The Salt-Box

It’d been a couple of months since I actually finished a poetry review for Bookslut, but, happily, one made it in time for this month’s issue.  The book is Matthew Zapruder’s 2nd collection, The Pajamaist:

Matthew Zapruder’s self-assessment here is, I think, entirely apt: The Pajamaist, his second book of poems, is rewarding when it moves from inscrutability to pure transparency. It’s a delicate balancing act that he pulls off: Neither wholly experimental nor wholly contemplative, Zapruder’s poetry repeatedly dramatizes the mutual entwining of these stances. What makes The Pajamaist worth reading, then, is less a particular concept than an attempt to enact that “clear mystery” as frequently as possible.

Near the beginning of Middlemarch, the dried-up quasi-intellectual Edward Casaubon and the preposterously glib Mr. Brooke (“human reason may carry you a little too far –over the hedge, in fact.  It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do.  I pulled up; I pulled up in time.”) are talking about the life of the mind.  Or, at least, Brooke is chattering away about it, while Casaubon continually denies any familiarity with living authors or debates.

Then, Brooke realizes he has a bona fide author at his house, and, the following exchange occurs:

“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, “but I have documents.  I began a while ago to collect documents.  They want arranging, but when a question has struck me, I have written to someone hand got an answer.  I have documents at my back.  But now, how do you arrange your documents?”

“In pigeon holes partly,” said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air of effort.

“Ah, pigeon-holes will not do.  I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”

But of course it’s not the system, it’s the man that’s mixed.

Any time I teach Middlemarch, I can’t help but think that reading other writers is a kind of fall from grace.

Today brought some welcome news: Alex Jarvis, one of my students, had a program in “digital humanities” approved by the special studies committee on campus, which means it’s officially his major.

The program draws on classes in computer science (human-computer interaction, database concepts, PHP), history (methods and public history courses), design (graphical information design), communication, English (cyberpunk, digital literary studies), and philosophy (ethics, ethics & technology).  It also requires him to complete a minor, which will likely be journalism, since Alex interns at the Consumerist.

There are now–I think–enough faculty on campus doing digital humanities-type-stuff that we can work towards creating a certificate in it.   There were some concerns from the program committee about whether digital humanities-type work was most suitable *after* a degree in the traditional humanities, and an interdisciplinary certificate would probably assuage them.

Here’s some of the language from his proposal:

Digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field that, as its name implies, enmeshes the methods and objects of study from computer science and the humanities. Broadly speaking, it has two different goals: First, it examines traditional humanistic objects of study (texts, cultural artifacts) with digital methods, involving itself with the digitizing of traditional media and the preservation of born-digital documents, such as the Text Encoding Initiative’s “Versioning Machine,” which can compare different versions of archived text to each other, side-by-side. In a similar vein, it also facilitates the creation of similar tools for processing/storing/showing data in new and interesting ways, such as the word-digesting application suite TAPoR, or the powerful research and bibliographic tool Zotero.  Moreover, digital humanities seeks to bring humanistic ways of knowing (interpretative methodologies and theories) to bear on digital culture, or to give them fresh relevance. An example here might be Ivanhoe, the game of interpretation.  This mutual interplay contrasts with computer science; whereas both concern themselves with the internal manifolds of computing, digital humanities is ultimately more concerned with the data itself, and the transformation of that data into knowledge, as opposed to pure programming. In other words, the analysis and interpretation of all data, both real and virtual, and the further manipulation of that data is more important that the individual structure of programs. Although digital humanities is still an emerging field, it has achieved several key milestones: there are several scholarly organizations devoted to it (The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization, the Association for Computers and the Humanities), various peer-reviewed journals (such as Digital Humanities Quarterly), and a dedicated grants-making office at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I have so far begun to research and present on the digital humanities in several different capacities during my time at Central. In my freshman year, I sat on a panel (alongside English department chair Dr. Gigliotti)  that spoke with Author Steven Berlin Johnson, analyzing his recent  book, Everything Bad is Good or You (which purports that activities such as video games and television can be beneficial instead of brain-numbing), and it’s relation to new media and academia. I have presented twice at the Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day on related topics. My first presentation was regarding the analysis of a Game Design Document and its reflection on gaming as an area of study (known as ludology). In my second year I presented “Songs of the Hive Mind: Literature, Images, and Music In Web 2.0,” in which I used random user input from the popular Internet applications Twitter and Facebook to create poetry and music, and to reflect on the implications of this mashup for notions of authorship. My advisor and I are in the process of applying for a Faculty-Student Research Grant to explore the interpretative possibilities of embedding RFID tags in academic objects (RFID tags contain short-wave radio signals that carry unique, digitally recognizable data–they are what allow Wal-Mart to track goods in its supply chains, or Exxon to let customers pay for gas by holding their keychain near the pump). Should we get the grant, I will present the findings next semester at URCAD. I am currently an intern at a high-traffic consumer advocacy website/blog, where I manage the influx of emails, categorizing and ranking each by subject and quality (incidentally, it is because of this internship that I have chosen Journalism as my minor).  I also assisted Professor Jones at this past year’s Academic Computing Conference, where I presented my experience with Twitter and academic wikis.

