The WhereProject

Dissertation

  • Would Thoreau Blog?

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    If Henry David Thoreau were around today, do you think he would blog? I began thinking about this after reading an interview with Greg Perry, editor of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. The article leaves that impression that there's a kind of natural correspondence between the Journals and the blog format: Thoreau’s journal seems…

  • Coming into Contact: New Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice

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    I received a copy of Coming into Contact: New Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (University of Georgia Press, 2007) in the mail early this week, several years after I wrote my contribution, "Composition and the Rhetoric of Eco-Effective Design," an ASLE conference back in 2003. It's bizarre to finally see it published after not…

  • Placeblogger.com Launched

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    Yesterday Numenius gave me the heads up the Lisa Williams went live with her directory of place blogs at placeblogger.com. Congratulations, Lisa! It's quite an accomplishment to pull something like this together, an effort I appreciate because I attempted something similar earlier this summer and gave up once I remembered that I hadn't finished my…

  • Paying Attention to Darfur

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    This week I've been reading Richard Lanham's book The Economics of Attention, and it's given new meaning to the phrase "paying attention." Lanham points out that if economics is the "study of how human allocate resources to produce various commodities," then it would seem that in an information society like ours, information would be the…

  • Home in Jamaica Plain, or Coming (Nearly) Full Circle

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    This morning I'm sitting in Emack and Bolios on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, working on the introduction to my dissertation. I've been working on a section where I describe my experience of dislocation after moving from Chicago to Boston, and how my sense of place there was deepened by working with refugees. I'm quite…

  • Internet as Oil Spill

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    In his Tuesday Boston Globe editorial, “Paradise Lost,” Nick King reports the arrival of wireless Internet access to the isolated Palmyra Atoll, a US Natural Wildlife Area 1000 miles south of Hawaii. He poses the following question to frame his argument: "Therein lies a philosophical debate. Is the Internet compatible with a sanctuary whose very…

  • A Day at RISD

    A Day at RISD

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    Yesterday I spent the day in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I gave a talk in Anne Tate’s course "American Communities in the 20th Century: Civics and Sustainability." She was interested in having me present some of my dissertation research and make connections between community planning and online technologies. It was…

  • From Blog to Book: Slow Road Home by Fred First

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    This morning I ordered a copy of Fred’s new book A Slow Road Home, a project that grew out of his blog entries over the last few years. I’ve been following Fred’s blog for the last two years as part of them dissertation research and have chatted with him several times about his writing, so…

  • Podcasting Places

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    Today I’m blogging from Boston University where I’m attending the Podcasting Academy for work. A bit ago Tony Kahn from WGBH radio talked about his experience with podcasting, particularly with Morning Stories. As example, he mentioned a segment called "One Foot in Front of the Other" in which Caleb Smith talks about walking every street…

  • A Cross Section of California

    A Cross Section of California

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    I just returned from a trip out to California for Monica’s wedding, a trip I extended so I could visit folks down the coast. I ended up with a cross-section of CA, stretching from Bodega Bay north of San Francisco, down the coast through Santa Maria and Santa Barbara, ending up in LA. Since this…