This brief presentation was part of a panel at MLA 2020 in Seattle entitled “Being Human, Seeming Human.” The panel brought together researchers from Microsoft with a couple of DH folks (me and Mark Sample) to talk about the history of research into artificial intelligence and conversational agen...
Don’t let the thunderstorm know where I am.
This, except with 2+ pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Four hours in the slow cooker, on high. Makes brilliant tacos.
We are finally, finally, in the thick of spring — the sun is out, at least some of the time, and the windows are open, at least part of the day. And the ability to stand being outside for more than ten minutes at a time has me pondering the things that sustained me through this miserable winter.
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
As I posted a while back, I’ve been on an extended European trip this summer, beginning with several conferences, followed by a pretty blissful four-week stint in Prague. As week four begins today, and as I see this trip beginning to draw to a close, I’ve been reflecting a bit on how it all went,...
I find myself at one of those moments at which everything is great and yet nothing seems to be working exactly right. I’ve got an enormous deadline just ahead — not, alas, the “boy, I’m going to blow that deadline and then I’m going to feel sheepish and guilty when I finally send the thing in two...
I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing every morning; I’ve gotten out of the habit of leaving work on time in order to make it to my yoga class. I’ve gotten out of th...
Today we’ve got one of those glorious mornings in New York in which you begin to feel the first bits of fall in the air. The sun is up and the temperature and humidity are down. I even saw a young woman walking down Third Avenue wearing a scarf.
Though my focus in writing here for the last ten years has mostly been professional, I’ve never tried to pretend that this wasn’t a personal blog. (In fact, I dispute the distinction: my professional life is extremely personal to me, and though my focus is often on professional stuff, I’ve worked...
Yesterday, as I noted then, was my birthday, and it was one that I was surprised to find myself a bit ambivalent about. I haven’t really felt bad about a birthday in that oh-god-I’m-getting-old kind of way since I turned 29. Of course, I look back now on that bit of moaning and laugh, but I do st...
The Chronicle’s ProfHacker and Inside Higher Ed’s GradHacker have this week collaborated on a series of posts about productivity apps and systems. I’m constantly in search of the right way to organize my working life, to keep my focus, and to keep my eighty-bajillion (that’s an approximation) pro...
The primary bit of awkwardness involved in not-blogging is the transition to once-again-blogging; there’s guilt and embarrassment, and an overwhelming need to explain where one has been and what one has been doing.
I’m in the midst of wrapping up a few last items in the office before heading home for the holidays. It’s a slightly odd feeling; this is the first time in almost 20 years that I’m operating on a calendar other than the academic one, meaning that my holidays are for the first time in ages literal...
I’m headed to Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship 2011 today and tomorrow. I’m taking advantage of the slightly delayed start by actually sitting in the Starbucks where I buy my morning coffee, instead of taking it and running.
I’m in what amounts to the last couple of weeks of my sabbatical, and so am finding myself reflecting a bunch on the goals I’d set for myself at the beginning of the year and the utterly unexpected place in which I now find myself. It’s typical for me, at the end of a break, to look back at what ...
So I’ve managed to survive all of the bullet points on my insane itinerary of June and July travel, and am happily ensconced once again in my very own home, madly catching up on work items that I promised people months ago and as yet have failed to deliver.
This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that leads to my neighborhood, gauging whether the gap between the vehicles was enough to get across, and completely did not see the pedestrian cross...
I’m not sure where October went, much less the first two-thirds of November. Actually, I do know where it went: to three conferences in five weeks, with an added surprise family trip in the mix as well.
It’ll no doubt shock everyone to hear that I’ve been starkly unproductive today. Weirdly unable to focus. Distracted. Nervous.
I’ve spent the last few days trying to process my grief over the loss of my colleague Dave Wallace, trying to imagine saying something even remotely significant about it. The phrase “words fail me” has never seemed quite so appropriate; the thing that I feel right now feels quite literally imposs...
The neighborhood they’re talking about in this article is where my parents live (though the image is from another neighborhood not too far away).
I talked to my mother a little while ago, and the news from post-Gustav Baton Rouge (which only Josh and The Advocate seem to be reporting on at all) is not good: much of the city could be without electricity for as long as four weeks, with temperatures in the 90s, enormous lines for gas and basi...
The transition to life in Paris has gone amazingly smoothly thus far; we’ve found the perfect boulangerie, a great local cafe, and even managed to find our way back to the best falafel place ever, which we were taken to once last year. We’re both sleeping, and quite soundly, and work has begun to...
Day 2 has not gone, shall we say, as well as day 1 did. This is primarily due to the fact that I woke up at 2 am, a bit sick and completely unable to go back to sleep. (Yes, the time stamp on the last post is accurate.) Focus is not high this morning, and the chances for gym action are pretty muc...
The spring semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today’s the first day of the new regime: I got up early, I’m sitting at the computer for half an hour of focused writing (though I’ll admit that I did sneak a peek at my email, but didn’t actually respond to any of it), and later this morning ...
Seriously: forget April.
What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during the three frenetic weeks of travel that followed. But now I’ve been home for over a week, and I’ve managed one lousy little post in that tim...
It’s raining again! And it looks like it’s going to rain all day!
First off, there are still two full weeks left, plus a full day of packing. And the longest time I’ve spent here before was two weeks, so it’s just like that trip all over again.
R. and I have been back at work this week after our weekend of picnics, and I’ve been attempting to knock some smallish tasks off the to-do list. The article that I was at work on last week is fully drafted, and is out to some folks for comment. I’ve been feeling a bit off my game this week, thou...
This was the weekend of picnics — first Saturday’s explosion-filled French-speaking one, and then Sunday’s, which was a bit more peaceful and overwhelmingly more Anglophone. We met Marcus and a few of his fellow American ex-pats, plus a few French amis, on the Pont des Arts for some wine and some...
As I remarked to R. midway through dinner last night, as we sat in the courtyard of the house of a friend of a friend of a friend up in the 20th, listening to sporadic p?©tards exploding in the surrounding streets, it’s good to know that the French also have the national holiday of blowing shit u...
An email correspondent has asked about — nay, demanded — that post about the meal. I feel honor-bound to comply:
Everyone here has been complaining about the weather non-stop, or, when not complaining about it, apologizing for it. “The weather,” they say, shrugging in that French way, “has not been so nice.”
Simply marking the moment. Carry on.
The good news is that the mystery box has been found!
There’s always something very odd about being in a place where the 4th of July is only… July 4.
I’m currently reading Empire of Signs (one of the few books that actually went in the suitcase, which I’m trying to spread out enough to tide me over), which just presented me with the following:
No sign of box-o-books. Paid approx. $67 yesterday to have two books I already own sent to the woman whose name is on the mailbox, who will hopefully receive them on 3 July.
Sleeping: improved, but not perfect.
I have to admit, I’ve gotten a bit complacent these days. Since moving to an address that the postal system and the various private shipping companies actually believe exists — a place where my packages actually arrive, taking a reasonably direct route from the shipper to my very own front door —...
In no particular order:
We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers showed up Tuesday morning, we finished last details there (and I spent some time with my mother) on Wednesday, and headed westward on Thurs...
R.’s been here for the last week, hanging out during his spring break, taking care of some odds and ends. It was fabulous having him here, as it always is, and somewhat hard taking him to the airport this morning.
I’m positively breathless about it all: we worked all morning, and then we went out to lunch today, and lunch had spices in it, and then we went shopping, and then I finished my grading, and then we went to the pool! And now we’re going to go get a drink! A fruity drink!
Part of the recent silence has been produced by the fact that everything I’ve been doing over the last however many days it’s been since I got back to Claremont (just checked; it’s eleven. I can’t decide if it seems like it’s been more or less than that) is either (a) bloody tedious or (b) variou...
Greetings from Paris! I’ll attempt to catch up on The Story Thus Far later today. For now, a warm welcome to 2007, and best wishes that it be a happy, healthy, and fruitful year for us all.
The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by. Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied when she got tagged, I’ll do the same. I want to note that this is hard, though; there are plenty of things you don’t know about me, but no...
“That new haircut really makes you look thin.”
I took a fairly long drive west yesterday, to go to a barbeque hosted by Bitch Ph.D. and attended by some other bloggy folks in the area. I’m always a little nervous about this meeting-online-people-offline business, and so I over-calculated a little bit. Things were starting up at 4, and I didn’...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/307748243/ "photo sharing")[this week](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/307748243/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). This is a slightly blurred screensh...
Thanksgiving was lovely, if much too fast. I spent a fair percentage of it just clearing my head and attempting to improve my attitude.
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one of those moments where I’m just not sure how everything that needs to be done between now and then will actually get done.
There is very little in the world like waking up on Friday and realizing you’ve survived the week, and that it was not even half as bad as you expected.
The thing that has taken up the vast majority of my time this semester — and something on the order of 95% of my emotional energy — is something I absolutely, positively cannot write about. Not even in allegorized form. And it’s less of an exaggeration than I’d like to think to suggest that this ...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/288930565/ "photo sharing")[the haircut](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/288930565/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). My hairdresser was so impressed w...
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
Every once in a great while, I get home from the grocery store and discover that they’ve failed to bag something I bought. It’s always annoying, but never worth returning to the store for whatever it was they left out.
Why do things like this only ever happen when you’re late?
Sigh. My end-of-summer blues have kicked in full-force today. They’ve arrived at a moment that no doubt seems premature, but really, everything’s rushing to a close. R. is leaving Friday, ending a fabulous seven-month stretch together. I hit the road on Friday, too, and with the exception of thre...
As in degrees.
Sitting here at my desk in the niche on the second-floor landing a little while ago, I started to realize that I had been hearing some kind of small aircraft overhead for a few minutes. I didn’t think terribly much of it, as there’s a small private airport not far from here. But — and not for the...
It’s been a week of major housekeeping since I returned from New York: first, I needed to unpack all the stuff that I moved back from Louisiana, which arrived while I was away; after that, the condo needed some serious organizing and cleaning. Just as I finished that, I began packing up and movin...
Graduation just began back in Claremont, and it feels mighty weird not being there. Cooler, certainly; I’m not missing sweltering under the klieg lights in my fluorescent purple triple-knit polyester robe. But I miss the ceremony, nonetheless–miss the opportunity to say goodbye to my students fro...
It’s spring break here in Baton Rouge; all the students in our apartment complex have decamped for the Florida coast, the restaurants are empty, traffic is light, and life is generally good. It’s been years, though, since I’ve lived in a place — wait; is there any other place? — where spring brea...
Friday afternoon, I got into the skinny pants. The ones that have been hanging in the closet for at least the last nine months, untouched. And they looked mighty fine, if I do say so myself.
For the last month, R. and I have been exercising a lot. A lot. And well. It’s the first time since the marathon — hell, it’s the first time since longer ago than that — that I’ve really felt in some kind of decent shape, in an all-around sense: I’ve lost a few nagging pounds that I couldn’t drop...
Taking the opportunity to gloat about being in Louisiana while I can: last night, my parents took me and my sister, who was visiting this weekend, to the new location of Galatoire’s (this one called Galatoire’s Bistro), here in Baton Rouge. We had the kind of meal that demonstrates conclusively w...
The subject line of this post is what I muttered at my mother after several hours of hanging out with my family, each and every last member of which is suddenly deaf as a post, except for my mother, and she just doesn’t listen. Here’s a sample scene, from yesterday as I was leaving my mother’s ho...
A junior colleague of mine, not long ago, reported being asked by some senior faculty members how she had managed to participate in a faculty seminar last year. “What did you have to give up in order to do that?” they asked, not so much incredulously as dubiously, expecting to hear that her resea...
A few days ago, I came within a couple of inches of hitting a pedestrian.
I was awakened just before 1.00 this morning by one heck of a thunderstorm.
Here’s one way to get out of the office before dark: have the power go out. The Claremont Colleges are on one of those reduced-cost power dealies (I think that’s the technical term), whereby we have to shut off the power in the event of rolling blackouts, but pay a vastly reduced price per kilowa...
Every semester for the last two and a half years, I’ve arranged things such that my scheduled commitments for the week all fall between Monday and Wednesday. The good news in this is that generally speaking, by Wednesday at 5.00 pm, I’m free to operate by weekend guidelines (that is, appointment-...
After what feels like days, my head is at last clearing, and I have my sights set on a productive weekend. Today, however, began with (a) me sleeping in, still recovering from the skull-splitting of the day before, and (b) an early-morning meeting, which, ick. But I’ve just gotten my hair cut and...
I’ve given to the Red Cross, and to Catholic Charities USA.
I woke up appallingly early this morning, considering how late I’d gotten to sleep last night, and lay there thinking about those dreams I’ve been having the last several days.
I’ve found myself, since mid-weekend, with a vastly reduced desire to write about Katrina and its aftermath. I’ve spent a bit this morning trying to figure out why, and have come up with a number of possible reasons why I no longer feel so compelled to post every frantic thought that goes through...
Things I don’t have the energy to write about right now:
A friend of mine from back in the day directs me to the Hurricane Poets Check-In, where some information has been gathered about the status, as known, of a number of New Orleans writers. Several of my friends are, happily, on the “found” list. At least one is still missing.
A pal of mine, whose mother works for one of the region’s power companies, passed on some information that she’d gotten via email. I’m not going to quote the message directly, but will report a few of the facts that it includes, below the fold.
I think horseman number three of four has just arrived on the scene: the city of New Orleans is on fire. And there’s no water pressure, and no equipment, to put it out.
My parents arrived last night, and while both of them look a little wrung-out, and both are clearly very upset about what’s happening to the state they both love, they’re doing quite well. They brought news from Baton Rouge, some of which I’ll post a bit later.
So they’re calling the city of New Orleans at the EPA, as reported by Wonkette:
Rumors are running rampant. No one seems to know what’s actually happening, and what’s just talk. But the chaos seems to be spreading outside New Orleans.
Governor Kathleen Blanco is ordering everyone who didn’t evacuate from New Orleans before the storm to evacuate now; she’s sending in buses and boats, and getting everybody out.
They live in New Orleans, but have families and other connections elsewhere in the state, and so — I hope — almost certainly evacuated early. But their email servers have been shut down, or destroyed, or both, and so no messages are getting through.
The news out of New Orleans is perversely getting worse instead of better; a two-block long breach in the levee surrounding Lake Pontchartrain resulted in water pouring into the city since late yesterday. According to Governor Kathleen Blanco, reports have flood water levels at five feet in downt...
Today’s the first day of classes. Today’s also the day I decided to start eenching (which is like inching, only more painful) my alarm clock earlier.
My parents have done what they can to protect their boat, which is just on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and have motored back up the road to Baton Rouge, where they’re busy battening down the hatches.
I have this genius plan, whereby I get up super early every morning this semester, do the requisite teeth-brushing and contact-lens-in-putting, and then plop myself down in front of the computer for at least one hour, and conceivably two, of working on my own writing — and nothing else — between ...
As in, pandering for my own anxieties, yes, apparently, I was. I’ll post about the anxieties that produced such pandering in the morning. In the meantime, thanks for letting me know you’re still out there. And thanks, in other comments, for the good wishes. It was a good birthday, all the way aro...
Today began utterly unceremoniously, with a trip to the eye doctor. Things were not looking good when I arrived; the waiting room was completely full, and about fifteen minutes into my wait my eye doctor herself appeared and began calling patients back into her exam rooms. Perhaps because she was...
You’ve just received a birthday present from your mother via UPS, but your birthday isn’t until tomorrow. Do you open the present right away, or do you wait?
Some days are destined to be expensive. This, alas, is one of them. I knew it was bound to be, because I had my appointment with Mike the blinds guy, but it didn’t quite go like I expected.
Say, for reasons that are absolutely, positively, Nobody’s Fault, you find yourself in one seriously grouchy goddamn mood. Like fight-picking grouchy. Fight-picking with total strangers grouchy. And say, for the sake of argument, that you find yourself in this mood in a place and at a time that a...
During the time that R. was in Washington — the most recent time, that is, the last ten months he spent on active duty there — we had a running gag over the phone and via email in which I would tell him, among other things, that “those kitties is too sad if you don’t come home.” You have to hear ...
So I managed to knock two major items off the mile-long to-do list, and it’s an accomplishment in no small part because (1) these were the two things that I most dreaded doing, and (2) they were the most pressing things on the list. (1) + (2) = major guilt paralysis; my inability (or perhaps lack...
Me? Nada. I didn’t even get the load of laundry I meant to do done (though there’s still time for that, I guess). Best yet, I didn’t even pretend to work — instead, I laid around, read purely for fun, got caught up on Six Feet Under, talked on the phone, and made a lovely dinner. That’s the entir...
Last night, I went downtown with some folks from the college to picnic in California Plaza, before last night’s performance, in the Grand Performances series, of Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu. The food was fabulous, the company entertaining, the surroundings gorgeous, and the performance enthralling.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/21707200/ "photo sharing") [BRHS stairwell](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/21707200/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). At last, some images from the class...
