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Backwards, Bookwards, Burke Words, Brooke Works

May 5, 2013 in academia, blog, writing with 2 Comments

I.

I want to wish everyone a happy Burkeday — Kenneth Burke was born on this day in 1897, making today as good a day as any to celebrate rhetoric.

KB is part of my origin story: When I returned to graduate school for my PhD, my first course wasn’t actually official. The summer before I started, I sat in on Victor Vitanza’s Kenneth Burke course. For me, it was like a homecoming, and only partly because I was glad to get back to academia. I was a fairly half-hearted rhetoric and composition person, having done a concentration in my MA program on the counsel of our graduate advisor. I’d originally gone to graduate school thinking to study Irish literature, and I was possessed of a fondness for critical theory. While I could see some connections with rhet/comp, they were weak ties at best, and it may not have been an accident that I ended up taking a couple of years after my first attempt.

Anyhow, reading Burke was a revelation for me. It wasn’t always easy reading, nor would I say that I agree with everything he wrote, but I’ve always felt a resonance with his work. I don’t doubt that it shows up in my own writing from time to time. But reading Burke was one of the things that made me feel (finally) like I’d made the right decisions to go back to graduate school and to stick with rhetoric and composition. One of Burke’s passages that has always appealed to me comes from the Afterword to the 3rd edition of Attitudes Toward History, revised a bit for an interview he gave later on:

Remember the big traffic jam in New York when the subways stopped? That’s when I learned the word gridlock. Gridlock means you can’t go any way. The traffic is so jammed, it can’t go forward, backwards, or sideways. What I had was counter-gridlock….So, I’d write six or seven pages; then another tangent would seem needed, and I’d start over again, with the same baffling outcome. Instead of no way out, there was a clutter of ways out, each in its own way running into something that cancelled it.

Kenneth Burke, “Counter-Gridlock”

 I don’t know if other people’s minds work that way, but mine sure did. I think that’s part of what drew me to hypertext originally, and eventually to blogging and social media. Along the way, I’ve learned tricks to help tame my own counter-gridlock (cut the first 5 pages, work on multiple parts at once, etc.), but it’s always there, making it harder for me to force my ideas into the shapes that I know they need to take.

II.

There’s another piece of Burke that always appealed to me secretly. Burke was raised on the work of Mary Baker Eddy (who founded Christian Science), and while he turned away from those ideas to an extent, there is a sense that runs throughout his work that language is not simply representational but material, that the ideas we hold affect us physiologically. The idea of literature as “equipment for living” is a mild expression of this. There’s a story about him that says that one of the reasons why he never published the third volume of the Motives trilogy was that he would be “finished,” and not just in the intellectual sense.

You might imagine how even the hint of this would appeal to a kid who grew up reading and gaming in worlds where language did have that power. There’s a “not really…but maybe” quality to it all in my head that sometimes crosses over the line separating figurative and literal. If you were to connect this idea to a passage from an academic text like this one, published in the fall before I started back to graduate school–

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace, Village Voice, December 1993 

–well, then, you might begin to tease out some of my own motives and interests. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke writes, “The magical decree is implicit in all language, for the mere act of naming an object or situation decrees that it is to be singled out as such-and-such rather than as something other” (4).

III.

Here’s where it gets even less rational. Imagine that you’re a person for whom writing has never been a struggle, but who does struggle with putting it into a straight line. And imagine further that you’ve got a secret fascination with what Dibbell calls that “logic of the incantation.” You force your work into those shapes, article after article and conference papers galore, and eventually, you even manage to craft your own little snow globe, your first book.

I shouldn’t continue in 2nd person here. I started deflecting before I even realized that I’d done it. I am those things, and have done those things. The process of taking Lingua Fracta from initial manuscript to published volume, however, took almost 5 years. If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that my father passed away before he had a chance to see it published. What you may not know is that my grandfather did as well, about a year later. And my grandmother’s health at the end of her life was such that she probably only caught a glimpse.

Part of me loves my book, and part of me blames my book. It makes no sense, and even sounds silly to me as I write it down like this. But the fact of the matter is that I stopped wanting to write for a long time. The gradual fade of my first blog took place over about 3 months following my father’s death, and the loss of my grandparents sealed the deal. In my brain, I know that this is a story (events happen) that a tiny part of me has turned into a plot (events are connected!)–that’s the very definition of superstition–but sometimes all it takes is a tiny part 

IV.

The tiny thing that helped me come out of this, to the degree that I’m out of this, came last summer. Since my book was published, I’ve been thinking on and off about what I’ll do my next book on. I’ve had several possibilities in mind, but I’m fairly sure that when I hit a certain level of detail in the planning, something in me just shut down. It was too easy to turn to something else and just forget about it. I’ll spare you the long stories of my self-distraction.

Last summer, though, I realized that I don’t have to write another book. Ever. I say this fully aware that this is a luxury; I am in an incredibly privileged position to be able to say it. But I don’t mean it in the sense that I no longer have to work: I’ve been writing articles and chapters for collections, supervising students, teaching and designing courses, mentoring as best as I’ve been able–I overfill my time (sometimes) with the work that I’m obliged to do and the work that I enjoy doing. What I mean by this is that I can continue my work, my reading, my writing, my teaching, my mentoring, my participation–and none of those things have to take the particular material form of a book.

Is this distinction clear enough? Because it’s made all the difference for me. In that deep part of me that associated my book with loss and grief, the idea that it could be the book as formal obligation rather the specific incantation I wove to meet that obligation shook something loose in me that’s allowed me to start relearning how to write. I know that this might sound like “Aha! It wasn’t my fault after all, but the evil institution that made me do it!” But that’s not quite right. Writing had become this thing that forced me against my inclinations and ended in heartbreak. It wasn’t a matter for me of finding someone else to blame; rather, it was working my way through to a place where “blame” didn’t quite work to capture the full range of possible relations. It’s not like it doesn’t still occupy me, but I no longer feel locked in by it.

I don’t know if this quite makes sense. It does in my head.

V.

Here’s a last little odd fact about me. When I was young, I was fascinated by writing backwards and writing upside down. To this day, I can read text upside down almost as quickly as right side up. I would practice backwards cursive with a mirror–something about inverting and reversing the shapes of letters felt like magic to me. I loved codes, non-Roman alphabets, letter substitutions, all that stuff. Our daily paper had a cryptoquote next to the crossword that I would try and solve in my head. Palindromes, ambigrams, word ladders, snowball poems, I have always been fascinated by the extravagant capacities of language. So add that fascination to my discomfort with the book as form and my fascination with the logic of incantations, mix it together with a little technology expertise, and it makes perfect sense that what I should do is to do it backwards, to announce the “publication” of my new “book.”

