Bbenzon
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 6827 )
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American Heartache in Jersey City
The thing about graffiti is, it’s a fugitive art. Walls come and go – in the case of freight trains, literally – pieces get buffed, tagged over, and so forth.... Read more
Posted on 06 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Madam Wayquay's House of Crochet
Posted on 05 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Digital Criticism Comes of Age, a Post at 3QD
I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age. I open with Moretti – natch – then to Willard McCarty’s 2013 Busa... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Working Paper on Computational Historicism
I've now taken my recent series of four posts on computational historicism and edited them into a single working paper. This required some reorganizing. Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Monumental Study of the Globalising Age That Was the 19th Century
‘The Transformation of the World’, by Jürgen Osterhammel. Review by David Cannadine. High quality global journalism requires investment. Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Maplewood, NJ: Sky and Tree, Orientation, Bridge and Tree
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Dream of Simulation and the Reality of Description, an Open Letter to Willard...
Hi Willard, I know you’re interested in the idea of computer simulations of human mental processes, so I thought you’d be interested in how I got from my... Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sheldon Klein on Computing Lévi-Strauss, a Blast from the Past
The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss was terribly important to humanistic thinking in the last half of the 20th Century. As Alan Liu has pointed out in a recent... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Town, Country, Blossoms, Sky
Posted on 02 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Method in DH: Signal and Concept, Operationalization
Signal and concept: distinction employed by Ryan Hauser and Long Le-Khac: A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The... Read more
Posted on 02 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Varieties of Visual Thinking
Posted on 01 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Visual Thinking for the Machinic Theorist
Visualization has proved to be essential to many projects in digital humanities. The visualizations aren’t mere illustrations of verbal concepts, helpful but no... Read more
Posted on 01 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computational Thinking and the Digital Critic: Part 2, An Ant Walks on the...
Simon’s ant is a well-known thought experiment from Chapter 3, “The Psychology of Thinking: Embedding Artifice in Nature,” in Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DH2013 Busa Award Lecture by Willard McCarty
If you're a digital humanist, or curious about the species, listen to this lecture, carefully! Roughly at 12:12: The primary historical object I want to bring... Read more
Posted on 29 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computational Thinking and the Digital Critic: Part 1, Four Books
This is about computational thinking. But computational thinking is not one thing. It is many, some as yet undefined. What can it become for students of the... Read more
Posted on 29 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I’m Lost in the Web & Digital Humanities is Sprouting All Over
When this is posted it will be the 2398th post on New Savanna since my first post on April 4, 2010 (which now contains nothing but a busted link). Read more
Posted on 28 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Along the Upper New York Bay
Posted on 27 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sampling the Space: Disney’s Fantasia
The following notes are an addendum to my original conjecture that Fantasia is encyclopedic in scope. That is, that it spans our knowledge of the cosmos, not... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is Computing? It's More Than Doing Sums!
Look at some of the presentations for the 2nd Workshop on Mind, Mechanism, and Mathematics (Mat 12-13, NYC): Mark Braverman (Princeton University) - Protecting ... Read more
Posted on 26 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In the Distance, from a Hill Top
a counterpoint to all the recent prettiness Read more
Posted on 26 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY