La Tinaja

Lost a few weeks to getting things packed up in Columbus in preparation for summer in Texas and Belgium and the upcoming year in Berlin. Lots of good reading this week, though.

Links

• What is Code?—Bloomberg: I admire Paul Ford’s entire catalog, but this might be his masterpiece. His fluency in reducing complex topics into understandable bites while not losing his enthusiasm for the unique and unusual corners of the material shows his usual combination of empathy for his audience and curiosity. I’ve recently embarked on a couple of projects that will require coding with people who have only limited exposure to programming; this essay has become required reading for those projects.

Books

• Anthony Grafton. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

  I first read this book about 12 or 13 years ago for Jim Sidbury’s undegraduate historiography seminar at UT-Austin. I re-read it as a way to get further into the thinking about citations and concordances I’ve been doing recently. The structural conceit of investigating Ranke’s citations and antecedents as a way of challenging his claim to inventing modern professionalized historiography is a great example of the exploratory or discovery sensation provided by citation that I’d like to play with.

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• Warren Ellis. Crooked Little Vein. New York: William Morrow, 2007.

  Hard-boiled detective fiction as a Bush-era grotesquerie. The first time I’ve encountered Columbus, Ohio in fiction. It does not come off well. Fun and quick read.

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