Author: Ding Wan

If we are to learn form history, making an important work accessible would promise a longer life. Plato’s Dialogues that lured the average literate Athenian outlives his technical and much less popular works. Regarding Classical Chinese, many essays by high level officials were lost, but a entry-level collection called Guwen Guzhi (the Finest of Ancient Prose), edited by two intellectuals in a small village in the south three hundred years ago has become one of the most widely distributed selections.

Although many classics have been preserved, most of art and artists faded. Cryptology dates back to when humans needed to send long distance messages for the first time, but only the most extraordinary techniques have left imprints to us today. When an old image is presented to me, it may also remind me of the majority of memories around the same event that were no long available.

Speaking of actual storage methods, I thought floppy disks were fascinating when I first used one, and envisioned storing some important and secretive messages in it. It seems challenging to specifically preserve a corpus of information. The SFF works I’ve read haven’t provided much fresh thinking. The stories depicts encoding text into the surface of a planet or sending a living human brain to aliens for an exchange of intelligence. Those futuristic novels rather demonstrate exploring than archiving.

The sound collections in the listenings are impressive and refreshing to me simply because of the different sensory information other than a visual or written encyclopedia. Acoustic productions like podcasts gained in popularity over the past several years. My mom tends to go to sleep with a book podcast in stressful days. ASMR seems to have become a subculture. The listenings just reminded me of the magnetic tapes I had in my first and second grade, which allowed me to enjoy storytelling before reading more text.

Screens and sound cater to the head, and what about the body? I think the artists immersed in the now are inclined to create an atmosphere with more than visual and acoustic effects. With 3D-printing and more technologies, touch would be increasingly represented. However, our storage may not be enough to record a period of time after new physical information becomes archivable.

Speaking of media archaeology, what excites me is that it is cyberpunk (or silkpunk if the early time is focused on). Intellectual property can date back to at least four centuries ago. It seems that human imagination has evolved slower than I expected.

Post for Oct 10: Ordering Logics

I believe classifications vary culturally. In ancient China, books were traditionally classified into four categories: Confucian classics(jing), historical works(shi), non-Confucian philosophical works(zi), and literary works(ji). Physics, geography, mathematics, etc all belonged to the “zi” category, which seems very unscientific nowadays although the subjects may have at once the perilous otherness and resemblances in Foucault’s preface. Speaking of food dropped on the floor, many people, especially nomads or some Japanese who often sleep on the floor, don’t necessarily regard the ground as very dirty. It’s not always the particular characteristics determine where something belongs to. Rather, it’s our cultures that arrange them.

Languages also play a fundamental role in classification. The example of certain aphasics sorting wool may indicate this point. There are a lot of rocks, birds, plants exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History. As we discussed last class, some ubiquitous objects may serve as a piece of archive. It seems that we divide objects into types as we speak and as if our ancestors had figured mysterious connections between the words and certain elements of the objects. No wonder several theorists found inspirations through the fictional writings that challenge the existing ideas using words. Scholars may create new terms as they recognize new types scientifically, and pop cultures also often times breed new phrases defining unclassified entertainment and phenomena. The Chinese customers who find the 6-inch Subway sandwiches not enough but footlong too much even have given that a term.

Post for September 19: Library Lineages

I used to think that as libraries’ role have shrunk to the similar level of print media’s role, the book rooms had better focus on the minorities, those who deliberately keep distance from the mundane, like the Komura Memorial Library serving as a haven for the runaway protagonist in Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. After being reminded of Marx’s argument, in the modern societies, people will have to give money in exchange for all the stuff they cherish, my conviction was even enhanced. For the disfranchised, libraries indeed provided a lot of free services in various places all over the world; But for rest of citizens, libraries also could be offering spaces for quality reading/writing groups or workshops. I personally would like to have those features in my hometown’s libraries, since book communities organized by local publishers here in New York are scarce there.
People aren’t consuming less books. Rather, we read and listen to content via increasingly varying media. The ubiquitous podcasts is one of the examples. If we can work with our sophisticated librarians to establish the required and desired facilities at the brick and mortar halls, communities would actually appear. Sometimes it feels a lot better to interact with likeminded folks and practice my enthusiasm at once than gazing at the screens and staying with the devices alone.