meta: November 2006 Archives

Okay, so December will probably not end up being National Blog No More Month, but I'm sure that the pressure of NotADayGoesBy, combined with the end of the semester and the joy it brings, will lead to something of a dip in traffic round Blogademia.

As for me, the pressure of finding something to say every day has kept my mind from the fact that in less than a week, I'll be celebrating the completion of yet another annual step towards old age, also known as the anniversary of my birth. Luckily, I'm getting dangerously close to the "new 30," which brings with it a little extra hop to my step, or so I've heard.

I can pretty much guarantee, though, that it won't mean daily blogging through the month of December. I've got a fair bit of travel ahead of me, and a little bit of work on top of that. Somewhere in there, I'll need to summon up a little holiday spirit as well.

Fare thee well, November. I blogged thee pretty well, if I do say so.

Here's how you can have an impact on one of the MLA panels I'll be seeing next month. And yes, meme propagation is a perfectly valid activity when you're in the home stretch of NotADayGoesBy.

The skinny:
Scott Eric Kaufman is conducting an experiment on the propagation of memes, the results of which will be part of his talk at said panel. He's asking people to post entries about his entry, link back to the original entry, and then ping Technorati (if your blogging platform doesn't already do so automatically). That's all. And to make it easy, all you really need do is to copy and paste this very paragraph, formatting in the links to Scott's entry and to Technorati, then visit Technorati and enter the URL for your own entry. That sounds like more work than it actually is. And the reward is that you'll be contributing to Science™.

Scott's URL: http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html
Technorati Ping Form: http://www.technorati.com/ping

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program:

Snip, snap, snout.

I'd heard about this a while back, but Lilia's got a fully linked TOC to the new special issue of Reconstruction, on "Theories/Practices of Blogging." In addition to her own piece, the issue features writing from Michael Benton, Craig Saper, danah boyd, Tama Leaver, Erica Johnson, Carmel L. Vaisman, David Sasaki, Anna Notaro, Esther Herman, and Lauren Elkin. Also check out the issue's "Blogroll," which includes brief "Why I blog" statements from all sorts of folk. I haven't had time to look the whole issue over yet, but it looks like a good mix of topics and approaches.

Craig Saper's "Blogademia" in particular was one I found worth reading. From his conclusion:

The challenge of blogademia is to focus on this translation process of scholarship and knowledge into the currently disparaged and debased sociopoetic form of blogs. Beyond apprehending the issues at stake in using this form, one can begin to articulate the advantages of research that uses the blog, not as an object of study, but as a vehicle to comprehend mood, atmosphere, personal sensibility, and the possibilities of knowledge outside the ego's conscious thought. The blog, podcast, and wikis may hint, fleetingly, at the future tools of academia.

And I recommend it not only because a few of us from Jeff's blogroll appear there. It's a nice extended reflection of what academic blogging might have to contribute to the production of knowledge--a question that has too many answers right now to be quickly or comfortably resolved.

So go take a look. And enjoy what's left of the Thanksgiven weekend. That's all.

Less than a week to go in NotADayGoesByVember, and to be honest, I'm pretty much running on fumes as far as blogging goes. Not that I don't have things to say or anything. But it feels like the last few weeks have slowly built up other parts of my life, parts I can't really blog about right now, such that it's tough to see over the surrounding junk to topics for blogging.

So rather than working harder for a post than I want to, I'm afraid I'm going to just let this entry stand, and then go off to work on some of the unbloggable stuff. I've got a two-part entry I've been meaning to write, but I need to put it off while I unload some of the backlog. So that's all for now. If I'm in a mood later tonight, maybe I'll show back up.

Okay, maybe not. But I hope that you all remember what happened the last time someone tapped me for a meme: the Great Bumper Sticker Brainstorm™ of 2005! Normally, I'd pretend not to read the entry in question long enough for people to forget I'd been tapped, but it is NotADayGoesByWithoutMeBlogging Month, and the longer entry I have planned probably won't be ready until after midnight, so here are 5 things that almost all of my readers will not have previously known about me:

1. Had soccer and tennis not happened during the same season while I was in high school, I was good enough as a young'un to play varsity tennis. I stopped playing regularly in jr. high, but could hit around and hold my own with most of my varsity friends, without any real practice.

2. When I was in grad school for the first go-round, I had the good fortune of a local radio station that (a) played music I liked, and (b) allowed the overnight DJs to hold call-in contests as often as the daytime crews. So, I might be the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 10th caller, but I won a bunch of music that way. To this day, the only boxed set I own is the collected works of the Clash, won in a call-in from WOXY.

3. There's more to it than this, of course, but one of the main reasons I ended up going to UTArlington for my PhD was Milan Kundera. (Mysterious...!)

4. Our house growing up bordered on a creek, and when it would flood, it would occasionally leave deceptively thick mud deposits on the bike path that parallelled it near my house. One year, in jr. high, one such patch sent me flying head over heels off the front of my bike. I tore up my hand and wrist pretty thoroughly, but rather than returning home or going to the nurse at school, I kept my hand in my sweatshirt pocket almost the whole day until I could take care of it at home. In my head at the time, it was more important to not admit that I had fallen off my bike than it was to get medical attention. The sweatshirt was dark enough that the blood didn't show.

5. Until last year, when I helped my mother clear out the house I grew up in (in anticipation of her move to a smaller place), I had kept every award, debate trophy, high school letter, etc. If I'd wanted to, I could have kept that stuff, but it was strangely liberating to part with it. I kept a few things, like yearbooks for example, but mostly, I couldn't conceive of any scenario where that stuff would be even remotely valuable to me. On the off-chance that someone someday will biographize me, I made their job a whole lot harder.

So there you are. Most of this will be news to most people. And some of it I hadn't thought about for years.

Snip, snap, snout.

Having been hailed, although not in so many words.

And no, I'm not counting this as my Nov. 1 post, although I could.