Weeknote for 9/29/2019

Conceptual modeling

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On my infographic design project, I made decent progress on my Munzner reading, and I’ll continue that this week. I chose this book because it’s very organized and very broad, but I’m finding there are pictorial types of graphics I care about that it doesn’t cover, so I’ll need to supplement with resources on technical drawing and instructional diagrams. Also relevant are insights from graphic design and comic design, but I’ll have to put off some of that until later project months.

I finished Semantics by John Saeed, and it gave me a good sense of the range of topics and theories in the field and where I want to focus my attention for my various purposes. Pretty much the whole field ends up being relevant to me, because it’s closely related to both conceptual modeling and AI, and a key message I took away was that each camp within the field offers valuable tools, even if you don’t accept their approach as a complete explanation of meaning. If I were going to settle in one of these camps, at this point it’d be cognitive semantics, because for a while I’ve thought of meaning as being grounded in bodily perception and action and as being pervaded by analogy.

Experimental literature

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I’ve decided to dip back into this topic from earlier in the year. I’ve learned my source for it, the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, has an ebook version, so that’s what I’m listening to now. It’ll be a while till I dedicate a month to updating my link list, but I may add a topic here and there if I feel like a break from my official projects. For now my goal is to hear the whole book so I’ll have a better sense of the context of each author and work.

Video

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Sunday Jeremy and I finally went to see Spider-Man: Far from Home, which was actually an extended cut. I wasn’t expecting such a political theme, though I think it was subtle unless you’ve been paying attention to political commentary, at least on the left, but I found it very timely, very relevant to my epistemological interests, and even a little distressing. Also distressing was the uncertainty over the future of the Spider-Man movies, since Sony (in charge of Spider-Man) and Disney (in charge of Marvel Studios) had a contract dispute that meant Spider-Man was being pulled out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I saw an entertaining discussion of some creative ideas for bringing him back into the series, but later in the week it turned out no narrative cleverness will be needed, because Sony and Disney resolved things so he could stay in the MCU for a few more movies.