A discussion today on Twitter about the rising costs of conference space, even on campuses, which in many cases charge their own faculty and staff for use of facilities, got me thinking that we humanists should be thinking more creatively about where to hold our gatherings.

The Hilton is nice. But as THATCamp has shown, it’s not an essential (or maybe even desirable) ingredient for hosting a good conference or enabling productive scholarly communication. Just as urban artists find cheap, usable—even cool—studio space in warehouses and garages, we should find ourselves some alternatives to the traditional hotel ballrooms and campus auditoriums.

So, here’s the start of a list. On the one hand, there are some places in most cities that rent space at low cost. In this category, I’d put the YMCA, local churches and synagogues, local public schools, those big suburban wedding halls they advertise on late night cable, and KOA and other campgrounds (hat tip, Brian Croxall). On the other hand, there may be places that are willing donate space that is otherwise unused on weekends. What about asking a local business for use of its offices and providing them with documentation for tax purposes of the in-kind charitable donation? What about asking a local foundation for use of its offices in lieu of a monetary donation?

None of these places will make us feel as important as we do when checking in at the New York Hilton. But they’d all serve just as well for communicating ideas. Please add your ideas for alt-conference venues in comments. Let’s build a list.

The book business tries to serve two readers, the one who loves the tactile page and the one who loves the digital ease.

There’s a endearingly geeky moment in neurologist Oliver Sacks‘ new book, The Mind’s Eye, which is coming out in October. Like most of Sacks’ books — including bestsellers like Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars — his latest is a collection of minutely observed and empathically drawn case histories that illuminate his patients’ ability to adapt and thrive despite neural injuries and challenges. The theme of this book is vision, and the patients in The Mind’s Eye are coping with blindness, alexia (the inability to read), prosopagnosia (the failure to recognize faces), and other disruptions of their ability to make sense of the world. One patient is a celebrated pianist who has become unable to read musical scores, but is still determined to give concerts; another is a neurobiologist, born with crossed eyes, who suddenly gains the ability to see in 3-D.

Unlike most of Sacks’ books, however, The Mind’s Eye also addresses the neurologist’s own illness and transition to a profoundly altered life. In 2005, he was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma in his right eye. Though the tumor was eliminated by radiation, Sacks is still struggling with profound changes to his visual field caused by the cancer and its treatment. The bearish 77-year old neurologist — who lives a block from his office in Greenwich Village — hasn’t talked much to the press about his illness, but that’s about to change with the publication of his highly frank account of the ordeal in the new book. This is his first in-depth interview on the subject.

The geeky moment occurs when Sacks is in the hospital, forbidden to leave his room because his opthamologist has embedded a chip of radioactive iodine in his eye in hopes of banishing the tumor. The tiny plaque of I-125 triggers a storm of hallucinations — including starfish, daisies, and purple protoplasm — as well as ravaging pain. In the middle of all this, Sacks muses about asking his long-time editor and friend, Kate Edgar, to fetch his beloved collection of fluorescent minerals so he can conduct an experiment. “Perhaps I could light them up by fixing my radioactive eye, my rays on them,” he writes. “It would be quite a party trick!” That’s Sacks: thinking like a subversive 18th century chemist in the most dire situations, eager to cast the light of science into unmapped recesses of the natural world.

For my first post at NeuroTribes, it seems fitting to begin by talking with the neurologist/author, whose humane portraits of people who “think different” — such as autistic author Temple Grandin, the subject of a recent Emmy winning HBO biopic — helped inspire some of the science and culture I’ll be exploring on this blog. After 14 years of writing full-time for Wired, I’m also currently working on a book. (Don’t worry, most of my posts won’t be nearly as long as this one.) I first met Sacks in 2001 after he responded enthusiastically to my article about autism among the families of engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley, “The Geek Syndrome.”  Shortly after that I wrote my own amateur case history of the doctor himself, “The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks.”

We spoke last week about his new book, the state of his health, his hallucinations (and the startling effects of cannabis on them), his apprenticeships with poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, and the role of science writing in an age when the authority of science is being broadly undermined by religious zealots and he said/she said media.

Thanks to PLoS blogging guru Brian Mossop, my fellow “Ploggers,” and the whole PLoS crew for offering me this platform to explore science, mind, and culture. I’m honored to be included in such a distinguished group of writers and scientists. PLoS is the future of science journals. Welcome to the future of science journalism.

Silberman: Oliver, what happened to you just before Christmas in 2005?

Sacks: It was a Saturday, eight days before Christmas, the 17^th. It seemed just an ordinary day. I got up, went for my usual swim, and decided to go to the cinema, but as soon as the previews started, I became aware of something bizarre happening — a sort of incandescent fluttering to my left, which I took to be a visual migraine. But then I became certain that it was in my eye and not in the brain, as a migraine would be. That really alarmed me. I thought, “What’s happening? Am I detaching a retina? Am I going blind?”

I didn’t know what I should do about it — whether I should go to an emergency room or phone up an ophthalmologist, or stay put and see if it all settled. I did the last of these, although I couldn’t concentrate on the film. I kept testing my visual field. Then I noticed that some of the little lights showing the way out of the cinema had disappeared in front of me.

Finally, after about 20 minutes, I burst out of the theater, hoping that in the world outside, everything would look real. But it was evident to me that there was still a triangular chunk of my visual field missing, going from about nine o’clock to eleven o’clock. I phoned up a friend who asked a few questions, suggested a few tests, and then said, “Get yourself to an ophthalmologist ASAP.”

