thanks for not being a zombie

So, as I've mentioned, I'm gearing up for various grant applications, and I'm also planning on very shortly circulating a book proposal. This very afternoon I'm looking at the current state of what I have, and it looks pretty darned good. I mean, I'd want to read this work, but then I'm not the most objective judge.

Coincidentally, I corresponded today with a grad student who has downloaded my dissertation. How freaky is that!?

Given that my stuff is out there on the web, already (for a fee), I am trying to decide (get to the point, George):

Should I post my book proposal and/or abstract here on my blog? Should I post it on my official homepage? Should I not post it at all?

What are the advantages and disadvantages, the potential drawbacks and vulnerabilities? Please advise.

Posted by at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A beautiful website has been established for the 2005 meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) in Halifax, Nova Scotia to take place July 14-17.

Papers on any aspect of book history and print culture may be proposed. The conference theme "Navigating Texts and Contexts" suggests that examination of the varieties of relationships between texts and contexts would be welcome. In addition, because Halifax is located at one point of what a Canadian historian described as "The North Atlantic Triangle" (Britain, France, and North America), papers on aspects of the book trade in that region would be appropriate.

Paper and session proposals, in either English or French, should be submitted by November 30, 2004. Proposals may be submitted online...

I wish some of you digital/textual studies folks in the blogosphere would start presenting your work at SHARP.

Posted by at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ahem. I've edited my blogroll, dropping a few blogs I don't really read, and adding a bunch more for which I've been using Bloglines. There's a grad student at the University of Missouri-Columbia who blogs, but I can't seem to find her address right now. I plan to add her, too. And pehaps some others who are escaping my memory right now.

That is all. Carry on.

Posted by at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Collaboration with Weez. Game on, indeed. Wanna play?

I got home from school, spent an hour with the Telecaster and the Powerbook, and came up with this: 20040929.mp3 (mp3, 2.6M). The GarageBand files are stuffed at this location (3.4M).

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I don't think most people realize what a radical thing the First Amendment to the American Constitution was when it was first proposed:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (emphasis mine)

I tend to read eighteenth-century American history through the lens of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. This quote from Paula McDowell's "Women and the Business of Print" (Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, ed by Viven Jones. Cambridge, 2000) might help you see why:

Over the period from 1695 o 1774, the English press underwent some of the most important changes in its history. Before 1695, the guild which oversaw the book trade, the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London, held a royal charter granting its membership sole right to print, publish, or traffic in the printed word. Printing was confined to London and the two university towns, there were strict limits on the number of printers, and texts had to be licensed before they could be printed. During the Civil War period, press controls temporarily collapsed; political upheaval and increased literacy rates had contributed to an unprecedented demand for the printed word. In 1662, the Printing or Licensing Act would revive the principles of government censorship, yet the press would never again be as effectively controlled as it had been prior to the 1640s. In 1695, the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse for good, ending pre-publication censorship and limits on the number of master printers. The situation after 1695 was not that of a 'free press'; government and trade restrictions still limited what could be printed and by whom. Nonetheless, the early eighteenth century was a period of anarchic expansion in the print trades. Whereas before 1695 there were only twenty-four legal printers in all of England, by 1795 there were between sixty-five and seventy printing-houses in London alone. (137-138))

Imagine if you had to get permission from the government before you could publish anything (e.g. on your blog). The idea seems ridiculous now, but prior to 1695, that was the norm in the most powerful nation of the English speaking world. This was a kind of dumb phrase, given that England was pretty much the only English speaking nation in the world at this time.

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We went out to see Silver City on Saturday night. This film has received unfairly negative reviews. It's not John Sayles' best work, but it's quite good. Check out Chuck's review from last week. Afterwards, we went to the Plaza Art Fair which was fun--big crowds, good food, good beer--but not that interesting. When I got home, I stayed up late adding some music to a sound file of Weez reading the first stanza of The Goblin Market. Neither one quite works. Weez IM'd me to say she thought something like a carnival organ grinder on crack would be appropriate. Here's where I ran into a limitation of GarageBand: it has a paucity of loops and beats for 3/4 time. (You know, 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3) Experimentation will continue as time allows. This creative collaboration is loads of fun and helps keep me sane. If anyone else wants to play along, all you have to do is ask. (Actually, you don't even need to ask, unless you want the GarageBand files; then I'll send them or post them.)

• Goblin Market 1a (mp3, 1.8M)
• Goblin Market 1b (mp3, 1.6M)

Sunday, it was back to work at the office. It's nice and quiet there on the weekends. Wrestling with the article. Working up towards putting various proposals and applications together. Listening to the cicadas through the open windows. Above is a shot of what my desk looked like right before I left for home. One laptop is mine, and one is the school's. My notes are displayed on the one in back, and the draft of the article is on the one in front. I love a small laptop, but I have a hard time tracking my way through a big piece of writing by looking at a small slice of it on a 12" screen, so I'm trying to expand the 2-D space upon which the article is represented: two laptop screens and an entire (real) desktop. It's easy enough to move the cards around to rearrange chunks of the argument, and I can stand up and get a picture of the whole thing, see what's missing and what's there.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the cards are lined up like the little bits of data in a GarageBand file. Here, take a look at what "Gimme Gimme (Angry Chicken Remix)" looks like visually (warning, big pdf, 430K). I've been trying to figure out why I'm so drawn to the GarageBand interface (no firm conclusions, yet) and I'm trying to mimic its form in writing this article. We'll see.

Posted by at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

What a week! Two very smart people appear in high profile news outlets. First, Chuck, whom I've been friends with for over a decade, is one of the bloggers mentioned in a Guardian article on academic blogging. Then Seth Silberman, with whom I went to grad school, is quoted in a CNN story. I have a feeling the academic conference on Michael Jackson is going to attract criticism from the usual reactionary quarters (haven't looked yet). Seth is no stranger to controversy: when he taught a course on sexuality at the University of Maryland, there were those who were up in arms over the use of the film Showgirls in the classroom.

Posted by at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

"He was angrier than a Georgia chicken in a bread pan without any dough!"

I was inspired by Michael Berube. This is my GarageBand masterpiece (mp3, 3.8M). It's composed entirely of loops provided by the software and stitched together by me. Oh, and there are some sampled vocals by... well, you'll figure it out.

I hereby release this mp3 into the wild with a Creative Commons license. Dump it into your favorite P2P music swapping service. Put it on your mp3 device. Burn it to CD. Tell your friends. Do what you like. If you have GarageBand, too, and you'd like to remix it, send me a self-addressed, stamped CD mailer with a blank CD-R and I'll mail you the files (which are something like 40M, and right now I don't have that kind of server space).

Posted by at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's an update to my previous post on the two panels sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

In an essay entitled "Speech-Manuscript-Print," D. F. McKenzie writes

"...a phrase like 'the impact of print'--however carefully it is qualified--cannot help but imply a major displacement of writing as a form of record. In the same way, too great a preoccupation with writing and printing (as the technologies of literacy) may lead us to forget the superior virtues of speech. After all, we did not stop speaking when we learned to write, nor writing when we learned to print, nor reading, writing or printing when we entered 'the electronic age.' For those who market texts in those forms, some of them may seem mutually exclusive (do we read the book, hear it on tape, or see the film?), but for the speaker, auditor, reader or viewer, the texts tend to work in complementary, not competitive, ways. None surrenders its place entirely; all undergo some adjustment as new forms arrive and new complicities of interest and function emerge" (Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays; ed by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J.; U Mass Press, 2002; 238).

Panel 1: "The Fate of Script in an Age of Print"

Chair: George H. Williams, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Panelists:

Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), "Shifting the boundaries of 'the shift from script to print': the case of engraved lettering."

Katherine Ellison (Emory University), "Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals"

Eve Tavor Bannet (The University of Oklahoma), "Printed epistolary manuals and the rescripting of manuscript culture."

Panel 2: "The Fate of Script in an Age of Print"

Chair: Eleanor F. Shevlin, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Panelists:

Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), "Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnson’s The Rambler"

Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), "Wish You Were Here"

Cheryl Nixon (University of Massachusetts Boston), "Circulating the Law in Manuscript and Print: Chancery Court Cases and Narrative Forms"

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Earlier, I mentioned how easy it was to put a song together using the parts that are included as "sound loops" with Apple's GarageBand. In other words, you don't need to know how to play a "real" instrument, in the traditional sense.

For your listening pleasure: "Gimme Gimme" (mp3, 1.4M), which I made completely from prefab parts. (See if you can identify where the loops repeat themselves: drums, guitars, cymbals -- each is a separate loop.)

There's a longer entry in here somewhere about creativity, composition, and working with chunks of information, but I don't have time to write it now. Hopefully later. The 3X5 cards I'm laying out on my desk as I revise this article remind me of the little round-edged rectangles GarageBand uses to represent the different components of a song. I'm trying to work out some useful parallels. I love reworking these songs. I hate rewriting. I'm hoping to achieve some kind of crossover effect, however.

Posted by at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm working on a lot of things at one time, and the stress is at just about the right level. Too much stress: bad. Too little stress: arguably bad, too. I think my low-grade mania is the result of this stress. Either that or all the allergy medicine I'm taking. Not even counting the personal stuff, here's what's going on:

• I've organized my ASECS panel, so that's done, but I'm hoping to put another one together, which will be chaired by someone other than me.
• I found myself a roommate for ASECS so the hotel costs will be half what they would ordinarily be. I need to go ahead and make the reservations just to get that task out of the way (or maybe that's the allergy medicine talking).
• For the first time ever, I've been invited to give a talk. Actually, two of them.
• I've been asked to submit a paper to a special journal issue on Charles Wesley.
• I need to get cracking on editing a special issue of another journal on the eighteenth-century English sermon.
• I considered, then turned down, a request to organize next year's meeting of MWASECS. I just can't afford to take that kind of time until after I have tenure.
• About a half-dozen proposals and/or applications are due in the next two weeks. Stuff I'm excited about. Stuff I don't want to screw up. Stuff that will take me to England next year and/or buy me a semester or two away from teaching so that I can work on the book.
• I'm revising an article for a journal. I'm late. That's okay, right? I mean, turning in a revised article beyond the deadline is not a fatal flaw, is it?
• I need to finish my book proposal and circulate it among potential publishers.
• Classes are going well (I'm very happy with both of them), but I have a stack of grading I need to take care of.
• I have two students doing independent study with me this semester, and I really need to engage with them more actively than I have so far.
• I'm also involved in the UMKC Honors Program as their first faculty fellow, and that taking a lot of ideas out for a spin to see how they handle. Hopefully I won't crash.

Here's what I need from you: What advice do those of you who have had some success at academic grant writing have for me? And are any of you willing to read over something I write and give me your feedback?

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The SHARP panel at ASECS 2005 (my original CFP here):

Chair: George Williams

Panelists

Giles Bergel (Queen Mary, University of London), "Shifting the boundaries of 'the shift from script to print': the case of engraved lettering."

Katherine Ellison (Emory University), "Tracing the Way of an Eagle in the Ayre: Script and Print in Seventeenth-Century Cryptography Manuals"

Betty Schellenberg (Simon Fraser University), "Vicarious Reading, Manuscript Culture, and Johnson’s The Rambler"

Rory Wallace (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design), "Wish You Were Here"

I received enough good proposals for a second panel on the topic, and I've asked the conference organizers if they could accommodate an additional panel. I'll keep you posted...

Posted by at 7:21 PM | Permalink

No, seriously! Parrish has the full story and great pix.

Posted by at 6:54 PM | Permalink

I'm not a rhetorician by trade, but I play one on the Internet. Making my work public, I share with you an email I sent to my class on the three rhetorical appeals. If you'd rather read someone who really knows what he's talking about, go here.

On Thursday, we'll start discussing the three rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. So I'm going to do a quick explanation here and we'll talk about it in more detail in class. When a speaker or writer (referred to from now on as a rhetor) is trying to persuade the audience, the rhetor will make use of various persuasive strategies:

-=ethos=-----

"Ethos" is used to describe the audience's perception of the rhetor's credibility or authority. The audience asks themselves, "What does this person know about this topic?" and "Why should I trust this person?"

There are two kinds of ethos: extrinsic (outside what you have to say) and instrinsic (inside what you have to say).

Examples of extrinsic ethos would be as follows: If you are a successful professional basketball player talking about basketball to other pro athletes, then your ethos is strong with your audience even before you open your mouth or take pen to paper. Your audience assumes you are knowledgable about your subject because of your experience. If you are a baseball player talking about basketball, instead, then your extrinsic ethos is not as strong because you haven't been played pro basketball, but you're still a professional athlete and know something about that kind of life. If you are a college professor of English, then your extrinsic ethos is likely to be pretty weak with your audience. Change your audience around, however, and the ethos of each hypothetical rhetor might change.

Examples of instrinsic ethos would be as follows: Let's say you're that professional basketball player mentioned above, and you start to address your audience and suddenly you stutter and mumble, you get all the rules of basketball wrong ("there's a three-point line?"), and you mispronounce other players' names, and you reveal your ignorance of the history of basketball by mentioning teams that never existed. Suddenly your overall ethos takes a nose-dive with your audience, and you become less persuasive. At the other extreme, let's say you're that English professor, and you speak with confidence and reveal that you know a great deal not only about the intricacies of basketball, but also about individual players' records, and the history and origins of the sport. Your overall ethos, which was weak to begin with because the audience was skeptical of what an English professor would know about their sport, suddenly gets stronger. It gets stronger because your intrinsic ethos goes up in the eyes of your audience.

The use of ethos is called an "ethical appeal." Note that this is very different from our usual understanding of the word "ethical."

-=pathos=-----

"Pathos" is used to describe the rhetor's attempt to appeal to (in the words of the course packet) "an audience's sense of identity, their self-interest, and their emotions."

If the rhetor can create a common sense of identity with their audience, then the rhetor is using a pathetic appeal, or a rhetorical appeal using pathos ("pathetic" here means something different than our usual understanding of the word). So if that college English professor above mentions having played basketball in high school and convinces the audience that she or he was pretty good, then not only does that fact strengthen the rhetor's ethos, it also makes a pathetic appeal.

"Pathos" most often refers to an attempt to engage an audience's emotions. Think about the different emotions people are capable of feeling: they include love, pity, sorrow, affection, anger, fear, greed, lust, and hatred.

Let's say a rhetor is trying to convince an audience to donate money to a hurricane relief fund. The rhetor can make pathetic appeals to an audience's feelings of love, pity, and fear. (And the extent to which any of these emotions will be successfully engaged will vary from audience to audience.) "Love" will be invoked if the audience can be made to believe in their fundamental connections to other human beings. "Pity" will be felt if the plight of the homeless hurricane victim can be made very vivid to the audience. And "fear" might work if the audience can be made to imagine what they would feel like in that homeless victim's place. If the rhetor works all of these things together properly (and also doesn't screw up ethos and logos), then the audience is more likely to be persuaded.

-=logos=-----

"Logos" is the use of logic to persuade your audience. There are various lines of reasoning that we will discuss (one of them you've already learned in some detail: definition). As the workbook puts it, "A logical argument usually convinces its audience because of the perceived merit and reasonableness of the claims and proof offered in support of the overall thesis, rather than because of the emotions it produces in the audience (pathos) or because of the status or credentials of the speaker (ethos)."

I'm not going to say more about logos right now because we will address it in detail on Tuesday.

