Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

The Stockton family ran a number of sessions at ThatCamp Philadelphia, including Deb Gussman’s session on small scale publications and digital editions.

• Gussman is doing a digital edition of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
• Deb’s steps of a digital project: Strategy and Approach, Scope, Content, Design, Development, Testing, Support.
• Collaboration is very important. Need to find others who have skills you don’t have.
• There are no guarantees that apps, websites, etc will work in a year.
• I suggested the use of emulators ala what is done in modern times with classic interactive fiction.
• Deciding on what app/website/cms to use can often come from other colleagues/friends.
• I brought up the work of Cory Doctorow and how, by releasing his work under a creative commons license, readers can create versions of his works for different platforms.
• It is helpful to be familiar with remix culture in general.
• A great idea from John Theibault: in grant applications, include money for development of emulators for later editions when platforms become obsolete.
• Creative Commons licensing allows others to care more about the preservation of your work than you do.
• A lot of Gussman’s work with Sedgwick is coming from Google Books.
• Theibault’s students digitized Philadelphia’s directories.
• Back in 2003, I worked on the digitization of the American Weekly Mercury in one of Tom Kinsella’s classes.

1. Laurie Halse Anderson-Speak
2. Laurie Halse Anderson-Wintergirls
3. Piers Anthony-Bearing An Hourglass
4. Paul Auster-Invisible
5. Donald Barthelme-Sixty Stories
6. Sissela Bok-Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life
7. Roberto Bolano-2666
8. Alison Booth-Greatness Engendered: George Eliot & Virginia Woolf
9. Terry Brooks-The Druid of Shannara
10. Terry Brooks-The Elf Queen of Shannara
11. Terry Brooks-The Scions of Shannara
12. Terry Brooks-The Talismans of Shannara
13. Italo Calvino-Cosmicomics
14. Lewis Carroll-Alice In Wonderland
15. Tracy Chevalier-Girl With A Pearl Earring
16. Robert Coover-A Night At The Movies
17. Robert Coover-The Universal Baseball Association
18. Richard Dawkins-The Ancestor’s Tale
19. Richard Dawkins: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
20. Richard Dawkins-The River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
21. Cory Doctorow-For The Win
22. Michel Foucault-The History of Madness
23. Sigmund Freud-The Penguin Freud Reader
24. Charlotte Perkins Gilman-Herland
25. Robert Graves-Homer’s Daughter
26. Henrik Ibsen-The Major Plays Volume One
27. Shelley Jackson-Half Life
28. Friedrich Nietzsche-The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner
29. John Perkins-Hoodwinked: An Economic Hitman Reveals Why The World Financial Markets Imploded
30. Mark Twain-Who Is Mark Twain?
31. Leonid Tsypkin-Summer In Baden Baden
32. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Cat’s Cradle
33. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian
34. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Hocus Pocus
35. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Player Piano
36. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-Slaughterhouse Five
37. David Foster Wallace-Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
38. David Foster Wallace-Infinite Jest
39. Tim Weiner-Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
40. Virginia Woolf-Mrs. Dalloway’s Party

• 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:

(No picture yet)

Recently read: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

My favorite Boing Boing editor’s first young adult book is one of the best novels I have read this year. In short: a group of teenagers are captured and harassed by the government after a terrorist attack. When one of their friends ends up in a Guantanamo style prison camp, they decide to fight back using the Internet, Linux, and other super geeky tools. The plot is good here, but the coolest part is that the way Doctorow writes Little Brother it can be used as a manual for securing your privacy and other growing concerns. Reading a popular book with pages and pages of Linux references was one of the highlights of my year.

Read via Daily Lit. I applaud Doctorow for releasing his novels via a Creative Commons license.

• The Quarterly Conversation reviews Jayne Pupek’s Tomato Girl and Conversational Reading on two new Dalkey issued Toussaint novels.

• The Guardian on the trouble with cinematic adaptation of Evelyn Waugh novels.

• Blogging Woolf on Unfinished Dialogues, a ballet about the last day of Virginia Woolf’s life.

• New York Times reviews Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother (review coming soon).

• Cory Doctorow is podcasting the lectures from the course he is teaching at USC.

• Net @ Nite interviewed the founder of Twitter this week. More on Twitter in a post coming soon.

• Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing has a new short story collection out. He was also on TwiT recently.

• Octavia Butler is remembered by Adrienne Martini.

• Speaker Of The House Nancy Pelosi has her own YouTube channel. That is pretty cool.

• FireFTP, one of my favorite Firefox extensions, was the download of the day over at Life Hacker recently.

• Bookslut discusses new YA titles as the heirs to Judy Blume.