Brookapedia

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It occurred to me last night as I was putting together my last entry that there's a deep need going unfulfilled here at cgbvb. When I linked the phrase "event model" to one of the pages from my course blog from a few years ago, it was a little more indirect than I'd hoped. And there are a couple of other posts that might do just as well. In other words, as I've been working slowly on the second book, I'm also polishing up concepts that in some cases are variations on others' terms and in some cases are my very own.

I'm planning this summer to do a fairly elaborate site redesign, and as part of that, I'd planned on doing some "Best of cgbvb" linking, fronting some of my favorite posts and some of the screencasts that I've done over the years. I'm thinking that maybe I should also put together some synthesizing posts on some of the vocabulary that I've been taking for granted, both my own and others'.

This occurred to me also recently as I was finishing up Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map (Amazon). I'm in the habit of talking about fallacies of scale (which you'll find as part of this essay), but Johnson's book has me thinking about a corresponding "felicity of scale" that might be worth making similarly explicit.

I really don't mean for this to sound as arrogant as it probably does--I don't mean to suggest that my thinking is so important that what's needed is a glossary so that people can understand me better. Rather, I'm coming to realize that the invention and/or development of concepts is pretty important to my own work process, even when I move past them or ditch them in favor of other ideas. Phrases like "event model" or "fallacy of scale" feel like pieces of the puzzle I'm working on, and I think it'll help me to start pinning them down a little bit. As I write about this, though, I think that this is something worth doing over at Rhetworks, even though I'll still talk about them here. It occurs to me as well that what I'm talking about here is the same kind of thing that Kenneth Burke did in his earliest books, including local glossaries in both Counter-Statement and Attitudes Toward History, and that recommends this idea to me even more.

So we'll see. There's only a few entries that I've got planned so far, but it may be worth picking up some related ideas from some of what I'm reading, and glossarize those as well. And who knows? Maybe a full fledged Brookapedia will make more sense after the third or fourth book. Heh.

That is all. Go Bears!

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This page contains a single entry by cgbrooke published on February 3, 2007 9:36 PM.

Something old, something new was the previous entry in this blog.

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