A Quote by David Christian
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
Related Quotes
Scale is a mental - you can say that a lounger has scale, a building has scale, or an object has scale, or a page, or whatever if it's just right. A scale is a relationship to the object and the space surrounding it. And that dialogue could be music, or it could be just noise. And that is why it is so important, the sense of scale.
Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were bigger and much more advanced than ours after the Civil War, but we had blown past them by the mid-80s.
I automate some tasks and delegate many others. Doing research, job organization, data processing, field surveys, and plan preparation can be tedious, detailed work.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
If you paint a building shocking pink, that has no scale, it is just a huge mistake, but it's not in the scale of the city to have things like that. You know. So, not only because it's not appropriate, not only because it's offensive to the environment, I mean but among them also because that quantity of that color in the urban scale, is out of scale.
The state of the world today demands that women become less modest and dream/plan/act/risk on a larger scale.
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.
They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.
Google Earth has become a little bit of an icon in our society. You get on maps and you wanna see what the quality of the road's like, you go on Google Maps.
The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing... The sooner the better - start talking to other people about what you're doing. Because that's what will stimulate things the fastest.
Breakthrough Advertising is not about building better mousetraps. It is, however, about building larger mice - and then building a terrifying fear of them in your customers.
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