thanks for not being a zombie

Sometimes it feels like we wake up every morning only to have the same arguments over and over and over again as if the arguments we had yesterday had never happened.

Case in point: John Unsworth's 1994 essay, "Electronic Scholarship or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public," should be required reading for any future columnists who want to address academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In many quarters of our profession, and among some of its immediate neighbors, the electronification of scholarly communication has become the occasion of more than a little anxiety over the past five or six years. This gradual but apparently inevitable change in the way we go about our business is affecting scholars and students in many different disciplines of the humanities and the sciences, as well as academic and commercial publishers, tenure-committees, university administrators, MLA policy-makers, private and government funding agencies, and librarians. The change that is taking place has profound implications, implications that are ethical and philosophical, economic, formal and generic, legal, and--sometimes overwhelmingly--practical and procedural.

Our responses to this change and its implications have covered the full range from despair to rejoicing, but for the most part they have focused on the local effects of the situation, rather than on understanding our circumstances as a limited and special case of a much more general shift in the culture as a whole. With few exceptions, academics have not successfully addressed the public on the more global effects of computers, networks, and electronic communication, and where they have, their discourse has generally fallen prey to the impulse to celebrate or to condemn the imagined, rather than to analyze or even extrapolate from the real.

People, he wrote this in 1994. It's one thing to disagree with what scholars have been saying about electronic communication and academia for well over a decade. It's another thing altogether to just ignore--a la Ivan Tribble--what they've said.

Posted by at 8:19 AM | Permalink

It was much, much easier than I thought it would be.

You snooze, you lose, D-Link.

Posted by at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Via Slashdot:

markmcb writes "It seems that teachers may have a new way to boost classroom participation using a device called a clicker. A clicker is a small handheld device that allows its user to wirelessly respond to various prompts selected by a teacher. So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker. Everything from a simple poll to a graded quiz can be conducted using the device. In the age of cell phones and wireless computers such a technology is likely to be well-received by students, but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."

Posted by at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Well, I'm still trying to get the wireless network up and running while we wait for all our stuff to arrive later today. (See previous entry.) Thanks to everyone who responded with suggestions.

In a nutshell, here's the problem: We have just moved halfway across the country. In our new home, neither of our Powerbooks can connect to the Internet using the wireless signal coming from our wireless router. Both of our Powerbooks could connect to the Internet in this way at our old home. I've found a partial, though unsatisfactory solution that eliminates the wireless router from the equation: I can plug Powerbook1 into the cable modem with an ethernet cable and then share the Internet connection wirelessly with Powerbook2.

Essentially, this is a process of identifying all the variables in the home network and determining which ones are functioning correctly and which ones are not.

I've written up a systematic response below the fold to Scott's comments:

Continue reading "troubleshooting home wireless network" »

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

We are using the same ISP as at our previous location. We have the same equipment (except it's a different cable modem supplied by the ISP). But we can't make the WiFi networking work. What's wrong?

Equipment:

• Time Warner cable modem
• D-Link DI-614+ wireless router
• Two Powerbooks running OS X

Any troubleshooting suggestions would be much appreciated. This is basically the same set-up we used before with no problem.

Posted by at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So after you've contracted document OCD, how do you manage all the information you collect on your hard drive? Here are some useful software tools:

1. LaunchBar: This is an affordable Mac application. [I don't know what an equivalent app for Windows might be.] I have so many documents full of notes (as well as full text documents of primary and secondary materials) that there is no way I can remember everything saved on my hard drive. I need something to access these documents easily, without having to hunt and click my way through different directories. LaunchBar, which Ian recommended to me, indexes all of my documents and allows me to launch them with a few taps on the keyboard. It also pays attention to which ones I open most often, so that it presents the most frequently used ones at the top of any list it creates. I have begun to change the way I title my documents because this makes it easier for LaunchBar to get to the document I'm looking for. See item 2 here. LaunchBar will open my Greenblatt notes for me if I type "Greenblatt," and if I've been using that document often recently then typing the letter "G" is enough to call it up.


2. Spotlight: This search feature comes with the new Mac OS, Tiger. [Those of you using Windows might try out Google Desktop.] The really powerful thing about Spotlight is that it will search the contents of all of my documents, which is great for finding all the references to, say, Elizabeth Eisenstein in all of my reading notes, my course syllabi, and the articles I've downloaded from places like J-STOR and Project Muse. It will also do what Launchbar does, described above, but it doesn't do it as quickly, which is why I'm still using LaunchBar. For example, if I want to launch Firefox, I just type "f" into LaunchBar, because it remembers that I use Firefox every day. Spotlight will just list everything that begins with an "f." Perhaps there's a way to customize Spotlight to change this behavior, but if so I haven't learned how yet.


3. OmniOutliner: Another Mac application [I don't know of a Windows equivalent.] I've been using this to sketch out my writing and to manage my task lists, and so far I like it. I've tried the outline function in MS Word and have found it awkward by comparison. I've tried to figure out how to outline using OpenOffice (well, Neo-Office, actually) but have had not luck. OmniOutliner it is. See these two entries by Scott, and this one by Kathleen.


4. EndNote: My university recently decided to get a campus-wide license for this bibliographical software, but I haven't yet acquired a copy. It seems to be the gold standard of such applications, though. And it's available for both Windows and Mac.

In sum, as any scholar of writing, reading, and publishing will tell you, the tools we use to read and write matter a great deal.

Addendum: I really wish that more academic books were available as e-books. This would not only make it easier for me to carry them around with me wherever I take my laptop (thus reducing the strain on my shoulder), but it would also pull them into what is now essentially a fulltext database on my laptop.

[composed and posted with Ecto.]

Posted by at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A couple of grad students at my alma mater recently wrote entries that got me thinking about tools and practices for keeping track of your research, writing, and thinking.

A few months ago, Steven Johnson wrote about the ways in which technology facilitates not only his writing, but his thinking. Now that I've started to use--in addition to a word processor--some tools for searching, organizing, and outlining, I'm really beginning to experience what he's getting at.

Below are some obsessive-compulsive suggestions for maximizing the accessibilty of your notes and documents. You should only adopt as many of these (if any) as you think might be helpful. They are only meant to be the means to help you in your research and teaching. Do not let them become an end in themselves.

1. If you can, take notes on your computer (or a handheld device that can sync with your computer), rather than by hand in a notebook or in the margins of your books. Why? Because digital versions of notes will be much more accessible and more portable. Trust me: you will need those reading notes later, either when you are writing something or when you are preparing to teach.


2. I read a very good suggestion some time ago on one of these blogs (I think). Give your documents filenames that will make it easy for you, or someone else (you never know), to determine what is in the document just by looking at the filename. For example, if you've taken notes on Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," which the journal Glyph published in 1981, then give your notes a filename like greenblatt_invisible.bullets_glyph.1981.doc (I've also started giving my syllabi ridiculously long names like 2004.spring.english.550.syl.doc.)


3. Reading on paper is still quite useful and allows you to spread your information out over a much greater two-dimensional space than even the largest computer monitor. However, when reading something printed you'll want to know where on your hard drive a particular printed document is to be found. So, for reading notes or for other things you are writing, open the document in your word processor, and insert the filename on the first page somewhere. If you can, insert the "field" "filename" so that if you change the filename of the document, it will automatically change in your document. Now, when you look at the printed document, you'll know what it's known by to your computer. You can probably create a macro so that this is done automatically on every document you create.


4. Put a header on every page of every document you print out. The header should contain enough information so that any page will identify what larger document it belongs to. Also, put not only the page number in your header, but also the page count so that as you look at any page, you will know where in the larger document it belongs and how big the larger document is. As above, you can probably automate (some of) this step with a macro. Your header might look something like this: "Greenblatt -- Invisible Bullets -- Reading Notes -- 1/5"


5. If you want to be really obsessive, be sure to include a field that indicates when the document was printed. Doing so will allow you to compare the age of the printed version with the age of the digital version. If you've made changes to the digital version, the printed version will be outdated and might need to be replaced. As above, try to use a macro for this.


6. Punch three holes in your printed documents--or print them out on pre-punched paper--and keep them in 3-ring notebooks organized along roughly the same lines as their digital documents on your hard drive. This is especially useful for teaching, when you need to take your notes with you into class and might need to grab them in a hurry.

Now, do I maintain this OCD system of organization? Well...no. But isn't it lovely to think so?

[composed and posted with Ecto.]

Posted by at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I've been thinking about writing a post on digital archives, commercialization, scholarship, teaching, and access, but Ray Rosenzweig, in "Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely" (Chronicle, sub req'd) has pretty much beaten me to it. Although Rosenzweig's focus is on teaching, he brings up a central concern of mine, namely the cost of commercial offerings of digitized cultural heritage resources: if my university cannot afford to subscribe, then my scholarship and my teaching (i.e. my students' education) are going to suffer.

