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The cameraI'm also one of the horse managers of the Stanford Polo Club, which means I make sure 16+ horses don't die every day. And I play on the intercollegiate team. Tara Laidlaw is my horse manager in training (ie, slave) and fellow teammate, as is Matthew Woodbury. You should come see one of our games.
Me on Dexter in this weekend's game against OSU. We tied 7-7 despite the muddy conditions. As you might guess, taking pictures of polo is really difficult, so if anyone wants a challenge, come out to one of our games - the team would love to have great pictures on our website and you can use them for yours as well.
I am working on an honors thesis on Sir Walter Scott and the formation of Scottish identity through border literature and art, or that's the current idea anyway. See Prof Shanks' work on chorography for a much better explanation of how place affects culture/literature/art and vice-versa.
You can contact me at mgrowe@stanford.edu.
Intercollegiate Polo: A Detail(ed) Study - An archaeography project with Tara Laidlaw
Assignment: writing about a photo
I thought I should write about this photo since I lived the first 18 years of my life about 10 minutes west of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, pictured here. It also captures my general feelings about the desert, especially after 2 1/2 years of living in the comparatively verdant Palo Alto area.
The effect of the tails of the planes converging on a specific point, far in the distance, gives a sense of the enormity of the desert and the flatness of the terrain. In the far background are, barely visible, one of the four mountain ranges surrounding Tucson. These mountains are huge (the end of the Rockies), nothing like the gentle hills around Stanford, and are an important part of life in Tucson (the only thing I miss). A lot of artwork by Tucson artists focuses on these mountains. In this photo, however, they are mostly obscured by the vast quantity of dust in the air, and seem trivial, almost fading into the sky.
The cactus in the foreground and the barbed wire fence behind that both illustrate the hostility and danger of the land, and this military base in particular. The unrelieved brown landscape seems to offer little hope for any new life, despite the fact that it is springtime (the picture was taken May 4th, 2005), and the grey-brown of the sky is equally ominous. The American flags on the tails of the planes are visible, but the identification numbers below them are not readable - these are anonymous planes left waiting in the desert...for what?
Assignment 1 for Digital Humanities
An artifact that I think captures what it means to be human is the novel. While machines keep track of their past in digital format, only humans imagine things that have not happened, in the past, present or future, and write them down for the sake of entertainment. Also, the materiality of the novel is part of the human obsession for physical recordings of thoughts, events, etc, even if fictional - does that mean that as physical novels are replaced by ebooks we are slowly losing our humanity?
Assignment 2 for Digital Humanities
Some examples of Computational Humanities:
*http://books.google.com/ - full text search of most books (where copyright is not an issue)
*http://www.lexisnexis.com/ - full text search of news articles, law reviews, court opinions, legal briefs, etc
*http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ - (Early English Books Online) full text search of 100,000+ titles from around 1475 to 1700
*Could gematria be an ancient, analog form of computational humanities?
Final Assigment for Digital Humanities
Digital Calvinism - Bill Duncan and Andy Rice's Online Exploration of the North-East