Djever have one of those days where you get up at like seven o’clock in the morning and pull the sheets off your bed because they’re totally overdue to be washed, and you put them in the washer and then the dryer and go about your day, and then walk into your bedroom for the first time around say...
So the storied twenty-one year high school reunion has come and gone. And I have to say, I had way more fun than I imagined I would. It was a bit of a blur — there are dozens of people I’d have liked to spend more time talking to, but barely got past “omigod! hi!” with. But a few highlights:
So I was at home this morning, getting dressed to my usual KCRW soundtrack, when the station cut away to CNN’s audio feed, covering the announcement of the new pope. I turned on the television and sat rivetted, watching every ruffle of the curtains as St. Peter’s filled to over-capacity and those...
So, moved as I was yesterday by the solemn, sonorous tolling of the bells at the church just a block from me, whose bell tower I can see from my balcony, but which I’ve never set foot in, I went to an afternoon Mass, wanting to spend some time focusing on my hopes for the more inclusive, more com...
I’ve spent the morning sitting on my balcony reading student papers and enjoying the quiet. The church two blocks from me had been ringing its bells for about two minutes before I realized that it wasn’t noon, and wasn’t Sunday, and there wasn’t a Mass about to begin. The bells have now been ring...
Where is the line between being that cool professor who shows up to student events and that skeezy professor who used to be cool but still shows up to stuff? Is it 40? Tenure? Marriage?
I’ve been watching since the beginning of the year, I think — yes, in fact, my first sighting was Liz back on January 4 — as first one and then another of my blogging pals have been overtaken by the Getting Things Done virus sweeping the net. And every time I ran across it — somebody linking to 4...
The other thing is that moving makes it completely impossible to do anything else other than move. Because I can’t find any of the stuff that I need to do it with.
Last New Year’s Eve, I spent some time counting my blessings over a big pot of gumbo and an Angel marathon, and then spent the first day of 2004 recovering from the MLA and articulating my hopes for the new year. (Well, before watching my beloved Tigers kick some Sooner butt, that is.) Those hope...
Well, finished, at least. Grades are turned in, and everything that needed to get read got read (and please don’t ask me to be more specific about that). And just in the nick of time, as I’m now madly doing a last load of laundry and packing to leave at what R. refers to as oh-dark-thirty tomorro...
This lucky: I had a mildly crappy day yesterday, and was feeling sorry for myself, and so R. bought a plane ticket to fly down to Atlanta and hang out with me for the weekend.
It’s 4.24 am as I begin this entry. I’m sitting in the Ontario (California; you have no idea how many times I’ve been asked for my passport when trying to fly here) airport, availing myself of the free wi-fi, feeling mighty blessed, the hour notwithstanding. Back in January, after the ritual end-...
Julia Child, the woman who single-handedly saved American cuisine, died yesterday at age 91.
There’s been a repeated refrain in my posts this summer: not-working, something I’ve been doing a lot of for the last two and a half months. I’ve been pondering this state of stasis for a while, trying to figure out what to make of it, and when I imagine myself moving forward again.
I’m upright, today, and out from under quarantine. Both of these things feel like victories.
[Part 3 in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.]
Why I’m glad I moved to California. If it’s a choice between this:
The appearance of my old pal Trent in the comments below reminds me: I’m fast approaching an altogether alarming milestone — the 20-year high school reunion.
I’m still obsessing about the LSU-Oklahoma game, reading everything I can get my hands (or my mouse) on, and generally relishing the little glow that comes with seeing your — well, I’m not going to go so far as to call it an “alma mater,” as that (a) seems to dignify the relationship I hold there...
Welcome to 2004. The year started while I was asleep, as I predicted; after a minor DVD-marathon (yeah, yeah, yeah; I’ve been a Buffy-fan for years, but somehow never made the spin-off leap. I’m now… somewhat intrigued, though not enough to find out when the current episodes air) and several bowl...
I’ve returned from the MLA adventure, and the Louisiana adventure before that, and the London adventure before that. I’m not, as Liz is, the kind of person who ordinarily prefers sleeping in her own bed, but after the better part of three weeks on the road, it’s mighty nice being home.
Posting plans have been completely overcome by the days-long non-cooperation of my hosting provider. They’re back, but now I find myself with precious little to say, except that it’s been a fabulous trip, and I’m not quite ready to re-enter the SoCal end-of-semester, Christmas-season melee. I ret...
[Part 2 in a series. Part 1 is here.]
[Part 1 in a series. Read Part 2 and Part 3.]
Here’s the part where I start feeling guilty — because we’ve been spared, largely, here in Claremont. And so I start thinking things like “whew, that was close” and “thank goodness that’s over” when in fact it’s gotten so much worse in other parts of the state.
Here are words I hope never to have to say again: I have packed my emergency evacuation kit, and can be ready to get out of the house in ten minutes or less.
Tuesday’s high temperature here in Claremont was 102 on Mr. Fahrenheit’s scale. Today it’s snowing.
I should begin with the caveat (possibly disingenuous) that I’m not ordinarily big on the “let me share with you the completely bizarre dream I had last night” conversational gambit. (What was the song that David Silver sang part of to me and Liz before Jason’s panel? Something about no one carin...
A colleague of mine, whom I haven’t seen frequently enough of late, given our mutually crazy schedules, my increasingly frequent travel, and his life with two small daughters, just stopped in the hall to ask how I was doing.
Just a few miles north of here — how few can be attested by the near-constant whirring of engines overhead and the overwhelmingly acrid air — the mountains are on fire, and have been for a week. Air quality has deteriorated to the extent that all non-essential outdoor activities on campus have be...
Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the crash of Pan Am 759, which fell victim to a wind shear during takeoff from New Orleans International, plowing into a nearby Kenner neighborhood, killing eight people on the ground and all 146 aboard.
As I posted a while back, I’ve been on an extended European trip this summer, beginning with several conferences, followed by a pretty blissful four-week stint in Prague. As week four begins today, and as I see this trip beginning to draw to a close, I’ve been reflecting a bit on how it all went,...
Having wrapped up a whirlwind spring, in which I successfully got through the craziness of buying an apartment in NYC, got myself more or less moved into it, closed down my California office and shipped everything east, and attended a ton of conferences and meetings and gave a bunch of other talk...
I’ve been on the road for a little over two weeks now, across three countries and nine time zones, and while I have a host of more serious topics for discussion originating from this trip, the one that’s most concerning me at the moment is the extraordinary variety in the ways the world has for d...
I need to begin this post by thanking Julika Griem for inviting me on what I hope was only a first visit to Frankfurt’s Goethe Universität; it was a privilege to be able to speak there, and I hope to be able to return very soon.
In what universe did I think I was going to get any writing done on my flight?
This morning is filled with the millions of details required to get self and stuff out the door and on the road for the better part of seven weeks. It’s the always enervating start to what’s bound to be an exciting, energizing trip.
I finally managed to purchase the last of my summer plane tickets yesterday.* I’ve got a bunch of travel coming up, most of it work-related, but part of it including a bit of actual vacation — the first one I’ve taken since the notion of “vacation” actually came to have some real significance in ...
We’re at the airport, on our way back to the US. Earlier this morning, as we were checking out of the hotel, I took one last look around the reception area, which was much emptier than it had been at any previous point during our stay. Past one sitting area, I spotted these two paintings:
Today’s our last full day in Dublin; tomorrow morning, we head to the airport to fly to Newark, where I’ll then kill three hours before hopping on another plane to Los Angeles for the MLA.
The Christmas market in Old Town Square has a smallish stage set up at one end; this stage is used throughout the Christmas season for performances of various kinds. Four years ago, when R. and I spent our first Christmas in Prague, we caught a dance recital, among other such performances; this y...
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Prompt the 22nd:
It’s been an eventful couple of months. A travelful couple of months, even. If you were able to see my Google Calendar, you’d see a whole lot of teal striping on it; that’s my travel calendar, which reminds me that since the beginning of May, I’ve been in
The good news is that I’ve gotten my exercise today: after dragging the suitcase to the train station, and up and down the various flights of stairs between its entrance and the entrance to the airport, I was sent by the monitors to the far end of the airport to check in, only to find that in fac...
I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first oppo...
Soon, at least.
Today marks the first time I’ve sat in the terminal waiting two and a half hours for the sun to melt the ice off the wings of my airplane, because my Southern California airport doesn’t need de-icing equipment.
Our twelve weeks in Paris have slid by alarmingly fast, and we’re deep in the thick of packing up for Thursday’s trip back to California. I’ve gotten myself past the initial dread, which was mostly about not wanting the utter freedom of being here to end, and am now really looking forward to a bu...
There are some things that I’m just not getting used to negotiating in French. The telephone, for instance, still gives me shivers when it rings, and not (or not just) due to my usual phonaphobia; without the visual cues of face-to-face conversation, it’s not only a lot harder for me to be sure I...
The most amazing thing thus far about our return to Paris is the immediacy of our immersion; having landed yesterday at CDG, taxied to the apartment we’re renting this summer, unpacked, and ventured out for our first bière, we both felt as if the nine months since we were last here had simply eva...
That summer is here is pretty undeniable — in fact, unseasonably so: as we venture into graduation weekend, we’re beset by severe heat advisories and a serious fire in the mountains just to our north. All of that’s far more August than May, which might help explain some of the mild panic I feel; ...
A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.
We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airport was fine, the boarding was fine. And the first flight was fine: 10 hours, CDG to IAH, during which I ate some and read some and dozed some...
Yesterday was the summer solstice, of course, the longest day of the year, which hereabouts began with the first bits of sun, sometime around 5.15 am, and ended with the last bits, well after 10.30 pm. Last night was also the F?™te de la Musique, with live musical events of all genres taking plac...
In no particular order:
The last three days have been utterly consumed with departure-for-Paris business. We head off tomorrow morning, and there are at least three things I need to do before I go. The most pressing of those is sleep, which I’m off to do now. More from the road, as there always is.
So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?
We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers showed up Tuesday morning, we finished last details there (and I spent some time with my mother) on Wednesday, and headed westward on Thurs...
In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC. If you’re there, look me up. And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.
There’s been a lot of talk about the need for an Air Traveler’s Bill of Rights of late, particularly since February’s JetBlue fiasco. I’m all for pressuring the airlines to be more proactive in its approach to customer service, as goodness knows I’ve experienced my fair share of delays and aggrav...
Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.
So apparently what it takes to get me something to blog about is leaving town. I’m traveling today, and am currently sitting in a Crown Room in Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. Sitting 100 feet due in front of me is John McCain.
I’m currently here, doing this. The return to the U.S. was only moderately painful (perhaps because mostly experienced in a state of denial and delirium). The return to Claremont promises to be a bit hairier (largely because I arrive Tuesday at 7.30 pm and teach for the first time on Wednesday at...
This has been a weird month. Weird enough that my last transatlantic flight seemed astonishingly easy. Heck, weird enough that I can use a phrase like “my last transatlantic flight.” ?áa suffit.
It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email,...
I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose–my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wondering if I were going to fall asleep and miss the alarm. R. walked me downstairs around 5.15, and I got on the shuttle to the airport. He’s sta...
I’m now completely convinced that this place really is the capital of Christmaslandia. And I mean that in a good way. All week, we’ve wandered out in the evenings to see the families and the friends enjoying the Christmas market, with its festival foods and its hot wine and its small local perfor...
Our first full day in Prague was spent in a state of mild to moderate delirium. After we finally arrived at the hotel on the evening of the 18th, R. and I found some food, drank a couple of beers, wandered briefly through the Christmas market in the Starom?¨stsk?© n?°m?¨st??, and tumbled into bed...
[This post was written on 19 December; internet access has been a bit non-ideal, so things are coming on a bit of a time delay.]
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one of those moments where I’m just not sure how everything that needs to be done between now and then will actually get done.
Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration.
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
I’m back in SoCal, and so is my suitcase, though it decided to take a little breather in Houston halfway through the journey. (So yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I’ve now had a bag delayed two out of the last three times I’ve checked luggage in. And they wonder why we insist on carry...
I haven’t exactly recovered from my d?©calage horaire yet, but the trip thus far has gone quite well. I got up at 4 am on Thursday and was, thankfully, ready to go when my cab showed up 20 minutes early. I had about an hour to kill in ONT, and then another six hours in IAH, where I sat in the Pre...
So I’m on the road again, in NYC, and I’m desperately trying to get done at least a small fraction of the stuff that has to be completed by a week from Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m completely exhausted from all the travel–my body clock is pretty screwed up from having jumped from EDT to PDT for ...
There’s good news, for me, at least: because, on returning to the U.S., one goes through customs on the Canadian side of the border, and because one can’t check one’s suitcase until after customs, one goes through the duty-free store dragging one’s huge rolly bag. This used to be a pain, but now,...
I’ve written before about how productive I manage to be while I’m on the road, whether it’s a matter of working on planes or in hotels (something I’d swear I’ve blogged, but can’t find an appropriate link for right now). Something about a change of venue, and the enforced disconnection from all t...
No way I can leave it at that. Not when there’s so much more to tell.
I’ll just say that today was not the ideal day to fly out of LAX, and leave it at that.
Confirmed and ticketed:
So, I’m sitting in Houston, waiting on the inbound aircraft that will take my outbound flight merrily back to the west coast. We’re going to be about an hour late. I am absolutely, positively, not complaining.
It’s been a fabulous visit, but I’m about up to here with both the heat and the humidity. Not to mention the crazy fattening food, the omnipresent alcohol, and the general sloth. I think I need a week at a spa to recover from my weekend in Louisiana.
Two and a half hours on the runway in Houston. Fortunately, there was beer after that.
I flew back from NYC on Monday, and have been trying to recover and unpack from the trip, as well as unpacking the stuff that arrived from Louisiana while I was gone, ever since. I’d hoped to post this sooner, but getting the house relatively organized really had to be a priority.
For the first time in, oh, a little less than five years, my flight into LaGuardia today flew straight up over Manhattan. As in, I looked out my window, and there was the Empire State Building. Like right there.
Having picked up the 40 in Amarillo (despite hearing that Oklahoma City is oh-so-pretty), we sped on through Gallup, New Mexico, as well as Flagstaff, Arizona (don’t forget Winona), Kingman, Barstow —
1. The rest area on Highway 287 a few miles north of Chillicothe, Texas has open wireless. I didn’t use it, but I was sorely tempted to blog from there, the middle of freaking nowhere, solely because I could.
This post has taken me an unconscionably long time to write. I didn’t have net access in Nassau–or, more accurately, I didn’t seek out net access in Nassau–and have had a bit of a hard time getting myself going again since I’ve been back. But at last, the Bahamas post, which begins with a caution...
This weekend, as others are celebrating the end of classes for the spring semester, I’m flying off to Nassau. This trip is in the main a girls’ trip, a long weekend with my mother and my sister, to be spent on the beach and by the pool and in other modes reflecting an appropriate state of torpor....
I drove into New Orleans late last night, and will be heading out to Jazz Fest later this afternoon. Given the darkness, I wasn’t able to get an overall sense of the city’s state, though I did see, right off the bat, that big stretches of the city seemed much more unlit than they used to, and tha...
The alarm went off this morning at 4.30, waking me after a much too brief four and a half hours of sleep. I woke up groggy and dehydrated and otherwise feeling the effects of the two glasses of Shiraz I drank last night. I stumbled into the bathroom, put my lenses in, cranked up the shower, and…
Good gravy, but I’m useless on a Friday afternoon. I’ve gotten nowhere in the drafting process today, not least because my usual morning yogalates class completely and totally kicked my ass. Since then, I’ve changed clothes, eaten lunch, drunk a diet Coke, and sat here hitting refresh on my brows...
I’m back in Claremont for a few days, for a couple of departmental events. Because I’ve rented out the condo, I’m spending these few days crashed on a friend’s sofa. Not to mention hiding from anyone who might want to take advantage of my presence to ask me to do something for them.
I’ve been in New York for the last couple of days, and though I’ve had the computer with me, and have been having a fabulous time, I haven’t felt the least bit compelled to post. I’m here for some meetings which are beginning tomorrow, about which more later, but have taken advantage — literally ...
The trip to SoCal to gather the last of my stuff, cram it in my car, and turn the condo over to my tenant (which concept weirds me out a bit) passed in a bit of a blur. There was something surreal about finding myself back in California after what seemed like months away, but that could have been...
Yesterday:
I’ve been having this series of moments of late that can only be adequately described using R.’s wonderful phrase, “light dawns over Marblehead,” the moment at which the utterly obvious becomes glaringly apparent. Perhaps it’s a function of travel, being removed from the quotidian details of my d...
We took an early morning train from Amsterdam to Paris yesterday and, after checking into our pretty over-the-top wonderful hotel here, wandered down to the Arc de Triomphe. One thing I’ll say so far: it’s a radically different experience being in Paris with someone who has studied military histo...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/77977358/ "photo sharing")[Amsterdam, from hotel room](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/77977358/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). The flights were fine. The...
Thus far, R. and I have managed to survive our holidays with only a modicum of fallout, which is not a thing to be said lightly. In fact, it may well be tempting fate, something I hope to undo with the acknowledgment of fate’s infinite power for reminding me who’s boss contained in this sentence,...
