thanks for not being a zombie

A piece of advice I've received about writing a scholarly monograph is that your imagined audience should include those who are likely to oppose your argument. So I'm trying to understand what that counterargument to my project would look like, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. You can come at this from whatever angle your expertise makes most convenient.

Here's a point I'm trying to hone:

Scholars and theorists of oral culture, manuscript culture, and print culture tend to focus on these subjects in isolation from one another. What is needed is more work that seeks to understand the neglected reciprocities of oral and literate practices, the dynamic interactions of speech, manuscript, and print.¹ My work investigages a number of these reciprocities in eighteenth-century Methodism: the importance of letter-writing campaigns in promoting preaching tours; the role of preachers in distributing print matter; the influence of print over the habits of diary keeping and public speaking. If we study these practices alone, we will fail to understand them fully.

Okay, that's not too pretty, I admit. What does it need? Does it seem like an obvious and uninteresting point? What kinds of objections am I likely to encounter? Is there a big body of scholarly work I'm overlooking?

1. You could add "digital culture" and "digital practices" to this list if you weren't, like me, writing about the 18th century, in which these phrases would probably be interpreted as being related to masturbation. I'm just speculating, here.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Comments were not working because of a denial of service attack on the 'Herders server, so Vika wrote me this email in response to my previous entry:

That sounds lovely! You mean a get-together place online, yes? IRC would be great for that...

Actually, I was writing about a face-to-face gathering, but online would be nice, too. Is anyone up for it? What are you working on in your research lately? Need help thinking through some issues? What's going on in your classroom?

If you're interested, let's figure this out and set up a time that we might spend an hour or so communicating in real time.

Posted by at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...then why aren't you dead?"¹

Things are going pretty well chez Zombie (Midwest division). I'm gettin' fit at the gym regularly with a new gym partner. My classes are going well. Time with friends and colleagues has been generous lately. Aside from living 1,000 miles away from L,² I have no complaints.

Here's something I proposed to the little group of us who go out to dinner about once a month. Inspired by Scrivener's standing invitation dinner parties,³ I suggested that we have a standing invitation get-together every week somewhere. If you can make it, great. If not, no problem. And let's make these gatherings into an opportunity to talk informally about what research we're working on, or what's going on in our classroom, or some other issue related to our fields of study. We already have a system whereby we share some writing every month or so, but this new tradition will be something different, something where we can feel comfortable sharing half-baked thoughts and ideas to see where they might go.

Everybody seems on board with the idea, so I'm hoping it helps make this a good semester for all of us.

1. Please forgive the seemingly hostile entry title. I love you, dear reader. Really I do.
2. Oh, yeah. That.
3. Sorry, too lazy to find the specific blog entry.

Posted by at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Does anyone remember how to convince Microsoft Word not to underline email addresses or URLs? Every time I reinstall this program I have to hunt and hunt and hunt for the option that turns this off.

Posted by at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Like many of you academics who have a bit of IT expertise but who do not work in IT departments, I have some official responsibility to maintain my department's website. Currently, there are two goals for changing the way we run the website:

1. Make it easier for a larger number of authorized people to make necessary changes.
2. Provide more regularly upated information about events.

The second of these two goals can be accomplished easily enough with one page run by something like Blogger. There are a number of options for the first goal, but it would be nice to choose the one that is most elegant and provides the lowest hurdle of necessary expertise.

If you are so inclined, oh loyal readership, I'd like to know how other departments pull off the above two tasks.

In order to consider different options, I'd like to learn more about possible content management systems for the website, which is currently composed of static HTML pages residing on a server running Microsoft software.¹ Whenever somebody wants something updated, they email the person or persons in charge of maintaining the website and request the change. This is not such an imposition, but it would be much better (IMHO) if there were a number of people with the authority to make changes, each of them responsible for different sections of the site.

We had been using a system by which one person used Dreamweaver to create pages and make changes, but that system seems to have broken down. I've never learned how to use Dreamweaver beyond the rudimentary stuff, preferring instead to code by hand or install server-side software that comes with customizable templates.²

Ideally, a person should not have to have particular software installed on her computer to make changes. Additionally, a person should not have to go through any elaborate training in order to make changes.³

I welcome any suggestions.

1. I think. I will need to contact campus IT support and get the details from them.
2. I'm such a stud, I know.
3. It's 2006. If you know how to use a word processor, you should know how to update a webpage. The software should be that simple.

Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Me: So then I wrote [blah blah blah].
L: That sounds like everything you've ever blogged about that subject.
Me [laughing]: Uh...yeah it does, doesn't it?

Posted by at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)