thanks for not being a zombie

I'm having a hard time composing this entry. It's just a little vignette that may or may not have a point:

I woke up very early again this morning. There will be a brunch starting at 10, but I wanted to get some coffee, so I called L on the cellphone to chat and walked into town to go to Somecrust. When given a choice, I like to avoid the ubiquitous Starbucks and patronize the local places in a town.

Claremont, California is beautiful. And the Claremont College campuses are beautiful. Sprinklers are everywhere, running almost all the time, and it must be very expensive to keep things so green and lush in a part of the country without much rainfall. And housing is not cheap in this city. It makes me wonder about the people who are hired to do the gardening, the landscaping, the cleaning. How much do they make? Where do they live?

As I walked up to Somecrust, I saw a man I had noticed before who walks around the "village" streets sweeping the sidewalks and gutters. I'd seen him get a coffee from Somecrust before, and wondered, because of his mismatched shoes and may layers of clothing, if he's homeless. He doesn't wear a city uniform or have any other marker of civic employment, but there he is, sweeping away. I hung up with L and walked to the door. He was standing right in front of the door to the bakery, blocking the entrance; he was also holding his hand to his ear and mumbling, as if he were talking on a phone.

Oh, I thought, He's making fun of me.

Me: "Good morning. Excuse me."

Him, sort of irritated: "They don't open until 7:00."

Me: "Oh! They're not open yet?"

Him, very sarcastic: "Is it 7:00? Is there a 'Closed' sign on the door?"

I just turned around and walked back to Starbucks, which was open, for a coffee and then found a sidewalk bench and called L back to continue our conversation. I couldn't help but feel like I was just another jackass talking on his cellphone and drinking his Starbucks coffee. That's not me. Or is it?

Posted by at 8:29 AM | Permalink

In the interests of event/entry temporal proximity I'll post a quick note reporting that I just delivered my paper moments ago. It went pretty well, I think, and the turnout was very large. Mine was the third paper, and the first two were absolutely top notch

• Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University College)
  “Covering God’s Ass: Casting New Light on the ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631”
• Matt Brown (University of Iowa)
  “‘God Leaves a Space that You May Write’: Bibliographical Theory, Reception Studies, and Early Modern Devotional Reading”

So of course, I felt like my paper was the ugly duckling of the three.

I'm off to the next panel. More later...

Posted by at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, a very good first day. Woke up at 5:15 local time this morning. Nice, cool weather as I walked around the beautiful campus(es) of the Claremont Colleges. I found out later that I wasn't the only one who thought, mistakenly, that they would be serving us breakfast on campus. So after I gave up on finding food here, I walked into the "village" and had a large cup of coffee, then stopped at a market to get a typically weird George breakfast of milk, a chunk of tofu, a peach, and a raw carrot.

The most-of-the-day trip to the Huntington was great. We had an hour-long tour of the library itself, then we were set free to wander the 130 acres worth of gardens on our own. Yes, I could have gone to an art exhibit or two, or even asked to look at some rare books, I suppose. But it's California and it's beautiful here! I can stay inside and look at art and books in Missouri. Not the same thing, I know.

After getting a shot of espresso at the garden espresso cart (and how many research libraries can brag of such a thing?), I walked with U of Minnesota PhD student Melanie Brown, whom I had just met on the van ride to the library, through the desert garden (more variety of cacti than you could possibly imagine; thanks for the tip, Matt), the Japanese garden, the Shakespeare garden (yeah, I don't know why they call it that, either*), and the Australian garden. Now, much to our surprise and on-again-off-again fear (do they eat people? or just cats?) in the Australian garden we saw a coyote. Later in the afternoon, when I met Kathleen for coffee, she told me that after five years in California she'd never seen a coyote. Me, I'm here for less than 24 hours and one just trots right by.

After coming back to Claremont, I went to see Melanie's panel on "Books in Series," which was very interesting. Melanie's paper had an interesting take on the marketing of the editorial personality of Emanual Haldeman-Luis' "Little Blue Books" A little background info from the Cal State Northridge Libary Special Collections:

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, publisher and writer, made books readily available to the ordinary American reader that were inexpensive, covered an extraordinary variety of subjects, and were easily obtained by mail-order. The Little Blue Books, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, sold for 5 cents. The larger format Big Blue Books sold for 10 cents. An estimated 500 million of these books had sold by 1951 when Haldeman-Julius died.

After the session, I walked down to the Somecrust Bakery to have a cup of coffee with Kathleen. It was an interesting experience to meet someone I'd only known via the Internet, and I felt self-conscious telling people at the conference, "I'm going to have coffee with someone I met on the Internet." And trying to explain, "We both have blogs" didn't help matters. Anyway, we had a great conversation about blogging, technology and literature, academia, and Southern California. As I write this very brief summary of our meeting, I'm reminded of one of L's observations regarding the editing of letters (a subject upon which she is currently writing): we think the story told to us by letters is the whole story, but sometimes the richest exchanges are the ones that happen face-to-face, and those are the very exchanges that are absent from the epistolary record. And so it is with blogging.

Kathleen and I walked back to the campus together, and then I went on to the tail-end of the opening reception tonight, talked a bit with folks, then went to an impromptu, eclectic picnic (fruit, smoked salmon, cheese, chocolate, crackers, and wine) with a variety of folks including my UMKC colleague Jane Greer, Lisa Gitelman (about whom Matt recently blogged, Ellen Garvey, Erin Smith, Pat Crain, the aforementioned Ms. Brown, and myself (and a couple of other people whose names escape me right now).

The picnic, in one of the beautifully landscaped courtyards here on campus, reminded me that SHARP is a very positive conference where even the most accomplished people are generous and friendly.

And as Samuel Pepys was wont to write, "And so to bed."

*Okay, I can guess that the garden features plants mentioned in Shakespeare's plays or poetry, but there was no explanation.

Posted by at 1:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A couple of weeks ago I had written about wanting to buy new music. Yesterday I picked up Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen and, just 'cause I was feeling sassy, a used copy of Whipsmart by Liz Phair. Now, I would have preferred Phair's Exile in Guyville, but they didn't have it.

The store (Rhino Records, no not the record label) also had a large section devoted to contemporary avant garde music, including a 2-disc set of the works of John Oswald, the creative force behind Plunderphonics. (See this review at Pitchforkmedia.) Oswald is described here as "a Toronto-based sound chemist [who] is known for his editing style of 'plunderphonics,' whereby he builds a dense collage of pre-existing recorded material to create jaw-dropping murals ." Now, this kind of thing is intellectually interesting to me, but I'm not going to plunk down the money to buy it. However, if anyone out there would like me to pick up a copy of this for you, just let me know. I'm not sure just how available this release is, given that Oswald was getting sued for copyright infringement before getting sued for copyright infringement was cool.

Posted by at 12:24 AM | Permalink

Also hope to get a cup of coffee with a local blogger at some point.

Posted by at 8:26 AM | Permalink

Well, I don't plan to blog live from session to session here at SHARP, but I'll probably check in now and again. For those most loyal to the g.h.w. experience, a rough agenda for tomorrow Wednesday is attached in the extended entry. You can also consult the whole conference program for yourself.

Posted by at 10:11 PM | Permalink

KC to SLC; SLC to LAX. Supershuttle to Claremont. I should have flown into Ontario airport instead, but I had a nice conversation in the shuttle with a few people who live in the area. Saving time isn't everything. Lots of smog over LA (no surprise). The air looks like dirty bathwater. Here in Claremont, though, it's beautiful. Scripps College has an absolutely gorgeous campus. And ethernet in my dorm room.

But I'm off to get something to eat and to drink something iced and caffeinated. SHARP officially starts tomorrow. I've gone over the program and selected what I want to attend. I'll share with you later tonight, I think.

Posted by at 4:46 PM | Permalink

Tomorrow I leave for the SHARP conference at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where it looks like the weather will be hot, but not humid. I feel pretty good about my paper, in which I position John Wesley's monthly Arminian Magazine (initiated in 1778) as an interesting case study for considering the institutional and social milieu in which religious publications were produced, distributed, and consumed in eighteenth-century England.

Working on this paper has forced me to reconsider some of the key assumptions I was holding regarding the unifying power of print and specifically of periodicals. Benedict Anderson attributes a great deal of this sort of power to newspapers, but the example of Wesley's magazine argues against this assumption. By endorsing and vehemently propagating dissenting opinions, periodicals can fragment readers as much as they might unify. Much work remains for me to consider religious affiliation alongside nationalism. This is a good thing.

Meanwhile, I'm also thinking ahead to the paper I'll be giving at the annual meeting of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Chicago this November. My paper is entitled "Comic Anxiety and Anxious Comedy: Anti-Methodist Satire on Stage, in Print, and in Person."

"Anxiety" is one of those words that everyone seems to be using lately with regard to new media, new technologies, and their impact. It's also used by those who wrote about the impact of print in the eighteenth century and about the reaction to Methodism. But what exactly does the word mean? I'd like to interrogate this term and see if we might complicate what we think we mean by our use of it. And what relationship does it have to laughter?

Among the definitions in The Oxford English Dictionary for "anxious" is the following:

1. a. Troubled or uneasy in mind about some uncertain event; being in painful or disturbing suspense; concerned, solicitous.
   b. Const., of an issue dreaded (obs.); for an issue desired; about a thing or person involved in uncertain issues.

And the OED definition of "anxiety" includes these:

1. The quality or state of being anxious; uneasiness or trouble of mind about some uncertain event; solicitude, concern.
2. Strained or solicitous desire (for or to effect some purpose).

What I find interesting is the mixture of a positive and negative; hope that something will not happen joined perhaps with hope that it will. I've really only just begun to think about this issue, and I would appreciate any recommendations for further reading.

