In the last 20 minutes it’s started to rain heavily and there’s an unusual amount of thunder and lightening. Our scaredy-cat German shepherd Lily has managed to limbo her way underneath our new bed to hide from the onslaught.
Month: December 2020
Our research began when a colleague brought to the university’s attention an 1850 US census return for Johns Hopkins: A “slave schedule” that attributed the ownership of four enslaved men (aged 50, 45, 25, and 18) to Hopkins. Preliminary research confirmed that the “Johns Hopkins” associated with this census return was the same person for whom the university was later named.
This evidence ran counter to the long-told story about Johns Hopkins, one that posited him as the son of a man, Samuel Hopkins, who had manumitted the family’s slaves in 1807. Johns Hopkins himself was said to have been an abolitionist and Quaker, the implication being that he opposed slavery and never owned enslaved people.
The details of the 1850 census slave schedule for Johns Hopkins have generated new research along four lines of inquiry. How had the university for so long told a story about Hopkins that did not account for his having held enslaved people? Which aspects of the Hopkins family story can be confirmed by evidence? What do we learn about Hopkins and his family when we investigate their relationship to slavery anew? And, who were the enslaved people in the Hopkins households and what can we know about their lives?
I’d read the news items and the op-ed earlier in the month when they were released. After a bit of digging I found this .pdf file that has more details about Johns Hopkins slave ownership. Interested to see what other details historical research reveals.
Review
Narwhal is a free WordPress plugin I maintain which adds a minimal front end new post box. You may configure it within WordPress' Writing settings. I use t...
Voor mij was 2020 op allerlei manieren een bijzonder jaar. Mijn zoon van 8 die een jaar thuis heeft gezeten van school, vond in oktober weer een plek op het Speciaal Onderwijs. Dankzij de onvermoeibare strijdlust van mijn vrouw en de Jeugdzorg in Utrecht. Mijn dochter heeft haar plek gevonden op de ...
Happy Monday! Ik heb genoeg te vertellen deze week over de connectie tussen nieuwsbrieven en genetwerkte notities. Ik hou het dus kort, ik ben benieuwd wat jullie vinden van de ontwikkelingen. Laat je reactie achter onder de blogpost bij deze nieuwsbrief of mail me! Blog on! Leestip: De hyperli...
Some great ideas about newsletters here that I ought to dig into.
Made an apple pie. It came together pretty quickly. I feel like I can almost make these in my sleep now.
Even better than it looks.
Curbside pick up for take out. Sadly the counter girl was chatting up one of her coworkers and wasn’t bringing the food out. I went in and it was sitting on the counter being ignored and going cold. Ugh…. All the worse because it’s also a rainy night.
It took a bit of moving data, extensions, and other details over, but I’ve now made the switch to Firefox as my default browser. Sweeping Chrome into the dustbin.
Talking out loud to oneself is a technology for thinking that allows us to clarify and sharpen our approach to a problem
I ran across this article this evening and some of the ideas resonate strongly with me. The article mentions some areas of psychology research and a few papers I hadn’t seen before.
I’m also particularly interested in the idea of embodied cognition within cognitive psychology. Has anyone delved into these areas in their research or memory-related work? @LynneKelly’s research and written texts encourage singing, dancing and performing (I don’t recall specifically speaking or walking in her contexts, but I’m sure they’re all closely related), but has anyone else experimented with these additional modalities in their practice?
Most of the Western-based mnemotechniques I’m aware of are focused almost solely on internalized speech/thought. Can anyone think of any which aren’t?
I’ve seen several works in which Nassim Nicholas Taleb propounds the benefits of the flaneur lifestyle for improving thought, though his mentions are purely anecdotal as I recall. I’d appreciate any additional references to research in these areas if others are aware.
Like many of us, I talk to myself out loud, though I’m a little unusual in that I often do it in public spaces. Whenever I want to figure out an issue, develop an idea or memorise a text, I turn to this odd work routine. While it’s definitely earned me a reputation in my neighbourhood, it’s also improved my thinking and speaking skills immensely. Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts. ❧
I’ve noticed speaking out loud also seems to help me in practicing and acquiring a new language.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 09:52PM
The idea that speaking out loud and thinking are closely related isn’t new. It emerged in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the work of such great orators as Marcus Tullius Cicero. But perhaps the most intriguing modern development of the idea appeared in the essay ‘On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts During Speech’ (1805) by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. ❧
Some of this is at play with the idea of “[rubber ducking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)” as a means of debugging programs
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 09:55PM
In both cases – speech and writing – the materiality of language undergoes a transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn produces a mental shift. ❧
There’s surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:06PM
Mute inner speech can appear as an inner dialogue as well, but its truncated form encourages us to create a ‘secret’ abbreviated language and deploy mental shortcuts. By forcing us to articulate ourselves more fully, self-talk summons up the image of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly. In this way, it allows us to question ourselves more critically by adopting an external perspective on our ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in our arguments – all while using our own speech. ❧
I’m also reading this and wondering about memory techniques and methods and how these may interact beneficially.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:07PM
It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them. ❧
I’m curious if Lynne Kelly or others have looked into these areas of research with their Memory work? She’s definitely posited that singing and dancing as well as creating art helps indigenous cultures in their memory work.
Annotated on December 28, 2020 at 10:10PM
Evan Stoner (evanstoner.com)A couple of years ago I started building an IndieWeb website. Then I got painfully busy at work, stopped improving it, and basically ran out of free time to even post to it. Fast forward a couple of years, and I've got a new job that's somewhat more manageable, and during the holiday break I'm tryin...
It’s interesting to see the growing pains people are having on the internet as they add new functionality to their websites. Even WordPress has at least half a dozen plugins to enable a lot of the functionality that is de facto within social media. Slowly though, both technologists and small to medium sized companies will begin offering these features as standard pieces that won’t require this sort of overhead or configuration. Well eventually see a sea-change in the environment as the technological hurdles come down. It would be nice to see things like Netlify and WordPress offer IndieWeb-in-a-box for their customers.
One of the many biographies of women artists that I listened to on my daily walks this year was Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon. Lange was a complicated, talented photographer committed to social justice. There were a couple of things about the book that annoyed me but mostly I loved it and was sad when it ended with her death from esophageal cancer at the age of 70. It seems like she wasn’t done contributing to the world. I have always admired the work of the FSA photographers, Lange among them. Her photo, Migrant Mother (below), is one of the most iconic images of the 1930s Depression. I love the idea of the US government paying artists of various types to document life in the US, especially during a time like the Depression.