It’s taken me a few days since arriving in Baton Rouge to clear up the last details of the semester, but grades are now filed, comments have all been sent to the proper students, various administrative tasks have been checked off the list, and my break can at last begin.
I’ve had several conversations with folks over the course of the week, conversations that were mostly about my stress level and general bad attitude, that resulted in my confessing my dread of the conference trip I’m taking this weekend. I’m going to the conference to do interviews, and not for e...
Yesterday’s travel was relatively painless, and generally productive; I managed to get the batch of project proposals that I needed to comment on done, which felt like something of a triumph. And then, miracle of all miracles, I came home and paid attention to my non-work life. I cleaned the hous...
The last five days have been absolutely dreamy — arrived in BTR at 9.30am, delirious and vaguely cranky, but got taken home to the fabulous apartment I’ll be spending the spring in, where I got to take a shower and a nap before beginning a serious unwind. Since then I’ve tinkered with this site, ...
Tired, headachy, IAH, wi-fi, blah blah blah. You know the drill.
Traveling weekend number four of four begins with the red-eye Wednesday night. This leaves me — or left me, in any case — approximately 72 hours between getting home from Chicago and heading off again. In the interim, I need to:
Otherwise known as 6 am in Houston. Greetings, once again, from mid-red eye IAH. The flight out of ONT was relatively painless, due to an upgrade: got on the plane, downed a vodka and cranberry, and dozed off. The odd thing about plane sleep for me is that I feel like I’m awake the entire time, b...
Sitting in the club lounge in HNL, waiting for a flight that is still hours away. The last day in Hawaii is always hard, not least because your flight never leaves until late evening, but your hotel boots you out in the early afternoon. And the thought of leaving is always so depressing that all ...
So my last post garnered me more than one slightly shocked “you brought your laptop to Hawaii?” from my faithful correspondents, which didn’t make me reconsider that decision, but which did make me think through why the choice was, to me, obvious. It’s not just that the little Powerbook and I hav...
I’d completely forgotten, since I was last here, that one of my favorite things about Hawaii is its time zone. Hawaii is to California as California is to the east coast: three hours earlier. Coming here, I try to avoid resetting my internal clock, and instead go to bed super-early. That part’s n...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/28845650/ "photo sharing")[aqueduct](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/28845650/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). The photos are at last somewhat organized...
I did make it home yesterday, though not without a snippet of travel drama. The flight was smooth, overall, though we got put into the fly-past-the-airport-and-land-from-the-west flight pattern that usually accompanies the Santa Anas here in SoCal, so I knew the weather was going to be a bit weir...
I’ve only got a minute before dashing for this morning’s flight, which will finally get me within spitting distance of home. This delay was mostly planned-for, as my EWR to IAH flight got me in after the last flight for ONT had left. I’d even planned ahead so far as to make a hotel reservation. W...
First, I left Santa Maria Maggiore off the litany. It should have come between the Catacombs and the Pantheon.
Spanish Steps. Piazza Venezia. Trevi Fountain. Via del Corso.
Every time I think I’ve got it beat, it comes back and kicks me in the ass. Several trips back, I was unable to sleep the first night I arrived in Europe. The next trip, I slept like a rock that first night, and thought, “heh, that wasn’t bad.” And then proceeded to be unable to sleep the second ...
Ah, Italia. Life is good, if the Internet access ain’t exactly easy. I’ll post more when there’s not a line waiting for the business center’s computer; for the moment, suffice it to say, so far, so good. I think today’s schedule includes the Colisseum and the Forum. And a lethal combination of es...
Actually, my head spins in a light breeze, at this point. But this was nonetheless annoying:
Way east. I’m back in the airport — my wonderful little airport, with the free wifi (though it’s behaving like free wifi, I’m afraid — flashing on and off, four bars, no bars, three bars, one bar, three bars, like a little strobe in my menu bar). Waiting for the red eye. And man, are my eyes goin...
All things considered, the red-eye went quite well. R. has thanked me repeatedly for flying “all night” to come out here to see him, which is extremely sweet but a little befuddling to my poor scrambled brain, because what it feels like more than anything else is that there was no night. I just k...
The Houston airport is an absolute wonder at 5.40 in the morning — ghostly quiet, deserted, just beginning to stir to life. Though the circumstances surrounding getting here weren’t ideal, I’m awfully glad I got to see this.
Greetings from the twelfth circle of hell, one Dante missed on his little tour: the airport at midnight. I’m waiting for the red-eye to IAH, which is going to be a serious red-eye, as the stupid flight is only three hours long, but it’ll nonetheless be 6.30 5.40 am by the time I get there.
The travel day yesterday went completely smoothly, utterly without any of the usual delays and aggravations. But there’s a moment I need to share, about a homecoming of a very different order.
The return, thus far, is going more smoothly than the venture out. For one thing, this is perhaps the first time that I’ve traveled at entirely reasonable hours — neither getting up well before dawn nor getting in after my usual bedtime — in years. I’m awake and mostly well-rested.
Frequent flyer summer continues today with a quick dash to Louisiana to see my pal Marcus. I decided at the last minute to drag the Powerbook with me, but given that I’m down to an average of about — and I wish I were exaggerating the situation — 40 minutes of battery life when I’m not plugged in...
Claremont is lovely. My job is fabulous. My students are wonderful.
Why, oh why, do I persist in flying through Houston?
Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become: I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because the coverage in the lounge is a little spotty, and for a while my connection kept dropping.
The good news first: I’ve finally gotten close to caught up on sleep. I’ve managed to get through almost all of the dumb administrative tasks that have landed on my desk in the last two weeks. And it’s officially spring break, so I’m packing up and heading to DC for the week.
Why is it that I invariably return from a big trip with some crazy travel saga? And why is it that so many of those sagas revolve around Washington, DC? I’m only halfway back to SoCal now, and so probably shouldn’t yet start telling the tale, as I’m just tempting fate. But I can’t help myself.
Hear that?
Despite last year’s suspicion that this year’s Thanksgiving would be spent with my family, at the usual New Jersey Italian feast, things changed. My mother decided to stay in Louisiana; my sister decided to join her there. And the Navy decided that they really needed R. again, right through the h...
Something I forgot to mention: the state of Vermont was so welcoming that it simply did not want me to leave. Or something. The result may have been the most bipolar travel day I’ve ever had, bouncing between panic and relief, fury and amazement, and, well, a general sense that all was well and a...
I’m sitting in an airport lounge, using the stupidly expensive wifi to post this entry, not least because it’s distracting me from the fact(s) that:
I left SoCal on Thursday, headed to DC for a little birthday-related celebration activity. Between the day of flying (in which one gets up at what R. refers to as zero-dark-thirty, gets on a plane, deplanes and runs across an airport to one’s already-boarding second plane, deplanes, drives into t...
So aside from the connectivity issues, Hawaii was fantastic. But it got me out of the habit of writing, sad to say, and left me hopelessly behind on all my summer projects. Which, now that I’m back in SoCal, I’m madly attempting to catch up on. So things may be a bit hit-or-miss here for a bit ye...
Internet access here in Wailea sucks. Which is the only bad thing I have to say about the place.
Planned Obsolescence was born a bit over two years ago on the island of Oahu. As has been true for many others, a journey back to the origin is inevitable. Like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, like a lost dog finding its way home in a cinematic cross-country adventure, Planned Obsolescence i...
A quick story from the France trip that I’ve been looking forward to telling, but hadn’t quite found the right moment for:
And courtesy of Marcus: the famous sofa-baignoire:
Returned to Paris last night, and will head toward the airport shortly for the long trek home. I’ll post more either from Houston or from home. It’s been a great trip, of course, and there are more stories to tell, but I’m ready to get back into the end-of-semester fray. I’m a little alarmed that...
What of Wednesday I spent in Paris was mostly spent in the post-travel fog I always find myself in; once I got to Marcus’s apartment, I showered, and then he and I headed out toward the gallery where he was that evening having a vernissage of a new group show he’s in. We ate some quick sushi, and...
[The following was written on the Powerbook in Paris at 6 am today, and is being transcribed in an internet cafe in Tours now. I’m not sure how much posting I’ll actually wind up doing from here; the cafe is fine, and darned conveniently located, but I’d completely forgotten about the AZERTY keyb...
[What follows was written at 30,000 feet. I’m no longer there, but firmly on the ground, for another fifteen minutes or so…]
But I am drowning.
Just as things in Claremont begin to slow a bit, my travel schedule picks up. I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow morning, to attend SCMS. I’ll be speaking on a panel put together by the Wordherders’ own Chuck Tryon.
I’ve returned from the MLA adventure, and the Louisiana adventure before that, and the London adventure before that. I’m not, as Liz is, the kind of person who ordinarily prefers sleeping in her own bed, but after the better part of three weeks on the road, it’s mighty nice being home.
I’ve apparently gone on another hiatus, without really intending to do so; the hubbub surrounding the MLA issues discussed here caught me a little by surprise. Once that died down, and I cleared out a bit of head-space to ponder other things, it was time for the next leg of the holiday journey, s...
I’m back in London, this week, and so this marks my fourth experience of the bone-crushing Los Angeles-to-Europe time-zone-change in the last six months. Complaining about such a set of experiences would be unseemly, of course; let me be clear that I am not complaining. Merely observing:
I’m headed back to London this afternoon for Thanksgiving break. We’re in a hotel this time, where R’s managed to cadge free high-speed access, so I ought to be able to update from there. In fact, I hope to get some good pondering and scribbling time in. To that end, here’s a list of what I am an...
First there was AoIR in Toronto. Then a quick trip to Boston for a meeting. Then the conference I organized here. Then several days with Mom.
I took off from Ontario this morning, not only on time but a full ten minutes early (Pilot: “Well, folks, everybody’s here, so we’re gonna go”). The skies were relatively clear, much as yesterday — visible smoke, but visible sky as well — and the faint smell of smoke was not much more overwhelmin...
I’m headed to Toronto this afternoon, and will be there through Sunday. As befits the conference, I’m traveling fully wired (wireless-equipped laptop, iPod, PDA-cum-cellphone, noise-cancelling ear buds), so I’m hoping to update from there.
Alas, the blogging-from-London bit didn’t pan out quite as well as I’d hoped — in no small part because I was having too much fun to stop and reflect on the fun that I was in the midst of having.
BT has managed to get things up and running here once again (not that we really blame him for the outage, which was admittedly systemic and not individual, but we imagined that a rather delayed shockwave resulting from last week’s nearly forgotten quiz might have thrown a kink into something or o...
One of the things one does as a tourist in Prague — one of those musts, like visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or seeing the Empire State Building in New York — is to make the across-the-Charles-Bridge and up-the-hill hike to the Hrad, the castle that looms over both the city and all its litera...
2002 ended with a lurch: My flight back west was hung up in Houston for 3 hours due to storms, and so arrived at 1:15 am on December 31, rather than 10:15 pm, Dec. 30. Waited for suitcase, grabbed cab, gave directions to difficult-to-find residence. Which was suspiciously dark. The short of it: c...
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
The last day in Hawaii, alas. Packing up the suitcase, hunting for the items lost beneath the bed. Realizing that I only took 8 pictures while I was here, and now this roll of film will languish in my camera until after Christmas, when I’ll finally take it to get developed and will open the envel...
for many things. For getting up at 4 am since your body can still be fooled into thinking it’s 9.
[Crossposted from The New York Academy of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, which has published a cluster of posts previewing a panel I’m presenting on at the AHA.]
Having wrapped up a whirlwind spring, in which I successfully got through the craziness of buying an apartment in NYC, got myself more or less moved into it, closed down my California office and shipped everything east, and attended a ton of conferences and meetings and gave a bunch of other talk...
I’ve spent the last two days in a meeting of the MLA Program Committee, thinking about, among other issues, the future shape of the convention — the new kinds of sessions we want to encourage; the new kinds of issues we want to take on. We’ve got some exciting plans in formation, but I’m curious ...
Last month, I was honored to be a keynote speaker at Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on digital media in academia organized by students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. It was an extraordinary two days of presentations and conversations, thinking with a cluster of energetic young s...
Keynote Nancy Baym, “This Song’s for You”
Utterly fell down on the notetaking/blogging job today, due to early frustration when the paper I’d shown up early for wasn’t presented, and then a long mid-day exhausted slump, and then desperate trying to marshal energy and focus for my own panel. I’ll hope to get back in gear tomorrow — though...
Session 4 Networking and Social Sites
A first in my conference-going experience: the first keynoter is sick in bed (get well, Jon Bing!), so the lecture hall is inhabited by sparse groups of folks chatting, Twitterfall on the screen. The break is not unwelcome, though for me it falls at a dangerously nap-prone moment…
Session 2: CMS Futures: The Way Ahead for Course Management Systems Alex Halavais, Jeremy Hunsinger, Ted Coopman, Helen Keegan
Please note that what follows are my notes, taken as I listen. Anything weird in here should be assumed to be my fault, and not that of the speakers.
Today’s the first day of the eleventh annual conference of the Association of Internet Research, and the sixth of which I’ve attended. It’s lovely catching up with some of the folks I often see at these conferences, but also great getting to meet and hang out with folks I only sort of know from o...
I’ve got a bunch of talks and conferences and other things scheduled in the coming weeks:
It’s been an eventful couple of months. A travelful couple of months, even. If you were able to see my Google Calendar, you’d see a whole lot of teal striping on it; that’s my travel calendar, which reminds me that since the beginning of May, I’ve been in
What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel was organized and chaired by Eric Zinner, Assistant Director and Editor-In-Chief at New York University Press, and the presentations before mi...
My friend Liz Losh has let me know that this Friday UC Irvine is hosting a conference to celebrate the addition of Richard Rorty’s papers to the Critical Theory Archive. These “papers” include years worth of word-processing files, recovered from 3.5″ floppy disks, and so the conference is taking ...
This morning, awfully bright and awfully early, I participated in a fantastic roundtable on the legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was quite well-attended, given the early hour and that it was the last day of the conference, and which produced some really fascinating presentations. I’d promise...
I’ve been busy tweeting up a storm at the MLA this year (or what amounts to a storm for me, anyhow), but haven’t been compelled to write a full blog post as yet — a situation that got called out when a pal of mine here suggested that this blog had turned into alternating posts reading “I’m on the...
I’m going to embed my slides from today’s talk here, but you’re probably better off actually looking at them on SlideShare, as you can see the notes that way…
I’m in Milwaukee this week at the tenth meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. The good news is that the wireless is strong, ubiquitous, and free. The bad news is that we seem to have broken Twitter.
Yesterday was the first full day of the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, the first iteration of which I’ve gotten to attend. So far the conference has been fantastic — and it promises to get even better (for me, at least) today, as my presentation was yesterday, and now I can sit back and abso...
Well, I suppose that three out of six isn’t half bad:
Soon, at least.
I’m in the Boston area this week, speaking at a couple of conferences, the first of which is starting as I type — a meeting sponsored by AcademicCommons, a special interest group of NERCOMP (the Northeast Regional Computing Program), entitled “The Future of Everything.” We’ll be twittering at #ac...
Just now via email:
Add this to the list of difficulties presented by holding SCMS in Tokyo this year: the government apparently asked the university at which the conference is being held to cancel [edited to add: due to H1N1, of course!], but the university resisted, instead negotiating the following conditions:
I’m at MiT6 this weekend, which is starting up as I type; if you’re here, be sure to say hello. I’ll post more from the conference as things unfold.
The following is a call for papers for a session sponsored by the MLA’s Media and Literature Discussion Group, to be held at the 2009 convention in Philadelphia.
Incidentally, I just found out that my proposal for MiT6 was accepted; I’ll hope to see some of you there in April.
The most amazing thing about conferences for me is always how energized I am during and after them, how excited I become about whatever project I’m working on and how much I look forward to getting back to work.
The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur, between the election, a pile of grading, a few general crises around here, and so forth, but one of the things that’s had me most preoccupied is this weekend — I’m headed to Nashville this morning for the Modernist Studies Association conference, wher...
Alarmingly, we’ve hit the midpoint of spring break already, and this is the first time I’ve managed to post. I’ve meant to post every day — really, I have — but what with one thing and another…
For the last couple of years, I’ve been a member of the executive committee of the MLA’s discussion group on literature and media (a group name that makes me a little bonkers). Each year, we sponsor one panel at the convention; this year’s call for papers is below. If you’re working on Second Lif...
The symposium was a smashing success, I’m happy to report; the talks were all pitch-perfect and, for a Saturday, we got a respectable turnout. Honestly, though, I’d have been fine if it had just been me in the audience, at least on a certain level — I felt as though I’d thrown myself a day-long p...
One presentation in this session on open access; notes below the fold.
This morning’s first panel was on campus strategic planning initiatives.
Final presentation of the day, from Dan Schnaidt, below the fold.
Three excellent presentations in this session, below the fold.
Today’s the NITLE conference on campus, beginning with a plenary panel on Scholarly Publication. My paper (based on my article, “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts”) was first, allowing me to relax and pay attention to the rest of the papers — which is great, because ...
I spent most of yesterday working on cutting a 35-page paper down into the 15-20 minute talk I’ll be giving on Friday at a NITLE symposium on collaboration in the digital age, on a panel with Laura and Tim. Usually I find such cutting painful, but I was able to get through it fairly quickly. (Tha...
Recovering today after a quite wonderful MLA. I got to meet several people that I’d been hoping to introduce myself to for a while, I got to catch up with some old friends, and I got to attend and participate in a number of fantastic panels. Conferences always make me eager to be back in front of...
The last few days have been a blur of travel and family, all of which I survived, though not without some bumps along the way. I’m happily ensconced in my hotel room in Chicago now, though, awaiting what promises to be the most action-packed MLA I’ve experienced.*
This morning’s keynote speaker was one of my favorite people, John Willinsky, head of the Public Knowledge Project, which has produced both the Open Journal Systems and the Open Conference Systems, among other projects. Again, problems in the notes below the fold should be attributable to me and ...
Yesterday’s keynote was from Henry Jenkins, entitled “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Reconsidering the Relations Between Producers and Consumers.” I’m posting my notes below the fold; anything goofy therein should be attributed to flaws in the notetaker rather than the talk.
I sorta dropped the ball on conference blogging yesterday, as I got increasingly caught up in conferencing itself — but I’m going to attempt to catch up on the rest of the day:
The first panel I made it to today (I slept in a tiny bit, and then got so irate over the Chronicle that I missed the first session) focused on the question of the openness of ostensibly open communities, including wiki contributors, YouTube users, and open-source programmers. First, Ralph Schroe...
The last panel for me for today was a collection of papers focused on methodological questions, ranging from the formulation of research premises, through the collection of data, to the publication of results. Radhika Gajjala began with a paper on the immersive nature of online research, describi...
Post-lunch panel today on blogging, with four excellent papers: Sean Lawson, on milblogging in relationship to the military’s official attempts to regulate and restrict such online writing by military personnel; Gina Walejko on academic bloggers’ perceived senses of risk and reward in their blogg...
The first keynote of the conference was from John Lester of Linden Labs, on Second Life. It was an interesting talk, for someone (like me) who has paid very little attention to what’s been going on there — a broad swath of the kind of experimentation that have been produced both by the developers...
First panel of the day, on sexuality and gender online; several excellent papers. I’m particularly compelled by Michele White’s exploration of the heteronormative pressures of eBay’s official discourses and the ways that individual sellers wind up rupturing the official narratives of community, a...
I’m headed here later today, for this. I’m certain to see him, and him, and no doubt a bunch of other folks, too. Look me up if you’re there.
Session 4: New Economics
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
Session 2: New “Texts”
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.
For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that affiliation has been mostly theoretical to this point. Today, however, I’m participating in a one-day retreat aimed at brainstorming the found...
The notes that follow are entirely my fault, and not at all the fault of the speakers. That said, I’m going to attempt to give a sense of what I take from various sessions at the conference. Various talks are available via webcast at HASTAC.
In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC. If you’re there, look me up. And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.
An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal. Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, alo...
Folks I’d met before, whom I was happy to see again:
Today was a heck of a day at the MLA. I actually experienced the conference, and the way it was meant to be experienced, I think.
It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email,...
I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose–my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wondering if I were going to fall asleep and miss the alarm. R. walked me downstairs around 5.15, and I got on the shuttle to the airport. He’s sta...
Notes from my session at Flow, below the fold. I’ll be cross-posting these at making MediaCommons shortly.
More notes from a very interesting session of Flow.
I’m posting some of my notes from yesterday’s sessions here. These notes should be taken primarily as my impressions of the conversations that took place; any misimpressions created by these notes are solely the fault of yours truly.
Yesterday’s presentations were overall quite provocative, and have been wonderfully blogged by Bryan, James, and Laura. There’s been a tension throughout, however, between the forces of standardization and the forces of innovation, and somebody (and I’m sorry I can’t remember who) finally hit the...
This morning’s first talk, by John Appley and Albert Borroni of Oberlin College, raises a very interesting problem: as the LMS becomes increasingly popular, its functionality will be increasingly desired by groups and organizations (such as departments, administrative offices, etc.) — but putting...
Ooh, boy, is this going to be interesting. I’m arguing in my presentation tomorrow that (in a very small nutshell) the so-called “learning management system” is not about learning at all; it’s content management, sure, but active learning (at least in our touchy-feely small liberal arts college m...
I’m in Portland for the weekend, attending a NITLE symposium on Learning Management Systems in the Liberal Arts College at Reed. It promises to be interesting, not least at the moment when I stand up and say “forget the LMS! It’s no good!”
Panel 3 Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Ricardo Cambiassi
So the talk went extremely well, I think; I got some good, challenging questions that I’m looking forward to pondering at some length. And I’d point you toward the talk, so that I could get more feedback from you guys, too–but, at least at this point, [the video’s not up](http://blogtalk.net/Main...
Panel 1 Elmine Wijnia & Ton Zijlstra and Uldis Bojars, John G. Breslin & Alexandre Passant
Keynote 1 Rod Smith (IBM) on Mashups
Did I mention that the presentations are available on video? They’re generally posted within several minutes of being completed. Which means that mine should ostensibly be up by around 12.30ish CET. Which is, like, 3.30 am in California, I think. If you’re up, take a gander. (But be kind; I got 1...
Panel 5: Frank Mantek and Jeremy Ruston
Panel 4: Wolfgang Zeglovits and Raymond Elferink & Graham Atwell
Keynote 2: Matt Mullenweg, “WordPress and Jazz”
Panel 3: Alexandre Passant and Suw Charman
Panel 2: Lee Bryant and Dieter Rappold
Panel 1: Adolfo Estallela and Jan Schmidt
I’m going to attempt to blog as much of the conference as I can. This is the usual caveat about the fact that what follows is my notes from these talks; any flaws in my representations of papers or conversations are mine, and not those of the presenters.
So I’m in Montreal for the American Sociological Association meeting, where we’re doing some interviewing. I have to reiterate that there’s something lovely about attending conferences for organizations to which you do not belong, but in this case it’s not the lushness of the environs (though Mon...
I’ve been in San Diego with my mother since Friday; she’s here for a conference, and I’m here as her date. The conference is that of a national organization that links a bunch of state and local organizations that are in the business of dealing with other people’s money, so in attendance are admi...
I’ve had a paper accepted for this October’s BlogTalk Reloaded, and so it appears I’m headed to Vienna in October. This looks like a fascinating set of papers, from a broad range of folks doing work on and in social software. It’s an exciting lineup, and a new city for me…
Last time I went to SCMS, in 2004, was I think the first conference the organization had held since the addition of the M to its name and, as I’ve snarked about before, it was pretty clear then that the M remained somewhat under erasure, as if the society’s name were more properly SC(M)S. Non-fil...
So I walk into a session after lunch on Friday, a workshop entitled “An Economy of the Gift”: Should Scholarship Be Available for Free?, where I am handed a handout. Said handout has, at top, a summary of the workshop’s purposes, which begins as follows:
For archival purposes (as well as for anyone else interested) this is a link to the page of links I used in my talk yesterday.
After what seems like way more hassle than was strictly warranted for a little ERJ jaunt from BTR to IAH, I’m sitting in my favorite President’s club waiting for my flight to Vancouver and the SCMS. I’m talking about blogs, twice, in this workshop and on this panel, which immediately follows. Am ...
There is something quite lovely about reading everybody’s early MLA posts and knowing that, not only am I totally not going there this year (for only the second time since 1996), I’m not even on the same continent. Why is it that avoiding what ought by all rights to be an intellectually stimulati...
As Alex notes, the AOIR folks are debating the next conference’s structure, trying to decide whether to include more alternative session formats in amongst what someone at the general meeting referred to as the “powerpoint and talking head” model of paper presentation. What follows leaps into a c...
It’s taken me since yesterday evening to be able to post this, first because the presentations were so inspiring for me that I took notes that were more copious than organized, and second, because I went from these two panels into the general meeting with a dying battery and no more wireless acce...
I’m playing a bit of hooky this morning, hoping to get a little work done. Day three of any given conference is usually the day when my brain says “enough!” and takes a hiatus; true to form, I simply could not persuade myself to get out of bed before 8.30, and I still haven’t taken down the do no...
I wasn’t really able to take notes during the roundtable on “revolution or reform” I participated in at noon today, but I wanted to note a few things from it.
What follows are my notes on Saskia Sassen’s keynote address, “Digital Formations: The Intersection of Technical and Social Logics in Electronic Space.” A reminder that any mischaracterization or misunderstanding is my fault, not hers.
On the up side, I slept like a big dog. Apparently, there was a choice to be made between sleep and breakfast, one I thought I’d sorted out — the concierge lounge remains open on Friday mornings until 11, so no sweat. Alas, my one crack at a free breakfast this weekend (the concierge lounge is cl...
This is the roundtable I’m speaking on, not that you’d be able to tell from the program. Not that, in fact, you’d even know I was at the conference. Grrr.
Well, there’s wireless. Sort of. It was there for a second and then it totally died, so this is going to be less liveblogging than intermittent blogging, much like AOIR 4. I’m going to capture what I can here, or rather what happens to catch my attention, but this should all be read with the cave...
Otherwise known as 6 am in Houston. Greetings, once again, from mid-red eye IAH. The flight out of ONT was relatively painless, due to an upgrade: got on the plane, downed a vodka and cranberry, and dozed off. The odd thing about plane sleep for me is that I feel like I’m awake the entire time, b...
I’ll be there. Lilia will be there. Alex will be there.
I’ve just posted a CFP for a panel for the 2006 meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies to the SCMS bulletin board. Despite the group’s name change (from Society for Cinema Studies), there’s still a paucity of work on digital media at the conferences, to the extent that, at the 2004 c...
Yesterday was a fabulous day at documentary boot camp, and a very good note for me to go out on. There are, in fact, two more days to go in the Flaherty, but I’m off to Louisiana this morning. And though I’m a little burned out, I’m still regretting missing the last two days of films.
Another foreshortened day at the Flaherty; in the middle of the afternoon screening, I began developing a massive headache, so when it was over, I headed home, took a nap, had a quiet dinner, and did some reading. Print is so soothing after such intensive experience with images — which only surpr...
A shorter day at documentary bootcamp yesterday; I only caught the beginning of the evening session, as I wanted to get home and relax a bit. The films are amazing, but the pace is intense, and I needed a bit more downtime.
After further thought, I’ve decided that there was something more to last night’s film than I’ve given it credit for, and that the protracted nature of its brutal imagery was up to something more serious than what it seemed, on first glance. There’s something in the duration of the images, and th...
[UPDATE 6.14.05, 8.27 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistakes.]
[UPDATE, 6.14.05, 8.28 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistake.]
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental receptions for graduating seniors in the morning; big awards ceremony in the afternoon. Tomorrow is graduation proper. It’s usually a sprint from o...
I’ve arrived and checked into the Atlanta Hyatt Regency. Forgive me for what follows; it’s a deeply unprofessional conference entry, but for whatever reason, it occurred to me as I was walking to my room, and I can’t shake the idea.
I’ve just completed a draft of the paper I’ll be giving at next weekend’s American Studies Association conference in Atlanta. It’s on the relationship between simulation and empiricism in CSI [warning: that’s a pretty Flash-heavy link], and it’s been a good deal of fun in the writing.
Greetings from Vermont.
I wish I could say things were on an upswing. Here’s the good news: the panels I attended yesterday were, by and large, quite good; the two keynotes thus far (Ted Nelson and Sara Kiesler) were worthwhile; the shower had hot water this morning at 6 am. And I’ve had a lovely time meeting and lunchi...
Friday was travel day — SuperShuttle at 9.55 am; flight out of Ontario at 12.40 pm (yes, SuperShuttle requires the better part of three hours to get you 15 miles); arrival in Houston at 5.49 pm, followed by traditional GHWBIA sprint to 6.40 flight to London; 9.30 am-ish arrival at Gatwick on Satu...
Off to Sussex. More from there, as connectivity allows.
My obligatory conference day-of-hooky has come a little earlier than usual; under ordinary circumstances, I usually burn out on panels on the third day and zip off to do some shopping or sightseeing or other non-session related activity. Here, it’s turned out that today’s the day, for a whole ser...
What follow are my notes from this afternoon’s plenary address by Mark Crispin Miller. Miller’s title, as listed in the program, was “Mediating Tomorrow’s History: Live Coverage and Documentary in the Digital Era,” but in fact his talk had nothing whatever to do with that title, so I’m assuming t...
What follows are my notes from the first session I attended today. They’re a little sketchy and a little incomplete (I got there about 10 minutes late), but they’ll at least remind me of what I heard.
Just as things in Claremont begin to slow a bit, my travel schedule picks up. I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow morning, to attend SCMS. I’ll be speaking on a panel put together by the Wordherders’ own Chuck Tryon.
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at the MLA,” which documents the many hi-larious paper and session titles contained in this year’s program via the device of a new prize competit...
ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
MISCELLANY REALLY IS THE LARGEST CATEGORY
ADVENTURES WITH ACCORDION GUY
THE TRIANGLE IS THE BINARY OPPOSITION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED
The conference has been fabulous so far, but I think the highlight for me, personally, has been reconnecting with old colleagues (David Silver, Tara McPherson, and Michele White from the NEH seminar a few years back) and getting a few faces to put with the names of folks I’m coming to consider ne...
ON THE QUANTITATIVE VS. THE QUALITATIVE
What follows is the first set of what I hope to be a decently full set of entries on my experiences here at the conference. A program note: because of some of the restrictions in wireless access here, my plan at the moment is to post once or twice each day, though I’m blogging throughout the day;...
I’ve been watching various blogs of folks preparing for their trips to Toronto for next week’s AoIR. I’m headed there, myself, though sadly not giving a paper; at the time the CFP went out, I was committed to an ASA panel (ASA being, of course, the same weekend), but then, as I fully expected to ...
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
My friend Alan Jacobs, a key inspiration in my return (such as it is, so far) to blogging and RSS and a generally pre-Twitter/Facebook outlook on the scholarly internet, is pondering the relationship between blogging and other forms of academic writing in thinking about his next project. Perhaps ...
Over the last couple of months, I opened Generous Thinking to a community review process at Humanities Commons. I am thrilled with how the discussion went and am thoroughly enjoying the process of revision started.
This post is likely little more than a bit of ritual throat-clearing, designed to help me get past a stage in the trying-to-write-again process in which I simply cannot get myself to focus on what it is that I need to write (promised articles coming due in very rapid succession) and yet cannot fi...
I have once again missed my own anniversary. It turns out that June 18, the day I launched this summer’s adventure, was the day this blog turned 11.
Over the weekend, something hashtagged as #twittergate was making the rounds among the tweeps. I haven’t dug into the full history (though Adeline storyfied it), but the debate has raised questions about a range of forms of conference reporting, and as a result, posts and columns both old and new...
One key problem with the blog as a platform for serial scholarship is that it’s much too easy to find yourself interrupted, to lose a train of thought.
In my last post, on blogs as serialized scholarship, I noted that a colleague of mine had posted a link to a prior post on Facebook, resulting in an interesting conversation that I regretted not being able to share. That inability is in fact two problems, not one: first, a technical problem, and ...
Over the last two installments of this series, I’ve thought a bit about the relationship between scholarship, seriality, and the unpopular, all of which thinking has been headed toward a consideration of what the blog can contribute as a mode of serialization for scholarship.
This post revolves around two jokes that I’ve heard of late, each of which has been stuck in my head since I heard it. The first joke, as I noted in part 1 of this series, surfaced in a fantastic workshop on “popular seriality,” discussing television series, film sequels and remakes, and serializ...
I nearly missed it. Again.
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop on “Popular Seriality” put together by Jason Mittell, Frank Kelleter, and the Popular Seriality research unit at the University of Göttingen. The workshop was relatively small, and so it produced a great set of conversations among schol...
A few days back, I tweeted an amusing bit of comment spam I’d received that morning:
This morning is filled with the millions of details required to get self and stuff out the door and on the road for the better part of seven weeks. It’s the always enervating start to what’s bound to be an exciting, energizing trip.
Collin published a fantastic post yesterday thinking through, among other things, love, writing, Roland Barthes, Etsy, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. He’s had reasons for having fallen out of the blogging routine of late, reasons that are quite different from mine, but that seem to have had much the ...
I’ve just gone through and pruned my blogroll, taking a look to see who was still active (by a fairly generous definition, given my own lack of activity), who had moved house, and who had gone the way of all things since I last took a hard look at my sidebars.
Some months back, I got pharmahacked, which was a royal pain, needless to say, and which I took extremely personally. (Witness: I got hacked.) Part of what annoyed me so much about the hack was that I knew I’d been a sitting target; not only had I not recently checked my security settings through...
A quick note: I had the opportunity to attend the Apple Education event today on behalf of ProfHacker, where I posted my reflections a bit later in the day.
I started this blog as an assistant professor, under conditions that were never fully pseudonymous but were perhaps semi-veiled, at least by the fact that very few people knew me, and even fewer of those who did knew anything about blogs. All of my colleagues, that is to say, were looking in the ...
So, you may have noticed that there’s a significant gap in the archives here, roughly corresponding with the summer. And you may have asked yourself, gee, is kfitz on vacation?
I got myself caught this evening in a thing that happens to me here every so often: I’ll spot an intriguing post title in my “Five Years Ago” block and click and read that post, and get all nostalgic about five years ago, and sometime later realize that I’ve just been paging forward through old p...
I’m participating in the University of Alberta-sponsored Day of DH 2011 today, and so will be posting there (and here) about some of my digital humanities doings as the day goes on. Assuming, that is, that things do not go awry in the way that they did last year. Which I’m hopeful that they won’t...
For the first time in the nearly nine-year history of this blog, I have failed to post here for an entire calendar month. There will forever be a gap where February 2011 should be in the archives.
Just to note that in the, what, four or five days since I’ve added the ReCaptcha plugin here, I’ve received a total of seven spam comments. In a similar span of time before adding the ReCaptchas, I’d have had upwards of 1500 — almost all of them caught by Akismet, but nonetheless taking up bandwi...
In the hopes of getting things around here moving a bit, of breaking up the logjam in my head, and of figuring out what’s ahead of me as I move on to new projects in the second half of my sabbatical, I’ve taken the utterly unlike me step of signing up to participate in #reverb10. For the rest of ...
Today’s the first day of the eleventh annual conference of the Association of Internet Research, and the sixth of which I’ve attended. It’s lovely catching up with some of the folks I often see at these conferences, but also great getting to meet and hang out with folks I only sort of know from o...
For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around ...
I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new Wor...
My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are t...
Among other things this weekend, I’m re-reading Fanon for Monday’s class. Fascinating to see today’s five years ago post pop up.
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.
Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to be written, and a 15-minute presentation to be carved out of a 40-page chapter. Plus a journal peer review, a dissertation report, and a tenu...
I’m deep in the thick of the best semester I’ve had in several years, so it’s taken some doing to pry me away from teaching in order to see what teaching-related stuff is going on out there in the blogosphere. Having spent some time poking around, though, I’ve found a bunch of exciting stuff for ...
I’m ostensibly up tomorrow as host of Teaching Carnival 3.2, but poking through Delicious and Technorati is turning up little in the way of submitted material. If you have written or read posts in the last two weeks that should be part of this carnival, shoot me an email at kf at plannedobsolesce...
If you’ve bothered coming round these parts lately, you’ll have noticed that things were loading excruciatingly slowly, a problem for which I was starting to blame my hosting provider. But this morning, for whatever reason, I decided to take a look at my code and see whether one of the scripts I’...
I’m getting loads of comment spam of late that is not bot-produced, but rather manually added, designed to generate google juice for some commercial site by taking advantage of the misimpression that this blog is a “do-follow” rather than a “no-follow” site. You might see an example of that in th...
I’ve just this morning upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and the nifty new interface has inspired me to actually post something. So here’s the post announcing my new toys, and, I certainly hope, the forthcoming ability to actually say something worth saying with them.
I did make this very short list of academic blogs, selected by the editors of More.ca, “Canada’s site celebrating women over 40.” Which is pretty cool. And makes me think that I should actually contemplate producing some proper content here!
There was a flurry of posts a few weeks back by folks noting that they’d been included (or not) on something that presented itself as being a list of the top 100 academic blogs. Just before that flurry began, I’d gotten an email message telling me that this humble site was included, and I was for...
I’m sitting in a cafe down the street, the one I mentioned some days back, the one with the streaming L.A. radio station.* The other thing they’ve got is free wifi, which is allowing me to sit here and goof around on some of my new iPhone apps (which I can’t do much of from the flat, as the WEP i...
For the sixth year running, and despite having reminded myself about it two days ago, I’ve once again missed the anniversary of starting Planned Obsolescence. (Witness: five, four, three, two, one, though of course two and four are cheating, linking to what surrounds what’s not there.) I’m mildly...
I’ve noticed in my stats over the last couple of days that I’ve been getting some hits off some genuinely vile googlings, things I’m not going to reproduce here. The hits have been on pages that contain no such content, and no content that could even be mistaken for the string searched for. I jus...
… since R. took off for the holidays:
I’ve read (and written) any number of blog posts over the last few years analyzing the phenomenon of meta-blogging — posts that creep up on meta-meta-blogging, I guess: blogging about blogging about blogging. Some of these have focused on the notion of the “life cycle of the blog,” that most blog...
What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during the three frenetic weeks of travel that followed. But now I’ve been home for over a week, and I’ve managed one lousy little post in that tim...
This was originally going to be another comment on the previous post, which I’ve been thinking about a bunch. Partially because meg seems to have gotten the idea that I’ve got something more substantive to say. And partially because my responses to Jason’s and her comments on the previous post ha...
Somewhere, not terribly long ago, I heard or read someone make the argument that blogging was the first genuinely internet-native mode of publishing. I’ve been searching around for such a statement, and am coming up a bit dry. My fear is that this was just said to me in casual conversation, just ...
Since my migration from ExpressionEngine to WordPress, my site traffic has fallen off by something between 60 and 75 percent. I want to attribute this to the change in my feed address, but if I’m being honest, I should also note that the distinct downturn coincided with my beginning to post on a ...
I swore I wasn’t going to miss it this year, as I did last year and the year before (and the year before that, and the year before that). I even went so far as to put it on my iCal, so that I’d remember to mark the occasion, but then I failed to look at the calendar yesterday. It’s a bit disappoi...
Incidentally, if you’ve been reading Planned Obsolescence via an RSS feed, you’ll no doubt have noticed that the feed URLs have changed since the migration to WordPress. The feed is now available, conveniently, at http://kfitz.info/blog/feed. At least one major feed reader caught the migration au...
I’m tinkering a bit with my categories, trying to make them a bit more tree-like, but given that I’ve already got two systems represented here (the old tripartite novels/networks/inbetween structure and the more recent whatever-occurs-to-me structure), they’re not organizing terribly well. In any...
Hey! Regardless of what my permalinks seem to tell you, that last entry was entry number 1000 here at Planned Obsolescence. It took me a little less than five years to get here, but it’s a nice week for the milestone, given my hopes for returning to serious blogging…
I finished up the looming-deadline project a full two days early, I’m happy to report, and am now turning to other phases of my summer work. I’ve got a zillion things I hope to accomplish, ranging from lots of MediaCommons stuff (with the goal of a fall launch!) to getting the new writing project...
Today, somebody figured out how to overcome my trackback URL randomization and leave me 20-plus spam trackbacks. All from different IP addresses.
It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rather than in the big auditorium, where it is invariably non-airconditioned, stuffy, crowded, and what my grandmother would have called “close.”...
To say that I’ve been a bad blogger of late is to underestimate the situation pretty seriously. There have been moments, over the course of the spring, when I’ve wondered if I was losing interest in blogging. In fact, I think the paucity of writing here is driven by something related, but slightl...
Grrr. I’m having an utterly infuriating time with air-l, one of the listservs that I’m subscribed to, because my subscription was apparently set up from my actual technical email address (which has a login id composed of a seemingly random collection of letters and numbers) but my email client us...
Perhaps after I finish with this week’s four department meetings and two program meetings. Not to mention the departmental social event, and the conference call, and the two one-on-one meetings, and the lecture.
I’m apparently on something of a hiatus, at the moment. In part it’s due to the issues I last wrote about (I’m too busy for much of interest to happen, and what of interest is happening, I can’t write about), but it’s also in part due to the fact that these days I seem to have the attention span ...
I’ve honestly just been too busy even to contemplate blogging, much less to write anything. (Or even read anything; I’m about as out of touch with bloglandia as I’ve been anytime in the last five years.) I’m hoping to get caught up enough to produce something of value here soon.
A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conversation (both in the column and in the comments) about gender, academic blogging, stardom, and anonymity.
An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal. Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, alo...
The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by. Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied when she got tagged, I’ll do the same. I want to note that this is hard, though; there are plenty of things you don’t know about me, but no...
Thanks to all of you who commented and emailed yesterday and this morning; sympathetic noises were much desired, and much appreciated. Yesterday’s post arose, obviously, out of a well of frustration, both with the core situation and with my painful inability to Let It Go. My hope was that bloggin...
Happily, two other things have happened in the last couple of days that have begun to turn my mood around a bit, diminishing the stress somewhat and making it all seem, if not exactly bearable, at least worthwhile. One was meeting up with a colleague last night for some food and wine and a genera...
While the panic has subsided (in no small part due to my having woken the fuck up and said NO, thank you, to a new administrative task that I was being asked to take on), my workload has not diminished. If anything, the stack in front of me has grown in the last week, and exponentially.
I’ve spent the last three days madly working on the article from which my talk at BlogTalk will be drawn. And late last night, as I was trying to fall asleep, it hit me: I’m leaving for Europe on Thursday.
Except looming deadlines, and deadlines already past. I’ll be back with more scintillating thoughts soon, I hope.
So I really honestly did add them to my blogroll a couple of hours before Liz popped up in the comments, and had made a note-to-self to post an actual bloggy link this afternoon, before getting all distracted by the notion of my disappearing audience, and then wrapped up in a little bit of work. ...
As long as I’m on the subject: one of the things that I actually have spent a bit of time worrying about — worrying, mind you, but not enough to really do anything about it — since I discovered among my readership a number of folks in positions of authority, folks whose good opinions of me I’d li...
I’ve had a few conversations about this here website of late, conversations with folks who seem uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of what I’ve blogged here. Nobody’s upset with me about having been indiscreet, or about having said something about them that I shouldn’t have. Rather, t...
I spent much of last night lying awake, primarily suffering under what I’m pretty sure was a bit of bad salmon. I wasn’t anywhere near as sick as I could have been, but I did at one point wonder whether TSA would let me board my plane today if the bucket of fluids I was carrying could be demonstr...
Hey: this site is not your own personal publicity organ. Any future comments that are clearly serving no other purpose than promoting your work–not contributing to a conversation, not responding to a post or comment–will be considered spam and will be deleted forthwith. Moreover, I will close com...
So there was a piece of comment spam loitering hereabouts for a couple of days, while I debated what to do with it. I finally deleted it, as the last thing I want is to encourage this kind of behavior. But what the culprit did is half ingenious and half insanely stupid, which is what had me think...
So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of every subsequent chapter, and the bibliography and index) and the ability to comment on them. I mentioned this to one of the guys here in N...
Somebody else has noted this recently — I’m sorry I can’t remember who — but spambots are getting weirdly smarter. Another blog that I have editorial privileges on gets a fair bit of trackback spam, and yesterday I got an email message telling me that there was a trackback awaiting my approval. T...
I have days when I really wish this blog were anonymous, or that I had another anonymous blog in which I could write without the kind of self-censorship that comes with knowing that many of my students, colleagues, and friends are reading along. I’m having a bit of a rough time right now, but the...
Via unrequited narcissism, the affirmation I’ve been waiting for:
News comes this afternoon that ogged‘s taking down the shingle. Things in the blogosphere feel different to me already.
In the last few days, I’ve gotten hundreds of hits from various Canadian browsers, nearly all of whom have come from some variant on a Google search for obsolescence, planned or otherwise. Is there something going on up there I ought to know about?
Site design conversion in progress. Things are likely to be wonky for an hour or so, and then just… different. Change is good, folks. It’s long past time.
I’m hard at work this morning on a hefty post that I’ll hope to publish soon. In the meantime, a quick Happy New Year to you all, and a wish that all your projects take flight in the coming days.
I’ve just posted what follows on Machine, the aggregator blog from this semester’s Theories of New Media class. I’d asked the class to post concluding thoughts thinking about the blog exercise, what they’d gotten out of it, how it affected their writing, what they wish had happened differently, a...
I was never really one for drinking and dialing. Probably because I so loathe the telephone as a medium of communication.
Sigh. When I began this here blog, it never occurred to me that I’d find myself, three and a half years and 680 entries down the line, desirous of a better organizational system. I had this cutesy tag line — novels, networks, and some stuff inbetween — and I thought, well, there’s your categories...
Somebody found this site the other day by googling “fitzpatrick investigation.” And oh, man, do I wish I’d had something to do with it. Patrick may be a Fitzgerald, but I’ll happily claim the brotherhood nonetheless.
The lecture that I’m set to give tomorrow, which I’m doing some heavy-duty work on this morning, is part of a series of lectures, classes, and screenings collectively titled “The New Documentary Impulse.” Much of this series, as you might expect, has to do with recent work in politically focused ...
One day, you write something about a guy’s first book, and the next day, you get an email message from that guy thanking you for your comments and offering help with a critical issue you’re currently facing.
Collin took the notion of “practice” that I raised on Sunday and ran with it, thinking both about the ways that academics are “disciplined” as binge writers and the ways that blogs, contrary to any Tribble-esque anxieties about their marginal utility and maximal dangers, might help scholars devel...
Just so you know.
So I’m wondering: have I completely alienated what little audience I ever had, such that no one’s reading this thing except for the bots and the crawlers, or have I somehow cowed everyone (except for a few hardy souls who know me personally) into silence? If you’re out there, speak up; inquiring ...
Via meg, a new response to the Ivan Tribble column, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,”, this one published as a letter to the editor in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Writes David R. Sewell, the Editorial and Technical Manager of the University of Virginia Press’s electronic imprint:
A moment of true confessions: I’m an obsessive stats watcher. I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around. And I’m a bit obsessed, in a weird audience-research sort of way, with seeing what posts draw a crowd and what posts don’t, and with speculating abou...
I’m in a hurry this morning, needing to get myself ready to drive into LA, but I simply cannot refrain from comment on this morning’s Chronicle Careers column, “Bloggers Need Not Apply” [Chronicle of Higher Education; subscription usually required but I think this is in the free area]. The jist o...
In my stats of late, I’ve noticed a rash (read: 2) of folks whose path through the site appears to indicate that they’re trying unsuccessfully to comment. It may be that they don’t want to leave email addresses (which my commenting system requires) or that the CAPTCHAs system is somehow eluding t...
About a month ago, I very, very belatedly hopped the Bloglines train, putting together a tidy pile of feeds and using them to keep up with all my favorite blogs. It was a bit of a struggle at first, as I mentioned then: half of blog-reading for me is about the aesthetics of individual design choi...
Here’s the thing: I’ve resisted the whole syndication wave for eons. I’ve provided various feeds for this site, mostly because the software made it really easy, but also because I knew there were folks out there who I wanted to keep up with the doings here via Bloglines or other such aggregators....
Why are my blogrolling.com pings suddenly producing database errors? There, I mean, not here. Other folks’s blogs are showing up as updated in my blogroll; is this retribution for the Foghat debacle?
From my pal BT, comes word of a dangerous ripple in the blog/reality interface. A couple of weeks ago, after my back-self-patting assertion of my general rockin’ status, BT generously defined the quality of that rockitude:
GZombie wrote a few days ago about his concern that his blog had jumped the shark, and I’ve got to admit, I’ve been wondering something of the same thing about Planned Obsolescence over the last couple of months. My concern is less that all of my posting has been personal of late (though there’s ...
So I arrived at work this morning to discover that an old class blog of mine got hit overnight with a cluster bomb of comment and trackback spam. And, alas, it’s running on MT 2.6, so I’m having to go through and delete and close comments and pings manually. And I’m grinding my teeth and feeling ...
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
Though what I really need to do, as G Zombie suggests, is lighten up on my blog reading, rather than writing, which has already become pretty desultory as it is, I nonetheless need to focus in on finishing that Powers article in very short order. If something particularly moves me in the article ...
I’ve been poking around all day in the recent upgrade to ExpressionEngine, which I installed yesterday. The major add-on in this release is a new image gallery module, which I’ve decided to take advantage of. I’m hitting a few speedbumps in the process, but I’m gradually getting the gallery onlin...
Greetings from Vermont.
Here’s something odd: a screenshot of my recent keyword analysis, looking at what searches have brought folks hither, from yon.
If someone would write a script that would work with… well, let’s say, just hypothetically, a software package like ExpressionEngine, that would allow an author to take full advantage of post-dated entries by storing a request for, and then sending, appropriate pings (to blo.gs, or blogrolling.co...
So here’s the part where I whine a bit about the process of building yesterday’s entry. I shall do this by delineating for you the steps involved in creating your own photoblog, the old-fashioned way:
George recently issued a plea for bloggers to make full-text RSS feeds of their sites available, such that folks who, like him, are hooked on Bloglines and other newsreaders can properly keep up. I’ll confess to not having checked out my feeds to see if they’re full-texts or not, since the migrat...
Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog. Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment, and having been failed by the job market once again, she is following through, and moving on.
Sometime last night I got slammed with comment spam — more than 250 comments before I was able to stem the tide — all of which were ostensibly advertising a series of blogs. Here’s the cute thing, though: many of them were positively self-referential, sort of meta-spam. A choice quote:
Announcing the launch of Palimpsest, a group-authored weblog devoted to open-source teaching resources. Thanks to George for getting it off the ground.