Continue reading "there are archives, and then there are archives" »

Posted by at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just got my hot little hands on one of these. It looks very well done. More later.

Posted by at 3:12 PM | Permalink

Rooting around in my own archives, I came across these two entries:

• Print and Information Technology
• Print and Information Technology, II (Grok is Jason, and I was going by gizmo, a nickname my niece gave me.)

Man, I remember 2003 like it was yesterday. Good times, good times.

Posted by at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I came across this and thought the stuff on using PHP to generate images might help with this.

Posted by at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friend, Kevin Hawkins, is on a Fulbright in Russia. His most recent post mentions smarty-pants phones:

I sent and received my first SMS messages yesterday with another Fulbrighter. You see, in Russia and Europe it's much cheaper to send SMS messages than actually talk on the phone (which, I'm finding, can become quite expensive), so people communicate that way a lot. Since people only think I'm a techie, they have no idea that I'm a total cellphone novice. So, as with most text messaging systems, it guesses what word you're trying to type based on the combination of keys you press. As it turns out, mine only has a Russian vocabulary no matter what language you set the interface to. Yesterday I couldn't figure out how to override its guesses, so I had to improvise when it guessed something other than what I wanted to write. Figured it out now.

Posted by at 8:33 AM | Permalink

Clearing out my inbox, I came across an email I sent to a friend and wanted to capture it here before I deleted it.

Continue reading "creating scholarly electronic texts" »

Posted by at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I came across a description of this device in the latest issue of ReadyMade:

It's all the rage these days to put your vinyl collection on CD. But one electronics manufacturer is being particularly literal. Japanese edutainment company Gakken recently released Gramophone: The Disc Player, a twisted throwback that lets you record sound onto discarded CD's by cutting grooves into their surface.

The device, which retails online for about $40, arrives in 41 pieces and requires an hour of assembly. The final step is to add your own sewing needle, used to both record and play sound on plastic. When you set the battery-powered device to record, the turntable rotates while its cone picks up vibrations in the air and, with the needle, etches a corresponding pattern onto a CD's surface. The needle uses a lighter touch for playback, pulling Ray Charles from that thrashed Wham! disc.

Like the late 1800's original, this gramophone is rather primitive. It's can't record off an external microphone, nor can it connect to stereo speakers, and the sound of etched plastic isn't as crisp as on the vinyl. You'll have to keep a supply of needles on hand, each lasts about 10 recordings. But there is good reason to buy one. Gakken says the device is flexible enough to be used with almost any soft, plastic material. You'll be the first DJ to rock the party with a set of instant-ramen lids."

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Help me Obi Wan Lazyweb. You're our only hope. We have a Magnavox television (19pr14 c122) with no headphone jack or RCA outputs. All it has is a connection for cable on the back. Is there any way to listen to the television using headphones so that the sound from the speaker cannot be heard by those who are not watching?

Posted by at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A fascinating article in today's New York Times by Marc Lacey:

Across the continent, linguists are working with experts in information technology to make computers more accessible to Africans who happen not to know English, French or the other major languages that have been programmed into the world's desktops.

There are hundreds of languages in Africa - some spoken only by a few dozen elders - and they are dying out at an alarming rate. The continent's linguists see the computer as one important way of saving them. Unesco estimates that 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages are not represented on the Internet, and that one language is disappearing somewhere around the world every two weeks.

"Technology can overrun these languages and entrench Anglophone imperialism," said Tunde Adegbola, a Nigerian computer scientist and linguist who is working to preserve Yoruba, a West African language spoken by millions of people in western Nigeria as well as in Cameroon and Niger. "But if we act, we can use technology to preserve these so-called minority languages."

Language geeks, and computer geeks, and progressives unite!

Posted by at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I learn to use MediaWiki, I'm realizing that while the software is great, the User's Guide sucks. It often tells you what you can do without fully explaining how to do it. There are many simple things I can't figure out:

• how to change the default appearance
• how to link to other sites
• how to use categories
• how to automatically link a book listing to library catalogue (is this possible? you can automatically link to online bookstores, which is cool)
• how to lock/unlock pages
• how to limit who does or does not get to edit pages
• how to revert to a previous version of page in case of vandalism
• how to list all articles automatically on a master page somewhere
• how to create headings and subheadings for each page.

I'm sure I'll learn how to do these things, but it's taking me longer than it should.

Posted by at 9:30 PM | Permalink

Yes, I love my PowerBook. But I have a directory full of OpenOffice Writer files (currently transferring wirelessly from my Win2k machine) that I want to be able to read and edit on my new machine. However, I can't get the program to run yet. *sigh*

There are a bunch of pages out there on the web dealing with this issue, but I can't seem to resolve it. My next step is to see if it's possible to batch-process all the files into something like *.rtf or *.doc.

Posted by at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Via Slashdot:

erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.

This comment in the Slashdot discussion is especially funny. I wrote about the Turing memorial when I was in Manchester a year ago this week.

Update: Kieran Healy takes notice of the anniversary, too.

Posted by at 10:16 PM | Permalink

My preciousssssss.....

Posted by at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I've given voices (mp3, 2.2M) to Matt's cicadas . This sound file is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Posted by at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jason J. provides links to some interesting readings for a summer seminar titled "The Future of the Page."

Posted by at 11:22 AM | Permalink

If you're going to be in New York in early June, this announcement, via SHARP-L, might be of interest to you:

The New York Chapter of the American Printing History Association is pleased to announce a lecture by Mark Batty, of Mark Batty Publishing, Ltd., on June 2, 2004 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY at 6 p.m. Mr Batty will be speaking on the complexities, trials and tribulations of making a new edition of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), the first book ever written on printing and printing types. The text, edited by bibliographer John Lane, has been extensively annotated and expanded for scholars and artists in the fields of printing, typography and the graphic arts. The new edition is based on that of the Oxford Univesity Press (1962), edited by Herbert David and Harry Carter.

The event is free and open to the public. More information about the event is available on the APHA website calendar. For information about the New York Chapter, contact its president Lowell Bodger at 212 777-0841 or write to APHA-NY, PO Box 1074, New York, NY 10278.

Posted by at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Slashdot: Sony, Phillips, and E-Ink have teamed up to produce a reading device -- christened the Librié -- with a display that mimics the features of paper.

The hardware technology that makes such a display possible is amazing, but really, the key details as to why this device is a bad idea are to be found in this story from The Guardian:

To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.

[T]he sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months, so it's best to think of the Librié experience as a library of sorts.

Okay, let's review.

There are billions of pages of information available for free on the Internet, but with this device, you get to pay for the privilege of reading material in a proprietary format that makes the content disappear after two months. More expensive then paper books and less durable? Where do I sign up!?

Oh yeah, this product is sure to be a big success!

The history of reading teaches us that readers engage in a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Rare book rooms the world over are filled with evidence of this fact. One of the strengths of the "old-fashioned" book format is that it supports a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Digital media present an opportunity to widen that range of possible behaviors even further: build your own concordances of your favorite works in seconds, search your personal library for other occurences of an interesting word or phrase, make your own literary "smash ups" by slicing and dicing plots, create an electronic commonplace book.

How sad that these possibilities have yet to be made available in a dedicated reading device. Any reading format that attempts to put absolute boundaries upon reading behaviors is bound to fail because attempts to make readers submit will breed resentment. Either someone will hack the Librié, or it will flop.

See also these stories on the Librié: NY Times, Forbes, C|NET.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Permalink

I've just finished Ellen Ullman's The Bug. I'm considering teaching the novel next spring in my honors section of English 225, the second course in the composition sequence at UMKC. Ullman describes the interaction between human and machine with a remarkably poetic voice, such as this passage where programmer Ethan Levin reads an email from a technical consultant and then ponders a software bug he's trying to solve:

It all presented itself as a continuum: hardware at the bottom, with all its miniature mechanics and electronics, becoming at each step upward more abstract, becoming software. It produced in him a certain vertiginous pleasure--this glimpse into the slip-space between the hard and soft, the physical and mental worlds, layer upon layer of human thought turned into chips, circuit boards, programs. And it struck him, as it sometimes did these days, how briefly physical the computer was. All software on the top, then just a small layer where it was only dumb wire and plastic and silicon--beneath which everything immediately turned abstract again: the intelligence of the circuits, "logic gates" designed with software and etched into chips, through which moved the bits of stuff human beings had named "electrons." (45)

Coincidentally, I'm dealing with my own bug as the university's "Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access" email server is only letting me log in about one out of every twenty attempts. The very patient folks in the university IT department can't find anything wrong. As for me, I miss telnet and pine, and I'm very tired of Microsoft. Apple is selling 12" iBooks for under a thousand bucks, and I'm very tempted. I'm using OpenOffice for my office-related tasks, GIMP for my image editing, MovableType for most of my website management tasks lately, and jEdit for my text encoding. Hmm. If only I could remember why I decided to go with this laptop running m$.

Matt first piqued my interest in The Bug, btw.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is really just a "Hey, isn't this cool?" kind of post, and I guess I've had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi's chapter on William Blake's "Illuminated Printing" techniques.

“Illuminated Printing” was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blake’s relief etching (“illuminated printing”) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six “Chambers” in the “Printing house in Hell,” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blake’s new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.

Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.

Posted by at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Via Slashdot:

LukePieStalker writes "Former English professor Eric Brown has published the first work in what he claims is a new literary category called the 'digital epistolary novel', or DEN. 'Intimacies', based on an 18th century novel, requires the DEN 1.2 software. The program's interface has windows for mock e-mail, instant messaging, Web browser and pager, through which the narrative unfolds. For those wishing to create their own works in this genre, Mr. Brown is marketing composition software called DEN WriterWare."

Also mentioned over at scribblingwoman.

Posted by at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It's the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.

I'm not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it's worth experimenting. If you're unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.

Posted by at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Via Liz, Michael Froomkin, Norman Geras, and Jewschool: here's the Wikipedia entry on the word "jew" and the Judaism 101 answer to the question, "Who is a jew?"

Posted by at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via The New York Times: Two economists have released the draft of a study concluding that illegal music "[d]ownloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates." Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have conducted what the Times is calling "the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying."

[T]hey analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.

So why have sales been dropping? Here's my take, and keep in mind it's only a theory unsupported by any rigorous analysis: because most music being produced by the music industry sucks. And the level of suckitude (or suckage, if you're a speaker of French) appears to be following an upward trajectory.

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

...I wanted to mention, again, "Listening Post," by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin at the Liszt Visual Arts Center. The work is beautiful, eerie, and captivating; a brief piece appeared in the NY Times when the work was at the Whitney. What the Times does not make clear, however, is that the language processed by the piece is pulled live from the Internet. (See this write-up, too.) The wall plaque explains that "['Listening Post'] continuously samples texts from thousands of chat rooms and other online public discussion forums." So you, dear reader, could be part of this exhibit and not even know it.

I felt this info deserved an entry all its own, having been previously embedded in the middle of a rather long entry.

Posted by at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via Slashdot: "By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays - it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works." I don't have time to investigate this tool fully right now, but one thing I like is that it maps these networks through the course of the play using an animation. Texts are not static objects; they change over time as the reader or viewer experiences them. Our visualizations of elements of texts should therefore be dynamic.

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Terry Belanger on SHARP-L: Order a copy of the University of Virginia Rare Book School catalog of videotapes and DVDs.

Via Lynne Connolly on C18-L: BBC Radio 4 discussion of "The Sublime."

Via email correspondence: Harvard University's H20 discussion environment.

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink

As I'm doing a little bibliography building, I'm thinking that it would be nice if library catalogues could incorporate some of the functions of Amazon.com. For example, the "Customers who shopped for X also shopped for Y" feature demonstrates connections between books that otherwise might go unmarked by the usual uses of metadata. In general, being able to track user behavior and share it with other users (while protecting the privacy of individuals) would lead to a variety of useful functions. It would also be great if you could build a wish list in order to make suggestions for books the library should purchase, and to help the catalogue make recommendations to you and notify you when new books of interest to you arrive.

Posted by at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here is a question asked in the face of way too many Google hits: if I want to create an online, collaboratively built, bibliographic database (mySQL and PHP), do I have to come up with the schema myself, or are there something like "plug-and-play" templates out there much in the way that there are for CSS and HTML?

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink

...to make the cover of Wired magazine?

I've subscribed for a few years now, and when the current issue came, L saw the cover and pointed out that the only women we've seen on the cover in the past several issues haven't exactly been known for their accomplishments in the fields of technology:

• Uma Thurman
• Anonymous blonde model covered in nothing but diamonds
• Jada Pinkett Smith

You have to go all the way back to 1996 to find a cover story on Sherry Turkle, and before that to 1994 for one on Laurie Anderson. Other than these two cover stories, there are none on women in technology.

See for youself. Check out the Wired archive of covers. Pretty shameful, no?

It's not like there aren't enough candidates. (Thanks to Caterina Fake on misbehaving.net for the link.)

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How hard should it be to figure out how to transfer MP3s from your Apple Powerbook to your non-iPod MP3 player? Apple has a reputation for intuitive user interfaces, and yet I cannot for the life of me determine how to get the songs off of the hard drive onto this Rio Cali. The computer recognizes the player, and it's listed in the "Source List" in iTunes. And yet... how do you get this stuff over here onto that thing over there?

Does anyone know?

Update: This does not help. The songs will not drag and drop.

Posted by at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Via Many-to-Many: "Using Wikis for content management...." Here, Tom Coates addresses what has been one of my reservations about wikis, the somewhat awkward resulting appearance and navigational elements: "the particularly networked rather than heirarchical model of navigation that they lend themselves towards isn't suitable for all kinds of public-facing sites (the same could be said of the one-size-fits-all design of the pages)." Coates asks us to

imagine for a moment that the Wiki page itself is nothing but a content management interface and that the Wiki has a separate templating and publishing engine that grabs what you've written on the page, turns it into a nicely designed fully-functioning (uneditable) web-page and publishes it to the world. It could make the creation of small information rich sites enormously quick - particularly if you built in FTP stuff.

Indeed. Make it so.

Posted by at 8:52 PM | Permalink

Noting similarities to the project I proposed, Dennis G. Jerz draws our attention to the Commontext Library:

Commontext is a completely new concept: a publisher of freely shared classroom texts. Its goal is to allow unrestricted, free access to a vast collection of learning materials produced at the highest level of excellence, including academic peer review and fact checking, and professional editing and proofreading.

Read the FAQ, which states that "'beta' phase" materials were to be available in Fall 2003, with "[f]inal, professional-quality course materials" available in Fall 2004. On first blush, however, there doesn't seem to be much content available. I also don't find the site very intuitive to navigate. Put yourself in the shoes of a non-expert web user: how easy would it be to find the information you're looking for?

It appears that the site runs on Drupal, "an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites."

How is Commontext different from what I'm proposing? Well, I don't really know, but I would return to these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

The answers to these questions would be a good starting point for this project. A user-friendly website that would allow users to act in response to these questions easily is what I'm imagining.

A couple of distinctions might be helpful here. On the one hand, I'm imagining contributors might share things like handouts, assignments, exercises, and syllabi. Feedback and refinement would ideally make these materials better. But on the other hand, contributors could also collaborate on building web-based resources like the ones that were mentioned before (e.g. Guide to Grammar and Style, Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms, Guide to Literary and Critical Theory). In addition, discussions of how to use these materials would be useful. A site that facilitates all of these things is what I'm thinking of.

Posted by at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the teaching realm of our work. A few years later, witness how various password-protected courseware adopted by so many campuses is making it increasingly impossible to see others’ teaching materials. Sure, some people may not want to share their syllabi, but I suspect many wouldn’t mind. Regardless, the increasing proliferation of these services makes the teaching side of our work less and less visible to a wider audience.

Eszter Hargittai, "The un(?)intended consequences of courseware"

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

The Open Source Initiative

In terms of web resources, what do those who teach courses in English need that a committed group of bloggers might create? I'm not talking about software, mind you, but I'm agreeing with the assumption that the open source philosophy can be successfully applied to all kinds of projects. We're all going to be coming up with course materials anyway. Why not collaborate or at least share?

Jack Lynch, who doesn't have a blog but should, has an impressive Guide to Grammar and Style that might prove useful as well as an unfinished Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms. I have a brief guide to the mechanics of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing in MLA style. Of course, materials like these are widely available in print, but when so many of us are creating websites for our courses, it is more than a little convenient to be able to link directly directly to information that students will find helpful.

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

Can we work to make these things available without taking an inordinate amount of time out of our already busy schedules?

Update 1: And if you think this is a good idea, please mention this post in your blog to increase the chances that potentially interested parties, who may or may not read my blog, find out about it.

Update 2: Okay, possibilities for format include a database (like DISC: A Disability Studies Academic Community, using MySQL) a blog (like the many group authored blogs out there using MovableType), a Wiki (like the Wikipedia), or some combination of such things.

Posted by at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Because there are only so many scales you can learn, my guitar instructor is now teaching me the Jimi Hendrix song "The Wind Cries Mary." I'm not a huge Hendrix fan, but he is, so...

It's an interesting experience (no pun intended) to get inside someone else's head to see how they created something. The opening of the song, which you may or may not be familiar with but can get for 99 cents on iTunes, features a smooth three-chord phrase repeated twice in two slightly different ways. It sounds really cool, but your hands do something fairly simple. Throughout this very melodic piece, Hendrix's musicianship is impressive. It's not a showcase for flashy virtuosity, but instead demonstrates his ability to phrase and rephrase things up and down the guitar's fretboard with an elegant economy of expression.

I was thinking about this, believe it or not, as I was working on implementing Liz Lawley's MT Courseware, her adaptation of MovableType for teaching purposes. What Liz has done is really ingenious, but also impressive because of its simplicity. In particular, the graceful way she pulls off the menu of tabs along the top of the content of each page using a stylesheet and some MT template tags just blew me away. Liz writes that she learned how to do this from A List Apart, which features a similar navigation scheme, but I believe the the bit of code using MT template tags that made it work with her particular application is all her own.

I'm sure Hendrix picked things up from other guitarists, too, and then added the bits that made his music his own. That's how we learn, isn't it? Imitation followed by innovation. I've learned a few things from using Liz's templates that I plan to use in my own blog.

Oh, and it appears I've pulled it off. The MT Courseware, that is. I'm still working on the song.

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink

My classes start on the 13th. I'm updating one syllabus and writing another one from scratch.

I have tweaked my explanation of the rules (PDF) for "Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation," an unconventional assignment that I blogged about earlier. I'll be having my students play Ivanhoe in my Spring section of Introduction to British Literature, 1

If you were a student, would this make sense to you? What might seem unclear? What questions would you have?

Posted by at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Admiring the new color scheme over at WeezBlog and working on setting up course blogs for next semester (with frequent stupid questions sent Liz Lawley's way), I'm remembering that back in the days of the browser-safe color palette, Lynda Weinman had a book called Coloring Web Graphics that included page after glossy page of sample website designs with color codes for the creatively lazy. If you liked a particular design, it was easy to just adopt the colors for your own purposes.

Does anything like that exist out on the web? (He asked without bothering to google first.)

Posted by at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...because a late night of karaoke meant I spent today in low-watt mode. But I've been working on getting Liz Lawley's MT Courseware set-up to work on my teaching installation of MT. Still have kinks to work out (I'm pretty sure the kinks are on my end, somehow), and coding/tagging always seems to keep me up later than I intend.

Earlier, I made some good progress on revising syllabi for the upcoming semester, including refining my use of the game Ivanhoe, something I wrote about earlier.

We were also fortunate enough today to catch the Marsden Hartley (images via google) exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I had seen his painting entitled "Christ Held by Half-Naked Men" (1940-1941) at the Hirshhorn in D.C., but I was unfamiliar with his larger body of work, which is quite varied.

Finally, I continued to tweak this blog's layout. Thanks to Jason for reminding me to check out the CSS provided by Blue Robot and to Eric Sigler for the pointer to MTSimpleComments. There are still kinks, but I'm just too pooped right now to figure them all out.

Posted by at 11:44 PM | Permalink

From the Technology and Bibliography department, via Slashdot: Remote-Controlled Robot Could Browse the Stacks.

From the Academic Blogger Attempts to Demonstrate He's Still Hip department: Cat Power is on tour in December. Well, Chan Marshall solo, anyway. Pitchforkmedia writes it up. Hilarity ensues.

From same department as above: Frank Black and the Catholics make four songs available exclusively on iTunes. However, no one will confirm if a Pixies' reunion is in the works for next summer.

From the Academics Who Like to Read Things that Upset Them department: Michael Bérubé writes about "Standards of Reason in the Classroom" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Erin O'Connor, and others, take issue with what they see as his profiling of conservative students as mentally handicapped. Now, new life has been breathed into Bérubé's website, which is starting suspiciously to look like a blog, though he continues to claim it's not.

Posted by at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been using some version of a Palm for about 4 or 5 years now, and I'm just about ready to quit and go back to paper and pen. Why? The immediate reason is that my Sony Clie PEG S360 just crapped out on me again: the battery goes dead with frightening frequency. And this time, I think I've lost a good chunk of data as a result.

But more generally, I'm just tired of the cramped space on the little screen and the low-contrast black-on-green text and images. By contrast, a simple pad of paper has much more room to write and sketch, features a high-contrast black-(or blue-)on-white surface, and the information you store there doesn't disappear when the juice runs out.

However, I would miss the searchability, the small size, and the syncing with the laptop. And I have had my eye on the Palm Zire 71 since it first came out. A camera and an MP3 player along with the usual PDA functions? Mmmmm.