Believe it or not, I’m not joking.

My next project is called Rhetworks, and I’m publishing it today, even though it hasn’t been written yet. It may or may not become a book; I’ve toyed with the idea of describing it as a BOOC, a Book-Sized Open Online Colloquium. I’ve been thinking about the relationships between rhetoric and networks for close to 10 years now, and I think I’m going to start writing something big and sprawling on the subject.

Over the next 2 years, starting today, I’m going to write it online, using a PBWiki installation. That means that I’m going to write in public, which scares the heck out of me, but not nearly as much as it used to. I’m going to make mistakes and I’m going to have to trust in the generosity of my readers. At the end of two years, if I feel like I have enough material to justify publishing it as a book, I may do so. But I’m equally prepared for the possibility that I won’t. In either case, I’ll be writing under a Creative Commons License and it will stay up there, freely available to anyone who’s interested, regardless of any subsequent form it might take.

I have a hypothesis, a fairly grand one, that I want to work through, and I even have a set of keywords that may someday provide me with the chapter structure for a book. But neither of those things will drive this project. I am interested instead in giving reign to my counter-gridlock, without knowing ahead of time whether or not it will actually work. But at its most basic level, this is an experiment. It may not catch on, I may grow bored with it, other people may find it stupid or silly or self-indulgent–I can imagine a hundred different ways that this could fail. And that’s why I’m going to do it.

Oh, but there’s more. My first idea was to write Rhetworks on a private wiki, and invite people to visit it once I’d gotten “enough” of it going to feel comfortable sharing. What I’m doing instead is to invite you to participate in it from the get go, and to contribute to it as much as you’re comfortable with. For some, this may mean correcting a typo or two, asking some questions in the comments, or adding a work or two to my bibliography. And that’s fine. But that’s just the start of what’s possible. I’m willing to collaborate with you on sections. I’m willing to list you as co-author. As long as you’re comfortable, I’m willing to let you publish your own work on the site, and even in the pages of the book, if it comes to that. My only request is that you make your own work as available and editable and shareable as I’m making my own. Does that mean that I’d be willing to include a chapter written by someone else entirely in the book version of this? Or include entire sections or chapters that disagree with me? Yes. Yes, it does. I’m also open to the possibility of using the site as an invention space and breaking off pieces of it to publish collaboratively in other venues–I know that not everyone can afford to invest time and effort as open-endedly as I can.

And yes, I can imagine that this project could be derailed by edit wars, or that someone might get it into their head to try and ruin it. I’ll be restricting editing access to registered users, so that I can exercise some minimal amount of supervisory influence. But I have thought about a lot of different ways that people might make use of the site, add to it in ways that I cannot predict, and even disagree with me in fundamental ways, and I find that I’m surprisingly okay with that.

A scholarly project sits at the heart of a network by nature. The traditional model of publication, though, encourages us to mediate that network ourselves, often out of fear of what would happen if we let others see before it was complete. William Germano described it as a snow globe in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago:

Within the realm of the snow globe, every authority on the subject has been cited or pacified. Look inside and find a perfect, tidy, improbable world where no questions are asked, or invited. Scholarly books, especially first ones, are a paranoid genre—their structure assumes that someone is always watching, eager to find fault. And they take every precaution against criticism.

He asks if we dare write for readers–what I want to do here is write WITH readers, with you. I want to create a book-sized network of scholarship that itself is the product of the network. It’s not coincidental that it’s about networks, too.

VI.

I go back and forth about this. On the one hand, it feels like the next step, or maybe a leap of faith: the idea that scholarship can locate itself somewhere that’s part text, part connectivist MOOC, part community. Germano suggests that maybe “the best form a book can take—even an academic book—is as a never-ending story, a kind of radically unfinished scholarly inquiry,” and part of me believes that enough to give it a try. Maybe what I’m describing is actually a 2-year online course on networks and rhetoric, open to anyone who’s interested. (I will almost certainly use it to some degree in the digital humanities course I teach next spring, and I hope others will take it up that way, too.) It pushes the idea of public, online review even further, and maybe it will ultimately push at our ideas of what acceptable (and accessible) online scholarship can look like.

And then there are days where I imagine that I’m so crazy to even think of this that I can’t see outside of the crazy. Even if I manage to summon the effort, time, and energy to do this successfully, it feels insanely risky, when I could just sit down, open my books, fire up my browser, and bang out a publishable manuscript.

And then I think about the “clutter of ways” that I want to give voice to.

I think about how maybe if I cast my spell backwards this time, something magnificent might happen.

And I think about Clay Shirky’s incantation–publish, then filter–and how much more sense it makes to me, even if it sounds upside down.

And then, one day in early May, I publish a book that doesn’t yet exist, and invite you to write it with me. I wonder what could possibly happen next.

Stock, Flow, Field, Stream

April 3, 2013 in academia, blog, DH, pedagogy, social media with 8 Comments

Every once in a while, everything just seems to flow into one large conversation full of resonances, connections, and it’s like striking a tuning fork. This is a post about the challenges of graduate education, and perhaps, by extension, academic work for those of us who identify with the digital humanities. Let me see if I can gather the threads together.

There’s a little history. Jokingly, I tell people that one of my biggest academic regrets is a paper I delivered at CCCC a few years back (2010). Our session took place in a huge ballroom (the size of our audience did not do it justice), and rather than a projector and portable screen, we had like a 30-foot monitor. It was colossal, and one of the things I regret is that, not knowing about it ahead of time, I didn’t prepare a full slide deck. Instead, I gave the only talk I’ve ever given that had just one, solitary slide. Don’t get me wrong, I was proud of that slide, and I wish that I hadn’t lost it in the Great Laptop Crash of 2011. It was a screen capture of a cover of an old issue of Field & Stream magazine, lovingly Photoshopped to reflect the topics in my talk, which was called “Writing Retooled: Loop, Channel, Layer, Stream.” Keep in mind that this was 3 years ago, when Twitter was still relatively exotic for academics, but what I was arguing was that

For those of us who engage with the field through social media, though, that engagement may seem more shallow in the short term, but it is constant and ongoing. We are setting foot in the river every day, rather than waiting for the occasional, official “event” to do so.
Think of it this way: who is more likely to shape the field? The person who sits in the audience for a presentation or reads a journal article that’s already been written, or the one who participates in weblog or Twitter conversations about that writing as it is being done? And yet, if you asked 100 people at this conference whether they’d rather publish an essay in CCC or have a couple of hundred followers on Twitter, I’m pretty sure most people would choose the first option.

A couple of hundred. Heh. Anyways, I suggested that, rather than focusing exclusively on the “field” of writing studies, we needed to be building the tools and habits necessary for dealing with the “stream.” I was arguing and, not or, but my talk was certainly weighted towards the stream, given where the field was (is?) at the time.

