Bbenzon
Description
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 ( 7356 )
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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
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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 -
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