I did so and told my story to the ophthalmologist. He took an ophthalmoscope, looked in my eye — and then I saw him stiffen. He put down the ophthalmoscope and looked at me in a different way, a serious and concerned way. He said, “I see pigmentation. There’s something behind the retina. It could be a hematoma or a tumor. If it’s a tumor, it could be benign or malignant.” Then he said, “Let’s consider the worst case scenario.” I don’t know what he said after that, because a voice in my head started shouting, “Cancer! Cancer! Cancer!”

Silberman: Yes.

Sacks: He said he would contact someone who was a great expert on ocular tumors. I spent a very nervous weekend and went to see the specialist a couple of days later. He looked in the eye, dilated the pupil, took photographs, did ultrasound, and sat down with me and Kate. He had a large model of the eye, and he put inside this model a horrid, black, convoluted object — like a black cauliflower or cabbage. I immediately interpreted his meaning: I had a black tumor, a melanoma, in my eye. In my medical student days, one was told melanomas were the most malignant of tumors and everyone died within six months. My thought then was of how, in England, a judge puts the black cap on before uttering a death sentence. So I thought this was my death sentence.

The opthamologist, Dr. Abramson, confirmed that I had a melanoma. He read my thoughts and said, “But these things are highly treatable. The tumors in the eye have a different natural history. They very rarely metastasize, and there’s a good chance of extirpating it entirely with radiation and lasering.” He said, “In the old days, ten to twenty years ago, one would just take the eye out.” He said he had done a thousand such enucleations. But he said I should be tried on radiation first.

I immediately got very impatient. I wanted the radiation the next day, but I had to wait three weeks, because Christmas was coming up and then the New Year. And in those three weeks, though he said these tumors grow very slowly, there were a lot of visual changes. What had been a small segment of missing vision became a whole hemisphere. Various strange distortions appeared, with horizontal lines getting squashed down and vertical lines diverging, due to edema under the retina.  So then, three weeks later… Well, people can read the book if they like.

Silberman: Yes they can, in about a month. But it’s important for readers to know that while the tumor has been successfully treated, you’re still coping with profound alterations in your ability to see and navigate. How is your vision now, and what accommodations have you had to make?

Sacks: After June of ’07, the tumor encroached on the fovea and had to be lasered there. So I lost central vision in that eye. I then seemed to pass into a relatively stable period in which I had a little crescent of peripheral vision from about three to seven o’clock. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but that little crescent was invaluable, because it gave me a full visual field, and a little stereoscopy in the lower part of the field. Since it was peripheral, however, as soon as I looked at anything directly, it became flat. But at least I had a sort of sense of depth and space.

But then in September of last year — as it happens, four days before I had to have knee surgery — I had a hemorrhage in the eye, and my vision went out entirely on that side. I found that condition much more disabling, because I had no sense of anything on the right. I couldn’t see anything to the right of my nose.

I was told that things would clear in six to eight months, but at eight months there was no clearing, and it was evident that there was a clot stuck in the eye. Also, the pressure in the eye was rising.  Then ten weeks ago, on June the 8th, I had a thing called a vitrectomy done, removing the bloody vitreous, and at the same time, bringing some sort of clear fluid into the eye. I had hoped that would restore my vision, and almost instantly, the vision started to clear a little bit. But then three days after that, it darkened again.

I then had a second procedure, and the eye bled yet again. I had a third procedure in which a drug called Avastin was put into the eye, which inhibits the growth of blood vessels. Since then, my eye has been steadily clearing, and there has been no regression.  But it’s very slow, and it’s still hazy looking out. For example, when I’m at the piano, I can see the black and white keys and count my fingers. But that’s the limit. I’m vaguely conscious of things happening on the right, but my vision there is not really functional yet, though I dare to hope it will become so.

Silberman: In the book, you go on to describe some fascinating experiments you performed on your own vision, where you observed your brain “filling in” the blank spots in your visual field with patterns and hallucinations. The naive view of our visual system is that it works like a camera, passively receiving sense impressions and compiling them in the brain into a more or less accurate picture of the world.  But the work of researchers like V.S. Ramachandran and many others has led us to understand that vision is a highly active and even speculative process, with the brain making guesses and predictions about what the eyes can’t see.

In the course of your illness, you discovered that your brain would generate elaborate patterns, even clouds or leaves, to hide the blank space in your vision caused by the tumor. You’ve always been interested in the brain’s generative visual activity — whether caused by illness or psychedelics — and wrote about it at length in your first book, Migraine. But what did you learn from these experiences about how the brain creates a seemingly seamless world out of fragmentary sense impressions?

Sacks: In general terms, I learned that the brain is always busy. In particular, if a sensory input — whether it be vision or hearing or kinesthesia — is taken away, there will be some sort of compensation, and the cortical systems involved in those representations will become hyperactive. This first became clear to me when I spoke to various blind people. One man, for example, who had lost his sight when he was about 20, said that when he read Braille, he didn’t feel it in his fingers, he saw it. And there’s nice evidence that the occipital areas of the brain, and the inferotemporal areas — visual areas — are excited in that sort of situation.

For myself, I was very struck by this “filling in” business. The first thing that struck me was when I was in hospital and I could pay more attention to these things — perhaps too much attention. But the scotoma in my vision, the blind area, was almost like a window looking into a landscape. I could see movement, and people, and buildings in it — things like those my brain concocts while I’m falling asleep or before a migraine. But this seemed to be going on continuously.

And then there was an episode that very much startled me. Kate was in the room at the time too. I was washing my hands, and then for some reason I closed my left eye, and I continued to see the wash basin, the commode next to it, and the mirror very, very clearly — so clearly, in fact, that my first thought was that the dressing over the right eye must be transparent. But it was a huge, thick, opaque dressing. This was something quite different from an after-image. It was more like a strange persistence or perseveration of vision. The image wasn’t being erased in the usual way.

But this sort of thing really only hit me after I had been lasered in June of ’07 and lost my central vision. Then the night I took off the bandage, I saw this great black amoeba — this thing shaped like Australia — but when I looked up at the ceiling, it immediately disappeared. It turned white and became camouflaged by taking on the color of its surroundings. I then found that I could fill it in with simple patterns, like the repeating geometric pattern on my carpet.

Then I discovered another phenomenon which astounded me. Later that month, I went to Iceland for a friend’s wedding. Coming back on the plane, it was very hot, so I took off my shoes and socks. I liked playing with the scotoma, moving it around and putting things “into” it, so I used it to amputate my leg mid-shin. But then I started wiggling my toes, and gradually there was a strange, pinkish, protoplasmic extension around the stump of my leg. This formed itself into the shape of a foot with wiggling toes, and followed all my movements exactly. It didn’t look quite real — it had no skin texture or whatever — but it really was an astounding phenomenon, and made me feel that the visual area had become hypersensitive to other inputs, such as proprioceptive input or some sort of motor afferent.

I also had — and still have — almost continuous hallucinations of a low order: geometric things, especially broken letters, some of them like English letters, some like Hebrew letters, some like Greek, some runes, and some a bit like numbers. They tend to have straight lines rather than curves, but they rarely form actual words. This is not something I said in the book, but if I smoke a little pot, they sometimes become words. And they tend to be in black and white — but when I smoke a little pot, they’re in color.

Silberman: That’s wonderful. What do the words say?

Sacks: Short English words of no particular significance like “may,” or pseudo-words, like “ont.” Also, since my back surgery last year, I’ve been on nortriptyline, which is supposed to block the gating mechanism for pain in the spinal cord. I only take a small dose, because it gives me an intensely dry mouth. But even the small dose has a striking effect of enhancing dreams and involuntary imagery, and upgrading my hallucinations from black-and-white to color, and from geometric patterns to faces and landscapes.

Silberman: Interesting.

Sacks: Neurologists talk about “elementary hallucinations,” and my own hallucinations used to be elementary. But when I read those passages of The Mind’s Eye for the audio version, I whispered to Kate, “They’re not elementary anymore!” I partly refrain from talking about this in the book because I say nothing about the leg and spine injuries and operations going on at the same time. I wanted to keep things simple. And in fact, I haven’t smoked any pot in a long time, because I’ve been on so many other drugs for a year, I’d be afraid to have the pot on top of them.

Silberman: In the book, you talk about several blind people who each deal with their disability in highly distinctive and individual ways. There’s religion professor John Hull, who describes his state of “deep blindness” — a total absence of any visual imagery, external or internal — in spiritual terms, as “an authentic, autonomous world, one of the concentrated human conditions.” Then there’s Zoltan Torey, an Australian psychologist who was blinded in an industrial accident when he was 21, but developed his ability to visualize details to the point where he shocked his neighbors by single-handedly replacing the gutters on the roof of his house at night. What did these very different experiences of blindness teach you about how different individuals handle disability?

Sacks: They showed me that there is no set way of handling blindness. There can be diametrically opposite ways. There’s the Hull way in which visual memory, visual imagery, visual nostalgia, and visual thought are all lost or renounced. And there’s the Zoltan way, in which visual imagery is emphasized, trained, and heightened.

When I saw Zoltan last year in Australia, I asked him why he didn’t hallucinate. And he said, in a rather Teutonic way, “I wouldn’t allow my cortex to hallucinate. It is strictly obedient to my wishes. I have it visualize in the way that I describe. I will not indulge hallucinations.” Zoltan also regards Hull as someone who has, as it were, caved in to his blindness a sort of passive spiritual way. I’m not sure what Hull thinks of Zoltan.

Jacques Lusseyran talks about the “visual blind” as a sort of sub-species, and I like that paradoxical category. I wonder which way I would go if… if… if.

I suspect I would go in the Hullian direction. But I’m not sure.

Silberman: Going back in time, few people know that in addition to studying medicine, you were mentored as a young writer by two of the most brilliant poets of the 20^th Century, W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn. What did you learn from these poets that med school couldn’t teach you?

Sacks: Basically, they taught me to look at disease, disorder, and suffering in broader human terms, and not just in narrow clinical or physiological terms. To look at predicaments, plights, and situations — not just diseases.

I had a very long, nice meeting with Ved Mehta, who has written very openly about his blindness and his ways of accommodating, which include fabulous so-called facial vision. When he was younger, he would walk rapidly without a cane, “seeing” by the echo of the sound the shape and distance of all objects near him.

Silberman: I’ve seen a video about that amazing kid you mention in a footnote, Ben Underwood, who taught himself to do human echolocation before he died. That was quite something.

Sacks: Oh yes. I just got an email that had been mislaid from July of ’09 about someone similar to Ben who would map his surroundings by making a clicking sound with his teeth, and was even able to go canoeing and avoid obstacles in the water. The man who sent this to me works on sonar installations. If I’d known about this, I would have included it in the footnote.

