As a child of the 50s, Sally Cruikshank, creator of cult favorite Quasi at the Quackadero, above, marinated in Carl Barks’ Donald Duck comics. In TheAnimators, an early-80’s PBS documentary centered on the San Francisco Bay Area scene, she mused that “the images of the money bin and Donald Duck and the nephews and Uncle Scrooge all sunk into my subconscious and came out later, not really looking like ducks to anyone but me, but in my mind they are ducks—Quasi, Snozzy, and Anita.”
Quasi at the Quackadero places two of those odd ducks, contented loafer Quasi and his controlling, lisping ladyfriend, Anita, in a bizarre amusement park where the attractions include opportunities to “Relive One of the Shining Moments of Your Life” and “See Last Night’s Dreams Today.”
The fun house mirrors in the 3:10 mark’s Hall of Time are a particular treat, contributing to a carnival of sensory overload that’s as old timey as it is trippy.
“You don’t need to take acid to have weird thoughts and imagine weird things,” Cruikshank, whose other favorites, tellingly, include Winsor McCay, Max Fleischer, and Yellow Submarine, replied to an admirer on YouTube.
In 2009, Cruikshank’s demented vision found its way into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, an honor she celebrated with a blog post toasting her late boss, E.E. Gregg Snazelle of Snazelle Films:
The job was to experiment with animation, and do commercials for him when the jobs came in. He also hoped I’d figure out how to solve 3‑d without glasses.
Needless to say I didn’t solve 3‑d. I didn’t even do very many commercials over ten years, but I showed up at 8:30, took an hour off for lunch and worked till 5:30. I was paid $350 a month, and I could live on that then.
He encouraged me generously without ever paying much attention to me. These days if an opportunity like that even existed, you’d be forced to sign all kinds of rights statements for characters and content created, but this was before “Star Wars” and he just seemed to be happy to have me around. We were never particularly close. It spoiled me for any job after that.
I made all my “Quasi” films while I was working at Snazelle. Unfortunately he’s no longer alive, but here’s to you, Gregg, with a big heart and much thanks.
Cruikshank was indeed lucky to have secured a day job in her chosen field, providing her with access to prohibitively expensive equipment.
Remember that her 1975 short predates personal computers, affordable animation software, and a plethora of free sharing platforms. Cruikshank says that Quasi at the Quackadero required two years of near daily work, likening its animation process to “something from the Middle Ages.”
Of course, 1975 was also a peak year for underground comix, another tradition from which Quasi sprung, right into the arms of a receptive audience. Anita and Quasi also appear in Cruikshank’s one and only comic, Magic Clams. In addition to her work at Snazelle Studios, Cruikshank cocktail waitressed in a hangout for San Francisco’s underground cartoonists, including then-boyfriend Kim Deitch, Quasi’s “Special Art Assistant.” Bob Armstrong and Al Dodge of R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders contributed the short’s score. Other friends from the indie comix scene were enlisted to paint cells at 50 cents per.
Quasi’s inclusion in theNational Film Registrynot only carries the imprimatur of cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance, it suggests the psychedelic short is a seminal influence in its own right.
We agree with KQED’s Sarah Hotchkiss that “the saturated colors, hard edges, and constant movement of Cruikshank’s animation could be source material for the future realization of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
Both deliver us from reality into the limitless possibilities of an anthropomorphic universe.
Explore more of Sally Cruickshank’s animations on her You Tube channel, including her cartoons for Sesame Street. Some of her animation cels, including ones from Quasi at the Quackadero are for sale in her Etsy shop.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Value in the art world depends on manufactured desire for objects that serve no purpose and have no intrinsic meaning outside of the stories that surround them, which is why it can be easy to fool others with fraudulent copies. Collectors and experts are often eager to believe a well-told tale of special provenance. As Orson Welles says in F is for Fake, “Lots of oysters, only a few pearls. Rarity. The chief cause and encouragement of fakery and phoniness.”
