Amazon link I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of […]
Category: thoughts
The Art of Conversation
A few months ago, Wes made a comment about my post about good conversations where he linked the idea of flow with what I was looking for in conversation. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that comment for a long time, and tonight’s the night. Conversation is a topic near and dear to my […]
Latour-ian Networking
As mentioned previously, I am currently reading Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour. I’m most of the way through now, and hope to finish it off this weekend. The thing that strikes me yet again about reading his work is that it is so elegantly laid out that he draws me in to a completely […]
Secondary research
A little while ago, I joined a mailing list for user experience folks who were interested in understanding how various anthropological and sociological theory might impact their work. I haven’t had as much time to devote to it as I would have liked; in particular, I didn’t have time to do the first assignment, which […]
Evaluating quality of construction
This post was triggered by a comment that Jofish made where he made the claim that “Popperian science just *doesn’t* exist”. I understand where he’s coming from (especially in light of that post, where I was describing how our lives are often re-interpreted after the fact), but I believe that Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability […]
Fractal identity
When I was reading Latour last weekend, I read the following quote: To say ‘culture forbids having kids out of wedlock’ requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying ‘my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter.’ (p. 53) Latour goes on to point out that, although it’s obvious that “culture” […]
Communities of identity
I was talking with a friend over the weekend about his workplace, and he mentioned that one of his coworkers was from MIT, and I asked where they had lived at MIT. He told me which dorm, I said “Oh, so they’re like this!”, and he said “Yup!” We both found it extremely amusing that […]
Option-full technology
This post was sparked by Jofish posting about some of the material he’s preparing for his A-exams. In particular, he’s researching the process of evaluating and measuring qualitative experiences. Examples he used to illustrate difficult-to-measure phenomena included MySpace and texting, where users are not necessarily using these technologies in any way that was originally anticipated […]
The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
Amazon link I first learned of Scott Berkun last year, when I followed a link to one of his essays and found it thoughtful and well-written. I started reading his blog, joined his mailing list. and kept my eyes out for new content from him. So when I saw his book, The Art of Project […]
Mysterious connections
Jofish was visiting last week and we had a fabulous time – at one point, we ended up at the screening of a short film that starred Jofish’s friend’s coworker’s sister. Afterwards, we went out with some of the folks that had worked on the film, and they were asking us what we do, and […]
