Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The final session I attended at ThatCamp Philadelphia was run bu Janine Utell on integrating the digital humanities into regular literature classrooms.

• Amanda French defines the digital humanities as “open access”
• How can student work be put online? WordPress, PBWorks, etc
• Digital Humanities Quarterly given as example of open access
• Should give students option to take down work at the end of the semester
• I am going to try out commonplace blogs with my eng102 classes next semester
• Utell: Digital humanities is essential to keeping the humanities alive
• Some discussion about establishing comment policies
• Crowd sourcing comment policy to students
• Peer review is important before work goes online
• Instructor comments on blogs tapers off as semester goes on
• French and Siobhan Phillips bring out Google’s ngrams, wordles
• I’ve had students A/B an Obama speech to a Jefferson speech
• More incorportation of audio, video, etc into literary classes
• Modernist Journals Project
• Amanda French stresses the need to teach bibliographic software like Noodle, Evernote, and Zotero

• Joseph Tabbi on locating the literary in New Media.
• Naomi Klein on demanding more from President Obama.
• The Quarterly Conversation has all of the details for the new UK edition of Cosmicomics which includes seven previously unseen, but seemingly slowly trickling out in a number of periodicals, stories.
• Forty seven new letters from Benjamin Franklin’s time in London have been found by an academic.
• Henry Jenkins is interviewing Nick Montfort (who also has a new weblog) and Ian Bogost about their work on Platform Studies.

• A brief essay on point of view from Daniel Green, focusing on The Virgin Suicides.  I think this will be useful to reference to in the future.
• Open Letters Monthly remembers the recently deceased Phillip Jose Farmer.  I read a few of his novels as a teenager.
• In general I have really been enjoying Glenn Greenwald’s daily columns.  I find his criticisms of the Obama administration to very much mirror my own concerns.
• My program director, Heide Estes’, excellent article on Sir Gawain & The Green Knight.

Recently read: The Audacity Of Hope by Barack Obama.

Early this summer I picked up a cheap first edition and the audio book of Obama’s second book. He has such a nice speaking voice that I figured the audio version would be a pleasant experience.

The book itself is alright. Some parts are dull, inside baseball, stuff about life in Washington I could care less about. Parts where he discusses policy points were nice, even if I don’t agree with a lot of them.

Overall, I’m not impressed and did not vote for him (I voted for one of the real, not make believe, Socialists on my state’s ballot). So far, almost a month into his administration, I am even less impressed by it. There are plenty of other sites to do detailed analysis of that, however.

As an aside, I am growing tired of a lot of those. I’d rather talk about books. I don’t except much "change" or any of that hocus pocus stump speech crap anytime soon.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool to have a president who loves Miles Davis.

• Thank you to Dr. Tompkins for passing along this encouraging article from Inside Higher Ed about the current crisis in English jobs.  Some of the ideas discussed in this article are very similar to my own thinking about what my eventual career path may entail.
• Via Jill, I am slowly engrossing myself in danah boyd’s freshly published dissertation about social networks.
• Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.  More on this from me soon.
• I’ve been thinking about Darwin a lot lately.  Conveniently, The Guardian has an article about a few new books discussing him.
• The new issue of The Atlantic has a number of articles about race in the post Obama election world, with mixed results, but also an excellent interview with Desmond Tutu:

Is there ever a time when a leader shouldn’t sit down and talk with an enemy?

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. The apartheid government in South Africa used to say they didn’t talk to terrorists, and they said Madiba [Nelson Mandela] was one of those. But of course, there’s no point in talking to someone else—someone who is not a leader, who has really no constituency—when that “terrorist,” so-called, is almost certainly the person that the oppressed regard as their leader. If you choose to talk with somebody else, the people will say, “That’s a stooge.” Any agreements you have with that one will have no credence.

How does peace come? Peace doesn’t come because allies agree. Allies are allies—they already agree! Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency. Then, when you do things that are risky, your people know that you are not likely to do something reckless. If you are doing something that is a bit dodgy, they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

This week’s video is from Black Flag’s very hard (as in, I can’t even find a full copy on the Internet hard to find) “Live 86″ video.   Here they are playing the song In My Head:

Jacket Copy recently had a good post about the promise and perils of audio books. As I have mentioned before, I listen to a lot of audio books these days. One issue which they have that I seem to have successfully avoided is crappy narrators:

Another disaster lies in hiring one reader to do all the book’s voices. DiMeo cites Jim Dale, who reads the Harry Potter series, as the rare talent who can successfully portray more than one character without sounding hammy. I recall David Sedaris doing this well too, but then, Sedaris is another rare talent.

My favourites so far have been the actual authors reading their work. Whether Barack Obama (Hmm, need to get a post up about that) or Richard Dawkins (currently listening to The God Delusion) I think I have had the most success when the author is also the reader.

• Enlightenment Rhetoric in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Ideological Implications of Worldviews in the Buffyverse
• Thomas Pynchon’s A Journey Into The Mind Of Watts

• The New Yorker endorses Barack Obama in very strong terms.
• …and on Emily Dickinson.
• The interesting looking First Wall Rebate podcast interviewed Nick Montfort recently.
• Literary Kicks on John Ruskin.
• Welcome back, Michael Berube.