My spring semester ended more or less three weeks ago, in a rush of meetings and grading and packing and etc. We hit the road a few days later, driving ourselves and a carload of stuff to Montreal, where we’re spending the summer. I took a week off to settle in, but then plunged headlong into all...
It’s spring break here at MSU, and never in the history of spring break was a spring break more needed.1 I’ve spent the week digging into book revisions that I’d been dragging my heels on, mostly out of fear that I didn’t know what I was doing. That I had no authoritative position from which to b...
Someone on Mastodon linked to this Cory Doctorow piece on Exxon’s 50-year lie about the recyclability of plastics, saying that they were only surprised how far back the lie went. And it brought to mind a conversation that has haunted me for almost that long.
Wrapping up Madeleine Shaw’s The Greater Good today, a fantastic book that provides a wealth of practical advice for anyone who wants to create a project, an organization, or a company that has as its goal transforming the world. Near the end she describes
We had super overripe bananas, and I had seen a recipe, and so I got it in my head to make a banana cake. I am not a baker, so this is a rare event.
It’s slowly dawned on me that one of the things I do when I’m overwhelmed or stressed or unhappy is tinker with my computer. I’ll suddenly find myself with the urge to install new software or move to a new system for managing my to-dos, or I’ll decide it’s time to learn how to use a static site g...
I joined the faculty of the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University in July 2017. In the five and a half years since we have experienced the gradual uncovering of one of the worst sexual abuse scandals in national history. We’ve had a president and a provost ousted as a result ...
As I sat down to write my annual review narrative, on a Friday afternoon in February, I was struck by the realization – not for the first time in my career – that my work has taken a very strange turn. I sat down expecting to have to write something along the lines of “the administrative parts of...
Almost thirteen (13) years ago, I was president of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Pomona College. As such, I was supposed to give an address to our new initiates during graduation weekend, but a couple of weeks before the event, I discovered that I had irremediably double-booked myself; I was goin...
For several years now, I’ve used reveal.js to build slide decks for my presentations. The primary appeal has been the ability to write new talks in Markdown and push them online with a minimum of overhead. I’m now literalizing that a bit by moving my collected presentations from their prior hosti...
Over the holiday break, I did a lot of work to migrate my 20-year-old blog out of WordPress and into the Jekyll/GitHub configuration you see here. It was both a fun and an instructive process, but it surfaced several ongoing questions for me:
I’m a little late in getting this posted, but I delivered the paper below at MLA 2023 as part of a session entitled “How the Liberal Arts Works,” organized by Julia Mickenberg. It draws on the work I’ve been doing toward (what I sincerely hope will be) the final revision of Leading Generously. To...
Building the new, but trying not to leave the old behind.
Testing out Jekyll and making wayyyy more than minimal mistakes.
You’ve already heard that Elsevier is evil. That they know this much about you — and that they are selling this data not just to our institutions but to god-knows-who-else — is cause for real, material protest. They may not have a crass loud mouthed billionaire spokesbaby but they’re so, so much ...
Spending today tinkering with a combination of ideas that have surfaced in my Mastodon feed over the last several days:
At some point in the last couple of weeks, a link passed through my hcommons.social feed pointing me to Ben Newton’s post on task-tracking in Obsidian. I loooooooove Obsidian. Love it. I keep all of my research notes in it, as well as a wide range of personal notes (e.g., the list of Christmas sh...
This morning, I am officially kicking off the process of revising Leading Generously for final submission. As the discussions there will show, I’ve got a lot of work ahead. My hope is that in this revision I might get a good bit more clear about who this book is for, and about the complexities of...
WP block editor gurus: Is there a way to use styles to create links that use different colors for the link text and the link decoration (i.e., the underline)? I know how to do it using CSS (I think), but styles within the block editor seems to insist that both text and underline have the same col...
Grounded in a model of individual success that rewards white men and the knowledge they have created for centuries, academia promotes competitiveness, exceptionalism, and ownership of history and knowledge-making. We are primed to believe we “find” history in an archive and therefore own it. W...
Some time back, I got sooooooper-interested in the work of IndieWeb and what it might do for connecting blog spaces and social media spaces. Things have quieted down since then, though I’ve been syndicating most posts to the bird site and gathering Webmentions from there.
For anyone who might be looking for a bit more information on the situation at MSU, faculty senator Jack Lipton has put together an excellent video detailing the timeline of events that led us to this point.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so we’ve always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we’ll be forever putting off the world’s demise. Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
Edited to add: Uh, whoops. Try Trentacinque Anni Fa. I am OLD.
I had the pleasure this morning of being part of an excellent townhall on digital American Studies held by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien. My assignment was to think about the critical concerns that DH has surfaced regarding neoliberalism and the contemporary university, my opening ...
I’ve had two ridiculously awesome work events in the last two days, and want to share them with you, because in some ways the excitement I have about them is a bit unexpected, a bit counter-intuitive. And it’s got me rethinking my approach to remote work and team building.
Over the last several months, I’ve regularly bugged folks on the Twitters for suggestions for a new class I’ve been putting together for this semester, called “Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing.”
For the last several years, I’ve had a daily planning routine. While I’d begun that routine in the Moleskine that was always nearby, I moved it onto my computer about a year ago, taking advantage of Obsidian‘s daily notes capabilities. I set up a template for those notes that allowed me to captur...
I’m in the early pages of Jenn Shapland’s gorgeous My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which brings the methods and subjects of literary criticism and biography and memoir together in lyrical and deeply personal ways. At one point, Shapland comments on McCullers’s loving relationships with wome...
Are there skills you developed as an adult that you enjoy enough that you wish you’d picked them up when you were younger?
A few days ago, I had the honor of keynoting the annual meeting of the APLU’s Commission on Economic and Community Engagement. The text of my talk is below.
I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to talk about Generous Thinking with Kai Wortman for the New Books Network.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak as part of a workshop held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). A NECS working group had drafted a Statement on Open Scholarship that was under consideration for adoption by the membership, an...
I’ve been wearing glasses with progressive lenses for a few years now, since it became clear that no form of contact lens-based correction was going to work anymore. (I tried multifocal lenses, and found that the sweet spot for my focus was about eight feet away. I do very little that requires me...
Friends, in support of the revision process for Leading Generously, as well as my broader research into the conditions for creating transformative change within institutions of higher education, I am inviting participation from scholars, librarians, administrators, and academic staff members at a...
I hope that your holidays were restorative and that your 2021 is beginning as well as it can. In addition to spending this morning getting myself rebooted for the upcoming semester, I’m posting the final section of the draft of Leading Generously. I spent a fair bit of time over the break thinkin...
I’m taking a bit of a break from my official job-related duties this week, which is allowing me to think a bit about the path forward for Leading Generously. As this process has unfolded, I’ve come across several keywords that I want to add to the project. I’ve also confirmed my sense that I need...
Week 9 of Leading Generously; just a couple more to go. I hope you’ll send me any stories you’re willing to share.
Part 8 of Leading Generously, already! Thanks to all of you who have liked and retweeted and commented. There are just a few more chapters ahead, and I’m starting to get a sense of my path forward, but I’m really looking forward any thoughts you may have to share, on this or any chapter.
This chapter of Leading Generously contains my first real TK TK TK — I’m not happy with how this section wraps up, in part because I’m not convinced the section goes at all far enough. I’m developing a plan for conducting interviews with folks willing to share their thoughts and stories with me; ...
Part 6 in this early draft of Leading Generously. This puts us a little over halfway through, so it seems a good moment to reiterate: what I most need in order to make this project into the thing it should become is examples. Stories of institutional transformation, both successful and failed, fr...
Here’s part 5. And boy, do I feel this one. Looking forward to any thoughts or stories you’re willing to share. Please feel free to leave them in the comments, or to write me at kfitz at kfitz.info.
This is the fourth in a series of eleven or so posts, opening up my in-progress project, Leading Generously. I’m posting this material at this highly drafty stage in large part because I recognize the inescapably partial nature of my perspective on the kinds of transformative change I’m hoping to...
Well, that was a week. Days of anxiously reloading every news outlet I could, followed by some precious hours of celebration and relief. And now… the fight continues.
This is the second draft chapter of eleven-ish in *Leading Generously. See the overview and the first chapter for the story thus far.*
This is the first chapter of what promises to be eleven in an in-development project, tentatively entitled Leading Generously. For more on why I’m posting this, and the kinds of input I’m hoping for, see Leading Generously. And tune in next Tuesday for more!
This post is a heads-up of sorts; I’ve got a project I’ve been working on for a bit now, and I’m hoping y’all can help with it.
Y’all. I found myself really needing to make some progress on a writing project. In order to do so, I needed to clear both my head and my schedule.
From today’s campus coronavirus update: “News this week of a spike in positive COVID-19 cases in the East Lansing area highlight the importance and urgency of our collective work to prepare for reopening campus this fall.”
That is: unless you are committed to the survival of the people who make up and serve that institution first, foremost, and above all.
Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve spoken on several college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators have been thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission....
The last month has been an utter blur. We traveled for spring break, which is on the early end of things here; we left Michigan in late February for a bit over a week in a quiet resort hotel in Cancun. It was our usual writing vacation: we stayed fairly well holed up and wrote and ate and drank a...
Crossposted from Platypus.
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...
A few conversations in recent days, as well as a bunch of the reading I did during my holiday writing retreat, have led me back to thinking about generosity. One would think I’d have exhausted myself on that concept, but not even close. In the same way that I find myself continually relearning th...
Those of us who labor in academia have a responsibility and a role to play in the transformation of society, but we are not, and should never aspire to be, Comtian ‘sociological priests,’ giving the people formulas of what the new world should look like…. Our job, then, is to work with and for...
This is likely to be a bit of a hike. It’s one of those posts in which some precipitating event has sent me off on a bit of an introspective tail-spin, and sorting out what’s going on in my head and my heart requires putting fingers to keyboard and letting some of the mess out. It’s also the kind...
Words come in and out of common usage, sure, but every once in a while I’m caught up short by repeatedly hearing a word that feels otherwise rare. Lately: “anodyne.” It’s suddenly everywhere, and I’m curious why.
A writer whose work I admire enormously tweeted the other day about the new book they’re working on and the joy they’re taking in it. Reading this tweet left me simultaneously delighted and saddened — delighted because there will soon be more amazing work for me to learn from; saddened because… w...
I am enormously excited to be keynoting Humanities 20/20 at Vanderbilt this Friday, supporting the faculty’s development of a vision for the future of the humanities at the university.
I’ve been thinking this morning about the difference between Planned Obsolescence and Generous Thinking, and why the latter, and the response to it, means so much to me right now. When I was writing Planned Obsolescence, I thought I had answers to big problems, and that I needed to get them in fr...
I turned 52 last week, and am not exactly sure how that happened. But it’s time for a new avatar that looks a bit more like the me I’m becoming than the me I used to be.
I don’t even know what to say about where this summer went. Things got done, but not the things I’d planned.
Before what’s below, I need to say something about the horror unfolding around us in El Paso and Dayton, and too too many other cities of late, though I honestly don’t much know what to say, except that it’s a national shame of the highest order that we have come on some fundamental level to acce...
