The last time I did this was October 18, and many of the items that were on my list then are still on it. So let’s start with that list (items preceded by an asterisk).
COMPLETED
*Heart of Darkness
What I was thinking about: I’ve thinking about a post that provisionally ‘solves’ the problem of ring composition in that text.
DONE! – Local narrative logic and global order, or how we get from here to there in Heart of Darkness and Kurtz as MacGuffin, or: Why trash him before we meet him?
Still on deck: I’m also thinking to submit a book proposal to the Dead Letter Office at Punctum Books.
IN PROCESS, PROGRESS MADE
*Intelligence
What I was thinking about: What is it? I think about this from time to time. The notion that “intelligence is what intelligence tests say it is” is not as empty as it seems–I’ve been through this before on the five factor personality model.
I think that’s become transformed into a piece I’m going to do for 3 Quarks Daily this coming Monday. I’ll cover the five factor model and a few more things, some of which I’ve recently blogged about: common sense knowledge, calculation and computation, speech to text (over at Facebook), and philosophical arguments about the computational mind. I'll be adding some topics, such as machine translation, and one or two other things most likely.
*The Human Swarm
What I was thinking about: I’ve got to keep reading and blogging my way through Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm, which takes a broad view of the nature of society. The idea is to write a formal review (for 3 Quarks Daily) when I’m done and then package the whole set as a working paper.
What I’ve done: I’ve now posted six installments and I’m not even halfway through the book. This is going to take another month and I don’t know how many installments plus the review.
*Visualizing Form and Evolution in Literary History: A response to Nan Z. Da and to Moretti and Sobchuk
What I was thinking about: That’s the working title for a longish article I’m working on. It will be of a methodological and theoretical nature. I’ve posted a working paper of draft material for the second part of the article, On the direction of literary history: How should we interpret that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis, Version 2. I’ve sent that to a few folks and gotten useful feedback [...]
The first part of the article will about the cultural analog to phylogeny in biological evolution, which Moretti and Sobchuk touched on. The crucial distinction is between a tree-like structure and a network structure. [...]
What I’ve done: I’ve started working on draft material for this first part. I looks like I’ve got to introduce the human mind into the argument and say more about cultural evolution than I’d originally planned to. I’d like to get this done in the coming week.
*Talent Search
What I was thinking about: I’ve got a bunch of posts on searching for talent that I want to gather into a working paper. I suppose I’ve got two notions.
What I’ve done: Gathered the posts into a document, and done a bit of formatting. But I still need to write the introduction in which I explain what it all means.
STILL PENDING
*Progress, painful but real
What I was thinking about: Here I just want to provide a setting for two papers by David Hays. “On the Painfulness of Progress” is in memory of his friend Raoul Naroll, who argued “that progress causes ... pain during periods of transition but alleviates this and other kinds of pain over the long term.” In “Relativism and Progress” Hays examines worldwide statistics on health, wealth, and social life and includes an appendix with 32 scatter plots depicting the data.
What I’ve done: Nothing.
NEW PROJECT
The Hallucinated City
This is a photo project. I’m working toward an exhibit. when and where I don’t know. Right now I’m just trying to figure out what. My theme – The Hallucinated City. The idea is to group photos into sets around that theme, with distinctly different kinds of photos in head set. Some will just be photos of cityscapes; but others will be graffiti shots, abstract patterns of light, interiors of Wayquay’s junktique store, and who knows what else.
So far I’ve posted four (potential) sets in the series, plus some photos of Midtown Manhattan, Herald Square to the Theater District. I’ve got two most sets organized but not posted. I figure I need to do at least ten sets before I have some idea of what I’m up to.
More later.
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