I was going to leave this in the comments of my last post, but found myself doing so much fulminating until it seemed worth turning this into a whole nother entry.
The nominations for the 2004 Bloggies are out.
I’ve been following with great interest a conversation developing over at George’s place on the possibility of creating an open-source collection of resources for teaching literature. It now appears that the first iteration of such a project will be a group-authored blog. If you’re in the field, ...
Mabel, pack up the kids. We’re outta here.
Okay, it’s not quite The End of the World, but bloggers all over are waking up to discover that their BlogRolls have been hijacked.
From The Onion, “Mom Finds Out About Blog”:
I’d been pondering what one might refer to as the Francois Question for some time —
I spent yesterday in my office, behind a closed door, listening to music through noise-cancelling headphones. Reading Habermas, on the disintegration of the public sphere. Unable to admit anything else about the day.
I’ve intended for the last couple of weeks to begin writing in here about my new project, or about my intent toward that project, in any event. Or, for that matter, about things I’m reading, things I’m watching, and so on. It’s one of my goals over the course of this summer, in preparation for ne...
…no longer has a blog. Or won’t soon, anyhow. Claiming concerns that, as he puts it, “the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact,” he’s planning to discontinue the blog he started earlier in the year to coincide with the release of Pattern Recognition.
Planned Obsolescence has been on the road these last five days, and has had only the most tenuous of connections to the Internet. Please forgive our absence; we’ll be back with further ruminations in a day or two.
I’ve been running hither and yon (mostly yon) these last weeks, and dealing with the complexities of life-in-a-suitcase, and thus failing to resume anything like my normal programming schedule. But I promise, I’ll be back with new things soon.
Here’s the main issue: obsolescence. A forum for exploring it, and for producing it. A space in which to think about the intimate interrelationship of new media and old media, and the ways in which newness and oldness are inevitably predicated on one another.
Crossposted from Platypus.
Crossposted from the Humanities Commons Team blog.
My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-and-forth discussion there that mostly took place on Twitter, as well as a lot of likes and mentions that came from there as well.
One of the instigating factors in my recent migration from my original plannedobsolescence.net domain to kfitz.info, and in my attempts to collect and reinvigorate my online presence here, was a talk by Herbert van de Sompel at last December’s CNI meeting. In this talk, Van de Sompel explored a s...
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
Earlier this week, I took a whirlwind trip back to my old New York stomping grounds, where I both had the opportunity to catch up with my colleagues at the MLA and to spend a day talking with the leaders of several scholarly societies who are helping us think through the future of Humanities Comm...
Today marks the start of my last week working at the MLA. It’s been a fantastic six years, and I’m enormously grateful to have had the opportunity to work on so many fascinating projects, and with such great colleagues and members, over that time. And I’m especially happy that I’m going to be abl...
As we’ve just announced, the MLA is grateful to have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the next phase of our work on Humanities Commons. I’m personally grateful as well, both to have had the opportunity to work with an amazing team (about whom more in a ...
Kevin Fitzpatrick’s monthly AT&T Wireless bill is creeping higher month by month, and unless he’s got family members on his account, he should probably seek a better plan.
Sarah Bond published a column on Forbes.com this morning on the importance of not for profit scholarly networks. I’m thrilled that she mentioned not only my blog post but also the work we’re doing at Humanities Commons. But if she hasn’t convinced you that it’s time to #DeleteAcademiaEdu yet, may...
Last week’s close attention to open access, its development, its present state, and its potential futures, surfaced not only the importance for both the individual scholar and the field at large of sharing work as openly as possible, with a range of broadly conceived publics, but also some contin...
I logged in to Skype for a conference call yesterday afternoon and immediately received a message letting me know that it was the birthday of someone with whom I’ve collaborated on a few projects.
[Crossposted from The New York Academy of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, which has published a cluster of posts previewing a panel I’m presenting on at the AHA.]
Weirdly, when our team said “let’s upgrade our server” got a message saying “we’re going to upgrade your server,” we didn’t expect you to redirect our DNS entry to a machine so new that it has no files on it. Not just no files, but no configuration whatsoever. And no users, so no way to, I don’t ...
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Dear major television scholar who appeared at the very top of my Facebook feed this morning, where I could not avoid you (and I think you know who you are): sticking the word “spoiler” immediately before a most appalling revelation about that episode I didn’t have the chance to watch last night d...
Over the course of last week, a huge number of friends and colleagues of mine posted links and notes on Twitter and around the blogosphere about Mike O’Malley’s post on The Aporetic about crowdsourcing peer review.
For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around ...
From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age of Print. Ted has opened a wiki for the project, through which interested volunteers can help him clean up the text for audio conversion. Ins...
A quick note: I’m (at least in theory) participating in today’s Day of Digital Humanities festivities. “In theory,” alas, because the conference I’m attending is wi-fi-less. Nonetheless, I’ll post when I can; you can keep up with my DH-ness here, and with more general Day-of-DH doings by followin...
A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circles. In case you haven’t seen it:
Oh, hi! I’m sure it appears that I’ve forgotten about this blog thing. Really, it’s less that I’ve forgotten than that my attention has gotten fragmented in a million different directions, both work-wise and internet-communication-wise. Much of the stuff that I would have blogged back in the day ...
I’ve just gotten the following email message from my friends at Time Warner Cable:
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that several of my favorite websites were becoming, well, wide. It’s become increasingly common, in fact, for me to find myself scrolling sideways as well as up-and-down when out there browsing, and frankly, it was getting to be a bit annoying.
You know what they say about it.
The newest episode of the Digital Campus podcast, #44 – Unsettled, is up, and I’m thrilled that it mentions Planned Obsolescence. Digital Campus, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, is a fantastic resource for those thinking about the future of technology ...
I went to bed last night about 11.30, and got up this morning around 7.30. And inbetween, didn’t receive a single piece of email. For some reason, I’m having a hard time accepting this — nothing from my listservs, nothing from my students, nothing from random spammers. Nothing. Why is it that eig...
I’m deep in the thick of the chapter I’m writing on issues of preservation for digital scholarship, and am feeling fairly acutely the extent to which these issues have not been on my radar before now, so I need to ask for your help, particularly the digital librarians among you.
Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.
There’s a fantastic series of tweets in my Twitter stream right now, from folks commenting on the new Facebook terms of service, which indicates that anything a user adds to their account is not only the property of Facebook while the account is active, but remains their property even if removed ...
Having blogged my excitement about the public beta of DEVONthink 2, and trying to get myself re-organized for my winter break projects, I spent much of yesterday poking around in my various databases, thinking about how the data I access frequently is organized and trying to imagine better workfl...
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Internet suddenly, completely, and inexplicably breaks. And there is nothing you can do about it — no router you can reset, or DSL modem you can...
I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites. And I’m having a hard time making myself stop and do the things I actually need to be doing this weekend. Like grading. This is in no small part...
I’ve nearly gotten through the copy-edited manuscript, which has been a pretty overwhelming and, at moments, frustrating task. I’ve got six small queries yet to finish dealing with, three of which have to do with whether an emphasis appeared in the original text or if I added it when I quoted, an...
Follow these directions:
Somebody somewhere apparently crossed the streams earlier today, and everything around here went kerflooey. Not in Claremont, at least not as far as I know; I’ve been at school all day, where the energy crisis of some years ago resulted in our being outfitted with mondo generators that we move se...
Via a listserv I’m in, information about the Katrina PeopleFinder Project:
Air America has announced a service that they hope will assist people looking for missing loved ones: Air America Public Voicemail. From their announcement:
A moment of true confessions: I’m an obsessive stats watcher. I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around. And I’m a bit obsessed, in a weird audience-research sort of way, with seeing what posts draw a crowd and what posts don’t, and with speculating abou...
My old pal BT passed me this musical-meme baton a while back, but I not only managed to let the damned thing drop, I kinda stopped in my tracks, hands on hips, staring at it, thinking “whaddaya want me to do with that?”
Just heard a story on Morning Edition reporting on a push by federal officials to force domain-name owners to identify themselves accurately in the WHOIS database, a database which is, of course, publicly available. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) moved earli...
Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become: I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because the coverage in the lounge is a little spotty, and for a while my connection kept dropping.
On the way home tonight, I heard a DJ on KCRW refer to a new film that’s out as “a story replete with sex and cultural theory.”
The leak in my garage continues unabated, through three plumbers who can’t seem to figure out what the problem is, when I keep telling them that the leak isn’t coming from my condo, it’s only ending up in my condo. They run my showers and flush my toilets, and say, nope, no leak here. And leave.
So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity —
Thanks to all who have responded to my various technological pleas over the last few days. My hosting provider’s waning is producing massive unreliability — my site’s been down more than it’s been up over the last week — and so I’ve done the poking around among the providers you recommended, and ...
The irony is of course that within moments of my having posted yesterday’s entry, my hosting provider’s service went down, so no one could get to the message in which I was asking for help with finding a new hosting provider. Coincidence? I think not. In any event, help would still be greatly app...
Just a quick one, as I’m in the midst of enormous piles of grading that I really want done by the end of the day tomorrow: I’ve just gotten an email message from my hosting provider saying that they’re shutting down as early as two weeks from now. I need recommendations for a good, inexpensive ho...
Why, oh why, did I decide that it was a good idea to put my computer in a different room from my television set?
I believe this to be the first weekend I’ve had to myself — sort of — in a month. “To myself,” in this case, means no conference, no travel, no grading. Ironically, perhaps, it also means that Mom is here, the only excuse I could grant myself for taking an entire two-and-a-half days off. This aft...
I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my hosting provider — first, of course, there was that ill-timed and unannounced bit of downtime last week, which I can’t be too upset with them about, given that their presence somewhere in SoCal may have been under the same kind of threat that mine was. Bu...
Definitely a bang. Or maybe California just breaks off from the rest of the US and goes off to hang with Hawaii. Either way, it’s The End of the World. (But Australia’s down there, like, WTF mates?) [Flash required; watch that volume. Via Metafilter.]
I’m finding googlings in my recent referrer logs that look like this:
Accordion Guy, who not only got to attend an extended Q&A with Neal Stephenson but also won one of the door-prizes (a trip backstage to meet the author), lucky bastard, blogged his notes from the Q&A. The entry is entirely fascinating in a wonderfully geeky way, but there’s one passage in...
I’m throwing in a link here to the color picker that everybody is linking to, mostly so I don’t forget where I put it. External memory cache, you know?
Via George comes Dictionaraoke, in which “Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary.”
I’d really begun to feel a bit left out: all the cool kids were busily discussing their comment spam problems and solutions thereto, while I remained, with one pathetic exception, completely unhit.
This site has been making the blog-rounds of late, but it’s still worth playing with, for the odd poetry (and even odder critical commentary) that it’s capable of producing. Input a line of English text, and Lost in Translation will use Babelfish to translate it into French, and then translate th...
Late this evening comes news of the death of Neil Postman, University Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU, and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. I never studied with Postman while I was at NYU, and, frankly, much of my recently-completed manuscript on the relationship between contem...
Part of my recent failure to be especially entertaining or enlightening here in the land of Obsolescence has to do with a smallish project that has absorbed increasing amounts of my already skimpy non-teaching, non-committee, non-fretting-about-the-state-of-the-world time: I’m co-coordinating a c...
ogged dropped me a line this morning pointing me to a discussion taking place over at Crooked Timber this morning about the potential conflicts between class blog projects and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Eszter, who originated the discussion, suggests that the provision...
As you know, I have a new iPod. (No, this is not another gloating entry.)
I finally got my hands on my new iPod this morning, after a series of nail-biting delays. I’d paid for the two-day express shipping when I ordered it, and it shipped on September 12, so I’d expected to have it by the middle of last week, and certainly in time to have slick music portability for t...
Some of you may have noticed the new link that appeared a couple of days ago, unannounced, under “Other Obsolescence.” I’m happy to make the announcement, if belatedly, that my class blog is up and running, having overcome the technical obstacles that were preventing its debut. The blog is group-...
From the good people who brought you Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers MUSHROOM MUSHROOM, comes the inexplicably-titled Scampi.
From Rory comes the Victorian Boy’s Guide to Blogging. Go forth and read it yourself, with the first verse below to entice you:
Happy consumerist techno-geek advice, that is.
Oh, the irony: at roughly the same moment that I was calling somone out in the Invisible Adjunct’s comments for what I took to be the implicit suggestion that professors at small liberal arts colleges exist in an intellectual backwater (a suggestion implicit, I think, in the assumption that such ...
The conversation about professorial personas, professional ethics, and blogging continues over at weezBlog, where Elouise considers the question of virtual fraternization — students reading professors’ blogs and vice versa. One of her commenters responds (copying his earlier post to Wealth Bondag...
I realized today that over the last weeks, I’ve begun a series of thoughts here that I haven’t fully followed through on — too appropriately, the thoughts seem to obsolesce before they hit the input screen. My Gibson re-reading, for instance: I found myself making mental notes of possible entries...
I’ve been away for a bit (as those of you reading this — and I quote — “US person’s boring memoirs about his travel trips” (ahem) already know), and since I’ve been back, I’ve been caught in the thick of semester start-up: first-year advising, grading placement exams, preparing for the first day ...
The internet cafe is a lovely thing — not this particular one, I mean, but the general development. Give the folks behind the counter one unit of the local currency, and receive in exchange some quantity of time on a high-speed connection, to catch up with what you need to catch up with. Today, t...
Why is it that folks who find Planned Obsolescence via net searches mostly show up in the wee hours of the night?
Having finished with the statement, and returning to the Gibson article, I’ve made the last-minute decision to accompany the Significant Other on his business trip to London. I’ll be blogging from there next week, while I reread Pattern Recognition, which combination seems wholly appropriate.
For years I’ve nagged my students to adopt a more critical eye toward the work they turn in to me, to refuse to be content with the first draft, to step back, take a breath, and attempt a real re-vision of their writing. Writing is rewriting, was the mantra we chanted back in the faculty developm...
A weekend post by Liz Lawley returned me to my recent thoughts about how to integrate a group-authored blog into my fall class on the Literary Machine. Liz has ingeniously leveraged MovableType’s calendar-based entries as a replacement for those clunky, kludgy, commercial course management packag...
… sort of.
Today’s second installment of what has apparently become an ongoing feature brings us further advisories, in over the transom:
As SIGGRAPH is happening practically in my backyard this year, and as I’m working on trying to get this INP off the ground (and could thus use all the imagination-stimulation I can get), I’m planning on taking a little spin down to San Diego next week. This is, however, my first SIGGRAPH, and I’l...
In a big hurry to get some non-blogging work done today, so I’m going to beg off by steering you all to Rory‘s thoughts on the manipulation of intellectual property laws by scholarly publications and the difficulties said manipulation poses to a scholar who takes his/her web-presence seriously (n...
I’m working these days on expanding a paper I gave at a recent conference, hoping that it’ll transform in the process into a draft of a chapter of the INP. This paper focused on Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and its representations of the geography and geopolitics of computer networks, arguing,...
Since my fantastic meeting with George a couple of days ago, I’ve been thinking more about my plan to fold a group blog into one of my fall classes. George helpfully alerted me to his post on Conversation as Game, which attempts to create a beginning typology of rhetorical moves that take place i...
Bill reports that he’s been having some difficulty loading the Planned Obsolescence front page, and this reminded me: back during our European vacation, I had some intermittent difficulty as well. On my hotel’s Wintel machine, running some recent version of IE, I periodically got the front page l...
I’m assuming, and I think not incorrectly, that many of the folks currently reading my meanderings have read and either celebrated or despised (or some deeply ambivalent mixture of the two) Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. For those who haven’t, a qu...
Sorry for the no-update today, folks (as well as for the unavailability of comments earlier in the day); my hosting provider migrated the site to an upgraded server late last night, and we encountered some minor but pesky database problems as a result. All seems to be in order now, though I actua...
This recent post by vika has made me uncomfortably conscious of the slowness with which the pile of books I’d planned on reading this summer is diminishing — or, more accurately, the alarming speed with which it’s growing, as the research reading list is getting added to much more rapidly than th...
Rather than taxing my heat-cramped brain by attempting to come up with a clever ‘why I’m not posting today’ post, here’s instead a smattering of July 4th postings from blogs around the way:
One of the reasons I’m so concerned about the relationship between this site and my current scholarly work (or lack thereof) is that my new project (or, as I’m beginning to think about it, my Imaginary New Project [INP]) focuses on the relationship between computer technologies and literary produ...
To be found here. Who knew. God love Movable Type.
I’d hoped to write something of substance today, something considering the impact that the Supreme Court’s Monday half-decision on affirmative action will have on higher education, or perhaps another bit of reportage from the Amsterdam/Prague trip. Or maybe something looking forward to the new pr...
I’d promised some time back to keep you posted on my adventures in the land of consumer electronics. After a bit of comparison shopping, both for cell-phone/PDA combo devices and for wireless phone services, I wound up buying the Kyocera 7135 and sticking it out with my friends at Verizon. My ser...
