The WhereProject

In the space of two hours on Friday afternoon, I closed on a condo in Jamaica Plain and picked up a fixed gear bike at Ace Wheelworks in Somerville. Sorry to drop this news on you without any run-up, but that’s just the way it has to be. I can’t really explain why I haven’t written about any of this all summer, but it was apparently too much to both blog about major life decisions and make them at the same time.

Buying this condo happened rather quickly–I got my real estate agent on June 21 and I closed on August 24th–so I haven’t had time for much else besides work, dissertation, and a bit of summer fun here and there. I realized during this process that I’ve been unconciously cultivating an image of myself as a rootless nomad, about to pick up and move at any moment, when in fact there’s little evidence for this–after all, I lived in my place in Allston for 7 years. But it was a frame of mind that I think grew from the kind of transient neighborhood Allston was and from my ongoing ambivalence about being in Boston.

But now I’m settling in, at least for the time being, and it feels good. I’m excited about my little corner of JP with it’s Minton Stables community garden and Franklin Franklin just a short walk in either direction. I’m excited about the chance to learn from being in a vibrant urban neighborhood, and trying a new relationship to place.

I closed on Friday and moved in on Saturday, which happened to be the hottest day of summer. In a true test of friendship, Cathy, Nirmal, Cheryl, Andy, Alan all showed up to give me a hand, and we managed to sweat our way through the move in an efficient three and half hours. Thanks everyone–it was a great way to start things off.

I’m also beginning a new relationship with my bike–a fixed gear Redline 9-2-5 –which has been a joy to ride so far. I’m still getting used to the new connection we have, in particular the obligation to keep peddling–all the time–but it’s clearly the best way to commute every day in all weather without the hassles of unnecessary maintenance.

I’m finding that a bit of fixity can be a good thing, whether it be in mortgages or gears, and I’m glad to have the chance to experience both.

Last night I rode by Hope Cemetery for the first time and noticed the flags set up for the veterans. It seemed appropriate today to return for another look.

Earlier this week, Nancy M. pointed me to a new Google mashup called The Right Ride, designed to allow users to document dangers spots for bikers by adding annotations to a map. Chris Briaotta created the site in response to the recent death of two Boston cyclists, and it gives fellow bikers a way to share important information gleaned from their everyday experience of navigating through Boston's often mean streets.

Two articles describe the site:

• Cyclist deaths cause concern: Hub cyclists promoting safety with bike route Wiki
• For safe city biking, a wiki this way comes

I find it interesting that both articles refer to the site as a "wiki" though it seems clear that the site is more accurately described as a map-based mashup, since information is not editable by everyone and revision are not tracked, etc. This fudging of terms may not matter to the averager reader, but I find it curious that the term "wiki" is used here to denote any effort at collaborative knowledge-making online,when in fact there are many web-based tools that allow for this without them being wikis.

The comments on the Boston NOW article led me to Governor Deval Patrick's website where citizens are able to post issues and invite others show their support by "voting," in this case on the issues of bike lanes: http://devalpatrick.com/issue/bikes. In good social media fashion, the site enabled me, to create my account and post my vote: "I'm a daily bike commuter with a fairly safe route, but I ofter bike to other parts of the city that are much less safe. Until space for biking is built into the fabric of the city, motorists will continue to treat us like second-class citizens who don't belong on the road. Bike lanes are simply the civilized thing to do. It's time for Boston to begin making changes."

While it's often difficult to sort through the overblown "Web 2.0" hype, these sites make it easier to excited about the democratic potential of participatory media to help strengthen local communities. As long as I don't allow my "vote" on the bike lane issue to substitute for other, more more substantive forms of political action, I can see how this and the Right Ride site play their part in helping us work toward change in the places that matter to us.

After hearing two outstanding concerts this weekend, I'm struck by how long it takes me get around to finding good music sometimes. Sunday night I made my first trip to Framingham to hear John Gorka play (Dan Coutier opening – nice job Dan), which gave me the chance to get better aqcuainted with someone I knew from his great cover of Dylan's "Girl From the North Country" on the Nod to Bob album. On Sunday night we heard the Mystic Chorale peform a concert of South African music in the historic Tremont Temple in downtown Boston, which got me back in touch with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whom I knew from Paul Simon's Graceland.

And how is it that I've lived without Miriam Makebe's “Pata Pata” to get me going on a Monday morning. It now has a permanent place in my “Happy, Funky, Soul” playlist.

It's nice to know there are some new things under the sun–at least new to me–if I take time to come out from under my rock once in a while.

My dad sent me these pictures he took a couple weeks ago at the edge of the Red River in Fargo. This “ice artistry” was sculpted by freezing temperatures at the waters crest and and then carefully installed in a gallery of trees as the water slowly receded. Wish I could have been there while the show was up.

We’ll, this is fairly late in coming, but I guess I should post something about our trip to Yosemite a week ago. I think I’ve been avoiding this post because it’s so hard to know what to say about such a fantastic place. Perhaps I’ll just let the photos speak for themselves, though they don’t really do justice either.

I will say that we were lucky to be there when we were–the weather was good, the crowds were relatively thin, and the waterfalls were at peak. We had a nice mix of activities–a stay in the Wawona Hotel, a visit to the giant sequoias, three nights car camping in Yosemie Valley, three days backpacking out of the Valley, one afternoon horseback riding, and a bit of time on either end in San Francisco.

Perhaps I’ll have more to say as I get further from it, but for now here are some photos to give you a taste of how we experience this incomparable place.

Picasa Gallery

Yesterday I spend the day "Sustainable Waters in a Changing World " conference at UMass Amherst where I gave a presentation on "Blogging Places: Using Social Media to Foster Place Identification and Share Local Knowledge," my standard place blogging spiel revised for audience of scientists and environmentalists. Here's the abstract:

If Henry David Thoreau were alive today, would he keep a blog? Greg Perry’s site, “The Blog of Henry David Thoreau,” helps us picture what this might look like by posting daily entries from Thoreau’s journal. While Thoreau would likely feel ambivalence toward blogging for technological and political reasons, it is not difficult to imagine him finding affinity with those who today identify themselves as “place bloggers.” In much the same way that Thoreau grounded his daily journal writing in his local surroundings, so also place bloggers use the genre as a way to explore the relationship between where they are and who they are. When blogging was first gaining widespread popularity, one group of bloggers created a wiki called “Ecotone: Writing about Place” that served as a portal for those interested in discussing both place and blogging. Between 2003-2005, more than 50 bloggers from around the world contributed 350 posts on a variety of shared topics that encouraged participants to construct a deeper sense of place. More recently, the launch of such sites as placeblogger.com reflects a growing interest in place blogging as a form of citizen journalism designed to enable people to share vital local knowledge with geographically proximate audiences. While the web has often been viewed as a disembedding mechanism that attenuates social relationships and undermines place identification, these sites suggest that place blogging can serve as a tool for re-inhabitation, creating what the Ecotone bloggers describe as an “edge effect” that blurs the real and virtual in productive ways. Place blogging can empower ordinary people to think of themselves as creators of local knowledge, whether as citizen scientists, citizen journalists, nature writers, or urban flâneurs. Because our environments are being shaped by digital networks whether we like it or not, it is incumbent upon those concerned with the health and sustainability of places to examine critically how new communication technologies might reconnect people to where they are and enable like-minded people to create and share vital local knowledge.

Also presenting in this session on "Place, Season, and Landscape Perceptions":

The Citizen Scientist: an Emerging Scientific, Social and Economic Voice in Discussions about Water Resources, Wildlife Habitats, and the Impact of Climate Change
Glorianna Davenport, The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Hudson River Almanac: Creating a Electronic Network of Phenologists
Steve Stanne, New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation and Cornell University

Our session was one of three sessions in a track called "Scientific and Watershed Community Collaborations" which also included panelists presenting on a interesting range of projects incorporating everything from handheld gps devices to Googlemaps and Flicker:

The Wildlife Inventory Project: Citizens Combining the Ancient Skills of Animal Tracking with Modern Data Collection Methods to Monitor Wildlife Activity within the Watershed
Bob Metcalfe, New England Discovery

Engaging Citizen Scientists in a Digital World: The Life on the Purple Loosestrife Project
Jennifer Forman Orth, Electronic Field Guide Project, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston

Disseminating Wetlands Restoration Planning Information via an Online Document with Interactive Mapping Capabilities
Beth Suedmeyer, Wetlands Restoration Program, Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management

The final session gave use time to share ideas about how we could use information technologies to help people connect with their environments and contribute useful data to larger projects to improve the health of ecosystems. It was exciting to how much my research intersected with the work of those in other fields, and it was fun to share ideas with those trying to solve real world problems using many of the same tools I've been working with and writing about for a while now.

If Henry David Thoreau were around today, do you think he would blog?

I began thinking about this after reading an interview with Greg Perry, editor of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. The article leaves that impression that there's a kind of natural correspondence between the Journals and the blog format:

Thoreau’s journal seems particularly well-suited to the blogging format. What similarities and differences do you see between his 19th-century paper journal and our 21st-century electronic blogs?

