Comments on: Historicizing Practices

By: Steven D. Krause

Steven D. Krause — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

I think you summarized what I was up to reasonably well, Mike– I thought that was you, too! Actually, I might end up talking a bit about wax as part of a chapter that I wrote already about chalkboards. That’s an article in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association from a few years ago. I still have some more research on all this, of course…

By: collin

collin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Not to step on Stephanie’s toes or anything, but if I remember my memetics, there’s not a whole lot of difference between teachers and hosts. I really got into memetics when it first emerged, but honestly, there wasn’t a lot of difference between what it had to say and what we already get from a solid background in rhetoric.

I’d be interested to hear if Stephanie’s thought about Gladwell’s Tipping Point as a more useful frame. One of G’s “laws” of epidemics is that few changes many, which sounds like what she may have been talking about…

And yes, I recognize how presumptuous it is for me to comment on a talk I’m hearing second-hand…
cgb

ps, Mike, I wanted to thank you for the session rundowns–there was some grousing a few days back about the lack of C&W reports, so I thought I’d express my appreciation…

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Glad I was able to do it justice, Steve — like I said, I really enjoyed it, and it sounds like you’re onto some really smart and interesting stuff. After reading your blog, it was good to talk to you in person.

Collin, I’m glad to do it, and I hope that people don’t mind that I’m doing it. After having talked to one person whose CCCC presentation ideas I was critical of, I’m doing my best to be very careful with my tone: I wish it was easier in the blogosphere to express strong disagreement with someone’s ideas without sounding like you’re attacking the person. As it stands, there was one C&W presentation that I had been looking forward to and was very disappointed with, and I decided that it was best just not to write about it.

The tipping point thing is interesting, and that might be worth tracking down Stephanie’s e-mail address to ask her about it. I just wasn’t quite sure how her discussions of memetics differed from saying, “People can tell one another about this stuff and it’ll change things,” but that may very well be an interpretive failure on my part.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

One more thought, Steve — if you’re interested in how the tabellae were used, Teresa Morgan’s Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (1998, Cambridge University Press) is well worth a look; very carefully researched stuff, and she does spend some time looking at the technologies. (As all classical philologists really have to, since the durability of their texts — wood from Roman Britain, papyri from Egypt, copied scrolls, and of course stone — has much to do with how well they can be studied.)