“Concepts of fakery and originality bounce off one another as reflections,” Lidija Grozdanic writes of Welles’ documentary on “our innate infatuation with exclusivity,” a film made when the internet consisted of 36 routers and 42 host computers — in total (including a link in Hawaii!). Now we are immersed in hyperreality. Copies of digital artworks are indistinguishable from each other, since they cannot be said to exist in any material sense. How can they be authenticated? How can they become exclusive placeholders for wealth?
The questions have been taken up, and answered rather abruptly, it seems, by the architects of blockchain technology, who bring us NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens,” an acronym and phraseology you’ve surely heard, whether you’ve felt inclined to learn what they mean. The videos featured today offer brief explanations, by reference especially to the case of South Carolina-based digital artist named Mike Winklemann, who goes by Beeple, and who first harnessed the power of NFTs to make millions.
A crypto whale known only by the pseudonym Metakovan paid $69 million (with fees) for some indiscriminately collated pictures of cartoon monsters, gross-out gags and a breastfeeding Donald Trump — which suddenly makes this computer illustrator the third-highest-selling artist alive.
The criticism is perhaps unfair. As Christies argues in its defense, the piece reveals “Beeple’s enormous evolution as an artist” over five years. Specialist Noah Davis calls the collage, stitched together from Beeple’s body of work on Instagram, “a kind of Duchampian readymade.” But it doesn’t really matter if Beeple’s work is avant-garde high art.
The libertarian econo-speak “nonfungible token” reveals itself as part of a world divorced from the usual criteria art historians, curators, auction houses, and others apply in their judgments of authenticity and worth. Instead, the value of NFTs rests mainly on the fact that they are exclusive, without particularly high regard for what they include. One may love the work of Beeple, but we should be clear, “what Christie’s sold was not an object” — there is no object — “but a ‘nonfungible token,’” which is “bitcoinese for unique string of characters, logged on a blockchain,” that cannot be exchanged or replaced… like owning a Monet without owning a Monet.
Unlike the Wu Tang album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, bought for $2 million in 2015 by Martin Shkreli, content attached to NFTs can be shared, viewed, copied, etc. over and over. “Millions of people have seen Beeple’s art,” the BBC explains, “and the image has been copied and shared countless times. In many cases, the artist even retains the copyright ownership of their work, so they can continue to produce and sell copies.”
Other sales of NFTs include a version of the 10-year-old internet meme Nyan Cat that sold for $600,000, a clip of LeBon James blocking a shot for $100,000, and a picture of Lindsay Lohan for $17,000, which then resold for $57,000. Lohan articulated the NFT ethos in a statement, saying, “I believe in a world which is financially decentralized.” This is not a world where judgments about the value of art and culture can be centralized either. But power can be, presumably, in the form of currency, crypto-and otherwise, traded in speculative bubbles.
“Some people compare it to buying an autographed print,” the BBC writes. Some compare it to the age-old scams warned of in folk tales. David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, calls NFT sellers “crypto-grifters… the same guys who’ve always been at it, trying to come up with a new form of worthless bean that they can sell for money.” This eternal scam exists beyond the binaries posed by F is for Fake. Originality, authenticity, or otherwise are mostly beside the point.
He was obviously correct, though Smith still doesn’t sound convinced. “I’m pleased I took it,” she says, “but it’s a bit of a weight around my neck. It keeps coming back to whack me on the back of the head — nicely in some instances, but aggravatingly in others.” Hitting one in the head — front or back — is the aim of the best album covers in punk, and “punk rock’s rage and dissent have always been easy to represent visually,” says Noah Lefevre in the Polyphonic video above. Taking the perfect punk photograph, however, depended on a number of variables all coming together perfectly for a once-in-a-lifetime shot.
For one thing, Smith had to have made the gig. She nearly accepted an offer to go out with friends instead. She also decided to change it up that night and stand on Simonon’s side of the stage instead of next to guitarist Mick Jones. And then, as Lefevre explains, there was the show itself. “In London, the Clash would play raucous punk bars and dancehalls full of standing room crowds. In the U.S.,” during their first tour in 1979, “they often found themselves playing in theaters with fixed seating.” The Palladium was such a venue. “Bouncers would hold crowds back, make sure they stayed stapled to their seats.”
The sedentary crowd killed the vibe. By the end of the show, “Paul’s frustration turned to anger,” notes Snap Galleries, “and then he lost it completely. His watch stopped at 9:50pm.” Smith remembers seeing him suddenly spin toward her. “He was in a really bad mood, and that wasn’t like him.” She was so startled, she got the photograph. “It wasn’t a choice to take the shot. My finger just went off.” That chance moment gave the band an ideal image for the London Calling cover.
It was illustrator Ray Lowry’s idea to crib the typography of Elvis’ first record, and the font “called back to the roots of punk rock,” born out of the ‘50s rockabilly tradition of simple songs and bare-bones instrumentation and arrangements. “Punk and rock and roll held the same cultural significance,” Lefevre says, but The Clash announced themselves on the album cover as purifiers of the tradition, stripping out the “phony Beatlemania” Strummer decried in the title track and replacing it with righteous, if barely-in-focus, rage. Hear the full gig just above, including the bass-smashing at the end at 1:08:10.
When William Basinski released The Disintegration Loops in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, it was the sound of decay preserved for posterity — recordings of decades-old tape loops literally falling apart on their reels, as the World Trade Center ruins smoldered across the river from the composer’s Brooklyn studio. The piece was performed ten years later by an orchestra at the Temple of Dendur, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Anohni (then known as Antony of Antony and the Johnsons) called it “the most helpful and useful music I have ever known.”
This might mark the first time a piece of ambient music has been awarded such gravitas and made the centerpiece of a significant memorial. It seems a long way from the origins of the form in Brian Eno’s Discreet Music (1975) and Music for Airports (1978), in which Eno pushed music to the periphery of experience, turning it into unobtrusive background stimulus that “created a sort of landscape you could belong to,” he says above, like the endlessly repeating worlds of a video game. In music, however, “repetition is a form of change,” Eno reminded us, or as Basinski’s loops suggested, writes Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker, “repetition is change.”
Another curious trait links Basinski’s 21st century lamentations and Eno’s 70s airport lounge music, one that seems to change the terms of the contract that ambient music, as we usually understand it, makes with the listener. We might think of it as music that makes no particular demands on us and take Eno’s statements about it as encouraging a kind of passive consumption: ambient music as no more than pleasant accompaniment for better queuing-up and calmer shopping. (Not that there’s anything wrong with stress relief….)
But what Basinski and Eno both describe in intense acts of ambient creation is more extreme. It begins with a kind of helplessness in the face of distress — in the first case an of helplessly watching lower Manhattan burn from the roof of a Williamsburg loft. Eno’s predicament was more personal and intimate, he tells Riz Khan above, but no less helpless. Convalescing in his bed after a car accident, he found himself unable to move when a friend put on a record and left him alone. The experience of immobility became a catalyst.
The album of “18th century harp music” was too quiet. He couldn’t turn it up over the sound of rain outside his window. At first, Eno says, he was frustrated by his lack of control over the environment. But as he “started listening to the rain and listening to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain,” it became for him “a great musical experience…. I suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn’t impose itself on your space in the same way.”
In paying attention to a loss of control, Eno discovered music that relinquishes control over the listener. In listening to his own shock and grief, Basinski discovered music that lets itself fall apart, slowly and beautifully over time. What he “pompously called” ambient music, Eno jokes above, “became something I no longer recognize.” And, yes, it may have come to take up more space than he intended. But it still functions as a creative response to circumstances in which, it seems, there may be little else to do but listen carefully and wait.
The talent of an individual may not always run in the family, but we can never discount the possibility of its doing so. This is true even in the case of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, not just one of the best-known composers ever to live, but a byword for deep, innate, and unrepeatable genius. Mozart was composing original music at the age of of four or five, an astonishing fact we know today in part because his older sister witnessed and later attested to it. Known as Nannerl, Maria Anna Mozart preceded her bother into keyboard lessons from their father Leopold, a composer and teacher. Together Wolfgang and Maria Anna toured Europe as a performing duo of child prodigies, until Maria Anna’s attainment of marriageable age took her off the circuit.
If Maria Anna ever composed music of her own, none of it has survived. But she did leave behind a fair few diaries and letters, many of the latter exchanged with her brother. These writings provided the material for pianist Heloísa Fernandes to create a piece in tribute to the lesser-known Mozart sibling.
“The writing, all in German, underwent painstaking analysis so that its tone and pronunciation could be translated into musical notes,” says Little Black Book. “A German interpreter was invited to read the letters and diary of Maria Anna Mozart out loud,” and a piece of software “translated the recording into musical notes by tuning the syllables. If a spoken syllable hit 387 Hz, for example, the program interpreted it as G.” Thus were Nannerl’s words transformed into music.
The resulting piece, “Das Königreich Rücken,” is named after “an imaginary kingdom that Maria and Wolfgang made reference to in their letters to each other,” as Sara Spary notes in Adweek — a publication that would naturally cover it, commissioned as it was by an ad campaign for LG Electronics. Developed by Brazilian firm AlmapBBDO in cooperation with the production company Supersônica, “Projecto Ms. Mozart” is meant to promote LG’s XBOOM Go Bluetooth speaker. But whichever device you use to hear “Das Königreich Rücken,” you’ll surely find that it sounds quite unlike any piece you’ve heard before. Fans of Maria Anna Mozart as a historical figure will listen and wonder what could have been, and even those ignorant of her can’t but welcome these three additional minutes of Mozart into the world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
After getting his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Yo-Yo Ma “took a seat along the wall of the observation area, masked and socially distanced away from the others. He went on to pass 15 minutes in observation playing cello for an applauding audience,” writes the Berkshire Eagle. You can watch the scene above, which played out at Berkshire Community College this weekend. And read more about it here.
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The cassette tape is so ubiquitous, so much a part of my life since I can even remember music as a thing, that it was a shock to find out that the man who invented it, Lou Ottens, passed away at the age of 94. Of course, somebody did have to invent the cassette tape, but in all these years I never thought to look the person up. Such an invention first makes you think of the world before it: records (dearly beloved, still around), and reel-to-reel tape (not so dearly beloved). The former was a fixed object, an art object, immutable (until turntablists came along). The latter was a way to record ourselves, but so much more was involved in the act. People had to wind the spindle, to thread the tape through the capstan and heads, and record usually in mono. You can see an overview of a model from the 1950s here.
Ottens was a Dutch engineer working at Philips who became head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium. His assignment was to shrink the reel-to-reel and, like the radio, make it more portable. And here is the most important decision: Ottens wanted the format to be licensed to other manufacturers for free, so everybody could partake. Considering the endless format battles that we fight every day, this decision was as monumental as it was humanist.
He designed his prototype out of wood and sized it to fit into a pocket for true portability. (This prototype, by the way, disappeared from history after he used it to prop up a jack when fixing a flat tire.) The actual compact cassette, promoted as a cheaper and smaller format for major label releases, immediately gained a second life as an artistic tool: a way for regular folk to record whatever they wanted. Keith Richards reportedly recorded the riff for “Satisfaction” on the portable cassette player near his bed. People recorded lectures, the television, the radio, their relatives, their friends, the random sound of life. People started to curate: their favorite music, their favorite people, their favorite sounds. People pretended to be DJs, pretended to be artists, pretended to be television hosts, pretended to be authors, pretended to be critics. And some through pretending became the things they wanted to be.
People made mixtapes for friends and for lovers. They looked at the remaining tape on the spindle and wondered if the song they had to end side two would fit. People realized that cassette tape could be a collage of sounds, cut up by the pause button.
Ottens may not have realized it, but he had created a completely democratic format. In the 1980s, the back pages of music magazines flourished with the catalogs of cassette-only album releases. If you had a Walkman and a friend with a halfway decent tape recorder, you could carry around your favorite music and listen to it whenever you wanted.
The record industry rebelled (for a while). They wanted you to know that “home taping is killing music” but did so with a skull and bones graphic that made it that much cooler. In the end it didn’t really matter. The music fans repurchased everything on CD anyway. (Apart from the people who taped CDs and even then after that *those* people downloaded the mp3s.)
And here’s the thing. Ottens wasn’t precious about any of it. He was part of the development of the Compact Disc. The cassette was just another stepping stone.
