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
Where are the procedural boundaries of an infinite story? How does the invisible render the visible meaningful? Is the true tree-narrative actually the structure of a network? Branching narratives are less objects than they are procedural systems. Usually when we talk about nonlinear, branching storylines, we think of either the popular Bantam line of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Read More
How may tree diagrams deepen our understanding of cultural phenomena? Are some forms of knowledge better suited than others to “tree-ish” representations? Francis O’Neill was born in 1848 in Tralibane, County Cork. He would sail the world as a crewmember on a British merchant ship before settling in Chicago, where he eventually rose to Read More
Boot Camp – November 7 The German-Swiss poet Hermann Hesse once wrote, “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” I have always had a Read More
Probe for Nov. 7 Given the extent to which tree structures have permeated computer science (think of the way the files are organized on a computer, or the nested windows and menus used in software applications), it’s no surprise that we find them everywhere in digital games. Some appear in the form of tree diagrams, 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
It looks like a tree, but I meant for it to be a map. I wanted to map out Titus’ destructive decline in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Titus Andronicus is my favourite Shakespeare play. The murder and mayhem is unrelenting and shocking. The first time I read the play I kept going back and forth Read More