“The notion that intelligence is a personal endowment or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class, as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they personally have wrought and possess.” John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems
Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Bryan Alexander on his Future Trends Forum. We were primarily focused on Generous Thinking, but by way of having me introduce myself, Bryan asked what I’m working on this year. I mentioned that I’m in the early research phases of what might turn out ...
I’m titling this post “Summer 2019” in part as a way of reminding myself, as firmly as possible, that the summer has begun, in order to get myself focused on a new set of priorities as quickly as possible.
Not the worst view I’ve ever had from a hotel room window.
Here’s how I know it’s almost summer: My dreams for the last nine months have been nothing but stress dreams. I’m at a conference and can’t find my way back to the third floor because the elevators on this side of the hotel only go to floors 53 and above, or sideways, or whatever. I’m in a train ...
Did I seriously spend a full two seconds wondering what kind of vegetable soup comes in a box and what it was doing in my hotel bathroom? (Yes, yes I did.)
Something weird is happening to this tree.
I’m enormously grateful to @dancohen for this most generous review of #GenerousThinking.
Crossposted from the Humanities Commons Team blog.
I’m grateful to have gotten to have such a good conversation with Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Scott Jaschik asked me some great questions about Generous Thinking, and I was happy to answer.
(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...
My dean Chris Long recently invited me to talk about Generous Thinking with him on his podcast, the Liberal Arts Endeavor. It was a great discussion, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity.
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...
It’s launch week for Generous Thinking! The book’s official ship date is tomorrow, and I’ve got several fun things in the pipeline to accompany it.
There’s one week and one day to go before Generous Thinking ships.
Yesterday afternoon, I taught my first new class in almost nine years.
That report? That had me terrified? I’ve been working steadily on it, and while I have a lot to go, I’ve turned the corner into being SUPER EXCITED about where it seems to be leading.
I’m working on a big piece of writing that’s had me a bit paralyzed, both because there seem to be too many unknowns as yet and because the stakes of this particular piece of writing — a report! — are enormously high. Over the last couple of days, though, I’ve started making some progress, which ...
Eeeeeeee!
Johns Hopkins UP’s higher ed catalog:
Adding to Things: a semi-annual reminder to re-read this blog post and its various links. Boy does four-years-ago me sound familiar.
Day 1 of my attempt to return to early-morning focus. It was challenging, but I’m hoping that it might help create some much needed clarity for the day (and days) ahead.
I’ve been having some difficulty getting myself to focus lately. Some of the scatteredness I feel is undoubtedly situational: I have traveled four of the last six weeks, and on the two I haven’t traveled, I’ve been in at least one day-long local meeting, all of which has cumulatively left me feel...
I drove to city hall this afternoon and turned in my absentee ballot. In doing so, I saved $0.80 in postage and paid $1.85 in parking. But considering the crap luck I’ve had with absentee voting in the past (I’m looking at you, 2016), I’m taking no chances.
Hey, there’s a thing! On Amazon! About which I am excited! #generousthinking
Okay, if anybody knows what it is that my calendar says I’m “busy” with on November 28, do let me know.
I’m delighted to be in Minneapolis today and tomorrow for the Politics and Aesthetics of Obsolescence, sponsored by the Moving Image & Media Studies Graduate Group.
I am sliding back and forth between incandescent take-to-the-streets rage and bleak take-to-my-bed despair.
I am attempting to proofread this thing about generosity and the public good today, but there’s something interfering with my concentration. Call it my apoplectic levels of rage. Yesterday was despair-inducing, but like @wynkenhimself, I’ve been sent utterly over the edge by the spinelessness of ...
“What motivates otherwise ordinary people to abandon all pretense of mercy when faced with the abject need for it?” A story that is both horrifying, and horrifyingly familiar. (Heads-up: sexual violence.)
I sat down this afternoon to force myself to write a blog post, as I haven’t been doing much in the way of writing of late, and am feeling a bit cramped because of it.
“Thundering Manichean dumbassery” is among the best phrases I have read in recent days.
On 4 September 2018, 11 national research funding organisation, with the support of the European Commission including the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. cOAlition ...
I have just finished reviewing the copy edits on a forthcoming project and am moved to send a shout-out to the awesome copy editors of the world. It can be painful at moments to see the flaws in what you wrote laid bare, but the process inevitably makes the work better.
Last year, just about this time, Humanities Commons (@humcommons) received its 10,000th member. This morning, we hit 15,000. Come join this growing community and share your work with the world!
How did I miss that my beloved 1Password added 2FA capability over two years ago? Now that iOS 12 is apparently integrating with 1Password — well, I’m excited. I may spend time today cleaning up my 1P and adding 2FA: a real nerd birthday. 🙂
I hope these two are getting the band back together today.
This is the first time in I can’t remember when that I’ve sat in front of a browser refreshing over and over and thinking MOAR NEWS PLS.
One thing I didn’t note in today’s post: the star system has not only distorted the flow of resources through our institutions, but has also deformed our relations with one another by determining what behavior we’ll accept from whom.
Two things that have me thinking this morning: First, the thread from Timothy Burke beginning here:
She was absolutely everything.
Sigh. I am wrestling with a few problems here, which have me a bit stymied. The theme you currently see1 is a child theme of Independent Publisher 2, which is a WordPress.com fork of Independent Publisher, originally developed by Raam Dev. The thing I like about the entire Independent Publisher f...
Imagine a little GIF of a caution sign displaying a man digging. Or a cute note asking you to forgive our dust. There’s a bit of renovation taking place around here, but it doesn’t compare to what’s happening outside my window.
Well, @Twitter has officially broken @Tweetbot, so I’m likely to be around there less. Look for me on micro.blog; I’m @kfitz there, too.
Today started with a bang: two back-to-back meetings over coffee, each of which was filled with possibilities for extending some of the projects I’ve been working on here. I left each meeting profoundly excited, and I don’t think it was just the caffeine.
At some point in the last few weeks I read a blog post about connecting the Aside format in WordPress to micro.blog in a way that includes the date/time as a post title but then suppresses the title from the WP timeline and the RSS feed. Does this ring a bell? (Maybe with @c?)
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Lexington for the Transylvania Seminar: fantastic conversations about the principles and practices of liberal education; great new colleagues; a bunch of amazing meals. But I’m ready to get home now, and ready to get back to work with my @CALMSU colleagues on bu...
This has been a rough week: some serious disappointments and a lot of bureaucratic annoyances. But today I get to participate in a seminar on the history and future of liberal education, and it’s hard to imagine a greater privilege.
It’s been a good-news-bad-news kinda day. I got word of two unsuccessful grant proposals, but I also got amazing comments on them: positive, supportive, enthusiastic, and helpful.
New tools become tenable only if the attendant social organization of labor changes in concert with the development of the tools, if adjustments are made to the ways that labor and expertise are divided and that resources and rewards are distributed. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge
So, trying this again: I posted a few preliminary thoughts this morning about the relationship between sustainability and solidarity. I’d love to hear your ideas, and in particular suggestions for things I ought to be reading.
Word to the wise: Gutenberg, at least at the moment, does not permit writing in Markdown. Nor does it accept incoming Markdown from, say, micro.blog. Ask me how I know.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about sustainability of late. To a significant extent, this thinking has been encouraged by my recent attempts to ensure that a non-profit scholarly network to which I’m deeply committed might be able to thrive. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the ...
For the last week-plus, I’ve had The Bee Gees’ “Nights on Broadway” on repeat in my head. It’s not the worst earworm I’ve ever had, but it did finally drive me to look up the lyrics so I had something more coherent than “Blay menemah (blay menemah) mmhm nights on Broadway…”
From earlier today, thinking about RSS and cultivating community on the decentralized web: Feeds and Gardens.
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.
Earlier today, I did a bit of musing about the decentralized, distributed, and yet radically interconnected future that I hope scholarly communication might have, and a few small steps I’ve been taking in that direction. (Hint: this is one of them.)
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 didn’t whine enough before, apparently, so I’m doing it now.
There are few complaints that make me feel whinier than does insomnia, but there’s at least a little bit of pleasure in the whining, because there are also few complaints that produce more immediate, genuine sympathy. Not being able to sleep is no fun, and everyone who’s been there gets it. It’s ...
Insomnia is the worst. Woke up this morning at 1.52 and could not go back to sleep for anything. Finally got up and made coffee at 4.00. Tried to nap around 6.00, without much success. Am, shall we say, not at my sharpest today.
On Monday, I spent a chunk of the day thinking with smart folks in our Digital Scholarship Lab thinking about the collaborations we might inspire and support. (And playing with modeling clay.)
I’ve spent the day with some smart MSU folks thinking about our Digital Presence and Public Scholarship Initiative and the ways it might help encourage more process-focused, publicly engaged, dialogic scholarly work: the core of the land-grant mission for the 21st century.
I’m experimenting with Webmentions and Semantic Linkbacks, at Chris Aldrich’s suggestion. Theoretically, if you reply to this post on micro.blog, the reply will aggregate to kfitz.info. Assuming I have things properly configured, which is no small assumption.
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 ...
I have this far snuck into all three of my books (those published and those forthcoming) by the back window. I’m not sure why I’m surprised to find that the thing I thought I would write next might not be welcoming me in via the front door. But that idea over there…?
This is what gives me hope for the future of the institution: “These three imperatives—to keep the lessons of our current crisis in front of us, to interrogate and redress all unjust structures, and to create a culture of shared, empathetic leadership—point to a paradigm shift in higher education...
Yesterday, I wrapped up the revisions on Generous Thinking, and I’m finding myself of very mixed minds about where I am today. On the one hand, I am super excited about getting the manuscript into the press’s hands, getting it moving through the process toward the next stage of its public life. T...
After spending 14 of the last 18 days on the road, I am ecstatic to be sitting at the computer in my pajamas, finishing up some last edits on Generous Thinking. I had a great time at #CHCI18, #ELPUB2018, and #DH2019, but omg there’s no place like home.
I went to bed at 8 last night, as I had to get up at 3 for a flight. When I woke up, my watch said 9:30, and I flipped out! Why hadn’t my alarm gone off? I’ve missed my flight! I was all the way up and making the bed before I realized: p.m. In my defense, it was still light out.
I have been quiet. Trying to imagine what I could say that could possibly make any sense whatsoever of the horrors around us. Trying not to start crying for fear that I won’t be able to stop. It’s all just too much.
I hate conclusions.1 Okay, I don’t hate them. But writing them, and feeling like they’re doing anything like the work they need to be doing, is super hard. ↩
After yesterday’s search for the source of Simone Weil’s oft-quoted “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” went a bit Lot-49ish on me, I wondered whether I should just have been satisfied with that “attributed to.” But I’m glad I didn’t let it go, for a couple of reasons.
Among the reading I’ve picked up thanks to suggestions from the most generous readers of the draft of Generous Thinking is a bit of Simone Weil. Alan Jacobs, who pointed me toward her work in a couple of spots, noted in particular that she “seems to have thought that /[attention/] is the primary ...
The return home, post-vacation, presented its usual challenges, not least the fragmentation and scattering of my attention in a dozen directions. I am working on recentering, even as I once again pick up all those neglected obligations.
I have somehow managed to achieve a state of vacation equilibrium that I previously thought mythical: Not a day too short. Not a day too long. Perfectly restful. So glad to be heading home.
Our lake house, not incidentally, came with its own bear.
Heading back home after an amazing two weeks spent writing and reading and staring at the lake. Just the fast reboot I needed to make the transition to summer.
We drove into this place on the northern coast of the Upper Peninsula two weeks ago tomorrow, and there was not a leaf to be found. Over the course of three days this week, everything went green. It’s the edge of summer here now. I so regret not having before and after pictures.
“The Media & Democracy Network aggregates & curates academic research, news, and opinion investigating the close relationship between media, technology, and democracy.” Volunteer to serve as an Editor-at-Large!
I just got informed of a privacy policy update from a service I’ve never heard of. Is GDPR becoming a tactic for scammers?
From Jade E. Davis, Draft of Empathy Manifesto #1: “To be in the shoes of an Other still leaves you with your own feet.”
It’s going to be hard to leave here.
WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES.
Okay, it appears that I’ve managed to get micro.blog posts connected to the aside post type and the micro category at kfitz.info, while ensuring that email subscribers to the blog don’t get these updates filling their inboxes, AMA.
A few immediate issues popped up in my micro experiment: markdown wasn’t enabled on the blog so posts there were, well, in markdown. And I’ve had to add a filter so that email followers don’t these posts. This one is a test to see if I’ve fixed these issues or not.
I’ve gotten to spend the last week-plus in a house on the shore of a lake far from nearly all demands other than revising Generous Thinking. It’s been blissful.
Thanks to @ayjay, I’m testing out micro.blog, linking the “aside” post type here and — if all goes well — eventually to twitter dot com as well. I’ve been working on consolidating my digital presence, and I’m hopeful that this might help.
I am returning, at last, to the thoughts I was exploring in my recent posts on Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (post 1 post 2), and I’m starting to wrestle this morning with the big one: obligation. Thinking about community as a strategic rather than an idea...
And then there are the mornings when I can spend two hours trying to untangle the logic in a single paragraph. I’ll grant that the thing I’m trying to say isn’t, and shouldn’t be, simple. And the paragraph is one of the keys to explaining why this chapter is in the book at all, so it’s important ...
Every so often you come across That Book, the exact thing you need to read, and a lot of the time it’s something that you might not have run into before and that you certainly had no idea you needed to read, and probably wouldn’t have except that more than one person pointed you toward it, and th...
As I noted in my last post, I recently read Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community as a means of thinking a bit more deeply about the ways that Generous Thinking deploys the notion of community. As Joseph’s analysis suggests, the concept is often used as a placeholder for something tha...
Thanks to a recommendation from Danica Savonick, I’ve been reading Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community. Danica pointed me toward it as a corrective for some of the ways my gestures toward community flirted with the romanticized notions Joseph seeks to question, and hard as it is for...
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.
Yesterday morning, I closed comments on the open review of Generous Thinking. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who took the time to read and give me feedback on the project: 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). I have a good bit of insight into what...
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 ...
“In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a ‘true revolution of values.’ He assured us that ‘the stability of the large world hou...
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 ...
Six years ago, I had the privilege of joining the staff of the Modern Language Association as Director of Scholarly Communication. My goal was to help the association and its members explore how developing digital technologies and platforms might affect the ways they produce and share their resea...
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.
“To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve...
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...
“You know, the question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are. We all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone.” Kate Braestrup, in Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
For the last week, I have been less than a page away from finishing a draft of the chapter on reading (see the overview for more on that), but found myself unable to press forward. The reasons are all too evident: it suddenly felt way too precious to be writing about the transformative potential ...
I am wanting desperately to find some still place to regroup, but I have to keep moving: I have to pack and get myself to the airport and go home, where I have to prepare for some beloved guests who will be arriving from the U.K. and all I can think of is the hundreds of ways I need to apologize ...
The text below is a revised version of a talk I gave at the University of Richmond this spring. It’s the first bit of writing toward my very much in-process project, Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good. I suspect that a modified version of it will wind up serving as an introduct...
I have been working — painfully slowly, but nonetheless working — on a new project for something that is showing every sign of turning into a book. I’m still in the phase in which the thing is a bit hard to discuss, as I’m really figuring out what it’s all about on a day-to-day basis. But it fina...
Over the years, I’ve posted a lot here about running, from chronicling my marathon training to pondering my deep ambivalence (if not flat out reluctance) about the act. Like writing here, I’ve stopped and started and stopped again, and issued myself new directives to get going once more.
I have been working for the last year-ish on a new long-form writing project. The project is proceeding slowly, mostly because of time limitations.1 But it is proceeding, which is something I need to remind myself of right now. One thing I’m finding particularly frustrating about ...
I’ve just finished a bit of tinkering around here. I’m hoping, of course, that the desire to tinker might signal an imminent desire to actually write new things that might warrant a refreshed platform. But that, as always, remains to be seen.
I have just had one of those moments in which writing about the reasons I’m having trouble writing the thing I’m trying to write just made the thing I’m trying to write become far more clear. As in previous such instances (c.f. the opening of the authorship chapter in Planned Obsolescence), the p...
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...
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...
The National Endowment for the Humanities is celebrating its 50th anniversary today. I’m joining many scholars, writers, filmmakers, educators, and countless others online today in thinking about the ways that the NEH has supported the work that I do, and my ability to do it.
We cannot normalize women’s pain as acceptable collateral damage. Lili Loofbourow, “Planned Parenthood Saved My Vagina”
Oh, this this this:
Seriously, I’m trying to make sure I’m reading this right. Is John Boehner being forced out of Congress for not shutting the government down enough? Because I would have thought — and bear with me here — that keeping the governing actually happening is one of the things one might like in one’s el...
“[A]t about the 10th, I started feeling as if it was inevitable — that it is going to get us all and there is nothing we could do to stop it.” —“In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another”
Today has been a day filled with making progress on a slew of different writing projects, adding a paragraph to this one, reviewing some comments on that one, thinking about some ancillary materials to go with another. It’s also been filled with email, and report outlining, and note-taking.
Please, please, please, somebody tell me that iTunes 12.3 undoes the certainty with which 12.2 decided that about half of my e-books were #actually audiobooks, no matter how many times I told it otherwise, thereby completely borking my device-syncing process?
A gorgeous cover, and a beautiful video, from an a cappella group at JMU.
I am utterly, utterly crushed by this story. What a way to destroy the inventive spirit not just in this kid, but in so many surrounding him. But some folks are seeking ways to respond:
David Skinner’s fascinating history of the Library of America details both the slow path to overcoming ingrained resistance to the project (including then Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin’s “serious doubts about the very idea of an American canon”) and the ways in which the project was conne...
This is another in a periodic series of updates in which I announce that I’m trying to work my way back into running a bit more regularly once again, and invite you to find me on Runkeeper if you’re doing the same.
I think now the greatest challenge to changing the system from within is changing the system within. Graduate education is the feeder for a kind of strong culture that is far more binding than the gears of bureaucracy are. Make no mistake, the greatest obstacle to a revolution in higher educat...
There are good and careful interpreters, and bad ones. Part of the job of the person who is in love with history is to recognize the difference. Rebecca Onion, “Vox Victorians”
When I was in sixth grade, I decided that I hated the way that folks where I grew up pronounced my first name (think three syllables), so I convinced everyone to call me by a shortened nickname version (think first initial). This was a fine solution, until I discovered at some point in college th...
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.
Don’t let the thunderstorm know where I am.
One of the added responsibilities that has come to me with my new position is serving as managing editor of PMLA. In that capacity, I work with our staff on facilitating the review process, and I work with the journal’s editor and editorial board as they make their selections and discuss other ma...
As a long-time Continental frequent flyer, I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear of the corruption investigation that has apparently brought down the head of United Airlines. Here’s hoping Mr. Munoz might be able to restore confidence in the airline’s management, in more ways than one.
I’m pretty sure that if I were driven by greed academic publishing is not the business I’d go into…. Alan Jacobs, “Academic Publishers and Greed”
This, except with 2+ pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Four hours in the slow cooker, on high. Makes brilliant tacos.
What refugees bring when they run for their lives.
For many years, I lived with a diet Coke addiction. It wasn’t bad in terms of quantity, but it was serious in its regularity: it was hard for me to go a day without one. The cravings that resulted were intense.
I would rather talk about the problems of ethics, value, trust, hierarchy, and labor in academic life than use cultural studies as an alibi, one more time, for the urgency of responding to the institutional pressures of the present that have rendered so many of us bitter or angry or tired or c...
[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.]
There are the things you know you ought to do, that are hard to do, in part because the “ought to” of them is pretty abstract, especially when they are surrounded by so many other pressing, concrete demands. For me, a whole lot of stuff has long fallen into that category, and particularly things ...
Yesterday was a lovely, quiet Saturday. I got up early, went through my morning routine, and then went for a walk in the park. I did laundry, I had lunch, I took a little nap. I spent part of the day with the book I’m currently reading (Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, if you’re curi...
Boone captures something here that I really needed to have drilled into my head: that if I’m going to get over my recent dread w/r/t running, I probably need to (a) know something about how hard the running I’m doing really is (rather than how hard I think it ought to be), and (b) make it way les...
Philosophical writers vested much of their identities and reputations in their printed works, so that counterfeiting, abridgment, translation, and piracy threatened them with far more than merely economic damage. The repute of the individual concerned — and of the knowledge he or she professed...
Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent “contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting questions. Michael S. Roth
The most difficult implication of this idea is the need to outgrow our supposedly Benjaminian habits of reading against the grain — the phrase the functioned as a byword for theoretically informed criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. In its place would appear a reading that s...
I’m contemplating a new writing project, and as I often do in the early stages of such projects, I’m beginning by thinking about the surfaces on which I’m going to do that writing, and the surfaces on which that writing will eventually appear. That sent me off this morning into a bit of tinkering...
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.
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.
Intermittently over the last year, I’ve found myself fumbling around an idea about critical temporalities. That is: ideas keep moving, keep developing, even after you’ve locked them down in print or pixels. You continue developing your own ideas, one hopes, but the others who encounter your ideas...
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...
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
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 honestly don’t know what’s worse: that I never knew these lyrics at all until @Karnythia linked to them in the context of #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, or that I have not been able to shake the mouth-full-of-marbles version I’ve heard since childhood ever since.
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,...
Consider this a plea for help:
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.
One would think, this many years and books and articles into a writing career, that I might have solved the getting-started problem by now. Or if not the getting-started problem, then at least the keeping-going problem. Not so much, though.
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...
[As many of you know, MediaCommons disappeared for a couple of days this week. It’s (almost entirely) back now, but we wanted to explain what happened, and to start rebuilding not just the site but our relationship with our community. Thus this, cross-posted from MediaCommons.]
Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum’s English 668K at the University of Maryland, I have been alerted to the fact that searching for me on JSTOR brings up my very first publication, “Cheese.”
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 ...
I’ve had an on-and-off romance with running for nearly 20 years now. I came to it late; I hated running as a kid, and I avoided it as much as I could in high school. And given that on the one hand I was pretty notably underweight until my mid-20s, and on the other, I grew up in a time and place t...
It’s not easy to write or talk about doubts. The things we have doubts about are often precisely those things that are most important, both to us and to those around us: a relationship, a job, a major life choice. If they weren’t important, our ambivalences and worries wouldn’t reach the level of...
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...
Lately I’ve found myself in one of those periods — perhaps we might refer to it as “my forties” — in which I’m so overwhelmed with the details involved in just keeping up with the most immediate and pressing tasks ahead of me that not only have I not gotten to do any writing, I’ve barely even fou...
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.
This is in part an apology for having ranted and run yesterday; between the little project I’m trying to get launched in the next couple of weeks and a meeting that took up a good chunk of yesterday, I wasn’t able to stay on top of the conversation that my post started for very long.
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 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 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:
I have an idea I’m backing into writing about this morning as I stand on the subway platform, a thing that I’m thinking about as “A Theory of the Information Class,” which attempts to unpack the bizarre merger of Weber and Veblen that so many of us seem to live under today. We operate under a not...
What happened?
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...
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...
I’m having one of those seasons already – one minute, it’s Labor Day, and the next, it’s almost October, and it’s not entirely clear what’s happened in the meantime. I know I had a couple of trips, and gave a bunch of talks, and sat in a ton of meetings, but beyond that, I’m not sure how a month’...
Occupy is back today, celebrating the first anniversary of S17 with Strike Debt, a movement meant to call attention to the unconscionable levels of debt that many Americans are forced to take on, not least in the process of getting an education. There is much anger out there – and much justified ...
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been thinking about the next Big Project. I’ve been circling it for a while, trying to figure out what several of the various things I’ve written recently have to do with one another. And over the last week, I think I’ve at least started to get it; I’m starting to ...
I’ve just gotten back from a trip (about which, as I said on Twitter, I hope to be able to write soon) to find it pretty solidly fall around here. Less weather-wise, though there is the beginning of a little crispness in the mornings and evenings, than in a more intangible sense of atmosphere; my...
Here’s a (rather long) question for the Google Calendar devotees out there:
I find myself in that state again, in which I have a particular writing task — in this case a talk — with a pressing deadline, one that’s pressing enough that I really need to be working on it whenever I have time to write. (Being a talk, its deadline really can’t be blown.)
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 funniest part of yesterday’s post — at least it’s funny to me — is how it got written: on my iPhone, on the subway. I remembered yesterday that, back when I started posting here semi-regularly again in the early summer, I began by jotting down some thoughts in this way, often standing with on...
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...
This is, rather, a post for posting’s sake, a post attempting to get out of the way the things that are keeping me from writing the things I actually want to be writing.
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 nearly missed it. Again.
crossposted from MediaCommons:
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...
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.
A few days back, I tweeted an amusing bit of comment spam I’d received that morning:
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.
A much-beloved aunt and uncle of mine who live not too far away from here, in a lovely suburban split-level they moved into — what? 45 years ago? — are preparing to move to an assisted living facility a bit further away. My uncle being an engineer, once by trade and still by temperament, even thi...
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...
I’ve been prompted, at last, to update this blog’s about page to reflect more information about the book that shares its name, by the appearance this morning of a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. I’m thrilled that this fantastic non-profit magazine, which “combines the great American tr...
I’m at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute Annual Symposium today, which has been fascinating all the way around. Perhaps the most amazing part of the day, however, was a writing workshop with Peter Elbow.
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 ...
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...
One super-depressing (not least for how close to home it hits):
A few weeks ago, as I wrote my last post about balance as not-falling, I very much had yoga on my mind; I’d gone with a friend a few weeks before that to the first class I’d taken in years. (How many years? I just did a search to check; according to this blog, at least, it’s been nearly 5 years s...
This is a post designed to see if I’ve managed to unbreak my RSS feed, such that Google Reader and other modes of subscribing to this blog will once again update. Cross your fingers for me.
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 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.
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:
Hi, my name is Kathleen Fitzpatrick. You may remember me from such conventions as the MLA, and from articles such as hey holy cow Stanley Fish wrote a whole bunch about my book.
It’s 4.25 am in Seattle, and I’m about to head to the airport, on my way home from MLA 2012. It was an amazing convention — I’ve rarely felt more energized about the opportunities ahead for the field, not to mention the amazing people working in it. I’m really thrilled to get to be a part of it a...
We began 2012 yesterday in keeping with tradition, by doing a lot of lying around and recovering. We’d had a late night, which was made doubly late by my downstairs neighbor’s rockin’ party, which rocked on until 3.30 am. So there were naps and movies, and that was more or less the sum of the day.
The elevators in our office building have these little monitors built into them, on which are displayed random tidbits of pseudo-news and other glossy distractions. Because god forbid we should be bored on the ride to the third floor.
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 ...
It wouldn’t be the holidays for me without some kind of emotional crisis, I fear; if it’s not a crisis impelled by too-intense familial contact (the kind in which the internal injunction to JUST SMILE HARDER suddenly fails, the kind which can only be averted by precisely the time alone that no on...
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...
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!
Grant proposals! Reader’s reports. Email. (Oh dear lord, the email.) Letters of recommendation. Conference presentations.
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!
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.
I got my watch as a gift in the fall of 2001. The battery that was in it when I received it lasted a really long time — five years, perhaps. And then it died, as they do, and I had it replaced. And the next one lasted a little less long — perhaps a little over three years. And then it died, just ...
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 ...
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?
After two days at the Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship meeting, I’m back in the office today, and am taking a few minutes to take stock of where I am and what needs to be done.
I started rewatching Sports Night on Netflix this week, and am finding myself amazed, first, at how well the show has held up, not to mention how well Josh Charles and Peter Krause have held up thirteen years later.
Two things I’m noticing about my lovely new MacBook Air (which replaced my 3.5 year old first-generation Air):
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.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have heard me growling a bit over the last week or so about @#$%! SEO blackhats and their @#$%! pharmahack.
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 ...
I’m in the midst of reading Dominick LaCapra’s History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, as I revise my essay on David Foster Wallace, Infinite Summer, and networked reading, and have been finding a lot there that’s helping me complicate some of my claims about identification and...
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...
[crossposted from MediaCommons.]
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 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 ...
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...
Earlier this year, I attended a conference at which I was given a really nice fleece jacket. Really nice.
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.
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...
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.
This is the first promptless morning I’ve spent in a month, and the freedom is almost a bit vertiginous. I sat here for an hour or so starting at the add-new-post window, wondering what on earth to write about.
At last, today’s final prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Yesterday’s prompt:
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...
Today’s prompt:
Today’s — hey, it may be the 27th where I am, but it’s still the 26th according to the server — prompt:
One of the things that I find fascinating just about every time I travel around Europe is the music playing in the background in restaurants, bars, hotels, stores, and so forth. It’s not terribly surprising that a bunch of it is American pop music, of course, but I’m frequently caught off-guard b...
Today’s prompt:
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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Today’s prompt:
Today’s (yay!) prompt:
Prompt the 22nd:
Prompt the 21st:
Prompt the 20th:
Another overdue prompt:
Blah blah behind, catching up, etc. A prompt from a few days back:
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...
Today’s Yesterday’s prompt:
Yesterday’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Yesterday’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Yesterday’s prompt:
I started this post yesterday, hoping to get myself back on schedule, but a visit to some relatives intervened and kept me from finishing it. In any case, yesterday’s prompt:
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...
Behind again, not because I was so horribly busy yesterday (though I was busy enough), but because no matter how much I pondered this question, I wasn’t able to come up with an answer that I found satisfying. Yesterday’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
I’m actually quite pleased that this is a second post for today, because I’d hate to have to contemplate it by itself. Interestingly, though I’ve subscribed to the email list for the reverb10 prompts, and each prompt has dutifully landed in my inbox the night before, this one didn’t arrive; I sea...
I’ve fallen a day behind here, for reasons I’ll write about in a minute. For now, yesterday’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
Today’s prompt:
This I’ll say at the outset: it is far harder for me to come up with one word than it is for me to come up with a thousand.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
I’ve got a bunch of talks and conferences and other things scheduled in the coming weeks:
[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]
One of the first things I’m doing here at NYU, now that classes have started up and things are underway, is giving a talk at the Hemispheric Institute, as part of our celebration of the launch of a new MediaCommons project, The New Everyday (about which more very shortly). Details are on the fly...
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.
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 ...
[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]
Where to begin? I’ve spent the last month getting myself moved across the country and settled into a small studio in New York, where I’m spending a year on sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and as an honorary fellow at NYU’s Humanities ...
REMEDIES Plaintiffs have demonstrated by overwhelming evidence that Proposition 8 violates their due process and equal protection rights and that they will continue to suffer these constitutional violations until state officials cease enforcement of Proposition 8. California is able to issu...
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.]
The Library of Congress has just this morning issued its statement of exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbid the circumvention of DRM and other technological measures intended to prevent access to or copying of digital materials. These exemptions are issued...
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.
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...
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
As the 2009-10 president of Pomona College’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, I was supposed to deliver the address at our commencement weekend initiation ceremony. I accidentally double-booked myself, though, by agreeing to speak at a one-day conference at Dartmouth; somehow, I’d forgotten than the initi...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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...
Finding myself yesterday felled by some nasty bug or another, I wound up spending the day in bed. And I can now say with certainty that the iPad is the best device yet invented for the lying-around-sick day.
The recent flurry of posting around here — not to mention actual progress on my revisions — has meant that I’ve got a couple of things I’ve let slide, one of which is now officially several weeks overdue. Guilt has gotten the better of me, so I’m off to finish it. I’ll be back as soon as my consc...
I’m finishing up the revisions on chapter 2 today, and have been thinking about the section “from text to… something more.” I’ve expanded my thinking about multimodal scholarship a bit, including the addition of these paragraphs:
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...
So I did, after a minor delay (produced by the Apple truck not showing up to the bookstore on time), get my hands on my new iPad. I spent most of day 1 just getting it set up, figuring out which of my iPhone apps I wanted to put on the iPad, what of my media I wanted to have on it, what new iPad-...
So yes, I did pre-order an iPad, or actually pre-reserve one with my college’s bookstore. And I intend to pick it up first thing tomorrow morning. And I absolutely cannot wait.
I’m vastly behind schedule, I’m afraid, but am at last pressing forward with revisions on Planned Obsolescence for the print edition. One of the things that’s been most useful to me in working back through the early parts of the text has been the comments from readers who suggest that I’ve grazed...
That after yesterday’s funk, today has been an aw, shucks kinda day.
I’m deep in a funk this morning, and am having a hard time yanking myself out of it.* So I’ve decided to overcompensate by writing a bit about something that actually is going well: getting my priorities a bit straightened out and getting back to work on my revisions.
I’ve just posted the following announcement at MediaCommons:
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.
Yesterday’s Day of Digital Humanities experience didn’t exactly turn out as I’d hoped, as I found myself utterly without connectivity all day. Not only does the SCMS conference venue not even have exorbitantly priced wi-fi available (which I was planning on forking over for and then complaining b...
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:
Yet another month-long absence. At least this time I have a major project to show for 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 ...
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...
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...
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...
You know how sometimes you’re trying to think of a name or a word and it just won’t come, no matter how hard you try, but later that day while you’re chopping onions or taking a shower you’re all suddenly “Judi Dench! Dude, it was Judi Dench!” out of nowhere? So sometimes when you’re trying to re...
One of the most exciting parts of Planned Obsolescence for me has of course been the open review process we’ve been conducting at MediaCommons; it’s been fantastic getting speedy, focused feedback from scholars already invested in new digital modes of communication. And NYU Press has been extreme...
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...
I’ve just gotten the following email message from my friends at Time Warner Cable:
So up inbetween the droning “ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod” of the last couple of weeks of the semester, I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff going on. First, I’ve gotten the outside reviews (old-school style) of Planned Obsolescence, and I’m really fired up about them, and looking forward to getting in...
There’ve been a few updates on Planned Obsolescence in the last couple of days, most notably that the text is now running in CommentPress 3.1, just released by the Institute for the Future of the Book.
I just want to note that not one of the 46 students I’m teaching this semester pointed out that the percentages I listed on my syllabi, detailing the amount that each assignment would count toward their final grades, don’t add up to 100. In one class, they added up to 105, and in the other, 120. ...
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.
I will begrudgingly admit that I’m intrigued by the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new device, previewed today, which seeks to be an Unnamed Other E-Reader Killer (follow that link and scroll down; apparently the K-word was banned from today’s announcement). There are three things about it that have ...
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…
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.
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.
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.
(cross-posted, with some edits for clarity, from the other Planned Obsolescence)
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 ...
Today’s the day: the project that I’ve been working on for the last year and a half is at last live and open for your reading and commenting pleasure. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy will, if all goes according to plan, come out in print sometime next y...
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’ve been using Things as my task manager for some time now, both on my desktop and on my iPhone, and have absolutely loved it. It’s clean, super-functional, and generally trouble-free.
After I was told last Sunday that it was likely I had picked up H1N1, whether on top of a case of bronchitis or masquerading as a case of bronchitis, I took myself back to bed with my laptop and started emailing.
This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for ...
The semester started here just shy of a week ago, but because my classes fall on Monday and Wednesday, today’s my first real day of teaching. Labor Day. Usually (where “usually” = about 4 out of 10 years) classes here start the day after Labor Day; when they start the week before, we still start ...
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...
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...
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...
Clicking through my Google Reader a few minutes ago, I read a TechCrunch article that Meg had shared, which details the increasingly egregious service failures of AT&T with respect to the iPhone. Some of them you probably already know about: their incomprehensible inability to get MMS and tet...
One of the best things I’ve been asked to do at Pomona College so far was getting to introduce Walter Cronkite before his commencement address a few years ago. He was extraordinarily kind and gentle when I met him, beginning to slow down a bit perhaps, but still brave enough to take on the Bush a...
The following was originally published as a guest post on Infinite Summer.
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 not sure exactly why I find this as funny as I do. The sad thing, however, is that I’m quite sure someone’s going to fall for it.
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...
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.
Because I had a rather amazing exchange about the future of open access publishing via Twitter last night with Brett Bobley (@brettbobley), Dan Cohen (@dancohen), and Steve Ramsay (@sramsay), and unless you were following all three of us, you probably missed it. And I’d love to repost it here, bu...
Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.
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:
I have a few things that I need to accomplish:
The ironies continue to pile up: five years ago today, I was moving office, out of a dank, lonely basement and into my newly renovated smallish (by the building’s standards, which are vastly out of keeping with the rest of the academic universe) but gorgeous second-floor corner office. Almost exa...
Thankfully, other folks are doing a much better job of responding to this horror than I can right now, so I’ll just direct you their way, except to say a quiet thank you for a life of extraordinary courage, and a small prayer of hope that this act of terrorism might be recognized for what it is.
I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.
Soon, at least.
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...
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:
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.
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 began the summer’s work yesterday morning by starting a read-through of the manuscript thus far, and was thrilled to discover that the introduction is not as far off as I thought it was. It needs a bit of tinkering, but a small enough bit that I’m comfortable putting it in the category of “revi...
Today is the last day of what has been alternately a difficult and an exhilarating semester. Honestly, it’s the first semester in I can’t remember how long that I’ve been sorry to see end, the first semester in several years in which I’ve actually felt good about my teaching way more often than I...
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.
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 was poking around the web a little while ago, pondering this blog — why I haven’t been posting much in recent months, wishing I were posting more, thinking about what I’d post if I were to post, and so forth — and found myself fixated on the notion that there’s this thing I’d like to be posting...
cross-posted at MediaCommons
Remember this kid? She, or someone like her, is at it again. Twice in the last two weeks I’ve had my Apple ID “disabled for security reasons,” which happens when someone tries to log into your account with the wrong password three times in a row. Each time, I’ve discovered what’s happened because...
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...
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.
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.
Sneak a peek at what I apparently started thinking seriously about five years ago today. I’m not sure whether I should be amazed by the prescience of that post, or appalled that I haven’t gotten further yet…
Incidentally, I just found out that my proposal for MiT6 was accepted; I’ll hope to see some of you there in April.
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…
Yesterday, it probably goes without saying, was a big day, made so not only by the inauguration but also by the first day of classes of the new semester. And even more so, for me personally, by the long-awaited relaunch of MediaCommons. (We tried really hard to have the site ready to launch at no...
I’m in the midst of a section in the project in which I’m discussing the potential for strategic collaborations within universities around the issue of digital scholarly publishing. Among such collaborations, I point to a number between university presses and university libraries, including those...
I finally got a chance at the very end of the MLA to sit down for coffee with Dave Parry, whom I’d tried but failed to catch up with at several earlier moments of the conference. Among the things we talked about (writing in public, digital scholarly publishing, etc.) was a brief bit of chat about...
1. I am writing my way into new holes far faster than I can do the research and reading necessary to fill them. On the one hand, this is great; I’m clearly making progress on the chapter. And what I need to be doing right now, more than anything else, really is writing, even of the broad strokes,...
How else to put this: I survived the holidays, survived the MLA, rang in the new year. I’m back home now, happily ensconced at my desk, hoping to carve a small dent into the massive pile of stuff that really has to get done before the new semester starts.
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 finding it extremely difficult this year to make the shift out of the fall semester and into everything I need to focus on over the winter break. Probably I should cut myself some slack about this, given that I filed my last grade for the semester at 5.30 this morning. But I’ve had some time ...
I’ve been using DEVONthink for a while now as a means of keeping my research notes organized, and so was happy (much as was Dave) to receive notice today of the public beta of version 2.0 of the software, which I’ve downloaded and begun tinkering with. It’s got a bunch of great new features — not...
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.
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.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/3061888328/ "photo sharing") [the view from here](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/3061888328/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/) R. and I are off o...
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...
It’ll no doubt shock everyone to hear that I’ve been starkly unproductive today. Weirdly unable to focus. Distracted. Nervous.
While you can, you should go do a little self-googling over at Google 2001. It’s mighty amusing to see how much less of a web presence I had back then…
I honestly didn’t mean to disappear for quite this long. I needed a little time, of course, to grieve, to process everything that was going on around me, to take care of things. But the longer I took, the harder it became to figure out what to say next, how to move on. So here’s this, partially j...
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...
Traffic has picked up considerably around here — I assume with folks looking for a reaction.
Answer here. (Be sure to read the source code.)
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.
This completely made my day:
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...
Yesterday was the first day of classes around here, but today’s my first day of teaching. In preparation, I’ve done a major revamp of my teaching site, built a blog for one class and a wiki for the other, and am now just looking forward to getting the fun underway.
@chutry: gah! This year, I’m chairing a panel on the 29th at 1.45pm, which feels like primetime. Last year’s panel was during lunch. #
Watching Gustav bearing down on the fam. Not happy about it. #
@ghw_twits: Thanks! That’s a serious vote of confidence. Now I just have to get it written. #
@ghw_twits: only a little. It is online (http://www.mlajournals.org/loi/pmla — inst. access required), but the accusation still bears out. #
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...
Having to get the car smogged so I can renew my registration for which I am paying a $15 late fee because the DMV didn’t correct my address. # And no, iPhone autocorrect, I did not mean slogged. #
The return from Paris, a little less than a week ago, went fairly well all things considered: all flights on time, all connections made, all bags arrived. Not too bad, all the way around.
@mkirschenbaum @nowviskie: he spent last year with us; we’re really going to miss him. #
From the window of our landing plane, California sure looked… brown. #
Off plane in Houston. How utterly bizarre it is to be surrounded by people speaking English. # I liked being able to tune out most of the chatter around me. My French is good enough for eavesdropping but not for passive bombardment. # @bighandsome: I thought it was a bit crowded in here… #...
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...
@mkirschenbaum: Well, you know, there’s sensitive information in there! I mean, if it fell into just anyone’s hands… #
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!
Why is it that having researched and written something on the order of 70 pages of new prose this summer feels like not having done enough? # Stop the presses! Edwards admits having affair! World obviously such otherwise perfect place that this warrants news cycles! # Honestly, my first th...
Just woke up from the first teaching-panic dream of the season. Thanks, August. # @mkgold: Echoing all the congrats, and also the request to hear about the project! #
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...
@academicdave: I’d follow up @ghw_twits rec with Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, for an argument countering EE’s techno-determinism. #
Not only did I completely rock in my French-telephonic skillz yesterday, but I also managed to repair the wi-fi situation.
The bad news is that our internet connection in the flat crapped out last night.
@calamityjake: Congrats on being done! #
Just before plunging back into my chapter this morning, I took my usual tour of the RSS feeds, and discovered DR’s post about collaborative authorship and its benefits. And just in the nick of time: the section of the chapter that I’m working on today is about the benefits of collaboration and ot...
@halavais: Because you are being held hostage by the baby-industrial complex, man. # @calamityjake: Hope you’re metaphysically alright. Apparently it was practically under Claremont; the college has been txting nonstop… # @bighandsome: I’ll take hurricanes over earthquakes any day. #
R. and I have been rewatching Deadwood, starting from the beginning, over the last few weeks, and I’ve found myself rather astonished by a few things:
Coffee, baguette, updates. Trying to get the morning started. # Realizing that the google-alertedness of my newest post (http://kfitz.info/blog/iphonery/) prolly ought to extend here. Delete! #
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...
Really, really wishing that the folks drilling into the other side of the wall would finish their project already and knock it the hell off. # @2xlp c’est dommage que tu n’est pas ici; on peut aller à l’as du fallafel. Mais bien s?ªr, on a d?©jeun?© il y a huit heures… #
It was like someone flipped a lightswitch.
@wmrandth, thanks for the shout. @lblanken, there are more at http://machines.pomona.edu, but I think not what you’re looking for… # …that being a college-hosted blogging service? # Which now that I think about it, machines is. Except that I’m a very restrictive administrator. Like getting...
One wonders whether the final outcome (please god) of this debacle will get anything like the coverage (so to speak) that its origin did: the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned the fine of $550,000 levied by the FCC against CBS after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the...
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.
Marveling at the omnipresence of this dark knight fella in everybody’s updates. Something happen over there while I was eating a baguette? #
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 was a day last week when I joked with R. that the entirety of the French air force flew over our flat, a few planes at a time, in tight formations. And really, really low. I assumed it was some kind of exercise — and I now think, in fact, that they were practicing for today.
My iPhone 2.0 is working swell, but where’s my MobileMe? I hate the name, but I want the farking update, thx. Don’t tell me I’m up to date. #
What would it take to convince US stationers/businesses/whomever else to abandon our attachment to “letter size” paper and adopt the more aesthetically pleasing A4? Some part of me is resigned to the fact that this is a losing battle, like persuading people that the metric system is not un-Americ...
Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours in a small caf?© a few blocks from here, first doing some reading and then having coffee with a former student. The caf?©’s quite cool — imagine a merger of French bar and college-town co-op coffee house — and felt somehow very much like home to me a...
I’m having one of those brilliant, and altogether too rare, periods in the writing process when everything that I’ve been up to, but didn’t really know on a conscious level that I was up to, has suddenly clarified, and what seemed like random bits of noise suddenly coalesce into message. And I do...
Happy 4th to everybody back there. #
After a couple of weeks of utterly annoying sunshine, it’s finally raining in Paris again — a tremendous relief! #
Good grief but it’s disheartening to look at today’s “five years ago” post and realize that I’m not only still asking many of the same questions, but also still need to look in many of the same places for the answers.
Following the leaders: testing out Friendfeed, which at least so far remains under capacity! (Also, the comment function is nice.) # @kfitz Also, while the 140-character thing sometimes produces something haiku-like, it’s nice to be able to finish my sentence. #
I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.
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...
Someone snuck in during the night and filled my head with rubber cement. Very clever. # Best part of Macworld’s “Empty Your Inbox” advice is keeping mail out in the first place. I’ve been madly unsubscribing for two days. # @chutry: Amen. My response: starting a blog. It was the cutting ed...
I had a positively spectacular work day on Tuesday, one of the first days in years on which I could say that I’d actually managed to accomplish way more than I’d expected. I hoped, of course, that this was the leading edge of a new wave of astonishing productivity, that I’d continue pressing forw...
Would much appreciate it if someone could tell me what good sinuses are supposed to do me. Thx. #
Earlier so-called communications revolutions wrought only partial transformations: the increased emphasis on the image in photography and film; the recovery of orality in telegraphy, telephony, and radio; the creation of mass consciousness through broadcasting. Though they began to challenge w...
Back in the thick of the project — or at least beginning to slog along again. #
I’ve got a million favorite lines, and so I just grabbed for the first one that came to mind. That there won’t be any more has already made the world seem a sadder place.
Testing twhirl. Got nothing but errors yesterday; seems to be working now. Still not sure whether I like it, but it’s good for killing time. #
About to head out for La F?™te de la Musique. I’ll be the one sitting at the cafe drinking a beer. # @bighandsome: Surely you make up for it in purple-and-gold decor? #
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 ...
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...
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 ...
I am completely and totally without focus today. That is all. #
Last night’s BSG (torrent) was really alarming, until Google told me it wasn’t the last episode *ever*, just the last until 1/2009. Sheesh. #
The title of this post may be a trifle overstated,* but I’m nonetheless seething over this. So, yes, I just got my regular old EDGE iPhone in December, and yes, I totally love it. But yes, I saw the announcement of all the groovy new features and super-zippiness of the shiny new 3G version and dr...
Took much of the day off today, to let the synapses cool down a bit. The work’s going well, but it’s exhausting… #
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.
Slowly but surely knocking things off the to-do list and out of the inbox. I only hope I haven’t tempted the busywork demons by saying so. #
I’d completely forgotten that one of the most brilliant parts of working here in Paris (leaving aside, for the moment, the bare fact that I’m working here in Paris) is that everyone who wants to ask me to do something is six to nine timezones away. What this means, in point of practice, is that w...
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...
A brilliant morning of writing and the markets. Now to stay awake for the rest of the afternoon, before the Sunday evening falafel. #
Someday I will not need to relearn the lesson that I’m most productive as a writer when I postpone checking my email until after I’ve gotten well into the morning’s writing session.
has done away with the last outstanding annoyances; now nothing’s in the way of the big project. Of course, that means no excuses. Hmm. # has just answered her first two telephone calls in French, and only butchered the first one. C’est un peu terrifiant! #
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...
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...
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...
After a pretty amazing first night’s sleep, sitting down at the computer with a cup of coffee and getting to work. The summer has begun! #
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...
What am I forgetting? What am I forgetting? What am I forgetting? # Sitting on the plane, waiting for takeoff for Paris. Au revoir, Etats-Unis! #
Recovering from two days of graduation festivities spent in 100-degree heat. Happily, ice-cold beverages are just what I want. #
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; ...
Sitting in a Community Coffee House, trying to finish up the grading. Thanks, local place, for the free wi-fi! # @ghw_twits: Great video, not to mention the excellent LSU product placement! #
Using stupid wi-fi you have to pay for because my mother’s internet is broken. The price one pays to be a good daughter… # All senior grades have been filed. The big class is done. Now: the grad class and the little class. And then, reports, reports, reports. #
@calamityjake: back atcha — good luck with the last stuff there, and the next stuff to follow! #
Just tripped and fell for the second time this year. Wearing the same shoes both times. Damn you, Keen, and your big rubbery toes. #
The most awesome thing about Twittering now is having yet another publishing option that I can fail to update often enough. #
“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”:
@calamityjake: Whoo-hoo, on all counts! # @chutry: Congrats — fantastic news! #
In which I bemoan the absence of posting; In which I gripe about being so busy; In which I broadly hint that all the interesting things are unpublishable; In which I promise a course correction; In which I suggest great things to come.
Very, very happy to be home. That is all. #
@lblanken: So many possibilities! My favorite would be Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 #
What little I managed to sleep last night, I spent dreaming about being exactly where I was, in the room where I was sleeping, in the house that I was in, waiting for the meeting that I spent the day in today. I find that kind of dream exhausting; you spend the night thinking you’re awake, only t...
Flying with a sinus infection is no fun. Just in case you were wondering. # PS: iPhone corrects “incase” to read “invade.” Be careful when authorizing laptop sleeve purchases. # Dare I hope? Could the middle seat really be empty? # I dare! The door is closed! The full breadth of armrest ...
My technologies are suddenly making me very nervous. Yesterday, at the end of a very long and stressful day, I came home and found my laptop open — I was quite convinced I’d closed it before leaving — and Skype running on the screen. And I absolutely know that I had not been running Skype before ...
Two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks. Perhaps if I say it enough, it’ll start to sink in. #
I’m still uncertain about the header; it may change yet, but I’m pretty happy with the rest. Do let me know if you find anything weird. (I mean, things I’ve overlooked, not things you don’t like.)
Contemplating ripping all my CDs and then carting them off to the used record store. When’s the last time I listened to a CD, anyhow? # Obviously tinkering with twitterings on the blog; rilly didn’t mean to produce such spam. #
So the twittery updates have started bugging me; I’m going to test out the daily digest option for a few days, and if that still bugs me, I’ll move to the sidebar option.
Fighting off a technicolor sinus infection. Yum. #
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 ...
Staying home in your pajamas on a Tuesday morning feels like playing hooky, even if you’re doing it in order to read a senior thesis. #
It’s prospie season, round these parts, and the campus is full of admitted students and their families, who are going to various panel discussions, browsing through department fairs, and attending classes. Both of my classes this morning were prospieful — 7 or 8 in Intro to Digital Media Studies,...
I’ve edited my feeds (RSS, RSS2, RDF, and atom) such that posts generated by the Twitter Tools plugin are excluded from my feeds. Let me know if you spot anything odd…
Testing out the code for excluding twitterings imported to my blog from my RSS feed… #
Ikea sez a new sofa may be all I need. If only it were so. # How does one go about thickening one’s skin, exactly? #
Classes went well, faculty meeting was survivable, and now the last minute of office hours is ticking to a close. Wednesday, complete. # Wishing I had something more interesting to report than that I got a good night’s sleep. But really, I feel like a whole new person. #
What I was tinkering with yesterday was Twitter Tools, a plugin for WordPress that connects your blog and your Twitter account, allowing you do a range of things like have your twitterings (I really can’t bring myself to use the word “tweets”) appear in your sidebar, notify Twitter when you post ...
@chutry Maybe we should set up an exchange; you read mine and I’ll read yours. That way they’ll all be new and different! #
Doing a bit of tinkering in the background here, so things may look a bit odd at moments. Carry on.
Of which there are several:
But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.
(Crossposted from MediaCommons.)
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...
I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my...
The good news is that I’ve been writing fairly well, am close to a draft on the new article/chapter, and am also close to a draft of the book/project proposal.
From the Broadsheet, without comment:
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:
I have had one of those days that makes me want to run away and never ever be in charge of anything again.
Week 1 status report:
I had one of those moments earlier this week, in which I suddenly felt as though the fog had lifted and everything I’d been muddling through for the last year or so became clear. I’m really hoping that this clarity isn’t temporary — I’m hoping I’m actually onto something — but I’m extremely excit...
I believe that this may be my most fun semester ever.* My schedule includes, on the English side of my appointment, my Race, Gender, and Science Fiction course, and on the Media Studies side, my Introduction to Digital Media Studies course. And, just for good measure, I’m teaching an overload cou...
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...
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...
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 ...
I spent a big chunk of yesterday (and will be spending a similar chunk of today) conducting a series of interviews via video conferencing, and I’m having one of those, “well, duh” moments: video interviews are different from phone interviews, because you can see the subject. And she can see you.
I’m still processing my responses to yesterday’s Macworld Stevenote and the announcement of the MacBook Air. On the one hand, a super-lightweight portable computer seems to me a great niche for Apple to move into. On the other hand, this one is almost too focused on lightweight portability for me...
I’m off to the eye doctor, foax, which doesn’t bode well for the old productivity today. I’ll be spending part of what remains of the day in a meeting, and the rest of it trying to ignore the increasingly loud ticking of the clock. More later, I hope, when I can see the keyboard again.
Which is less anxiety about the semester, per se, than anxiety about the fact that the break between semesters is all but over, and that I’ve still got an enormous pile of stuff that really needs to be done before the spring gets fully underway. And this spring — yeesh — promises to be nuts: betw...
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 ...
Why is it that, even when I’ve realized that the book I’ve started reading isn’t the text I actually need to be reading — either it doesn’t do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere — I nonetheless feel the need to finish the thi...
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...
Four years ago, I live-blogged the game (let’s count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — fifteen fanatical posts! Mwahahahahaha!) and scared the crap out of my cats in the process of running back and forth from television to co...
I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively r...
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...
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...
1. Man, do I have some greasy fingers.
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.*
I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.
The real beauty part of having teeny tiny little classes, as I’ve always suspected but never really gotten to experience, is that grading goes fast. One can zip through everything in a day or two, and get on with the important business of one’s life. Like, say, finishing that paper you have to gi...
With one exception, every single Christmas card I have received so far this year has been produced by Shutterfly.
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.
… since R. took off for the holidays:
Every semester has an emblematic moment. This semester’s finally arrived today, in the moment when, walking along talking with the dean, I stumbled on a bit of uneven sidewalk and completely face-planted on the pavement.
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...
R. and I are just finishing up a long weekend away, spent in a very low-key way, if not exactly in a very low-key place, mostly holed up in a hotel working. I’ve gotten a good bit done — about two-thirds of my MLA presentation is now written (though it will need revising, no doubt, when that last...
For the last three days, as I’ve faced my computer in my office, I’ve heard this insistent tapping at the windows in front of me; dozens of hornets buzzed outside, looking for ways in. A couple each day succeeded, sending me in search of campus maintenance, as I’m fairly seriously allergic to all...
I am, at the moment, just freaked out enough to feel the need to post this right away, though it’s one of those things that on further reflection may make me wish I’d waited. But…
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...
The only problem with refocusing this blog on my research is that, of late, I’m not doing any, as, well, it’s November. This week, I have a set of project outlines and a set of term paper proposals to comment on, and then a series of small administrative things that need to get written: the copy ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Does this mean that when I’m back in Paris next summer, I can buy an Orange SIM card for the iPhone I’ll have by then and use it natively?
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.
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...
That would be this hint on how to force Apple Mail.app to display messages in plain-text. Even those annoying messages from the assistant who insists on using an image as background for the message. And forcing plain-text also forces re-wrapping of HTML messages with lines that are too long for M...
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...
Here’s where I’ve been, and where I’ll continue to be for a bit yet:
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:
The Chronicle covers the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress this week. Overall, it’s a strong article, though with a pretty unfortunate headline.
From my friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book today comes the launch of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book-in-progress, The Googlization of Everything. Siva, who is the Institute’s first Fellow, is writing this book in public in an attempt, as he says, to open the “black box” of its prod...
I’m utterly flabbergasted by this story, from the afternoon update of the Chronicle of Higher Education:
An odd assortment of things:
Is another three hours in the day, only available for reading and writing. No meetings, no meals, no phone calls, no email. Preferably — and this will no doubt make me sound like even more of a misanthrope than I actually am — no human contact at all. Three hours in which one is somehow protected...
Seriously: forget April.
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...
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...
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 just got an email message from MoveOn.org, with the subject line “Vigil to End the War in Claremont,” and for a few seconds longer than I’d like to admit, I was mightily confused. We have a movie theater now, and several new restaurants, but those were all the developments of which I was aware.
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...
I am completely up to my eyeballs in theories of subjection right now, and am thoroughly enjoying the connections that the reading that I’m doing is helping me to make, but I just want to note, for the record, that I long to be able to read (and, I guess more to the point, comprehend) at a rate s...
Have not posted in part because I don’t want my very own blog to confront me with the knowledge that it’s no longer July. But must suck it up: August is both going to blow, and to blow by…
Among the kinds of texts that we’ve repeatedly noted as potential forms for MediaCommons to explore is what I’ve previously referred to as the “digital casebook,” an evolution of the anthology that allows scholars working on a single text, such as a television series, to produce an organically de...
In which I attempt to figure out whether my computer, or WordPress, or the internet more generally has a problem with the 31st of July. I posted an entry on the MediaCommons blog earlier this morning, but for whatever reason the permalinks to that entry totally fail. And Quicken was very wonky th...
There’s much I’d like to post about, but there’s only been steadfast, nose-to-grindstone work today, in part because I’m feeling that last week running through the hourglass mighty quickly, but in part because I spent the weekend with Harry Potter, both in print and on film. No spoilers here, I s...
I’ve been taking all my research notes in TextMate for a while now, which, as text editors go, is really way more powerful than what I need. What I like about it, though, is the notion of the “project” — a cluster of text docs that you designate as being somehow related. I have this project calle...
I had a great IM chat with Stephanie Booth this morning. I met Stephanie at Blogtalk back in October, and she pinged me today to tell me about an article of hers that’s just gone up, on MySpace and online predator paranoia. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned her attempts to find jou...
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...
The database anthology I’m on the editorial board of is going into a second edition, of sorts — we’re adding a fair number of new texts and cleaning up some issues with the old ones. For this second edition, I’ve produced a very brief essay introducing students to some of the methods used in basi...
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...
I got sucked into a conversation last night over at Unfogged that started out with ogged’s annoyance over what he refers to as the “bitchy whine” at the Washington Post about how Harry Potter basically demonstrates the end of literacy as we know it. Ogged wisely noted that the general claim that ...
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...
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 ...
It astonishes me how frequently I say to myself, I’m going to write an article about x, and then realize that in order to make the argument about x that I really want to make, I must set up a whole series of background issues, such that on or about page 17 I look up and realize that now, finally,...
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 box has been resent, via a much more expensive but apparently trackable commercial carrier, who promises that it will arrive on Monday, July 9, at 11.30 pm. I am fascinated, both by the apparently round-the-clock deliveries they provide and by their precision. Or, is this just their way of ...
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.
1. The box of them (a.k.a. le colis de mystère) is still nowhere to be found. The USPS remains clueless. La Poste no longer acknowledges that there was once a package with the number they’d assigned to it.
It’s gray and rainy here in Paris today, which is actually kind of awesome because it enables me to refrain from feeling guilty that I’m sitting here at the computer, again, rather than being out in the streets wearing fabulous scarves and shopping in open-air markets.
Must post quickly, because I know it won’t last, but: as of 2.43 pm CET today, my email inbox is completely, 100% empty. In fact, so are the inboxes for all four of my accounts. I’ve taken care of everything that had been lingering in there, and I’m entirely on to new business.
One of the speakers at the “New Structures, New Texts” summit in early June was Michael Jensen, the director of web communication for the National Academies, as well as the director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press. His talk was the one that most captured my attention o...
We were down for a few hours in the early a.m., PDT (around 1 p.m. ish here) for some site maintenance, which I got a little carried away with. All seems okay now, but let me know if you encounter any weirdness, okay?
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:
One of the greatest joys of summer, for me, is getting a brief glimpse of that seemingly long-ago period of my life when I used to Read for Fun. Which is something different from having fun while reading; it’s reading utterly divorced from utility, reading something that one intends neither to te...
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 —...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Poor, poor beleaguered experts. How can one possibly survive the onslaught of the unwashed (and uncredentialed) blogospheric masses?
I’m quite behind the times on this (appropriate for mon ?©tat, quand je souffre du d?©calage horaire), but the talk of the lefty blogosphere a couple of weeks ago was the much that was being made of W’s having been spotted drinking what his advisors insisted was a non-alcoholic beer (and, of cour...
In no particular order:
Well, I’m never gonna get it.
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 suddenly find myself with about a dozen things I’d like to write about, which is a remarkable change from the blankness that I’ve experienced when pondering the blog. At least a couple of these things I’m quite behind the curve on, given our recent preparations for travel, and our travel, and o...
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.
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...
So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?
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.
Last night, I have to say, was a heck of a night of television — the second-to-last episode of The Sopranos (EVER, as the trailer for next’s week’s episode informed us, in case we hadn’t been paying attention), followed by the second-to-last episode of the first season of The Tudors. The two epis...
The transition to WordPress has thus far gone fairly well, and what you see is roughly the site you’ll see once I’m done. However, I’ve got one significant problem that’s going to require me to go offline briefly this morning, I think: I originally installed WP via a one-click install in my testi...
mod_rewrite is determined to kill me. Here’s what I managed to figure out: I can use mod_rewrite to rewrite my URLs from ``
And because I didn’t feel like working today: I managed to find a way to export my content from ExpressionEngine and import it into WordPress. And I’ve found a theme I rather like, and futzed with it until I like it even better. And I’ve gotten just about everything working the way I want.
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…
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...
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.
Major editorial project due June 1. Approximately 50% of work on project remains ahead of me. I hate deadlines.
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...
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.”...
Just grading. Classes ended Wednesday, senior grades are due today, and graduation’s in a little over a week. I’ve been completely buried under a big pile of end of semester work for the last several weeks, and I’m just now beginning to see a bit of daylight around the edges. Unfortunately, once ...
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.
I don’t think I know anyone at Virginia Tech. But if any of you are there, I hope you and your colleagues and loved ones are okay.
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...
This is just to say that the guys who are tearing down the building that is directly outside my office window–and, conveniently, directly outside the window of the classroom where I’ll be spending two and a half hours this afternoon–are currently jackhammering all over my last nerve.
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.
Timothy Burke has posted one of the most sensible assessments I’ve seen of the problems with “effects” research, spurred on by the vastly over-reported study recently released suggesting a correlation between time spent in day care and “disruptiveness” in school. Burke extrapolates outward to thi...
Earlier this week, I spent a couple of days on the Jersey shore with the guys from the Institute for the Future of the Book, my MediaCommons co-coordinating editor, Avi Santo, and nine-twelfths of the founding members of the editorial board. We spent all day embroiled in a series of very intense,...
I cannot stop looking at this. There’s something about the flatness of the subjects’ affect (apparently a learned pose, which sinks in sometime around age 4) and something about the monumental changes in the kids and the ever-so-gradual changes in the parents that I find absolutely haunting.
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...
Or, Threatening Other States Not to Follow Our Lead:
Good grief, do I love these women.
What little time I’ve got these days, outside of teaching, preparing to teach, grading, feeling guilty about not grading, and going to meetings, is being spent getting ready for next week’s MediaCommons editorial board meeting. We’re attempting to set the agenda for this meeting in public, on the...
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...
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!
A quick post to say thanks to Chuck for letting me know that the New York Times has finally made its Times Select features free to students and educators with a valid university email address.
So, we were able to get out and take a bit of a walk and have a little lunch, and the walk and the lunch seem to have gone well, not least because I was able to put my finger on exactly what’s had me feeling so stifled and on the cusp of depressed. R.’s illness hasn’t exactly been either of our i...
Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.
I’m teaching my Big Novel class for the second time this semester, having struggled a bit while teaching it the first time during Spring 2004, and the class is proving to me daily what a difference a blog can make. Three years ago, my students wrote weekly reading responses; this year, instead, t...
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.
Henry Jenkins has a new article in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, suggesting the ways that the field of media studies needs to shift in the face of the increasing penetration of the read/write web (the link above should be good for the next few days, after which time I’ll hope that...
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.
Incidentally, one thing that I can write about is MediaCommons, which is making fabulous progress. We’ve migrated the site to a new, much more flexible platform (multi-user WordPress), we’ve got In Media Res going full-bore, with new posts every weekday, and we’ve just announced the founding memb...
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 ...
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...
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’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.
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...
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.
Yes, I’ve drunk the koolaid. But holy crap. That’s all I’m sayin’.
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...
File this under “things I really ought to have read a long time ago, but am just now getting to”: I’ve spent the last few days slowly working my way through The Pleasure of the Text. And I found myself quite astonished by how much there is in this deceptively tiny text, and how elusive it all is.
