The online library catalogue at Utrecht University not only has a design homepage to go with their cool design building. It has also just integrated Library Thing into their catalogue. When you look up a book, the search results come with a set of tags from Library Thing users, as well as a list of [...]

About a year ago, I read Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine and wrote about the experience. I was fascinated by this attempt by natural scientists to explain cultural change, but had some major reservations as well. Today I read parts of another book on memetics: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited [...]

A friend of mine had one, and I wanted it too: the Thumb Thing. It’s an ingenious invention for reading in bed (or in the park and on the couch). With your thumb in the thumb thing, you effortlessly keep your book wide open.
The only drawback is that it left tiny indentations in the pages [...]

I just came across an interesting call for papers on how digital media (blogging among them) are changing forms of memory. I couldn’t find a website for the project, so here is the call in its entirety:

A re-run of a BBC Horizon documentary on genetic imprinting on Belgian television reminded me of an early modern theory of conception and imagination. The documentary announced that scientists have discovered that our genes have a memory:
The lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they [...]

I had a wonderful weekend visiting a friend in Ireland. We went to Limerick and Killarney, walked around a beautiful lake and visited country houses and castles. At the University of Limerick the student canteen featured this amazing vending machine that does not sell Bounties or Balistos, but books:

The machine has a small display that [...]

In an essay in the Academic Commons, Tatjana Chorney argues that there are many similarities between the way hypertext structures our reading practices, and the way in which early modern readers interacted with the things they read. Unlike a printed text that can only be passively read, hypertext shapes an active and appropriative reader who [...]