Anyhow, someone reminded me of that talk this year at CCCC, my first trip back since I gave it, so I’ve had cause in the past month or so to remember it fondly. Over the past couple of days, it’s connected for me with a few different links. First, there’s Anil Dash’s talk yesterday at the Berkman Center on “The Web We Lost.” There are a number of things in there worth thinking about, but Doug Hesse pointed out in my FB comments something that I’m not sure we’ve all really processed:

We built the Web for pages, but increasingly we’re moving from pages to streams (most recently-updated on top, generally), on our phones but also on bigger screens. Sites that were pages have become streams. E.g., YouTube and Yahoo. These streams feel like apps, not pages. Our arrogance keeps us thinking that the Web is still about pages. Nope. The percentage of time we spend online looking at streams is rapidly increasing. It is already dominant.

In Writing Studies, I think that we still think of ourselves as being in the business of writing pages. Think about all of the infrastructure we have, from page counts to citation formats, that make this simple assumption about the “object” of our practices. Or about how vital .PDF has been in finally getting people to accept that scholarship isn’t necessarily inferior because it’s online. (None of these are particularly thrilling examples to me.)

As part of my own stream, I just came across a tweet from Jay Rosen that provides some nice overlap as well:

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 5.48.41 PM

Yes, that’s the same Robin Sloan who wrote Fish and Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, which I happen to be reading at the moment. :) Sloan writes about stock and flow:

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

  • Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
  • Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

If you push on, as I did, and read the Rushkoff interview, then you’ll see Sloan’s treadmill metaphor writ large, and translated into “present shock.” This is a line from the book that the interviewer quotes:

When we attempt to pack the requirements of storage into media or flow, or to reap the benefits of flow from media that locks things into storage, we end up in present shock.

I realize here that I’m making my own talk appear far more prescient (and perhaps more sophisticated) than it actually was. I was in good shape just identifying the difference between what I was calling field and stream, I suspect.

Another thing that I talked about with several people at this year’s CCCC was how I was sometimes struggling with the presentism of social media. It’s particularly acute for me as I dip into conversations around the digital humanities, as so much of that discussion seems to happen on Twitter. You could argue variously that this is a symptom of its relative novelty but also of its dynamic energy, and even perhaps a combination of the two. Talk to me in five years, I suppose. It’s sometimes become difficult for me, though, to step back from social media and to focus instead on the page-oriented commitments that I have. The virtue of being in my position is that, if I want, I can just tone down the commitments and focus instead on more short-form work of the sort that social media energizes and provokes from me. I’m conscious that not everyone has that luxury, though.

This is not a post where I want to scold anyone. Rushkoff has a particular position that he’s promoting, to be sure, and there are hints of it in Dash and Sloan, I suppose, but my own interest is in thinking about how the balance that I was arguing for back in 2010 has so radically shifted in the other direction. But only in certain places. I’m slated to teach our Rhetoric, Composition, and Digital Humanities graduate course next spring, and already I’m thinking about how I can hack the curricular and conceptual space of my classroom to allow for a more dynamic and distributed course experience. But now I find myself in the odd position of thinking about whether that kind of course will provide enough field, enough stock, for students who (as I was arguing three years ago)

are more likely to rely on bookmarking than bookshelving. They are more likely to read an article that has well‐developed keywords than one with page numbers. And they are more likely to follow citation trails than to sit still and read a paper journal cover‐to‐cover. They are more accustomed to managing the flows of information, sorting them, and assembling them for their own uses. In short, they are much more likely today to be what  Thomas  Rickert  and  I  have  described  as  practitioners  of  ambient  research.

I’ve been deeply committed to making over my pedagogy in ways that help students work with flow, but as a colleague and I were talking about today, those students still have to go through a comprehensive exam process and to write a dissertation. Believe me when I say that I know all the arguments for reshaping those requirements, and that I agree with them. But I have to reconcile them with my own ethical beliefs about graduate education and whether it prepares students adequately for what follows. I’m not so full of myself as to think that a single graduate course with me will make the difference in a student’s ability to finish or not; however, years spent as a graduate director have made me keenly aware that every course is itself a blend of stock and flow, with obligations both to itself and to the ongoing curriculum that it is a part of.

So while the blogger in me celebrates the short-form and the streams, the academic in me starts to wonder if the shift away from more traditional academic practices doesn’t ultimately do my students a disservice–I think about whether or not I’m responsibly modeling the kind of balance they’re going to need in their own careers. I say that fully aware that it sounds like the first step on the road to rationalization, but it’s not. Really. I think that it means that I’ll think more carefully about how I hack my course next spring, not whether or not I’ll do so. It’s an issue that I’ll likely grapple with for some time, and this is really just the beginning of that process for me. That’s all.

(ps. If you’ve read the above and thought, “why isn’t he doing something about this in his research?” or some variation on the hack/yack question, then you’ve happened upon one of the driving forces behind my next major project. About which, more soon. :) )

 

Peer to Peer

March 18, 2013 in academia, conferential, social media with 1 Comment

I should be doing many other things, but every once in a while, there’s a bundle of ideas in my skull that gathers together and sets up a resonance field, and there’s really nothing for it but to write it out. So this is more suggestive than it would be had I the time to really write through it all.

The piece that clicked it all together for me was Jon Udell’s recent post on networks of first-class peers, which has its roots (I think) in the recent announcement of the demise of Google Reader, the death knell for which happened while I was in Las Vegas at CCCC, our annual conference for all things compositional and rhetoricky. I don’t want to project my own affect onto Jon’s post, but there was a sadness there, a nostalgia for the days when the weblog was the undisputed chief of social media. Jon closes his discussion with a look back:

What some of us learned at the turn of the millenium — about how to use first-class peers called blogs, and how to converse with other first-class peers — gave us a set of understandings that remain critical to the effective and democratic colonization of the virtual realm. It’s unfinished business, and it may never be finished, but don’t let the tech pundits or anyone else convince you it doesn’t matter. It does.

He’s responding in part to the “has Google decided that blogs are dead?” portion of the hullabaloo over Reader here, I think, and also hearkening back to something that I think Kathleen Fitzpatrick was getting at in her discussion about civility a couple of months ago. I’m struck by the difference that Udell is articulating between first-class and second-class peers (although that language is freighted in ways that a more networky “first-degree” and “second-degree” might not be). Services like Twitter and Facebook, the argument might run, allow us to treat our discourse as more disposable, less our own.

This cross-blog conversational mode had an interesting property: You owned your words. Everything you wrote went into your own online space, was bound to your identity, became part of your permanent record. As a result, discourse tended to be more civil than what often transpired in Usenet newsgroups or web forums.

