conferential: December 2006 Archives

How early must a body wake up to beat the Starbucks line? I had to wait behind 5 people at 6:50 am, which is when I got up in an attempt to beat the crowd. And from about 6:50 to about 8:30, when the session started, I had the title of this entry bouncing around my skull, to the tune of "Roll out the barrel." And yes, we had a blogload of fun.

I'm going to jot some notes re the panel, but probably not until I'm back in Syr, since I have to check out of my room soon. I had vague memories of reserving an extra night, specifically so I wouldn't have to drive after waking up early for that session, but the fine folk at the Philly Marriott think not. So I'm going to caff up, and hit the road shortly.

Update

Liz Losh has a rundown of the session over at Sivacracy, including links and whatnot, so I won't repeat that. One thing I will say is that each of the speakers in the panel took a particular angle on what Scott explicitly called "academic blogging" (as opposed to blogging by academics), but that there wasn't really the time to put all of these takes together.

It's hard to know what to expect from supersessions, and this one was no exception. It felt like each of the speakers just got started with an idea, and ran afoul of time. It's tough to put 4 substantial talks into a 75-min panel, honestly. The one quote that I jotted down came from Michael's talk, about how "intensity comes to function as a value of its own" in blogspats--seemed to me an entire panel could be put together on whether the intensity that powers blogspace is genuinely compatible with the kinds of knowledge we associate with research and scholarship.

If nothing else, though, it was interesting to see some of the ubers in person--kind of like seeing radio personalities after hearing their voices for a long time. Michael has pix of himself at his blog, but I could feel myself wondering if the other 3 "looked" like their blogs.

That is all.

This may not be of much use to anyone not already here in Philadelphia, but Jill points to a list assembled by ACH of all the "digital humanities" panels here at MLA this year. It's an encouraging list...

I really wanted to get to a panel or two today, but I have a thing about needing huge swaths of time in order to prepare for formal stuff. So no sessions today, it looks like, although I'm hoping to run into a couple of folk at the Rhet/Comp cash bar at 5:15 and the Bloggadoodle at 8:45.

In the meantime, carry on.

This may not be of much use to anyone not already here in Philadelphia, but Jill points to a list assembled by ACH of all the "digital humanities" panels here at MLA this year. It's an encouraging list...

I really wanted to get to a panel or two today, but I have a thing about needing huge swaths of time in order to prepare for formal stuff. So no sessions today, it looks like, although I'm hoping to run into a couple of folk at the Rhet/Comp cash bar at 5:15 and the Bloggadoodle at 8:45.

In the meantime, carry on.

As the regular reader will remember, this year's MLA kicked off with a stirring rendition of the second chapter of my book manuscript, with the unusually expository (for me, at least) title "The Rhetorical Canons as an Ecology of (New Media) Practice." Gee, I wonder what the talk was about?

Hee. Today was also the 3rd step in the epic self-transformation that will see me turn from a reader of conference papers to a speaker of conference presentations. I worked from an outline and from the slides, but otherwise, did not script the specifics. I think it went okay, but I do have to confess that the fellow in the 3rd row who used his cameraphone to take snapshots of each of my slides, and whose phone rang not once but twice during our session, was a bit of a distraction.

And yet, it was he who inspired me to go ahead and try out SlideShare, which is basically a YouTube-like service for PP presentations. Keynote exports to pdf, which I can then upload and turn into a shareable Flash doodad.

(Update: The doodad was taking serious download time, so I'm replacing it with a link to the SlideShare page instead. Those readers uninterested in unnarrated PP slides may now breath an appropriately grateful sigh of relief.)

The pdf option, far as I can tell, preserves original layout and font better, and has the virtue of being about 1/10 the size of a PP export. So even though there's no support for a Keynote native presentation, it works out just fine.

The slides themselves are probably a little oblique without commentary, so I'll use ProfCast when I get back to Syracuse and offer a full-service version. In the meantime, suffer in silence. I'm done with my talk, and have a much more leisurely conference ahead of me.

That is all.

So I left Iowa on Christmas night, and put in about 5 hours of driving so that I could stay overnight in Lafayette, IN, whereupon I woke at 6 am, picked up a wingman, and proceeded to drive some 700+ miles to Philadelphia. We made surprisingly good time, despite some weather and traffic delays, and arrived in Philly at around 8 pm. Little question, though, that this drive would not have been possible had I been on my own. We had dinner, at a reasonable hour no less, at Monk's Cafe, where the food and beer was as good as promised.

Socializing today will be at a minimum, as I prepare for my presentation tonight, but otherwise, it's a pretty wide open conference schedule for me. I have a few panels marked as potentially interesting but otherwise, I expect to be able to relax a bit after tonight. Track me down if you're here, too.

That is all. Welcome back to the mostly daily blogging. And a big thanks to the wingman.

I'm too busy. But I can say that I made it through 2 relatively pain-free days of driving to get to Iowa (relatively only because of the rain yesterday in S. Ohio and Indiana).

But I've got work to do right now, not the least of which is preparing my presentation for MLA later this month, so blogging will be intermittent.

That's all for a spell. Check ya later.