Collin Gifford Brooke

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.

What follows is a fairly rough approximation of the talk that I gave at the UK Networked Humanities Conference (#nhuk) in February, 2013. I don’t usually script out my talks in quite the level of detail that I have below, but this time out, I struggled to get my thoughts together, and scripting seemed to help. As usually happens with me, though, I went off-script early and often.

Also, I use a lot of slide builds to help pace myself, so I’m not providing a full slide deck here. Instead, I’m inserting slides where they feel necessary, and removing my deck cues from the script itself. I’m also interspersing some comments, based on the performance itself.

I’ll start with the panel proposal that Casey Boyle (@caseyboyle), Brian McNely (@bmcnely) and I put together:

Title: Networks as Infrastructure: Attunement, Altmetrics, Ambience

Panel Abstract:  In his early 2012 discussion of the digital humanities, Stanley Fish examines a number of recent publications in the field, and arrives at the conclusion that DH is not only political but “theological:”

The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated — knowledge at this time and this place experienced by this limited being — and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system.

Fish connects this diagnosis of DH with Robert Coover’s 20-year-old call for the “End of Books,” itself once a clarion call to practitioners and theorists of hypertext. While there is perhaps an implicit promise in some digital humanities work that we will be able to move beyond and/or better our current circumstances, we would argue that Fish’s dismissal of that work is misguided at best. The digital humanities broadly, and this panel more specifically, offers a careful revaluation of our current practices, treating the social, material, and intellectual infrastructures of the academy as objects of inquiry and transformation. Rather than seeing these long-invisible networks as given or as something to be “ended” and transcended, we follow Cathy Davidson’s call to engage with them critically, “to reconsider the most cherished assumptions and structures of [our] discipline[s].”

And here’s my contribution to this panel, titled “The N-Visible College: Trading in our Citations for RTs”

I want to start today by referencing two essays that I published last year. The first is an essay called “Discipline and Publish: Reading and Writing the Scholarly Network.” It appears in a collection edited by Sidney Dobrin called Ecology, Writing Theory and New Media, published by Routledge.

The second essay is a bit shorter, and appeared on my blog in July of last year. “Cs Just Not That Into You” was a response to the acceptance notifications from 4Cs, the annual conference in rhetoric and composition. In the space of roughly 24 hours, this essay received over 500 views, 100 comments on Facebook and my blog, and at least 20 retweets and shares.

Both essays grew out of my interest in the intellectual and organizational infrastructures of disciplines, and what network studies can tell us about those structures, but when it comes to my department and my discipline, only one of these essays really counts. I don’t think I’m revealing any great secrets when I say that only one of them appeared in my annual review form this year.

As folks who were there can attest, I actually scrapped this intro on the fly, since Byron Hawk’s presentation actually referenced “Discipline and Publish.” So instead I went meta, talking about how I was going to open the talk, right up until the point that Byron ruined it for me by citing the very essay I was going to claim would never be cited.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I find disappointing the fact that more people read and engaged with that blog post than will likely ever read “Discipline and Publish.” Routledge has library-priced the collection at a cool $130, meaning that it won’t be taught in courses, at least not legally. As much as I like the collection, I can hardly recommend it to friends and colleagues at that price. From the perspective of my institution, “Discipline and Publish” was probably my best piece of scholarship last year, but it’s also the one with the least value to me personally and professionally.

This question of relative value is one that has frustrated those of us who work closely in and with new media for years. There has been some progress in the form of organizational statements about the value of technology work, and some of us have pushed at the boundaries of our individual tenure and promotion requirements. But that progress has been slow, not the least reason for which is the patterned isolation that separates our disciplines, our institutions, and our departments. But I’ll get to that in a couple of minutes.

First, I want to offer one more example that raises this question of value. When Derek Mueller (@derekmueller) and I worked on the online archive for College Composition and Communication, one of the things we did was to track the internal citations of that journal. That is, whenever one essay from the journal cited another, we linked them together. So this list represents the 11 most frequently cited essays from CCC spanning roughly a 20-year period, ranked by the number of citations.

Compare that to the list of Braddock Award winners from the same time period. The Braddock Award is the prize for the best essay published in CCC in a given year. As you can see, there is some overlap between the lists, but there are substantial differences as well.

