The New York Times has published a sequence of blog posts by filmmaker Errol Morris telling a story of the invention of e-mail and his brother’s role in its development. The posts – mixing personal history with the history of e-mail and computer time-sharing – consist largely of excerpts from conversations between Morris and individuals who worked on CTSS and Project MAC at MIT in the 1960s with Morris’s brother. The resulting story provides insight into early human-computer interaction and describes how computers, through the advent of e-mail and time-sharing, unexpectedly came to mediate and facilitate interaction and community-formation among people.
Month: June 2011
Tim Eriksen on The Makers of the Sacred Harp
Southern Spaces, the journal I worked for this past spring, has just published a review by Tim Eriksen of David Warren Steel and Richard Hulan’s The Makers of the Sacred Harp.
“Subliminal History of New York” Featured in the Ninth Letter
The third edition of my and Carrie Dashow’s Subliminal History of New York State: Route of Progress, a collection of shape note songs and accompanying stories telling the subliminal history of New York’s Erie Canal, has been published as the “Art Feature” in Ninth Letter, Volume 8, Number 1 (Spring/Summer 2011).
I collaboratively produced this book with New York City-based artist Carrie Dashow. Carrie wrote the poetry that I set to music, and wrote and illustrated the stories accompanying each piece. I designed and typeset the book.
- More information on our project is on the web site of the Society for a Subliminal State, the organization that published the book.
- Listen to many of the songs featured in Ninth Letter on our Subliminal History of New York State Song Map.