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via Confetta on FlickrEubie Blake's tune "Baltimore Buzz" as performed by the Shuffle Along Orchestra in 1921. One nugget from a first look at the Library of Congress' amazing new National Jukebox.]]>
Today is the birthday of Rabindranath Tagore. Here's a favorite passage from his work:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.
Where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth.
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by Thee
Into ever-widening thought and action.
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
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This blog has been even quieter than I feared. That's partly because I've been busy helping put together CreateBaltimore. It's a "barcamp" or "unconference" for members of the arts and tech communities in Baltimore. Nearly two hundred people have signed up to attend, so I think we've hit a nerve.
I've also been producing the TummelVision podcast and helping in various ways behind the scenes. Heather, Kevin, and Deb have fostered some great conversations with fascinating guests. I've been learning a lot about tech, social interaction, and networked culture.
Bethanne Patrick and I have also been developing a podcast. Bethanne has gathered an incredibly active group of global book-lovers around, of all things, a Twitter hashtag - #FridayReads. It turns out that Twitter is a great way to trade recommendations and engage in conversations about reading things substantially longer than 140 characters. We're creating a live and recorded audio/video podcast to enrich and grow the community Bethanne has fostered.
I think my own online arts and culture projects are going to be heating up soon as well. It is past time for me to post and publicize some great stuff I've been working on for The New Modern.
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There really is an appalling shortage of girl superheroes. I knew that in theory before we had a daughter, but bedtime storytelling needs have made it glaringly obvious.Beehive Baltimore from Retouch Relive on Vimeo.
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Here are much clearer images of the slides I used:
]]>Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria.” ...as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?
Listen to James' talk at dConstruct here.
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Nerve-wracking and exciting: I'm speaking at Ignite Baltimore #6 on the evening of Thursday, September 30th. My proposal was to talk about older forms of culture and whether and how they can survive and flourish in the networked age.
If you're so disposed, you can "tune in" to the Ignite Baltimore live stream here.
I'll post notes and slide images here after the talk. I'm sure I spent at least as much time selecting and preparing the images as I did composing the talk.
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