According to the wire services, the Supreme Court has issued a split decision in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, siding with the law school on the constitutionality of its diversity policy, but declaring the undergraduate school’s admissions policy to be unconstitutional. An ...
I just discovered this morning that I missed my own one-year anniversary; Planned Obsolescence made its inauspicious debut exactly one year and two days ago, broadcasting from the sunny shores of Waikiki.
Yes, all you impatient readers (well, Bill), we’re back Stateside, and mostly recovered from the nine-timezone, two-day, train, plane, and automobile journey from Central Europe back to the Far Southwest. Planned Obsolescence’s European Vacation was glorious in most every way — fabulous food, ple...
We’ve gone on a bit of a hiatus here, as you can no doubt tell. The hellish end of semester rituals gave way to travel preparations, which gave way to the actual travel. Planned Obsolescence is spending the week in Amsterdam, and will next week be in Prague. We’ll be back in mid-June with newish ...
I had a microwave. It weighed something near unto 50 pounds, and it cost me something on the order of $400 when I bought it 18 years ago. (The number of numbers in the previous sentence begins to make this look like a word problem — answer: 44 cents per pound per year!) This microwave was a workh...
So the antenna broke off of my cell phone the other day, and I’m imagining all that electromagnetic activity, with no other focal point, penetrating my skull and gradually radicalizing all my brain cells.
The link will tell you so.
Yesterday, when our good friends at The Morning News linked to this article in the London Observer, which reports that the Royal Shakespeare Society “aims to prosper with Tempest videogame,” I was stupefied. Flabbergasted. And very, very curious, about which aspects of the play might become inter...
In over the transom today:
Whew… the posts just keep coming fast and furious this week. Spring break began for me today (well, yesterday, given that it’s now after midnight) at 5 pm, and I’m just raring to go.
Perhaps you’re a wholly reasonable person, with the potential to become an irrational fool? Perhaps you’re a team player, with a potentially argumentative loner lurking about inside you? Or perhaps you’re a dreamer, within whom lives a potentially disillusioned grouse, simply waiting to take f...
The following exchange is available for your further perusal in the most recent issue of Harpers.
Well, almost.
Sorry for the protracted radio silence; we’ve been in the home stretch of a search here, and I’ve been spending an astonishing amount of time going to job talks, conducting interviews, and generally glad-handing about. Then, in the interstices, there’s been that little teaching thing, and sometim...
The Propaganda Remix Project. Some of these are fantastic.
Am happily running the public beta of Apple’s very own browser, Safari. It’s got that groovy brushed-metal iInterface that grace all the hippest iApps, even despite its absence of iNess. It’s light-years faster than IE5, which was released for the Mac approximately a decade ago. And — as open-sou...
William Gibson has a blog.
Or perhaps Hunt for the Ring, by Tom Clancy. Can’t decide which is my favorite.
Remember me? I used to write stuff here, and periodically even had something to say. Alas, in the last few weeks I’ve been transformed into a committee drone, and have been mucking about in a paperwork swamp. Really. If paper could ooze, I’d be covered in it up to my elbows.
An odd weekend: I made the mistake of reaching for a hairbrush on Saturday morning — I should know better — and was rewarded with a muscle spasm between left shoulderblade and spine. The initial sensation — think cattle prod — was bad enough, but worse was the knowledge (from too many previous ex...
One day after Shauny‘s outcry against the ongoing horrors of the morning news, there is this: the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, three staffers, and two crew members in a plane crash in Minnesota.
I’ve been gnashing my teeth over a stupid browser problem, and bemoaning said browser’s total lack of online support, particularly of the discussion group sort, and thinking to myself that gee, I wish I had someone I could ask this question, or some forum in which I could ask it.
This is apparently the season of the improbable stage production here in SoCal. Two much-acclaimed works of cultural criticism (each with ties to the journalistic tradition, but with very different results) have been set loose upon the stage in L.A. this fall. I saw one this weekend, which sadly ...
The new season has at last begun, and eager students are buckling down all over campus, absorbing new materials, debating new ideas, and anticipating developments to come.
like this.
I spent a chunk of this past weekend hanging out in my apartment, not wanting to think about either the quantity of work I have to do in the next two weeks or the fact that somehow all of my belongings in this apartment need to transport themselves back to California at the end of that same two w...
And the wonderful folks helping steer them that way: Click To Add Title. Genuinely sublime.
Inspired in part by the wonderful pulchritude, and in part by my own overindulgences, I’ve undertaken a plan of (somewhat) radical detoxing. The most significant aspect of my pretty much semi-annual attempt to achieve a less chemical existence is giving up caffeine, which has the immediate effect...
That is: unless you are committed to the survival of the people who make up and serve that institution first, foremost, and above all.
I am honored that my colleagues in the College of Arts & Letters asked me to talk a bit about digital humanities and the role that it might play in reorienting the university toward the public good. We had a rather long conversation, more of which is represented in the full story, but they wi...
Two things that have me thinking this morning: First, the thread from Timothy Burke beginning here:
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
Earlier this week, I took a whirlwind trip back to my old New York stomping grounds, where I both had the opportunity to catch up with my colleagues at the MLA and to spend a day talking with the leaders of several scholarly societies who are helping us think through the future of Humanities Comm...
As we’ve just announced, the MLA is grateful to have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the next phase of our work on Humanities Commons. I’m personally grateful as well, both to have had the opportunity to work with an amazing team (about whom more in a ...
Sarah Bond published a column on Forbes.com this morning on the importance of not for profit scholarly networks. I’m thrilled that she mentioned not only my blog post but also the work we’re doing at Humanities Commons. But if she hasn’t convinced you that it’s time to #DeleteAcademiaEdu yet, may...
Last week’s close attention to open access, its development, its present state, and its potential futures, surfaced not only the importance for both the individual scholar and the field at large of sharing work as openly as possible, with a range of broadly conceived publics, but also some contin...
The following is the text of a talk I gave last week at the University of North Texas’s Academic Leadership Workshop. I’m hoping to develop this further, and so would love any thoughts or responses.
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Folks, we need to have a conversation. About Twitter. And generosity. And public shaming.
I have come to despise the term “neoliberal,” to the extent that I’d really like to see it stricken from academic vocabularies everywhere. It’s less that I have a problem with the actual critique that the term is meant to levy than with the utterly sloppy and nearly always casually derisive way i...
I somewhat inadvertently made a big announcement via Twitter last night, and in so doing, as my friend Julie pointed out, sorta buried the lede. So here’s the story, a bit better presented:
Over the weekend, something hashtagged as #twittergate was making the rounds among the tweeps. I haven’t dug into the full history (though Adeline storyfied it), but the debate has raised questions about a range of forms of conference reporting, and as a result, posts and columns both old and new...
One super-depressing (not least for how close to home it hits):
I’m really happy (if mildly tired) to be writing from Budapest, where (like Cameron) I’m honored to participate in a meeting on the tenth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It was this gathering, ten years ago, that gave a name to the growing sense that the content produced as a ...
I’ve just posted the following response to Stanley Fish’s comments about my book; they should be up once they’re moderated through. In the interim, and for the sake of keeping this comment visible long after it’s drowned in a sea of commenter crankiness, here’s what I said:
I’ve got a new column up at the Chronicle this morning. This one’s been in the works for a bit, and I’m really happy to have it out in circulation, and to see it getting some attention both from the DH crowd and from other scholars as well.
So, you may have noticed that there’s a significant gap in the archives here, roughly corresponding with the summer. And you may have asked yourself, gee, is kfitz on vacation?
The news is starting to make its way out there: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Modern Language Association this July as the Director of Scholarly Communication. In this role, I’ll be leading a new office that will expand upon the existing book publications program, exploring ne...
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments, making further discussion of or linking to it unlikely. I’m thus republishing it here, in the interest of having a copy that’s viable into ...
A compelling argument that it does, at See Also…, with a particularly interesting concluding suggestion:
Things are getting a bit under my skin right now. Maybe it’s exhaustion; yesterday’s travel went as smoothly as it possibly could, with some real cushiness along the way, but it was still a long day, and the time zone change is kicking my butt. I’m prone to being a bit crankier than usual, it’s c...
Last month, I was honored to be a keynote speaker at Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on digital media in academia organized by students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. It was an extraordinary two days of presentations and conversations, thinking with a cluster of energetic young s...
The recent New York Times Opinionator column by Robert Pippin, “In Defense of Naive Reading”, has had me thinking for the last week or so. I knew I wanted to respond right away, but I wasn’t sure how, exactly; there’s an awful lot in the post that I’m quite sympathetic to, and yet something in it...
In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I’m experimenting with moving these things back here again.
My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are t...
There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values, which he wrote for the Hacking the Academy volume, a crowd-sourced book he and Tom Scheinfeldt ...
As I’ve mentioned around here a few times, I’ve been in the midst of a review this spring, and now that the results are official, I can finally say out loud and in public that, as of July 1, I’ll be a full professor.
As I’ve mentioned around here before, I’m in the midst of a promotion review, and am in the anxious waiting phase: everything I can do is done, things are taking place behind the scenes, and I’m trying not to think about it. I was having a conversation with a couple of friends last night, and one...
There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by D...
In the coming year, I’m going to be going up for a promotion review, and along with all the other attendant stress work, I need to develop a list of potential outside reviewers for my case. (I’m replacing “stress” with “work” here in no small part because this review has far lower stakes than the...
I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first oppo...
Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they h...
Actually, I mean that in a more positive sense than it no doubt sounds. I tried a few other variants (Mouthing Off Pays Off!) but none were quite as satisfying. And it’s possible that the ambiguity is intentional.
I was somewhat bemused to see the white paper recently released by the MLA, reporting to the Teagle Foundation on the goals and objectives of the undergraduate major in language and literature in the context of a liberal arts education. (From what I can tell, the report itself was actually releas...
The big news around here is last night’s announcement that the Media Studies program at Pomona, in which I’ve taught for the last ten years, and which I’ve chaired (other than the semester I was on sabbatical) for the last four, will as of July 1, 2009, be converted into a department.
So here’s a set of research findings that have caught me completely by surprise*: women’s careers in academia sometimes stall out on the road to full professorship because of heightened departmental and institutional service demands placed upon them. So reports Inside Higher Ed, in an article abo...
There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days of William Deresiewicz’s article in The American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” I’m mildly annoyed by the opening of the article — I suddenly realized the shortcomings of my super-fantastic education when I couldn’t think ...
I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.
Okay, I’m in the middle of reading today’s Chronicle Careers column, and have just hit a paragraph (or two) that has me positively gobsmacked. The column is about ostensible faculty misuse of campus computing resources, and begins with a fairly reasonable anecdote about a faculty member being den...
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication that indicates that, generally, scholars accept the notion of innovative modes of electronic publishing in theory, but remain resistant in a...
Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently announced the launch of a new pre-print server, Nature Precedings, intended to be an open-source, Creative Commons-licensed repository for mat...
For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that affiliation has been mostly theoretical to this point. Today, however, I’m participating in a one-day retreat aimed at brainstorming the found...
It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rather than in the big auditorium, where it is invariably non-airconditioned, stuffy, crowded, and what my grandmother would have called “close.”...
One can only hope. It appears that the various crises that resulted in my protracted silence have now all passed, and that I can do at least a little, partial explaining, and then get back — schedule willing — to something approaching blogging as usual.
A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conversation (both in the column and in the comments) about gender, academic blogging, stardom, and anonymity.
I’ve discovered something today: either I was a whole lot braver eight years ago, or a whole lot dumber. I’m giving a talk in our faculty lecture series in about an hour. The last time I did this was during my first year here at the college. And I don’t remember being half so terrified as this.
I completely collapsed again last night, apparently not as recovered from my jet lag as I’d thought. I was dead asleep before 10 pm last night — but then woke up in a cold sweat sometime before 2 am. A serious cold sweat — I actually had to move to another spot on the bed because the sheets were ...
Good lord, but this is depressing.
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
So here’s what’s going on around here, that made my dream so open to Meg’s instant analysis: as I’ve mentioned before, my department has suffered some major losses recently, with three senior colleagues all departing at the same time. The up-side of this is that I’ve got an amazing new office. Th...
Via if:book, an interesting draft policy statement proposed by Alan Liu on student use of wikipedia. (See also the followup discussion at Humanist and Kairosnews.)
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905668/ "photo sharing")[new office](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905668/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). We’ve suffered a series of losses i...
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
Dear President Sexton,
Again, via email:
Miguel’s story has now been picked up by the Pacific News Service.
Gee, spend one little day traveling and the blogosphere goes a wee bit bonkers over some article in the New York Times about how some professors seem to think that student use of email is hastening the end times. And my pal meg winds up with an inbox full of vitriol, not to mention having to spen...
Letters of recommendation.
A bibliography-in-progress, bringing together resources and discussions on electronic scholarly publishing, as well as other links useful to particular issues in the ElectraPress project.
(Or, Remaking the Academy, One Electronic Text at a Time) cross-posted from The Valve:
There is something quite lovely about reading everybody’s early MLA posts and knowing that, not only am I totally not going there this year (for only the second time since 1996), I’m not even on the same continent. Why is it that avoiding what ought by all rights to be an intellectually stimulati...
Word in this morning’s Chronicle is that Tulane University is entering a period of major restructuring as it attempts to reopen. This “renewal,” as the university calls it, includes the elimination of 233 professors (53 from academic departments and 180 from the medical school) and 14 doctoral pr...
My doctoral institution, that private university in the public service, was at one point not too many years ago ahead of the pack in its recognition of its grad-student union. That recognition has of course now been withdrawn, and the university’s failure to negotiate with the union at all result...
And also because the wisdom contained therein is pretty damned good: Fontana Labs’s advice for new grad students. Even if it does contain the word “fellatio.”
Hey, could I persuade somebody to build this application for me? What I want is something that combines the functionality of something like Library Thing with the functionality of a bibliographic software package like EndNote — a web-based application that would let me keep track of the books and...
In the category of things I failed to blog yesterday: Bill Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, has apparently been forced out by a restructuring of the press’s British parent company, Taylor & Francis.
When you completely fail to show up for dinner at the dean’s house, because you’ve written it on the wrong day on your calendar.
The thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to go back to teaching. I’m fairly well prepared for my classes, and I think they’re going to be a lot of fun this semester.
I’m in a hurry this morning, needing to get myself ready to drive into LA, but I simply cannot refrain from comment on this morning’s Chronicle Careers column, “Bloggers Need Not Apply” [Chronicle of Higher Education; subscription usually required but I think this is in the free area]. The jist o...
Here’s something I wouldn’t quite have expected to see: the Chronicle of Higher Education actively making fun of an institution of… well, higher education. (Subscription required, alas; I’ll try to post an open link as soon as one exists.)
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental receptions for graduating seniors in the morning; big awards ceremony in the afternoon. Tomorrow is graduation proper. It’s usually a sprint from o...
Be careful who you ask to write your papers for you.
Where is the line between being that cool professor who shows up to student events and that skeezy professor who used to be cool but still shows up to stuff? Is it 40? Tenure? Marriage?
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
Via George (and, as he points out, a host of sources before him), the Guardian’s article, Cracks in the Ivory Towers, on problems in the academy. As George points out, though the study being reported on is focused on the UK, it bears significant comparison with problems in the profession here in ...
I’ve arrived and checked into the Atlanta Hyatt Regency. Forgive me for what follows; it’s a deeply unprofessional conference entry, but for whatever reason, it occurred to me as I was walking to my room, and I can’t shake the idea.
Word comes this morning of the death of Jacques Derrida, and the summing-up-the-career obituaries are coming fast and furious. Says the BBC:
There has been a series of conversations of late, both here and elsewhere, about the nature of academic work, whether sparked by anxieties about the impending end of the summer, or by the perception that we in the academy have the luxury of having summers “off”, or by the conviction that many, bo...
So I just got my copy of the American Literary Scholarship 2002 in the mail, and for the first time ever, I’m mentioned in it.
Michael B?©rub?© has published a brilliant reconsideration of an early run-in he had with Dinesh D’Souza, on the occasion of D’Souza’s being hired as an analyst for CNN. The myth of the liberal media has been explored in some detail, several times, in fact, by better folks than me, and so the myt...
A listserv I frequent has, on and off, had a bit of conversation about the plight of adjuncts in the academy, and one listmember this morning posted a link here, mentioning my recent post on the Chronicle article about Invisible Adjunct. (Hi there, wallace-l!)
This entry comes with an Irony Alert, though it’s an irony more in the Alanis Morissette sense, rather than irony in the classical sense.
Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog. Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment, and having been failed by the job market once again, she is following through, and moving on.
Gee, it’s nice to be in the news for something other than hate crimes or hoaxes thereof. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has a lovely consideration of the beauty and impracticality of our relatively new campus center. Designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the building i...
Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.
The Claremont Police and the FBI have released a statement saying that they have concluded their investigation into last week’s apparent hate crime, and in so doing have announced that the victim is now the primary suspect:
HATE CRIME INCIDENT ON MARCH 9TH, 2004
It’s spring break here. I’ve got a conference paper to write, and some sleep to catch up on. Things may be quiet around these parts this week, but rest assured that there is much thought going on beneath the surface. As Ralph Ellison suggests, responsible hibernations are only preface to renewed ...
