Reflections on Technology, Media & Culture
writing
The dissimulated city
As anyone who plays video games or works with digital media will tell you, a simulation of a city is a model or image of a city. A simulated city (as in SimCity™) is similar in some respects, but not the same as a brick and concrete city. Now consider the related word dissimulation. Something … Continue reading
Write me a city
I’m interested in cryptography and the city, as a way of thinking about the supposed smart city. The graphic part of cryptographic might make us think of drawing, but it has most to do with writing. Etymonoline.com describes the common abstract noun ending -graphy as a “word-forming element meaning ‘process of writing or recording’ or … Continue reading
Big corpus
UK publishers produce over 180,000 books each year. (About one third are in digital formats.) So that’s a lot of words, even before the outputs of other countries are taken into account, and all the other words generated online — self published, or unpublished — and journal, magazine and newspaper articles. These large text corpuses are more than … Continue reading
Written any good books lately?
Comment about the lament of sustained reading practices. These need to be seen in the context of a growth in online writing and publishing. Continue reading
