Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

If you are interested in following me on a day to day basis, there is always Twitter, but I now have a Tumblr blog as well. I write about a variety of things on there including what I am reading, what I am listening to, and some political commentary.

I am quite disappointed with the Kindle Fire I recently purchased. I have shopped for a tablet for about a year, but haven’t been impressed by what I saw on the market. The $200 price tag intrigued me, so I picked one up during the preorder period. The Kindle Fire is, at best, a starter tablet, and, at worst, more or less just a portal to Amazon’s infrastructure with some, and I mean *some*, apps allowed in. I will hold onto it, but I see myself upgrading to something else eventually. Here are some other observations:

• Recently, I have looked for a new Twitter client to replace TweetDeck. After trying out Tweetcaster on the Fire, I have settled on Hootsuite as my client of choice not only on my Fire, but on my phone as well.
• The biggest problem with the Fire is how annotations are stored. On earlier Kindles, there was a simple .txt file called “clippings” that stored any portions of a text that were highlighted or annotated. This was simple and JUST WORKED. Every so often, I could plug my Kindle into a laptop and export the clippings.txt file. On the Fire, there is no .txt file and annotations are kept on Amazon’s server. I DO NOT want my clippings in the cloud, especially a third-party who has been known to delete things in the past. I just want it to simply work and the Fire is very pretty, but makes this extremely more complex than it needs to be.
• The best part was that Amazon’s customer service didn’t even know about the change. Wow.
• An Android tablet that can’t open any open source documents like an .odt is a pretty terrible use for Android. I was going to use the Fire to edit and grade student work, but that doesn’t seem to be happening now.
• No wall charger. Yeah, I know that most people charge via USB these days, but I would still like the ability to charge via a wall outlet from time to time. Having to pay extra for that is pretty ridiculous.
• I ended up ordering a Kindle Touch as well for book reading. This Kindle works just like my earlier Kindle. The touch screen interface is fantastic. I am quickly getting used to touch screens in general.
• I haven’t used the Touch in class much yet, but the other day I used it to follow along with a student led lecture. I will post more in the new year about classroom uses for the Kindle Touch.

This will be my last post for 2011. Grading and end of semester activities will take up the rest of the month. Afterwards, I will be taking some time off around the holidays. Normal posting will return early in 2012. See you then.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the style they wanted, but here is my contribution for the Hacking The Academy collection. Last week, a CFP went up on Prof Hacker to put together an edited volume of essays in different forms of media about, well, hacking the academy. Among those putting this together is Dan Cohen from Zotero. I decided to write about what attending and promoting hardcore-punk shows for the past 15 years taught me about academic conferences.

Lessons Learned From 15 Years of Hardcore-Punk Shows About Hacking The Academic Conference

A lot of this I’d already deciphered by the time I was 15 years old. I spent my youth attending hardcore punk shows in, primarily, the tri-state and Delaware Valley area. I had a lot of ups and downs in regard to this, but a lot of the experiences, both good and bad, prepared me to “hack” my experience at academic conferences. Like hardcore shows, I only attend a handful of conferences per year. This is due to a variety of concerns: finances, lack of ability to travel, and a strong tendency towards being antisocial keep me at home or on campus most of the time.

I was originally drawn to the digital humanities because it encompassed a lot of the things I wasn’t seeing fully actualized by DIY hardcore. While underground and outside of the mainstream, although that is unfortunately changing, hardcore-punk is often very slow to change and evolve. Fans sneer at new means for communicating, producing and distributing records, and changing attitudes about digital media. The digital humanities are constantly changing and innovating, progressing in new and interesting ways. “Unconferences” like #thatcamp and forward thinking meetings like Digital Humanities 2009 are how I have always envisioned conferences being, but never had seen before. Projects like this one, where a book is compiled over a week, are much more “hardcore” than the ridiculous, conservative, nonsense which passes for it music wise.

When I first began attending conferences about five years ago, I drew from years of attending hardcore shows to make my experience much more interesting and productive. Here are some of the lessons I can offer for “hacking” the academic conference:

• You don’t have to attend every conference (aka just say no): I go to, maybe, a handful of hardcore shows a year. By December, I have attended around the same amount of conferences. As a teenager and in college I wasted a lot of time, energy, and money going to hardcore shows “just to go,” or because a friend of a friend’s band was playing, and other stupid excuses. As an academic, if I even remotely feel like my attendance at a conference is due to a circumstance like this, I am not going. If the money isn’t there, the schedule is bad, the presentation you want to see is the metaphorical headlining band and you can’t see yourself waiting, just say no.
• If you don’t go you can still keep in touch: The first half of my senior year of high school, I barely attended any shows because I was working every weekend at a crappy job as a dietician in a nursing home. Back then, 1996, I got caught up on shows and other concerns via IRC. I would wait up until my friends logged on at night and get all of the information I needed about the show. These days, this can be done in near real time via applications like Twitter and FriendFeed. A great example of this was the Twitter stream from Digital Humanities 2009. I did not attend, primarily because of a lack of financial resources, but I was able to follow the conference due to the #dh09 hashtag on Twitter. Many attendees live tweeted the conference, posting notes and comments about the panels they attended. Interested parties, like myself, could not only follow that stream, but offer questions for attendees to ask panelists. I could also comment and interact with those who attended and participated, offering my own thoughts and ideas as the conference progressed. Many new friendships and connections were also formed during this process.
• People who seem totally cool online can and will be jerks in real life: Attending hardcore shows for years, one of the most heartbreaking things for me was finding out someone in a band or a fanzine editor, or other sort of important scenester was a jerk, sexist, homophobic, etc. I took this personally and often brooded on drives home about how IMPORTANT it was to notice and point out their jerkiness. Eventually, I concluded, not soon enough, that hardcore was just like the real world. There were cool people, there were plenty of jerks, and many were very insincere. A lot of popular scenesters and band members had bloated egos or serious delusions of grandeur. At the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia at the end of 2009, I met a lot of friends who I had known from my weblog, Twitter, and other social media. I also encountered a certain person who is very prominent in the digital humanities. They are someone I have interacted with online and had been a fan of their very popular weblog. After I introduced myself, this person couldn’t have been a bigger, egocentric, asshole to me. Totally dismissive, self important, and uninterested in anything but himself. In the past, I would have been distraught and agonized over this, but now I just shrug it off and move on. Just because someone is an awesome theorist/blogger/podcaster, doesn’t mean they will be a good person. Nor, however, does it take away from their art.
• Save ephemera: I run a website called Hardcore Show Flyers (and it’s sister website Hardcore Punk Misc) which archives show flyers from the mid to late seventies to a few months from now. I’ve been in the habit of saving flyers, folders, handouts, and other ephemera since I was a child. The first scanner I bought in 2000 allowed let me to begin digitally archiving a lot of what would become the roots of Hardcore Show Flyers. Since becoming involved with attending, and putting on, conferences and symposiums over the years I have saved and scanned a lot of things which I hope one day will be useful or interesting to someone. I’d rather spend the time now and save something, than wish someone else had later.