-=putting them together=----

Seldom is any one statment an example of only one appeal.

"As your doctor, I have to tell you that if you don't stop smoking, you're going to die."

This statement combines all three appeals. (One of the lines of argument we'll address in future readings and discussion is called "cause and consequence")

-=don't forget=----

Always, always, always think about your audience. When thinking about how best to persuade your audience, ask yourself these kinds of questions: What are their values? What do they believe in already? What is their existing opinion of my topic? What are they likely to find persuasive?

What might work for one audience might not work for another.

==============

Putting these into practice...

Here's a local issue that we'll use to test drive these appeals: according to BlogKC, "The Star reports that KC City Councilman Chuch Eddy is proposing a unique metro-wide ban on smoking in public places and most work places."

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/9699506.htm?1c
(Any time you are prompted to log in to a site where you haven't already registered as a reader, go to http://www.bugmenot.com and get some generic log-in information.)

Between Tuesday and Thursday,

1. decide whether you want to argue for or against this proposal,

2. pick one of these audiences: a) a girl scout troop, b) a local chapter of the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), or c) umkc students,

3. the above questions about your audience (you should already know something about umkc students; you might try to visit the official websites of the other two groups),

4. be prepared to explain what kind of appeals using ethos, pathos, and logos would be most likely to persuade your audience to accept your point of view. I'm not asking you which audience would find ethos most persuasive, which pathos, and which logos. Instead, I'm asking you to think about what kind of ethos would be most persuasive to your audience, what kind of pathos, and what kind of logos. Your rhetorical strategy is likely to be different depending on your audience.

You do not have to prepare anything to turn in on Thursday, but you should be prepared for discussion.

Questions? Let me know.

Posted by at 6:00 PM | Permalink

Like Randy, when I first started up GarageBand, I had no idea how to work it.

Notice how the sides of the GarageBand window are simulated wood (click above for a slightly larger image). This is an interesting (or is it ironic?) gesture towards the current vogue for vintage, analog equipment. The White Stripes, for instance, record only on vintage, '60s-era equipment.

One of the things I really like about this program (and I'm sure there are other programs that work the same way) is how it turns one sensory experience, sound, into another sensory experience, vision. All the parts of a song are laid out in front of you and they scroll from right to left as the song progresses. If the song is short enough or the screen wide enough, you can view the whole song as a static object, like a short text, from start to finish. You're not forced to listen your way from start to finish in order to get a sense of the whole. It makes understanding the structure of songs much easier.

I need something like this for the rest of my life. When you're right there in the middle of your life, you're not sure what's coming next and you can't remember all the details of what went before. And it's hard to pay attention to more than one track at a time. With a real iLife program, that would no longer be a problem. You could step back and say, "Aha, this class needs a bit more reverb, but the other one's doing fine. I'm going to turn down the volume on this committee assignment for a little while so it doesn't distract from the research track. Up ahead we can see where the tenure decision is made, so let's jump ahead and see what's going on there. Then we'll come back to this part and make sure everything leads up to where it's supposed to."

Well... read on for a more prosaic explanation of GarageBand as it actually works:

As with most of Apple's iLife software, you don't even need to read the instructions to start using it. (The advanced features are another story, and I'm not certain this suite of programs is as user-friendly as it could be.) If you click on enough buttons and menus, eventually it starts to make sense. GarageBand mimics a mixing board in a recording studio, and you can add as many tracks as your computer can handle (warning: it's a real processor hog). So you can create a track for a guitar, one for a bass, one for drums, one for vocals, and one for keyboards. Then you have a choice of using either a "real instrument" or a "software instrument" in each track. You can record each track individually, and soon enough, you have a song with all your instruments playing together.

If you choose "real instrument," then you just plug directly into the computer and start to play. Although my percussion has been computer generated, the guitar parts in the 3 tracks I've posted have come from my Telecaster (tracks one, two, and three). Of course, you can also specify what you want your "real instrument" to sound like when it's recorded on the computer. So on some tracks I adjusted the settings to make the guitar really crunchy and mean (track 3), and on other tracks, I made a more dreamy kind of sound (track one). I think the software designers tried to emulate common amplifiers and common guitar effects pedals so that if you were already familiar with the settings on non-software equipment, you could make GarageBand work the way you want it to.

Pretty much anything that can be plugged into an amplifier can be plugged into your Apple and recorded using GarageBand. (You'll need one of these, which costs between $20 and $30.)

But you don't even need "real instruments," because the program can emulate just about anything, it seems like. You can use a virtual keyboard on screen to play notes, which is not easy when you're using a mouse (or worse, a touchpad). Or you can open up an interface that allows you to construct your music note by note. Alternately, you can pick from a large number of "loops," short sound files of instruments like percussion, bass, drums, piano, and strings that, when repeated in a loop, make up part of your song. You click on a loop, drag it to the place you want it to appear in the song and drop it. If you want it to repeat, you just click on the end of the loop and stretch it out for as many beats as you like. Use these loops exclusively, however, and I think your music would sound pretty canned.

There are lots of other bits and pieces, but I don't know what they are, yet. This program can clearly do more than what I've been using it for. For more info, check out MacJams, an online GarageBand community.

Posted by at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's something fun to start your week (MP3, 1.88M).

In other news, ragweed is just about killing me.

Posted by at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So why can't I search the catalogue of the British Library this weekend? wtf? I've got work to do! If you claim to be the repository of the "World's Knowledge," shouldn't you keep your site up and running?

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink

Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I've just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:

Dear Colleagues:

I have a couple of questions I'm hoping you might help me with.

First, there's a microfiche series I can't seem to get my hands on here in Kansas City. Published by IDC, it's called "The People Called Methodists." I've looked at parts of it in Emory University's Pitts Theology Library, but I'd like to be able to request it via Inter-Library Loan to my university's library. The database Worldcat does not list the materials that I know exist at Pitts, so I'm assuming that these materials are available elsewhere but not listed on Worldcat. I am hoping that the collective power of C18-L might inform me of hidden caches of this series, or advise me on how to locate said caches. Are there other databases I should consult? Emails to IDC have gone unanswered.

Second, I'm trying to get a sense of how much eighteenth-century British magazine publishing was devoted to religious topics. I spent this afternoon combing through part 5.II (Prose > Periodical publications) of volume 2 the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature looking for magazines with a decidedly religious orientation. I've included the results below. Potential problems with this approach include overlooking those religious periodicals that did not have a title signalling the nature of their content. Is there a standard scholarly treatment of periodical publishing in eighteenth-century Britain (religious or otherwise)? Are you aware of British religious magazines from the period other than the ones listed below?

Thank you in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide.

Sincerely,

George H. Williams
==================================
Assistant Professor of English
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Kansas City, MO 64110
http://georgehwilliams.net
williamsgh@umkc.edu
816.235.2559
IM (AOL/MSN): ghwumkc
==================================

NCBEL (columns in parentheses)

-={II. Periodical Publications}=-

={D. Magazines, Miscellanies, Learned Journals and Reviews Published in London 1660-1800.-}=

The new magazine or knowledge: concerning heaven and hell, and the universal world of nature. Vol 1, April 1760-Dec 1760. (1303)

The Christian's magazine: or a treasury of divine knowledge. Ed W. Dodd. No 1, May 1760-vol 8, 1767. (1303)

The spiritual magazine: or the Christian's grand treasure. 1760-. Merged with the Gospel magazine, 1784. (1303)

The Protestant's Magazine. No 1, Feb 1761. (1303)

The gospel magazine: or treasury of divine knowledge. Ed A.M. Toplady. No 1, Jan 1774-Jan 1784. Merged with Spiritual Magazine. (1305)

The cathedral magazine: or divine harmony. No 1, April 1774-no 12, March 1776-? (1305)

The Arminian magazine: consisting of extracts and original translations on universal redemptions. Ed J. Wesley et al. No 1, Jan 1778-. Continued as Methodist magazine, Jan 1798-. (1305)

The gospel magazine and moral miscellany. No 1, Jan 1779-? (1306)

The Protestant magazine. No 1, March 1780-no 6, Dec 1780-no 3, 1783. (1306)

The new Christian's magazine: being an universal repository of divine knowledge. No 1, Oct 1782-no 50 [1786] (1307)

The new spiritual magazine: or evangelical treasure of experimental religion. No 1, July 1783-no 60, Dec 1785. (1307)

The theological miscellany, and review of books on religious subject. Ed C. de Coetlogon. No 1, Jan 1784-Dec 1789. (1307)

The Christian's magazine: or gospel repository. Ed J. Priestley. 1790-2. (1309)

The new magazine of knowledge concerning heaven and hell and the universal world of nature. Vol 1 no 1, April 1790-vol 2 no 20, Oct 1791. (1309)

The Christian miscellany: or religious and moral magazine. No 1, Jan 1792-no 8, Aug 1792. (1309)

The evangelical magazine. Ed T. Williams, M. Wilks. No 1, July 1793- (1310)

The Protestant dissenter's magazine. 1794-9. (1310)

The gospel magazine and theological review. Ed W. Row. 1796-. (1311)

The Methodist magazine. 1796-. (1311)

The general Baptist magazine. Ed D. Taylor. 1798-1800. (1312)

={I. Periodical publications: English provinces}=

{(3) Magazines and miscellanies}

Birmingham: The theological repository: consisting of original essays, hints, queries etc, by J. Priestley. Vol 1 1769-vol 6 1788. Vol 1 rptd 1773; vol 2 1770; vols 1-2 1795; vol 3 1795. (1349)

Bristol: Zion's trumpet: a theological miscellany, by a society of gentlemen. June 1798-. (1349)

Leeds: The Methodist monitor: or moral and religious repository. Ed A. Kilham. Vol 1 no 1 [1796]-vol 2 no 18 [1797] (1350)

Leeds: The Methodist Magazine: or evangelical repository. 1798. (1350)

Newcastle: The evangelical magazine: or Christian Library. No 1 3 Aug 1780-78[sic] (1351)

Newcastle: The Protestant packet: or British monitor. Ed J Murray. No 1 4 Aug 1780-vol 2 no 27 18 May 1781. (1351)

={J. Scotland}=

{(3) Magazines, Miscellanies, Learned Journals and Reviews}

Edinburgh: The Christian monthly history: or an account of the revival and progress of religion, abroad and at home. Ed J. Robe. No 1, Nov 1743-no 10, Jan 1746. (1371)

