cccc: March 2005 Archives

Looking back on my CCCC experience this year, I can say two things with some certainty. One is that I think that we should have included the word blog in our panel title, since we ended up talking more about blogs as a site of creative computer literacy or network literacy than anything else. Two is that, if I choose to continue going scriptless, I'm either going to have to (a) learn to live with a certain level of incoherence, or (b) prepare my presentation even more than I did already. I'm not going to swear off reading, because I think I write a pretty snappy script--it's usually the delivery that I have to work on.

Anyways, for those of you who weren't able to "here" our presentation, you can now hear it, recorded in all its glory. You can hear me forget to click a couple of slides, then catch my slides up while I lose my train of thought in the process. That was a real gem. For my part, it went okay, but I felt like the threads of my talks were a little more loosely woven than I would have preferred. Ah well.

And yes, I am thinking about going into GarageBand, and futzing around a bit with my portions of the talk. Without further adieu, I present session D.24: The Aftermath of Access: From Critical to Creative Computer Literacies. Speaker 1 & 3 is Jenny Bay; speaker 2 & 4 is me. The whole session runs about 40 MB, so I've broken it into four pieces: Jenny, Collin, Jenny, and Collin.

Enjoy.

Update: Clancy just posted her account of our session...

Jenny has already mentioned this, but it's worth saying twice: the set-up for the conference was abysmal.

Abysmal.

This year, many many panels were held in spaces on the edges of the big open exhibit room, separated from the exhibit space by curtains. In many of the largest rooms, the back walls were not walls, but curtains. On at least one occasion, I left a panel because I couldn't hear my own session over the sounds of another.

Unacceptable.

And this was the second year in a row where the conference was scattered socially. There was no central social space for people to hang out in, meet up with each other, or encounter each other serendipitously. On Friday, they set up tables in the upper level (for the party that night), and people flocked to them. Loud and clear, once and for all:

We would like a place where we can sit down.

I'm not talking about three tables near the coffee kiosk. Genuine social space, please. Please. Half of the fun is running into old friends, making spur of the moment plans, all the while having an anchor space where we can go with some assurance that we'll see someone we know. Two years in a row now that hasn't happened. And as a result, it feels disjointed, jumbled, and I feel like I missed seeing some people I wanted to see.

As expensive as I know it will be, I'm honestly longing for the old Palmer House. Sweet home Chicago.

That is all.

One of the disadvantages of getting noticed is that, with the solidification of blogging as a Topic™, I found myself duplicating the experiences of other CCCC bloggers. In other words, I went to the Wednesday night session (A.15: Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices) that Mike has summarized in far more detail than I could provide. And I went to the first half of B.26: Evaluating Academic Weblogs, mainly to see Derek present before I left to work on my presentation. And Mike and Clancy both have blogged that session. Since my own session was largely a haze (more on it soon), I thought I'd offer some quick thoughts on the two sessions I hit on Friday--I haven't looked around too much, but I don't think anyone's blogged them yet.

On Friday, after going to see an 8 am panel, my friend Lorie and I went to the SF MOMA, where I saw the 2004 Exhibition of SECA award winners. One in particular caught my eye, a guy named Simon Evans. His work is a funky combination of a Dave Eggers sensibility and perhaps an aesthetic close to New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, with a dash of Borges' Chinese encyclopedia thrown in:

Hard to read, I know, but I haven't found too many good reproductions, and his work is new enough that I couldn't find prints. There are a couple of good pages of his work at the gallery where he's currently showing. His work was the highlight of my MOMA trip this time out. While I appreciated a lot of the other work, Evans clicked for me.

You remember Borges' encyclopedia, right? Foucault cites it in The Order of Things. In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides animals into the following categories:

those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase, and
those that from a long way off look like flies.

For those of us unfortunate enough not to have a Celestial Emporium handy, I offer to you the new and improved Call for Proposals for next year's CCCC. Once upon a time, back in the day, we simply chose an "area cluster," one of 11 areas which would determine where (and by whom) our proposals would be considered.

