habitually probing generalist

This is my 2nd book review for 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge although it is the 3rd book I’ve finished. I’ll be writing some comments on the other book shortly. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason : a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I thoroughly enjoyed [...]

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Let me state up front that I do not mean to pick on any particular authors here. Also, that I have an immense amount of respect for Dr. Brenda Dervin; for her output, for her research itself, and for her willingness to take on an established discipline and challenge it to be something better. But [...]

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Dervin, Brenda. 1976. Strategies for Dealing with Human Information Needs: Information of Communication? (Part One of Information: An Answer for Every Question? A Solution for Every Problem?). Journal of Broadcasting 20, no. 3 (Summer): 324-333. I quite enjoyed this Dervin article.  But what I did not enjoy was not having access to any of the [...]

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Katzer, Jeffrey. 1987. User studies, information science, and communication. Canadian Journal of Information Science 12, no. 3: 15-30. Argues that changes in technology, the economics of info systems, and previous research into information behavior is pushing information science to more complexity and predicts that it will become more like the field of communication. “What has [...]

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Change of blog name I have changed the name of my blog. Again. This time it should not break any of the Internet nor should you need to change feeds; I hope. 3 years ago tomorrow I moved my blog to WordPress and renamed it Off the Mark. This was after a few years of [...]

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Foskett, D. J. 1984. Pathways for Communication: Books and Libraries in the Information Age. London: C. Bingley.   I read this lovely little book [128 pages] last week. In many ways it has a lot in common with John Budd’s Self-examination and with Patrick Wilson’s Two Kinds of Power. All in all, it falls in [...]

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… but broken for much longer. This blog, Off the Mark, is 2 years old today. I shall refrain from calling it an anniversary, as such, since last year we sort of decided that my blogging anniversary ought to be from the start of my 1st public blog, …the thoughts are broken…, which debuted in [...]

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I went back through my posts of the last two months and there isn’t much explicit mention of the best distraction a boy could ask for. I think the first (and one of 2, maybe 3) explicit reference is in the post “Living room talk.” There are certainly several other references that were mostly for [...]

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Things have sort of “settled down” around here; here being the blog. Related things in my daily life got “interesting” and have only progressed. Today was a most enlightening day. [Yes, Christina, that "interesting" was purposefully vague, and for you.  ] Wow. What to say, or not say? Been working on this for a while [...]

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Drinking with the Troops From a local blog, Urbanagora, comes “Drinks with a Soldier.” I just love how some jackass commentor tries to hide behind the shield of anonymity and call the post author a liar. Certainly there are all sorts of views on this war, including those of the troops fighting it. Perhaps if [...]

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