The WhereProject

Last night Cathy, Edward, and I took in a great show by our new friend Geni from St. James's at Ryles in Inman Square. In addition to being an accomplished flutist, Geni distinguishes himself by playing jazz with a shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, and the shakulute, a traditional flute with a bamboo headpiece. Throughout the evening, he treated us to his own tunes as well as fresh versions of songs by Sting, Theolonious Monk, and Violent Femmes. He also brought up a vocalist for a few Brazilian tunes and his instructor from Berkeley for some tag-team flute virtuosity. Looking forward to your new album, Geni.

Yesterday Numenius gave me the heads up the Lisa Williams went live with her directory of place blogs at placeblogger.com. Congratulations, Lisa!

It's quite an accomplishment to pull something like this together, an effort I appreciate because I attempted something similar earlier this summer and gave up once I remembered that I hadn't finished my dissertation (funny how that slips my mind sometimes). What I find interesting is that Lisa and I were developing place blogging directories using Drupal at the same time while living a few miles apart in the Boston area but without having met each other. By July I had developed and abandoned my revised Ecotone site at placeblogging.com and by early August Lisa had bet a colleague that she could collect 1000 place blogs from around the country. I don't know if she's reached the 1000 mark yet or not, but she must be close, and placeblogger.com promises to be a useful showcase for this genre of blogging.

Lisa's definition of place blogs is a useful one:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place

Lisa has spoken a couple of times at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and you can listen to her discuss the project by visiting the Berkman archives.

Thanks to Numenius, I ran across the photoblog Everydot from my part of the world:

Every dot on the map interests me, especially the little tiny ones. Some “towns” are no more than an intersection, possibly with a store or a town hall. A few towns seem to be gone without a trace, though sometimes the tiniest evidence remains. I have photographed over 300 towns, mostly in Minnesota and North Dakota. I also have photographed a number of towns in Manitoba, Ontario, and Washington, as well as a couple in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Iowa.

His attention to "every dot" counters the tendency of maps to impose an abstract system of valuation on places, a system in which big dots gather power and attention at the expense of little dots. While his statement "I’d like to finish North Dakota first, as it seems the easiest to conquer" seems to run counter to the more egalitarian premise of his project, I'm trying to not take offense as a North Dakota native. I suppose its just a matter of quantity in this case, not quality.

This week I've been reading Richard Lanham's book The Economics of Attention, and it's given new meaning to the phrase "paying attention." Lanham points out that if economics is the "study of how human allocate resources to produce various commodities," then it would seem that in an information society like ours, information would be the scare resource that we have to figure out how to allocate. But in fact, the reality is exactly the reverse. We have too much information; it's attention that's in short supply. Lanham asserts that in this context the new economists are the artists, the designers, the rhetoricians because they are the ones best equipped to deal in the cultivation of human attention.

In the particular economics of attention created by the web, we've created tools to help make sense of the information glut–search engines, blogs, rss feeds. Recently I've been noticing how rss feeds have become a way for me to allocate attention, to make decisions about what topics I'm interested in and to let Google Reader suck in the posts that keep them in mind. Among the blogs I've been tracking the last few months is Coalition for Darfur which has kept a steady stream of rather grim updates coming may way, whether I felt like taking them in or not. I don't always read every post, but just their daily presence has served as a reminder to pay attention, to allocate regular portion of my thoughts and feelings to this issue that is not going away.

A recent post made me aware of an event at tonight at BU called "Accountable to Humanity: JUSTICE in Darfur," a town hall meeting of scholars, religious leaders, media representatives and concerned citizens to discuss the genocide in Sudan.The Keynote speaker Alex de Waal was joined by moderate Susannah Sirkin and guest panelists Jennifer Leaning, Omer Ismail, Dr. Rev. Gloria White-Hammond. It was a richly informative discussion, one that was equally depressing and inspiring in that it both deepened my understanding of the horrific crisis in Darfur and made me aware of the growing global, grass-roots movement trying to do something about it.

As I bike home, I thought back to my Lenten reflections on Hotel Rwanda about a year ago in which I struggled to hold on to the heightened sense of concern the movie created. Even at the time is was clear that Darfur was becoming our Rwanda, and I didn't want stand by in silence as we had before. But I knew that the inner space that opened up inside me that afternoon was going to close up, and I needed ways to prop it a bit so maybe it might open just a little wider next time around. It occurs to me tonight that my Coalition for Darfur rss feed has been gradually working this issue into my consciousness, post by post, without me even being fully aware of it. To switch metaphors, this rss feed has allowed me to accumulate just enough inner capital to begin "paying" attention, and in my mind that makes it an even more valuable tool than I first realized.