Jon cites Dave Winer’s mantra, “Own your words,” and that resonated for me with Ryan Cordell’s “mea culpa” entry that followed Kathleen’s post, about the ethics of conference tweeting and its effect on community. For me, Ryan’s post is a lovely example of all the best thoughts that “own your words” suggests.

There’s another thread to all this for me, one that comes directly out of some of the discussions at CCCC with respect to textbook publishers, and the role (or control) they have when it comes to our field. Because of the vagaries of the conference process, folks had committed to particulars panels, papers, and topics largely before the big publicity rollout last summer about MOOCs, and as a result, other than at ATTW (whose deadlines are later), there was little formal discussion that I heard about. That’s not to say, however, that there weren’t goings-on. In particular, the spectre of MOOCs haunted (for me at least) the annual focus groups, publisher lunches, etc. I don’t participate in those events, but I’m deeply sympathetic to those who finance their trips to CCCC in part by reviewing textbooks, attending focus groups, and/or eating (let’s not call them “free”) meals provided by the publishers.

It’s hard, though, not to see such “partnerships” as more nefarious, or to imagine that these companies aren’t basically doing preliminary research for their own MOOC experiments, whatever they end up looking like. It’s similarly difficult for me not to see these companies, whose budgets underwrite much of our annual conference, acting in the role of shepherd, as KB expressed it:

The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be ‘identified’ with a project that is raising the sheep for market. (Rhetoric of Motives)

It is not easy to suggest to my colleagues, old and new, that they need to go about owning their words here. That sounds a lot like blaming the sheep for the variously scaled loyalties of the shepherd. It does make me think more carefully, though, about what my role and responsibilities are as a member of the discipline, the community, my department, etc. It’s a deeply complicated set of issues; all I know for sure is that I can’t really see my way out of it at this point.

In each of these scenarios though, I’m conscious of nostalgia in my approach to them, the feeling that “if we knew then” which often accompanies the despair of inevitability for me. If only we’d fought hard to keep the blogosphere going. If only I could be more mindful in my approach to social media. If only we could operate at a disciplinary scale that didn’t require the implicit quid pro quo of the textbook companies.

I wish I had an easy answer for all of this, one that offered more promise than each of us simply needing to think our way forward. That’s what I’ll be doing, just as soon as all those other things are done.

Walking the walk

September 22, 2012 in academia, if i were in charge, RSA with 1 Comment

You may have caught the news over Facebook or Twitter late this past week: I accepted an offer from the Rhetoric Society of America to become their inaugural Director of Electronic Resources (DER). First, I want to thank everyone who congratulated me over email, FB, Twitter, etc. I appreciate all the positive feedback and good wishes.

By the time we got to the point of the offer, it wasn’t a difficult decision at all. I really like how RSA has framed the position, imagining it as on an organizational par with a journal editorship, an ex officio board membership, etc. And there were several things, I think, that recommended me for the position–my familiarity with most things digital as well as the fact that I’m tenured/established, the support that SU was willing to provide me upon accepting the gig, and the fact that I have a good working relationship with the person who’ll be running the conference in 2014. All of those will make the position a manageable one for me.

I did spend some time this summer really thinking carefully about whether or not I wanted to dip my toe back into the pool of organizational service, though. After last year’s surgery, my health and energy levels are still somewhat precarious. I feel pretty solid now, but it takes less to incapacitate me than it used to, and taking on extra duties was something I really had to think about. I’m also in the process of getting my next major project off the ground, so that was another factor I had to take into consideration. I’m not always the greatest at long-term planning, as I have the bad habit of extrapolating my short-term free time unrealistically, without remembering the other commitments I’ve made.

I think one of the things that pushed me into applying and accepting the position, though, was that I still believe that there are a lot of changes that could take place within our professional organizations, many of which are related to the work I do in rhetoric and technology. I’m more than happy to write about those changes on my blog, and do with some frequency, but there’s also a degree to which I feel like I should be doing what I can to implement them. Some of them are small and gradual, while others will be fairly major.

I like the fact that I’ll have a chance to do this work in a context like RSA, an organization with a richer history than I think most of us truly know but one that may be a little more agile than the Big 2 (NCTE/CCCC & MLA). RSA’s been growing quite a bit over the past few years, in terms of the size of the conference, the creation of local affiliates, and efforts at internationalization (did you know that there’s an RSE?). It’s also in a fairly unique position as a well-established organization with both leadership and membership drawn from English and Communications, a relationship that varies a lot from institution to institution. All of those factors put RSA in an interesting position, one that (to me, at least) is ripe for the kind of work that the DER is meant to accomplish.

There are a lot of possible first steps, but I’m starting right now with social media (follow RSA at @rhetsoc!), with the idea that those structures will take some time to develop and take hold. They’ll also function as a loose framework for a lot of the other developing that we’ll end up doing, I suspect. And I expect that I’ll be posting updates here periodically, asking for feedback on site features, wishlisting, etc.

So yeah, prepare to be directed, you electronic resources.

Migrating the MLA JIL from list to service

September 19, 2012 in academia, if i were in charge, tools with 4 Comments

I left a comment over at Dave’s excellent discussion of the MLA Job Information List, and part of it was picked up at Alex’s equally worthwhile followup, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Here’s the comment I left:

I was going to make the same point that Alex makes vis a vis the costs of the JIL vs. the costs of the conference itself for both interviewers and interviewees, especially all those years that we were forced to compete with holiday travelers for both plane seats and hotel rooms. The list is the tip of a very lucrative iceberg that has supported the MLA for a long time.

I wanted to second your comments about opening up the job list database, which for all intents & purposes is the same (inc. the crappy interface) that they used in the mid-90s. A much richer set of metadata about the jobs could be gathered by MLA (and made available to searchers) if the arbitrary scarcity of the print list is set aside and MLA were to take their curative obligation seriously.

There’s been no small amount of buzz lately surrounding the MLA JIL, our fields’ annual posting of open academic positions. For a long time, that list has been proprietary to MLA. At one time, institutions paid to have their positions appear in the list, and prospective applicants paid for a print copy of it. I don’t remember the exact year that the online database version of the JIL went live, but I’m tempted to place it at around 1996 or 1997. At that time, database access was granted to those who’d purchased the print version. It’s never been an especially elegant solution, as some of us would gladly have paid less money and forgone the print version. And as many people have observed in this discussion, the JIL is a monetary imposition on those who are least able to bear it, (often debt-ridden) graduate students and/or contingent faculty, at a time where the costs of application (mailing, copying, dressing, traveling, boarding, eating) are already substantial.

MLA appears to be taking steps to mitigate some of these costs (open JIL, Interfolio), which is good. But for me, there’s an additional layer that needs to be addressed. One of the arguments that MLA made in opening up access to their publications is that they provide curation, such that allowing authors to make copies of individual articles available doesn’t damage the brand. I don’t disagree with this. But I would love to see them extend the same logic to the JIL, and see them take a more active role in curating that information.

For several years now, there have been other, free alternatives to the JIL (departmental & institutional sites, disciplinary listserves, word-of-mouth, et al.). The MLA JIL is not strictly speaking, necessary any longer, and as more programs move to Skype or phone interviews, the monopoly the organization once held on the interviewing process may also be in danger of fading. Frankly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, although it’s going to be a long time before those changes affect the overall process. There’s little difference in cost if you’re attending MLA for one interview or for twenty, but once applicants can get away with not attending at all, that will change things. (I’m interested to see if offering a Skype interview as an alternative to MLA will someday soon become an institutional mandate along the lines of equal opportunity/access.)

Anyways. If I were in charge (a phrase I think so often that I’ve made it a new category on my blog) of the JIL, the first thing I would do would be to update its horrific interface, which hasn’t changed substantially since the days of its first appearance.

I can’t imagine the cringes that this interface elicits from my colleagues in “Technical and business writing,” particularly insofar as they have experience with usability testing and/or identify with terminology a little more recent than “business writing.” There are some basic tips for searching at the end of the help link, but really, there’s so little to work with that those tips are obvious. (want more results? check more boxes.)

Okay, I lied. The problem with this interface is actually just symptomatic of the curation problem. If the JIL is just a text file, then really, all you can do is text matching. And if you charge departments by the word (which they used to do, iirc), then you’re actually incentivizing a lack of information, and crippling your service. And that’s the point that I want to make here: the MLA should be thinking of this as a service rather than a list, a service they provide (and can and should improve) rather than a list that they sell in both directions (pay to get on it, pay to get it).

Part of what MLA should be doing is standardizing the categories of information that institutions provide to prospective applicants, and encouraging members to supply that information. I don’t have a full list to hand, but I think it’d be helpful for any number of people to know things like institutional type, salary range, replacement vs new hire, teaching load (both numbers and distribution), administrative expectations, course caps, service duties, startup costs, travel/research funding, sabbaticals, mentoring/advising expectations, and to have specializations separated out into primary, secondary, tertiary, and so forth. I don’t know that we would all agree on this list, and institutions would certainly be able to opt out, but imagine being able to sort the JIL data by all the variables that inevitably go into our hiring decisions (from either side).

On the search side of things, the ebb and flow of our various fields are a lot more complicated than the small list on the JIL database lets on. When we hire someone here (a freestanding writing program with a doctoral program), it goes without saying that our primary area for the position is rhetoric and composition. Often, we also have particular subcategories in mind, without which an application wouldn’t be considered. But then, we also have a wish list of areas not currently covered by our faculty–those might not be as high a priority as others, but they are still potentially valuable for applicants to have. Here’s an example. Several years ago, we were concerned about whether or not our program was preparing students enough in terms of methodology. No one hires a “methods person” per se, but when we hired in a different area, one of the questions we asked all of our candidates was how they would approach our graduate course in methods. I think it very likely that digital humanities will be an area like that over the next several years. Departments may prioritize that in pools of applicants that list the content areas they “need.” There should be a way to communicate that kind of nuance, through some form of tagging, multi-faceted categories, etc. As Alex points out, “Of the 56 results that return when searching for rhet/comp and asst prof, 10 are not rhet/comp specialist jobs of any kind, but maybe want someone who has some rhet/comp training.” For me, that’s a pretty obvious (and ongoing) failure of the interface. (I should also mention that the only way currently to find this out is to read through 6 separate pages of 10 entries each, since there is no way to filter results or choose how many entries per page to display. Ugh.)

Some schools already provide information like this (and like the litany above) in their ads, cost and space be damned. And others go to great lengths elsewhere to provide context for their positions on listservs or their own pages. The existence of these workarounds (which have been common for years now) should be a sign to MLA that the “service” they currently provide is little more than a text file and the Find command from the Edit menu of a word processor. It could be so much more: Dave’s ideas of an open API and a Google Maps mashup are brilliant, and they’re the kind of things that I’d love to see MLA take some lead on. At the very least, though, it’d be great to see them take some responsibility for the service that so many of us have paid for, over and over and over.

UPDATE: fwiw, the first job ad I saw after I wrote this post contained the sentence, “Interviews will take place at the MLA convention in Boston, though video conferencing is an option for those not attending the conference.” I’d be willing to bet that, within 3-4 years, this will become standard practice, as hiring schools continue to look for ways to cut costs. Not sure when it’ll tip to the point where it’s safe to pass on MLA as an applicant, but that day is sooner than most of us think.

UPDATE2: following a suggestion from Bill Hart-Davidson, Jim Ridolfo did a quick map/mash of the JIL data at http://rhetmap.org/.

 

They pay you in books?!

September 17, 2012 in academia with Comments Off

There’s no way to talk about this without sounding like I’m #humblebragging, but really I’m not. I just finished the fourth and final book proposal review I agreed to do this summer.

Those four reviews were three more than I’d been asked to do during my first 14 years in the field (yes, yikes, this fall marks the 15th anno of my PhD), but this summer, le deluge. I know that there are folks out there who do a lot more of this kind of stuff than I do, but I’ve been conscious lately of all the largely invisible work that has been occupying my to-do lists. I’m not complaining about it–I believe in gift economy karma–but it’s forcing me to rethink a lot of my work habits and accept some limitations that I would have scoffed at ten years ago.

On the plus side, there are some really good books coming out in the next year or so. And when you see them acknowledge the anonymous press reviewers, one of them might be me.

The Zone of Proximal Discomfort

August 22, 2012 in academia with 1 Comment

Someone is less than amused by the lack of content around here lately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, unfortunately, my workload basically took my good intentions with respect to MOOCMOOC and turned me into a lurker, and the past couple of days’ worth of orientation activities wiped out whatever rest and energy I’d managed to save up. Hooray, end of summer.

On Monday, we had our annual grad program orientation day. Considering that last year at this time I was having my gall bladder removed, I can say without a trace of irony that there are worse places to be.

Anyhow, one of the conversations we had was about program values–what does our program do well, and where might it be stronger–and the discussion followed fairly predictable lines. One point that I raised then is something I want to mention here. While I was directing our graduate program, I considered it my duty to advocate on behalf of the graduate students in every way I could. The basic ethos behind that hasn’t changed for me–I doubt there are too many graduate programs out there we could accuse of caring too much for their students, and it shouldn’t just be the job of the graduate director.

