A death-knell for the Dewey System?
I’m intrigued about the opening of a new library wing at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). It has a world-first, tech enabled cataloguing system, called The O, which means you can just put a book down anywhere and the system will find it for the next reader.
“Phrontisterion is animated by technology that allows us to organise books however we want, while keeping track of everything—and thus does away with the in-many-ways-inadequate Dewey cataloguing system. It’s also a lot bigger than Mona’s old library. Since 2011, the collection has continued to grow and now boasts (literally, David boasts about it quite a lot) some 50,000 items in a range of formats, covering topics such as architecture, science, philosophy, statistics, literature, mathematics, numismatics, ancient Egypt and African art; alongside wine, beer, betting odds, religion, socialism, sex and—that old chestnut—death.”
This latest attempt at innovative library cataloguing put me in mind of art historian Aby Warburg and his library, which was arranged according to what Warburg called ’the law of the good neighbour'.
You can read an interview with David Walsh, the owner and creator of MONA:
I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club
The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.
Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.
You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.
I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.
Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.
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Compliment this with: Jules Verne could have told us AI is not a person
💬 Sadly, not just tech.
📷 Lounge lizard
📚Currently reading: My year in paris with gertrude stein by Deborah Levy.
📷 Late afternoon at the ocean baths.
“He’s like Jesus with a plow, and we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”.
An apprenticeship in writing, with Wendell Berry. | Substack
‘Renaming Lake Ontario’ has the form of a classic mafia loyalty test. The Don sets an absurd, demeaning small task, to learn who’ll accept the subsequent steps. Google keeps passing. They don’t know their boundaries, which for a leading map-making company is ironic.
#Tech #TechEthics #Cartography
There's only make
The consistently inspiring online writer Brennan Brown ‘confesses’ to being a compulsive worker.
“Twenty sheets a day, or 2,000 words, or one essay every single day for eleven straight years… I don’t know if any of it is good, in the way Tellado’s editors meant good or the way Cervantes meant it when he called Lope a prodigy of nature. But I know the not-writing feels worse than the writing, and apparently that’s been true of every obsessive scribbler since at least the Spanish Golden Age, and there’s something comforting in that lineage. We’re not well, certainly. But we’re not alone, either.” — Compulsion – the writers who wrote the most in history
This compulsion to express oneself put me in mind of Coreta Kent’s rule number 6:
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.” – Coreta Kent’s Ten Rules for artists
It’s not so much that consistency beats quality. More that consistency is what produces quality. But even before the desire to make good work comes the simple urge to make something.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Thinking about the late Yayoi Kusama today. We remembered our visit to the art gallery in her home town of Matsumoto where we were moved to tears.
#YayoiKusama #JapaneseArt