But despite the numerous articles that cassettes were a dead medium, they kept coming back. Mixtapes, the lifeblood of hip hop culture continued to thrive, even if by the end of the century the idea was more of a concept. And then in the middle of the 2010s cassettes came roaring back after the vinyl resurgence. For bands it was a cheap way to provide a physical product, what with vinyl still being very expensive to produce. Bandcamp, the place to go for cassette-only releases, offers artistic tapes for the same price as a digital download. So why not get both and start your library again?
Ottens never foresaw any of this happening, but it speaks to something very human: we want control of our music, and digital music, especially in the cloud, ain’t cutting it. We want to hold something in our hands and claim it as our own.
So pour one out for Lou Ottens, who started a revolution that hasn’t finished. Do *not* press pause.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Editor’s Note: This month, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman has published The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, a book that takes a historical look at the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. His new work also maps out what we can do about it. In the coming days, Peter will be making his book available through Open Culture by publishing three short essays along with links to corresponding sections of his book. Today, you can read his second essay “On Wikipedia, the Encyclopédie, and the Verifiability of Information” (below), plus download the second chapter of his book here. Read his first essay, “The Monsterverse” here, and purchase the entire book online.
When the ideas that matter most to us – liberals, democrats, progressives, republicans, all in the original sense of the words – were first put forward in society in order to change society, they were advanced foremost in print. The new rules, new definitions, and new codicils of human and civil rights that undergird many of the freedoms we value today had as their heart text and its main delivery mechanism, the printing press.
In that sense the first Enlightenment was based upon the foundation of the printed word. And of the 18th century’s contributions to knowledge and society – Newton’s physics, Montesquieu’s laws, Linnaeus’s taxonomies, Rousseau’s political philosophy, the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man – there was perhaps no greater printed offering than the 22-million-word Encyclopédie that the French Enlightenment philosophers starting writing, compiling, and offering to the public in 1750.
The Encyclopédie was monumental. Not just from a content-assembly perspective – an effort to gather all the world’s knowledge and to print and publish it – but also from a sociopolitical one, given the powerful forces suppressing knowledge that such an effort would provoke. The Encyclopédie found the state and the church banning at one time or another almost every one of its 72,000 articles, 18,000 pages, and 28 volumes and invoking a hundred ways to forbid its distribution.
The encyclopedia’s entire approach to collecting and presenting knowledge was radical. The articles presented truths – some heretical, some blasphemous – that astonished contemporary readers. And its innovative approach to the verification its own content, to proving what could be proved, which was really its nuclear core, rocked the Western world.
The Encyclopédie smote 18th-century orthodoxy with ink-and-paper sledgehammers. The article on “RAISON,” or “REASON,” for example, told every reader who for centuries had been steeped in church doctrine and the divine rights of royals that:
No proposition can be accepted as divine revelation if it contradicts what is known to us, either by immediate intuition, as in the case of self-evident propositions, or by obvious deductions of reason, as in demonstrations. It would be ridiculous to give preference to such revelations, because the evidence that causes us to adopt them cannot surpass the certainty of our intuitive or demonstrative knowledge…
Clerics and kings, needless to say, were not fans. Articles on religion, philosophy, and politics and society challenged the government and the church even as the censors watched. Direct swipes at the monarchy and the church appeared even where you might not expect – in articles on CONSCIENCE, LIBERTÉ DE; CROISADES; FANATISME; TOLÉRANCE; etc. The entry for FORTUNE spotlighted the gross inequalities of wealth already evident in 18th-century Europe. And a zinging condemnation of slavery in the article on the SLAVE TRADE made few friends among any who had a hand anywhere in the business.
Slave trade is the purchase of Negroes made by Europeans on the coasts of Africa, who then employ these unfortunate men as slaves in their colonies. This purchase of Negroes to reduce them into slavery […] violates all religion, morals, natural law, and human rights.
