bookporn #45: edinburgh

It’s been a while since my last bookporn installment. But I had the good fortune to visit Edinburgh over the summer–and what an unexpected windfall it was. The city itself is gorgeous, a tangle of medieval streets sprawled over an ex-volcanic landscape—cobblestones, narrow alleyways, tiny tea shops, and deceitful roads which mysteriously turn out to [...]

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recognition

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we [...]

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The Mysteries of Lam Qua

Cross-posted at HNN. “The Mysteries of Lam Qua” is a gallery of nineteenth century oil portraits by a Chinese artist known as Lam Qua (林官) (1801-1860). His paintings are beautiful, grotesque physiological studies of patients with extreme tumour growths. Lam Qua’s paintings were specially commissioned by Reverend Dr Peter Parker, who established the first American [...]

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the other Cambridge

My prolonged absence in the last couple of weeks is partly explained by my great transatlantic move. After some weeks of upheaval, I’m finally settled into my new postdoctoral life in Cambridge MA, where I’ll mostly be for the next three years. So far, postdoctoral life is frighteningly, thrillingly autonomous. I am full of plans, [...]

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on DevonThink and history research (III): Chronologies and Bridges

This is the last (and much delayed) installment in my short series on using DevonThink for research (See parts 1 and 2). My previous installment was about database meta-structures, in the context of which I discussed using labels for GTD. This post is about using labels for content-management. Over the course of my PhD research, [...]

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