Digital Phyllo #1

Today's accessible digital files record far more than only stories of local politics and regional shifts of power. Modern technology allows potentially every human being to participate. The question is how we get from olde timey "map-making" and story-telling to digital geography and myth-busting, in the broadest sense? Almost anyone can create a record of their experiences, interpretations of these, at home, or from deep in the ocean, onward to various vista points. We can also to see through the eyes of technologies such as the Hubble telescope... new views of what is... what was... and to create their own History.

 

As one of many important socially relevant endeavors, visualization of information has been evolving along with humanity as we continue attempts to communicate what is known, more efficiently, and as unequivocally as possible. Recently, in this context, Edward Tufte (1990) has provided a wonderful visual guide that conveys not only the difficulties of portraying time scales, but also the need for combining these with spatial scales. Merging these procedures is another persistent issue that will require ever more effort as we delve deeper into both the very small,with the light microscope, the even smaller with the scanning electron and confocal microscopes - and the vast - via telescopes, and space probes to gain knowledge of our expanding Universe.

 

 

This is 20th century Scylla, in southern Italy, the site of one of the terrors of early Greek mythology, a monster whirlpool that was responsible for the swallowing up of sailing ships... Charybdus, across the narrow sill of the Straits of Messina, was another...

These ancient/modern people continue to struggle with the sea, even today, as they have harvested the seasonal migrants, tunas and swordfish, each summer for at least two thousand years... using unique, sophisticated high speed diesel powered boats, that have evolved from earlier sail or oar driven shells, replacing mid-ship tree-trunk with tall "antenna" towers from which the ships are guided, and from which they sight fish...

It seems highly unlikely that The Internet, for example, will have a great immediate effect on these traditional cultures, although telephones, automobiles, some of the most sophisticated boat propulsion units in existence, and other "modern" tools are employed in this fishing community.