Silberman: A vision researcher I know online, Mark Changizi, told me he had lunch with you at Caltech in 2005, when you were writing the chapter of your book on “Stereo Sue.” He said that you asked him if he considers himself a naturalist. “Although that’s not a term I readily use,” he said to me in email, “I realize that I am indeed a naturalist, as the fundamental premise of my research concerns understanding our biology in the context of the natural evolutionary environment.” But Mark is still not sure what you meant by asking him that question.

Sacks: I don’t think I meant anything quite as lofty as this. What I meant was that although I love general principles, I am no great shakes at extracting them myself. I feel that I’m sort of collecting specimens and observing phenomena. In this way, I’m like Wallace or Bates, but not like Darwin. Darwin of course was a fabulous collector, but his son says that he seemed to be charged with theorizing power, so that everything immediately generated a hypothesis. Crick was also like that.

Silberman: Didn’t Darwin himself say something about how his mind had become a “machine” for generating hypotheses?

Sacks: Yes, yes, exactly. There’s a peculiar passage in Darwin’s autobiography where he says how, when he was young, he took great delight in poetry, and painting, and music. But now, he said, his mind had become a sort of machine for extracting general laws from large collections of facts.

When I met Crick at a neuroscience meeting in 1987, he seized me by the shoulders at dinner, sat me down next to him, and said, “Tell me stories.” In particular, he wanted to hear stories of visual disorders. You probably saw the piece I wrote about Crick in the New York Review of Books. Crick was a theoretician who felt starved of the data that he needed. Some of this data would come from experimental work, but some of it would come from observations like mine, which look at experiments of nature, in a sense. It’s similar with Ramachandran, though he is more active and ingenious at devising experiments.

Silberman: Your case histories are accounts of these “experiments of nature.” What is the role of the case history in the age of computerized, data-driven medicine?

Sacks: Well, all science should be data-driven or evidence-based — whether it comes from a careful longitudinal study of a single individual or a study of thousands of individuals. The minute study of a single individual could provide data or evidence that may be inaccessible any other way. Doing that depends on patience, trust, and the relationship between the observer and the patient. I think of Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist as an ideal case history, though when I first read it, I thought it was a novel.

Silberman: Do you fear that physicians are losing the ability to write precisely observed case histories?

Sacks: Luria lamented in his letters to me that the great observers of the 19th Century are gone now, and that the art of observation has diminished. You can put that down partly to specialization and technology. Certainly, reading some of the classical papers on agnosia and alexia, one feels that no one is writing like that now, or very few people. But there’s a new journal called Neurocase that’s worth reading, and I’ve seen some return to the notion — at least in the more complex areas of neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry — that one needs case histories as well as detailed longitudinal studies and everything else.  Case histories can never be replaced. They will always be needed to compliment other sorts of study.

Silberman: Science is under attack these days by religious zealots who want creationism taught in schools alongside evolution, opportunists with political agendas, media outlets that play into bogus controversies about climate change, and so on. What should the role of the science writer be in an age when the role of science in society is being increasingly undermined?

Sacks: In my preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, I quoted G.K. Chesterton’s attack on science as a cold, impersonal, Sherlock Holmesian business, whereas his fictional detective, Father Brown, proceeds by a sort of uncanny empathy. I think as a writer, one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses — the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms.

I hesitate to use the word purity when there have been so many uncomfortable frauds in science. One can feel ideally that science shouldn’t need policing, because there’s much more pleasure in a genuine result than in making anything up. Nothing that one could make up will be as deep and interesting as the reality. Freeman Dyson says something like, “Nature’s imagination is much richer than ours.”

But I’m genuinely bewildered by people who tout creationism and so forth. It was understandable that Gosse should do so in his book, Omphalos, which was published in 1857, a couple of years before Darwin’s book. Gosse was a very good and passionate naturalist, but also a devout literalist, and this tortured book was his attempt to, as he put it, “untie the geological knot” and reconcile the Bible and the fossil record. But I can’t see how after Darwin, any beliefs like this can be maintained. The sheer, endless beauty and depth of evolutionary theory is far beyond the dullness of a divine Creation.

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It may surprise some readers, but the Italian Renaissance was invented in Switzerland exactly 150 years ago.




Have you ever wondered why English speakers use a French word, “renaissance” to refer to an event that apparently happened in Italy? Not an English word and not an Italian word but French. It is, one must surely admit, a question worth contemplating, though for some strange reason seldom raised. And the answer makes the situation even more perplexing. We use a French word in English to refer to an Italian event because it appeared in a book in German. The book in question was Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien by Jacob Burckhardt, published in the original German in 1860 and in English translation in 1878 as The Civilization of Italy in the Renaissance. It gradually grew in popularity, eventually gaining Burckhardt near unanimous acclaim from his fellow historians and the adoration of the likes of a young Friedrich Nietzsche. (The philosopher and historian would become colleagues at the University of Basel and close friends.) Burckhardt had borrowed the term “Renaissance” from an 1855 article by the famed French historian Jules Michelet (hence the French word). Until this point the term “renaissance”, when used at all, referred to an artistic movement. Michelet however, saw it as an era that combined the voyages of Columbus, the art of Florence and the scientific discoveries of Galileo. Burckhardt now took the term and used it to name a period spanning the 14th to the 16th centuries in Italy during which, he argued, the modern world, the world of individuality and tolerance and reason, was forged.