What about you? How do you keep track of contacts, appointments, interesting citations, to-do lists?

Posted by at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Warning. Cranky entry ahead.

When my family lived in Belgium, we used to travel to Brussels to see recently released movies. On our first such trip, we were struck by the strange behavior of the ushers, who would not guide you to your seat but instead would stand by the entrance to the theater with slick flyers advertising coming attractions. If you took one, they would hold out their hand for a tip. If you declined giving them the tip and gave them back the flyer, they were quite resentful.

In short, they served no purpose. At some point in the past they probably provided a helpful service, using their flashlights to help you through the dark, letting little old ladies hold onto their arms. Whatever. Those days were long gone. Well-lighted aisles and better designed entrance and exit ramps made them obsolete. But they just couldn't stop hanging around with their hand out.

Believe it or not, I think of those ushers when I think of the modern academic journal. What do we get for the (often considerable) money that we pay for journals? Ideally, we get well-written articles that have been vetted by experts in the field. And how much do the authors get paid? Nothing. How much do the journal editors get paid? Nothing (right?). How much do the readers who evaluate the articles for the journal get paid? Nothing.

Isn't something wrong with this picture? What exactly are we paying for?

How many journals do you actually read in print anymore? How many are not available online in addition to being available in printed form. Yes, I know that creating PDFs, say, of a set of articles is not free. And I also know that storing such articles on a server or set of servers costs money, too. But surely that cost is negligible and could be borne by universities for significantly less money than they currently pay to subscribe to journals. Can't we replicate the exact same system we have now - the articles being submitted, being distributed to experts for evaluation, being accepted or rejected by the journal - without the fee system? What's the difference?

I think we can agree that the current system has problems. For one thing, library budgets are (always already) threatened by the vagaries of funding and journal subscriptions are often the first things cut, meaning that crucial information becomes unavailable to library patrons.

Second, insane new copyright laws are pressuring libraries to put unreasonable restrictions on copying and distributing scholarly material. At UMKC, we can't put articles on reserve for more than one semester because library policy is that this violates copyright law. Here's the ultimate frustration for me: authors of these articles do not care one iota if you are making copies of their work so long as it's clear who the author is. Our reward for our scholarship is usually not financial; it's professional. We don't get paid for publishing our work, so we're not the ones losing any money. But are journals losing money from library reserves? I doubt it. What's the difference between a student copying an article from the reserves list and copying an article from the journal sitting on the shelf? And if journals are losing money, who cares? What purpose do they serve? The peer-review process does not need a commercial component in order to function properly.

Consider the list of journals available through Johns Hopkins University Press' Project Muse. I can link you to the home page, and you can take a look at the tables of contents, but you can't read the articles without a subscription because... Well, why?

What am I missing?

Posted by at 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Jake is a free, online database that provides information about where a particular journal is indexed, lists of all journals indexed by a particular database or lists of journals by subject, Dewey or LC call numbers. Jake also provides information about full-text availability of journal articles. Very useful stuff.

Posted by at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Just thinking out loud: Let's say you're a blind person, and you would like to access public domain literature on the web, the kind of stuff that is made available to sighted readers by folks like Project Gutenberg or the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (two very different enterprises, but you get my drift). You could acquire a screen reader program, which will read text out loud right off the screen. But let's say you want to hear it in a more 'natural' sounding voice, rather than in a somewhat robot-like voice.

• Where do you go? Are there free sites on the web featuring sound files of people reading out loud?
• If not, why not?
• How hard would it be to start up such a project? An oral/aural Project Gutenberg staffed by worldwide volunteer labor? Obviously the necessary storage space for sound files would be larger than for text files, but not insurmountably so.
• If one were to apply for grant money to support such a project, what would be some likely places to apply?

Posted by at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I don't mean to neglect you, dear reader, it's just that you'll get somewhat light blogging from me as I try to sort out the busyness of my life.

Link and comment: go check out the DISC website, which I helped create back in the MITH days along with Jason, Eric, and Amit Kumar. DISC "is an international, interdisciplinary, user-generated, digital forum providing support, collegial networks, and information that sustains a disability studies academic community and promotes disability studies in a humanities focus."

Disability studies and "adaptive technologies" should, imho, be the next big focus of digital studies and human-computer interaction in that this focus forces us to confront our own assumptions about how technology works to meet the needs (natural? culturally constructed?) of humans.

Plus I think there are some really cool gagdets in the future for all of us.

Posted by at 6:30 AM | Permalink