 

[beyond my scope today, but it’s interesting to think about how and why an essay might show up on one list and not the other, or on both lists]

For my purposes today, one of the most important differences between these lists is that our institutions are far more likely to recognize the Braddock Award as a sign of value than a handful of citations.

All of this is not to say that one of these lists is better than the other, but rather that we have different measures for value. If we think about this in terms of culture industries, this idea makes complete sense. There’s a substantial difference between the books that win literary prizes and those that top the New York Times bestseller lists. The top grossing movies for a given year don’t usually receive Academy Award nominations. We’re both comfortable and conversant with the different definitions of value that these lists and awards represent.

I had several slides here to slow myself down, with book covers and movie posters to help the contrast below between Best and Most. Copyright violations, every last one of them. So use your imagination. 🙂

This is horribly overreductive, I know, but I’ve been thinking about these two models of value as Best and Most. And much of our intellectual infrastructure in the humanities is targeted towards the idea of Best:

It operates on the principles of scarcity and selectivity, with the goal of establishing a stable, centralized core of recognizable activity. This model is a particularly strong one for fields in the early stages of disciplinarity–it creates shared values and history, as well as an institutional memory. On top of that, it’s a pretty easy model to implement.

But this model has some weaknesses as well. The larger a field becomes, the harder this model is to maintain. The center becomes conservative, slow to recognize or respond to change, and less and less representative of the majority of its members.

In some ways, what I’m calling Most runs counter to these principles. This model of value is collective rather than selective, focusing on the aggregation of abundance instead of scarcity. This model scales well with the size of a discipline–the more people and texts there, the better the information becomes.

If there’s a weakness to this model, it’s that it requires a lot more infrastructure and information to be productive. And it’s something of a chicken/egg problem: it’s hard to demonstrate the value of this model and to advocate for it without the model already in place.

Over the past couple of years though, we’ve seen a push towards something called altmetrics. Spearheaded by scholars in library and information studies, altmetrics is a term with several different layers. On the one hand, it refers to opening up traditional measures of value for alternative research products, like datasets, visualizations, and the like. On the other, altmetric advocates have also been pushing for measures other than the traditional (and flawed) idea of journal impact factor.

But there’s another layer to this term at well, one that gets at the questions of approved genres and recognizable metrics from a more ecological perspective. That is, altmetrics is only partly about reforming our current system; it’s also encouraging us to rethink the system itself. One of the leading voices in altmetrics, Jason Priem (@jasonpriem), gave a talk at Purdue last year where he talked about something called the Decoupled Journal.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, running out of time, I swiped three of the diagrams from Jason Priem’s slideshow. I’m hoping that the links here serve as sufficient apology. I’d hoped to adapt them to my own purposes and disciplinary circumstances, but I was putting the final movement together on the road, and took the shortcut. I also quoted (and attributed) the line that we’re currently working with the best possible system of scholarly communication given 17th century technology, which got both a chuckle from the room and a fair share of retweets.

Traditional journal system, where each journal is responsible for each stage of the publication process.

This traditional process is a masterpiece of patterned isolation — very little interaction from journal to journal — except when journals are owned by the same corporation. There’s tremendous duplication of effort, and that effort is stretched over a long period of time in the case of most traditional journals.

Thanks to blind peer review, most reviewers are isolated from each other as well, as are the contributors. It isn’t until you reach the top of the pyramid, with the journal editor, that there’s any kind of conversation or cross-pollenation of ideas and research. It’s a top-down model of scholarly communication.

I’m pretty sure I was completely off-script through here. I did remember to emphasize the idea that our current model is a “masterpiece of patterned isolation,” but I’m pretty sure that I forgot to mention at any point that PI is a phrase I’ve pulled from Gerald Graff, who borrows it from Laurence Veysey. Pretty sure I never defined it, either.

What Priem suggests is that we think about the various layers and practices independently of how they’ve traditionally been distributed. Social media in particular have opened up a number of possibilities for engaging with and assessing scholarship; rather than waiting for our journals to adopt these practices, altmetricians would have us begin exploring and applying them ourselves.

