When I was walking to school in the second grade, I found myself behind a group of older kids, arguing about what subjects they hated most. The consensus was geography. At the time I didn’t know what geography was, but I became determined to find out. When I did, two things happened. First, I realized that I loved geography (and along with it, geology). Second, I learned that popularity of anything often meant nothing. And I’ve been passionate about geography ever since.
But not just for myself. Instead I’m interested in feeding scholarship wihin subjects that interest me. For both geography and geology I do that mostly through photography. Toward that end, here are a few recent sets I’ve posted, or updated:
- Flying over New York at night, from LaGuardia to BWI in Baltimore.
- Devils Tower.
- Flying over New York at night, from Newark to Boston Logan.
- Flying from Salt Lake City to Denver (en route to Boston). Subjects in many of these shots are not yet identified. I could use some more help (I already have some) from the long tail on this one.
- Come to think of it, I also need help with this much longer Boston to Denver to SLC series.
- In that last one, I already have four sets with subject well-identified: Central Michigan, Bay City and Saginaw, Michigan, White Lake, Michigan, and Lake McConaughy, Nebraska.
- After-storm shots of snow in and around Times Square. All shot on an iphone 4, by the way. The best camera is the one you have with you, they say. I still wish I’d brought the Canon 5D, though.
- Walker Lake, Nevada.
- Hull, Massachusetts. Over in the Infrastructure collection, I visit the WBZ transmitter site. All the shots here had text when I saved the set, but the text was somehow lost, and I haven’t had the time or energy to replace them. Until then, W1QWT BostonRadio.org and Scott Fybush do a better job, anyway.
- London to Dulles to Boston. Didn’t see enough, but did get to zoom in on some nether regions of Wales.
- 1949-1961 The Wanigan. Our summer house on the edge of New Jersey’s pine barrens, where the woods were scrub oak and pitch pine, and the underbrush was nothing but blueberries and huckleberries. It wasn’t much more than a squatter’s hut, with a hand-pump atop a hand-drilled well, outdoor non-plumbing and other inconveniences. It was paradise.
- A tour of Boulder with my man Erik Cecil. By the time Defrag was over, Boulder beckoned. Seriously.
Meanwhile, close to 200 of my shots are now in Wikimedia Commons. Big thanks to the Wikipedians who have put them there. I can’t begin to count how many Wikipedia articles many of these illustrate. This one of Denver International Airport’s distinctive roofline currently accompanies eighteen different articles in fourteen different languages.
While we’re on the subject of Wikipedia, I’ll commend to you the new book Good Faith Collaboration by Joseph Reagle, a fellow at Berkman this year. His first chapter is online.
You may notice that most of my links to subjects, both in my online writings and in my photo captions, go to Wikipedia entries. Sometimes people ask me why. One reason is that Wikipedia is the closest we have come, so far, to a source that is both canonical and durable, even if each entry changes constantly, and some are subject to extreme disagreement. Wikipedia is, like the protocols of the Net, a set of agreements. Another reason is that Wikipedia is guided by the ideal of a neutral point of view (NPOV). This, Joseph says, “ensures that we can join the scattered pieces of what we think we know and good faith facilitates the actual practice of fitting them together.”
The nature of the Net is to encourage scatterings such as mine, as well as good faith about what might be done with them.
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