At the same time, I think it is important to acknowledge the limits of what a graduate director, program, or faculty member can do with respect to graduate students. It’s hard to talk about this without feeling like you’re “shaming” specific people or like you’re advocating neglect. On Monday, the word that I ended up with was “discomfort,” in the sense that there is a certain amount of inevitable discomfort involved in graduate education which the program simply can’t address, and perhaps shouldn’t. I say this because, institutionally, the position of a graduate student isn’t an ideal one. Graduate school is an investment whose return won’t happen until later, and given the current climate, that return is less than guaranteed. Even if it were, though, the conditions under which our students learn and work are nowhere close to optimal, much less comfortable.

And I mean comfort in a variety of ways. Very few students enter their programs fully conversant with the issues, vocabulary, and texts they’ll need to succeed–discomfort should be a spur to catch up, as best as they can. After a couple of years, when perhaps they have caught up, they lose a lot of the structure provided by coursework–discomfort should be answered with a conscious ownership of work habits, organization, self-discipline. As they dissertate, there should be a certain amount of discomfort with the limitations of a process that asks 3-5 people to stand in for the whole discipline–there’s an inevitable awkwardness that comes from being (arguably) the most expert person in the room on one’s own topic but not having a vote on whether a dissertation is sufficient.

I know that “discomfort” may not be the best word in each of those circumstances, and I know well (as I sit here a year later still experiencing some of the aftereffects of major surgery, posting to a blog that went dead for 3 years as I struggled with grief and depression) that not all discomfort is simply a matter of “sucking it up.” There are important ways that we can design and structure our graduate programs such that they aren’t more difficult than they need to be. But there are also ways, sometimes, that we try to make them easier or more comfortable than perhaps they should be.

I’m struck by how difficult it is for me here to articulate the idea that graduate school is not easy. Maybe it’s a matter of sorting through all of the different factors, and understanding that some forms of discomfort (financial, e.g.) can and should be addressed, while others (intellectual, e.g.) should be preserved. If only it were that easy. The truth is that many of them are beyond our control (cost of living, e.g.), unfortunately invisible to us (interpersonal jackassery, e.g.), and/or institutionally mandated. It helps me a little to remember that graduate programs are greedy institutions, with a stake in naturalizing themselves, i.e., turning “the way we do things” into “the way things are.” In that light, discomfort might be something that keeps us from identifying wholeheartedly with a program, and understanding that it’s more of a stepping stone than a destination.

 

4Cs just not that into you?

July 26, 2012 in academia, conferential with 17 Comments

Late July is awfully early for CCCC notifications, but the Facebook and the Twitter were all abuzz tonight with news of whether or not our annual conference hit the Like button on our various proposals. Since I ended up doing a blog entry’s worth of writing in people’s FB comments as a result, I thought I’d collect my thoughts here. 4Cs might actually make a good theme for an upcoming Random Access Monday–there was a time when I was pretty shrill about what was wrong with the conference, even when I was in the middle of a long streak of acceptances.

The good news is that I’m no longer quite so shrill about it; the bad news is that the conference hasn’t really gotten any righter in the interim. CCCC ’13 will be the 4th or 5th in a row that I won’t be attending, after a 1992 debut, and a streak of 10 accepts in a row in there. While I didn’t get accepted this year, my record is still pretty solid, but it’s gotten harder and harder for me to get motivated to submit, much less attend. Health precluded me from attending once, and I didn’t submit for a few years after that, although I was a Stage I reviewer a couple of years, and an official proposal coach for a while as well.

I don’t claim to being a historian of the conference, although some of my first experiments with text mining were conducted on 4Cs program abstracts, and I have a broader interest in the structures and processes of disciplinarity. So you should probably take what I say with a grain of salt and understand that my take on this is a fairly anecdotal one. It’s a little amazing to me that I attended my first CCCC more than 20 years ago, and honestly, given my introversion, a little surprising that I’ve been to as many as I have. There was a time, though, when I thought a lot about the conference, and some of my work on networks has as one of its origin stories a paper I delivered in 02 (iirc) about how we misunderstand the conference program.

Anyhow, my take is that a broad range of factors combines to result in a conference that ultimately appeals to certain members of the field and far less so to others, and I find myself in the latter group. When the conference began, and for a long time after that, it represented an oasis for a small, dispersed community, many of whom found themselves the only person in their department interested in the teaching of writing. It was small enough, even as the field grew, to be organized and programmed by a single person, a senior scholar who could reliably make judgments about the quality of proposals across the field. As the field continued to grow, though, in terms of journals, graduate programs, and specializations, certain changes were made to the structure of the conference (multi-stage review, blind review, single submission, topic areas) designed to make the process more manageable. There are other factors that I can’t speak to (the incredible lag time between proposal and conference, e.g.), but they’ve contributed to this as well. There are some ways that the conference is still modeled on the idea that rhetoric and composition is a single, coherent community–the idea of a single chair, a conference theme, etc. There are also still significant portions of the process, to my mind, that presume particular technologies as well.

The conference is finite in the amount of space it can give to presenters, and as the field has grown and the number of proposals has risen, the selectivity of the conference has gone up, not in the conscious sense of “we need to be more selective” but rather the pragmatic sense of “we can’t fit any more sardines into the can.” Having just presented at a conference that spread over four days the number of presentations that appear in a single CCCC concurrent session, I can tell you which I prefer. :) But there’s also been a push in recent years to be more inclusive. First time attendees, whether they receive special treatment or not during the proposal process, are asked to indicate that status as part of their proposals. In the conscious sense, inclusion is a worthy goal; in the pragmatic sense, though, it’s an illusion. If you’re limited in the number of proposals you can accept by practical constraints, then one conference can’t really be more inclusive than another. Unless. Unless inclusion is a value that gets transmitted to the reviewers, who then allow it to guide their decisions, and assume that the broader the possible audience for a proposal, the more appropriate that proposal is for the conference.

The bigger that potential audience gets, the more implicit pressure there is on the reviewers to pass along panels with a broader appeal. If you’re reading a number of proposals on technology, for example, it may make more sense to you as a reviewer to choose those panels that the other 95% of the people at the conference will be able to follow and/or be interested in. And there’s nothing wrong with this per se. Programming a conference of this size means making choices, and I think there’s value in the idealism of believing that every panel should be intellectually accessible to first-year graduate students and full professors alike.