Then they added the "level emphasis" which designates 2-year college, 4-year college, or cross-insitutional. Insofar as CCCC attempts to encourage participation from faculty at 2-year institutions, this seems okay to me.

Last year, they added the "interest emphasis," which named race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and disability as interests from which we were to choose one. This year, there were supposedly 209 panels with an interest emphasis of race/ethnicity, a fact which (I'm sure) had nothing to do with the explicit mention of race/ethnicity in the call for proposals.

This year, another category, "major focus," appears on the proposal form, which allows us, if applicable, to check basic writing, two-year college, first year composition, WAC/WID, feminist studies, or cultural studies.

Umm...what?!?!

In advance of the 2007 Call for Proposals, I'd like to suggest that, in addition to area cluster, level emphasis, interest emphasis, and major focus, another category be added called Evidentiary Inclinations, from which proposers can, if applicable, select one of the following: careful observation, dictionary definitions, thinkers whose last names begin with vowels, elegies, and, as a nod to Borges, those included in the present classification.

After all, it couldn't get much worse.

Perhaps CCCC is indeed trying to do something with this data. What they are currently accomplishing, however, is exactly the opposite. By proliferating these categories on the call itself (instead of asking for, say, 5 minutes of our time when our proposals are accepted), they are influencing the proposal process itself, in a bad way. Last year, it was pretty obvious that people felt that naming race/ethnicity as their emphasis gave them a better chance of acceptance, and unfortunately, the numbers bore that out. We don't need a more complicated formula for determining acceptance rates, and if the data isn't being used that way, then there needs to be some type of explanation on the form itself of how exactly it's being used.

And it needs to be a helluva lot more nuanced than "check one." Panels are comprised of multiple papers--is an emphasis in one paper enough to qualify the whole panel? If so, then my panel was "about" gender this time out. Which "major focus" is appropriate for a paper on using WAC strategies to help basic writers enter FYC classes sooner? And so on and so on.

I realize that CCCC is us, and I realize that I run the risk of hurting some feelings when I say this, but this trend, towards increasingly arbitrary and unclear categories, is downright stupid. If we want actual data about the conference and the presentations, then make a brief survey part of the process by which we accept our invitations. And design it better than a bunch of "check one if applicable" lines that don't come anywhere close to actually naming the range of areas covered in CCCC presentations. The implication right now is that these are "favored topics," and if they're not, it needs to say so. If they are, then it may be time for me to spend my March next year doing something else. Because my work doesn't fit comfortably (or even roughly) into any one of them.

Oh, and if we hurry, we might be able to book Simon Evans to do the cover for the 2007 program.

That is all.

I'm going to be throwing down some pre-dated entries here, mostly so's I can keep them relatively organized. Before I get to a few session notes, though, let me just provide the year-from-now-me with a little reminder:

Don't ever do that again!!!

Clever me, I thought that it would be nice to get into SF with a chance to do a little exploring on Tuesday. And so I went ahead and booked a flight that left Syracuse at 6:15 a.m. And since I'd probably need to get to the airport a little before 5, I should leave the apt at around 4:30, necessitating a wake-up at 3:30. So far so "good."

Compound my clever with the fact that I'm not really much of a morning person, and I decided that it was better to just stay up all night than to try and sleep a little and risk oversleeping (it's happened before). Since I wasn't really able to sleep on the plane (despite my foolish assumption that I would), I got to SF having been awake for roughly 27 hours straight. In other words, I got into SF with a chance to take a nap. Which I did. But it was a short one, and the end result was that at no time did I ever feel anything but bone-crushingly, mind-numbingly, personality-transformingly exhausted.

I never get enough sleep at CCCC. Rather than take this into account, I somehow talked myself into going there with a guaranteed sleep deficit, an energy hole that I only was able to dig deeper and deeper over the course of the next 4 days.

Yeah. That's smart.