So here it is, the beginning of November. A lot of work in /lexicon and /lifebox, and at the moment it’s not clear what the blog is doing, beyond helping me remember where I’ve put stuff. I may return to thinking of it as a way to keep like-minded others (whoever they might be) updated with my doings and discoveries and curiosities, but I have no idea if there’s anybody out there …
Lots of activity in the last couple of months, unrecorded in the blog. A lot of my daily link-farming is captured via my August 2025 page (Collecting the Portentous and the Exemplary)
Lately I’ve been thinking about Legacy and the where and why and how of collecting, curating, displaying. Today I looked through the homepage links (oook.info) and made a page of links to pages found/rediscovered that trace some of the ways I’ve used html to track my own thinking… some from W&L years, some from the last 20 years, and even one dating back to 1971. The page needs reorganization (perhaps chronological, maybe topical) and …explication, and it hints at further delvings into my past, so it’s just a start.
The tracking AI page that I started in 2022 was pretty unwieldy by January 2025, so I started a new link collection, and it’s now updated to the present.
About 3 weeks ago I got a request from Stephanie Aude, the Local History and Genealogy librarian at the Andover Public Library, to use a map I had drawn (in 1976) of the world around me when I was 10-11-12 (1953-1956) and lived in Shawsheen, a village that is part of Andover. In short order I volunteered to talk to the genealogy resources group at the Library, and the Event took place on April 10th… and was a grand success from my point of view. http://oook.info/etc/Andover.html has the materials I prepared for the presentation (along with links to various other bits I had gathered and shown and talked about). To my great surprise and pleasure one of the participants (Alice Mooney, as she then was) was a classmate from the Grade 6 class picture. Small world, as they say.
Along the way I revisited material Broot and I had gathered for a project we did on our own families in 2001, and was pleased with its eloquence.
As seems to have become routine, I’ve set up pages to gather links to revisit from April incoming, YouTube videos of particular salience, and videos specific to the current contretemps with Canada. And now I’ll get back to work on the Lexicon project.
I made a directory to collect texts and videos re: Canada and US in these parlous times. Not sure what it will be useful for in the long run.
March 2025 links begun, and March 2025 YouTube videos too.
This mode of curation/gatheration seems to be working pretty well.
I’ve bundled the February YouTube finds into a suite of 7 connected pages (so that they load more reliably and quickly), and just barely started a location for extracts from my yellow pads since 2018. The page of February links is unwieldy, but I haven’t decided what to do about that.
The tag cloud for my LibraryThing is updated and still under revision, but provides the beginnings of subject access to books on my library shelves.
And the Lexicon Project burgeons.
A summary of morning encounters:
…which does surface the eclectic side of my …mind
I’ve started to build oook.info/lexicon/ to contain the project that I’ve been gathering material for at oook.info/etc/lexicon.html. I expect it will summarize a sprawling domain of explorations, just right for a winter month.