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.
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.
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...
Amusingly enough, my very last post of 2005 was about the difficulities of beginning a new large-scale project. That project, which I planned on spending my sabbatical with during spring 2006, got somewhat overcome by events, primarily the take-off of planning for MediaCommons. That project, call...
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...
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...
After waking up at 3 this morning, utterly unable to sleep, and after struggling both before and after lunch to take a stupid nap, but finding myself too exhausted, and thus too hopped-up, to doze off, I finally fell asleep for a little while this afternoon.
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...
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.]
“That new haircut really makes you look thin.”
With apologies to the student who wrote it: I know something is wrong with what follows, but I can’t quite make my brain kick up information about what and why.
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’...
Ben has opened a discussion over at if:book about Gore Vidal’s recent BookForum interview, in which, among other things, he laments the death of American readership. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to rant a bit about the presuppositions of this kind of death-discourse, which I’ve gone on at le...
This is supposed to be a relatively slow week, the quiet before the storm: classes end tomorrow, and I won’t have any substantive grading to do until Friday, most likely. Pre-registration is done. Meetings are winding down. I’m supposed to have time to do things like, say, write on this here blog...
[](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.
(crossposted from making MediaCommons: )
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.
From “Agony”:
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 Helsinki Complaints Choir:
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.
Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration.
making MediaCommons is up and rolling, but we really need your help. One of our major benefactors is watching the planning site carefully, using it as a metric to gauge potential future interest and involvement in MediaCommons proper; for that reason, we want to demonstrate a robust level of part...
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...
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 ...
(cross-posted from making MediaCommons)
Senate races in Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania appear to have gone to the Democrats. I am, however, not counting my chickens as yet. I’m still waiting for the after-10-pm-PST-election-day surprise, which has bitten us in the ass too many times in the last decade…
As I mentioned during Flow, the guys at the Institute for the Future of the Book have helped my co-editor Avi Santo and I me create a planning site for MediaCommons. Some of what’s going on there is thinking out loud–Avi and I pondering the ways that MediaCommons will develop. Some of it’s puttin...
[](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...
She’s at it again. I’ve just gotten an email message from tagged.com asking me to confirm my new account with them. I didn’t sign up for any such account. And it’s the same bloody email address this kid has been using, over and over again.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/285023194/ "photo sharing")[squishycow!](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/285023194/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). Some time back, I emailed the Acc...
The person who happened upon The Anxiety of Obsolescence by googling how long to bleed to death lacerated liver has me quite worried.
What I know about music honestly (as George once said here) would not fill the thimble of a small-fingered seamstress. But this is an astonishingly cool visualization, which makes clear something about the relationship of music and math that I’ve always known was there, but never really got. And ...
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.
Greetings from Austin, and the Flow conference. Things here have been fabulous so far — the conference organizers have developed a great new open format, in which brief papers were posted online, roundtable participants are presenting brief statements, and then the conversation runs from there — ...
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...
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
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!”
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 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 ...
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...
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...
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.
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...
JD asked me the other day about my experiences using Sakai, and how I liked it as compared with something like Moodle. This is something I’ve been thinking a fair bit about, not only because Sakai marks my school’s third primary course management system in perhaps four years, but also because I’m...
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.
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.
Thanks to Liz and Lori, I spent a chunk of last night watching a little, tiny version of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
I want to call attention to this for ever so many reasons, not least among them that it’s perhaps the first effective trailer for a book that I’ve ever seen.
Why do things like this only ever happen when you’re late?
Here’s a bit of irony*: Chest pain is a primary symptom of a heart attack. A panic attack can produce chest pain that mimics that of a heart attack. But other kinds of chest pain can produce the symptoms of a panic attack, as you freak out over what their cause could be.
Say you’re quoting a passage from a text, and within that passage, the author uses a parenthetical citation to refer to another text. Do you:
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. ...
This time last week, something on the order of 72 blogs apparently linked here; today, it’s 58. (I’ve also dropped from a nice, solid rank of 36,000ish to well into the 45,000 territory.) Does Technorati know something I don’t know? Am I losing my appeal? Or has their database/algorithm/little ma...
So word is spreading throughout the blogosphere this morning that the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon was produced (actually, that link seems to have disappeared, at least for the moment, perhaps victim of a metafiltering) by a group of filmmakers with a connection to a major Hollywood talent agency. And...
Good lord, but this is depressing.
I just did something that was either absolute genius or pretty much evil. Or maybe just borderline stupid.
You might not have noticed without my pointing it out, but several of the links at right have changed. I now have my very own subdomain for networked teaching projects, machines.pomona.edu, and so I’ve migrated my old projects (including the MarxWiki) to the new space. If you’ve linked to or book...
Someday I will discover the secret to making the first day of class not desperately dull. Alas, I haven’t figured it out yet. The dullness has in part to do with the emphasis on policy-download during that first session, which is simply tedious, any way you slice it. But it also has to do with my...
In his new memoir, “The Discomfort Zone,” Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed…. While some readers will want to give Mr. Franz...
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...
It’s not to be helped or avoided at this point: it’s my birthday. The first one I’ve really dreaded in about… well, in pretty much precisely a decade. Interestingly, it’s not a big round number type birthday, but the one before it, which to my way of thinking is worse, apparently. Turning 29 stan...
Okay, (a): Did you realize that Rocky is, and I shit you not, thirty years old, this year?
On another note: what the New York Times looks like to the Right, courtesy of the Huffington Post. Make sure you roll over the masthead a few times. (Hat tip: Scott.)
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 ...
After a particularly obnoxious argument over a final grade a couple of semesters ago, I decided to dramatically revamp the grading policy that I include in all my syllabi. The dispute made clear to me that certain students (by no means all students, and I’d venture not even the majority of my stu...
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 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...
Or anyone with Walter Kirn’s mailing address. I’ve got a book I’d like to send him.
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...
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...
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.
…and why it matters. Two unrelated links:
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...
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
1. I was awake from approximately 1.30 am to approximately 5.00 am, for no apparent reason. And when the sun rose, and when the construction guys commenced jackhammering outside my bedroom window, I was awake again. And none too happy about it, I might add.
I’m not sure I ever publicly admitted this, but over the last year-plus, while I was contemplating this past spring’s leave and the work that I’d do then, I’d pretty much concluded that my next major project was going to be more creative in scope than scholarly, in no small part because I’d come ...
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...
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:
I’m a day late on this — finishing that draft and other emergencies got in my way — but I want nonetheless to direct your attention to MediaCommons 2: renewed publics, revised pedagogies, posted on if:book by my colleague and collaborator Avi Santo. Avi makes a very compelling case for the kinds ...
A bouncing baby draft, and not a moment too soon.
The article draft nears completion: I’m at 32 pages, with about two pages to go. And then a whole heckuva lot of editing and revision. So lots of work to go, but oh, the bliss of knowing that there will shortly be an object with which I’m working…
…on the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As in degrees.
I’m now 28 pages into an article that I wanted to be around 25 pages long, and I’ve got at least another 5 pages of analysis and conclusion to write before the thing is complete. Annoyingly, the first 20-ish pages of the article hold together pretty darn well — ideas move from one section to the ...
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.
Ben Vershbow has posted a nice round-up of the reaction, over the last couple of days, to Monday’s MediaCommons announcement. There’s also a healthy comment thread on the original post over there. Needless to say, we’re gratified by the generally positive response, and we’re taking very much to h...
(cross-posted from if:book)
There’s been a lot of hubbub about the Pynchon-speaking universe over the last couple of weeks, as Viking/Penguin let it be known that there would be a Big New Novel by the man himself released near the end of this year. I’ve been watching the wild speculation without chiming in, in no small part...
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...
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...
As I’ve mentioned several times of late (so many, in fact, that I’m not going to link; you can check out the “electrapress” category, if you’re interested), I’ve been working with the Institute for the Future of the Book this year on a project that attempts to reimagine the scholarly press as a w...
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...
I had this dream the other night, which I’d almost forgotten, but which came back to me just now for a reason I’m not at all sure of. I’d been drafted to be the accompanist for some musical theater production that I was involved with. How I’d gotten involved, and who was producing the show, I’m n...
Here are some quotes from a pro-abortion person, Miss Caroline Weber, who wrote an article at The Onion online magazine.
Confirmed and ticketed:
I’ve been attending relatively regular Bikram yoga classes since late May, and it occurred to me yesterday that the time might have come to take stock of my practice and reflect on how it’s going.
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.)
Seriously pissed.
Subtitle: Why I Should Not Be Allowed to Listen to the News on the Way Home from the Gym.
Managed this week:
I realized over the weekend that I’ve been struggling for so long with the article I’m writing — or, to be honest, not writing — that it’s (a) now pretty heavily overdue, and (b) threatening to take on the albatross-like status that only things I feel hugely guilty about can take on, a situation ...
(cross-posted from if:book)
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’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…
Under the category of things I’ve been meaning to note for a while: David Weinberger at Many-to-Many brought my attention to PennTags, a project of the UPenn library that allows users not only to collect and tag bookmarks, del.icio.us style, but also to tag links to the library’s catalog data, th...
[](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...
[](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...
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...
A whole fucking lot.
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...
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.
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...
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
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.
What’s the relationship between the Kantian sublime and Freudian sublimation? Is the apparent relationship merely a coincidence of translation? Or is there some deeper connection that I’d never noticed before? It sounds as though sublimation ought to be the process of making sublime, which makes ...
There’s an article that I need to write, one that, in theory at least, I’ve been at work on for some weeks. In reality, however, I never made it beyond the first day of drafting.
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...
90 minutes is much, much longer than 60. It’s pretty rough at that moment, when my yogalates classes would have been wrapping up, to realize that there’s still a third of the class yet to go.
Holy moly. Having settled back in here in Claremont, and having spent the last five days mourning the loss of my beloved yogalates class, I managed to cart myself down to the Bikram place a few blocks from here. And I’m not sure I’m going to be terribly articulate about the class and how it felt ...
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.
We’re headed out of town sometime this afternoon, starting down the road toward SoCal.
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
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...
This is one of the scariest things I’ve read in quite some time.
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...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/146178186/ "photo sharing")[Jazz Fest](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/146178186/) Originally uploaded by [KF](http://www.flickr.com/people/kqf/). I took a few pictures during Jazz Fest ...
Dear President Sexton,
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...
On another note: last night’s Alias contained what I have to call the worst moment of product placement in the history of crass commercialism. It went something like this (names have been elided to avoid spoilerage):
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....
Or, On Not Being a Bruce Springsteen Fan.
What I had intended was a series of daily updates. Of course, I also thought that I was going to use my hotel’s gym several times this weekend, so I clearly had some misunderstandings about how general time management was going to function while in New Orleans. But then, time management issues ar...
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...
Two posts this morning, the first of which makes the second one possible. Post the first:
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…
I’m at USC today, in a room with a bunch of smart folks, thinking about the future of academic publishing. So far, the conversation has been fascinating. I’m taking notes, and will look forward to distilling and discussing them.
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...