Collin Gifford Brooke

Yesterday, there was a minor squall that swept quickly across my Twitterological system. One of the departments in my field that maintains its own, somewhat official Twitter account trumpeted the names and schools of the finalists for a senior search in their department. I do have a screen shot of the tweet, but figured that I’d have to redact so completely that there wasn’t a lot of point in sharing it here. But it read:

Delight! Our job search found exceptional candidates: [candidate1]- [school1], [candidate2]- [school2], [candidate3]- [school3]. Job talks coming up!

The post has since been removed, appropriately, but not before it was linked and critiqued by some folk with pretty substantial numbers in terms of followers. I don’t want to name, shame, or blame here; rather, my point is a broader one about social media and the search process, and why folks reacted so strongly and so negatively to what was in all likelihood a genuine expression of excitement and appreciation.

I think that many of us often assume that everyone in a department will know where to draw the lines when it comes to social media. And yet, the landscape changes fast enough that we don’t always have time to think about how they might interact with what may be tried-and-true procedures when it comes to things like job searches, which are not exactly everyday occurrences, particularly in the humanities. And the intricacies of the search process can be opaque, for anyone who hasn’t experienced it from …

[It occurred to me that, after sharing my Reading Notes assignment, I should be doing more of this myself. I don’t know that this will last, but in the interest of walking my talk, I’m going to try to contribute some entries to my class’s shared bibliography. I’ll post them here and at the course wiki, and I’ll be covering essays that I wasn’t able to include in the syllabus itself. My goal is to average an essay a week for the semester–I doubt that I’ll do this evenly, but we’ll see. I’ll probably work ahead a little this weekend.]

Moretti, Franco. “Operationalizing: Or, the Function of Measurement in Literary Theory”

Moretti, Franco. “Operationalizing: Or, the Function of Measurement in Literary Theory.” New Left Review 84 (Nov/Dec 2013): 103-119. (paywall)

Abstract: Moretti suggests “operationalizing” as the bridge between the quantitative study of literary works and the theoretical concepts with which critics approach them. He demonstrates this by operationalizing Alex Woloch’s concept of “character-space,” testing it via word counts and network centrality maps. But Moretti also argues that this kind of operationalization must do more than simply provide additional detail or precision if it is to have value. In the case of character-space, he argues that “Two conflicting criteria for protagonism emerge from the two types of measurement…[and this] shows that the ‘protagonist’, far from being a fundamental reality of dramatic construction, is only a special instance of the more general category of ‘centrality’” (109, 112). …

There’s a phrase that I got from Laurence Veysey, via Gerald Graff (although it appears in other places as well): “patterned isolation.” Veysey uses the phrase to explain the growth of the modern university and the way that disciplines grew without engaging each other, but I tend to apply it on a more “micro” scale. That is, there are many things we do as teachers and scholars in patterned isolation from our colleagues, tasks that call upon us to reinvent wheels over and over in isolation from one another. Fortunately, with the Internet and all, much of that is changing, as folks share syllabi, bibliographies, and the like online.

But I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to short circuit patterned isolation. For me, reading notes are one of those sites. I’m not a great note-taker and never have been–I’m too reliant on visual/spatial memory and marginalia. Disconnecting my own notes from the physical artifacts that I was processing didn’t make sense. Now, of course, I’m lucky sometimes if I remember having read a book, much less what I scrawled in its margins, so I wish that I’d been better about taking notes and I admire those people who have already internalized the lesson that it took me 20+ years to figure out. So one of the things that I like to do in my graduate courses is to aggregate the note-taking process. Rather than asking or expecting each student to take a full set of reading notes for the …

In a little less than 24 hours, my spring graduate seminar on Rhetoric, Composition, and Digital Humanities will begin (syllabus). I’m not typically the kind of professor who gives his students assignments to complete prior to the first course meeting–it always struck me as a little mean-spirited to bite into what little break we have between semesters. This year, however, I broke form, and suggested to my students that they read one or both of a couple of “fun” reads: Charles Soule’s graphic novel Strange Attractors and Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. I may talk later about Soule’s book, which shares some features with Sloan’s, not the least of which is the apprenticeship that form the social core of each, but far more digital humanities folks that I’ve seen recommend Penumbra as the DH novel par excellence. As I finished re-reading it this evening, I thought about why exactly that recommendation is so prevalent.

Not that I disagree. On the surface, though, there’s really only a small part of the book that feels like a recognizably DH moment (whatever that is, I know). I’ll try to do all this without spoiling too much, but it’s the early scene in the book where data from Penumbra’s logbooks are mined and digitally visualized. Digital tools play various roles throughout the book beyond that scene, helping to propel Clay forward, but there’s also some irony in that a microscope and an audiobook on cassette tapes (arguably) play as …

So I’ve been slowly reading S by Abrams and Dorst, and slowly expanding my Twitter horizons with respect to bots, and today, I came across a really interesting app/tool that crossed the streams, so to speak.

It’s called Telescopic Text. Not unlike Tapestry, it’s an application that lets you write and store texts. Those texts, though, are like that word game where you create a ladder of words by adding a letter at a time (a, an, pan, plan, plane, planet, etc.). You start with a tweet-length sentence, highlight particular words, which then “unfold” as they’re clicked on. It’s like drilling down into a text to find more and more details.

The TT site itself starts with an example:
http://www.telescopictext.com/

The tools for building one, and saving it, are at:
http://www.telescopictext.org/
(registering for an account is free, which you’ll need to do if you want to save your efforts)

I ended up finding the site from a link to Tully Hansen’s “Writing,” which is located here (you’ll need to scroll down):
http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/electronic-overland/

It reminds me too of Jon Udell’s classic screencast about the WIkipedia entry for the heavy metal umlaut:http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html

I’m not entirely sure how I’ll be using this, but it’s been a lot of fun to play with this afternoon…

(x-posted from Facebook)…

Apropos of positively nothing:

I was thinking just now about -aholic as our kludgy suffix for addiction, as in workaholic, chocoholic, danceaholic, Brookaholic (okay, that last one isn’t real). I figured that it must have come originally from alcoholic, but alcohol doesn’t match up with my spotty recollection of Greek and Latin. Briefly, I wondered (given the al-) if the word wasn’t originally Arabic.

Lo and behold, it is. It comes from the Arabic al-kuhul, or “the kohl,” which was ground ore used as mascara. Later it generalized to mean something like the pure substance of anything, including liquids, and it only acquired its modern sense in the 18th c or so.

Kohl comes from kahala, to paint or stain. Given the aversion to rhetoric as a merely decorative art that stretches back to antiquity, I begin now to understand certain rhetors’ obsession with beer.

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Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.…

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