In The Science of Discworld II: the Globe Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen describe the way the human brain and mind interact, and use the term pans narrans as a much better species descriptor than homo sapien.
Pans narrans or the storytelling ape is how McKemmish starts her chapter Traces, and I wish she was more coherent through the rest of it. I enjoyed her example of Children Overboard, but I had difficulty with the writing style, that made verbs of adjectives and wasn't particularly readable. Describing what archives are, what records are, and how they become so shouldn't be as abstruse as she made it. I did find her emphasis of the importance of context informing the meaning and information encoded into a document to make it a record, with the same photographs representing totally different bits of story depending on what archive had them as a record especially helpful in thinking about the concepts she was trying to get across.
I enjoyed the encyclopedia entries by Pawley and Rusch-Feja as things I already knew about put in complete, precise, cogent terms. I didn't learn anything by reading them (except the names of a few minor historic figures and the cool fact that the Soviet Union had a library for every two thousand citizens), but they were helpful as a connotation-check of many of these terms and concepts at a basic level.
No comments:
Post a Comment