The similarities are obvious. Daily entries. Personal notes. Natural observations. Runs the gamut really. I don’t think there are any differences except the obvious one. Thoreau wrote his journal as if others would read it eventually. So other than the immediacy of a blog, there isn’t that much different.

One of the joys of reading The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is realizing that some things haven’t changed since his time. What continuities do you see between his era and ours?

Actually, that’s the thing. Most things are the same. He is living in a technological age as well as we are. The railroad and the telegraph are changing the world he knows. The country that he lives in has changed from the primeval days of his ancestors. There is a buried past there as well. And people are people. Politicians are especially politicians. Commerce is commerce. Even farmers are joining that business.

But I wanted to get a few other thoughts on the subject, so I posed the question to a few of my friends who have spent time with Thoreau. Their initial responses are below.

George:

Great question, Tim!

I think he'd blog, but I think he'd equivocate about why he was doing it.
Much like his famous ambivalence with the train that abutted Walden Pond (he
admired the energy of the industry as human accomplishment, but resented the
intrusion on nature and philosophic solitude for the mere sake of
connectedness), I think he'd find the Web a vexing friend.

And I don't think he'd give up journaling, at all–he might publish his
journals on his blog, in fact, in addition to whatever timely entries he was
making there.

And, of course, he'd be doing all of this on a borrowed computer, using a
DSL connection paid for by his parents.

Matt:

What's a blog?

Ha ha. I'm not that ignorant.

He would not. His journals were reservoirs of material for his polished, longer work. I don't think he'd have made his writing process public. Of course, the blog form could have changed his composition process–maybe he'd still keep a journal, and write "publically" in a blog more often. But I think his informal writing/journaling was important as a place of refuge.

I also think he was fairly class-conscious–a naysayer, and one who loved to tweak the establishment, but I think he liked to do so from within, rather than from without. I would guess that a part of him would see blogging as too democratic: that is, unreferreed, lacking true craft. Of course, there's some good writing online, but he was anal about drafting and language.

Jonathan:

Hmmm, would Thoreau blog. An interesting question.

We know that Thoreau was involved with The Dial for some time, and did publish there, so maybe today he would be a contributor to something like n+1.

But what makes me doubtful that Thoreau would be a blogger is precisely the 'timeliness' of blogging – the genre of rushed thoughts rapidly written down before their shelf life expires is something that would not appeal to him (cf. "Reading").

And yet, Thoreau did give talks at the Lyseum, "A Plea for John Brown," etc., and so perhaps today he would find The Blog to be the successor of the public talk / lecture. I'm not sure.

But if the specific question is: would Thoreau have blogged rather than kept his journal, or would he do his journaling on a blog, I think the answer is no. The journal was a writer's journal (as you know, most of Walden comes out of it), not something that existed for the sake of public perusal. Near the end of his life, however, he was going back to revise portions of the journal, seemingly deciding that they would be worth preserving.

So, in sum, I don't know. But I'd be interested to hear what others have thought.

Their responses offer a more nuanced take on what Thoreau's attitude toward blogging might be.
Anyone else want to weigh in with opinions?

I received a copy of Coming into Contact: New Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (University of Georgia Press, 2007) in the mail early this week, several years after I wrote my contribution, "Composition and the Rhetoric of Eco-Effective Design," an ASLE conference back in 2003. It's bizarre to finally see it published after not thinking about it for so long. The more time I spend publishing content online, the longer the print cycle seems, especially for academic books. But it's good to see the book published, and it looks like an interesting collection. 

Book Description
"A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature.

The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern."

I must be in the front row. That's what I keep thinking as I bike into spring this week, getting a great view of each gradation of change as I get to work and back.

Last week at this time I was facing 6 degree temperatures with a ferocious headwind, but I felt my body had fully adjusted to these conditions. I didn't even both to cover most of my face; I just let the frost tighten and tug on my beard as it collected throughout the ride. In this kind of weather, bikers have a love/hate relationship with speed: you have to get going fast enough to generate body heat, but the faster you go the colder it seems. Five minutes into the ride you can reach a place of equilibrium, but you feel the paradox acutely until that happens.

Yesterday I rode without my jacket at the end of the day and I experienced the wind as an amiable presence, much closer in kind to my own body than the alien adversary it's been most of the winter.

The ponds have been shedding their layers this week, which Thoreau describes in his journal today:

No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water. It is affecting to see nature so tender, however old, and wearing none of the wrinkles of age. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if it had been melted a million years. To see that which was lately so hard and immovable now so soft and impressible! What if our moods could dissolve thus completely? It is like a flush of life to a cheek that was dead.