As most people who expected to see me in New Orleans have learned by now, I'm not there. It's not as dramatic as some may think. I've been struggling a little health-wise this semester--nothing big, but a lot of small things, and it's taken me longer to recover than it did when I was, say, 20. Or 30 even. I was sick again last weekend, when otherwise I would have been leaving on the road trip that took me to NO and to CCCC, and I thought to myself that it would be sooo much easier on me physically if I simply bailed on it this year. And so I did.
I feel sad not to see everyone, and a little guilty about bailing on my co-panelists, but I feel really good today, and it took a few days of sleep that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten to feel that way. So I think it was the right choice.
I have a couple of QuickTime versions of my talk, which I used to test out Keynote's recording and exporting functions. It's a pared down version of the talk I would have done, and the visuals are done up a little as well. It's not great, but it's there. I've got two versions that you can either watch on screen or download: a smaller 10MB version and the monster 44MB version. You may need to right-click the links to download. The larger version is more faithful to the smart builds in the original presentation, but still a little choppy. It would have looked and probably sounded much better in person. Deal.
And have a good time in NO, everyone. That's all.
Update:It occurred to me that it might be nice if, prior to downloading a 40+ MB file, you had some idea of what it is you were downloading. Here's the abstract that I submitted:
Speaker X: Visualizing the Invisible Collage of ResearchIn 2006, Brad DeLong likened the academic blogosphere to an invisible college, a metaphor familiar to those of us who use email, discussion lists, and blogs to maintain our social networks of friends and colleagues. Speaker 5 argues that Web 2.0 represents an opportunity to make public other disciplinary networks as well. These technologies allow us to conduct practices like annotation, referencing, and collection collaboratively; in doing so, they permit a different model for knowledge production to emerge. If the blogosphere makes visible the invisible college, our journal web sites may help us reveal the "invisible collage" of texts and ideas that each of us now assembles in isolation.
Ahhh, prognostication. My talk ends up being less about "journal websites" and more about the college/collage play on words, I think. And my examples are drawn more from my own experimenting than from anything happening right now in the field, I fear. But the talk's true to the spirit of the abstract if not the letter. My favorite moment is a slide with Robert Boyle (17th C originator of the phrase "invisible college") and "Ye Olde Webbe 2.0" in an old English font. Cracks me up every time. Anyways. That's what all you're in for if you take a peek. The panel's in a matter of hours, and I have it on fairly good authority that they're going to screen my cast. So you'll sort of see me there. 'Night.
Nice presentation. The two things that I was most struck by was the cool stuff you were able to do with KeyNote (I have a copy of this myself, and I have a presentation to whip up in a couple of weeks, and I think I'm going try to do something kind of like this) and the tag cloud example. My talk was to be on blogs, and, as you noted, blogs was not exactly a key word on this year's program. CCCC bastards.
Anyway, you should have gone to NOLA since everyone knows that beer and spicy food kill germs or whatever else is ailing you... ;-)
A shame not to see you there Collin. The panel was very good. Your "ye olde webbe 2.0" slide got a good laugh.
We missed you, but it's important to take care of yourself. This presentation is great--I'm going to suggest that my colleagues come by and view as you have succinctly and clearly put together the connections between disciplinarity, composition, visual web and so forth. I have long wanted to have the time to create timeline map in which the different theorists from comp/rhet/cultural studies and so on are represented. Right now, I'm creating a timeline to go with my women's lit class in the fall.
Thanks for the kind words, all of you. I definitely missed seeing everyone (and meeting others), but the rest that I got instead did me a lot of good...
I had you on my iCal. I even felt horrible about not being able to see you at the last Cs because of my quick turnaround. Oh well. Hope you heal up. See you next you in 'Frisco?