Category Archives: Reading

“What we say no to”

By david.humphrey | Published: July 26, 2010
Paul Graham has an interesting essay up about the Acceleration of Addictiveness, in which he argues that our ability to refine and improve things through technology is leaving us increasingly susceptible to addictions, many of which develop too quickly for cultural norms to temper: As far as I know there’s no word for something we like [...]
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On the Reading of Books

By david.humphrey | Published: June 26, 2010
Much of my time writing on this blog is spent advocating for the open web, and the potential it brings for distributed, global, collaboration.  I don’t believe in this any less, despite the critique that follows. At the same time that I am passionately involved in the creation of the open web, I am also intimately [...]
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Questions about books after dinner

By david.humphrey | Published: June 9, 2010
“Dad, do you know the Odyssey?” I do. “How do you know it?” I’ve read it in English many times, and fought with it in Greek, too. “Tell me something about it.” I leave you in Browning’s hands for a more complete account of a similar exchange.  Allow me to quote “Development” at length: MY FATHER was a scholar and knew [...]
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Rereading Girard on Good Friday

By david.humphrey | Published: April 2, 2010
I’ve written about Girard before, and always glossed over some of his ideas that mean the most to me.  Today is Good Friday, and as I ponder the meaning of it for my own faith, I decided to post an old lecture I gave as part of a lecture series Luke organized many years ago. This [...]
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Letters on the ground

By david.humphrey | Published: October 12, 2009
Living in the country, one of the yearly jobs one has to do, which my city friends miss out on, is cleaning out a septic system filter.  It involves removing a man-hole sized cover, which is fastened with 8 three-inch screws.  Once open, you have to reach the length of your upper-body down into the [...]
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A moment of reading

By david.humphrey | Published: October 6, 2009
I’m too tired to do it tonight, but soon I’ll have something to say about Derrida’s book, Archive Fever.  I’m reading it in response to Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I’m reading in order to properly understand Luke’s post on the same.  In it, Derrida is [...]
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Reading Against and Reading Up Against

By david.humphrey | Published: September 29, 2009
I want to draw a distinction between two types of reading.  The first, what I’ll call Reading Against, is a form of reading that reads a text against itself.  It explicitly contains the idea of disagreement, but also implies the reverse, that one might agree with the text, or that the text might agree with [...]
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Responding to the web

By david.humphrey | Published: September 23, 2009
When I teach open source development, the very first thing I do is get students blogging.  It’s a trick I learned from Chris.  Last week we spent the entire week learning to use blogs, blog planets, wikis, irc, newsgroups, teleconferences, twitter, etc.  Why take so much time teaching students how to use that many parallel [...]
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Defining Open Data

By david.humphrey | Published: September 21, 2009
I read the phrase “bearing witness” twice tonight.  It’s a phrase that has been going through my mind for the past three weeks.  During this same period I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Open Data.  They’re connected in important ways. I seem to encounter the term Open Data everywhere these days.  People like [...]
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Quiet civility

By david.humphrey | Published: September 14, 2009
Today David Eaves is writing about an experience he had in a meeting recently: The day long event included 180+ leaders and interested parties from different sectors and was supposed to cap off discussions that had been going on about the future of British Columbia. But rather than be an open dialogue, the discussion was intensely [...]
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