Selected Writing
Recent writing: history of information science and library technology.
- Aeon: Indexing the information age: Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable (Chosen for JSTOR Daily’s “Suggested Readings”)
- Aeon: Ingenious librarians: A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it. (A Longreads Editors’ Pick, essay of the week by The Syllabus, recommended by The Browser and many others)
- The Syllabus project: Undercover at the library: spies, reference desks, and the invention of privacy (Chosen for JSTOR Daily’s “Suggested Readings”)
Earlier Writing: art & aesthetics
For many years I wrote about art and aesthetics for Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, e-flux, Frieze, and many other places. More recently I’ve decided to focus my writing on my passion for the history of information science and library technology. The full archive of my writing on art & aesthetics is located at http://www.monicawestin.com/artwriting
A few of my favorite writing projects from this time include:
- Essays for The Believer’s review section about how clouds were named and the aesthetic category of cuteness in contemporary culture.
- Exhibition reviews of shows about the intersections of accessibility, art and design. Disability as a design problem is something I think about every single day, and which I got to write about for SFMOMA’s Open Space (RIP) in a residency at the Prelinger Library.
- Artist interviews with Tania Bruguera for a profile about her Escuela de Arte Útil; and with Aimee Balkin about her climate change project A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting.