Scott B. Weingart

Welcome

The Last Tree is a book-in-progress about the ways tree and network metaphors permeate our lives. It doesn’t work like a usual book, read front-to-back as described by the King from Alice in Wonderland:

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Read it instead as you would Wikipedia, meandering through the text as suits your fancy. The preface may be a good place to start, or just dive in at random. Other entryways include:

Recent activity: recent additions and updates.
Chapter Drafts: narrative pieces.
Illustrations: diagrams of knowledge and related material.

The project is still in its infancy, so the site mostly includes chapter drafts, reading notes, and other ephemera. As a side project, it will likely form over several years. I write in public deliberately, both as a means to gather early and continuous peer review, and as a challenge to the standard closed and finished-product focused practices of academics.

This is my second publicly-written book, conceived after the success of The Historian’s Macroscope (written with Shawn Graham and Ian Milligan). My name is Scott B. Weingart (@scott_bot), and I am a historian of science who works as the Digital Humanities Specialist at Carnegie Mellon University while finishing a Ph.D. at Indiana University. Learn more in my bio or cv.

Recent Updates

Modified	Title	Words
08 Jul 2016	Eleventh Century Practical Knowledge Diagram	65
08 Jul 2016	Twelfth Century Philosophical Dichotomies	86
08 Jul 2016	Logo from the Third International Eugenics Congress, 1932	139
08 Jul 2016	smith_picturing_1992	1016
08 Jul 2016	Roth's Illustration of Diderot & d'Alembert	11
08 Jul 2016	H.G. Wells' World Encyclopedia	9
	All pages →

Github Activity