John McCreery's Blog – February 2011 Archive (3)

Too much education?

The picture you see here is the front page of the China Daily Asia Weekly for the week February 18-24, 2011. The lead paragraphs read as follows:

They are the lost generation. From North Africa to Europe and America to South and Southeast…

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Added by John McCreery on February 24, 2011 at 10:27am — 7 Comments

Art, Science and Engineering — Should Anthropologists Be Engineers?

The question is a metaphorical one, inspired by Heesun Hwang's remark that she is attracted by "an engineering approach." Now what could that mean?

I instantly thought of Henry Petroski's classic To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. There, right at the beginning of chapter 4 "Engineering as Hypothesis" (1985:40), I found what I was looking for. Try substituting "anthropologist" for "engineer" in the following…

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Added by John McCreery on February 13, 2011 at 4:00am — 8 Comments

The Artist's Eye

At The Word Works, we translate a lot of the text in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography's exhibition catalogues. Interacting in another forum with a friend who has become an avid landscape photographer, I mentioned that we are now working on the catalogue for an exhibition dedicated to Pictorialism, an art photography movement that began in the late 19th century in Europe and flourished in Japan in the early 20th century. The debates that surrounded Pictorialism and the Modernism…

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Added by John McCreery on February 2, 2011 at 4:09am — 9 Comments