Epistolary Erasures

We are always in the the land of lost letters...

https://kfitz.info/connections/

Dear Kathleen

If I may intrude on the party... and offer some disjointed observations.

I see a telos in creating gateways for conversations. And I see some retrospective stances in a gluttony for connectivity and combatting ephemerality (wanting it all and wanting it all to be forever). Is there a role for forgetting and recovering the forgotten in the cultural practices of intellectual work?

Blogging offered the permalink to assist in citational practice. And so addressed the connecting to. As well, the reader could see who had linked and thus revealing a web of relations. Plus one could search the blog ... and find other connections.

You may remember "web rings" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring as a collective attempt to deal with the short comings of search engines.

Search engines ... ah, the balancing act between precision and sensitivity ... it would be great to be able to turn off and on the search algorithm's use of one's previously used keywords to have the option between "fresh" searches and "conditioned" searches.

The problem may be twofold: how to tag and link in the vast sea of digital decay; how to trace tagging. Tools to make connections and tools to excavate them.

Almost like documenting graffiti.

Which we know from Pompeii can last.

And the walls themselves may at last crumble...

Always in the ruins, it's a scramble: Gluttony for Connectivity, Combatting Ephemerality, Gateways to Conversations. Which comes first? Which last?

And so for day 2311
11.04.2013

Stocking the Pond: Faunal Disappearances

When you catch a good sentence… you are inclined to release and let it go.

Me, sometimes, I like to bring the animal to a new environment, watch it wiggle in the wide sea. Such activity is a type of specialized baiting. Often we catch signs of nibblers.

Archaeological evidence for fish eating is limited by the typically rapid decomposition of fish bones in certain soils, with the result that fish consumption is likely to be underrepresented in faunal remains.

Kathy L. Pearson. "Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet" in Speculum Vol. 72. No. 1 (January 1997) p. 9.

Marvellous what breeds in intellectual ecosystems. See links to citations including "Cultural symbolism of fish and the psychotropic properties of omega-3 fatty acids".

And so for day 1486
07.01.2011