An annotated index of several web-essays*(there's a note down below)

web-essays

Wild theory

Not exactly the opposite of urban theory.  This is more an opposition to some of the presuppositions of urban theory (and the rest of the post-whatever world).  Phenomena like global warming and the peak oil crisis suggest that we might be headed right back to the wild and to wilderness.  Time to be theorizing what that's going to be like.

Not quite as wild theory 

- Mediated Discourse Analysis  

This is the main presupposition of most of what else is here - the most useful unit of analysis is the social actor acting with mediational means - a person doing things with tools.  Seems simple enough.

- Nexus Analysis

The methodological arm of Mediated Discourse Analysis.  A nexus analysis consists in trying to learn the itineraries by which people and their tools have come into a pivotal moment of action and imagining the itineraries away from this moment.

Discourses of Food

Whatever else might seem important, food is pretty much the central need of life.  This essay worries about the ways in which food has become mass produced, globally distributed, and a pretty unhealthy business when it comes down to it.

Work

This isn't about how to get work and it's not about how to avoid working.  It's about how action uses and transforms tools, places, and people.

Transitions

Stability is largely an illusion and mostly not a good concept to help us understand how the world changes (and so might be improved).  This essay examines the ways in which we cross over from one place into another.

Footprints

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research examines the overlays on particular places to try to understand how these overlays can be correlated.  This essay starts with a place (The Gutenberg Dump) and the objects we find there and works its way outward to map the overlaid geographies that make it a place.  It's kind of an ante-GIS project.

Geographies of Discourse

A material view of discourse insists that any discourse implies a place on the earth; any view of a place implies a discourse in which that place is constituted.  This isn't to reduce either place or discourse to each other but to look for the pathways between object networks in one place and object networks in another place.  This point of view sees globalization as an attempt to create a place-less space.

Haines Food Project

This is a rough (so far) essay about food in our hometown.  Where does it come from, how does it get here, what's the cost of the fact that right now almost everything comes from very far away?

*NOTE:  A web-essay isn't an essay because it's not linear.  Once one of these gets going even I have trouble following all of the links.  But it is an essay in the sense first set out by Montaigne.  It's a way to follow out my own thinking in trying to answer for myself 'What do I know?' (Que se-je?)

Now I do this by playing with images and making networked connections.  Mostly those connections are made by the way images are placed on the screen and then glued together with some words.

There isn't a plan; ideas are worked out a few links at a time.  I do a lot of patching and editing as I go.  I change the structure of the links as I go; I'm never successful at sticking with any original grand design.

A web-essay isn't a book or a blog; it's not an argument or a political tract.  Whether anybody else sees it or not is not the issue for me.  It's a way I use html links to jump around in my own thoughts and to look for the connections - some of them - and it encourages me to guide my thinking with images as much as with words.