Slow Food, Slow Code

Slow food is a movement (and registered name) that celebrates hospitality, long slow meals, the preservation of culinary heritage, and rest (after a long meal.) The movement organizes “conviti”, an old Renaissance term of a symposium of ideas while eating (and drinking.)
What about “Slow Code”? Isn’t it time to celebrate the slow appreciation of coding? Rather than be extreme about coding, I think we should slow the pace of programming, slow the pace of new releases, and slow down our computers.
As Willard McCarty has pointed out, you learn so much more when you take your time marking up a text. The encoding journey is its own reward. Why not take longer, learn more, and have a glass of Barolo while you are at it.
Read on for the Slow Code manifesto.
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Empire by Ferguson

“Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.” (p. 211)

Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power is by Niall Ferguson who teaches at NYU and Oxford. I read the book right after Confusion by Stephenson, and it makes a good companion since Empire provides a well written tour of the birth and evolution of the British Empire that maps to the themes of Confusion. The Empire was born in piracy, benefited from slavery (which made possible the exploding taste for sugar), survived by evolving sophisticated economic (monetary) and bureaucratic systems, and staid popular at home by developing global communication systems. The Empire didn’t benefit the brits (except for those who emigrated), it entertained them. I should reread Innis Empire and Communications which is one of the first of the works to develop ideas about information technology determinism – the so called Toronto School. (McLuhan was Innis’ student.)
Stephenson is weaving (con-fusing) entertainment out of the birth of the British Empire. What he leaves out is the taste for sugar.
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Fiormonte: Genetic Machines

Another great paper at the Brown conference was by Domenico Fiormonte on “Textual genesis and the writing process: The Magrelli Genetic Machine”. After giving us a background on philology and textual criticism in Italy, he showed a Flash variant machine that allows one to see manuscript and text interact. Domenico led the development of the Digital Variants site at the University of Edinburgh which has information about tools, theory, texts, and projects.
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Resources for the Humanities: Brown Conference

Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives was a conference that was hotsted by Brown University and organized by Massimo Riva. It was one of the better small conferences I have been to in a long time (so there will be a series of blog entries on the ideas that circulated.) As Dr. Riva put it:

We are in a process of transcribing the humanities. This involves both representing the traditional evidence of the humanities in digital form and the developing new questions and techniques which we can ask of digital evidence.

One special feature of the conference was that it brought together a number of people in Italy doing Humanities Computing with people in North America. For me it was a chance to see a breadth of activities from Italy and to talk about humanities computing in Italian.
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