A Landscape of Things To Read

Tracy Durnell recently posted Browsing as Thinking:

I’ve been having fun lately browsing as thinking, as in, searching a broad category of terms and exploring what’s connected to that node, in service of the things I want to write about. Essentially, intentionally doing a “bad search” as a means of survey.

There’s a character in William Gibson books: Colin Laney.

His skill is sifting through lots of data and getting something useful–finding the “nodal points”–he was “an intuitive fisher of patterns of information”

I loved this character because I identified with his skill. It felt like I could survey data and inferentially come up with useful information.

Nowadays, we all do this in bits and pieces. At the extremes there’s a negative extreme–finding conspiracies and evildoing that does not exist–think: “Pizzagate.”

It’s one of the reasons I loved working at the library as a Library Aide. In taking an hour and being made responsible to sort books on the shelves, I was also surveying them. If I was sorting bookcases full of biographies I was learning the names of notable people. I was seeing which people warranted multiple biographies over time. Like walking around a neighborhood in an unfamiliar city, learning what’s there.

Aside

I still miss magazine stands and record stores, partly because by going through the stacks, I was also learning. I was absorbing facts about the set of books, and I did this for books, magazines, videotapes, large books, everything the library had.

I described my library job–at the time–as “ditch digging in the Information Age.” I was a weird 18-year old. It wasn’t just a job–it meant something. I’ve always been a little grandiose and philosophical and thinking about what things mean.

Surveying Sets Today

Online, we are usually denied the excuse to just look at lots of stuff without having banner ads and recommendations pushed at us. Lists of titles have less information. We browse Netflix or other streaming services and are limited to seeing maybe 24 things at a time. There’s no view of seeing hundreds at a time to see something interesting. There’s no way to spot the one more people have used and so their cover has more wear and tear.

This Post Is Really Just A Ramble

Funny enough, and unrelated, I learned yesterday that a photo I took in 2004 is in wide use on Wikipedia: This Flickr photo: flickr.com/photos/artlung/1625328/

It’s on the entry for Library. And many other pages.

I still love a library.