Maggie Appleton
Spatial Web Browsing
Metaphors We Web By
An Essay by Maggie AppletonAs George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.
…Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
A Brief History of the Digital Garden
An Article by Maggie AppletonDigital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden
A Website by Maggie AppletonAn open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
The meaning of objects
The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words.
Something akin to style
My own attitude toward the microstructure of metals is not unlike that of an art historian regarding a painting or sculpture. There is something akin to style even in a photomicrograph. There are aspects of structure that are not immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and quite minor features may be clues to a deep meaning.
From the head of Jove
A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.
Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.
The objects themselves speak loudly
The written record is very little help in determining the techniques used by ancient metalworkers, though the objects themselves speak loudly to an educated ear.
The way it has been made
The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them.
…Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material.
Aesthetically motivated curiosity
It seems that the first and most imaginative use of practically every material was, before quite modern times, in making something decorative. People are experimentally minded when looking for decorative effects, but they can’t experiment with the established techniques on which their livelihood depends.
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It is of basic significance for human history that, from the cave paintings on, almost all inorganic materials and treatments of them to modify their structure appear first in decorative objects rather than in tools or weapons necessary for survival. Aesthetically motivated curiosity, or perhaps just play, seems to have been the most important stimulus to discovery.