Welcome to Miscellanea- a bi-weekly newsletter at the intersection of art, tech, and culture and how they influence each other.
Welcome to Miscellanea- a bi-weekly newsletter at the intersection of art, tech, and culture and how they influence each other.
Why Miscellanea?
Miscellanea is a collection of notes, annotations, and critiques. Miscellanea is a good description of what most of us are doing when learning and researching: notes on physical books, sticky notes on documents, digital annotations on articles, blogs, and bookmarks.
What you can find in Miscellanea
I envision this newsletter to be a curated solution to the digital world, focused on art, content strategy, books, and how technology influences us and shapes our culture.
Logistical details about Miscellanea
Emails arrive every other week, usually on Thursdays.
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Resources
Miscellanea refers to a collection of various things, a mixture of different items. Borrowed from the Latin miscellānea.
Working in the Renaissance tradition of the commonplace book, Miscellanea is a loose collection of notes, comments and impressions. The tradition didn't die with the ancients. The Victorian people were obsessed with data and improvements:
“Industrialisation, imperialism and rising bureaucracy fuelled demand for desk and pocket diaries to record meetings, appointments and financial transactions. Printed diaries with dated pages became a popular stationery product, with an unprecedented variety and number of these commercial diaries sold to purchasers who sought to organise their lives in the pursuit of productivity.”
The stationery brand, Letts of London, offered, in 1862, 55 different diary versions, and by 1980, they produced around 20 million units per year.
More about Victoarian self optimisation and diary writings in this article by Aeon.
If you want to make your own collections of tidbits, The New York Times has a good guide.
I’ll leave you with two book recommendations.
The first recommendation is “How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums” published by Oxford University Press, 2022.
Jillian Hess, PhD, is a professor of English, and her book offers an “investigation into the relationship between technology, knowledge production, information management, and literary forms.”
The other recommendation is “Living in Information. Responsible Design for Digital Places”, published by Rosenfeld Media in 2018.
Jorge Aranjo, the author, is an Information Architect and Strategist Designer. His book explains how we interact with information spaces, like apps, websites, and how to make them better.
Until next time.
PS: The main image is a detail from a book of hours, France, 15th century. Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Latin MS 162, fol. 169v.
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