Displaying posts categorized under

Books

The stacked books meme

Thanks to this post by Susan at Crunchy Granola, I’ve discovered that there are lots of people stacking books so that their spines tell a story or form a poem, much like Nina Katchadourian’s very cool Sorted Books project. (And do check out all of those examples. Many of them made me sporfle.) So naturally, I […]

Random Bullets of Ghostliness

‘Tis the season, not just for a deluge of forced consumerism and overplayed Christmas music in every public space, but for cold and darkness and, traditionally, for sitting around the fire and scaring the living daylights out of each other with creepy stories. And since supernatural things have been on my mind a lot lately (I […]

Commonplaces in all sorts of places

Not long ago, having realized that none of the other online to-read list options I’d been trying were really working out, I joined Goodreads. I like the ease of adding a book to one’s to-read or currently-reading shelves; I like the tagging; I like being able to specify what page I’m on; and I like […]

Fun with Google Books Ngram Viewer

When Google’s Ngram Viewer appeared on the scene last month, I (like half my Twitter feed) went a little crazy feeding search terms into it and looking at the results. For any of you who missed the news, the viewer lets you search language corpora generated from Google Books and display a chart of the […]

Glory be to God for knitted things; or, Knitting with Gerard Manley Hopkins

I blame Lady Penelope for my latest oddball knitting obsession. Had she not dropped the word "inscape" into this recent post about stranded knitting, I might not have gone off on the train of thought that began with "Oh, Hopkins! I should reread those poems again" and quickly led into "Wouldn't 'Goldengrove Unleaving' be a […]

Something scary for Halloween

Inspired by The Little Professor's annual posts about scary Victoriana and James Hynes' Halloween reading and viewing lists (which, this year, includes a YouTube link to a filmed version of one of my all-time favorite ghost stories, M.R. James's "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad": w00t!), here are a few recommendations of […]

Random bullets of knitting

Welcome, all of you who surfed over from my guest post on ProfHacker! I think this means I should probably update this blog more often. I didn't quite intend to take a month-long blogging break, but the summer vacation mindset was hard to shake off. Anyway, I still feel like writing about knitting, so herewith, […]

Encountering literature by walking through it

Over on the excellent BLDGBLOG, a new favorite and a recent addition to the blogroll, Geoff Manaugh has been speculating about augmented reality applications for buildings that never were, inspired by a new iPhone application for browsing visionary Manhattan architecture. He also suggests something that sounds a lot like what I've been trying to do […]

In search of a better to-read list application

I read more books, or at least it feels like I read more books, when I can keep a tally of them somewhere. I also read more books when I have a way of tracking all the books I want to read — the ones that friends and colleagues have recommended, the ones I read […]

My THATCamp session idea: literary mapping and spatial markup

Over at the THATCamp blog, I’ve just posted some preliminary ideas for a session about literary mapping. I’d cross-post here, but there’s some overlap with my earlier spatiality project posts; so I’m just going to link, in case any of you are curious. In the meantime, if you’re interested, have a look at my experiment […]