Others, like Willard McCarty for one, are much more the historians of computational humanities as well as representations of computers and reading than I am, but every time I watch Three Days of the Condor I am taken both by some of the initial scenes of machine reading and by the protagonist’s later description of [...]
When I have the time, I want to read more science fiction. When I read more science fiction, I like it when someone has already given me a sense of what is worth reading and what is not worth reading. It’s not because I will follow their advice, but if I get part way into [...]
Brent Simmons has a lovely post in praise of readability.
Apps like Read It Later do collect interesting kinds of data from their users. Interesting in the aggregate: it would appear that one of the things that iPad users are doing is spending their evening hours on the couch not watching television but reading. (Or perhaps both.) There are a variety of cool graphs and [...]
This morning’s ProfHacker, now part of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has a write-up by Konrad Lawson on his portable copy stand that lets him quickly set up his camera to photograph book pages in archives and libraries.
Alexander Chee’s meditation on his collection of books and on how to shelve them in his new apartment makes for an interesting companion piece to Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Unpacking My Library.”
During one of my business trips to London in the late nineties I picked up two books by Ruskin. Bother were published by George Allen of 156 Charing Cross Road. I gave one of the books to Henry Glassie as a thank you for being my dissertation director. I kept the other book, which is [...]
Too much ink and too many pixels has been spilled of late about the state of reading or the state of publishing or the plight of books in the IT era. Craig Mod has a simple take on the matter: good riddance to all the ink and paper spent on books that simply don’t require [...]
Some old notes on a yellowed slip of paper that were in my copy of Being and Nothingness. I am backdating this entry to 1986. Sadism – transcendence trying to incarnate other’s transcendence Fat – superabundant facticity (521). How does Sartre deal with “wanting to be desired”? I.e., making oneself incarnate in order to be [...]