I love making lists. A lot. All sorts of lists. Actually, I love organizing & being organized & lists are only a part of this. In Everything Is Miscellaneous [which I finally have time to begin reading], Weinberger has a section in Chapter 4 called “The Secret Life of Lists.” It talks about metadata & the ways we organize it & he quotes a essay by Jorge Luis Borge called “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.”
In the essay, Borges invents a Chinese encyclopedia, which he calls the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge and devised animals into the following catagories:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
I love how whimsical & arbitrary this list is! Using this as an example of a non-list, Weinberger gives an interesting commentary on the nature of lists & the ways we use them to lump [put like things together] & split [put a boundary between this lump & that].
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At the moment, I’m watching the Ypsilanti City Council meeting online. I follow the Ypsilanti Citizen, our local newspaper, on Twitter & they tweeted about streaming the council meeting. In my Information Use in Communities class this past semester, we talked a lot about the role of technology & information in promoting civic engagement & I think this is a great example of that! Right now they’re discussion the new proposed beekeeping ordinance [they recently passed an ordinance allowing residents to keep chickens!].
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Here’s a fascinating study done on “grade-hungry” vs “knowledge-hungry” students. They had a group of students take a general trivia test, telling them after each question if they were right or wrong & gave them the correct answer. While doing this, they wore a helmet that measured brain activity. The grade-hungry students paid attention to if they were right or not, but not so much the right answer, whereas the knowledge-hungry students paid close attention to learning the right answer. You can read the article here.
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Tomorrow, I have the whole day off!! I can’t wait, although a lot of it will be spent doing homework. But still, no work, no class, no stress. Yay!
xoxoxo
Related posts:
- The zoo, books, bands & new tattoos!!
- Summer 2011 Bucket List
- Clocktowers, harmonicas & making the best of today
- Serving in the Archives Together
- The beauty of books
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009, 8:09 pm | 
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