My fascination with all things digital is a long-standing attribute in my life, a passion I have carried from my early childhood (where I was personally responsible for the destruction of 3 family computers because I was “messing around with them”) to my adolescence (where I had built several computers of my own). It was only during my time here at Central did I find the resources and people that would help me craft my disparate ideas into a concise point, which lead me directly to the digital humanities. Before even stepping foot in a class, I had petitioned the Student Activities/Leadership Development board to sponsor my own club, “the Nucleus Game Development Group,” a group dedicated to analyzing and experimenting with digital games.

. . .

My curriculum is modeled along the lines of such programs as the Master’s degree in the digital humanities at the University of Virginia, The Georgia Institute of Technology’s MS and PhD programs in digital media, and University of Central Florida’s “Texts and Technology” degree. I have attempted to emulate the programs’ combination of design, programming, and theory courses in my own study.

Should be interesting!

Last week, Brian Croxall asked Dave Parry the following:

why do you like blogs for teaching better than wikis

As far as I can tell, Dave’s answer isn’t recorded.  But, since I’m up late anyway prepping for a workshop on wikis, I thought I’d give it a shot. (UPDATE: now includes a link to the presentation notes.)

To a certain extent, this question doesn’t parse–it’s like asking “why do you like rakes better for yardwork than clippers?”  What’s wrong with both questions is that the category invoked (teaching/yardwork) is too broad to help us evaluate the tools at hand.  Although both blogs and wikis are platforms for online discourse, they embody/instantiate that discourse in quite different ways.

Parenthetically, this reminds me of one of my real frustrations with technology in universities: the tendency to freeze “technology” as one thing (online discussion! PowerPoint lectures!) and also “teaching” as one thing (Guide on the Side!).  I tend to think, somewhat lamely, that lots of different pedagogical approaches *can* be useful, and that in some contexts, well-thought-through online assignments can let us do things that can’t be done in the real world under current teaching conditions.  But fitting the tool, the assignment, and the learning outcomes together is a complicated process.
Anyway, all of this is to say that if you give me a goal, I can tell you why I prefer one form to another.  I prefer wikis to blogs for my class notes assignment, for instance, because that assignment focuses on the public, shared work of the class.  The collaborative nature of wikis is good for that.  In cases where I want students to develop, over the course of a period of time (a month, a semester), a perspective on a topic, or when I want them to roleplay in an interpretative game–well, a blog sounds better for those tasks, since it’s probably going to be organized chronologically.  But I cannot tell you, abstractly, why one tool is always better than another.

In general, I also think that it’s a mistake to invest all of one’s assignments in one technological tool.  Give up the quest for One Tool to Rule Them All, and trust that an ecology of on- and offline assignments can help you reach your goals.

I notice on Amazon.com that Gregory Tague’s collection, The Origins of English Literary Modernism (Academica) is now out. The collection has several interesting essays on turn-of-the-20thC English literature; it also has my essay, “The Middlebrow Prophet: Reading the Future of the Modernist Novel in Bennett’s Early Criticism.”  This is a bit of a return for me–my first peer-reviewed publication was on The Old Wives’ Tale and Riceyman Steps.  This time, as the title suggests, I re-read Bennett’s criticism, discovering there a critic more sympathetic to modernist aims than we might expect.

Here’s an early paragraph:

Why did Bennett fall out of fashion?  Once again, Bennett’s foresight provides a clue.  Writing in dismay about what he saw as an overly provincial reaction on the part of London’s cultural elite to Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionism exhibit, Bennett imagined his own imminent obsolescence:

Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my contemporaries–us who fancy ourselves a bit–to admit that we had been concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms?  Well, that day would be a great and disturbing day–for us. (“Neo-Impressionism” 285)

As everyone familiar with the modernist novel knows, this is precisely Virginia Woolf’s charge against Arnold Bennett in her widely-anthologized essays, “Modern Fiction” (1919) and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)  And while Woolf has largely convinced posterity of the justice of her claim, she never was able to force Bennett to admit anything. I’ll take up some details of their argument momentarily; for now it’s worth just underscoring Bennett’s model of artistic progress.  At least in 1910, he is not the bogeyman of tradition, the strawman of Woolf’s manifestos.  Instead, he is an advocate of cultural change, bringing to provincial London the good news of modernism–announcing an art of permanent revolution, one which will ultimately undo his own achievements.

(Footnotes snipped.)  Bennett’s a great read, both as a novelist and a reviewer, and so this essay was enormous fun to write.  Have a look at the whole collection, or, better yet, have your library order it!

