Collin Gifford Brooke

What you may not know about me is that, once upon a time, I went to graduate school fully intending to focus my efforts on Irish literature. I had the opportunity to meet Seamus Heaney on a couple of occasions, and to hear him read several times, both in the States and during my semester abroad in Dublin. So it was with some sadness that I learned this morning that he had passed away.

Here is what you don’t know. Some of this has to do with Heaney, some more of it with Seamus Deane (who was a visiting professor at Carleton one term and from whom I took a course), but most of it has to do with Irish literature in general. As an English major in college, I took plenty of literature courses, and all of that literature was mediated through the printed page, of course. And the page, it flattens things. Birth and death dates follow the names of the writers included in our Norton anthologies, important numbers, but ultimately pretty meaningless to a 20 year old. When I started studying Irish literature, it was a bit newer, certainly, but as it stretched to the current day, to authors still living, and later to authors that I was meeting, literature changed a bit for me. This is the analogy my undergraduate mind devised: as I started out, the texts I was reading were like stars in the night sky, bits of brilliance against a much vaster sea of dark. What Irish literature did for me was to flip that metaphor on its head–I began to see literature itself as the field and the textstars as intensities rather than disconnected objects.

A big part of that was that the writers I met in Ireland all knew each other, and wrote both for and to each other. It may seem obvious to me now, but they were part of an ecology, a network, a community, and something was lost when you read them in isolation from the others. They weren’t writing in isolation and so they changed the way I read–little wonder that when, in a few years, I encountered what rhetoric and composition had to say about the myth of the isolated, originary writer, I was already primed for that work to resonate with me. And while it may be a stretch from the outside to connect the 20-year old me stepping out of a Dublin pub with the me who’s focused on ecologies and networks for the past several years, for me it’s always made perfect sense.

So, below the fold, is Heaney’s “The Ministry of Fear,” written for Seamus Deane:

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Apropos of a couple of different Twitter conversations yesterday, I found myself thinking last night about just how much our tiny, academic corner of the media landscape has changed in the past five or ten years. The first such conversation involved a simple request for resources–someone was looking for an article on a topic (archives) that could be included in a syllabus–and the second was about citation, and whether a particular writer had engaged with the scholarship in a specific discipline. Depending on the Venn diagram of our following, you may have seen one or both of these. I’m being purposefully vague here, though, because the details here matter less to me than the fact of the conversations themselves.

I entered my PhD program right about the time that Mosaic was making the transition to Netscape–the latter was released during my first semester, although I wouldn’t know it for another year or two. Here’s how long ago this was: unless you specifically requested otherwise, my school put the last 4 digits of your Social Security number in your email username–that’s how oblivious we/they were at the time. Before I devolve here into a combination of tech history and Abe Simpson stories, I’ll just say that it was a different time.

The availability of Facebook and Twitter (and any number of other sites), and the presence of fairly usable journal databases, are in the process of changing much of what it’s meant to be an academic. Those changes are happening …

Next spring, I’ll be teaching our grad program’s DH course for the second time. While not a complete loss, the first time I taught the course was affected in no small measure by the fact that I had major surgery just prior to the start of the semester. It turned out that debilitating pain and medication-hazed convalescence were not especially conducive to course planning. 🙂

So in many ways, then, it feels like I’m really teaching the course for the first time. I’m going to paste below my preliminary outline for course readings, for which I would especially welcome your feedback. It’s not really close to done yet, but I feel like I’ve got enough now that I can finally move on and plan my fall courses (!!).  I still have several layers of research to do (bookmarks, instapaper, fave tweets, TOCs, etc.) before this will feel finalized. So if you have any suggestions for readings, please share them here, or drop me a note–this will be an ongoing process throughout much of the fall semester.