The Encyclopédistes announced from day one that this new work would be, as we would say today, fact-based. There would be an underlying and overarching commitment on the part of all contributors and the work as a whole to the verification of all of its source materials. Verification is potentially “a long and painful process,” Diderot wrote in his introduction to the whole enterprise – the famous “Preliminary Discourse” that these philosophers used to sell in the whole project:
We have tried as much as possible to avoid this inconvenience by citing directly, in the body of the articles, the authors on whose evidence we have relied and by quoting their own text when it is necessary.
We have everywhere compared opinions, weighed reasons, and proposed means of doubting or of escaping from doubt; at times we have even settled contested matters.… Facts are cited, experiments compared, and methods elaborated … in order to excite genius to open unknown routes, and to advance onward to new discoveries, using the place where great men have ended their careers as the first step.
What this meant in practice was revolutionary. There would be no accepted truths but for those that could be proven and cited. Fact-based versus faith- and belief-based: the start and spark of the Enlightenment. One of Diderot’s biographers explains that approximately 23,000 articles had at least one cross-reference to another article in one of the encyclopedia’s 28 volumes. “The total number of links – some articles had five or six – reached almost 62,000.” And all while retaining a sly sense of humor. The article on CANNIBALS ended with “the mischievous cross-reference,” as another historian would later describe it: “See Eucharist, Communion, Altar, etc.”
That commitment to reference citation continues in the Enlightenment’s most important successor project – Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales and colleagues 20 years ago this year. It’s the foundation of what today’s Wikipedia terms verifiability, and in many key ways it’s the foundation for truth in knowledge and society today:
“Verifiability” … mean[s] that material added to Wikipedia must have been published previously by a reliable source. Editors may not add their own views to articles simply because they believe them to be correct, and may not remove sources’ views from articles simply because they disagree with them.
[V]erifiability is a necessary condition (a minimum requirement) for the inclusion of material, though it is not a sufficient condition (it may not be enough).
In 1999, free-software activist Richard M. Stallman called for this universal online encyclopedia covering all areas of knowledge, along with a complete library of instructional courses – and, equally important, a movement to develop it, “much as the Free Software Movement gave us the free operating system GNU/Linux.” That call (reproduced in full as the appendix in my book) is credited by Wikipedia as the origins of the work that is now the largest knowledge resource in history.
The free encyclopedia will provide an alternative to the restricted ones that media corporations will write.
Stallman published a list of what that the encyclopedia would need to do, what sort of freedoms it would need to give to the public, and how it could get started.
An encyclopedia located everywhere.
An encyclopedia open to anyone—but, most promisingly, to teachers and students.
An encyclopedia built of small steps.
An encyclopedia built on the long view: “If it takes twenty years to complete the free encyclopedia, that will be but an instant in the history of literature and civilization.”
An encyclopedia containing one or more articles for any topic you would expect to find in another encyclopedia – “for example, bird watchers might eventually contribute an article on each species of bird, along with pictures and recordings of its calls” – and “courses for all academic subjects.”
1999, and it sounds familiar. Wikipedia, of course, is one of the world’s most popular websites (the world’s most popular noncommercial one) now and an irreplaceable source of verifiable information – open to any and all. Its processes are transparent, and thanks to hackers affiliated with the project, you now can watch and listen to its edits live online:
Communities that work with Wikipedia are likely to benefit from this commitment to citation, and new collaborations that take effect around it are likely to benefit society. The Internet Archive is working with Wikipedia now, digitizing books so that links to sources in Wikipedia link all the way through to the books themselves – and render images and text on the cited pages. The reference link to a biography by Taylor Branch at the bottom of a Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, now hotlinks to the readable book online at Archive.org. That work is essential. “Only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them” – as Princeton historian Anthony Grafton writes – “makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannical and democratic alike, to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted.… Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part.”
Can we take verifiability further now, especially as our epistemic crisis deepens? Can we improve citation for the medium that’s beginning to overtake us all, which is video? Can we make resources on the web – also a new thing – verifiable? What is a citation like in a … podcast?
The great historian of the Encyclopédie, Robert Darnton, tells us in his new book, “When the printed word appeared in France in 1470, the state did not know what to make of it.” So, 700 years from now, what will tomorrow’s historians say about us? Further thoughts about how we can start more consciously collaborating with one another and producing – but immediately – for our burgeoning knowledge networks: next week.
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