Considering that many journals treat promotion and search as somehow accomplished by their subscriber list and a conference booth or two, there’s a great deal of room for innovation. Priem describes this decoupled model as publishing a la carte. He offers an example of a writer who might place an essay in a journal, but choose a number of alternative methods for promoting it, making it findable, having it reviewed, etc.

Cheryl Ball (@s2ceball) called me out in Q&A for being too cavalier about the shift in my talk from the “Decoupled Journal” to DH Now, and she was absolutely right. What I was trying to get at here was the way that DHNow starts from a different set of questions, and thus “couples” the process in a way that accomplishes both “Most” and “Best” without buying in to the traditional model of what a journal should look like. This is also where my script simply turns into talking points.

DH Now

• Aggregation of tweets, calls for papers, job announcements, and resources
• Monitor the network for spikes in activity
• Cross-post and RT the things that folks are paying attention to
• Added layer of publication: Editors’ Choice
• EC texts are solicited for the quarterly Journal of Digital Humanities
• Publication is the final step of a fairly simple, but widely distributed process

Why it’s useful as a model

• Process produces much closer relationship between the map and the territory – DH Now vs DH 2 years ago
• Driven by engagement and usefulness to the community rather than obscure standards administered anonymously
• That engagement occurs much more quickly, and at all stages of the process — publication becomes evidence of engagement rather than a precondition for it

Conclusion

 

Deleted Scenes

You might notice that there’s no reference at all here to my original title. As I was planning the talk, I’d intended to frame it with a three-part movement from invisible college to discipline to what I was calling the “n-visible college” (network-visible), a model of scholarly communication that preserved disciplinary memory but not at the cost of innovation and circulation. My CCCC talk from several years ago (this link is to QT movie of the talk) gestures towards that model, but to my mind Priem’s work in particular gets at it much more concretely.

Also, I didn’t emphasize enough the degree to which our traditional model has as a default the silos or smokestacks that separate us all (journals, disciplines, individuals) from each other. This may be part of my underemphasis on patterned isolation. Our current model keeps us silo’ed by default–to my mind, open access isn’t just a matter of taking down those walls, but in reimagining the system that defaults to silo in the first place. Nate Kreuter (@lawnsports) talked a little bit about this the following day in terms of considering both material and cognitive accessibility. We can make our work open materially, but without an infrastructure that makes it accessible cognitively, we’re not doing as much as we should be.

I spent way too much of my inventional time trying to figure out how to incorporate an essay from Noah Wardrip-Fruin on interface effects. It fit with what I wanted to say, which is that the “interface” of the Braddock essays fails us in that it gives very little sense of the complexity of the field that it represents. Love this line from NWF: “Just as play will unmask a simple process with more complex pretensions, so play with a fascinating system will lack all fascination if the system’s operations are too well hidden from the audience.” My point is that, at a certain disciplinary scale, holding to notions of the “Best” ends up occluding more of our scholarly activity than it reveals. It’s a point I like, but I just couldn’t get there from here. And it may be too intricate for the kind of talk that I give.

Finally, Nathaniel Rivers (@sophist_monster)asked a good question in Q&A that went something like “what happens if you succeed?” In other words, have we really thought through what it would mean if Facebook likes or retweets acquired currency. My answer was that it was less about replacing our current system with a better one than it was about opening the system up to the competing models of value that are currently neglected.

And that’s really all that I can remember. Like I said, this is a fair approximation, although not likely a perfect one. If you’ve read this far, thanks! And thanks to all those who chatted with me before, during, and after.

 

It’s been a while, but I need to get back into my blogspace. I’ve got some thoughts to share about the brand new semester, but I thought I’d start the year by retrieving an old post from the first incarnation of my blog. I shared a link on Twitter this morning to an entry where I shared a draft of the statement I included in my tenure portfolio, about the role that blogging played in my academic work and why it should be considered in my tenure case. While it made me a bit anxious to think of my colleagues across the college reading some of my sillier and/or snarkier posts, I certainly believed what I wrote about the value of academic blogging. In the wake of the push towards the digital humanities, it only makes more sense now.

For what it’s worth, I did indeed receive tenure, and the committee took this statement seriously. What follows was a draft of what I included in my portfolio–I did revise it a bit, in part according to comments that I received both in the entry and privately.

__

“We’ll see how this flies”
Collin vs Blog, 26 August 2006

I’ve spent the past few days finishing up the overview document for my tenure case, known affectionately across the campus as “Form A.” The form closes by asking for “additional information” that might be helpful in evaluating one’s work. Here’s what I put:

In a conversation with one of the members of the search committee that recommended my appointment at Syracuse, after I arrived in the Writing Program, I learned that this particular committee member had three criteria for each of the candidates. This person explained that each candidate was expected to make technology their primary area of scholarly inquiry, to be able to apply it in and to their pedagogy, and, just as importantly, to be a practicing user of technologies. While I believe that this form documents my achievements in the first two areas, I want to discuss that third area briefly.

In the field of rhetoric and composition, a field devoted to the study and teaching of writing, there is a sense in which we are practitioners of that which we study. But for those of us who choose to specialize further in the study of information and communication technologies as they impact writing, practice is not only essential, but it brings added pressures as well. In addition to staying abreast of developments in our field, we are obligated to remain familiar with developments outside of academia, to be practicing technologists as well as scholars, pedagogues, and colleagues. However, the criteria by which tenure and promotion are determined do not easily admit this fourth category, partly because it is a difficult one to measure. The proficient use of technologies does not fit into any of the three categories, but it is not entirely separable from them, either. I have spent hours learning software in order to write multimedia essays, familiarized myself with various research and productivity tools in order to help students become more proficient at online research, and drawn on my understanding of spread sheets, databases, and web design in order to improve the performance of the graduate office. But I also engage in activities that cannot easily be reduced to scholarship, teaching, and service.

It is in this context that I wish to call attention to my activity as an academic blogger. I started a weblog (Collin vs. Blog) in August of 2003, and in the three years I have spent writing and maintaining it, it has become an integral part of my academic practice. I use it as a place to work through ideas that will eventually be turned into published scholarship, to reflect upon teaching practices, and to connect with colleagues both local and distant. In roughly 20 months of tracking site traffic, my site has received close to 75,000 unique visits and over 100,000 pageviews, averaging 144 visits and 199 views daily since January of 2005. In the summer of 2005, I received my discipline’s award for Best Academic Weblog. In short, maintaining a weblog has raised my profile, both within my discipline and beyond it, far more than any course I might teach or article I might publish. And in doing so, it raises the profile of Syracuse and of the Writing Program in a fashion that I believe to be positive.

In recent years, there have been high-profile tenure cases where applicants have offered their technological work in lieu of activity more easily categorized in traditional terms; that is not my intent here. I feel that my scholarship, teaching, and service stand on their own. But in a year where Syracuse is actively pursuing and promoting the idea of “scholarship in action,” it strikes me as particularly important to include this form of public writing as part of my activity as a member of the Syracuse University faculty. At a time where much of the discussion surrounding academic weblogs focuses on the risks of representing one’s self publicly as anything more than the sum total of items on a vita, I feel that it’s important to acknowledge the positive, productive impact that blogging has had upon my academic career. My weblog is not a strictly academic space, any more than my life is consumed with purely academic concerns. But it adds a dimension to my contributions here at Syracuse, both as a writer and as someone who studies technology, that would be difficult to duplicate within the categories articulated in this form.

—–

I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

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.

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/.

 

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.

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.

 

It’s my blogday too, yeah.

On August 13, 2003, I uncorked what would be the first of a little more than a thousand entries on my old blog. At the time, apparently, I had Cracker’s “Teen Angst” running through my head, because I think three of my first ten or so entries troped on the “what the world needs now” line from that song, including the first one.

It hasn’t been one long, uninterrupted string of blog entries, but it’s been 9 years since the first one, as of today. I’m still figuring out the new ratios among platforms, but I’m pretty comfortable with the pace that I’ve set for myself here this summer. Next year at this time, I’ll likely feel a little less sheepish about claiming a blogiversary.

“[Rhetoric] seems to me then . . . to be a pursuit that is not a matter of art, but showing a shrewd, gallant spirit which has a natural bent for clever dealing with mankind, and I sum up its substance in the name flattery. . . . Well now, you have heard what I state rhetoric to be–the counterpart of cookery in the soul, acting here as that does on the body.”

Ahh, Plato, our old friend.

Yesterday was the first day of MOOCMOOC, a massive open online course devoted specifically to the topic of massive open online courses. Follow that link if you’d like to take a look–my understanding is that lurkers, observers, and hangers-on are welcome. Far as I can tell, there are a few hundred participants at the moment; other than posting an introduction and missing a Twitter social this evening, you won’t have missed much if you hop on in.

One of the values that I’ve already found is that the readings for each day provide so much more context for MOOCs than the infotisement columns that have been floating around lately, dutifully penned by those with a corporate stake in the success of a certain brand of MOOC. If you’re like me, you’ve gotten quickly tired of them. And by quickly, I mean that I now scroll to the bottom to check the identity of the author before I’ll even bother with paragraph 2. Anyhow. The readings for MOOCMOOC are refreshing in that respect. If you’re doing anything related to digital pedagogy for the upcoming semester, there are worse things that you could do than pulling together those resources for yourself and/or your students.

There’s an internal, winding path that took me from thinking about MOOCMOOC to the Plato quote above, not the least of which was the opportunity for the pun in my title–the MOOCs, they are fond of the puns. As I’ve been thinking about how I (should) feel about MOOCs, it did occur to me that, if I wanted to hop on the Plato side of things, I might dismiss them as “showing a shrewd, gallant spirit which has a natural bent for clever dealing with [humanity].” And I’m not sure that I blame folks for feeling that way. The way that MOOCs have been infotised to us lately does seem to imagine the world of education occupied by students, teachers, administrators, parents, governments, and employers. And you might be forgiven for imagining that the solution (MOOCs) proffered appears to be to take all of those stakeholders and to phase out the one group of people among them who (a) has some sort of professional stake in knowledge, and (b) has some sort of professional stake in education. And you might also be forgiven for imagining that by phasing out, they mean turning 0.003 percent of educators into “anchors” and the rest into glorified teaching assistants. After all, I’ve heard that offered as a serious model in the past, and no doubt will again. Having forgiven you for all of those assumptions, I could hardly blame a body for finding some resonance in Plato’s dismissal of rhetoric.

(There’s a part of me, too, that imagines the dystopia of the 1.3 million-member Comp 101 course, and my future career looking like a permanent seat at an AP Exam Grading session, complete with a clock to punch. Frankly, I’m not sure that there aren’t folks out there drooling over this possibility.)

I forget the place where I saw this and for that, I’m sorry. I’ve been reading so many pieces about MOOCs over the last few days that I finally sort of lost track. One of them, though, actually made the MOOC – cookery connection, in terms of the food culture that’s emerged in the U.S. over the past 10 or 15 years. [Edited to add the link.] There’s a sense in which the Food Network is massive, open, online, and educational–most folk don’t have the time or the inclination to attend culinary school (although there was a time in my life where I actually seriously considered it). You could argue that it’s not really possible to become a serious chef by watching Food Network, but then, not everyone’s after being a “serious chef.” And it’s not as though the Food Network makes it more difficult for actual chefs to find work (I don’t think). If anything, I’d argue that a lot of their shows have raised the level of food discourse and knowledge for a healthy percentage of people in the country, making it more likely that they will support quality establishments, rarer ingredients, organic food, etc. This is completely back-of-the-napkin on my part, but I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that food culture has shifted for the better in the wake of Food Network.

The other thing that strikes me here is that cookery isn’t a bad analogy with writing, because they’re both crafty (in both ways). There is a certain degree of unapologetic cleverness about each when they’re done well. But more to the point, they’re practiced, over and over, not absorbed. I can watch wall-to-wall Food Network, and that does less to make me a better cook than an hour spent in my mom’s kitchen over the holidays. I can easily think of circumstances where it’s been helpful for me to work in that kitchen, times when it was easier to test something out on my own or on friends (and sometimes fail), and times when I brought something to an expert for a tasting (I did a little baking when I was younger). Point is that there’s no one way to learn cooking, nor is there any one way to learn writing. Ideally, I’d hope the folks who come through my classroom are learning to write from as many sources as possible, as much as possible.