Edinburgh: The religious magazine: or Christian's storehouse. No 1, July 1760-no 2, Aug 1760. (1371)

Edinburgh: The missionary magazine. Ed G. Ewing. Vol 1 no 1, 18 July 1796-. (1373)

Edinburgh: The Christian magazine: or evangelical repository. No 1, 6 1797. (1373)

Edinburgh: The Edinburgh quarterly magazine: intended to promote the knowledge, belief and influence of divine revelation. No 1, 31 March 1798-28 June 1800. (1373)

Glasgow: Exhortation to the inhabitants of the south parish of Glasgow, by J. Gillies. No 1, 26 Sept 1750-no 21, 10 April 1751. (1377)

={K. Ireland}=

{(3) Magazines, Miscellanies, Learned Journals and Reviews}

The olio: or anything Arian magazine. 1800. (1380)

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink

...at ASECS 2005:

Panel Title: Between Anachronism and Antiquarianism: 18th-Century
Experiences and 21st-Century Interpretations

Chair: Jeffrey S. Ravel, MIT

Paper 1: Kevin Berland, Pennsylvania State University , "The Author vs. the Archive: Historiographical Problems in William Byrd's Dividing Line Histories"

Paper 2: Carol Martin, Texas State University-San Marcos , "From Fascinated Gaze to Fetishistic Construction: A Reading of Antiquarianism and Anachronism in the Context of 18th Century Studies"

Paper 3: Downing Thomas, University of Iowa , "Staging Early French Opera"

Paper 4: George H. Williams, University of Missouri-Kansas City , "Rewriting Religious History: the Case of Methodism"

I'm still putting waiting to hear from those I've accepted for the panel I'm chairing, so I can't post those titles yet, but it looks like it's going to have some great papers. Info to come later.

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink

Blogging enriches my life.

Note, something weird is going on with the links in this entry. I'm not sure why, but Safari did something to them when I was editing... I'll try to fix later.

Exhibit A: I had a few drinks with some KC Bloggers on Thursday night: M. Toast, Patrick, Joe, Jen, Eric, and two other folks who either don't blog, or whose blogs aren't listed on KC Bloggers, so I won't mention them by name. We talked about music, good books read recently, and computers.

Exhibit B: I ran into my favorite local comic artist, Parrish, at Muddy's Coffee yesterday morning, and we talked for about ten minutes on the magical creature known as cat. The only way I know Parrish (and Bonnie, who works at Muddy's) is through his blog (and through his comic "Sparrow's Fall"). This was the first somewhat extended conversation we've ever had, and yet I felt like I already sort of knew him, and had a sense of his personality.

Exhibit C: I've never met Weez, except through our blogs. We IM from time. She's recording blog entries as audio posts, and I've remixed one of them with music (MP3, about 2M).

I feel like I'm finally finding a voice. I love my job. But my life is much larger than my job.

Posted by at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

...but I'm going to see Sonic Youth, again. And this time PJ Harvey is on the bill, too.

The tickets were $20. On top of that, Ticketmaster took another $9. Dear record industry, if you want to know why people are copying music from each other without paying for it, it's because Ticketmaster took the money that would have gone toward the purchase of new CDs.

Posted by at 7:30 AM | Permalink

Man, this sucks.

Posted by at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Dang, these things take longer to write than you'd think they would!

Here's the original call for papers of this particular panel at ASECS 2005:

Between Anachronism and Antiquarianism: Eighteenth-Century Experiences and Twenty-First-Century Interpretations

History is always poised precariously between uninformed, anachronistic readings of past events, and antiquarian obsessions with minute details at the expense of bigger questions. The eighteenth century, often seen as both the founding era of modernity and the most refined moment of a lost aristocratic sensibility, is especially susceptible to these interpretive missteps. The convener seeks papers that identify and address problems faced today by those who wish to avoid anachronism and antiquarianism in the interpretation of Eighteenth-century people, ideas, cultural products, and events. All disciplinary approaches welcome.

And here is the abstract that I submitted, just to give you an idea of what kind of scholarly work I'm engaged in:

Rewriting Religious History: the Case of Methodism

This paper will argue that anachronism and antiquarianism have left us with a partial and inaccurate history of one of the most important movements of the eighteenth century: Methodism. The most recent bibliography of anti-Methodist literature from the eighteenth century lists 598 unique titles published between 1738 and 1800, 934 including reprints and new editions. There were only 70,000 Methodists in Britain by the end of the eighteenth-century, but the negative attention they garnered demonstrates that they occupied a place in the cultural imagination much larger than their numbers would seem to justify. Given how much of an impact the Methodist movement had upon British culture during this period, it is imperative that we develop a more complete understanding of its origins, development, schisms, and reception.

In the twentieth century, influential studies of Methodist history were largely characterized by two approaches, both of which are problematic. On the one hand, arguments that Methodism acted as an oppressive and revolution-dampening force were initiated at the beginning of the century by Elie Halevy and continued two generations later by E. P. Thompson. Unwittingly, perhaps, mimicking early anti-Methodist sentiment, Thompson added the assertion that early Methodists’ enthusiastic expressions of religious fervor were simply outbursts of repressed sexual desire. On the other hand, more sympathetic work published by such scholars as Frank Baker, Richard Heitzenrater, and Albert Outler has emphasized the contributions of well-known Methodist leaders such as John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and Francis Asbury at the expense of more obscure Methodist lay people who enacted (and in many cases altered) the directions handed down by the leadership. Additionally, this sympathetic thread of scholarship has not accounted fully for the schisms and disagreements that led many individuals and more than a few groups to split from the Wesleyan strain of Methodism, leaving us with the incorrect impression that the history of early Methodism and the life of John Wesley are more or less the same thing.

The first thread is classically anachronistic, revealing more about the concerns of twentieth-century scholars than it does about those of eighteenth-century Methodists, many of whom were quite socially progressive and active in such movements as abolitionism and many of whom were given or took the reins of Methodist polity through the annual meeting of the Methodist Conference. The second thread, much of it based largely upon or influenced heavily by nineteenth-century histories of eighteenth-century Methodism, is arguably antiquarian in that it carefully tends the Methodist legend of John Wesley’s genius and the inevitability of his success while ignoring the tangled evidence (much of it available only in manuscript form at the Methodist Archives in Manchester, England) to the contrary that might provide answers to some of the bigger, compelling questions: what role did lay preachers play in disseminating or altering the Methodist message? how important were women to the early years of the movement and why was their role obscured in the generations following Wesley’s death? why did so many groups split off from the Wesleyan branch to form movements of their own (e.g. the Huntingdonian branch, the Kilhamite branch) if Wesley was as great an organizer as his reputation indicates? to what extent did the audience for Methodism’s message resist the discourse with which they were presented?

If we focus only on the received narrative of Methodist history first developed in the early nineteenth century, we will maintain a fundamentally flawed understanding. If, however, we carefully comb through the diaries, letters, account books, and marginalia of the Methodist people, a much more sophisticated picture begins to emerge. In this paper, I will use the results of two summer research trips to the Methodist Archives to argue that only by returning to the primary manuscript sources available in the archives can the scholarship of the twenty-first century avoid anachronism and antiquarianism in the interpretation of eighteenth-century Methodism, and I will provide an overview of how attending to the communications circuit, to use Robert Darnton's formulation, results in a much different history than the one we currently have.

Posted by at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Okay, I could use some feedback, if you don't mind. Do these instructions lack anything? I'm asking my comp students to do some blogging this semester. Any suggestions for revision?

Blogging Instructions

Go to http://www.blogger.com and log in under the username and password you previously created
You will then be presented with an interface that will allow you to write new blog entries.
If you have forgotten your username and password, you will be able to have blogger email you that information when you try to log in.

Your participation online and in-class counts towards 15% of your final grade. Your online participation will take the form of blog entries that you write using the concepts you learn in this class to analyze the writing of others. You have already written a definition on your blog.

You will write a minimum of 5 additional blog entries between now and the end of the semester. What you write about is up to you. However, you must use one of the concepts from class to frame your blog entry: for example, you might use the concepts exigence, tactics of definition, audience, the rhetorical appeals, logical fallacies, or the stases. And you must link to another piece of writing on the web somewhere by a blogger (not one of your classmates or me) or by a news reporter or columnist. Each entry should be no less than 200 words.

The way to create a link is to use the following HTML code

Consider the argument made /a href="http://www.address.com"/by this writer//a/ about the upcoming election.

Look specifically at this part of the above. This is how you make a "link" to another document on the web:

/a href="http://www.address.com"/word or phrase//a/

For further formatting information, re-read the intro to HTML:
http://www.mith.umd.edu/teaching/tutorials/html/index.html

Do not wait until the last minute to post your blog entries. Technical problems with the website will not be acceptable as an excuse if you miss a deadline. Get your entries done sooner rather than later.

You can post sooner than the deadline, but you will get no credit for any entry that is posted after the deadline. The following dates are the deadlines for each of the five entries.

1.Friday, September 24
2.Friday, October 8
3.Friday, October 22
4.Friday, November 5
5.Friday, November 19

Posted by at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Okay, first this happened, so after a bit of this, I went and got these and started doing this, but then this happened. But then I got this, which comes with this, so after I got one of these, I found it surprisingly easy to create this, which comes in second after this in the list of these published on this blog. Now I have to go finish reading from this to prepare for that.

Posted by at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Back in June, Erin O'Connor asked why scholars in English departments would concern themselves with video games. Specifically, she asked

• "What does an essay collection on the ecology of video games have to do with the discipline of English?" and
• "Why is this study originating from within an English department?"

O'Connor asks important questions about academia and the field of English studies. Her readers' comments, unfortunately, often provide more heat than light. I'm going to assume her questions were not rhetorical and point to two things that provide some contextual information that might help one to answer O'Connor's questions:

First, an introduction to Ecocriticism provided by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Second, this analysis, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto, of the writing in a forthcoming videogame.

[Thanks to Dennis Jerz, Jill Walker, and Jason Rhody for pointers to the second item above.]

Okay, now I must go back to reading through my summer notes on eighteenth-cenury evangelical periodicals.

