Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Andrew Kalaidjian, "Flight Paths" Team

 1. James, William. The Principles of Psychology Volume 2. Dover Publications: New York, NY: 1950.  

William James's seminal work. I will be focusing on the chapters concerning "Imagination," "The Perception of Space," and the "Perception of Reality." 

"A blurred picture is just as much a single mental fact as a sharp picture is; and the use of either picture by the mind to symbolize a whole class of individuals is a new mental function." (49)

This quotation is useful for beginning to address the way representation negotiates between the real and the imagined, as well as the extensions being drawn from the character Yacub to a larger conception of immigrants. 

"[Space-relations] are nothing but sensations of particular lines, particular angles, particular forms of transition or (in the case of a distinct more) of particular outstanding portions of space after two figures have been superposed." (152)

I'd like to perhaps look at Flight Paths as a purely spatial phenomenon, as much of the fascination seems to focus around the lines and trajectories of the characters. 

"The conceived system, to pass for rue, must at least include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more. The system which includes the most of them, and definitely explains or pretends to explain the most of them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail" (312). 

I think this quotation is helpful in beginning to negotiate the multiple parts that form the whole of the flightpaths universe. 

2. Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness. Ed. Hart, Nelson, Puhakka. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY: 2000. 

"We are increasingly sensitized to the differences in perspective that reflect the varieties of ethnic groups and subcultures within the larger cultural matrix, even as we move toward globalized culture. And it appears that in some cases the awareness of multiple perspectives has the effect of loosening the hold of any particular perspective..."Perspective" itself then becomes more tenuous, more fluid, less binding on the knowing that operates within its confines. The consequent undermining of perspectival truth has no doubt contributed to the general loss of faith in the traditional ways of rational knowing—those of science and religion. At the same time, it appears to have allowed more expression of alternative, nonrational modes of knowing. Thus we not only have multiple perspectives on knowing, but apparently multiple modes of knowing. Some of these modes may involve simultaneous awareness of several perspectives, others perhaps do not involve perspectives at all." (2-3)

Flight Paths seems to aspire to this level of knowing. I think this book will be helpful to identify how such a new "perspective" or "modes of knowing" may be successfully approached. 

3. Weiss, Gail. Refiguring the Ordinary. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN: 2008. 

"No matter how stable it may seem, the "taken-for-granted" quality of ordinary life can be irrevocable disrupted at any point in time. While the disruptions themselves tend to dominate one's attention when they occur, when life is running smoothly and predictably most people are usually less inclined to question the status of the familiar...Whether the disruption of the ordinary is experienced as a curse or a blessing, it is evident that it is the permanent possibility of such disruption that defines the structure of human experience. If one takes seriously the ways in which class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, and ability no less than death and the body itself serve as overlapping, albeit indeterminate, horizons of significance that collectively contextualize individual as wel as group experiences, one can understand how the meaning of these experiences becomes over-determine and thereby resistant to change. And yet, recognizing the continual interplay of these horizons in relation to one another as one's situation itself continually changes over time and across space helps to explain the improvisational nature of human experience from one moment to the next. Thus to affirm the indeterminacy of these multiple horizons as a constitutive feature of experience allows one to understand why the familiarity of the ordinary can always be refigured in extraordinary ways. (7)

I think this book will be helpful in analyzing the emphasis on the extraordinary colliding with the ordinary in Flight Paths.  

4. Bell, Simon. Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process. Routledge: New York, NY: 1999. 

"Consciously or unconsciously we seek order out of chaos. We tend to look for patterns which seem to make sense in the knowledge that we have about our world, as well as being aesthetically satisfying in the relationship of each part to the whole...Pattern recognition is important to help us understand and relate to the world around us. We can develop a language of description and analysis to communicate relationships between different patters, the processes that change the landscape and our aesthetic and emotional responses to them." (3)

What patterns might emerge from an analysis of air travel and international networks? What would these patterns reveal about landscape? 

5. Juxta. http://www.juxtasoftware.org/.

Juxta is an open-source cross-platform tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, and to annotate Juxta-revealed comparisons and save the results.

Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate — at the level of any textual unit — all witness variations from the base text. A histogram of Juxta collations is particularly useful for long documents. This visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule (in HTML format) of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.