I want to highlight a few guest blog posts I have contributed in recent weeks:

First, I contributed to Prof Hacker’s big #mla09 wrapup about the role of social media at the conference. There is a lot of great information and ideas in that post. I tried to come at it from a different angle that hopefully supplement the other ideas.

Secondly, I wrote a post about the role of intertextuality in Mrs. Dalloway for the Blogging Woolf weblog. This coincides with the Mrs. Dalloway Online Discussion Day that happened a day later as part of Woolf In Winter. Hopefully, in the future, I will be writing a few more posts for Blogging Woolf.

One of the best panels I attended was on the role of collaboration in the Digital Humanities. I got to meet up with some friends from Prof Hacker and Twitter like Jason Jones and Bethany Nowviskie, who were both on the panel. I also caught up with other friends who I have known for some time as well.

My notes aren’t really detailed, I suppose, but here is what I wrote down during the panels:

Jason Jones

• What does collaboration mean?
• Social media role
• Twitter is a crowd sourced search engine
• Institution based models of collaboration are 20th century

Laura Mandell

• Two point of views about collaboration
• Hybrid scholar: Interdisciplinary scholar who begins in English, but ends up in computer science
• Hybrid field: Experts in discipline come together (Example: An English professor and a java scriptor) to work on a project
• Hybirds don’t have fit in modern university
• Modern universities prioritizes those in ensconced fields

Bethany Nowviskie “Monopolies of Invention”

• Consider institutional status (staff, adjuncts, etc) “can’t afford to make trouble”
• Digital Humanities can fix intellectual property problems
• UVA must tell patent office about new patentable DH

One of the reasons I have been pretty quiet in recent months is that I am writing a lot more on Twitter (wpwend42) these days. As Jill Walker-Rettberg notes, it is much easier to dump a series of links (what used to be posted here as “weekend reading” or “weekly reader”) and get instant feedback and discussion from peers and friends. I agree with Jill that this does not offer more long-term discussion, like she gets on a lot of posts, but this weblog doesn’t get a lot of traffic so that doesn’t bother me too much.

My concern at this point is with that real-time discussion. I like the idea of having more long-term discussion in comments like Jill gets, or websites like Prof Hacker, but it is not really realistic for here. This weblog has never been traffic heavy and comments are sporadic at best. Twitter allows me to get instant feedback and discussion going about links, topics, and anything else going on at the moment.

Lately, I have thought a lot about the changing focus of this domain. This line of thought began after I read Torill Mortensen’s recent post about the changing focus of her own weblog. My focus has changed from blogging about personal views, commentary about literature and technology, and my own private life to more about teaching, upcoming publications, and other miscellaneous events.

I will still post about literature and technology, and the intermixing of them, from time to time. Linux is in my thoughts, now more than ever, and will get coverage from time to time. In general, however, my focus has shifted and slowed down to focus on my teaching and writing.

Like Torill, I am a bit embarrassed by how actively I used to blog. When I began in 2004 I would set a goal to post at least ____ times per day/week and it led to some seriously silly/embarrassing posts. As the technology changes and we move to more real-time conversation I am sure this domain will continue to evolve and grow with it. Stay tuned.

For the past week or so, I have followed the tweets from two conferences: Digital Humanities 09 and That Camp (An “unconference”  Here is a good explanation of what that means).  Due to some monetary constraints, I was unable to attend but could follow what was happening in real time due to the massive amount of posts on Twitter by attendees via the hash tags #dh09 and #thatcamp.  I was able to interact with them, comment on what was happening along side, and meet new friends and Twitter followers.

Twitter has really changed conferences.  For years I have always kicked myself when I miss an interesting conference.  Live blogging has made this less painful, but real time coverage on Twitter really changes how people not even at the conference can interact with presenters and attendees.  I was definitely not the only non-attendee commenting and asking questions to people in attendance.

Soon, I will have a number of posts commenting on topics I read about on the #dh09 and #thatcamp tags.  For now, the notes Digilib posted for various panels is a good place to start.  After this week’s discourse, I am more proud of the Digital Humanities than I have ever been before; clearly this was the right direction for me to take and I hope to begin a career in it soon.