Posted by at 10:00 AM | Permalink

Robert Darnton, "First Steps Toward a History of Reading"

Both familiar and strange, [reading] is an activity that we share with our ancestors yet can never be the same as what they experienced. We may enjoy the illusion of stepping outside of time in order to make contact with authors who lived centuries ago. But even if their texts have come down to us unchanged - a virtual impossibility, considering the evolution of layout and of books as physical objects - our relation to those texts cannot be the same as that of readers in the past. Reading has a history. But how can we recover it?

Darnton suggests that scholars writing the history of reading pursue answers to these five questions: How was reading discussed or portrayed at different times and in different places? How was reading learned? What did readers write about their reading either in diaries or as marginalia? How was meaning construed by readers? How did the typographical features of print direct or at least influence the experience of reading? These are, of course, very basic questions, but they are ones we do not yet know the full answers to.

The history of reading is something I've been doing a bit of work in, myself.

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...literally. I have a feeling Chuck is going to love this.

Posted by at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in February, KF posted a question to Palimpest: "How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?"

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," we're reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we're perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

• What are the main points of this essay?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How does it differ from / disagree with other material we've read?
• How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted at Palimpsest.]

Posted by at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Star this morning reports that Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle" is playing this month in Kansas City: "The entire 'Cremaster' series will be shown on three succeeding Wednesdays this month at the Tivoli Cinemas, courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media." Well, better late than never, I suppose. Tickets to this Wednesday's showing of parts 1 and 2 are already gone, but starting Thursday you can get tix for next week.

Wait a minute, the Nelson has an "Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media"? Cool.

Posted by at 8:11 AM | Permalink

With 9/11 just a week away, L points me to this poem, "The Names," by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States.

Posted by at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?"

One can easily lose sight of the larger dimensions of the enterprise because book historians often stray into esoteric byways and unconnected specializations. Their work can be so fragmented, even within the limits of the literature on a single country, that it may seem hopeless to conceive of book history as a single subject, to be studied from a comparative perspective across the whole range of historical disciplines. But books themselves do not respect limits either linguisteic or national. They have often been written by authors who belonged to an international republic of letters, composed by printers who did not work in their native tongue, sold by booksellers who operated across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another. Books also refuse to be contained within the confines of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all the aspects of the life of a book. By its very nature, therefore, the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method. But it need not lack conceptual coherence, because books belong to circuits of communicaiton that operate in consistent patterns, however complex they may be. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It was a busy day, and Chuck left before we had a chance to get his picture.

This is Mike trying to look silly.

This is me trying to look cool.

Do I look like Dee Dee Ramone?

Posted by at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A new blogger joins the Wordherders with jeblog. From the first entry:

Primarily, I will log my consumption of culture and/or media, from the somewhat contrary position of someone who believes that less culture/media is more.
Secondarily, I will log my own production of culture/media, such as virtual performance spaces, and installations, as well as various digital projects.
I will also be logging my work life as a web/graphic designer and scholar/academic, as well as some of my other avocations/interests/investments, such as music, activism, and buddhist meditation practice.
And then occasionally there will be something that doesn't fit into any category, with which, dear reader, you must deal.
I will aspire to concision in my entries and, most often, fail.
First favorite quote, from Samuel Beckett: "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."

Sounds like it will be interesting stuff. Welcome, jeblog!

Posted by at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I gave a 5-question quiz in one of my classes today, and every single student did poorly. Let me rephrase that: every single student failed. This was not a difficult quiz, which leads me to hypothesize that the problem is that students just aren't doing the reading, although it might indicate that they are having trouble with the material. They were assigned "What's a blog?" at Blogger and this basic "Introductory Guide to HTML." Very simple stuff. Additionally, the course text covered 16 different tactics of definition for an upcoming essay they'll write in which they define a term. Consider these questions:

1. Define a blog using two different tactics of definition.
2. HTML uses tags. What's a tag and what are some examples of tags?

Most students simply left these questions blank, not even attempting an answer. Part of me feels like it's a problem of motivation. It's easy to think that the first couple of weeks are simply time to coast. "We're not really doing anything important, yet." Then a quiz comes along. "Oh! You wanted us to actually read that stuff?"

However, I need to check in with the students during my next class to see what's going on. I'll point out the universal failure and ask their thoughts on the results. The biggest mistake a teacher can make is to assume one's own infallibility.

Posted by at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Slashdot:

neile writes "I stumbled across a fascinating paper over at the Microsoft Typography site today that provides a really nice overview of the different theories on how humans read. If you thought we read by recognizing word shapes, think again! With the assistance of fancy eye-tracking cameras researchers have been able to devise several clever experiments to give us new insight into how reading works." We've linked to some of Larson's work previously.

Posted by at 6:11 AM | Permalink

John Feather, "The Book in History and the History of the Book":

The history of the book is built up, like all social history, from bricks, each complete in itself, but each fulfilling its true role only when it is linked with others. If it is indeed true that the book, and the written or printed word it contains, is central to our history, then it follows that it is also central to the study and writing of history. Our understanding of the past, which is the ultimate objective of all history, will be severely impaired if we do not recognize this crucial fact ... The perimiters of book history are defined by the perimeters of the printed word itself and if we accept, as surely we must, that we live in a culture whose development has been based on the transmission and understanding of words, then the history of the book is as fundamental to history as is the book itself to the culture whose history we seek to learn.

Posted by at 11:52 AM | Permalink