(A technical post for those seriously interested in e-reading. Feel free to move on if you’re here for other things!) I like the convenience of reading on a tablet, but I prefer annotating PDFs to reading in Kindle or epub. If I’m buying a book and taking notes, I want…
Most books are made in factories, and even boutique presses use machines alongside hand labor to create a small run of books: But you can also craft a high-quality book by hand. A few years ago, I got to watch British bookbinder Jonathan Smith, at his craft in southern Kazakhstan. It can…
So John Oliver’s just come out with a Chrome extension called Drumpfinator, that changes all web mentions of Trump to his ancestral name, Drumpf: This is fantastic! But why stop there? There are so many other Chrome extensions to change your perspective! If you feel like the Internet (or the…
I moved back from Kazakhstan last year, but I still have posts that never quite made it to the blog. Here’s one on the good life: Seven is a popular numbers among Kazakhs, as our language teacher reminded us the other day. First, you listing your seven grandfathers (jeti ata), telling you…
One year at university, I gave up the internet for Lent. It wasn’t an especially holy move. I was just curious what would happen if I no longer depended on Google for answers to life’s biggest questions: But you wouldn’t believe how complicated it gets when you can no longer consult your…
Below, Murat and his Kazakh family build a yurt in the highland plains of Western Mongolia. I made this draft of a children’s ebook two years ago for the pupils at my school in Kazakhstan. View pictures of how a yurt is built, below, or download the PDF and read it…
Four years ago (!) I wrote an ethnographic research paper on missionary ethics that was, I like to think, well-written, complex, and faithful to the interviews. But I struggled throughout the research — and I struggle now — with concerns about what writing does to our subjects, with the…
*Checks date.* Nope, this vid of officials quickly covering up an unauthorized statue of Snowden is not an April Fools. That step on the head of an eagle is particularly nice: This is coming to light because the worst part of the Patriot Act (“Section 215”) is up for renewal…
I’ve added RSS feeds from blogs about librarians, data, and data visualization to Feedly recently, which I was going through the other evening. When I came across this particular picture, though, I paused. What do you notice about it?
Earlier this semester, I met with a student looking for ways to easily analyze news articles and social media. For anonymity purposes, we’ll say that Anna* was researching girl scout cookies*. Everyone loves Samoas, am I right? Now some librarians look up a topic before a student arrives, so that they have…