Printing our Digital Images, Scanned Negatives, and the Limits of the Digital.

I print out some of my digital or digitized color images using a color xerox machine. They look ok, until you get close up and realize that what you will see are the dot patterns of the screen. If I printed them out on a inkjet printer (or even at Walgreens), one that was good on photos, the deeper details would be retained. I will have to find out.

Put differently, insofar as a photograph will necessarily capture all that is within the purview of the lens and film, there is usually lots more than we attend to--details, and whatnot in the fore/background, whatever. When we make a print, we are selective but also give up lots of the detail, usually. Yet for archival purposes you want everything. Hence the archives we have of digital images, and often of scanned negatives and transparencies, are abstractions from the originals. Yes, you can get better resolution up to the Nyquist limit in a digital, but film loses its resolution more gently and may go further (albeit with weak quality) than the digital sensor or scan. None of this is new or surprising, since what we save is often such an abstraction, whether it be sound or materials or images.

One might argue that digital will become much more capable as we get more resolving sensors. I believe that will be the case. And a well scanned negative will print better than the negative itself (at least in most enlargers), since you are not demanding anything of the enlarger lens since it has been replaced, for a scan, with a lens that is typically of fine quality since it need not cover a large area. The mechanics of the scanner is also important.

Tragedy and Being "Research Productive."

When tragedy strikes, what is most important is to care for yourself, and if nearby others can care a bit for you, ask. 

A friend described her situation: 

I am living my life post-mortem, and that I'm supposed to fit in the clothes and shoes, eat the food, live the life, of a person who is now dead, as if i am an imposter unable to connect with a person whose place i have taken.

The description is poignant and concrete. She is eloquent in talking about herself, with a genuine of literary and psychological insight. It may be useful try a diary or a memo about how you feel, if only to write such wonderful prose. 

People are always saying something like: just snap out of it, you'll get over it, get down to working--you'll be fine. They do not acknowledge tragedy, and wounds that won't just heal--the wounds are chronic although you do learn to live with them and go on, eventually.

I do believe it is good to read, to think, to write oneself notes about what's on your mind, future projects, etc. But real work demands a level of presence that may not be available.  In a culture of "research productive faculty," there's insufficient room for tragedy or thinking that takes time. 

That I know all of what I say here does not insulate me from believing I should be able to just produce.

Rereading Some of My Earlier Books

I have no idea if this will be of wider interest, but I am recording what I have just experienced.

I have been thinking about What next? in my work. Usually, I do not reread my books once they come out, unless for another edition or some such reason. In any case, I just reread four of my books, from 1982, 1989, 2000, and 2011. (I had a much clearer sense of the contents of the 1992, 1996 (2), 2003, and 2013 books.) Each chapter of each book is a distinct essay or a study of a particular example, linked together by the Introduction and other materials.

1. I realized that most of the themes that have concerned me over the years were there, developed in some detail and elaboration, even though I did not now recall what I wrote then. Much of what I might have written about in future work was already worked out in these earlier books. (In general, to be effective in scholarship, you have to say the same thing, in different ways or with further elaborations, several times. So, what was said earlier might still be reimagined and expanded.)  

2. Moreover, I was struck by my analytic descriptions of various phenomena in planning, public policy, and design. There is a consistency in my approach (or you might call it a lack of inventiveness) to thinking about the world. Moreover, those analytic descriptions are not abstractions, per se. Rather they have particular examples and situations in mind, and I am trying to find out what is essential in those examples and situations and in related examples and situations. Analogy characterizes how I think about the world, and I even write about that mode of thinking (presumably using analogy). My descriptions are generic descriptions, using a mildly technical vocabulary, of the particular cases, in light of other cases (the analogy) and their description.

3. I tried again and again to write without polemic or taking advantage of positions with which I did not concur. For me, it was a matter of providing an adequate description, borrowing from whichever theoretical or ideological perspective that would serve my description.

4. I had forgotten how much I had been influenced by my reading of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and books about Husserl, and how useful those authors' works were for me. When I use the term "useful," I am saying that my concern was not to faithfully present their thought, so much as to find in their thinking and writing what I needed to do my descriptions.

Right now, I have little idea how I came to think in terms of analogy and analytic description, not even sure who are my models for such work.