What is sacrificed in such an approach, however, is a certain sense of progress. If you go to the panels in a particular area for a few years in a row, and feel as though the panels at this year’s conference could have easily appeared 5 years ago, that can be a little frustrating. And without continuity among the people who make the decisions about the proposals, there’s no way to control for this. There are certainly always exceptions, but they tend to be few and far between. Again, this is not a bad thing. But it leads to a conference that is more appropriately thought of as an introduction to the field than one for experts in the field. And it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if we didn’t self-present the conference as “selective” in the conscious sense. But we do. And we still treat the Conference Program, to a certain extent, as the “yearbook” or “best of” when it’s not, really. Speaking purely for myself, I can say that the best of my work that I’ve presented at 4Cs tends to be whatever portion of it I can translate to a general disciplinary audience, and yes, sometimes, the less-than-stellar conference themes. When I’ve gone ahead and tried to do what I think of as more “advanced” work, those have been the times when I’ve gotten rejected.

The thing about it is that it’s not something that has be either/or, but the way that we’ve structured it forces that choice. There are implications to rules about single submission, 100% general blind review, with a dash of conference chair latitude. And that’s okay. According to a particular definition of fairness, we have a scrupulously fair process for our conference.

All of which, to be honest, is cool by me. But if you were to ask me what my relationship to CCCC is, I would tell you that it’s a conference where only rarely are there panels that interest me and only rarely am I able to present the work that really energizes me. And as a result, even though I enjoy the time I spend there with my friends, it’s not really a conference that represents me in any meaningful way. Insofar as they can only accept a dwindling percentage of proposals in a given year, I have no issue at all with that. Insofar as we still think of it as the flagship conference in our profession, I think we’re deluding ourselves a bit, though. It caters really well to the field’s newcomers and to the featured session superstars, but as I’m no longer the former, and highly unlikely ever to be the latter, I haven’t spent a lot of time over the past few years regretting the fact that I haven’t been. And I’ve probably spent more time tonight thinking about it than I’m likely to spend over the 8 months leading up to it.

 

“No DH, No Interview” revisited

July 23, 2012 in academia, DH with Comments Off

William Pannapacker published a followup to his tweet from DHSI that I responded to a while ago. I spent a few minutes weighing in on the comment thread, and thought I’d go ahead and post it here.

I think what I’m responding to here is a general sense that the digital humanities is just another “area” to be “covered.” I don’t think anyone out and says so, but the vibe I’m getting is that notion that in a generation or so, people will all use these tools, and it’ll just be part of how the humanities operates from that point forward. Maybe so, but…

I take their project to be a little more far reaching than that. Could be partly because I’ve just been reading Hacking the Academy, but I think part of the DH agenda is to move the whole academic apparatus forward. That means making room for experiments with the review process, accepting forms of scholarship that aren’t always or only words in a row, and taking on an evaluation system that currently doesn’t accommodate the kind of “making” that DH advocates. Did I convey this successfully?

“such a person never needed a distinct, interdisciplinary field called DH to do that”

Well, yes and no. It’s certainly true that such a person could succeed without DH, by publishing articles and books, incorporating those passions into his or her teaching, etc. But one of the things that DH folks are advocating for, as I understand it, is that such work doesn’t necessarily (or even optimally) take the form of print, and that is a fight that’s still ongoing. I’ve been around long enough to hear the horror stories of colleagues’ digital work being misunderstood or misrepresented in tenure reviews, for example. I know places where they still hold to some fundamental distinction between print and online publication, even in cases where the peer review process is identical (to say nothing of more experimental moves towards open review). For many departments in the humanities, if those questions are settled, it’s because they haven’t been raised in the first place.

If our geographical Wordsworthian wanted to spend a couple of years developing the tools to be able to do that work, there are a lot of departments where that would not be considered valuable academically. And that’s a place where the fallback reliance on peer review doesn’t help. Traditionally published, innovative scholarship is going to be judged by the reviewers for journals and presses, but the humanities have not traditionally held themselves accountable for the kinds of “making” that Ramsay argues are central to DH.

I don’t think that most DH folk would suggest that other kinds of work in the humanities are less valuable, but I think it’s important for everyone to understand the ways that DH work differs from that work, and may need to be evaluated differently. My first foray into the job market was when “Computers and Writing” was trending in my field, and I had a number of friends who struggled, not because they couldn’t do “traditional” work, but because they were loaded up with responsibilities that ultimately counted for little later on.

All that said, I’m pretty ambivalent about the idea of “no DH, no interview” for a lot of the reasons explained above. I also believe, though, that part of the reason for the DH zeal (some of which I share) is that it takes a lot of pushing to shift some of the mindsets that I’m talking about here. For me, it’s more of a both/and than an either/or, though.

Surreality

July 13, 2012 in academia, writing with 4 Comments

(This is a riff off of Kathleen’s post on seriality and may make more sense if you read that first.)

One of the years that I was in graduate school, the Computers and Writing conference was held in Hawaii, a fact that drove me bananas. Bad enough that it happened every year at the end of the fiscal year (guaranteeing the absence of travel funding), and bad enough that I could barely afford any conferences, but to hold it in a place that was extra expensive to get to? So, one evening, I went on this prodigious rant in front of a couple of friends, enumerating all of these points and more–apparently, at some point I convinced myself that I’d made two points and needed to gear up for a third. I said, “And C…Hawaii?!?!” (imagine this in my best whatever voice) whereupon we all collapsed in laughter. After that point, regardless of how many items were on the list, “C. Hawaii?!?!” became our way of poking holes in each others’ will-to-rant. (It works best, I find, if I number my points, and then break out the C.) And I still think about it from time to time, if I get particularly wound up about something, and need a way to defuse. So clearly, it’s a charter member of my Inside Joke Hall of Fame.

Inside jokes are interesting to me, in that we talk about them primarily as a strategy for patrolling the boundaries of a given social group: You don’t get it. You’re not one of us. You had to be there. And C. Hawaii?? But no one sits around with friends plotting out how they can exclude everyone else through the use of obscurity and in-jokes. There’s something to the in-joke that’s typical of social networks in general, something that doesn’t have only to do with exclusion.

There’s an analogy here to be made between the inside joke and scholarly publication, but the analogy is less perfect than I think critics typically let on. Think for a moment about the criticisms of disciplinary specialization that complain about all the jargon, the barriers to entry, the tiny number of people who comprise the intended audience, and you’ve got a bumper sticker: Print publication is the inside joke of academia. But it’s a little more complicated than that, yes? Part of the point of publication is that you don’t have to be there and then, and thank goodness for that. Whatever the truth of execution may be, part of the point of a published essay or book is that it intends to rise above the messiness of the moment (deixis!) to make some sort of statement that incorporates both the flashes of insight and the perspective of reflection. That perspective, ideally, allows us to select and combine the insights that have some lasting value, those that are worth preserving precisely for those people who weren’t there in the moment with us.

