Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Via boing-boing, I came across Men’s Health rankings of “The 20 Worst Foods in America,” which I found pretty much lol funny, like foods served on The Simpsons (I am thinking in particular of Homer wrapping a bacon cheeseburger around a stick of butter). The absolute worst food on the list are these cheese fries from Outback Steakhouse:
Note the sides of bacon and ranch dressing.
The other items on the list here are pretty predictable, with Chili’s winning a lot of the top 20 spots.
These both might be kind of teachable moments in a couple different classes. First, there’s the Obama inspired “Yes We Can” song/video:
Well-done, inspiring, etc. And then, via Deb Hawhee, I came across this parody featuring almost certain GOP candidate John McCain:
Good luck with that in November 2008 indeed….
As I finish up sorting through my RSS feed, I have to note posts from Alex, Jeff, and (via Jeff) Anne regarding Dana Boyd’s call for academics to boycott closed/”locked down” journals. It’s all kind of interesting in an, um, academic way; but is this dust-up really all that relevant?
Boyd seems to be kinda steamed because her article in the journal Convergence is not just “out there” on the Internets for one and all to grab for free/as an open source document. Without getting into the pros and cons of all this (though I think I agree with the general sentiment of folks I link to above, that while open source is a good idea, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to boycott journals that haven’t gone that route), I guess I am just having a hard time getting too excited one way or the other about this. Yes, I can’t get Boyd’s article directly from the Internets. But we also have this old-timey academic technology called “the library,” and from there, I am sure I will be able to access this article, either electronically or, if EMU doesn’t subscribe to Convergence, via inter-library loan. The last time I got an article via interlibrary loan, they emailed it to me as a PDF. So while this might not be as open and as easy if it were “just there” on the web and while the EMU library probably doesn’t do this for people coming in off the street (though they might, actually), it’s still pretty quick and open and accessible if you ask me.
One of the things that most of these (kind of, but not really) closed access journals get you is paper, and paper, as I discuss in this section of version 2.0 of my article “Where Do I List This on My CV?” can matter. Granted, these closed (but again, not really) journals don’t have the reach of stuff that’s just up on the ‘net; on the other hand, paper doesn’t just disappear, which is something I experienced with the first version of this piece.
Besides, if Boyd (or anyone else) wants to put up an academic article that they wrote up on the web, well, go ahead. Anne makes a point of saying that she has written this into contracts for things that she’s published. That’s probably the legal and proper way of doing things, but I don’t think that’s even necessary. As I wrote in this article (also in the section I quote above), plenty of scholars in my field just put things up on the web– Carolyn Miller, Michael Day, most of the people in my blogroll, etc. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I intend to make links to PDF versions of stuff I published that came out in closed journals available under the “Scholarship/CV” tab. If some academic publisher wants to email me and tell me to take it down, then I will. But really, is that going to happen?
So, WIRED is turning 15 this month. Happy Birthday, and it makes me feel kinda old, actually.
Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous.com (the link is above) has a nice write-up about the first issue. Here’s a highlight couple of paragraphs for me:
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren’t even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway.
Ah, memories….
I’ve subscribed to Wired off and on for many years now. It went through a phase there during the “dot com” bubble where it was trying to be a business magazine, and it definitely lost its edge. I started taking it again about a year and a half ago, and I guess I have very mixed feelings. I have yet to read the January issue, for example, but the one on Manga was pretty good. It all just goes to show you that institutions/publications/etc. can’t remain “the cutting edge” forever.
From Weblog Tools Collection, “Extending WordPress Beyond the Blog.” I don’t have the time/brain power right now to figure this out, but since I’m going to be contemplating some way of redoing my online teaching for the spring and I’m interested in trying to make it work with WordPress, these links about making WP into a CMS might come in handy later.
I stumbled across this tonight for reasons I can’t explain, director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson talking with Henry Rollins about (among other things) There Will Be Blood.
Cool stuff.
We had our second annual Mardi Gras Party last night, and a good time was had, me thinks. Annette and I have done a fall party of Indian food for several years now, and we decided last year that February was a good time to have another party, especially since it is cold and dreary and kind of the low-point of the school year. So Mardi Gras it was then, and Mardi Gras it was this year.
Well, sort of. Purists will note that “Fat Tuesday” was last week, so technically, we should have had this party last weekend. But scheduling conflicts and all the rest postponed it. No one seemed to mind.
The pre-party planning/work started with a bit of a bang, and I mean that in a bad way. I slipped and fell about halfway down the basement stairs and I managed to land quite hard on my ass in the process. I don’t think I broke anything too significant, but I had the wind knocked out of me pretty good and I was kind of dazed for about the first hour or so of the festivities. This morning, I’m not so much hung over as I am sore. Sitting down is a delicate matter.
I uploaded a boatload of pictures to my flickr account here, or, if you’re a facebook kinda person, you can go see them over there, too. I didn’t actually take any of these pictures– Becky S. started playing with the camera, and, 70 some odd pictures later, I had a bunch to share. Note how many of these pictures Andre manages to get in. My favorite is this one where he must be going for the cover of Teen Beat.
Of course it was great to have so many good friends, work colleagues, neighbor-types, kids, etc. But what I like most about Mardi Gras is the food, and we had WAY WAY too much of it. Here’s what we had, along with my own biased reviews:
So by next year, maybe we’ll figure out how to streamline this a bit and how to gauge how much food we actually need. And now, I’m going to go wash some more dishes.
