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recommendations and web picks
``` The July and August issues of The Network Observer have run drastically behind schedule and over budget. Scores of highly trained pataphysicians are working night and day at the TNO Skunk Works in the Mohave Desert to get them ready. It's clear that they'll be too complicated to have room for recommendations or web picks, so here are the ones I have queued up.
Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, New York: North Point Press, 1986. Why is white American food so bad? It wasn't always. The answer is something called "food science", which originated in some turn-of-the- century women's breathtakingly misguided attempt to elevate women's standing in society by remaking cooking on a "scientific" basis. The problem, of course, is that vitamins hadn't been discovered yet, so that basically nothing was known about the subject. Instead, "food science" consisted of a bunch of symbolic displays designed to make kitchen work look like laboratory work. Many of the food scientists recommended making food completely tasteless, so that nobody would be distracted by flavors from the scientific precision of eating it. Millions of women were taught that it was the height of modernity to cook their vegetables to a near- mush. Many of those women evidently believed what they were taught and handed it down. The great fashions for American regional and ethnic cooking in the 1980's, together with the great 1970's-era restaurants of the San Francisco Bay area, filled -- but only part way, as yet -- a vacuum that food science had created. Shapiro's question is why this cultural disaster happened.
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Ways of looking at paintings (and everything else) vary across history, and our ability to understand a painting (or anything else) from another time is limited by our familiarity with those older ways of looking. In the case of some of the great paintings of Renaissance Italy, fortunately, it is possible to reconstruct these ways of looking. Religious paintings were used in elaborate spiritual exercises (not dissimilar from exercises still practiced to the present day among Tibetan Buddhists) that involved praying on a certain series of religious sentiments that the paintings depicted. Paintings commissioned by merchants, for their part, included numerous visual illusions that celebrated the merchants' highly trained abilities to judge the capacities of containers that arrived on the docks. Baxandall's theoretical book "Intentions in Painting" is tough going, but "Painting and Experience" is a book that you can read on the beach or in a graduate seminar. This fall I'm planning to do both.
Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio Gianturco, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. A few centuries later, Italy's great humanistic culture had largely collapsed under the weight of the great rationalistic fervor that swept Europe in the period from Descartes to Newton. At the beginning of the 18th century, Giambattista Vico invented -- pretty much all by himself -- the countermovement to Englightenment thought that would eventually produce the rise of both nationalism and anthropology. Vico's magnum opus was the "New Science", a brilliant, utterly unique, and frequently bizarre history of the world's cultures that hardly anybody understood until the great explosion of cross-cultural research that gathered steam after his death. "On the Study Methods of Our Time" is a much shorter, more commonsensical work on the meaning of the university. In opposition to the Cartesian methods of impersonal reason, it upheld a vision of teaching and learning based on personal development and dialogue. It can be read in 1996 with perfect clarity and relevance to contemporary concerns. Vico invented multiculturalism, in other words, and his version was often more sophisticated and attractive than the caricatures (and the sometimes confused reality) of university multiculturalism today.
Michael S. Mahoney, The history of computing in the history of technology, Annals of the History of Computing 10(2), 1988, pages 113-125. A stimulating article cataloguing everything we don't know about the history of computing, and what it would be like to have an intellectually serious understanding of that history.
David Siegel's article "Severe Tire Damage on the Information Superhighway" is an interesting analysis of the future of HTML. http://www.dsiegel.com/damage/index.html
Materials from the 1995 Allerton conference on social aspects of digital libraries are at http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/allerton/95/
Hal Varian maintains a useful page of information economics resources at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/
The hyper-theory journal Bad Subjects has an issue on political aspects of cyberspace. This sort of writing makes my eyes cross, but perhaps others may benefit. http://eng.hss.cmu.edu/BS/24/
"Use of Videotape in HOV Lane Surveillance and Enforcement: Final Report", a report to the State of California Department of Transportation is at http://www.bts.gov/smart/cat/274.html
Information on the Western governors' Virtual University is at http://www.concerto.com/smart/vu/vu.html Like a lot of cybervisions, this sounds great in the abstract. But I find its philosophy of education and the role of a university in public life scary once I really think about them. ```
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