Displaying the most recent of 34 posts written by

Amanda

Updates, and a newsletter about forgotten poems

I didn’t exactly mean to stop blogging, but life has a way of getting busy even when there are no major changes happening, and then sometimes you realize it’s been over a year since you posted anything, for no good reason. And then you try to remember everything noteworthy that’s happened in the last year. So here […]

Random bullets of the book project

The thing about writing a book (and it feels like “writing a book” now, even though the phase I’m in at the moment is revising an article that will eventually become a chapter) is that it leaves virtually no writing-brain left for blogging. Everything’s getting channeled into the larger project, even if it’s just 15 […]

Testing out a teaching idea: library instruction meets close reading

Hello, neglected blog! I’m still here, just preoccupied with other writing projects, so blogging has fallen rather by the wayside. I have plenty of updates to share about said writing projects, but I’ve been meaning to post this, so here goes. Last semester I was prepping for a library class when an idea popped into […]

Personal anthology: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the side effects of working on the Potential Book Project has been that I’ve encountered a whole lot of Victorian and Romantic-era poetry that I would never have bothered to read if I were doing straight-up literary criticism. I’ve written before about how the project has challenged some of my own assumptions about […]

The algebra of knitting

Warning: this post contains math, as well as highly technical knitting details. I took algebra in sixth grade, and then again in high school, and by the end of it I was reasonably good at solving for X and all that, but none of it ever seemed to have any practical application. It would have […]

A day at Rhinebeck

The New York Sheep and Wool Festival, held every October in Rhinebeck, NY, is one of those knitting events I’ve meant to go to for years but never managed to make it to. Until this year, when two librarian friends and I drove up the Hudson in a Zipcar for a day of fiber-fanaticism. We […]

New York City: a love story

It’s been nearly a year since I moved to New York. You’d think my decades-long crush on this city would have abated a bit by now, wouldn’t you? You’d think I’d be used to it by now, that I’d have developed my own list of gripes and complaints (New Yorkers love to kvetch, after all). […]

Libraries and the cognitive resource pool

One of the most interesting things I’ve read in the past few weeks was a post at Kathy Sierra’s new blog called “Your app makes me fat.” Sierra looks at psychological research that shows how we use the same “pool” of cognitive resources for both thinking and willpower. Tricky cognitive tasks drain our ability to exercise […]

Ten years. Who knew?

It’s hard to believe, but it was ten years ago today that I impulsively opened up an account on Blogspot and semi-anonymously started my first blog. I was expecting to chronicle my transition out of academia into something else — I had no idea what the something else would be, at that point — and […]

More fun with visualization: word clouds

I’ve been slowly and steadily adding to the Potential Book Project database that I wrote about in the previous post, and somewhat to my shock, I realized that I’ve now got entries for over 1500 individual poetry quotations from 24 commonplace books compiled between 1800 and 1900. (And I’m still nowhere near done; I’ve got many […]