    Four friends in Basel: Brocklin, Bachofen, Burckhardt and Nietzche

 There is no denying that something remarkable happened in and around Tuscany between the 14th century, with the poetry of Petrarch, the prose of Boccaccio and the paintings of Giotto, and the 15th century with the achievements in art, architecture and letters by the likes of Leonardo, Brunelleschi and Machiavelli. Vasari, writing in the 16th century, was convinced that the greatness of ancient Greece and Rome had been reborn in the work of his contemporaries, especially in that of his master, Michelangelo. He used the word “rinascita” to refer to this revival or “rebirth” of the ancient classics. But for the next 350 years few thought to bind the many disparate achievements of Italian civilization under one concept; no one declared that this had been a specific period of time that marked the beginning of the modern world. Yet today, in universities and schools worldwide, we start courses on Modern History with a unit on The Renaissance. It is there, we assert, in Florence to be specific, that we find the first rumblings of the modern mind, the seeds of modernity – individuality, secularism, reason, capitalism, even political science. This is the convincing myth that Jacob Burckhardt created in the mid-19th century.

The Burckhardt family could trace their lineage back for centuries and had been leading citizens in the city-state of Basel since the 16th century. Burckhardt himself spoke French, Italian and English fluently, as well as his native German. He was also fluent in ancient Greek and Latin, could read Hebrew and even some Arabic. He composed music, wrote poetry, dabbled in painting and drafted architectural drawings. One is tempted to say that he was a Renaissance Man. In 1855 he was appointed Professor of History of Art in Zurich’s brand new Polytechnic , today’s Federal Institute of Technology (the ETH), and he enjoyed the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city, mixing with the likes of novelist Gottfried Keller, architect Gottfried Semper and composer Richard Wagner. Three years later he was made Professor at the University of Basel and, despite many offers from more prestigious universities, he would remain there for the rest of his career. But it was during the brief years in Zurich that he penned his greatest single work, The Civilization of Italy in the Renaissance.


        Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology - the ETH


Perhaps it is not a mistake to say that the patrician Burckhardt despised many aspects of his own time. The 19th century, with its technological dominance, its ugly industrialization, its selfish materialism and vulgar bourgeois culture was an attack on everything that he held to be worthwhile. In Lionel Grossman’s summary of Burckhardt’s views the age “blunted originality, discouraged independence and forced all opinion to conform to the dominant opinion”. In Italy, especially the Italy of the 14th to 16th centuries, he had found his antidote. Grossman adds: “It is tempting to discern in the magnificent account of the city of Florence in Burckhardt’s book the ideal model of humanist Basel… of the early 19th century” and “Burckhardt’s Renaissance man, whatever his historical validity, has provided a model for a contemporary ideal of freedom that seeks refuge in the sphere of art.” Burckhardt defined 15th century Italy as one of individualism and modernity. In his own words: “In the Middle Ages human consciousness lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil… Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation”. But in Renaissance Italy “this veil first melted into air… man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such”. For Burckhardt the Renaissance had introduced greater freedom and greater tolerance, had brought about a scientific and a cosmopolitan outlook as well as a veritable explosion of artistic and literary genius. It is the image that most of us carry around in our heads, and we have received it, even if only second hand, from Burckhardt.



In professional (or professorial) circles Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance has taken a severe beating. Medievalists have attacked it by claiming the Middle Ages were not so backward after all, citing the Renaissance of the 12th century, the birth of universities and modern cities, the growth in trade and banking and the achievements of Gothic (the term itself a 19th century invention) architecture. On the other hand historians of the modern period claim that Renaissance Man was not so modern after all, with his obsessions with magic, astrology and the terrible witch-craze. In his A Study of History Arnold Toynbee famously attacked the uniqueness of The Renaissance, claiming that there were many renaissances, some of which weren’t even European. Joan Kelly emphasized the misogynist views of modern Renaissance Man, concluding that “there was no renaissance for women, at least not during the Renaissance”. Jerry Brotton has drawn attention to the non-western, particularly Ottoman roots of the Renaissance while post-modernist historians find Burckhardt’s work to be one of the worst examples of a grand narrative that forces events into a neat story while reality is messy and complex and is bound to always spill over the narrative designed to contain it.

And yet, and yet… for most of us, most of the time, despite knowing better, we somehow believe there is an intrinsic truth in Burckhardt’s story; such is the persuasive power of his secular myth. Burckhardt himself, more than many, realized that historical interpretations, like the works of fiction that they resemble, are simply suggestions to look at the world in a different way. In the opening page of The Civilization of Italy in the Renaissance he wrote: “To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture … and it is unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every moment both on the writer and on the reader… In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies, which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.” With old truths being eroded in the middle of the 19th century, and old certainties discarded, he created a historical masterpiece that provides a metaphor in which we can find the roots of our modern predicament. It still resonates today. In this way, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of Italy During the Renaissance is one of the most important books of modern times. Even if you have never heard of it, not to mind read it, it has helped to shape the modern mind, including yours. To a large extent modern consciousness was not born in Florence during the 15th century, it was created by a history professor in Zurich.



         Burckhardt walking to a lecture in Basel in the 1890s

Ever since I took on the job of Editor at GeekDad, and would meet people at events like Maker Faire, the question I kept hearing over and over was “but what about GeekMom?!” Sometimes it was spoken with a bit of humor, but more often with a sense of real desire to see such a site.

