[Flickr: Pierce Place]
Recently in travel Category
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.
It is not the best week to be (slowly) recovering from back spasms. In a couple of days, we have our annual recruitment visit from prospective students (posts from years past on this process). The good news is that I'm heading into this event with more sleep than I've apparently gotten in years past. The bad news is that I've been getting lots of sleep because there's not much more to do than nap when you're lying on your stomach in bed with a heating pad on your lower back.
I thought I blogged about this, but just about everyone I tell is surprised, so apparently I haven't mentioned it. This year, inspired in part by Wordplay, I'm an entrant in The 31st Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which is happening next weekend down in Brooklyn. So while our prospective students are flying back to their home bases, I'll be taking the train down to NYC to prove just how nerdy I can be.
And actually, I'm looking forward to it. If my practice has been accurate, I'm probably not going to finish much higher than middle of the pack. I'm a little sloppy when I'm under the gun, and I have the same bad habit that sometimes plagued me on multiple choice exams--"how can that be a good clue for this word?!" I've been stepping up my crossword solving to maybe an hour or so a day right now, but other than that, I'm not doing anything special. No stacks of notecards with obscure names of rivers on them for me. Just me and my brain and a bunch of pencils.
If I think of it, I'll try and do a little bit of blogging from the tournament, but it'll depend on how social I'm feeling and how much I feel like putting words outside of the grid...
That's all.
A couple of quick interruptions of my (admittedly intermittent) biographical musings. The first is a picture of me and Paul that Jenny posted yesterday. This summer's midwestern swing was like the Tour of Babies, seeing my nephew Patrick and meeting Paul and Vered for the first time each. This is the only photographic evidence of the Tour, however.
Feel free to suggest captions for the photo either here or at JB's.
Inspired in part by Donna's theme review of CCCC:
There was more to it than that, to be sure, but as far as my presentation went, at the risk of sounding like I'm fishing for sympathy, having a featured presentation on Saturday afternoon was a lot like being called up to the big leagues the day after one's team is knocked out of competing for the playoffs. Hard to know when or if I'll be back.
I continue to be grateful to Cheryl Glenn for the opportunity, grateful to those good people who did come, and grateful to Derek and Deb, whose presentations were excellent. And I'll go ahead and screencast my talk this week, for all of those who couldn't make it.
I may post a little more about the conference over the next couple of days as well. What won't I post about? The squawking that Alex references that's going on right now over whether or not it's better to read or speak.
That's all, except to note that I did this with Stripgenerator 1.0.1)
Update: You can find both my slides and Derek's at Slideshare.net. We'll both have screencasts soon as well.
If you haven't already gathered that I'm going to be intermittent whilst on the road, then I just don't know what to do with you.
Anyhow, I was thinking today about nothing much in general when I came across Laura's psuedo-signoff. Like the folks leaving comments, I hope that she takes some time off, reconnects with the people around her, and later on (post-diss, perhaps), finds a way to reintegrate blogging into her daily grind.
What strikes me about all this is the degree to which I'm basically the opposite. And I think that's a function largely of my lack of local connections. Asked last night if Iowa still feels like home, or if Syracuse has supplanted it, I ended up with a relatively unsatisfying "neither." It's not a sad nor a happy thing especially, but I was struck today by the fact that I feel more of the burdens and pleasures of connection here than I do in any particular locality. No, I'm not going to start waxing on about how this space is my home--it isn't. I don't feel anchored to any particular place. I have ties, and lots of them, to people and places, I suppose, but none of them seems to bear the weight in my head that's signified by "home."
I sympathize with and sometimes even envy those with a strong feeling of home, and I don't discount the possibility that I'll feel it myself at some point. And I'm fully willing to acknowledge that the fact that I'm currently traveling may have more than a little to do with how I'm feeling lately. Right now, I feel a little ghostly, floating around the country, not really tethered.
Like I said, it's not a good or bad thing. Just describes how I'm feeling at the time.
I would have posted this a little sooner, but I've spent the last day or so figuring out how I can cast aspersions on a field that I'm only peripherally involved with, reaching the conclusion that the best way to argue that the field is going in the wrong direction is to "cherry-pick" 5 panel titles, out of hundreds, from their annual conference, and then not going to the conference so as not to complicate my thinnnnnest-slice impression (which I'll describe, of course, as a "fair portion" which provides the double-entendre of both representativity and fairness) of what it is that they're doing.
That's all I have to say on that bit of nitwittery.
It was a good conference this year, although I definitely feel older and less able to keep up than I used to. This year's CCCC had the strange distinction of embodying two strange trends: each night, I got to bed later, and each morning I had to get up earlier. If I had stayed one more day, these trends might have passed each other in the wrong direction--I might have had to wake up before I went to bed. Eek.
As far as sessions went, I only hit a few of them, and they were pretty much superstar caliber. I didn't go to anything before Derek's and my performance at the Computer Connection on Thursday, but afterwards, I saw Jim Porter, Catherine Latterell, Dà€nielle Devoss, and Stuart Selber (E.28 Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing). It was a solid panel, doing some of the work necessary to bridge our disciplinary (and pretty traditionalist) notions of authorship with the implications of new media. Shockingly enough, after a 7 am breakfast meeting, I caught David Blakesley, Thomas Rickert, and Diane Davis all give really intriguing papers revisiting KB's notion of identification (F.15 The Rhetorics of Identification; Or, Me and You and You and Me, So Happy Together?). All three were strong papers, but I was especially interested in Diane's--the idea that mirror neurons suggest an originary, pre-linguistic "togetherness" which is first broken and then imperfectly healed through identification was (a) a really smart take on neurobiology's implications for rhetoric and (b) a very original challenge to some of our cherished disciplinary assumptions. After a brief pause to fill my body with sugar and caffeine, I went to see Becky Howard, David Russell, and Sandra Jamieson (H.15 Authentic Arguments: Information Literacy and Case Studies in FYC). Becky and I chat IL all the time, but I hadn't seen before the work that Russell was doing to track how students use sources in building arguments. Interesting stuff. Having been up at 6-ish, by the end of their session, I was pretty much wiped, so I skipped on the next 2 sessions plus the other general (the awards one).
