August 07, 2003
Tasty Brain Fodder
via Matt comes a link to Heckler & Coch, a site which in turn links to all sorts of tasty things. Among them is "A Brief The History of The Book" by Sam Vaknin, who seems to have a fairly wide-ranging intellect.
Long-time peterme readers may recall an extended thoughtwander of mine on The Form of the Book (scroll down to September 14, 1999), where I puzzle over people's obsessions with paper tomes. If you scroll up to September 26th, you'll see some follow-up thoughts.
August 06, 2003
It's All Semantics
From a book I'm reading:
"A theoretical grid through which behavior, institutions, and texts are seen as analyzable in terms of an underlying network of relationships, the crucial point being that the elements which constitute the network gain their meaning from the relations that hold between the elements."
This quote resonates with a theme from the last information architecture summit, where people expressed frustrating with spatial/structural metaphors, and wanted to develop systems that better expressed meaning, and did so through the relationships between items. This feeds into notions of ontologies (Brett Lider's PowerPoint from the Summit) and the Semantic Web.
What's interesting to me is that in the book I'm reading, the passage actually begins with, "We can define structuralism as a theoretical grid..." Yep. I'm reading a text on semiotics. (New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, to be exact. Blame him.) Maybe these Frenchies are onto something.
August 04, 2003
On the Road, Again.
August 4 - Baltimore to Syracuse
August 5 - Syracuse to Ottawa
August 6,7 - Ottawa
August 8,9 - Montreal
August 10-16 - Bop around northern New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine) and then south, ending in Washington, D.C.
August 17-21 - Washington, D.C., for Adaptive Path Workshop.
Should I visit you along the way? Let me know.