To the best of my ability, I’ve always run GeekDad to be as much as parenting blog as it is a dad blog, to the point of including four wonderful geeky mom writers on our team. But it comes down to the fact that a site named GeekDad will always skew just a bit to one side of the gender line.

And so, with the help of our founding father Chris Anderson, we’ve been able to acquire the URL for GeekMom.com, and over the last couple months I the four GeekDad moms (Natania Barron, Kathy Ceceri, Corrina Lawson and Jenny Williams), with loads of help from GeekDads Michael Harrison, Anton Olson, Dave Banks, Nathan Berry and others, have built out the new site, gathered a tremendous team of contributing writers, and set ourselves the awesome goal of doing for geeky moms what GeekDad has done for us dads.

This is intended as a soft launch, and we’ll be taking reader feedback and tweaking the site and the content over the next month before the “official” launch (think of us as a Google beta, but with an actual end goal). So please, check it out!

It was a dark and stormy night on December 18, 1908. Okay—maybe it wasn't so dark and stormy. But it should have been, because that was the night Thomas Edison tried to hijack the motion picture industry.

"With his beetle brows, long wispy hair, and beatific look, Edison might have seemed the addled inventor," writes the historian Neil Gabler, "but he was a shrewd businessman and a fearsome adversary who was never loath to take credit for any invention, whether he was responsible or not."

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As an open source, not-for-profit, warm-and-fuzzy, community service oriented project, we don’t normally like to talk about market rivals or competitive products when we talk about Omeka. Nevertheless, we are often asked to compare Omeka with other products. "Who’s Omeka’s competition?" is a fairly frequent question. Like many FAQs, there is an easy answer and a more complicated one.

The easy answer is there is no competition. Omeka’s mix of ease of use, focus on presentation and narrative exhibition, adherence to standards, accommodation for library, museum, and academic users, open source license, open code flexibility, and low ($0) price tag really make it one of a kind. If you are a librarian, archivist, museum professional, or scholar who wants a free, open, relatively simple platform for building a compelling online exhibition, there really isn’t any alternative.

[Figure 1. Digital Amherst, an award-winning Omeka powered project of the Jones Library in Amherst, MA.]

The more complicated answer is that there are lots of products on the market that do one or some of the things Omeka does. The emergence of the web has brought scholars and librarians, archivists, and museum professionals into increasingly closer contact and conversation as humanists are required to think differently and more deeply about the nature of information and librarians are required to play an ever more public role online. Yet these groups’ respective tool sets have remained largely separate. Library and archives professionals operate in a world of institutional repositories (Fedora, DSpace), integrated library systems (Evergreen, Ex Libris), and digital collections systems (CONTENTdm, Greenstone). Museum professionals operate in a world of collections management systems (TMS, KE Emu, PastPerfect) and online exhibition packages (Pachyderm, eMuseum). The humanist or interpretive professional’s online tool set is usually based around an off-the-rack web content management system such as WordPress (for blogs), MediaWiki (for wikis), or Drupal (for community sites). Alas, even today too much of this front facing work is still being done in Microsoft Publisher.

The collections professional’s tools are excellent for preserving digital collections, maintaining standardized metadata, and providing discovery services. They are less effective when it comes to exhibiting collections or providing the rich visual and interpretive context today’s web users expect. They are also often difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain. The blogs, wikis, and off-the-rack content management systems of the humanist (and, indeed, of the public programs staff within collecting institutions, especially museums) are the opposite: bad at handling collections and standardized metadata, good at building engaging experiences, and relatively simple and inexpensive to deploy and maintain.

Omeka aims to fill this gap by providing a collections-focused web publishing platform that offers both rigorous adherence to standards and interoperability with the collections professional’s toolkit and the design flexibility, interpretive opportunities, and ease of use of popular web authoring tools.

[Figure 2. Omeka Technology Ecosystem]

By combining these functions, Omeka helps advance collaboration of many sorts: between collections professionals and interpretive professionals, between collecting institutions and scholars, between a "back of the house" and "front of the house" staff, and so on.

[Figure 3. Omeka User Ecosystem]

In doing so, Omeka also helps advance the convergence and communication between librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and scholars that the digital age has sparked, allowing LAM professionals to participate more fully in the scholarship of the humanities and humanists to bring sophisticated information management techniques to their scholarship.

Which brings us back to the short answer. There really is no competition.

Through the work of the New Media Literacies Project, we make a core distinction between the digital divide (which has to do with access to technologies -- especially networked computers and mobile telephones) and the participation gap (which has to do with access to skills and competencies required to meaningfully engage with networked culture). While there is clearly a relationship between the two, we've seen great value in decoupling them -- recognizing that one can have access to the technology without having the support structure around it which would enable you to meaningfully participate in the online world and suggesting that even schools which have little or no access to the technology might still help to foster core literacies which would allow their students some leg-up when and if they were able to gain access to networked computing. We've taken as a challenge the design of activities for low-tech and even no-tech contexts, trying to reassure teachers that ultimately it is about new conceptual models and cultural relations as much or more than it is about new technologies.

That's why I am so excited to share the following story with you. It was written by Laurel Felt, a student in USC's Annenberg School, who took my New Media Literacies class last year and has since joined our core research team. I will let her tell her own story in her own way and won't step on her punchlines here, but I hope that all of those schools and teachers who use lack of access to state of the art technology as an excuse for not changing how they teach and what students learn will read this story and perhaps think about their own situation in different terms.