Yesterday, Pomona College held a teach-in on Marston Quad, a usually-deserted lawn in the center of campus. Faculty from across the curriculum had been invited to speak, and after their brief talks, the mike was opened to anyone else who had something to contribute.
Coverage of events here from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Last night, sometime around 9.30, there was a knock at my door. I live in a faculty residence on campus, so I knew that this was going to be a student, but I also knew immediately that something was wrong, because my students never just drop by.
It’s been some time since I’ve been able to update, as the month of February just hasn’t been a great one around these parts. There was the madness of job candidate season, though the candidates themselves and their various visits were great. There were committee crises. There have been, and cont...
To continue yesterday’s thoughts: The exchange between Matt and Rory in the comments of my last post leads me to ponder the viability of a genuinely open-source model for the exchange of scholarly writing. Specifically, their conversation has prodded me to think some about the academic distinctio...
Dorothea Salo and Timothy Burke have both turned their sights on the state of academic journal publishing, arguing, in slightly different veins, that the move to electronic delivery of such journals is the most affordable, equitable, and just plain sensible model for publication into the future. ...
Last month’s MLA-bashing controversy, which surfaced here, at Invisible Adjunct, and at Chun the Unavoidable (among other locations), quickly came to circle around the question of “difficulty,” and in particular whether the perceived abstruseness of contemporary literary theory and criticism are ...
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at the MLA,” which documents the many hi-larious paper and session titles contained in this year’s program via the device of a new prize competit...
Anxiety is a phone that doesn’t ring when it’s supposed to.
When asked, via other channels, what twentieth-century theorist I am, I should have known the eventual response:
I’ve spent a number of hours that I’m actually afraid to tally over the last week reading applications for the three jobs that my department is seeking to fill this year, and I must say that nary a one had the panache of Alex Golub’s job letter. He’s got style, he’s got verve, and boy, has he got...
Via the New York Times comes news of the death of Edward Said, who had been fighting leukemia for several years.
I have just discovered something that has completely freaked me out. Ordinarily, I am pretty unfazed by the whole passage-of-time, getting-older, good-lord, what-happened-to-my-early-thirties thing.
Thanks much to Jason for his recent entry rounding up some related thoughts at blogs around these parts and raising some interesting questions about their conjunctions. Some of my recent fretting figures into this round-up, in an ironic fashion: I worried about my sense that I was shouting down a...
The question of “rock-star professors” has resurfaced, in the form of a Stanley Fish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Fish begins by quoting an Illinois state Senator who balked at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s recent star-buying-spree, saying of said high-priced academic h...
I did abysmally on Marcel’s People test. How did you do?
I’m a little flat today, and unlikely to find the inspiration I need for a properly ponderable post. The flatness has something to do with the heat here, which has ratcheted back up to the usual August/September levels of misery, bringing along with it nasty levels of smog and general sinus heada...
Invisible Adjunct reports on Unfogged‘s pitch for a new reality series: “PhD Island.” Quoth Bob:
The conversation about David Weddle’s anti-film theory screed has continued over at the chutry experiment, and Jason and Anne‘s comments, as well as Chuck’s response, have prompted me to think a bit about the role of “theory” in contemporary humanities scholarship and teaching, and whether that r...
I resisted posting on this yesterday, in part because I was so angry I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. I’m still not sure I can muster a sufficiently articulate response, but I feel I have to take a crack at it.
There’s a fascinating conversation going on in two different posts on Invisible Adjunct (post 1 post 2) about the celebrification of academia, and the potential costs of such a star system. IA herself (now that’s an interesting bit of gendering; why do I automatically assume ...
(Crossposted from the Johns Hopkins University Press blog.)
The conclusion to the print edition of Generous Thinking directs readers to the manuscript’s open review site to share thoughts and ideas growing out of the book, in the hope that we can find ways collectively to develop opportunities for rebuilding the relationships between institutions of highe...
In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidden processes of scholarly communication, enabling scholars to treat the process of review less as a mode of gatekeeping than as a formative ...
It’s Open Access Week, and as befits the occasion, I’m starting it this morning by thinking about what we’ve accomplished, what obstacles we’ve found — or even, if I might dare to whisper, created — and what remains to be done in order create full commitment among scholars and researchers to gett...
Oh, this this this:
I’ve been writing a bit about peer review and its potential futures of late, an essay that’s been solicited for a forthcoming edited volume. Needless to say, this is a subject I’ve spent a lot of time considering, between the research I did for Planned Obsolescence, the year-long study I worked o...
Back in the late spring of last year, I participated in a panel discussion on the future of publishing in visual culture studies, as part of the Now! Visual Culture symposium held at NYU. The panel organizers, Marquard Smith and Mark Little, have edited our presentations together into a brief col...
crossposted from MediaCommons:
I’m really happy (if mildly tired) to be writing from Budapest, where (like Cameron) I’m honored to participate in a meeting on the tenth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It was this gathering, ten years ago, that gave a name to the growing sense that the content produced as a ...
A quick note: I had the opportunity to attend the Apple Education event today on behalf of ProfHacker, where I posted my reflections a bit later in the day.
The last talk I gave at MLA 2012 was a keynote for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the text of which is below. I’d love any feedback you might have to offer.
Some months back I received a contract from a Certain University Press for an article that I’ve got forthcoming in what’s going to be a super cool edited volume. I was a little taken aback, on reading the contract, to discover that I was being asked to sign over 100% of my copyright to the press,...
New rule! From this moment forward, in anything claiming to be a “discussion” of open peer review, no one is allowed to refer to the Nature experiment as evidence that open review can’t work, at least not unless you simultaneously demonstrate (a) that you’re aware of at least one experiment in wh...
According to Amazon, at least: today is the day that Planned Obsolescence has been released!
And just to round out what has been a completely insane week, an article reviewing Planned Obsolescence, including an interview with me, is up this morning at Inside Higher Ed. Thanks to Steve Kolowich for a fun dialogue!
The news is starting to make its way out there: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Modern Language Association this July as the Director of Scholarly Communication. In this role, I’ll be leading a new office that will expand upon the existing book publications program, exploring ne...
I’m thinking that I’m going to start a new publishing project around here, based around a cluster of essays that I’ve written for various collections that have never actually gotten published — because the editor lost interest in the project, or because the publisher dropped the book, or because ...
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments, making further discussion of or linking to it unlikely. I’m thus republishing it here, in the interest of having a copy that’s viable into ...
Stuart Shieber posted an interesting and troubling analysis a few days ago of the recommendations of the Chicago Manual of Style with respect to open access publishing. The upshot of these recommendations appears to be “fight it,” or at least “limit the threat it poses to publishers’ ownership of...
Back in 2006, a few months before the release of my first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, I launched a small WordPress-driven site to promote it. The site contained the full introduction and first chapter of the text, plus the introductory bits of t...
My friends at MPublishing have released a new issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, guest edited by the director of the University of Michigan Press, Phil Pochoda, and including extremely insightful essays from a number of key thinkers in contemporary scholarly publishing. Jen Howard rep...
Over the course of last week, a huge number of friends and colleagues of mine posted links and notes on Twitter and around the blogosphere about Mike O’Malley’s post on The Aporetic about crowdsourcing peer review.
Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book and key supporter of MediaCommons, has posted a provocation entitled “Proposing a Taxonomy of Social Reading,” in conjunction with his presentation at the Books in Browsers gathering, which wrapped up yesterday. It’s great to get this...
In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I’m experimenting with moving these things back here again.
I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new Wor...
[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]
What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel was organized and chaired by Eric Zinner, Assistant Director and Editor-In-Chief at New York University Press, and the presentations before mi...
There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values, which he wrote for the Hacking the Academy volume, a crowd-sourced book he and Tom Scheinfeldt ...
From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age of Print. Ted has opened a wiki for the project, through which interested volunteers can help him clean up the text for audio conversion. Ins...
I’ve got that cringing feeling that I haven’t been getting enough work done lately, but I at least have a few links to remind myself otherwise.
A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circles. In case you haven’t seen it:
Yet another month-long absence. At least this time I have a major project to show for it!
Over the course of the last year I’ve been very excitedly following the developments at the University of Michigan Press, as the press became an academic unit housed within the library, and then developed a very forward-looking collaborative strategy called MPublishing, bringing together the stre...
Oh. Hi there! Gee, um… long time no see.
As is being discussed a good bit around the academic blogo-/twittersphere this morning, Jennifer Howard reports in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on a new report soon to be released by a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance, entitled “The Future of Scholarly Journals Pub...
The newest issue of M/C, the Journal of Media and Culture, is out, and it’s focused on a topic near and dear to my heart: the Obsolete. There’s an excellent cluster of articles there, and the editors invite active discussion, as they have a larger series of projects focused on obsolescence in the...
I’m a bit off the grid for the next several days, but wanted quickly to draw your attention to an article by Jeffrey Di Leo published a couple of days ago at Inside Higher Ed, entitled “Against Anonymity”. The article makes the general case that anonymity should be used only sparingly in academic...
Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they h...
Noah Wardrip-Fruin has posted a thoughtful reconsideration of the experience of putting the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, through an open peer review process at Grand Text Auto, meditating on a few surprises that he encountered along the way.
crossposted from MediaCommons:
crossposted from MediaCommons:
I’ve just posted on MediaCommons in order to point to Lisa Spiro’s fantastic post rounding up and reflecting on important developments in the digital humanities in 2008, with particular attention to issues of scholarly communication and open access. This post is the second in a series; the first ...
For all the folks who’ve been asking: CommentPress is back. I also have it on good authority that a major update will be coming soon.
The SPARC Campus-Based Publishing Resource Center has officially launched today, along with the guide to creating campus partnerships around publishing issues that Maria mentioned in her comment. I’m very much looking forward to diving in…
If you’re a Facebook status watcher and a friend of mine, you may have seen the recent update in which I announced that I have a contract. It’s an advance contract for Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, which will, if all goes according to plan, be releas...
WordPress 2.6, which was released just a few days ago, contains expanded support for versioning of blog posts, allowing an author to see all of the revisions made to a particular post, as well as to compare various versions and to revert to some previous historical state.
Things have been a bit quiet around MediaCommons for a while, as we’ve been working behind the scenes on a major platform transformation that should be coming soonish. But there has been a little activity there of late, and in case you were looking the other way, I wanted to bring it to your atte...
My friends over at the Institute for the Future of the Book yesterday announced a new project, in which they’re working with the British Arts Council and Harper Collins to publish an electronic, CommentPress-like edition of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, hoping to produce a conversation in ...
As promised several days back, the proposal for the blob, below the fold. Any and all comments would be enormously appreciated. Further blobbing will follow in the days to come.
The peer review chapter that I’ve mentioned a few times of late is a key element of the big project I’ve been working on since January (or more accurately, given the last couple of months, gearing up to work like crazy on this summer). I’ve said several times that I want to start blogging some pi...
A colleague of mine recently sent me a link to the Summer 2008 issue of Kairos, guest edited by Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Cheryl Ball, entitled “The Manifesto Issue.” The manifesto as a form is near and dear to my heart, and particularly those that have to do with new media composition and publishin...
I’m back at work on the peer review chapter this morning; I started re-reading it yesterday, but was unable to make much sense of what I’d done during the spring. Yesterday, at least, I was still firmly in the scrambled-eggs-for-brains stage, in which I was pretty sure that the sentences that I w...
While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats they allegedly pose to literature may reflect fears about larger societal changes, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that critiques ...
Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal (whose board I’m on) published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just released its first CFP:
Yesterday morning, as part of the new regime, I sat down and did half an hour of uninterrupted, undistracted writing, beginning the process of blocking out the new article I’m working on, focusing on the history and future of peer review. And not a moment too soon, apparently. This morning, via t...
So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The article attempts to look fairly neutrally at the object itself, what it gets right and what it gets wrong, as well as at the responses to the obje...
I’ve just found out that The Anxiety of Obsolescence has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Amazon Kindle: My Writing Machines class spent a fair chunk of the week of its release discussing the Kindle, the things that make it cooler than the Sony Reader (wireless connectivity; rudimentary search and annotations), the things that make it as dumb as if not dumber than the Sony Reader (bon...
My friends at the University of California Press and the California Digital Library project last week launched a beta version of the Mark Twain Project, an astonishing archive bringing together more than 2300 of Twain’s letters, painstakingly edited and catalogued, all searchable, with a robust c...
Apparently this is the week when everything I’ve done for the last four months hits the metaphorical stands: today, the newest issue of Vectors was released; I served as peer-reviewer on a project called “ThoughtMesh” by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich. (My response has also been published.) Thou...
The other thing I’ve been meaning to post about: my friend Bill Tipper has for the last several months been overseeing the rebirth of editorial content at Barnes & Noble online, in the form of the new Barnes & Noble Review, an editorially-independent book review of the sort that has of la...
Late last spring, I attended “New Structures, New Texts,” a very exciting one-day meeting of folks from various academic publishing units, both press-affiliated and library-affiliated, who are all engaged in attempting to think through the problems and opportunities that the digital poses for sch...
As hinted yesterday, I spent part of last week working on a response to some reviews of The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Those reviews (five of them!), and my response, are now up at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, where mine is one of three books-of-the-month. (And I’m happy to find th...
I just got the following email message from a colleague on the far side of the country, with whom I actually haven’t been in contact in at least four or five years:
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication that indicates that, generally, scholars accept the notion of innovative modes of electronic publishing in theory, but remain resistant in a...
A while back, I mentioned the release of the Ithaka report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Ithaka has now partnered with the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library and with the Institute for the Future of the Book to post the report online in CommentPress (wh...
I haven’t gotten to read the full report yet, but the Chronicle’s article today on the release of the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, is extremely promising. The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication a...
The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publication and discussion of a wide range of documents. My article on scholarly publishing, released earlier this spring by MediaCommons, was pu...
Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently announced the launch of a new pre-print server, Nature Precedings, intended to be an open-source, Creative Commons-licensed repository for mat...
Session 4: New Economics
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
Session 2: New “Texts”
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.
Major editorial project due June 1. Approximately 50% of work on project remains ahead of me. I hate deadlines.
About six months ago, I published a lengthy post, both on Planned Obsolescence and on if:book, about the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing. At least some portion of that post was occasioned by Nature‘s experiment with an open peer-review system. That experiment was closed e...
Right before I left for Paris and Vienna, I did an email interview with a writer from Media Life magazine who was working on an article about The Anxiety of Obsolescence. The interview, unsurprisingly, was mostly about the television end of the novel-and-television relationship, but the questions...
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
Hey, this is cool: the Amazon page for The Anxiety of Obsolescence now has “Search Inside” capability. So now, in addition to the bits of text I put up over here, you can also search the rest of the text over there.
(cross-posted from if:book)
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905755/ "photo sharing")[books!](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905755/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). They arrived yesterday, proving that th...
If you live in a market that carries Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, you may be able to catch me flogging The Anxiety of Obsolescence in the coming days. The show should also be available online starting Monday.
So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of every subsequent chapter, and the bibliography and index) and the ability to comment on them. I mentioned this to one of the guys here in N...
In preparation for the release of my book (also available here and here!), which should be out in something like a month, I’ve put some of the text online. I’d love it if you’d check it out — The Anxiety of Obsolescence — not least because the site could use a bit more hard testing. As the front ...
The best news I’ve gotten in a long time: that the index, completed and submitted about an hour ago, is pleasing unto my publishers.
Have I mentioned, in my many rants about electronic scholarly publishing that one of the benefits of a new system such as ElectraPress would be that no one would ever have to build an index again? Searchable text and keyword tagging are the way of the future, man, reader-based tools that let you...
I need help with a bit of phrasing, index-wise. A bit of necessary background: at one point in the book, I discuss at length the various pronouncements of the death of the novel. These are indexed as:
Which is my complete and total inability to maintain focus on the index. I am much too easily distracted.
I begin to suspect that, if anything, I’m too obsessive-compulsive for this job.
Proper names, searchability of.
Am I completely nuts for attempting to do my own index? Have any of you done any indexing? Do you have advice on method?
So the forthcoming book now has a page at B&N.com and Amazon. Which seems to suggest it’s actually going to come into physical being in the world at some point between now and May 30. Which is awesome.
So I spent much of yesterday attempting to compile my meager thoughts about l’affaire Frey into something halfway worthy of a post. After all, this little crisis around the truth value of the memoir is hardly the first such I’ve encountered, but this particular one seems different, somehow, and n...
For some months, I’ve had a project on hold, one that I wish I’d had the time, the energy, the funding, and the general wherewithal to push forward much sooner than I have, but… haven’t. My leave is now coming up, just around the corner, and I’m hoping to come back to this plan, to make it some k...
I got nothing more to say but this. It seems to be coming a few months later than I expected, but it’s on the internets, so it must be real. Right?
In the category of things I failed to blog yesterday: Bill Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, has apparently been forced out by a restructuring of the press’s British parent company, Taylor & Francis.