One of the very few moments of friction for me with Kathleen’s post comes in her historicization of academic discourse, and only because I think that

The first modern scholarly journals came into being as a means of broadening and systematizing such correspondence, and in the process, gradually replaced a sense of ongoing exchange with one of formal conclusion.

is a thin description of the shift to formal publication. (I actually talk a little bit about this in a CCCC presentation I did a few years back.) Not that I disagree with it, but there are a lot of advantages to be had in supplementing conversation: community, memory, storage, preservation, hypotaxis, et al. There’s perhaps an argument to be made about how that shift parallels the one from orality to literacy, but I’d have to do a lot more research to make it. At the very least, though, I think there’s a danger in imagining the modern scholarly journal as simply a fall from seriality–I don’t think K does this, but I definitely get that vibe from some who advocate for open access. For example, the phrase “guerilla self-publishing” brings into play a whole host of associations that position us in particular (undesirable?) ways, and tend to return us to the bumper sticker understanding of things. (For the record, Aimee doesn’t use that term–I’m fairly sure she got headlined.)

I’ve titled my piece “surreality” partly for the homophony with “seriality,” but mostly because I don’t think we can talk about the horizontal of seriality without considering it in combination with some vertical quality, and “sur” (over, on top of) + “reality” (duh) fits cleverly. The inside joke is a micro-example of this ratio in action–something happens over the course of a conversation (seriality) that’s particularly funny, and it becomes a touchstone or reference point (surreality) in later conversations. A discipline is a much much more complicated site to think about this, because you have to get into talking about a lot of different layers of surreality. In one important sense, seriality doesn’t change (Randall Collins has a tome); it is the foundation of what we do as writers, as social beings, as communities. But as any community expands to the point where its members can no longer sit around the same table, or fit into the same room, surreality begins to assert itself. Actually, that’s not quite right, because it implies that there’s some point prior to surreality. Fact is, regardless of how reflexive or naturalized the process becomes, we’re always choosing the words we use as a result of the combination. Within a complicated, dispersed community like a discipline, surreality manifests itself in a broad range of genres, from course syllabi to reading lists to published scholarship–we are constantly engaged in the process of sorting and managing our serially generated knowledge along that vertical axis of evaluation, priority, importance, salience.

And yet. It’s not just the case that, back in the day, academia flipped the switch and got to publishing. The system we have now is broken, in part, because surreality drowns out the seriality, and again, I firmly believe that this is a question of scale. (I also still believe that there are important steps that we can take to deal with issues of scale, that we don’t.) At a given size, a community outgrows itself in certain ways, almost like phase transitions. Aimee’s essay (not to mention countless others) points to some of the implications for this outgrowth: the model we have often results in long lag times that erase seriality even further, specializations become ever more insular and inaccessible, and institutionally, we can become overwhelmed with the added layers upon layers (please write an executive summary of the committee report compiling the outside reviews of the scholarship section of the tenure packet, would you? oh, and write another book while you’re at it.). It can become an Escherian vision of interlocking, overlapping synecdoches–wholes distilled into parts gathered into wholes distilled into parts gathered into wholes–that’s disorienting and demoralizing.

In that sense, the metonymy machines of social media are a refreshing alternative. And honestly, I think we desperately want that alternative. Some of the most popular essays in my field are those that highlight their seriality (Elbow v Bartholomae, Gale v Jarratt/Glenn). Think about all the energy generated at conferences, in part because of the stark contrast they provide to our normal academic lives. The surreal pressures of academic life (and here I’ll use it both ways) have created a space where our cv’s, the tiniest surreality tip of the seriality iceberg, replace all of the energy, exploration, invention, experimentation, community, and (yes) excitement that should accompany what it is we do. It’s freakin hard to replace “I have to get another line for my cv this semester” with “I want to explore this set of ideas and talk with these people” as a baseline motivation; one of those goals is measurable, and one is not (or at least not necessarily so).

One of the cool moments for me about K’s piece was that it sent me back to my essay in Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media–in a sense, that essay’s actually all about this issue. And the fact that it appears in a book that’s library-priced only underscores the point. Anyhow, among the recommendations I make there is one about turning our graduate seminars more towards seriality. Let me quote liberally:

As disciplines grow, and the ground that we must cover in our courses increases, the temptation is to rely more and more heavily on the shortcuts we develop, synoptic texts, surveys, anthologies. We rely upon the consensus of the field to determine our texts, comfortable in the assumption that while our students might not be exposed fully to the conversations in the field, they’ve acquired some sense of what’s important. As I hope I’ve implied above, one problem with such shortcuts is that they skip over the very processes our students need to understand to arrive at that perspective. There is no single, correct model that could be applied to every subject matter, but one important step we might take is to treat at least some of our graduate courses less as sites of coverage and more as sites of topical development. In other words, our courses could serve as disciplinary simulation, where students can study a topic or issue as it unfolds in the discipline over a particular interval, even if that unfolding doesn’t provide the coverage that a more synoptic survey might.

An important part of such a course would be attending to the conversation as it emerged, taking texts chronologically, of course, but also studying them closely for their epistemic practices. It would be worth examining how the texts during one time frame take up or set aside those texts that preceded them, and reading one week’s texts as the consequence and outcome of prior weeks’ readings. Certain texts would begin to acquire disciplinary density and centrality; others might prompt a week or two of discussion and fade into obscurity. Such a course would ideally train students to read the discipline, helping them see how each successive text built on what preceded it, how each framed issues in particular ways, how certain texts were taken up and canonized, and others set aside. A certain amount of time would be need to spent exploring and explicating the texts themselves, but the emphasis in such a course would be intertextual, exploring the impact that the texts had on the network formed through the conversation they engaged in (102). (“Discipline and Publish: Reading and Writing the Scholarly Network”)

[Alex's piece on "how to do things with a humanities phd" just came across my reader, and it occurred to me that the idea of "microecology" links up nicely with what I'm suggesting above. He writes: "A microecological approach, at least as I see it, suggests that elements might combine in unexpected ways, and that while the totality, seen from a great distance, might look the same (i.e. from the outside an English department still looks like an English department), from the inside (of any discipline), the relations might look very different." Metonymy!]

Wow, I should wind this up. Let me close with the same issue that K does – evaluation. Like her, I really value seriality, and I’m conscious of the fact that in today’s academy, it’s a privilege to be able to embrace that value. I think the question of credit, though, can drift dangerously into the surreality side of things. It can reterritorialize seriality, if we’re not careful about that. So I think there’s some strategy in looking to the sites where seriality hasn’t been erased–like conferences–to think about how we’re able to preserve seriality. Where I get a little tangled up is in the “prepositional differences” I wrote about in response to the OPR document: should blogging be more like publication? should publication be more like blogging? should both be more like conferences? do I really need one thing to rule them all? (probably not.)

I’ve got more to say, but I’ve also got more clever post titles to invent, so I’ll do both later. After I finish this damn essay.

 

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