Along the way, Felt builds on her research in my class to explore potential intersections between the frameworks which have emerged from the Emotional Literacy movement and those we've identified through MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning initiatives.

Take it away, Laurel.

High Tech? Low Tech? No Tech?
by Laurel Felt

We'd lost electricity... AGAIN.

Power outages ("coupures" en francais) are hardly a novelty in Dakar, Senegal, during the early summer. Despite the fact that Dakar is Senegal's capital city, and despite the fact that Senegal is known as one of the most advanced sub-Saharan countries in terms of access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the regular but unpredictably-timed blackouts bring digital manipulation to a standstill. Lack of electricity stymies desktop computing and shuts down router-dependent Internet networks.

Those offices/apartment buildings/restaurants/hotels with the means independently purchase backup generators to see them through these periods of electrical deprivation. My workplace, the African Health Education Network (Reseau African d'Education pour la Sante (RAES)), had a backup generator.

It was broken.

After a week or two of persistent outages and incalculable loss of productivity, RAES Director Alexandre Rideau was finally able to wrangle a stop-by from the hotly-in-demand (1) generator repairman. He charged us $400, a small fortune by our non-profit organization's cash-strapped standards, and fixed yet again our mediocre, overtaxed generator. Three days later, due to negligence, the generator was blown. So it was back to the drawing board... only not quite. This time, the generator's shoddy circuitry just couldn't be salvaged. And rather than draw 10,000 non-existent dollars from RAES's red budget to buy a new generator (which was sure to be exhausted in another couple of years, or carelessly destroyed at any moment), Alex ruled that we simply had to manage this season - powerless.

Oh, did I mention the reason I was in Senegal? To teach teens, among other things, how to harness the New Media Literacies (NMLs).

I can almost hear my fellow educators protesting that teaching NMLs in such a context is impossible. But I can testify, to my colleagues' and my relief and delight, that NMLS are precisely what are needed to survive this challenge. Since NMLs cultivate critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills, and since we, as a teaching team, had benefited from NML training before unrolling the teen workshop, we were able to construct a series of ingenious solutions. While we were powerless in a technical sense - Electrical flow? That'd be a "No" -, we were quite the opposite of "powerless" in a productive sense. Our NML training had made us powerful.

How?

Well, let me explain a bit about NMLs, and skip down if you're already in the know. As I learned in Henry Jenkins's course on New Media Literacies and discussed with Project New Media Literacies Research Director Erin Reilly, NMLs don't require technology -- they're not about technology. They're about enriching learners with useful, versatile capacities that help them think sharper, work better, and appreciate fuller the ethical ramifications of their actions.

Who can quibble with that? Who's against supporting kids' intellectual, social, and moral development? Seems like a bipartisan, big tent, "everybody on board" kind of issue to me. But a lot of people doubt the necessity of NML instruction... maybe because they misunderstand it? Maybe it's a name thing, maybe people hear the word "new," and they hear the word "media,"(2) and they think,

"Forget about it! Enough with the bells, enough with the whistles! Enough with time-sucking TECHNOLOGY! Get back to teaching little Johnny and Susie(3) good ol' fundamentals, like reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. How about teaching them how to spell, for goodness sakes?! They don't know how to write anymore!"

Noted. And I basically agree with you. But did I ever mention "technology"? No. NMLs build cultural competencies and social skills - no technology required.

But fine, let's address technology. I mean, YOU brought it up. I'm not looking to dodge the topic. ;-) Look. You can't deny that technology has entered our lives in a significant way. Personally and professionally, we're accessing digital tools and sifting cybersourced information constantly. In this new context of digital ubiquity, we especially need the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that we've always found handy.

Am I making sense? Here's an example: We've always needed to know how to experiment in order to figure things out. How else could we have mastered free throw shooting, can opener using, or parallel parking? But now we especially need to know how to experiment. Why? Because we're confronted with complex cell phones, tricked-out digital cameras, and bewildering new versions of Microsoft Office. Let's face it, unless you're my dad, you're just *not* gonna read the manual. If we're not comfortable pushing buttons, navigating menus, and noticing what happens, we're gonna find ourselves in a jam and/or seriously undertapping potential.

Here's another example: We've always needed to know how to respect diverse perspectives and flourish in unfamiliar environments. How else could we have moved to new towns, traveled overseas, or made friends on our first day of school? But now we especially need to know how to negotiate. Why? Because we're viewing YouTube clips from abroad, joining global communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, and harnessing online tools like Wikis, GoogleDocs, Salesforce and BaseCamp to manage group projects. If we're not proficient in reading and respecting people's ways of functioning, again, we'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place or flagrantly wasting opportunity. And who wants that? I'll tell you who wants that: NOBODY.

But back to Senegal.

I was working for the summer as a consultant to RAES's program Sunukaddu, which means "our voice" in Senegal's indigenous Wolof language.

Funded over the past two years by the Soros Foundation of West Africa (OSIWA), Sunukaddu had already proven itself an innovative and effective force for social change. Its model was participatory and hands-on, connecting local media experts with motivated teens for training in multimedia health message development. Participants learned reporting and writing techniques, as well as manipulated digital cameras, camcorders, audio recording equipment, editing software, and web interfaces. Their products live online and educate all who come and click on youths' perspectives vis-à-vis HIV/AIDS. Notably, this past February, Sunukaddu ran the first public awareness media campaign by youth for youth in West Africa. Thousands of youths submitted their songs, poems, narrative films, documentaries, audio reports, articles, commentaries, and posters. This authentic content will be disseminated nationally.

