Listening to Braille
In her recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv quotes a writing excerpt from a sixteen-year-old blind student whose literacy has developed through aural/oral means, without the benefit of braille. This single excerpt is meant to stand as damning evidence of the failure of oral-based literacy:
He looked in the [...]
Google Maps old school
A charming and delightfully perverse take on the google maps tutorial (reminiscent of Michael Gondry’s The Science of Sleep). The object of satire here is not so much google maps as the now ubiquitous screencast tutorial:
I think of Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Power of Powerpoint, in which he argues that each medium has its own [...]
Playing with Google Maps Street View
As you may know, Google Maps street view is captured by a fleet of automotive vehicles with cameras attached to their roofs. These vehicles roam the streets of urban and suburban areas during daylight hours and take pictures of the streets, sidewalks, and buildings they pass. Because there is no accounting for what type of [...]
The map is not the territory
Fredric Jameson concludes that the fragmentation of urban space and the social body creates the need for maps that would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a whole.” These maps would allow their users [...]
