Add technology and stir!

June 22, 2012 in pedagogy, tools with 1 Comment

Apropos of little other than some background reading that I’ve been doing this week, I think I’m just about finished with the arguments about how we need to be careful about “not letting technology drive our X.” Right now, the arguments I’ve been scanning are about pedagogy, but this would just as easily apply to any other set of practices.

Actually, maybe it’s a little apropos of the whole kerfuffle happening at UVA right now. I was certainly struck by the astounding media illiteracy of the UVA Board of Visitors, whose sense of kairos needs an upgrade from its current early-90s version. The idea of pulling out the old “news cycle” trick–making major decisions/announcements after 5pm on a Friday and hope no one notices until next week–was some pretty dynamite strategery on their part.

One of the undercurrents of the blowback has been their apparent infatuation with other elite institutions’ efforts at staking out MOOC turf, and the dismissiveness with which that infatuation has been described. So maybe it’s that attitude that has been resonating with some of the reading I’ve been doing lately. (And while I’m taking issue with that dismissiveness here, that’s not to say that I condone any part of what happened at UVA–I think the tech stuff is a symptom of a much deeper problem.)

And yeah, I get it. The correct answer is that technology should be adopted cautiously and with sound pedagogical reasons behind that adoption and for better reasons than novelty and/or change’s sake. What bugs me about the correct answer, I guess, is that it assumes some degree zero world of pedagogy, as though our current practices aren’t themselves implicated, imbricated, and often enough, driven by the available technologies. Once you teach a course online, with all of the ups and downs that that brings, you realize that face-to-face conversation is itself a technology with certain affordances.

Just because that experimentation happened 4 or 5 centuries ago doesn’t mean that print technologies didn’t have to go through the same phases of novelty, resistance, adoption, diffusion, invention, and experimentation. The difference is a matter of naturalization and invisibility, not an issue of technology vs an atechnological pedagogy.

Maybe I’m personally coming around to a position that’s actually in favor of an “add technology and stir” approach. I can name a number of occasions where that was basically what I did in the classroom. I would rather experiment with the technology (and explicitly invite my students to do so along with me) than wait for the “tool” that matches my goal. So, a couple of years ago, I asked students to use Tumblr to do an annotated bibliography project (a lot like what Ryan Hoover describes, only he used Prezi, which I wish I’d thought of!), with no other real motive than wanting to see what/if/how Tumblr might contribute to my classes. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Just like every other course and every other assignment I’ve ever designed, technology or no.

The fact is that what pedagogical expertise and commitment I have is going to be present regardless of whether I’ve slowly and carefully adopted something or decided to do it on a whim. Just as there’s no degree zero of technology when it comes to pedagogy, there’s no degree zero of pedagogy when it comes to adopting technology for the classroom. Someone, somewhere, has to do the stirring, and I’m kind of tired of the idea that it shouldn’t be me.

Open Peer Review and Generative Attention

June 21, 2012 in academia, curation, DH, social media, writing with Comments Off

I’ll begin by thanking Kathleen, Avi, and the rest of the Mellonaires for posting Open Review, and providing a nice hub for this conversation. Honestly, I have other things I should be doing, but upon reading Alex’s thoughts on the matter, and waiting for the aftermath of today’s root canal to come and go, I hunkered down and did a little reading. Now that I have enough focus to write, my thought is that if I don’t post something now about it, I probably won’t ever. So…open peer review.

I’m not opposed to it in any way, so like Alex, I may not quite be the audience for the piece. That being said, my own rhetorical disconnect differs a bit from his. Alex asks, “What is the problem with existing scholarly review procedures that the open review process seeks to solve?” and his answer is that “The humanities publish work of little interest.” There’s a lot more to his comments, so they’re worth reading in their entirety, but I want to pull out one thread and take it in a different direction. Among other things he notes:

For most humanities scholars (and when I say most, I mean 99%+), review feedback is the most substantive (and often only) conversation they encounter regarding their work. We know something like 95% of humanities articles go uncited. Even when an article is cited, there’s no assurance that the citation represents a substantive engagement with one’s text. So there is rarely much intertextual conversation that would be akin to editorial feedback. Be honest: have you ever published an article that received the degree of attention I’ve given this white paper here?

This was a little jarring to me, because honestly, my answer is yes. In fact, I’d say that just about every article I’ve published has received that degree of attention. I’ve gotten plenty of substantive conversation, engagement, and even some intertextual conversation. However, I’ve gotten that attention before publication, not after it. And although I do my share of reviewing for journals and tenure cases, most of my “generative attention,” if I may turn a phrase, is shared with those friends and colleagues who seek my feedback.

For example, the piece that I published in JAC on posthuman rhetorics way back when (PDF) actually began as a review essay of Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, drifted towards Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and I can still remember sitting with my writing group at ODU, talking about it, and feeling the click as we all realized that it was actually something else entirely. I remember that click better than I remember the essay itself, honestly. And just about every memory that I have of having received generative attention is similar–I remember the attention and engagement more than I do the final product. Insofar as open peer review might provide that, sign me up.

But I guess it feels like it’s almost a little backwards to me. My first reaction upon reading

They impact publishing, of course, but also the ways scholarly work is assessed beyond the moment of publication, from hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions to funding applications, and the development of a scholarly reputation.

was to mad-lib it, and to ask what about “the ways scholarly work is [encouraged] [before] the moment of publication…”? It seems to me that we do a better job of providing generative attention at conferences, research network fora, workshops, and the like. So, OPR feels a bit like we’re asking about how we can get X (peer review, publication) to be more like Y (conferences, writing groups), when it might be just as fruitful to ask how we can build upon Y to the point of making X less of a chokepoint.

It’s entirely possible that I’m inventing a difference where none exists. None need exist, certainly–the obvious answer to this concern is that there’s nothing to stop both kinds of projects from happening. And I buy that to a degree. But when I read through some of those recommendations, I felt exhausted by them. One obvious problem of starting from X is that you have to deal with all of the accumulated and varied baggage that the traditional peer review system brings. And honestly, I wonder a little about how these publication-style experiments would scale up if a significant portion of any community (much less lots of them) tried to implement them. I’m sympathetic to turning over a rock or two, but I can also imagine a world where every single site comes with its own set of rocks that have to be lifted over and over and over. I pity the first people who have to prepare their tenure committees by explaining each of the peer review schemes behind their various publications. :)

Maybe it’s just a push-pull thing for me. A site like Digital Humanities Now feels like a much more intuitive way to build upon the kinds of attention that we want than trying to chisel away at the gigantic ice block of publication. The more I say about this, the more I realize that this is more of a prepositional difference than a propositional one, so maybe I should stop writing at this point. Heh. If nothing else, I like the idea of generative attention, and I certainly agree with the goals behind the idea of OPR, enough so that I’m planning on experimenting with it for my second “book” project. More on that story as it develops. Now? Now I have deadlines to dispatch.

 

 

 

It is no mere coincidence

June 16, 2012 in writing with Comments Off

I’ve been sorting back through some of my old posts at cgbvb, and thinking about whether or not I’m going to port some of the oldies here to this site. I’m not decided one way or the other just yet. I will say that, given the time I spent on job market advice and scholarly communication, among other topics, it does seem a shame to let those posts languish. The prospect of sorting through 1000-odd posts to pull them out, however, suggests to me that it’s a project for another time.

One of the things that I didn’t talk about when I stopped blogging is the fact that really, I only added about 40 or so entries after my father passed away in the fall of 2007, over the course of about 3 months. That sounds like a lot of posts to me now, but most of them are short. Maybe I’m projecting, but as I read back through some of them, I can feel myself just trying to hold on to the habit despite a deep affective resistance to doing so. What I’m circling around to here is that it is indeed no mere coincidence that my dad’s passing matches up so well with my old blog’s demise.

I don’t think about it nearly as much, but I still feel that grief and pain, and given that Father’s Day is tomorrow, those feelings have surfaced. What hasn’t surfaced this year is the strong association I carried with me between his death and the torturously protracted process that led to the publication of my first book. I’ve told plenty of people this, but I don’t know that I’ve ever said it publicly: from the time that I turned in the first draft of my manuscript (late summer 2004), it took nearly five years for it to be published. For those of you keeping score at home, that means that my dad never got to see my book, and that’s a fact that added several layers of anger, pain, and disenchantment to the emotional cocktail brewing in me at the time. When they honored my book at Computers and Writing the following year, it was very difficult for me to feel any sort of joy.

And I don’t know that that’s changed all that much. At some point this year, though, I seem to have recommitted myself to writing in a way that wasn’t possible for me for a long time. And thus here I am, writing mostly to myself, and inviting you all to read along. It feels pretty good, although it’s a different sort of pleasure than I got from the first go-round of my blog. Perhaps one of these days, I’ll puzzle that all out.

Anyhow, I’m also circling around to the fact that the final blog post I wrote was something that I never published there. Those of you who happened upon my book will recognize that post as the Acknowledgments section. Given that Father’s Day is in less than an hour now, I thought I would post it here. Perhaps it functions for me here as something of a symbolic opening ceremony, a place to pass the proverbial torch from one blog to another, and a sign that enough of my grief has passed to be able to let me write again. Whether or not those things are true, it makes me smile tonight to think that they are.

 
Acknowledgments

The book before you is the culmination of a long and layered history, spanning my time at three different institutions. It began as my dissertation at the University of Texas at Arlington, and while the current volume shares little with that document beyond a title and an abiding interest in the classical canons of rhetoric, it’s difficult for me not to think of this project as an inevitable outgrowth of my work as a graduate student ten years ago. In that time, however, my thoughts on rhetoric and technology have been honed, challenged, supported, and complicated by friends and colleagues at UTA, Old Dominion, and Syracuse, and there is no question in my mind that they have helped to push my thought further than I ever could have on my own. Under normal circumstances, I would take this opportunity to thank as many of them as possible; I am grateful for their support and mentorship over the years, certainly, but I believe that they will understand if I fail to mention them here by name.

While this book was in press, my father, Charles Winston Brooke, passed away after a protracted battle with cancer. Even now, some months later, it is difficult for me to write those words, or to grasp fully the facts behind them. We are faced in our lives with losses and joys at every turn—I am not so self-centered as to imagine that my own experiences in this regard are unique—but with my father’s passing, I have struggled to regain what was at one time my unquestioned faith in the sufficiency of language. I have struggled to articulate the conflicted mess of emotion and experience that has been my near-constant companion for the past year. It has not been something that I have felt especially comfortable either talking or writing about, and even now, I have my doubts. But this is what I remember:

  • Saturday morning errands to the library, the hardware store, the firm
  • Dad’s Club softball, YMCA soccer, and playing kickball at dusk in the summers
  • Our annual trips to Missouri to buy fireworks for the 4th of July
  • Youth group canoe trips to the Boundary Waters
  • My father trying to learn to play the flute. Trying.
  • The first Quad-City Symphony Riverfront Pops concert
  • Going to Wrigley Field in the summers
  • Borrowing my father’s clothes for debate tournaments
  • Being able to attend any college that accepted me
  • Exploring cemeteries in Indiana tracking down our family history
  • Struggling to understand graduate school my first go-round
  • Living in and renovating the saltbox on 13th Street
  • Deciding to give graduate school another try
  • Landing my first tenure-track position
  • Driving the UHaul from Virginia to New York
  • Watching my father be sworn in as Mayor of Davenport
  • Going to Busch Stadium last summer

In one sense, I never had the chance to thank my father for any of these things. But as I spent time with him last summer, even though we never talked about it, I like to think that I showed my gratitude each day. I think it frustrated him to be treated as someone who was dying, when in fact each day was another day of life. And we spent those days doing crosswords, watching baseball, eating out, reading, catching movies, and talking local politics. For the past few years, every time I left Iowa to return home, I did so not knowing if I’d see him again, but when I was there, I was there, in the moment, nothing more, nothing less.

Through all the good times and the bad, my father was there for me, and that’s something I don’t know that I fully appreciated until it was my turn to be there for him. Here’s a final memory. In May of 1997, I received my first job offer from Old Dominion, which was contingent upon completing my dissertation. I had to choose between turning down the offer and spending another year in Texas or spending the entire summer doing nothing but writing. Without a second thought, my father loaned me the money so that I could finish my dissertation and accept that offer. Of all the layers that comprise the history of this book, one of the deepest is the support I received over the years from my father. He may not be around to read it, but he’s here in these pages. The name on the front is mine, but the book itself is ours.

Hope you enjoy it, Dad.
-cgb

Argument by Adjective

June 15, 2012 in writing with 2 Comments

This summer, for what seems like the umpteenth time, I’ve been working with our veteran graduate students in our Summer Job Group. We meet every couple of weeks, peer review cover letters, dossier materials, etc. I’ve backed away from the group a bit in years past for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I think it’s important to have multiple voices guiding the process. It’s a bit like teaching the same course several times in a row–it gets increasingly difficult to remember who knows what, which stories you’ve told and which you haven’t, etc. It can be difficult to hold your own thinking about the process at the same place year after year, even though for each group of students, the advice and anecdotes are new. And in the past few years, there have been some major changes (Interfolio, Skype interviews, et al.) that can have a ripple effect on even some of the tried-and-true pearls of wisdom that I once held dear.

As is often the case, this kind of work makes me all the more conscious of my own verbal tics and habits, and this year, I found one that I emphasized quite a bit to the group, particularly in the context of cover letters. I don’t know that I’d elevate it to the level of fallacy or anything, but my name for it makes it sound like one: I call it “argument by adjective” (AA).

There is a lot of ground to cover in an application letter, and no small amount of emotional investment on the part of the writer. Perhaps more than any other document, the cover letter is a prose representation of one’s self as an aspiring academic, and as such, it’s probably the most difficult site at which we need to balance the competing interests of writer and audience. That is, we want to present ourselves in the best possible light, as quickly as possible, while still ensuring that we meet audience expectations and interests. Perhaps not everyone thinks of it in those terms, but I guess I always have. I’ve been on plenty of search committees, and I can tell when a letter tips too far in one direction (3 dense, 10pt, expanded-margin pages that cite every line on the vita) or the other (someone largely unqualified who’s trying way too hard to prove to the committee that they really do fit the position after all, despite every indication to the contrary).

It’s hard to strike that balance and even more difficult to let go of the letter enough to judge semi-objectively whether one has struck it successfully. One of the things that often happens (for me, at least) is a kind of compression; I might have only 1-2 sentences to describe a project where I would prefer 6-7, and as a result, I’ll really try to pack those 1-2 sentences, and make every word count. When I’m doing this, I have a bad habit of building arguments into my adjectives. So for example, rather than including 2-3 sentences about the various perspectives I’m negotiating as I engage in an interpretation of a phenomenon, I might instead simply say that “my project offers a nuanced, rhetorical interpretation of X.” It’s easy to fall into this–it saves space, and it starts to get at what I feel is the value of my project.

The problem is, of course, that I’m claiming that value on behalf of my project that the letter itself can’t ever earn. And if the people reading my letter are doing so closely, I can’t really blame them for wondering exactly why I’m claiming values that are best judged by my readers. I try not to read this strictly when I’m on committees, but honestly, it’s sometimes hard for me to ignore it. My archetypal example for AA is Dave Eggers’ book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; while I can thankfully report that I’ve never seen AA in a cover letter even approach that level, I do think that we employ that kind of blurby language, albeit more subtly.

It’s not really up to me to decide or to claim that my work is complex, sophisticated, nuanced, compelling, effective, interesting, thoughtful, careful, close, detailed, thorough, or heartbreaking. Heck, it took me almost a month (and a Facebook poll of my friends) to decide to include the word “groundbreaking” when I was writing the cover blurb for my book, and I still feel awkward about having done so. And that’s a blurb.

What I try to do is to treat adjectives a lot like pronouns. In the same that you wouldn’t use a pronoun without first establishing the proper noun to which it refers, I try (hard) to use only those adjectives that are earned within the context of the document itself. That means that if I want to describe my project as nuanced, I need at least an additional sentence that communicates (effectively) that nuance. Or that complexity. Or that thoughtfulness. Or that staggering genius.

Adjectives, I try to remind myself, are for interviews. Nouns and verbs get my foot in the door. That’s the (brilliant) piece of (timeless) advice that I (thoughtfully) re/learned this (delightful) summer.

You’re a top-100000 link mule!

June 12, 2012 in social media with 1 Comment

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a flurry of emails from apparently reputable sources, asking me to add them to my blogroll and/or link to their materials. Of course, they all referenced the blog that I haven’t updated in nearly 3 years, so that was my first clue. The second clue was the fact that they could have all been cut from the same “Dear Mr. %LastName%” cloth, although to be fair, they did all get it right that I was a boy. I didn’t think a whole lot of them, and after the second, it was obvious that there was a new form letter circulating, so I’ve been sending them straight to trash.

Yesterday, though, I saw a couple of articles that made me think more deeply about them. The first is a truly excellent piece by Dan Meyer, about how devious and abusive “education companies” are becoming. He marshals an impressive series of screen caps, and lays out the step-by-step process by which these companies, who offer “online education,” are basically trying to recruit us into marketing for them. They do this by creating “resource” pages, such as lists of top blogs, or top twitterers, or top tools, the kinds of pages that folks are fond of linking to, posting on Facebook or Twitter, etc., and then using the PageRank mojo generated that way to drive their search results.

The thing is, it’s flattering to be considered for lists like this. And it’s great to have resources to point to in order to help out our friends and colleagues whose adoption cycles are different from our own (“here’s a place to start if you want to start thinking about Twitter for educators,” e.g.). What they’re doing, though, and what we do every time we link or RT such lists is preying on our own insecurities and feeding the economic pressures that play a huge role in creating those insecurities:

The other predators make big money when they’re Google’s top result. How do they become Google’s top result? They get a bunch of people to link to their website!
How do they get a bunch of people to link to their website? They make a list! They make dozens. Top 10 social studies blogs. Top 20 writing teacher blogs. Top 100 administrator blogs. They flatter a bunch of people who are underpaid and underappreciated who then relink, reblog, and retweet the list, simply flattered to be included!

Lest you think this is some sort of anomaly, take a gander at another essay I came across yesterday, about Gawker’s approach to “virality,” which might be more accurately described as pageview journalism. Basically, Gawker has a person whose job it is to do nothing but create those lovely (non) stories that will generate pageviews, in order to free up their other staffers to focus on the “real” stuff. The list of this person’s “top stories” is truly a marvel to behold, and won’t be confused with journalism any time soon. But the point here is that there’s a new set of rules by which online success is measured, and old school discussions of credibility don’t figure very prominently.

This is the angle that I don’t think got enough play a while back in the discussion over the Chronicle’s PR fiasco. A lot of people accused the CHE of link-trolling, but of course, they did so while providing them with links. And the folks in charge who hash-taunted people about their “media literacy” didn’t seem to realize the implications of what they were doing, both in the moment and overall. The Chronicle is in the unenviable position of having to negotiate already between two competing ethoi–that of the trade magazine and of the academy, the trade they cover. But social media introduces a third ethos to the mix, one that’s a lot more cynical, and they got caught out as not having thought it through with any real care. I don’t know that I would say that this was “the most important” part of that story by any means, but it provided a backdrop to it that I didn’t see a lot of people address.

It’s been interesting to me to see these different threads swirl and eventually merge into a pattern, one that should be familiar to anyone who’s been involved with social media for a while. I think we’re on the front edge of seeing SEO (search engine optimization) turn into SMO (social media optimization), and it’s going to take a while for our critical literacy to catch up. Here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later. The thing that’s truly pernicious about the education industry SMO is that they’re effectively fooling us into making ourselves obsolete, by using us to market low-cost, low-value alternatives to ourselves, and preying on the people who share our ideals. That is evil.

Curation, proCuration, deCuration

June 7, 2012 in academia, curation with 2 Comments

Like many, I was surprised and a little pleased to hear about the announcement from MLA that they’ll be updating the author agreements for their publications, allowing copies of articles to be placed in personal and institutional repositories. It’s a nice first step, albeit one that won’t have a huge effect on my own field (very little space is devoted to writing studies in MLA publications). As a symbolic gesture, however, it may prove to ripple throughout related journals and organizations over the next year or two, and it could have very positive implications. We’ll see. I think it will depend a lot on the financial models of those journals. I don’t think the repository step is one that will trouble too many, but whether it’s a “first step” or a stopgap will depend on a lot of factors.

Anyhow, I was interested to read some of the context provided by Inside Higher Ed’s account of the announcement. Therein, Rosemary Feal comments on the move:

“We believe the value of PMLA is not just the individual article, but the curation of the issue,” she said. PMLA regularly includes thematic issues or issues where articles relate to one another. While there will be value in reading individual articles, she said, that does not replace the journal. Further, she said, the individual articles posted elsewhere could attract interest to the journal.

For me, Feal’s comments should have more far-reaching consequences than the actual policy change. Two of those comments struck me as really important. One is the idea of blogs/repositories “attract[ing] interest to the journal,” which is a move in the direction of the decoupling that I talked about a few days ago. I think that’s an accurate statement, but only if MLA spends some time thinking about how frictionless acting on that interest can be. In other words, if a body reads an article of mine that I’ve posted here, and thinks about following up on it, what will that body have to do? If the answer is change out of pajamas, shower, drive to campus, walk to the library, check the map, find the shelf, pull the issue, and sit down at a table, then I’ve got a newsflash for you. You may have momentarily provoked interest, but not much else.

That’s actually more of an observation disguised as snark, though. Taking the first step is good. Understanding what sorts of next steps are implied by that first step? I’m willing to be patient. And I trust smart people to do smart things.

The other remark that sparked my attention, though, was Feal’s reference to curation as a source of value for PMLA, because that’s another shift in the landscape of scholarly communication that I’d like to see a lot more of. I do think there are important differences among curation and procuration/procurement–our journal gets good stuff–and decuration/decoration–our journal wraps that stuff up in Adobe software and pleasing fonts and cover images. (I’m afraid I couldn’t resist the puns.)

If indeed our journals begin to move towards OA-friendly agreements (or OA more broadly), then it seems to me that they will soon need to begin asking what sorts of value they can add through curation, because it’s that value that they’re going to be asking members (and members’ institutions/libraries) to pay for. Let me be clear: I’m a huge believer in this value, and often, I’m willing to pay for it. But I think it requires organizations and journals to ask and answer frankly questions about why people buy their product, and under what models they will continue to do so.

Here’s one example, and I hope that it won’t shock you to learn that it’s something that I worked on. I’m actually a little proud of it:

cover graphic for issue 5.1 of Enculturation

You can follow that graphic to issue 5.1 of Enculturation, a special issue of that journal from 2003 on the relationship between rhetoric and composition. It grew out of a CCCC panel, and features a bunch of smart folk.

(And yes, I know. It’s from 2003, almost 10 years ago now, so sharpen your validation knives somewhere else. It still looks all right in my browser.)

I still have vivid sense-memories of working on that site, because I did a lot of it in a feverish 3 days in mid-December, trying to finish it up before I left Syracuse for the holidays, and resenting myself for how long it was taking. (Some things don’t change, apparently.) Anyways, if you look at the site, you’ll see 10 essays (plus a CFP, some reviews, et al.), each of which shows up on a pretty plainly designed page, with a pdf version available (bear in mind that this was a rarity back in 2003). For me, though, the value comes from the bottom of the sidebar, in the “Threads” category.

I identified 5 conversational threads in that issue–definitions of composition, definitions of rhetoric, the relationship between the two, writing more generally, and institutional practices. Each of the thread pages pulls and juxtaposes quotes from the essays. Those links end up being bi-directional because I went in and marked the spots in the essays themselves with links to the threads. Then I also took the quotes themselves, and sprinkled them amongst other essays, to provide little tiny juxtapositions. Almost 10 years later, I’m still pretty pleased with the results–yeah, it’s small potatoes, and yeah, blogs and wikis and social bookmarking, but honestly, how many of us were doing any of those things in 2003?

What I like most about it is that it’s a decent solution to the problem of presenting the essays in a journal in a way that allows them to maintain their individual coherence, but also provides lots of paths outward to the broader conversational network that they participate in. And I remember, vividly, sitting on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by printouts of all the essays, with 5 different colors of highlighter, reading pieces of each, scribbling links onto the pages, and figuring out how to make it all work on the screen.

Much as I might like the takeaway from this to be what an awesome and visionary curator I am (or was 10 years ago), my point is actually a lot simpler (and less arrogant?): there is nothing that stops our journals, right now, from experiments like these, even in print. (Two syllables: Hop. Scotch.) Scratch that: the thing that stops our journals from doing things like this is the presumption that their value is located in protecting their content through the imposition of an economy of scarcity. As the pressure to reject that economy continues to mount, they will need to start thinking about alternative models, or at least start seeing themselves as one of the core audiences for the conversations that are already happening.

In my opinion, that means expanding their ecologies to something more complicated than the (print-driven) publisher-editor-author model. That model is more a matter of habit and convenience (for some) than it is a realistic way to conduct business these days.

Oh, and I’m still an awesome and visionary curator. Just so’s you know.

Plus ça change…

June 5, 2012 in academia, DH with Comments Off

There’s been some buzz on Twitter today, coming out of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), about the increasing centrality of the digital humanities. William Pannapacker, who blogs for the Chronicle, notes:

This is a development guaranteed to scare the bejeezus out of any number of job applicants, I would suspect, not just those who self-identify with English. Like a lot of technology-oriented discussions, though, what will undoubtedly happen is that differences among fields will be elided, panic will ensue, and the fear generated will far outweigh any sort of perspective. A few thoughts:

I honestly believe that changing your department through the hiring process is a horrible strategy, with two exceptions. I have been in a department where there were a huge number of hires over the course of about 2 years, because of an early retirement outlay on the part of the school. Faced with turning over a significant portion of the department, departmental hiring priorities could actually be a good strategy. The only other exception I can imagine is if you’re looking to change what the department will look like 10 or 15 years down the road. But expecting a new hire to perform like a magic wand–ding! our department is now digital!–is a little insane.

A “no DH, no interview” kind of strategy places the burden for departmental change on those people least able to negotiate (much less question or resist) it, the as-of-yet-unhired colleagues. I don’t doubt that there are folks out there who would welcome that challenge and succeed at it, but engage in this little thought-experiment: imagine a fully-DH-ified department. Now measure the distance between your department and that one, honestly adding up all of the equipment, maintenance, and faculty, staff, and student training costs. Don’t forget to kick in the 2-3 years it will take to get all of the curricular changes approved. Oh, and the dedicated IT staff that you’ll have to draw upon. Add all that stuff up and then ask yourself: are you going to give all that time and all those resources to the person(s) you hire?

This is not to suggest that it’s not a good idea for departments to begin that process, because I think that it is. I don’t think of technology as an “area” to be “covered” with a single faculty member, though, nor do I believe that candidates can afford to be willfully ignorant of the various developments that are gathered under the DH umbrella. (In fact, I wrote about this, once upon a time.) But I do think that asking one’s applicants to commit to DH, to the point that it becomes a deciding factor, is problematic, unless the department has already thought through its own commitment and acted upon it in significant ways. Frankly, if a department can’t be bothered, then what business do they have requiring it of job candidates?

I can imagine DH expectations playing out in several different ways:

The buzz: Because it’s sexy for the time being, I suspect that DH will become another in a long list of buzzworthy ideas that some candidates will be able to exploit, armed with little more than a glossary of terms. Some candidates will be able to talk the talk, and even impress committees who are looking for DH without knowing exactly what it looks like.

The DH chapter: It wouldn’t shock me to find that some programs will start expecting their doctoral students to have a “DH chapter” in the dissertation, in the same way that our field has the “pedagogy chapter.” Insofar as this encourages them to consider carefully their project’s (digital or pedagogical) implications, this isn’t a horrible thing. Insofar as it will feel like a vestigial tail, pinned to the dissertation without much thought about how it actually might affect the rest of the project, this is a horrible thing. It will improve some projects and derail others.

The techie: I suspect that a number of departments will fold DH into their departments as though it is simply another speciality to be covered. I’d like to believe that, in 10+ years, we’ve gotten away from the “you know about computers; could you come see what’s wrong with my printer, young colleague whose tenure committee I’ll be on soon?” The academy often moves more slowly than I’d like to think it does, though.

I do hold out some optimism that there will be departments that get it right, that are able to rethink how they do things. Those departments would be flexible enough to account for the different kinds of work that a DH scholar/teacher might engage in, and foresighted enough to provide that person with the support that s/he needs to do those things. They would see their hire as part of a long-term, infrastructural plan to re-envision their department (and perhaps their college). And they would see it as something that is a part of their own expectations as well, not simply another job requirement to pile upon the newbie.

It would be unfair not to mention that I do believe that, in a lot of cases, rhetoric and composition has gotten it right with respect to computers and writing, our particular brand of DH. I think that there are a lot of programs out there that do a good job of preparing their students when it comes to technology, regardless of whether or not it’s their research interest.  And it’s here that the parallel with pedagogy strikes me as pertinent: you don’t have to count pedagogy among your primary research interests to care about teaching and to do well at it; increasingly, I think technology is functioning the same way, and that’s a good thing.

 

 

Open up, floodgates!

June 2, 2012 in talking, writing with Comments Off

I’ve spent the better part of today scribbling in a notebook and mapping out possibilities for the talk that I’ll be giving at the end of the month. The struggle I sometimes run into is that I tend to start in the middle, with a handful of viable theses, which I then proceed to connect up. Then I’ll trace each of them outwards to possible sources, associations, and examples until I have a huge tangled mess of stuff.

Actually, that’s not the struggle. I’ve (always) got plenty of material. The trick is smoothing it out and paring it down until I have something that will legitimately fit into the 15 minutes or so I have. And then adding in more citations and connective tissue and paring it down again. Like everyone else, I’d imagine, I have to find the balance between having enough context and making a point clearly. Pull one string out, and I might make what’s left that much more manageable. I might also cause the whole thing to unravel.

Generally speaking, I work backwards from the first major point that I want to make for my introduction. Almost everything I write tends to work that way–to make point C, first I have to provide context A and transition B. And then I have to provide context Y and transition Z to get to A. And so on. I almost always cut the first 5-6 pages of writing to get myself to a viable first draft for an article or an essay. As soon as I’d worked myself back today to “When I was first hired at Syracuse…” I knew it was time to start cutting. No one is coming to hear me muse on 11 years of personal/institutional history.

My point right now? Thanks for asking. :) It’s that we can use the tools of network visualization to help ourselves acquire what Artemeva and Fox call “disciplinary genre competence.” Direct and to the point, I think. The panel itself is about genre studies and graduate education, so I’ll be talking about some of the viz assignments that I’ve given over the past several years in the courses I’ve taught, and rationalizing them in terms of some genre studies scholarship.

And I have a slide. Lots more to create after this, but usually if I’m feeling good about where to start, I’ll start mixing my inventional platforms. By the end of a talk, I’m usually writing it in Keynote. So this is step 1:

title slide for my Genre 2012 talk

I’ll post more of the talk as it takes shape. My plan is to drop slides, notes, and sources online ahead of the conference…

WEcologies

May 30, 2012 in academia, writing with 1 Comment

It occurs to me that another nice feature of mecology is that it lends itself to pluralization as wecology, and that actually, my discussion of Twitter earlier this week is a perfect example of what I mean by that particular neologism. Whether or not a body chooses to adopt or engage Twitter doesn’t mean that they have the option of abstaining without effect. Along similar lines, it’s why I always request presentation technologies at conferences whether or not I plan to use them–the more people who file such requests, the more likely it is that everyone will have access to them. The intensity of the conference setting (and I’d include the couple of weeks leading in and following it) is a nice place to observe and consider how an organization and/or community trace out their interactions with various media.

I was thinking of this in particular today as I finally caught up to @bmcnely’s RSA talk: Graduate Assistant Professionalization: Reframing Identifications via Networked Writing Practices (http://vimeo.com/42899860). Although he describes this as a genre ecology, the following slide is a nice example of what I think of when I muse on wecologies:

Brian McNely, genre ecologies

The one thing that a Venn diagram doesn’t necessarily communicate is how a change in one place ripples off to affect other components (to be fair to Brian, he talks about this too, so I’m not critiquing here). To borrow my example from earlier, investing energy in a peer-reiewed conference proceedings has an effect on the modalities of the conference itself. With a deadline set at the conference, the organization encourages presenters to do this work in advance of the event. This probably results in more folks submitting for the proceedings, but it also most likely results in papers that are written to be read rather than heard. Given a choice (albeit one that isn’t strictly forced) between a more engaging presentation and a double peer-reviewed publication, most folk will choose the latter, for reasons that have to do with the broader institutional wecology that most of us participate in.

I’ve been thinking lately about moving in the opposite direction too, though. Rather than tracing back the factors that led to the status quo, what would it mean to make some changes? I packed a Sharpie for RSA so I could add my @handle to my nametag, but adding it to nametags and/or the program would require making changes to the submission process, either at the application or acceptance stages. Easy enough to do, but it requires thinking ahead, by exactly those people who have a lot of other concerns on their plates as they prepare for the conference. I find that there are a lot of great ideas in the air about how to improve conference-going, but those ideas usually circulate during the conference, 8-12 months too late :) For a long time, back in the days of my old blog, there was an annual carnival about “how to make our national conference better.”

Another talk that has sparked my thought in this direction comes courtesy of @jasonpriem, whose work on alt-metrics for scholarly work is something that I’m finding pretty fascinating. Here’s another slide (from a talk he delivered at Purdue recently), about the idea of the decoupled journal:

The idea here is that our journals and presses are responsible for all of these different stages or practices, with incredible duplication of effort, and little difference among them: “Every journal does every function itself. Each produces the same product. Little variety; little choice: publishing as a fixed-price menu.”

[As a sidenote: you might think that this would be perfectly obvious to someone whose book is arguably a 200+ page exploration of what writing might look like if you thought about it as "decoupled," an ecology of practices rather than a single, vertical "process."]

For me, this is what’s potentially radical about ideas like CommentPress and DHNow, the idea that some of these services might simply try to accomplish one or more of these different layers really, really well, and partner with presses to make the publication process more openly accessible, nimbler, and more effective for a lot of the players involved. And I say that not just as someone whose own process was abnormally looong, but as someone with a genuine belief that this could change this particular game for the better.

Let’s circle it back around. What if a conference proceedings went through a more decoupled process? Let’s say that presenters were allowed to submit their presentations to a protected archive, that could handle not only pdfs but audio, video, slides, et al. And that the selection process were crowdsourced, where conference attendees were allowed to discuss the various possibilities, and then given a number of votes to distribute among the presentations that they felt were worthy of inclusion. And that those papers selected were permitted some revision time post-acceptance? It would be easy enough to set up some structural constraints, so that the entire proceedings wasn’t simply a compilation of the most popular topic(s). Would the result necessarily be worse than having a small handful of people read every single submission and choose among them? I don’t know.

I do know, though, that what would be left over would be a really intriguing body of work, most of which otherwise is basically disposed of after the selection process. So when folks interested in this kind of work, provided here by @davidgruber,

want to do some analysis, they have a lot more to work with than simply titles or even titles and abstracts. (I’m one of those interested folks, btw.) I do think that we’re slowly moving towards a culture where work like this is more possible–I think those folks who are using Twitter are increasingly taking responsibility for their own marketing, and are more inclined to share their work as a consequence. As the utility and availability of alt-metrics grows, so too will its credibility, even with the more conservative niches in our institutions.

But yeah, thinking ahead. Figuring out (or at least educating our guesses about) how these ideas might fit with our current practices–that’s what wecology has been prompting in me lately.

Coming soon: entries on tweecologies (hipster ecosystems), the hauntological implications of bansheecologies, and the oh-so-meta ecologycologies.

Or not.

 

Mecology 2012

May 29, 2012 in tools, writing with Comments Off

It occurs to me that, if I start trying to toss out manifestos on a daily basis, I’m going to burn myself out pretty quickly. So I thought I’d reflect today on some of the changes brewing that led me to resuscitate my weblog.

I really have no idea if the term is mine, but a long while back, I started using the word “mecology” for a couple of different purposes. It crams together the phrase “media ecology,” but also “me” and “ecology,” which put me in the mind of Ulmer’s mystory (among other puns). I’ll have you know that mycology is taken–insert “fun guy” pun here. :)

Anyhow, for about 7 or 8 years, I’ve been occasionally asking students in my (technology-oriented) courses to do what I call either mecology or T+1 assignments. I ask them to take stock of the various platforms, media, tools, software, et al., that they use to process information. It’s something like a literacy autobiography, I suppose, but one that is more focused on their present-day habits and usually their engagement with contemporary ICTs. It’s a nice opening assignment, one that gets them thinking about how they structure their activity, and it’s a great way for me to get a sense of what they’re ready to do in my courses and where we might focus our attention. The T+1 assignment (where T is their current distribution/structure of activities) asks them to choose one application, add it to their mecology for the semester, make a good faith attempt to really integrate it, and then write up a brief reflection at the end of the term. It’s a nice low-stakes way to have them try something new, and it’s an assignment that’s worked well for students along the full spectrum of tech expertise.

When I designed the assignment(s), my own mecology was pretty well established and consistent–this was back in the early days of the first iteration of my blog, and options were far more limited than they are now. My homepage was my base of operations, although it split time with my blog for that purpose. Everything else fed back to one of those two static locations: Flickr, Delicious (back when we had to remember where the dots went!), Bloglines, et al., with a healthy dose of email for keeping track of my activity, participating on discussion lists, and so on. It’s probably less simplistic than I’m making it sound, but I really had the sense of a stable location, from which everything else flowed or attached. And it lasted for a solid four or five years like that.

Cut to today, and things got a lot more fluid and messy. I sat down yesterday to try and actually visualize my mecology a bit, and quickly gave up. Right now, I work from 4 primary devices: phone, ipad, and home & office desktops, with a fifth (my laptop) that’s pretty much used for speciality work (conferences, meeting with specific software needs). My ipad’s become a lot more central, a shift that happened because of my convalescence in no small part. It’s now my primarily email device–and the difficulty of typing on it without a separate keyboard has made me less responsive (and less inclined to hoard). Some applications are cross-device for me, while others that could be tend to be associated in my mind with one or the other (I generally prefer FB on my desktop and Twitter on my ipad, for example). My “home” feels distributed to me among this site, FB, and Twitter, and so I’ve been trying out different arrangements to see how they fit. Right now, I have the sense that they’re working at different scales for me. I’m not as worried about the audiences for each, although that may change. The next circle out would probably include a lot of plug-in style apps: Instapaper, Google Reader, Scribd, Slideshare, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, GoodReads, etc. Some of them are more central than others, but they’re all defined for me in terms of specific tasks, and they generally feed back into the center. There’s another circle outward, where I’m still thinking about what to do regarding social bookmarks–a habit I fell out of (and regret doing so)–and a few other apps that I’m trying out somewhat haphazardly.

I don’t really have any grand conclusion here, except to note that it’s about damn time I took my own advice/assignment, and rethought how everything is fitting together. Also, it’s nice to question that fit every once in a while. The past couple of weeks for me have been about rediscovering a sustainable structure and flow that can help me write regularly and be more present to myself.

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