Philip puts it Basically, you take a dictionary and throw out the definitions. Then you let everybody define the words themselves. Then make…
media matters
mass producing the past
The Cultural VR Lab at UCLA this week reached the Humbul Humanities Hub – the definitive portal for online resources in the humanities. There’s a lot here – many ancient sites and places (they like ancient Rome) reconstructed in that clean look of rendered architectural models. And they all look the same … Truly, and…
photoblogs
Archaeology shares a great deal with photography. Particularly time and a temporality of actuality. Here is how I descibe it in my wiki entry on the archaeological (also mentioned on 10 December). Four archaeological temporalities: Recollection It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection…
metamedia utopias
Maybe a positive side of all the proposals for funding we have to write is the dreams and utopias they embody. Here is a current proposal from Joe Adler and myself. What if one could learn about a work of art on-line as if tackling a mystery in a game?What if each solution creates a…
Tolkein, world building, and archaeological memes
Last month I was thinking about archaeological antecedents for the Tolkein movies. The visualization of the books was very reminiscent, for me at least, of northern European prehistory. OK so Tolkein was immersed in epic sagas. And the design team clearly complemented the conceptual design with details drawn from archaeological finds, most notably Sutton Hoo,…
manifesting archaeology
Joe Moore, retired photographer, is shedding light on California’s contradictory history. With a 132k dollar grant administered by the state library, Joe, librarians and archivists are gathering letters, family documents, court records, songs and photographs, about 800 documents, for an internet archive about slavery in California – the state that likes to think it entered…