Hi there! I'm Ben Schultz, the administrator and founder of Bluepages, and this is my personal user page. If you'd like to contact me with any questions or concerns, you can reach me here.
My philosophy in creating Bluepages
I created Bluepages out of a desire to share and preserve local knowledge, and to establish what I consider a new form of research. By analogy with genealogy, I call this research platiology.[1] Genealogy (which I have plenty of experience with) is not just the study of people, but the study of the connections and relationships between people, and of the impacts they have on others. In much the same way, I hope that platiology will emerge as not just the study of places, but the study of the connections and relationships between people, and of the impacts they have on people. Bluepages is meant to be a single, consistent place to collect this research, where anyone with the time and will to do so can be a platiologist.
Notes
- ↑ As of August 8, 2020, the only correctly identified use of the word "platiology" that Google can find is in Labyrinth of Hybridities: Avatars of O'Neillian Realism in Multi-ethnic American Drama (1972-2003), a 2010 book by Marc Maufort, which states on page 141 that Christy Stanlake's 2009 book Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective "articulates a theory of Native platiology, which privileges the political, 'signifying' power of specific places over the abstract and generic concept of space." Credit where credit is due, I'm evidently not the first person to coin this term.