Maps from Prague summer 2011

Maps of scholarly citations

This is fascinating, red the whole article (linked below.)  Thank you Sharron Macklin at OIT for sharing this with me.

Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship’s Hidden Terrain
By Jennifer Howard

Imagine a Google Maps of scholarship, a set of tools sophisticated enough to help researchers locate hot research, spot hidden connections to other fields, and even identify new disciplines as they emerge in the sprawling terrain of scholarly communication. Creating new ways to identify and analyze patterns in millions of journal citations, a team led by two biologists, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall, has set out to build just such a guidance system.

This network of disciplines shows how strongly different areas in the large JSTOR collection of scholarly journals are connected. Thicker lines represent more back-and-forth journal citations; thinner lines indicate less communication.

via Maps of Citations Uncover New Fields of Scholarship – Research – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Subscribing to Google calendars

We have two Google calendars related to THEA 228, one for classes and any other meetings or events happening that relate to the academic side of things; and a second calendar related to the production itself, which handles rehearsals, production meetings, due dates, tech and performances.  We want you to have access to both of these calendars on your iPad in the native iCal app, and this post will walk you through the steps needed to make that happen.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: site tweaks + poll

Hi everyone,

I tweaked the site a bit, made the menu (in the black bar between the header image and the posts) more useful — it now has quick links to all categories!  I pulled out the ones related to class operations (so, announcements, homework, production, how-to posts) and then put all of the more “map-themed” ones under a catch-all header of “categories.”  All are nested menus, so more options pop up when you mouseover.

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Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science”

Of Exactitude in Science

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

—From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. English translation quoted from J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975.

From Wikipedia:

The story elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll‘s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” One of Carroll’s characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Subway maps from class

Here are the subway maps we’ve looked at in the last few classes: