Michael A. Innes

A brief foray into distraction’s history

03.01.2017 by Michael A. Innes

This looks interesting: A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017 When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age. Yet […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: books, cognition, history, information, literature, reading

What “post-factual news” means for researchers

14.12.2016 by Michael A. Innes

Some semi-random thoughts, as headlines continue to focus on “post-factual” news: There is a lot in common between what we’re seeing now in Britain and the US, and researchable “news” in fragile and conflict affected states. The recent Brexit referendum and US Presidential campaigns are just the two, latest and possibly most prominent cases that come to mind wherein the tone and content of open media forces a radical rethink of how researchers can use it. Fact-free politicians (and their […]

Categories: Practice Notes • Tags: guerrilla vernacular presses, post-fact, post-factual news, Stephen D.K. Ellis, the social construction of reality

Terraforming Diplomacy: Beijing, Manila and the Scarborough Shoal

08.11.2016 by Michael A. Innes

Over the last eight years I’ve commissioned, edited or led a dozen or more research studies and analytical pieces on the South China Sea disputes. China’s assertiveness in the region, and especially the way that it has operationalized its diplomatic and strategic interests over the last two years, have lent considerable urgency to the issue. The most recent development in this story has been the changing relationship between Beijing and Manila, and its impact on regional security dynamics, US-led “hub […]

Categories: International Boundary Disputes • Tags: Asia-Pacific, Beijing, China, diplomacy, hub and spoke, international security, Manila, Nine Dash Line, Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, Scarborough Shoal, South China Sea, Xi Jinping

Maps: Telling a Story of Imagined Omniscience

06.11.2016 by Michael A. Innes

In lieu of something original from me, I offer you something insightful by someone else – Michael Caines, in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing a new British Library exhibition entitled Maps and the Twentieth Century: Drawing the line. It tells “a story of imagined omniscience,” Caines writes, “of the world seen in a series of bird’s-eye overviews, albeit on widely varying scales and for competing purposes.” The subject is entirely apropos as Britain debates and decides its identity and its […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: British Library, cartography, history, maps

Forensic History: Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened

23.10.2016 by Michael A. Innes

In his much quoted critique of medieval historiography, R.J. Collingwood noted that historians, … in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God’s and not man’s, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man’s actions in order to detect the plan of God; and consequently the actual detail of human actions became for them relatively unimportant, and they neglected that prime duty […]

Categories: Sources and Methods • Tags: academia, evidence, forensic history, historiography, R.J. Collingwood, Rankean history, wie es eigentlich gewesen