listening to repeating

Thanks to a Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) plugin, you can now “bibliomap” your Zotero library.  Fun!  Er . . . wait . . .  useful!

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After a cursory go (about thirty minutes) at it, I’ve been able to:

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Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric is now out on McFarland.  You can get it there, or at Amazon, among other locations.  In it, I have a short piece, “Novel Cartographies, New Correspondences,” which just so happens to be the last chapter (#27) in the book.

What’s up with the oblique title?  The chapter’s a gesture toward thinking of how the production of new media can foster community-based learning and engagement with one’s local institutions (such as universities).  Put another way, how does web-based new media correspond with people’s actual, everyday practices (as opposed to simulating them or rendering them virtual), and how might it enable social change?

And so the chapter describes how neogeography is one such vehicle for correspondence.

Thanks to Heather Urbanski for being a fantastic editor.

Yesterday, on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design.”

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it’s stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship.

And I know “standards” can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren’t static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse).

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Just a quick note: this portfolio and blog should be up-to-date and tidy as of today.

That includes all portions of my CV, and the list of things upcoming and the like.

Of course, all of it will likely change soon.  Such is the character of things.  And time.

I honestly forgot how long it takes to update a CV.  Note to self: do that much, much more often.

I’m in the process of fleshing out the course I’m teaching during the spring quarter at the UW: English 242, “Modernism Now: Digital Platforms for Studying Fiction.”

Essentially, the course will be a survey of literary modernism, with an emphasis on the novel.  Three class meetings per week will be dedicated to discussing novels and modernism, and one class per week will be dedicated to learning digital tools and platforms.  The final papers will be web-texts (equaling roughly ten to fifteen pages of words, plus media).

I’m sticking with WordPress for this one, but it will be the first course where I’m including Zotero and Twitter in the curriculum.

Below’s the working course description.  As always, suggestions and comments are welcome.  The course site will go live in late February/early March.

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Today, during the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel entitled, “Faculty of the Future: Voices from the Next Generation,” with Netta Avineri (UCLA), Shauna Carlisle (UW), Judith Flores Carmona (U. of Utah), Elizabeth Hoover (Brown), Ilana Kramer (Long Island U.), Jonathan Rossing (Indiana U.), Wendy Wagner (U. of Maryland), and Holly West (NYU).  (Learn more about each of them.)

The panel was particularly refreshing because it consisted of a Q&A-style conversation with the audience about teaching at the undergraduate level, the role of community-based learning in various disciplines, the views of today’s college students, how to retain new faculty members, and people’s perspectives on the changing American academy.  I learned a lot from each of the panelists, not to mention the audience; and since our conversation this morning, I’ve been ruminating on a few things:

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The KEXP “Civil Rights” documentary on Curtis Mayfield’s classic, “People Get Ready,” is now in the archives, should you wish to give it a listen.  Below is a description, and there are more documentaries, including one on James Brown, coming soon!

“People Get Ready” was a song Curtis Mayfield wrote for the Impressions. And it would become one of Martin Luther King’s favorites and a standard used for demonstrations during the civil rights struggles in the 1960’s. Throngs of famous people would later record the song, including Bob Dylan, U2 and Aretha Franklin. Curtis shared a philosophy with Martin Luther King, Jr. – that what really mattered about people was not “the color of their skin but the content of their character”. And this song’s lyrics have the stamp of sincerity, intelligence and soul shared by both great men.