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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Krugman and Brooks on Piketty
Krugman: No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a... Read more
Posted on 25 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Godzilla and Wuthering Heights, Kissing Cousins?
In what way is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, like Wuthering Heights? You might think that they are so different that their resemblances are of little account. Read more
Posted on 25 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Conflict Necessary to Plot?
From still eating oranges: The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. Read more
Posted on 24 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 4: Into the Autonomous Aesthetic
This is the fourth and last in a series of posts that began with Discourse and Conceptual Topology, moved to From History to Abstraction, and then Abstraction a... Read more
Posted on 24 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 3: Abstraction at the Time Scale of...
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which humanity casts upon the present; the words which express... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Philological Mysteries
I have long known that my discipline is descended from philology by, but I've never had a very firm sense of just what philology is other than the study of... Read more
Posted on 22 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Computational Historicism. Part II: From History to Abstraction
I examined three different uses of network vizualizations, topic models, Moretti’s plot diagrams, and cognitive networks in first part of this essay, Discourse... Read more
Posted on 22 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 1: Topologies of Concepts and Discourses
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. – Percy Bysshe Shelley ... it is precisely because we are talking about ordinary language that we need... Read more
Posted on 21 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Heers for the Lieral Arts
Tom Friedman to Laszlo Bock, head of hiring at Google: Are the liberal arts still important? They are “phenomenally important,” he said, especially when you... Read more
Posted on 20 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trees: Their Use in Visualization
Scott Weingart reviews Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Princeton 2014: Lima’s book is a history of hierarchical... Read more
Posted on 20 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Literary Studies in the Current Era (the Machinic and post-Apocalyptic...
Back in August 2011 I published a short document called Preview: The Key to the Treasure IS the Treasure, A Program for Literary Studies in the Current Era. Read more
Posted on 20 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Irving Geis: He Saw Molecules
Well, not directly. No one can do that, they’re too small. They’re so small that you can’t even see them with the most powerful light microscope. They’re... Read more
Posted on 19 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Only Game in Town: Remarks on Alan Liu and Digital Humanities
I've collected five posts on Alan Liu into a single PDF. You can download it from my SSRN page: Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, A Working... Read more
Posted on 18 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Road to Damascus...
I’m wondering how many digital humanists set out to do one thing and ended up realizing they were doing something else, something they don’t quite understand.... Read more
Posted on 17 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism
The Gist: The only way the digital humanities are going to develop a cultural analytics that is sui generis is by thinking about the nature of computation itsel... Read more
Posted on 17 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
As Greece Founders, Athens Becomes Graffiti Mecca
From the NYTimes: Graffiti in Athens, as in other cities the world over, has flourished for decades. But in a country where the adversity of wars and military... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Gojira Papers
While I've got some more thinking to do about Gojira, I'm currently preoccupied with other things. So I've to decided to take what I've got so far and wrap it u... Read more
Posted on 15 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Machinic Theory and the Humanities Singularity
Back when I threw in my lot with cognitivism in the early 1970s, I did so because I was excited by the idea of computation. That's what animated the early... Read more
Posted on 15 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism
I would like to continue the examination of fundamental presuppositions, conceptual matrices, which I began in The Fate of Reading and Theory. Read more
Posted on 14 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lilies in the Kitchen
The bag holds take-out dinner for three. Read more
Posted on 14 April 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY