Word of the Week! Topophilia

Shenandoah ValleyI love few places on Earth more than the Shenandoah Valley. Richmond’s West-of-The-Boulevard neighborhood comes close, as do parts of Western Ireland and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Segovia Spain, and not least, the Fundy Coast of Nova Scotia. I would gladly live the rest of my days in any of them and never look back.

In fact, I’m hoping to spend the hot months of my retirement years in the first one: the trick involves finding the right rural property in The Valley. I like neighbors fine, but I don’t want to see them except when I wave my hat at them from the tractor’s seat as they go down the road. Unless I were to live in Segovia or West of Richmond’s Boulevard, I don’t even want to see other houses. Having managed rural land for decades, I know what we’ll face.

All of this serves as an introduction to our Word of the Week and a personal story. I learned our from Atlantic columnist Arthur Brooks, who switched from being a Washington Think-Tank wonk to a writer about happiness. I heartily approve of his change of career. I used to cringe at his columns; now I seek them out. Brooks writes, in a 2021 piece “Find the Place You Love. Then Move There,” about choosing where to choose to live:

There is a word for love of a place: topophilia, popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1974 as all of “the human being’s affective ties with the material environment.” In other words, it is the warm feelings you get from a place. It is a vivid, emotional, and personal experience, and it leads to unexplainable affections. 

He acknowledges that we don’t all have the luxury of choice, though moving across town can change your life.  In terms of origins, Wikipedia’s page on the subject provides a solid etymology. Alan Watts reports, in his autobiography, that poet John Betjeman coined the term, and W.H. Auden wrote in his introduction to a volume of Betjeman’s poetry that history with a landscape results in topophilia.

Appropriately, my topophilic relationship with the Valley goes way back.  I recall trips with my parents to buy apples in many places, as my dad was a trucker, then a produce wholesaler. Best of all involved visiting friends at the little hamlet of Massie’s Mill, VA, where Tom Massie managed an orchard. Tom was a business associate second and friend first to my dad. Dad saw Tom as a practical Appalachian farmer whose strong, quiet persona, long history in that place, and obvious love of the land made him special. Even pre-teen me picked up on this feeling. He adored that farm and it showed in his care for it.

Topophilia swayed my old man, who was a tough city-boy through and through, but he’d mellow the second he stepped out of his big GM car at Tom’s.

The Massie family lost their matriarch in the terrible floods of 1969, when the remnants of Hurricane Camille parked themselves over that part of the Valley. Tom’s mother’s house was washed away to the foundation and her body never recovered. My dad barely escaped earlier in the day. He was hauling a load of apples to Winchester in ferocious weather down the Tye River Valley. He said the rain was solid and the road treacherous. He knew something awful was coming so he kept going as water covered the road. He spoke quietly later of the Massie’s tragedy, but when we returned, Tom and his family seemed as tied to that beautiful place as ever.

My own topophilia for The Valley continued to deepen over the years. Decades later, my wife and I began to make monthly trips to a farm near Stuart’s Draft, VA, to buy feed for our growing flock of chickens. With the flock approaching 90 hens, we go through more than 300 lb of feed monthly. Ostensibly, the trip lets us save money by buying truckloads in bulk, but the trip also reinforces my topophilia.

I have a theory (run while you can). If we really loved the places we lived, and I don’t mean the structures that shelter us, would we ruin them with sprawl, pollution, wider roads, and other forms of debasement? Rural Henrico was once lovely. No more. So many places I visit around Richmond’s periphery have become generic, forgettable. Money and convenience drive our decisions, not topophilia. Maybe too many of us don’t stay in a place long enough to establish that deep connection.

If we practiced topophilia by living where we love, wouldn’t we do a better job? Sadly, there’s no guarantee. There’s an Amazon distribution center a few miles up the rural road from where we buy our feed. The jobs are nice and yes, I have a Prime account. Yet if we loved places more, we’d build such giant buildings on gray-field sites where a closed factory now stands.

The Pandemic afforded us the opportunity to rethink how we work and where we live. It promoted me, in part, to retire from full-time work early. The Valley, after all, awaits. I’m laying my plans.

What places do you love most? Why can’t you move there? As Brooks notes, “perhaps the biggest barrier for you is the sheer audacity of moving for a feeling. The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy.”

My old man was a homebody. He’d have thought me crazy for living on a Goochland farm, but crazier still for my topophilic need for mountain vistas and even more farmwork.

Sorry, Pop. I’ll plant some apple trees, just like Tom Massie did.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

image source: location undisclosed. I don’t want neighbors I can see…

Metaphor of the Month! Data Scraping

Web Scraping GraphicAs I prepare for my Fall class, “Writing With and About AI,” as well as a book proposal on AI in the writing classroom, I keep encountering neologisms like this month’s metaphor.

What do “scrapers” do? They can, according to a firm that employs them, “browse sites based on your keyword inputs or connections to your website or social media accounts. They can also skim through online reviews, product descriptions, and other categories.” That sounds benign enough, as sites like this one lie behind no pay-walls (there’s a neologism to which I’ll return in some future post).  The practice, according to the Wikipedia entry, appears to date to the 1980s, before we had The Web or household Internet.

Why scrape data to train AI? From the firm quoted in the previous paragraph, data scrapers assist in “automating outreach, [and] they can also help during the early company development and research phases. Even later on, you can use them to monitor online chatter and brand perception.” As I tell my students constantly, they need to learn how to use these AI-based tools, even if they dislike them. Getting a job will depend upon AI-fluency.

And yet as I write this, the BBC has threatened to take the AI firm Perplexity to court for unauthorized scraping of its data and “reproducing BBC content ‘verbatim’ without its permission.” This use of BBC content, though free, poses a new problem for me, a self-professed “Copy Leftist” who has long opposed copyright save for creative work.

Open-access scholarship, my own syllabi, and more in The Creative Commons are there to be scraped. The problem for me involves my and other creators’ words being used without any asking or attribution; this use violates the ethos of the Creative Commons. 20 years ago, I wrote to a Hong-Kong firm that had used our online handbook pages, verbatim, without acknowledgement. I told them I’d be contacting every e-list I knew to show that they had done this. They relented and gave our creators credit. I gave them my blessing to use our content under that one condition.

I’ve long advocated having everything save classified government information and creative work given away, free. That was one promise of the original Internet. Just cite it if you scrape it. I dislike copyright for other materials intensely.

Now I’m thinking that Web-crawlers and other bots that scrape data pose an even larger problem than copyright laws and pay walls. We may need to revise copyright laws to require attribution even for Creative-Commons work, or to watermark all AI-scraped content.

Scrape the barrel for new words and metaphors, then send them to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of lab.howie.tw

Word of the Week! Agentic

Travel Agency, Glasgow ScotlandWe have this week a neologism that I encounter, suddenly, almost daily. The word is one you need to know, if the enthusiasts for certain technologies are not stretching the truth. Our word proves too new even to appear in The OED.

Soon it will. But what does it mean? In the current contexts about artificial intelligence, “agentic” means autonomous, making decisions on their own. Agentic AI does more than answer a query; it can be given parameters for complex tasks and then go about solving them in a manner it best sees fit. Human input may not be needed by such systems.

I’m thinking of travel a lot lately, and how, before I moved to Spain in 1985, I went to a travel agency with lots of general ideas. I then relied upon them to provide me with several affordable options for touring France and Spain before I arrived in Madrid, for a job interview that led to my first paying teaching gig.

Flash forward 40 years: tonight I dined at a really fine place in Richmond’s West End for sushi and sashimi. I’ve been curious about it since spotting it, so for about 20 minutes I read I used my phone to read reviews, comparing notes others left, looking at how it ranks with other similar places.

Flash forward again to the year 2030: Had I an agentic AI to help, I could have simply said “Hal, could you brief me on the strengths and shortcomings of the food at XYZ? I’m thinking of going.” No huge prompt needed. Hal would perform a number of tasks to discuss happy or unhappy reviews, prices, comparisons, even where the place sources its seafood. It could find out that Kirin Beer, my dad’s favorite, was on tap. I quaffed one in his honor today.

Agency of this sort does not, luckily, imply sentience; I’ve covered the term sentient here before. Even so, these new AI systems already have reshaped industries, if New York Times reporter Kevin Roose’s work holds true. You will need to get past the paper’s paywall to read the entire story, but Roose’s latest column focuses on the downturn in employment for recent college grads. In a podcast Roose prepared from this article, he and his cohost claim that for young college-educated workers, “if you look at the unemployment rate for college graduates right now, it is unusually high. It’s about 5.8 percent in the US. That has risen significantly, about 30 percent since 2022.”

This while overall unemployment stands at historic lows. One theory? Industries are simply automating a record number of entry-level positions. The replacement has proven acute in fields such as finance and computer science.

As agentic AI expands its scope and abilities, how many more jobs will also vanish?

These are questions we humans need to ask, we who have been agentic for longer than our primate ancestors had fire or went on two legs.  We need to have a conversation, too, about how agentic we want our cybernetic companions to become. That’s not a doomsday warning, but if one loses a career and means of support, the outcome is dire.

As I tell my students, “if you want a job soon, you must add value to AI output.” Too many of them see AI as a shortcut. That’s not wise. Yet even if the students get wise about leveraging AI’s abilities, agentic AI may make statements like mine sound, and here comes a future metaphor of the month, like whistling in the dark.

AI did not write this piece, but if you or your AI have words or metaphors useful in academic writing, send them along by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image from Flickr of a wonderful old-school travel agency in Glasgow, Scotland’s Great Western Road. I’ve been there, but the agency must be long gone.