Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

One of the highlights of the spring semester was being accepted to attend the latest ThatCamp, this time here at the shore in Atlantic City at the Carnegie Library. Even more thrilling was the fact that The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey was the sponsor and host for it. I did some work with Stockton’s own John Theibault, vetting applications, and doing some general organizational work for the conference.

Over the next few weeks, along with NJCEA posts, I will post my notes from ThatCamp Jersey Shore. I made a point to heavily tweet my notes on the #thatcampjs hash tag. For now, however, here are some pictures.

(Amanda French discussing our written, voted upon, schedule for the conference)

One of the biggest highlights of ThatCamp was getting to meet my internet pal Amanda French. After meeting up with John on my way in, she was the next person I saw and we greeted each other with a big hug. Amanda explained that everyone hugs at ThatCamp, which I will keep in mind, and we spent some time together while she, as a representative of ThatCamp, worked on organizing some aspects of the first day.

By far, the coolest aspect of ThatCamp is that the session for the conferences are completely “camper” driven. At the beginning of day one, after Amanda introduced the conference, those of us who wanted to propose a panel wrote it in one of the squares on the board. Campers then voted on which they would like to participate in or view. I proposed a session on using wikis in the classroom, which is something I am doing as of the spring semester. My session got, I think, the most votes, which gave me a lot of confidence heading into it.

John talking to the assembled group of campers on the final day.

Amanda French speaking during a session.

A nice surprise at ThatCamp was running into and spending time with Deborah Gussman, my first ever literature professor at Stockton. She has gotten very interested in the digital humanities in the past few years.

I recently came across a printout of this: I only vaguely recall making this presentation, but this is my midterm presentation for Scott Rettberg’s seminar on postmodernism back in 2004 at Stockton. As you can see, I wrote my final paper on Borges. At this point, I was still putting the pieces of the puzzle in regards to Borges in general, semiotics, and especially Kristeva and Barthes.

Ada Lovelace Day is an awesome idea going on today to celebrate women in technology. Participants are asked to blog about a woman in technology who has inspired them.

There are so many women I could blog about. To name a few: Angela Thomas, Molly Wood, Christy Dena, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and so many others. However, the woman who rises above all others in my mind, and for readers of this weblog this should come as no surprise, is Jill Walker-Rettberg.

I first encountered Jill’s work via, her now husband, Scott’s weblog while I was taking his senior seminar on postmodernism in 2004. She blogged about everything I was becoming interested in: weblogs, electronic literature, sticker art, and other emerging forms of New Media. It was her paper on distributed narrative that really was the big “ah ha!” moment for me about New Media. Combining sticker art, literary theory, and reader/user participation the way she did in writing about things like sticker novels and Online Caroline really opened the blinders for me about all of these things.

(Funny story about that article: the day I read it, I met Jill! I was at an event on Stockton’s campus and I overheard a woman talking to Dr. Tompkins, what sounded like an Australian accent, squinted at her for a moment, and realized who she was. I went over, introduced myself, and embarrassingly gushed about how much I like her weblog and articles. After talking for awhile, she was also very supportive of my then burgeoning hypertext project that would become War Prayers. Seeing a link to it on her weblog a few days later blew my mind at the time.)

Jill’s work with feral hypertext has been extremely influential in how I engage with both print and electronic literature. A lot of the first ideas I engaged with while planning what would become my MA thesis came from the time I spent the holiday break before last spring reading that article over and over.

Even if you don’t care about New Media (how dare you!), Jill’s weblog is filled with useful links. Whether about knitting or motherhood, or social networking, or other weblogs, or anything else I’ve always thought of it as the Boing Boing of New Media. So many websites I read daily I first encountered via her own.

Can I also mention that I have rarely met someone as honestly just flat out nice and engaged as Jill is? I’ve been told by people I am bit overwhelming at times, and don’t doubt it, and she has always been a wonderful person to email with or spend time chatting in person. While writing my thesis she has been helpful and interested in what I was doing with her work, to which I cannot truly state how appreciative I am.

Jill inspires me every time we send messages back and forth on Facebook or when I load her weblog in Google Reader. She even went and married my favorite professor, one of my favorite people ever and now they have a baby together. I wouldn’t be as involved in New Media if it weren’t for Jill’s inspiration. Thank you.

(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

There is another big reason for not wanting to continue in academia after my MA.

I don’t feel like I have anything to prove anymore.

The few people I have strongly confided in over the years will understand this. I have had a lot of ups and downs over the years. I struggled coming out of high school and even when I first got to Stockton. I was able to get my life in order, become a strong student, and thrive in both the English and Philosophy departments. I went back and retook classes I struggled in and made up for my mistakes. I became, hell yeah I did, one of the best students in both departments at the time.

I got into graduate school next. Which was a huge deal for me. While there have been some pretty awful parts of my experience, I have also thrived here and proven to myself I can do this. I know I am a good writer, I do solid research, and I am a strong academic.

Nevertheless, I don’t think going on for another degree is that fruitful. Economically, with our economy in the tank thanks to the swine who run things in Washington, it is not sound. On an intellectual level, I would need to find the exact right program that would accentuate my interests and abilities, not hinder them. I am still open to such a program, but my active engagement with such a search is minimal.

What would that prove anyway? I feel like I have redeemed myself for past grievances and failures. It is time to move on.

I may have graduated, but I am still interested in what is going on down at Stockton. Dr. Kinsella is teaching two sections for the senior seminar, one in narrative theory and another about travel literature, this semester. They have their own blog. I hope I can have the opportunity to view some of the end of semester presentations in April.