I haven't posted much - a trip drive from Calgary to Toronto was followed by throwing myself into the dissertation work. I'll try to do more short posts instead of fewer longer ones. Here's a little thing that I dug up for a class I'm prepping for next semester called "New Economic Spaces." This is a graph of trademark registrations in the United States from 1883-2009, drawn from data from WIPO. It's a fairly amazing dataset, with information from over 100 countries, but the spreadsheet is laid out in such a way as to make importing it to a GIS very annoying, so no pretty map this time. Anyways, here is a good example of the rising importance of symbolic content in the valuation of commodities. Want to know more? Plenty of time to apply to U of T and enrole in the class.
