La Tinaja

Links

• Notes from the field: Retracing Sixteenth-Century Steps in Seville—Not Even Past: Mark Sheaves’s recollection of his walks around Sevilla mirror my own from my time researching the Archivo General de Indias there. It doesn’t that Mark and my projects’ share an interest in Monardes, that we had the same dissertation supervisor, and are dealing with much of the same secondary literature. These shared interests and experiences surely contribute to making Sevilla evocative for both of us. My experiences with historical serendipity walking in Sevilla, however, have encouraged me to walk more wherever I go, and frequently to walk aimlessly. Given my familiarity with its history, the sidewalks of Sevilla were thinker with these encounters than anywhere else has been, but Ghent, Copenhagen, and even Columbus, Ohio all have offered up similar experiences when given the chance.
• Toolkits for the Mind—MIT Technology Review: I often find myself trying to make the case to non-programmer friends that computer languages can have a culture and a perspective just as spoken languages do. Given the relatively limited cases and communities of use for programming languages versus spoken languages, I have no illusion that the effects are as large with programming languages, but they are nonetheless interesting. This argument, of course, is no unique insight of mine; it is essentially a truism; however, this essay does a great job of making the case based on clear real world narrative and limited theoretical elaboration.

Books

• Ellen Ullman. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 1997.

  Close to the Machine is the kind of book about computers that appears reverently in the words of many of my favorite writers who write about computers, and seemingly nowhere else. It’s a great document of what being engaged with computers and the online world felt like in the pre-bubble mid-90s, resonating with me even though I was still only in my teens. More universally, it is the best exploration of the worldview that experience with computer programming engenders and of the tensions inherent in being passionate for the possibilities of a medium so innately tied to unappealing corporate and material realities. I recently read Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed in which he makes the rhetorical case for programming literacy and its epistemological benefits; Ullman’s memoir provides the emotional case.

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• Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Saga. Vol 3. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2014.

  I’ve fallen a bit behind with Saga, but it continues to be my favorite active series. This arc expands the scope beyond the core family of protagonists and begins to explore the negative consequences of conflict on the many proxies that fight it.

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• Jo Guldi and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

  This short experiment in open-access publishing presents a provocative invitation to historians to use the analytical tools of the digital humanities to re-open longue durée perspectives. The tone is polemical and, as with any polemic, the presentation of historiographical trends is more simplified and argumentative than it is comprehensive and nuanced. There has been a good deal of recent pushback against the work (that I have not yet read, but plan to), and I imagine that at least some of the hullaballoo results from this aspect of the book. I can say, however, that as an undergraduate in the late 90s and early aughts and a graduate student in the late aughts and early teens, the historiographical, pedagaogical, and methodological tropes challenged here are at least anecdotally familiar to me and reflect some of my frustrations as a student. I am happy to accept the polemic its own terms in that sense.

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