Ask and ye shall receive

Yesterday, I noted some Flickr photographs of James Bridle's The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs, which is a printed collection of every edit of the Wikipedia page for the Iraq War, a twelve volume set.

I mentioned in one of the afterthoughts to my post, about the creator of that work who had spoken at a recent conference:

Sounds like the rest of us really missed a good talk. Hope they taped it.

Today, I went over to booktwo.org, one of James Bridle's web sites, and what did I see but a fascinating post on the Historiography and his thinking on history as a process, and then this line at the very end:

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying “um” a lot, over at Huffduffer.

You can stream or download the audio. Here is the blurb:

The Value Of Ruins

Huffduffed by dConstruct on September 6th, 2010

Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria”.

In his session James will ask if, as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?

http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/james-bridle

With a background in both computing and traditional publishing James Bridle attempts to bridge the gaps between technology and literature. He runs Bookkake, a small independent publisher and writes about books and the publishing industry at booktwo.org. In 2009 he helped launch Enhanced Editions, the first e-reading application with integrated audiobooks.

So there's that. Downloading now.

[Added] Note that clicking the dConstruct link in the above blockquote (or that one, obvs.) will show you some of the other talks from the same conference.