For those of you in Boston, the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur has organized a candlelight Vigil for Darfur in Copley Square on International Human Rights Day (Sunday, Dec. 10) and as a part of the Weekend of Prayer for Darfur. For those of you in other places, the Safe Darfur website has a page the can help you find an event near you.

Genocide in Darfur is happening on our watch. Are we paying attention?

Over lunch today I attended the Brain Gain luncheon hosted by the Harvard Business School where Katie Livingston-Vale talked about what's happening in educational technology at MIT. In her discussion of a course on social software tools she's teaching, she mentioned a video blog she points her students to called Drivetime, a talk show filmed during Ravi Jain's commute to work. The segments themselves are great, but I'm even more pleased that his route takes mirrors the one that I travel several times a week to get to Cathy's or to St. James's. Here's how Ravi describes his blog:

DriveTime is a video blog that I produce during my daily commute to work.

My commute to work takes me from Jamaica Plain through Coolidge Corner and on to Allston. My evening commute: Allston, brief foray into Cambridge, Fenway area, Jamaica Plain. My hope is to pick up some guests along my commute — folks that have something going on in and around Boston.

In most episodes, picks up guests and interviews them, often to discuss an upcoming event that they are a part of. I've only just dipped into the site but I can tell I'm already hooked. Check it out.

This morning I'm sitting in Sweet Finnish, one of my new coffeeshops here in JP, and I just watched a man pass by on the far sidewalk, riding on a Segway. While biking will always be my first love, I've had a little thing for Segways since I dreamed about them a while back , and I was struck by how beautiful it looked as it glided by, seeming to float it's passenger along, perching him at that odd, forward-leaning angle. I think what makes it attractive in this case is the appropriateness of the technology for this particular user, a man who without the Segway would depend on crutches to get around.

I couldn't help but watch him a few weeks ago when he came into Sweet Finnish to buy coffee. He rolled up to the counter and stood there eyeing the display of pastries, the Segway tilting and shifting to respond to his subtlest movements. A few minutes later he rolled to his table, coffee in hand, and leaned over to put his cup and bag down, while the Segway somehow adjusted to support his changing center of gravity. He struggled a bit as he stepped own, wrestling with his crutches and slowing shuffling his legs into position. Later, just as he was leaving, I was mesmerized as he stood by the door and removed his coffee from the holder, standing for several seconds on the Segway without holding onto the handlbars.

The Segway may not have been the transportation revolution it was touted to be when it first appeared, but it's still an astounding machine to watch when it provides ease of mobility to someone who might not otherwise have it.

One of the best perks of living in JP is the ride from here to work each morning. The 20-25 minute journey takes me down the backroads of Brookline and Chestnut Hill on what feel like country roads. Along the way I pass three bodies of water, the first of which is Jamaica Pond, the bluest of the jewels in the Olmstead-designed Emerald Necklace.

According to The Heart of the City, Jamaica Pond "largest and purest water body in the City of Boston." Geologically speaking, it's a "60-acre kettlehole, which is a water body created by glacial meltwater. Natural springs feed the pond, which is up to 90-feet deep in some sections. According to the 2001 Emerald Necklace Master Plan, the pond has 'exceptionally good water quality' (p171)."

More on Jamaica Pond: http://www.jamaicapond.com/

This morning I'm sitting in Emack and Bolios on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, working on the introduction to my dissertation. I've been working on a section where I describe my experience of dislocation after moving from Chicago to Boston, and how my sense of place there was deepened by working with refugees. I'm quite certain that I've ended up in JP because it has always reminded me of my old neighborhood in Rogers Park, and now that I've moved here after years wandering in an Allston wilderness for too many years, I feel like this is not just a new beginning but also a kind of homecoming, a return to a sense of urban place that I've missed for a long time.

It's good to be back.

Friday night we took in a free performance of Carmina Burana Harvard's Sanders theater. Our friend Arnie was in the chorus, so it was a good chance to hear him sing and experience this great piece live for the first time. The performance was outstanding, and I can think of few better places to hear a concert like this.

Being there reminded me that one of the first things I did on my first day in Boston was to hear a concert at Sanders Theater.