A couple of additional notes: In addition to weekly readings, I expect that I’ll ask the students to look at 1-2 online projects a week–I have a huge list of possibilities, but I haven’t sorted through them yet to match them up with readings and topics. We’ll also be spending time each week in the lab working with various tools–again, big list that needs sorting and matching. Finally, I’ll be hosting a more dynamic …

I am not an historian, nor a member of AHA, nor an early-stage scholar, nor a publisher, nor am I responsible for library acquisitions. But then, the same can be said of plenty of folk who have weighed in on the decision by the American Historical Association to release a statement allowing for (and by implication, perhaps, endorsing) the “embargo” of history dissertations. As Rick Anderson notes (in a Scholarly Kitchen post that provides a pretty strong overview), the AHA “smack[ed] the hornet’s nest.” I follow enough Digital Humanities and Open Access inclined historians on Twitter that this statement, and the furor that ensued, registered substantially throughout my feed. And over the past week or so, the discussion has trickled upwards to the usual suspects (and beyond!) and sideways to other disciplines. At least it has to my own, based on listserv discussions and retweets.

And it should spread, because it’s not just an issue for historians. Times for university presses and for academic libraries are tough all over, and that affects every discipline. As someone who routinely advises late-stage graduate students and untenured faculty, I think that the questions raised by the AHA statement are ones that everyone in the humanities should be thinking about, not just members of that particular organization. For a good cross-section of the various positions and issues, my best recommendation is Open History, a project that began as part of the backlash against the AHA statement, but one that I’ll be watching …

[I wasn’t sure whether or not I really wanted to share this piece of writing. Perhaps you’ll understand both why I was hesitant to do so, and why I have.  -cgb]

If you were on FB or Twitter this weekend, and are associated with academia, you probably caught a glimpse of a tweet from an evolutionary psychologist who suggested that “obese PhD applicants” should save themselves the trouble of applying for doctoral programs, since their obvious lack of willpower will keep them from being able to write a dissertation. I’m not going to link in any way to Geoffrey Miller’s work, but this Jezebel story will tell you most of what you need to know. Miller himself has progressed quickly through the life cycle of denial: he initially defended his statement, then deleted it, then apologized for it, then disavowed it, and finally, when pressed by his university, claimed that it was part of a “research project.” My guess is that Miller has managed to damage himself pretty seriously; it wouldn’t shock me to hear that his home institution will have nothing more to do with him.

Like a lot of people, my first response to that tweet was both outrage and rage. It was a shitty thing to say. The more I thought about it, though, the more layers I found. Some of them were prompted by others’ comments about Miller’s tweet, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my own embodied response as well. If you’ve never …

So, Jim put out this call for advice this week:

ICYMI: I’m giving a short #cwcon presentation on publishing as a grad student. What advice would you give grad students? Use #gradpub tag.

— Jim (@jamesjbrownjr) June 1, 2013

 

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and Jim’s tweet got me to thinking, so I figured I might write a few thoughts down. They’re not necessarily complete, because I do think that discipline and venue matter quite a bit, as does the student’s progress, work habits, and readiness. While it might be nice if there were a simple 10-point listicle that provided us all we ever needed to know about publishing, the fact of the matter is that it’d be pretty horoscopic. I’m not sure my advice will be any better, but it’s generally worked for me.

There are a few essays that I hand out to graduate students on a semi-regular basis, pieces that I’ve found really useful to have and to revisit every so often for my own writing. In honor of the listicle, I present to you my Top 5 Must-Read Essays for the Aspiring Scholarly Writer:

* C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (PDF) — It’s dated, and it’s from the social sciences, but it’s worth every graduate student’s time to read and adapt Mills’ advice:

By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events

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I.

I want to wish everyone a happy Burkeday — Kenneth Burke was born on this day in 1897, making today as good a day as any to celebrate rhetoric.

KB is part of my origin story: When I returned to graduate school for my PhD, my first course wasn’t actually official. The summer before I started, I sat in on Victor Vitanza’s Kenneth Burke course. For me, it was like a homecoming, and only partly because I was glad to get back to academia. I was a fairly half-hearted rhetoric and composition person, having done a concentration in my MA program on the counsel of our graduate advisor. I’d originally gone to graduate school thinking to study Irish literature, and I was possessed of a fondness for critical theory. While I could see some connections with rhet/comp, they were weak ties at best, and it may not have been an accident that I ended up taking a couple of years after my first attempt.

