For a little over a year, I worked for an internet porn company. It was very boring. I’d been un- and under-employed for the better part of a year before, picking up contracts from private high schools and tour groups and science museums, but nothing that stuck. Then, a friend, another writer, told me I Read More
The Reading Series In the past twenty or so years, a large number of poetry sound recordings have been collected and stored in online databases hosted by university institutions. The SpokenWeb digital archive is one such collection. Housed at Concordia University, SpokenWeb features over 89 sound recordings from a poetry reading series that took place Read More
To fuck something up – to deform – deformation. There is an immediate resistance to this prospect. Fuck up, deform, deformation – these words are instilled with a negative connotation – at least in so far as we are applying them to an object that we either admire or respect. Exploring the formal qualities or Read More
Francis O’Neill’s seminal collection Music of Ireland, and Irish Minstrels and Musicians, his principal book on the subject of his collection endeavours, both contain a photograph of Chicago’s Irish Music Club (Irish Traditional Music Archive; O’Neill, 479). The photo is dated as having been taken between 1901 and 1909, and shows 26 members of this Read More
The initial challenge encountered in approaching this boot camp involved the difficulty in deciding upon a subject. How could the quantitative methodology involved in producing a network diagram reveal a specific insight to an area of my interest and study? My initial conclusion was that should I be able to determine exactly how many times Read More
For this bootcamp, I wanted to see what Moretti’s network theory could bring to my own research, and more specifically to the interpretation of visual texts related to law and justice. I chose to look at a group of three 14th century frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, located Read More
I am a firm believer that the history of Québec is a collection of paradoxes and contradictions dressed in settler-colonialist and nationalist-driven social and political development. As a scholar deeply concerned with engaging in revisionist histories of Québec, I decided this week to take on a text that has plagued me for the past few Read More
Bootcamp + Trees + Nov 7 “There is a constant branching-out, but the branches also grow together again, wholly or partially, all the time.” – Alfred Kroeber, Anthropology Experiencing our class thus far, I must say it’s been less painful then expected to get my mind inside the theory circle. Once I became familiar Read More
Maps themselves are also texts (Harley: 7-8). As raw material, I decided to take a map showing the projects and infrastructure planned to implement the (in)famous Plan Nord of the Charest government. The project, now called Le nord pour tous, hasn’t changed much under the new government, although its implementation has been somewhat slowed down Read More