Collin Gifford Brooke

There are a couple of different conversations that serve as context for this post, but rather than hail people directly, I’ll just note that it’s that time of the year (for us at Syracuse, anyway) when we encourage our dissertators to start thinking about the job market. Part of what we do in our graduate program is to set up gradual deadlines over the summer for them to share their dossier materials with each other and with faculty, so that when the deadlines start rolling in, they’re ready to go.

I’ve noticed in recent years, off and on, what has been kind of a surprising decline in the number of folks who maintain some sort of professional home page, whether a set of static pages or embedded within WordPress (or some other CMS). This isn’t to say that they’re not active online; for rhetoric and composition, at least, activity on social media has been steadily growing, I think. But as more and more of us embrace Facebook, Twitter, and the like, one of the casualties has been the individually-maintained homepage, and that’s to say nothing of blogging, which has been supplanted by its various micro- cousins. I want to make the case, though, both for my own students here and for others across the discipline, that this is a mistake. You might not necessarily know it to look at my own page (which has been in-process for an embarrassingly long time), but I think that a periodically maintained homepage may …

Whenever I put together a course, I like to imagine that there’s some sort of narrative thread running through, whereby early topics and readings lead to the ones that follow. Sometimes that thread is brute chronology, but most often, it’s thematic, and I suspect that more often than not, the thread is one that only I can see, although I do try to suggest it at various points during the semester. In the case of RCDH, this has been a little tricky, not least because DH is still emergent, somewhat interdisciplinary, and my own field’s engagement with it is uneven. In my head, though, after we’d gotten an obligatory week of definitions out of the way, the first “unit” of the course was a trio of weeks gathered under the headings of database, archive, and metadata. (Here’s the schedule, if you haven’t seen it.)

We’re turning now to a week that didn’t necessarily fit that well as I was originally putting the course together, a week that combines Stephen Ramsay’s Reading Machines, some work on procedural literacies, and a few pieces/performances of algorithm. It’s an ambitious little week in its own way, but as we were working our way through a discussion of metadata last night, it got me to thinking about the transition between this week and next. Some of this I raised in class somewhat tentatively, but I wanted to write through it a bit today, partly for my own memory, and also because …

Last week, as part of their 10-year anniversary, Facebook released a tool that allows users to create (and later edit) movies based upon their FB usage. The “Look Back” videos offer “an experience that compiles your highlights since joining Facebook.” For a couple of days, my feed (and I suspect, most people’s) filled with “looks back” from a variety of friends, followed by the inevitable wave of parodies (Walter White, Darth Vader, et al.).

Like many of my friends, I went ahead and let FB sort through my photos and updates in an effort to set my “highlights” to music, but I didn’t end up sharing the results. This week in my DH course, we’re talking about archives, so I’ve been reading around somewhat alert to discussions of archiving, and I ended up thinking a bit about my “Look Back” and what it had to tell me about my relationship with FB as an archive of my life. I didn’t end up sharing my movie because I didn’t feel like it was particularly representative–while it did manage to hit on a couple of significant events (such as the fact that I bought a house), most of the updates and images included were pretty random. And so I’ve been thinking on why that was.

One obvious reason is that I don’t share as much of my life with FB as others do, and I say that without judgment. As FB itself notes, the content of the movie “depend[s] on how long …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

I should be doing many other things, but every once in a while, there’s a bundle of ideas in my skull that gathers together and sets up a resonance field, and there’s really nothing for it but to write it out. So this is more suggestive than it would be had I the time to really write through it all.

The piece that clicked it all together for me was Jon Udell’s recent post on networks of first-class peers, which has its roots (I think) in the recent announcement of the demise of Google Reader, the death knell for which happened while I was in Las Vegas at CCCC, our annual conference for all things compositional and rhetoricky. I don’t want to project my own affect onto Jon’s post, but there was a sadness there, a nostalgia for the days when the weblog was the undisputed chief of social media. Jon closes his discussion with a look back:

What some of us learned at the turn of the millenium — about how to use first-class peers called blogs, and how to converse with other first-class peers — gave us a set of understandings that remain critical to the effective and democratic colonization of the virtual realm. It’s unfinished business, and it may never be finished, but don’t let the tech pundits or anyone else convince you it doesn’t matter. It does.

He’s responding in part to the “has Google decided that blogs are dead?” portion of the …

I’ll begin by thanking Kathleen, Avi, and the rest of the Mellonaires for posting Open Review, and providing a nice hub for this conversation. Honestly, I have other things I should be doing, but upon reading Alex’s thoughts on the matter, and waiting for the aftermath of today’s root canal to come and go, I hunkered down and did a little reading. Now that I have enough focus to write, my thought is that if I don’t post something now about it, I probably won’t ever. So…open peer review.

I’m not opposed to it in any way, so like Alex, I may not quite be the audience for the piece. That being said, my own rhetorical disconnect differs a bit from his. Alex asks, “What is the problem with existing scholarly review procedures that the open review process seeks to solve?” and his answer is that “The humanities publish work of little interest.” There’s a lot more to his comments, so they’re worth reading in their entirety, but I want to pull out one thread and take it in a different direction. Among other things he notes:

For most humanities scholars (and when I say most, I mean 99%+), review feedback is the most substantive (and often only) conversation they encounter regarding their work. We know something like 95% of humanities articles go uncited. Even when an article is cited, there’s no assurance that the citation represents a substantive engagement with one’s text. So there is rarely much

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a flurry of emails from apparently reputable sources, asking me to add them to my blogroll and/or link to their materials. Of course, they all referenced the blog that I haven’t updated in nearly 3 years, so that was my first clue. The second clue was the fact that they could have all been cut from the same “Dear Mr. %LastName%” cloth, although to be fair, they did all get it right that I was a boy. I didn’t think a whole lot of them, and after the second, it was obvious that there was a new form letter circulating, so I’ve been sending them straight to trash.

Yesterday, though, I saw a couple of articles that made me think more deeply about them. The first is a truly excellent piece by Dan Meyer, about how devious and abusive “education companies” are becoming. He marshals an impressive series of screen caps, and lays out the step-by-step process by which these companies, who offer “online education,” are basically trying to recruit us into marketing for them. They do this by creating “resource” pages, such as lists of top blogs, or top twitterers, or top tools, the kinds of pages that folks are fond of linking to, posting on Facebook or Twitter, etc., and then using the PageRank mojo generated that way to drive their search results.

The thing is, it’s flattering to be considered for lists like this. And it’s great to have …