Month: July 2007

NYT publisher talk about transition to the internet

Also via jill/txt, here’s an interesting and rather candid interview with Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, in the Israeli (maybe? I’m not sure about that), newspaper/web site Haaretz.com: “NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet.” Among other things, Sulzberger suggests that the day may soon be coming in which the NYTimes is not printed at all and only available online.

BAWS: jill/txt post on genre that kind have has to do with blogs, maybe

See jill/txt’s post, “the whole point of the genre is the long-time accrual of meanings and experiences.” Some good and smart points, Jill is borrowing from discussion about how shows like Lost are rarely thought of as being like a soap opera, even though that’s a show that certainly borrows from some of that form.

In the BAWS project, I’m going to have to address blogging as a genre since that has been the approach that most of the analysis has taken and/or assumed has been based on genre: blogs as journals/diaries, blogs as journalism, etc. That’s all fine and good, but thinking of blogging only in generic terms is first very limiting, especially since that a lot of these analyzes more or less end with this connection between a personal blog and a personal diary. But it also strikes me as inaccurate in that a lot of blogs– second or third generation blogs? ones fueled by tools like WordPress?– have moved beyond some of the generic categories that have been used to describe/contain blogs.

And besides all that, I’m interested in contemplating blogs as something other than a genre. Maybe this makes me a bad scholar, but genre is only so interesting.

Still, what Jill says here is interesting and potentially useful for my project, depending on how it evolves.

A Walking Score, with a grain of salt

There’s a web site called Walk Score, which calculates how “walkable” your neighborhood/house is in terms of nearby restaurants, stores, parks, schools, etc. It’s kinda cool, but I don’t completely trust it. When I typed in our address, I got a score of 49, which means that it is on the line between “not walkable” and “some walkable locations.” That seems about right, but when I plugged in the address of a colleague/friend of ours who lives within easy walking distance of Main Street in Ann Arbor, her house also scored 49. Hmmm. Well, as the Walk Score web site points out, its formula doesn’t calculate things like things within walking distance that you would actually want to walk to.

Ward Churchill, Academic Publishing, upcoming Kairos article

It’s funny how some of these things link together– or maybe how I make links between them:

While browsing my google reader feed this morning, I came across this article from Inside Higher Ed, “Ward Churchill Fired.” Old news, but basically Churchill was let go by the University of Colorado because (officially, at least) because of what has been called “overwhelming evidence” of scholarly misconduct. When this case was still an issue, I wrote on my blog and on the Inside Higher Ed site that Churchill shouldn’t be fired because of some unpopular views on 9/11. But when it turns out that he was cheating in his scholarship, well, that’s a different story. Still, I think this paragraph sort of sums up my feelings about the whole thing:

The meaning of the Churchill case has been heatedly debated over the past two-plus years. To Churchill and his defenders, he is a victim of politics and of a right wing attack on freedom of thought. To Brown and others at the university, Churchill’s case is not about politics at all about enforcing academic integrity and punishing those who don’t live up to basic rules of research honesty. To many others in academe, the Churchill case has been less clearcut. Many academics have said that they are troubled by both the findings of research misconduct against Churchill and by the reality that his work received intense scrutiny only after his political views drew attention to him.

This article lead me to this interesting blog post by Aaron Barlow on a blog that I will probably add to my feed reading called Free Exchange on Campus. Barlow’s post is trying to parse through the meaning of the Churchill case in complex terms so I won’t try to simplify it here, but I admire his efforts of trying to sort it out.

Anyway, reading Barlow’s post lead me to another post on the Free Exchange on Campus blog that lead me to this, “University Publishing in A Digital Age,” on another site I ought to add to the feed, Ithaka, which is site about promoting “the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide.” Here’s the abstract of this piece:

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing�. Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.

This paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.

I haven’t had a chance to read the full report yet, though I kind of wish it had come out a few weeks/months ago. Forthcoming in Kairos is going to be “Version 2.0” of an article I had originally had published in College Composition and Communication Online, “Where Do I list this on my CV? Considering the Value of Self-Published Web Sites.” Had I known about this Ithaka report earlier, some of what’s in the abstract here might have been good to incorporate in this revised article. Oh well; at least my thinking now and in 2002 are in line with some others.

Oh, PS:
Inside Higher Ed had a piece about this Ithaka report, too.

I like Ikea, but not this much

Via Boing Boing comes the news that Ikea in Oslo is opening up a hostel-like/hotel-like space so that shoppers who just don’t want to leave can get up the next morning and keep on shopping. Yikes! By the way, that link above also has lots of other cool Ikea links, including this one, Ikea Hacker, which is a blog space about making various mods with Ikea products.

Will and I went out to the Canton Ikea yesterday. Originally, we were supposed to meet up with Bill HD and family, but the timing was off and once we got there, my cell phone didn’t work in the store, thus thwarting our plans for meeting up. But alas, another time. Anyway, Will and I first had lunch where Will ate 13 out of the 15 Swedish meatballs we ordered (I had two and a salad) and about two-thirds of the cake-like thing we always get. I bought a magnetic white board (note the cheesy painting of Will in the right part of that image, the hat collection, and other “basement boy” office decos), a Billy book case (I’ve moved over some of my snow globe collection to this shelf), and a few other things, including cardboard magazine holders like the ones in the picture of the book case.

It’s been a while since I bought an Ikea book case, and it seems like the quality of materials and ease of assembly has improved a great deal. On the other hand, it turns out that the white board function of the metal bulletin/white board isn’t quite like the white boards at school. I wrote on my new Ikea purchase with an old dry erase marker from school I had around here, and it is most certainly not wiping off. This picture of the stain is after much elbow grease and rubbing alcohol. Not good, though easily concealed behind some photos, so as long as I use the official Ikea markers, I should be fine.

93/94****

I played at Pierce Lake Golf Course yesterday with Bill HD, Jim K, and Bob H (a former administrator returning to faculty at EMU), and I had a 93 (see below), a new low for me.

However, there are many asterisks that must be noted:

  • We did play the usual house rules, which did include a mulligan on the front nine (though I didn’t need one on the back nine).
  • None of us were happy with our play on the front nine; I had a 54. So we all agreed to play the back nine from what I guess I would describe as the “old man” tees: they weren’t the women’s tees, but the next one back. I’ll admit that we were all happier with our play–the other fellas knocked off between 5 and 10 strokes on their game, and I had a 39 (see below) back here– but it did feel a little like cheating. There are some significant carries off of the that these closer tees simply avoid.
  • Bill kept score, and I think he added wrong– I actually had a 40 on the back, giving me a 94– still my lowest game ever.
  • While there were no unicorns involved, I obviously had some good luck, too.

Anyway, with all of that, I still played really well, and it probably could not have come at a worse time. For all kinds of sabbatical related reasons, I really need to not play a whole lot of golf and spend my time reading and writing, and when I’m not doing that kind of stuff, I should be doing stuff around the house (e.g., painting, stripping wallpaper and painting the bathroom, etc.). And yet, after golfing like I did the other day, I feel like I need to figure out a way to sneak some more golf in….

Facebook taking over the world ala Microsoft

Or at least that’s the possible claim in this TechCrunch post, “Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?” This is kind of a wonky post about Facebook seems to be going the route of Microsoft in the past and Google in the present in becoming the number one destination on the internet by incorporating all sorts of different applications and the like.

I don’t know much about that, but I do know that Facebook has become more popular in my own house recently: my wife, Annette Wannamaker,
has joined the Facebook party.