That doesn’t mean that I believe that writing courses can simply be ported to MOOCs, or that that kind of instructional model can take the place of everything we do. I do think, however, that it pushes us to consider how much of “learning to write” as it’s currently happening is actually “learning to write an essay,” and whether or not that’s the best way to approach things. To push my analogy further, it’s a little like saying that “learning to cook” actually means “learning to cook a roast.” You can improve your roast-cooking without ever touching one, by learning about ingredients, cooking time, managing your food prep, and some of that can be accomplished by watching Food Network shows (I imagine). More to the point, you can learn to cook (and I’d guess that many, many people do) without ever touching a roast, much less learning to cook one. Similarly, I can imagine MOOC experiences that would help students practice and develop the skills that they need to become better writers, regardless of whether or not they’re writing “essays.”

And that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’m setting aside my (earned!) suspicion for the week, and trying to imagine what might be gained by students and teachers alike if a MOOC were done well and centered around questions of literacies, communication, and discourse. I’ll probably watch an episode or two of Chopped, too.

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Addendum: Pamela Hironymi, “Don’t Confuse Technology with College Teaching,” in today’s CHE:

As someone who spends time with students in directed conversations on difficult subjects, I’m sure the online model won’t work. We will, instead, produce graduates who cast assumptions they’ve never really questioned into grammatically correct slogans, and the sloganeers with the catchiest phrases, the most confidence, and the most money will shape the future.

That sounds a little familiar.

I spent a little quality time in the cgbvb archives last night, and thought I’d dredge up the entry below. It’s a nice example of the kind of seriality that Kathleen was talking about, and also highlights for me the kinds of serendipity that online scholarship is capable of. Sadly, the blogosphere isn’t quite the metonymy machine that it used to be, but this summer, I’ve been feeding data from my desktop and my iPad into Instapaper, and I’m finding that the same kinds of patterns emerge.

I also found out that at some point, for a while anyway, I was ending blog entries with “Snip, snap, snout.” I don’t have any recollection what that was about.

[This entry is a little more impressive with all of the links that I originally included, but now that they’re mostly dead and gone, I went ahead and scraped them. Dead links are not as impressive.]

 

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“So that’s how it works!”
Collin vs Blog, 18 September 2006

I have a folder on my desktop that I’ve been gradually filling for almost two years now. I probably add something once a month or so. Maybe I’ll pull something off of a delicious bookmark, or I’ll see a link to a pdf through Bloglines, and just dump it in.

So anyway, I didn’t have a “next” thing to read about 10 days ago, so I went into that folder and grabbed a pdf. Turns out it was James Moody’s “The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999.” I read it right before I left for Jeff & Jenny’s wedding, so I marked it up some with the intent of bookblogging it. Before I could do so, I was browsing my blog stats, and found some visits from a site I hadn’t seen before, and followed the link, coincidentally enough, to the page of a grad student who’s working with Moody.

Which was enough to send me browsing through the various pages associated with the Sociology department at Ohio State, including Moody’s, which took me to the page for his course on Theories of Social Action. And although there are lots of texts both there and on other pages that ended up in that desktop folder of mine, the one that happened to catch my eye was Mustafa Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology” (JSTOR), which of course I’ve now read and intend to bookblog as well.

And in the works cited for Emirbayer’s essay, I happened to see an entry from David Kaufer, whose Rhetoric and the Arts of Design I’m a fan of. And it turns out that he and Kathleen Carley wrote an essay on semantic connectivity back in 1993, which of course is next on my list and will be bookblogged once I do. But the emphasis on relational sociology (as opposed to sociologies that assume substance) in Emirbayer’s essay connects for me with Latour (whom Emirbayer cites), which is close to the top of my brainpile thanks to Jenny’s post.

But it’s Debbie’s post, along with the comment about verbing rhetoric, that reminds me that I need to go back and dig up Michel Serres’ stuff about philosophy that would focus primarily not on nouns or verbs, but rather on prepositions. And the appeal for me of the word pre/position, as something both that is relational and that precedes the stasis of positioning, clicks together pretty nicely with Massumi (whom Debbie also mentions) and Jenny both.

That it inches me closer to the things I want to say, by this point, is almost gravy. That’s how it works.