Posted by at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Recently discovered this genre of candy, in which the traditional sweet, hard candy of a lollipop is covered with a spicy chili pepper powder. Very good, but perhaps not for everyone. So far I've tried watermelon and mango.

Posted by at 11:41 AM | Permalink

"My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy ... [T]he creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but ... once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide array of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments" (4).

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Press, 1991. Revised Edition.

Posted by at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Without even necessarily being aware of it, scholars of all stripes have become dependent on databases, but while these databases are not really designed to provide us with the data we need, they don't provide data in the way that we need it. New tools are available for presenting information, but the commercial publishers of most of the databases we use are not putting these tools to good use. This longer-than-I-intended entry looks at one such database and imagines applying one such tool, the treemap, to that database.

One of the most important resources for scholars of the early modern period is the English Short Title Catalogue, a database whose ultimate goal is to provide bibliographic records for all items published in English anywhere in the world (or in any language in England) between 1470 ("the beginnings of print") and 1800. They claim to have already created records for everything published up to 1700. While working on my dissertation, I must have conducted hundreds of searches in the ESTC.

When faced with such a massive number of records, however, it's important that we develop new tools for end users not just to sift and sort through the huge "piles" of information that result but also to be able to step back, figuratively speaking, and have an overview of the piles themselves. Sometimes it's the shape of the pile you're interested in, not the items that make up that pile. Currently*, the ESTC functions are defined by the conventions of print: in response to a search, you get a list of 25 (I think) records per page. If your search returns 1,000 records, you get 40 pages to scroll through; there is no easy way to download all of these records to your own bibliographic database. The ESTC is not unique in providing these sorts of functions; they are common to scholarly databases.

These functions are adequate if all you're trying to do is compile a list, or find a particular item. But it falls far short of what electronic resources are capable of and what researchers might be after. It does not, for example, allow you to contexualize the printed output of one publisher in relation to others. You cannot get a sense of the relative production of printing houses in Bristol, say, versus those in London between the years 1740 and 1760. You cannot easily find out which author has the most records in the database. (It was only after working on my dissertation for two years that I discovered through an outside source that one of the figures I was writing about had more records in the ESTC than any other author; it would have been nice to know this from the beginning.)

It would be very useful if database publishers of resources such as the ESTC could begin to feed the output into some of the information visualization tools that are becoming available. This would change significantly the nature of the work we do and how we think about knowledge, I believe. In the interests of brevity, I'll mention one such tool (a treemap), but I'd be interested in hearing about similar tools if others know of them:

A treemap is "a space-constrained visualization of hierarchical structures." This may sound like an awkward definition, but in practice it means you get an overview of a great deal of information that fits into the confines of your computer screen. The concept was was first conceived by UMD professor Ben Shneiderman as a means of analyzing the contents of a hard drive, and then developed at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab for a variety of uses; Prof. Shneiderman has written a history of the concept and the tools developed. Download a free copy (for noncommercial use) for yourself, if you like.

A good place to see the treemap in action is this visualization of the stockmarket. The map provides you with an overview of the (almost) real-time performance of 500 stocks. Each stock is a rectangle and is a different color, ranging from bright green to bright red. The larger the rectangle, the larger the market cap of the stock; the brighter the green (or red), the more the price has gone up (or down) since a point in time determined by the end user. The rectangles are grouped into market sectors. Mouseover a rectangle and you get a small pop-up window with some basic information; click on the rectangle and you get a menu that will take you to webpages with more information about that stock. It's amazing how much information you have at your disposal in such a small and pretty easily navigable space.

Why not apply this technology to a database like the ESTC? After a search returns 638 items, say, you ask the database to give you a treemap where the items are grouped by publisher, or by year, or by author. The size of the rectangle could be the number of pages (or words) in the work; the color could be the distance between the city of publication and some geographical point of your choosing. You would then be able to spot certain patterns, or unusual individual entries in a way that would be much more cumbersome (or even impossible) with the current list-based results.

If you know of any other such visualization tools that prove useful along these lines, I'd like to know about them.

* Disclaimer: It's been a year since I've used the ESTC,m so it might have changed. The university where I work now does not, unfortunately, subscribe.

Posted by at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

It's July. In the northern hemisphere that usually means it's pretty hot. Here's a quick and easy recipe that doesn't require any cooking:

• 2 16-ounce cans of black beans, drained and rinsed
• 2 medium red bell peppers, cut into thin strips
• one half cup of low-fat vinaigrette
• one half cup of chopped fresh parsley
• one half cup of crumbled feta cheese

Directions: toss well, serve. You might combine this with a grain dish like couscous or with a nice, hearty bread.

Source: Vegetarian 5-ingredient Gourmet

So post your own favorite summertime recipe in your blog and TrackBack to this entry, or put the url in the comments section. Soon we'll have a distributed cookbook.

Posted by at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)