Video version of podcast #2, spliced with some relevant graphics (some, however, not). All part of the continually improving product we offer to encourage brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Watch out: it’s 48 MB and about 20 minutes. And it needs more pictures.

The site was down for a while due to some wankery at ipower, my hosting service. In the meantime, what have I been up to? Not much. Stay tuned.

I have accepted a one-year position in history at Loyola University Chicago for the 08-09 academic year. This should be fun.

A feature of summer that aggravates me to no end is the excessive use of air conditioning in public places and shops. I just had to flee from ERC because it was too cold in there — and I’m wearing long pants. Another great thing about Italy and Greece was that caffes only used AC enough to provide relief from the outside heat, basically keeping the indoors 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the outdoors, rather than the 30 degree difference we often see here in the US. The summer I worked in DC, my office building was so cold I would walk out into the 90 degree weather and the humidity outdoors would condense on my cold hands.

Robert Darnton, a European intellectual and cultural historian, has a piece in the most recent New York Review of Books on libraries and information worth a read.

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

I’ve long said that, even given all the new-fangled communications and information media of the last century and last decade, paper is probably the greatest medium in human history (and possibly the human future). And let’s not forget the printed photograph.

Darnton points out that, even if we wanted to, we’re not going to see even a majority of printed American material available online (if even digitized) because of copyright issues and the logistics of it. As for international material, good night. These logistical and interpretive issues of all information everywhere being online are rather easily conceived of and frequently discussed. Darnton brings up another interesting challenge — capitalism. Google is pretty much the acknowledged world leader of making information digitally available, but it must be acknowledged that they are a for-profit corporation subject to the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of capitalism like GM, Enron, and hell, even other long-gone information companies such as, say, the Chicago Daily News. There’s no guarantee Google will be around in twenty years, much less 100, so it’s up to libraries and other government, public, or non-profit bodies to provide the stability that capitalism not only lacks, but abhors. For example, if anyone wanted to read a back issue of the Chicago Daily News, s/he would have to go to the Chicago Public Library or another local Chicago institution to see it.

Yesterday I ran into Ed on the street and our conversation turned to research. He asked me how information digitization has altered my dissertation work. Now that I’ve come off as a neo-luddite, I’ll note that it has improved my work. Digitization isn’t going to have much of an effect on the archives (with a few isolated exceptions), so historians are still going to have to turn page after page for days, weeks, and months in an archival reading room as one of their primary forms of research for years to come. However, with the advent of programs like ArcGIS and digitization projects for census data such as NHGIS (from a university, natch), there is more information that is easily available for inclusion in such a study. Printed census data has been around a long time, but getting any significant sets of data from paper to spreadsheets and into maps is a matter of months rather than a matter of hours (I can make a basic map of a city and make it look decent in about 2 hours at this point). IE, I just wouldn’t be able to do it. General web availability of journal articles, etc., has made the discovery and collection process more efficient, as well (keeping in mind the difficulties of availability of wireless internet access). So I’m sanguine about the prospects for information and books, provided we still cover the basics — how to read a book or evaluate an argument, how to do research, what constitutes meaningful information, etc.

It’s long-awaited and it’s available. Drawn from one of the chapters of my MUP thesis and presented at last fall’s conference on planning history. All audio, like the last one. I’m thinking about adding visuals and making it a .mov or something similar. It looks like I’ll be teaching a class on history and media, so I’ll be practicing up.

As Julia says, I’m a total badass, the most hilarious guy ever, my musky smell is a joy to all, and my knowledge of and skill at hanging maps is legendary.

I’m taking an intensive course in Italian this term. I enjoyed Italy so thoroughly last summer and was so fascinated by their urbanism and land use I started to think of ways I could do research there and have excuses to travel. Step 1 is to learn the language. It’s not so hard since I studied Spanish in high school and college (I thought about doing a major in it until I got into classes with native speakers and they killed me), as well as a semester of French.

The class is a blast, though it moves fast. There is regular positive feedback, which I haven’t gotten in a while, so it’s an ego boost even when I answer the simplest questions. The instructor is terrific, making it very fun and balancing many of my classmates’ desire to joke around with the need to cover material. Probably one of the better professors I’ve had in higher education.

I was hanging around with several classmates, almost all of whom are undergrads, the topic of our instructor came up and everyone was quite laudatory, to the point where they surmised this person must be one of the top professors in Romance Languages, if not all of LS&A. I had to break their little hearts when I explained the difference between lecturers (which our instructor is) and tenure-track professors and what these mean in the pecking order of universities. They were dumbfounded that there was any difference between the two and that one had security while the other generally got the short end of the stick.

Getting a job. Preservation issues. Learning Italian. Being back in Ann Arbor. Defending my dissertation proposal. Drinking coffee. GLMS shows. Declining interest in the blogosphere. But I’ve been busy and don’t have internet where I’m living, so this will have to do.

Video version of my presentation at the Society for American City and Regional Planning History from the fall of 2007.