Devin Jernigan

Two works on one subject: a dissertation and a book in development, with different texts and different readers.

The circus left almost no drawings, but it kept books, and two sets of them, read figure by figure, recover much of what drawings would have shown. The first is the journals of William Hobson, who ran the Ringling Bros. sail loft from 1927 to 1939. They record a sailmaker’s trade that came ashore when steam took the deep-water work: manila rope spun from Philippine abacá, cloth in a 30-inch bolt fixed by colonial bounty law, and a sizing arithmetic that let competition push tents from 40 feet across to 200. “Sailcloth Ashore” (Technology and Culture, October 2027) argues from them that the loft was a third case in the history of craft and industry, beside the trades industry degraded and the idea of craft it invented: a trade that reskilled its own workers and remained a handcraft.

The second is the ledgers of Gollmar Bros., Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey, and the Parsons candy concession from 1891 to 1922, 173,234 figures in 46 workbooks. Read together, they show one trade at three orders of magnitude. Gollmar and Barnum & Bailey both charged an adult 50 cents at the wagon, though one took a fifth of the other’s daily receipts, so the big shows won on the size of the crowd and on what it bought once inside. Gollmar and Ringling each took the candy privilege back from the concessionaire and ran it themselves, and the candy butchers and bill-posters were paid in small draws against wages held until the season closed, which left the season’s risk with the lowest paid. The ledger work continues in the book.

In the 1990s architects took animation software made for Hollywood and used it to think. Within a decade the same tools had become instruments of optimization and branding. “The ’90s: Hacked in Reverse” (Log 67, 2026) calls this reverse hacking: a method published openly, then sealed into proprietary workflows and sold as innovation. The tools in this work run the other way. Each was written for one job, pushed as far as that job needed, and put down.

A parametric model of the circus’s round tops and round oblongs carries one set of numbers from the width of a canvas bolt to the edge of the pitched tent; it could not reconcile the tentmaker’s figures, and working out why deciphered his journals. A rail network rebuilt in ArcGIS Pro from Jeremy Atack’s historical railroad data routed competing circuses across the country and earned Yale’s 2026 Esri Innovation Program Student of the Year award. Procedural model-makers turn out castle walls as solid meshes ready to print, candy trees, rope nets, and tie-down straps for other projects. Where optimization was the real problem, a custom physics solver placed solar arrays along engineered canals, choosing panels, converters, and cabling against the levelized cost of energy. The question under all of it goes back to a 2011 Princeton thesis, Intellectual Algorithmic Property: when a procedure produces the form, who is its author?