I’ve got to get a move-on here because I’ve got to clean up after our faux Mardi Gras party we had last night (pictures and a post about that later). But I wanted to post something about the last couple weeks of wiki-centric stuff around here, culminating in a couple lectures featuring Larry Sanger and Marshall Poe.
Just to back up a bit:
Marshall Poe is the McAndless visiting scholar at EMU this year. This is an endowment that was set up many years ago to bring in various visiting professors for a term; a couple years ago, this is how we got Scott McCloud to be on campus and do so much stuff with our classes. Poe’s approach has been to bring in others, presumably the people that he worked with/interviewed for his forthcoming book on Wikipedia, to come in and give talks and such. There are a couple more scheduled through the term.
This week, it was Sanger, who spoke along with Poe Thursday night and Friday morning at this little symposium thing we had here. Basically, Sanger spoke mostly about his new project, Citizendium, which he sees as a sort of anecdote to the anarchy and chaos of Wikipedia, a place where articles are written by people who use their real names and are then vetted by real experts, and a place where everyone has discussions in professional and polite tones.
I have to say there are few things that Sanger said that I agree with.
One of the things that framed my own preconceived notions about Sanger was Poe’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Hive,” which is a history of Wikipedia. In the story, Sanger is depicted as a guy who came up with much of what was Wikipedia (at least in the early days), who was victimized by/a participant in some ugly flame-wars, and who was more or less tossed out of the Wikipedia universe just as it started taking off. So I knew that he had reasons to be bitter and defensive. But the extent to which this came across in his two speeches was rather striking. Sanger seems like a pretty angry guy.
I don’t think Wikipedia (or YouTube or Digg, both of which Sanger and Poe mentioned frequently) are as chaotic and lawless as they suggest, and it seems to me that model of many eyeballs has served Wikipedia surprisingly well in terms of it accuracy. Citizendium (and btw, an unsolicited piece of advice: change the name to something that folks can easily pronounce) aims to be a better online encyclopedia, but even if that were possible, why? What’s the goal? All encyclopedias– Britannica, Wikipedia, Citizendium– are, by definition, summaries which are inevitably “watered down,” which frequently gloss over controversial details, and which are often enough wrong. I encourage my students to use Wikipedia as a place to get started, though I don’t allow them to reference it as a source in an academic research project. But I wouldn’t allow them to reference Britannica or Citizendium either. So even if Sanger is making a better mousetrap/encyclopedia (and that’s an “if,” of course), it’s difficult for me to understand the point.
In the end, I think what was most interesting about Sanger’s speeches and point of view is that it is so very very different from mine and, as far as I can tell, most of my colleagues. Sanger is a Philosopher with a capital P and out of the same mold as Plato. He’s an academic (of a sort) who, based on his training and world view, has no problem at all with an epistemology that assumes Neutrality is possible, that Knowledge is “out there” and, that the goal of philosophy is to objectively approach and understand that Knowledge. The best way to get to that Knowledge is to ask a Philosopher, which is someone who has Wisdom (and, in these days, Credentials) and can thus provide the answer.
Rhetoric has traditionally been described as the opposite of Philosophy, and given that Sanger and I (and probably most of my colleagues in the English department) begin with completely different world views about what (K)knowledge is and how we get there, I just don’t get where he’s coming from at all. Sanger would probably feel the same way about me.
At some point on Thursday night, Sanger made one of those “off-the-cuff” comments that really has stuck with me: he said he imagined Citizendium as being kind of like those old county fairs, where article writers would be like the farmers presenting their wares and the academic experts would be like the judges picking the winners. Well, this– and the call for politeness and decorum and order that came up again and again– just struck me as nostalgia. And like most things that are based on nostalgia– the genre of the western, for example– it is a longing for a more perfect past that never actually existed in the first place. In that sense, I think that Citizendium is a beautiful and futile dream.
As I type this (or at least as I start to type this), Larry Sanger is talking at the symposium I’m attending on wikis and stuff, and (obviously) my mind is drifting a bit. I will probably have to write something more thoughtful about the events surrounding Sanger’s visit later.
Anyway, while that was going on, I stumbled across “A Call for Professional Attire” by Erik M. Jensen in Inside Higher Ed. Basically, he’s pointing out the long-standing bad dress of most academics. It’s kind of a funny piece, one that I don’t agree with generally speaking, but amusing and thought provoking nonetheless, and there are lots of good comments on the article.
As far as my own fashion senses (or lack thereof) go, a couple of thoughts in no particular order:
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on some sweats and do some online teaching….
I’m giving a talk in a couple hours at a small and local symposium about wikis and Wikipedia this morning. It’s part of the McAndless Scholar series of lectures, which features Marshall Poe (he has a book coming out on Wikipedia and an article in The Atlantic called “The Hive”) and Larry Sanger, who was one of the guys who thought up Wikipedia in the first place. My talk is called “Wikis, Free and Easy,” and it’s really just a show and tell about different wiki softwware. Here’s a link.
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks as far as all this wiki stuff goes, both in the class I’m teaching and with the guests on hand. But I’ve got to get ready to actually go and do this now; maybe more later….