Category Archives: Popular Culture

Fun Home

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Timothy Burke

As long as I’m talking about parenting, two anecdotes: 1) We teach on the MLK holiday, but I had time to take my no-school-that-day daughter out to lunch. We ended up talking about a bunch of things, but at one … Continue reading →

Posted in Domestic Life, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

Blizzard Is CLU

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Timothy Burke

x-posted to Terra Nova I don’t understand why Tron: Legacy has come in for so much critical abuse. I like it as much as my colleague Bob Rehak does. Just taken as an action film, it’s considerably more entertaining and … Continue reading →

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 2 Comments

Mimesis and Interactivity

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Here comes a bunch of blogging! Fasten your seat belts. ================ So yes, we got a Kinect at our house. I am the very model of the modern gamer tech geek. As an incremental change to the wand-driven interface design … Continue reading →

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

Restoring Sanity One Civic Ritual At a Time

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Couldn’t make it to Washington today, much as I’d like to. As Jon Stewart said when they announced the rally, probably most of us who’d liked to have been there wouldn’t come because we have lives. For us, that was … Continue reading →

Posted in Domestic Life, Politics, Popular Culture | 5 Comments

Goodnight to Goodnight Moon?

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

The NY Times says that the picture book for children is disappearing, largely because so many aspirant middle-class parents are pushing their children aggressively towards reading chapter books early in life, and receiving some endorsement in this move from teachers … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 11 Comments

A Lord Byron in Every Cyberpot

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’m interested in seeing the film Catfish after reading A.O. Scott’s review. Still, Scott’s references to familiar examples of online deception coupled with his welcome awareness that literary and cultural fraud is an old and established part of American life … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 2 Comments

Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Re-reading King Solomon’s Mines for today’s class, I was suddenly struck powerfully by a sort of deja vu. Not about the novel itself, since I’ve read it quite a few times, both for courses and otherwise. Nor even about the … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | Comments Off

Toilers in the Trope Workshop

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One of my hopes for cultural history & media studies courses that I teach is that students will learn not just how to read, analyze and critique expressive culture but also get some sense of how to produce it, use … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Popular Culture, Production of History | 1 Comment

Looking Backwards

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

In a few weeks, I’m going to be talking about how searching as an act changes when the digitized texts you’re searching through are either highly specialized in their content or are from a distinctly different era of rhetoric and … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 1 Comment

Geeking Out About Dragons and Alt-History

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve talked about Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series before, which is an alternate history focused on the premise that many of the major governments of the world between 1600-1800 have had access to intelligent dragons as military, economic and cultural resources. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Popular Culture, Sheer Raw Geekery | 3 Comments