Anyhow, reading Burke was a revelation for me. It wasn’t always easy reading, nor would I say that I agree with everything he wrote, but I’ve always felt a resonance with his work. I don’t doubt that it shows up in my own writing from time to time. But reading Burke was one of the things that made me feel (finally) like I’d made the right decisions to go back to graduate school and to stick with rhetoric and composition. One of Burke’s passages that …

Last night, in lieu of watching television, getting caught up on my work, or doing any number of other, more productive things around the house, I let myself get sucked into rearranging some of my bookshelves. As I mentioned on Facebook afterwards, one of the things I started thinking about was how I would arrange them if I were going to play Bookshelf Bingo, a game I invented while I was shelving.

Bookshelf Bingo is not all that different from Hipster Bingo or SXSW Bingo. My first idea was that you could play it during a keynote address at a conference, although I would think a Twitter feed might work as well (although it’d be more difficult, as I explain below). Here are the rules:

1. Each player needs to start with roughly similar shelving units. I’m a huge fan of the cube shelves myself, which have the added advantage of providing the bingo grid. Each cube holds around 15 books, give or take. The grids should be the same for each player, and the grid sizes as well, to keep it fair.

2. Each player can arrange books on and among the shelves in any way he or she sees fit.

3. Each player then takes a high resolution photo of their shelves and prints it out. This is the Bingo card.

4. Then, at a keynote address (or panel), a player gets to cross off a square each time a book in that square is cited by …

Every once in a while, everything just seems to flow into one large conversation full of resonances, connections, and it’s like striking a tuning fork. This is a post about the challenges of graduate education, and perhaps, by extension, academic work for those of us who identify with the digital humanities. Let me see if I can gather the threads together.

There’s a little history. Jokingly, I tell people that one of my biggest academic regrets is a paper I delivered at CCCC a few years back (2010). Our session took place in a huge ballroom (the size of our audience did not do it justice), and rather than a projector and portable screen, we had like a 30-foot monitor. It was colossal, and one of the things I regret is that, not knowing about it ahead of time, I didn’t prepare a full slide deck. Instead, I gave the only talk I’ve ever given that had just one, solitary slide. Don’t get me wrong, I was proud of that slide, and I wish that I hadn’t lost it in the Great Laptop Crash of 2011. It was a screen capture of a cover of an old issue of Field & Stream magazine, lovingly Photoshopped to reflect the topics in my talk, which was called “Writing Retooled: Loop, Channel, Layer, Stream.” Keep in mind that this was 3 years ago, when Twitter was still relatively exotic for academics, but what I was arguing was that

For those of us who

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It feels like a particularly dark time around the Interwebz these days–I don’t think it’s just me. I’ve been studying and working with new media for a long time now, and so you’d think that I’d be sufficiently inured to bad news. For whatever reason, though, it feels like the hits have kept coming over the last month or so. There’s plenty to feel down about, but since this song is about me, I wanted to collect some of my thoughts on the changes that are happening with two pieces of my personal media ecology: the demise of Google Reader and the recent purchase of GoodReads by Amazon.

I’ve been soaking in a lot of the commentary regarding Google Reader, ever since it happened while I was at CCCC, and while there’s a lot of stuff I’m not going to cite here, there were a couple of pieces in particular that struck me as notable. I thought MG Siegler’s piece in TechCrunch was good, comparing Google Reader’s role in the larger ecosystem to that of bees. Actually, scratch that. We’re the bees, I think, and maybe Reader is the hive? Anyway, my distress over the death of Reader is less about the tool itself and more about the standard (RSS/Atom) it was built to support. I understand why there are folk who turned away from RSS because it turned the web into another plain-text inbox for them to manage, but as Marco Ament (of Instapaper fame) observes, that was …