Hey, those of you who went to MLA this year, a query: Did any of you go to the "Literary Geospaces" panel? How was it? And who was it who was talking about "memory mapping," as the Chronicle bloggers report? I do rather wish I’d been there for the various Association for Computing in the […]
"Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns," reports yesterday’s New York Times. I must confess that my first reaction was somewhere between "Gee, ya think?" and "This is news?", with accompanying eye-rolling. I’d probably be a tad less cynical if the decline of the tenure track hadn’t started, oh, twenty years ago, and if people […]
All I have to say about "Lagretta Gradgrind"’s column in the Chronicle of Higher Education on why she’s no longer advising graduate students is this: Thank God she wasn’t my adviser. Some of the grad student behaviors she objects to are eminently objectionable. But what chaps my hide is that along with the dissertation-plagiarizers, sloppy […]
I’m incubating potential topics for the paper abstract I’m planning on submitting for the Analogous Spaces conference. I want to send something in for the session on spatial analogies for memory, so, by way of making myself write some of this stuff out, I’m posting about it. (Brain-dump follows. You’ve been warned.) Among other things, […]
A couple of days ago I went to a forum on libraries and education at UPenn, at which one of the speakers (Alexius Macklin from Purdue) talked about integrating information literacy into the curriculum in a way that most of us in libraries haven’t yet: by teaching writing classes herself and working the information-seeking skills […]
One of the mailing lists I’m on drew my attention to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s "Vanishing Shakespeare" report. There’s been some conversation about it on The Valve, too. Quite a lot of this report triggered my skepticism reflexes. In particular: The claim for an "assault on Shakespeare" at colleges and universities.* The […]
I’ve been planning a post on Zotero for ages. Today I was using it to speed up part of a work project and remembered several things I wanted to say about it. So here are some thoughts about why I like it so much. Zotero is a citation-management tool, like RefWorks or EndNote. It’s a […]
So I went to four panels on poetry (What We Talk About When We Talk About Form, the presidential Sound of Poetry forum, Sound in Stevens, The Future of Poetry Criticism), three on early modern studies (Perilous Playgoing in Early Modern England, History of the Book II: Consuming Print, Early Modern Migrations), one on both […]
Strangely enough — given that the last time I attended an MLA convention, I took a rather jaundiced view of the whole thing — I had a really good time at this year’s conference. Maybe it was that nobody asked me "Are you on the market?" Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t have […]
I’ve wondered before about how one might measure the spread of memes across blogland, and now Scott Eric Kaufman is doing exactly that in preparation for a panel on academic blogging at the MLA. Here’s the post explaining his project in full; here’s the basic explanation: Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning […]