Philosophy of Sociology, SOC 508

Actually a pretty awesome course on the nature of research methods and the formation of discipline. Professor curates changingsociety.org, does interesting video interviews with top sociologists.

• Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences / Jon Elster
• Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory / Green & Shaprio
• Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences / Mahoney & Rueschemeyer
• Social Mechanisms / Hedström & Swedberg
• Department and Discipline / Abbott

UROP research

• The Rational Guide to Building SharePoint Web Parts / Darin Bishop. While you’d expect this to contain only the repeated phrase “danger — run”, it does not, so it fails to fulfill the promise implicit in its title. That, or it sets up some sort of paradox that will destroy us all.
• (two other books related books, whose titles will sour this post, but are central to the success of my project)

General Awesomeness

• The Media Lab / Stewart Brand
• Finally: A Pattern Language /Alexander et al, thanks to a well-timed Borders gift card.
• Imagined Communities / Anderson, my first real book that BookMooch allowed me to take.

Christmas Sociology

• Structural Holes / Burt, reviewed and recommended on Vacuum some time ago.
• Orality and Literacy / Ong, which, as the title suggests, links oral and literary cultures;
• Emergence / Steven Johnson, on emergence theory and group power;
• Turf Wars / Gabriella Gahlia Modan, on linguistics and the formation of conceptions of place in neighborhoods.

And, finally:

How to Marry the Man of Your Choice (imagine the o in choice is a gold band) / Margaret Kent. Required reading for anyone entering a serious relationship. Sample chapter available.

Annotated books section. Write in the margins. Pass notes in the back. Extrapolate. Vandalize. Interpret.

Foreign newspaper collection: Die Zeit, Suddeutsche Zeitung, People’s Daily, Le Monde

A whiteboard

Edge City
Faust Eins und Zwei
Nathan der Weise
The History of Sexuality
The Problem of Race in the 21st Century
Complications
Wasting Away
Emotional Design
Turning Information into Knowledge
On Liberty
On Crimes and Punishments
In Defense of Anarchy
A Mathematician’s Apology
Animal Farm
On Writing Well
The Elements of Typographic Style
Hickory Dickory Death
The Practical Stylist
The Design of Everyday Things
Post für den Tiger
Geometry of Design
Thinking with Type
Building Accessible Websites
Agile Web Development with Rails
On Revolution
501 German Verbs
How Buildings Learn
Justice
Worldchanging
The Company of Strangers

(crossposted with the RC book share group)

Better organization is coming soon. I enjoy making incremental changes. Perhaps other people have similar pages, and no doubt there’s a web2.0 service that handles this. I’m not familiar with them, though. Can you enlighten me?

The first books in the series were lots of fun, so it’s disappointing that the comforting stories about a BIG CASTLE with ADVENTURES and MAGIC and DELICIOUS FOOD have somehow mutated into an alternate-reality British political thriller about genocide. What? I want castles! Magic! Food!

Also, the amount of schmaltz contained in the epilogue was more than enough to cook my dinner, and I still have some left for tomorrow.