Epistemographer

So, the heat finally broke, and I spent the late morning/early afternoon yesterday playing soccer in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. It all started with an e-mail from a friend:

From: Josiah R Madar
Subject: Soccer?

I know I have floated this idea by some of you, but it might actually happen now: this Saturday morning 11:00 am, Prospect Park Brooklyn, soccer, for the unathletic. No off-sides, no yellow cards, no shin guards, just lots of panting and coughing and resting and missed shots.

So about ten people showed up to play, and over the next few hours we managed to pick up another five or six players who were just walking by and asked if they could drop in. Needless to say, the random soccer players looking for a game on a Saturday morning were generally playing at an entirely different level from us “unathletic” guys and gals who started the game. We all held our own, though, and managed about three hours of decent play. It felt great.

Until today, that is.

Woke up with a combination of muscle aching, bruises, and the worst sunburn on my shoulders and arms I’ve had in years. Don’t know what I’ll do with the rest of the day, but it’s going to involve lots of lying in bed and whimpering.

Arianna Huffington reviewing Legally Blonde 2, and comparing it favorably to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington…

Shout out to my college friend Kevin, who says he always remembers our conversations (which don’t happen nearly often enough for me) for a long time afterward. Ditto.

And he may be exaggerating about our conversations, but not by much.

Also, speaking of conversations, I tend to have massive, Homeric Epic chats with my friend Dave, who’s also got a blog. He also made a movie in which I get killed with a rubber band.

About six months ago, I put up a website to collect oral histories from people who remember the early days of home video. You can read more about the rationale here, or just go and tell your own story…

You might be saying to yourself, “Exactly what is an epistemographer, anyways?” To give credit where credit is due, I picked up the term from Peter Dear, a historian of science in my department at Cornell and a damned fine person in his own right. He argued that “Science & Technology Studies” is a misleading name for our field, and he’s been trying to coin the alternate label “Epistemography”, which would basically translate to the mapping of knowledge.

Hence, like a cartographer of old, I see myself as charting the hills and valleys of knowledge, tracing its shorelines and venturing guesses as to the forces that helped to produce it. In short, an epistemographer.

After lurking around the blog-world for far too long, I figure it’s finally time for me to get one started of my own. Seems like a trend for me – in 1992 when I first logged on to CapAccess (the original Washington, DC-area freenet) I spent a few months just reading other people’s posts before starting to write my own. When I started surfing the web, it took me months before I started writing my own web pages. I lurk, then I join in.

More about me: I’m going into my sixth year as a PhD student in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. My dissertation’s a social history of the VCR and home video in America in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and if you read this site regularly I’m sure you’ll hear far more about it than you’d ever want to.

Right now, I’m counting at least three reasons for starting this blog:

So welcome.