We’ve come to the end of our fifth week of the fall semester. I suppose that, under the circumstances, things have gone about as well as can be expected; certainly, we’ve handled things much better than some other places I could name. Campus-wide, we’ve had only a small number of cases of COVID among students, faculty, and staff, which is of course good; the administration, though, anticipates a spring semester much like this one: a mix of face-to-face classes and various hybrid formats. In short, it’s been a busy time, which has kept me away from “here.” A growing pile of books and articles here in the study, though, attests to what I’m going to call “research” for the book and for a couple of other, teaching-related ideas I’ve been kicking around.

Before I lose track of it, I want to post a link to an online archive I’ve just come across via Twitter, Stones That Calculate: https://stones.computer/ Its subtitle is “Collection of resources about post-digital materiality,” which sounds like it would come in handy for people interested in larger contexts (and consequences) for discussions about our dramatic shift toward the computer as a medium and regulator of human experience. Here’s its preamble:

By stones that calculate, we mean the assemblage of all information processing devices or infrastructures and their socio-political impact on our automated society. This website is an online collection of resources that maps academic as well as artistic perspectives which reflect digital conditions within materialist discourses. We have examined the research field on the basis of three topics from which we later derived sixteen aspects.

This archive is an evolving exercise to provide an entry point and simplified overview for inspiration and further explorations.

I’m looking forward to having a deeper look around this collection for pieces that might come in handy this spring when we talk about AI and machine learning in my comp. classes.