(I didn't get to see the morning general session on Thursday, either, although I heard vaguely unflattering things about it, or rather that the Address itself had less than flattering things to say about some of the things that I do. Rather than offer a 4th hand response, I'll wait to see/read a version of it...)
Saturday morning, with my sleep and energy quotients approaching zero, I attended my final session of the conference, K.23 From Panel to Gallery: Twelve Digital Writings, One Installation, and no, I won't list the 12, although several are friends. Being able to walk around the room and futz was perfect for me, though, and there were some really sharp pieces. If I can find the URL, I'll post a link to Tim Richardson's thingamajig, which was a Flash interface that positively hypnotized me. It reminded me of the stories I've heard, and pics I've seen, of SIGGRAPH interface galleries. Cool Cool Cool.
Anyhow, that was my formal CCCC. Counting my own, I went to 5 sessions, which is about right, and I met lots and lots of people and strengthened ties with others. Can't ask for much more.
So I'm getting myself together to leave in the near future for my annual trip to the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Rather than regale you with tales of catching up on my bills or my laundry (both of which have commanded my attention today), I thought I might express my annual regret that I must go to CCCC instead of, say, ETech or SXSW, both of which command the attention of the blogerati this time of year. Not that there's anything wrong per se with CCCC--I always learn a little something, and I see a lot of people with whom I would otherwise fall out of touch. It's a visceral reminder for me of the academic community that I've chosen to join.
And yet. I can't help but feel that my interests and my inspirations would be better served at one of these other conferences. I envy Laura, who is/was down in Austin for SXSW. And I share her sense that "that education needs to catch up a little bit to this world." But I'm also struck by the outsider-ness of her post, because I've experienced that myself on more than a few occasions. I want to feel like there's a middle space, between the mercenary collisions of acronym people and the (at times) oblivious pokiness of the academy when it comes to these things. I think that there are conversations out there that are just waiting to be held, conversations that take the potential of these ideas as their jumping off point rather than the painstaking objective of endless wheel-reinventing presentations.
This is how you can tell that it's late, and I'm a little frustrated. I start stacking words and phrases as high as I can until they start wobbling.
At any rate, some of my frustration has its source in the fact that, unless I somehow move to CA or TX, I won't ever be a regular attendee at either of those conferences. As a humanities scholar, I'm basically priced out of those venues before I even start. The humanities don't get grants, they don't get corporate sponsors, and they don't include lavish travel budgets among the necessities. I can afford to go to Chicago for 4 days, but only because I applied to my college to cover the difference between cost and my normal travel funding allotment. They do so only because I'm giving a presentation--there is no argument I could make for putting a trip to SXSW on the university dime.
It's frustrating to me because I know where Laura's coming from when she despairs of "fighting the fight" of getting our colleagues to see technology and getting the technologists to see us as something other than a cottage industry ripe for takeover.
No grand conclusions or solutions to be found here. I know that there are those among us who would really welcome rich and complicated conversations, but I don't think it's simply a matter of academics being willing. It's also a matter of patience on the part of industry, some faith on their part that there's some long-term good to be had in engaging with us. Maybe there are already those kinds of spaces that I just don't know about. It's frustrating to me, though, not being able to afford to visit the ones I do know about, even as I suspect that I can't afford not to be there.
If that makes sense.
I need to remind myself, for the umpteenth time, that I'm not really the sort of person who likes to worry about catching a ride. And so, when I scheduled my return trip to Syracuse at 1:45 with the idea that I might be able to do something Saturday morning, I was basically fooling myself. Some two hours in advance of my departure, I'm sitting here in Penn Station, having ponied up for what amounts to a 2-hour wifi pass, so that I can do something other than stare at the other poor souls in the waiting area. I always hate myself for scheduling early departure times on trains, planes, etc., but I guess I need to remember that the only difference between early and later times is the amount of time I'll spend waiting.
Still, I've gotten caught up on my feeds, and a couple of days of email, and if I'm feeling frisky, I might even get a little reading done on the train for Tuesday's class.
The presentation seemed to go well--several people came up over the course of the day to tell me so. To me, it felt a little uneven--especially when I'm not working with a script, I tend to wobble, get nervous, lose vocabulary, and change my mind about what I'm saying almost as I'm saying it. I'm not saying that all that happened yesterday (well, except for the nervous part), but...
If I can, I'll get a slidecast up of it while it's still relatively fresh, but if you'd like to know what it was about, try this. Visit Kathleen's AOIR writeup first--the people that the presenters were talking about were the ones I spoke to yesterday. Too early to tell if anything will result by way of contacts/projects, but I did swap cards with a woman from Atypon, the company working on AnthroSource (see Speaker 2 of KF's writeup), and I'm crossing my fingers.
My talk was a mix of Web 2.0, Long Tail, and social bookmarking, and I think that I'm onto something in this regard. As I explained CCCO to people, it seemed to make sense to them, and I think that it's a model that will scale up. We'll see. In addition to 'casting my talk, I have it in mind to do a little geegaw on social bookmarking, sort of a "why is it important for educators?" thing. Seems to me that I saw someone a week or so asking for such, and I think I have a point or two to make. Maybe that's something else I'll hammer out on the train today.
That's about all I have at the moment. I'm gonna empty a few more feeds, maybe get some brunch, and hit the train.