Last week, the Tomorrow’s Professor listserv circulated a chapter by Jeffrey Buller explaining how to handle, as a dean, one-on-one meetings with faculty.  I am not a dean (though the son of a provost), but this advice seems useful for anyone:

There is a tendency to treat one-on-one appointments as somehow less critical than the formal presentations we make before committees, boards, and similar groups. After all, individual meetings occur all the time-how much preparation do we require to talk to someone? The fact of the matter is, however, that some of your most important-and anxiety-producing-meetings will take place in one-on-one conversations. Without others present, people tend to say things they would never admit in a public setting. They also feel free to bring up matters that they would be reluctant to broach before groups of people. For this reason, dismissing a one-on-one appointment as a mere conversation is rarely a good idea. At best, you may miss an opportunity to discuss ideas that could truly advance your college. At worst, you may be unprepared for a situation that could become disastrous or at least unpleasant because you didn’t take the time to do your homework.

This is true for meeting with students and colleagues, as well as meetings with administrators.  A significant number of my time-management problems arise when, an individual meeting, I make exceptions or informally agree to look into something.  Handling one-on-one meetings, especially with students, is something I need to get better at–especially meetings with students who need to improve some aspect of their performance.  (I tend to be deliberately upbeat and enthusiastic, which can seem at odds with the seriousness of a given situation.)

This morning at breakfast we were talking about college & saving.  A pointed out that if the 5-yr-old went to a CSU school, we could set him up pretty well for afterwards.  He said that he’d probably like to use that money for toys.  Then the following exchange:

A: When you’re a college boy I’d probably rather you spend your money on your girlfriend than on Lego toys or comic books.

A very horrified Boy: I will not have to pay a girl to be my girlfriend!

A falls over laughing, then: No, I mean you would take her out, or buy her things.

Boy: We’ll see . . . but I don’t think I’ll have to give her my money.

Not sure where, at 5, he would have picked up on the idea that some people pay for it, and that it’s culturally deprecated, but there you are. (Relatedly, see the Comics Curmudgeon.)

It is, I think, a rule of the internets that if you do something well and openly, that someone will sue you.  In this case, it’s the makers of Endnote suing Zotero for having the temerity to help users access their information.

The Courthouse News Service writeup (via Bethany Nowviskie) is slyly funny:

 The complaint states, “Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU’s Center for History and New media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others.” (my emphasis)

That’s certainly grounds for complaint!  Curse you, Dan Cohen, for your commitment to open software, free intellectual exchange, and fruitful research!

It’s a rainy day in CT, and so this morning at breakfast the topic of “going to school in the rain” came up.  Here’s the conversation with the 5-yr-old:

we were talking about how kindergartners are a lot like
college boys — except college boys can choose not to go to class.
[The boy] said, “I can tell you one thing: If they’re not there, they are
home playin’ video games!”  And then he said, “You know that’s true!”

Alex, I believe he’s talking about you.  The fact that he started playing Lego Batman on the Wii yesterday has nothing to do with it, I’m sure . . .

Other college-themed geekery from this morning: A kind of plumbing I can understand!

Hey, look who’s at Geek Dad today!

This semester I’m teaching for the first time our department’s intro-to-the-major course, which is fairly new to us.  (Previously we tended to assume that our majors got all the intro work they needed from the surveys.  We no longer think that’s true.)  It’s a dog’s breakfast of a course, mixing “how to write” with “how to read closely” with “oh, right . . . you should have heard of some theory, in at least a practical sort of way, if you want to be able to read contemporary academic criticism successfully.”  (A big if, to be sure, but I guess it’s often required.

The texts we read in the course don’t matter too much–the point instead is to work on the idea of reading–as long as there are multiple genres.  There’s a mini-tradition of using Great Expectations as the novel, hitting as it does a sweet spot of length + critical industry around it.  (Thus making it possible for people to write on it from any one of the theoretical views we cover, and being sure to find scholarship about it.)

So, we’re a week or so into Great Expectations, and we’ve covered New Criticism and reader-response theory in our theory book.  (Monday is theory day.)  I can say I’ve learned two things already:

1.  Boy, New Criticism teaches a treat.  You can see why it was so influential in classrooms for so long.

2.  It’s hard to teach a novel in a class like this.  When teaching Great Expectations in my Victorian Age course, or my Victorian Novel course, or my Dickens course, certain kinds of readings come to the forefront.  But here, none of that really matters in an obvious way.  Do I bring in Newman’s discussion of the gentleman?  Does the novel’s re-mixing of David Copperfield matter?

We can close-read passages all day long, but articulating those readings together in a coherent way is . . . well.  We can also simply disband the idea of gaining any understanding of the novel, and simply churn through a set of disconnected formal analyses, but that’s not much more appealing.

(Mercifully, no matter what we can also watch the South Park adaptation of Great Expectations, which is both awesome and surprisingly accurate.  Don’t miss Herbert Pocket’s tutoring Pip about London manners.)