Drawing on my studies of communication, child development, and social policy, I developed a model that, at its most parsimonious, looks something like this:


New Media Literacies Improved Functioning
+
Social and Emotional Learning →
+
Asset Appreciation

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) pairs perfectly with NMLs. In the words of Forrest Gump, they're like peas and carrots. As with the 12 NML skills, SEL's five core competencies - self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making - set the stage for meaningful education. In my view, SEL forms the individual, then NMLs sweep in and form the learner.

Back to the cries of skeptics and censurers:

"Our public school system is bankrupt and our students are falling behind. Fourth-graders in Kazkhakstan out-perform our kids in math! Most US students think Beethoven is a dog! So should we really be spending taxpayers' precious dollars on touchy-feely lessons like 'making friends' when kids can (and probably are!) learning these things themselves on the playground?"

Yes, I hear you. And yes, we absolutely should.

What are the prerequisites for learning? And what is the point of school? The first federal Bullying Prevention Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., last week. Director of Healthy School Communities (part of the Whole Child Initiative at educational leadership organization ASCD) Sean Slade summed up associate professor of child development Philip Rodkin's argument:

"Children are there [at school] to learn not only how to read, write, add, and subtract, but also how to work together as a group, a team, a community" (2010, paragraph 4).

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is proponents' rationale for teaching SEL. Sounds awfully similar to our rationale for teaching NMLs, doesn't it? And that is why SEL and NML are like peas and carrots, folks. And why life is like a box of chocolates...

Back to Senegal.

The whole Sunukaddu team agreed, Our workshops should optimize participants' engagement, appropriation, and application of the material. We should also operate as non-hierarchical partners in the learning process, and so create a context in which ideas and knowledge can flow freely in both directions.

So we developed a method that enabled learning via hands-on exploration, game play, improvisation, creation, discussion, and self-reflection. We configured these pedagogical activities such that they cultivated NMLs, SEL, and asset appreciation (a construct that I created that draws on principles from asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, intrinsic motivation, and resilience). The explicit curriculum was a 12-session workshop supporting teens' efforts to access their voices, make connections, manipulate multiple communication forms and tools, and share their messages with their peers and communities.

Our original curricular outline:

DAY 1: Introduction + Basic Computer Literacy (NML skill of the day: Distributed Cognition)
DAY 2: Basic Computer Literacy + Message Development (NML skill of the day: Multitasking)
DAY 3: Message Development (Classic media literacy; NML skill of the day: Collective Intelligence)
DAY 4: Message Diffusion (Diffusion of Innovation + Stages of Change; NML skill of the day: Networking)
DAY 5: Audio (Hip hop; NML skill of the day: Appropriation)
DAY 6: Non-fiction (Journalism + Positive Deviance; NML skill of the day: Negotiation)
DAY 7: Conflict (NML skill of the day: Performance)
DAY 8: Fiction (Script-writing +Entertainment-education; NML skill of the day: Transmedia Navigation)
DAY 9: Fixed images (Photography + Peer support; NML skill of the day: Play)
DAY 10: Moving images (Cinematography + Human rights; NML skill of the day: Visualization)
DAY 11: Basic Internet Literacy (NML skill of the day: Judgment)
DAY 12: Conclusion (NML skill of the day: Simulation)

Then the power went out.

Oh yeah, remember that? ;-)

The power left the building early in the intervention, Days 1-4.(4) How do you teach basic computer literacy without computers? How do you teach distributed cognition (defined by Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, and Robinson (2006) as "the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities" (p. 4)) without the digital tools we'd intended?

Is it too jingoistic to holler, "New Media Literacies to the rescue!"? Probably.

Here's the answer: You harness distributed cognition and tap other tools -- we broke out the battery-powered smartphones.

You multi-task -- while the participants were filling out their asset inventories, we powwowed and rejiggered the day's schedule. You play -- along with the participants, we tested our way through this challenge, discovering what happened when we did X, Y, and Z, noting successes and setbacks, evaluating, replicating, discarding, and innovating. Like I said, the NMLs returned power to our powerless situation.

And a few days later, when Sunukaddu instructor Idrissa Mbaye hatched the idea of a Competence Clothesline, the NMLs provided an effective solution to our lack of electric fanning. Because our perceptive participants had pulled down competence card(s) from the line, they had in their hands... handy hand-fans. How about THAT? ;-)

So what I'm saying is, Who needs electricity when you've got skillz? And these skills don't need digital technology. What they do need are understanding, and they need sharing, with students, colleagues, parents, partners, anyone, everyone.

Now.

(1) literally - no power means no air-conditioning (not that most establishments could afford to buy or run air conditioners) and no standing fans. And this is serious in July, when average daily temperature is 81 degrees Fahrenheit and average relative humidity is 70%.
(2) and the word "literacies" - fuhgeddaboutit. Who even knows what "literacies" means? Seriously - can you define it?
(3) (nowadays, it's more like Aidan and Madison, or Muhammad and Elena)
(4) By Day 5, Alex greenlit the daily rental of a tiny generator.

Laurel Felt is a third-year doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism who only wants to change the world... To do so, she seeks to support youths' development of new media literacies, social and emotional learning, and asset appreciation. Her research also looks at gender, obesity, bullying, an

The furor over a reading assignment for students at Brooklyn College feels more intense on the Internet than on the campus itself.